837: Career Success in the AI Era, with Deepali Vyas
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This is episode number 837 with Dipali Vyas, Global Head of the Data and AI Practice at Korn Ferry.

Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast, the most listened to podcast in the data science industry. Each week, we bring you fun and inspiring people and ideas exploring the cutting edge of machine learning, AI, and related technologies that are transforming our world for the better. I'm your host, John Krohn. Thanks for joining me today. And now, let's make the complex simple.

Welcome back to the super data science podcast. Our guest today is the stunningly well spoken and entrepreneurial Dipali Vyas. Dipali is senior partner and global head of the data AI and financial technology practice of Korn Ferry, one of the world's largest executive search firms.

She's also founder of Profolios.ai, a video-centric, AI-enhanced professional branding platform. And she's founder of Fearless Plus, a platform that empowers tens of thousands of young people to have career success. She holds a bachelor's in financial mathematics and a master's in international finance from the London School of Economics.

Today's episode should be interesting to everyone. In it, Dipali details how AI has driven a 10x increase in applications per position and how you can compete in this high-volume climate.

She talks about why technical skills are becoming table stakes and what will differentiate the best candidates in the AI era. She provides an insider's view on the talent flows between Wall Street and Silicon Valley and how you can capitalize on these flows in your career. And she fills us in on the green flags to look for in potential bosses and employers. All right, you're ready for this enriching episode? Let's go. ♪

Dipali, welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast. It's been way too long to get you on the show and it's all my fault. I'm delighted to finally have you on. How are you? Where are you? I am doing so well. I was so excited when you reached out. I'm in my home office in Westchester. Nice. Yeah, thank you.

Wonderful. And so we met in the spring at NYU. Jepson Taylor, who has been on the show many times in recent years as the name Jepson Taylor, but he is the artist formerly known as Ben Taylor, which didn't have as good SEO skills.

So I think that was a driver. But there's like a dozen episodes of the Super Data Science Podcast with either Ben or more recently Jepson Taylor on the show. And he's always a hoot. So Jepson was co-leading this AI masterclass at NYU, along with Edwidge Hall, who leads Intellibus. Yeah.

And yeah, it's a really cool program, executive program that people can check out. They bring in tons of, it's just a weekend long program. Executives flying in from all over the US and they get to be at NYU campus, great food, great networking. And Jepson brings in lots of people like you and me to give talks.

Yeah, it was so much fun. And by the way, thank you for the super data science podcast hat. I have it. It's in my office back there. Nice, nice. I believe it is. It must be cherished, a very cherished object. Definitely.

So let's get into the technical stuff here, Deepali. So you have spent the last 24 years in executive search and leadership coaching. You must have started when you were like five years old or something because you certainly don't look like you could be possibly that old.

You haven't seen the grays coming through in my hair yet. We don't. It's not getting picked up on camera. In those 24 years, they've led you to today where you're global head of AI, data science, and financial technology, FinTech, at Korn Ferry. People don't know Korn Ferry.

It is one of the world's biggest recruitment firms. You probably know exactly the stats, but there's like a few of these absolutely gigantic companies and Corn Ferry, recruitment companies in Corn Ferry is one of them.

So at Korn Ferry, you lead executive search and leadership consulting for strategic AI, data and analytics leaders across industries. Wow, that sounds relevant to our audience. You advise clients on talent management, succession planning, diversity and inclusion, and organizational design. And so this is just, yeah, you're an unbelievable person to have on the episode. So let me actually get to a question. Okay.

So as recruitment becomes increasingly technology-driven, particularly AI-driven in recent years, how should executive search firms evolve their relationship-building strategies with clients, with candidates, in order to maintain an authentic human element and fair evaluation?

while also trying to leverage data and AI to get those efficiencies. Yeah, it's a really great topic of conversation that's happening now in the job market. And honestly, there's

so many different elements to this when it comes to recruiting in general. How are the firms handling it from an executive search or assessment or recruiting perspective? How are employers handling it in terms of what AI tools are they using to assess candidates? And how are candidates using these tools to get on top of the pile when they are searching for jobs? So

There's so many different things that are happening in the market. So I'll kind of break it down in a couple of different ways. I think every client that I talk to under the sun wants to understand AI. They want to use AI, whether it's to recruit talent, whether it's to increase productivity, whether it's to...

to optimize in some way, shape or form the way that AI is being embedded in their organization. Right. So, so AI is a topic I would say, you know, when you, when you look at the graph, right, like it's, it's on, on the vertical and it's on the horizontal, they want to use it everywhere and anywhere. What does that mean for candidates in the job market?

