LinkTech

Ten years of experience can mean ten years of growth. It can also mean one year repeated ten times. That’s why years alone tell us surprisingly little. Experience tells you someone has been exposed to something. Range tells you what they can do with what they’ve learned. Can they transfer knowledge into a new environment? Handle something they haven’t seen before? Change their mind when the evidence changes? Work outside the exact conditions where they originally succeeded? Those questions matter even more when the work itself keeps changing. In your next interview, replace one question about how long someone has done something with one about how differently they’ve had to do it. Ask for the moment the playbook stopped working. The answer may tell you more than the year count ever could. #Hiring #Leadership #TalentStrategy #FutureOfWork #LinkTech

75,000 downloads!!! Who would of guested? NOT ME! When we started The Human Advantage Podcast a few months ago, I remember thinking how cool it would be to get 100 views on a single episode. That was the goal. Now we’ve passed 75,000 downloads, and I’m feeling proud, grateful, and a little shocked. We started this because we wanted to help people understand how to actually build better workplace cultures. What does that look like day to day? How do you turn good intentions into something people actually experience at work? Getting to explore those questions with our guests has been my favorite part of this whole thing. To everyone who has joined us: thank you for sharing your time, your stories, and the lessons you’ve learned along the way. This podcast exists because you’re willing to have those conversations. To my cofounders, Adam Kleckner, EMBA and Tia Kleckner I’m so proud of what we’re building together. Do we have to call ourselves podcasters now?!? 😂 And to everyone who has listened, shared an episode, or sent us an encouraging message: thank you. It means more than you know.A few months in, and we’re just getting started.

A nonlinear career is not a collection of detours. It can be a tool belt. Every role adds something: a new way to solve problems, communicate, lead, or understand people. The challenge for employers is recognizing how those tools transfer instead of only looking for an exact title match. As Ben Cohen explains: “Your career is a tool belt, and you add tools along the way.” In Episode 036 of The Human Advantage Podcast, LinkTech’s Adam Kleckner, EMBA and Devon Walker talk with Ben about transferable skills, creative problem-solving, and leading global teams with clarity and trust. Episode 036 - Creativity, Storytelling, and Leading Global Teams is live now. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eBVmiiBG #TransferableSkills #Leadership #TheHumanAdvantagePodcast

Hiring loves precedent. Someone has done the role before. At the right company. With the right title. In the right industry. Easy to explain. Easy to defend. Possibility is harder. It might come from an adjacent industry. A nonlinear career. Someone stepping up instead of across. A candidate whose experience doesn’t perfectly match the pattern you expected. The problem is that precedent tells us what worked before. It doesn’t necessarily tell us what will work next. Look at the last five people who reached final interview for one role. How many came from genuinely different backgrounds? If they all tell roughly the same career story, your process may be filtering for precedent long before anyone consciously makes that decision. #Hiring #FutureOfWork #SkillsBasedHiring #LinkTech

We tend to notice the person who works differently. The employee who needs more context. The person who processes before responding. The colleague who communicates differently. The person who questions a process everyone else quietly learned to tolerate. And because they are visible, they become the disruption. Meanwhile, the system gets to remain invisible. The meeting that only works for fast processors. The instructions that live entirely in someone’s head. The culture where asking for clarity gets mistaken for incompetence. The process that works beautifully—as long as everyone behaves the same way. Difference is not the disruption. Rigidity is. The next time one person appears to be struggling with a process, don’t immediately ask how to fix the person. Ask: Who else would this process work better for if we changed it? Sometimes one person identifies the problem before everyone else has words for it. #Neurodiversity #WorkplaceCulture #Leadership #FutureOfWork #LinkTech

Hiring managers: “I didn’t feel a connection” might describe your reaction to an interview, but it doesn’t give your recruiter much to work with. Useful feedback connects what you observed to what the role requires. Instead of: “They weren’t senior enough.” Try: “They’ve supported projects, but we need someone who has owned delivery and made decisions when priorities conflict.” Instead of: “They weren’t a strong communicator.” Try: “When asked to explain a technical decision, they didn’t clearly outline the tradeoffs. This role needs someone who can explain those decisions to nontechnical stakeholders.” Instead of: “I’m not sure they’re a fit.” Try: “We need someone who can build a process from scratch. Their examples focused on improving processes that were already established.” And if you didn’t get enough information to assess a skill, say that. An unanswered question is different from evidence that someone can’t do the job. Before submitting feedback, ask yourself: • What did the candidate say or demonstrate? • How does that relate to a requirement of the role? • What needs a follow-up question? Specific feedback helps your recruiter refine the search, gives your team a clearer basis for decisions, and helps candidates understand the outcome. What’s one thing you wish hiring teams included more often in interview feedback?

Hiring 100 people in a year can look like growth. Layoffs soon afterward may reveal that the business added people before fixing its processes. Jennifer Paxton (her/hers) learned that lesson early in her startup career- and it still shapes how she approaches people strategy today. In Episode 034 of The Human Advantage Podcast, LinkTech’s Adam Kleckner, EMBA and Devon Walker talk with Jennifer about what changes as companies scale, why promotion alone doesn’t prepare someone to manage, and how clear decision-making authority can prevent micromanagement and bottlenecks. Growth isn’t just about adding headcount. It’s about building an organization that is ready for it. Episode 034 - Scaling Teams Without Losing Trust is live now. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eBVmiiBG #Scaling #PeopleStrategy #TheHumanAdvantagePodcast

Experience can be verified. Credentials can be checked. Past results can be listed. Potential asks us to make a judgment before all the proof exists. And hiring processes don’t love uncertainty, so we reach for what feels measurable: Years. Titles. Degrees. Previous employers. Exact industry experience. Useful information? Absolutely. But none of it guarantees what someone will be capable of next. Some of the best hiring decisions require recognizing something before it becomes obvious. When you’re comparing final candidates, separate your evaluation into two columns: What has this person already proven? What gives us reason to believe they can grow beyond it? If you only have answers in the first column, you may be hiring a resume instead of a trajectory. #Hiring #FutureOfWork #Leadership #LinkTech

AI can write the email. Build the first draft. Summarize the meeting. Analyze the spreadsheet. Generate 50 ideas before you finish your coffee. It’s impressive. But the more output becomes cheap and abundant, the more important a different skill becomes: Knowing what deserves to survive. Which answer is actually right? Which recommendation fits the context? What’s missing? What shouldn’t be automated? When does technically correct become practically terrible? Who is affected by the decision? AI can give us more options, faster. It still takes human judgment to decide what to do with them. And that has implications for hiring, too. Look at one role being changed by AI and ask: Are we still evaluating people mostly on their ability to produce the output—or on their ability to question, interpret and make decisions about it? Because as production gets easier, discernment gets more valuable. AI can generate output. It cannot generate judgment. #AI #FutureOfWork #Leadership #LinkTech

FAQ: How does LinkTech find candidates that other recruiters don’t? The short answer: we don’t rely on job titles and keywords alone. Great candidates don’t always have the “right” title on LinkedIn. Someone doing exactly what a company needs might have an unconventional title, come from an industry you wouldn’t immediately think to search, or simply not have the right keywords in their profile. So before we start sourcing, we spend time understanding what actually makes someone successful in the role. What have they built? What problems have they solved? What level of ownership have they had? What kind of environment have they succeeded in? What signals would tell us they can do this job, even if their profile doesn’t immediately look like the obvious fit? From there, we build our search around those signals rather than just a list of titles and keywords. It takes more work. But it also means we can find people who are easy to miss when everyone is running a variation of the same search. That’s a big part of how we recruit at LinkTech.