There was an interesting stat that had come across my desk recently. So, John, you know, there's almost a billion people on LinkedIn. Pre-AI tools for, and I'm talking about the candidate side, when a LinkedIn job post went up, roughly 250 applicants would apply to that job.

Post AI tools, because a lot of the candidates that are savvy, tech savvy, are now utilizing it to chat GPT their resume to really pass through these ATS systems. So that number went 10x, right? So now there's 2,500 people per application. Now, both sides are being burdened.

So coming back to sort of the origin of your question around what are companies going to look for and what do candidates need to do, I think the big question is,

How are candidates going to jump off of their black and white resume or their digital resume into a more authentic, you know, deliverable to actually showcase themselves in front of these clients for the jobs that they want?

My view and where I want to be very disruptive in this space, because I've been in it for 25 years or 24 years, is that I think the next gen is going to be video. I really believe that.

And I think that, you know, looking at platforms like LinkedIn, they're trying it and it hasn't been as successful for them. So they're doing it in a different way. They're trying to get the thought leadership on video. They're trying to do all these feet, the trying to embed it in the feed. So they're about the feed as opposed to the person.

And I think that's where a lot of, you know, people that are on the market and employers, leaders that are trying to attract talent are going to have to see talent differently and assess talent differently.

Yeah, if listeners were listening and thinking, oh, I wish I had an auto-applying AI tool, we've actually dug some up here. So I've got two GitHub repos that I'll put in the show notes. One of them has 22,000 stars, and it's called the Auto Jobs Applier. It's from something called the AI Hawk app.

And so I've got a link to that one for you in the show notes. I've also got the Easy Apply Jobs Bot, which is another GitHub repo. It only has 500 stars, but could be worth checking out as an alternative. And then we've also got a couple of click and point tools for people out there who don't necessarily use GitHub and code. We've got Job Copilot and Lazy Apply. So you too can be contributing to that 10xing of applicants to Jobs bot.

And do you think that that makes sense from the perspective of the candidate, Deepali? Do you think that people should be taking advantage of these tools or do you think it's just too much? It's just spray and pray. Do you think they should be more targeted? So as an executive search consultant and as sort of a de facto career coach, I

I'm going to lean towards no. And the reason why I say no is actually, I'll walk that back a bit. I probably have a one and one a answer to that. John, you've seen in the last 18 to 24 months within Silicon Valley and, you know, I probably even broadly a lot of layoffs.

I mean, we've been in the layoff game for quite a while now. In fact, my, you know, my tick tock went viral because I started talking about layoffs and I didn't want to just be the layoff reporting czar, but that's kind of where I, you know, got notoriety for, for whatever reason, but I'm bringing the real news of the job market. So yes, there have been a lot of really highly talented people that have been laid off and I,

the stigma around layoffs, they start to panic and they need to apply to everything in order to land a job. So part one of that question is,

Can you use those tools to be more effective and productive in your job applications? Yes. The answer is yes there, right? If you want a 10 X you're because you know, you're, you're, you're at home and you need to apply to a certain amount of jobs and it's a numbers game and you need to get in front of these employers. Yes. Do it.

I think that the folks that have the ability to be more discerning about their job search need to think about how they're going to show up differently than those chat GPT wrapped resumes, right? Because they all start to look the same at some point.

And what's happening with these tools is you're able to download the job spec. You're able to upload your resume. You're able to match those keywords so you get past the ATS systems. That's effective if your resume wasn't getting picked up. More power to you. I totally agree with that. But then now you're going to have to jump through another hoop. And so there are things that you're going to have to do to show where those soft skills are more transferable.

And ATS is a term that you and I know very well. And if you're an executive or a recruiter, you would know it as well. But if you're a candidate, you might not. It stands for Applicant Tracking System. And it's a typically click and point tool that has these days lots of built-in AI bells and whistles with things for automatically based on keywords that show up in there, surfacing some of the applicants to the top.

Now, something we haven't talked about on air yet, and you and I haven't actually talked about that much before either, is that I co-founded a company called Nebula that automates recruitment. And what we're trying to do differently, and hopefully allows people to be kind of more human with their applications, as opposed to trying to just get the right skills on there, which is that instead of doing keyword-based matching or skills-based matching,

we use large language models to encode the meaning of the information on a job description or on a candidate's profile. And so for our data science listeners out there, we encode them in a vector space. And so you have this high dimensional space that represents the meaning of these job application or resume related documents. And so it means that

Our system could think that you are, our matching algorithm could think that you are the perfect fit for a role, even if there's literally no words that overlap between your resume and the job description that you're applying to. So I'm kind of like, it's my vision for the future that instead of just trying to game these ATSs, that you can just kind of, you can be authentic, you can be creative with your language, you can be funny, you can be cool, and that

These AI systems like ours, at least, and hopefully more that we see in the future in these kinds of ATS systems and these kinds of recruiting pipelines are more clever than just looking for the right keywords. I think you've sort of hit the nail on the head there. And yes, we haven't had a lot of time to talk about Nebula, but that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's the next step.

from the cookie cutter, you know, way to do things. There's, there's this next deeper level and, and even beyond that, there's going to be a deeper level. You know, when I was talking to, um, folks at SpaceX and Tesla and some of those types of, um, employers, um,

Each one of the internal talent acquisition teams said, it's not enough that we see your resume. We need more. We need, you know, a GitHub link. We need a personal website link. We need something to assess you beyond your resume. And so if they're requiring it, you know that it's going to be a trickle down effect eventually to most all employers.

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Yeah, lots of opportunity to be, yeah, I guess this is something maybe kind of a general thing, whether you're listening to this episode for career tips or anything, in terms of opportunities to be making a big impact with AI in your organization or as a startup, this idea of where can I be using things like large language models, not as generative AI, but as

encoding AI to take natural language and convert it into a high dimensional vector and allow much more clever search or discovery over documents. And this can be done in any industry and offers huge improvements over trying to do keyword based matching. All right, so Deepali, we've talked now about the technologies themselves, but what about the kinds of people that are needed to

bring these technologies into the marketplace effectively. So what kind of leadership style and attitude towards technology is required for strategic leaders in AI, in data, in analytics? You know, you advise a lot of these kinds of companies,

how, you know, what kind of leadership style or attitude is required in order to use AI effectively and actually make a difference as opposed to just trying to find a nail for a hammer. So this is where I think there's a huge opportunity for, you know, your audience, right? These data science experts

leaders, team members, if you are trying to level up on your leadership skills and communicate with stakeholders up, down, and across the most, uh, I guess the most important soft skills that you can have is the way that you articulate, educate, and communicate about your specific role.

expertise or industry or tool or whatever it is. Someone just told me that when you have a technology person, but they can actually sell or have a commercial DNA, that is unicorn status. And I think most technology people need to remember that. I think the way that you articulate a story, all of you are in the data.

Tell the story about the data.

Right. Tell a layman like myself, right? I only speak data at a surface level, right? You guys are much smarter than me at any given day and twice on Sunday. But I traverse in the talent landscape of seeing sort of the beauty in which you guys are working with data, telling your story to clients that are interested in implementing this. So think about the things that

I want you to tell me, but spoon feeding me that information helps you get to that next level. So I always think about your why, your communication, your ability to articulate, your ability to manage and educate others.

your stakeholders is the way that you're going to get the seat at the table. So, you know, those are those one, the green flags that, that were in that article were around, you know, point blank communication skills. Nice. Yeah. Those are all great tips. And we actually hear that a lot on the show from people doing hiring, you know, communication skills, interpersonal skills,

These are some of the most in-demand characteristics amongst technological people. And so definitely something that's worth brushing up on, yeah. I would say one more thing. I think, you know,

So I've been at this for a while. And when I originally started in the industry, I was recruiting a lot of quants. And so when you think about quants, you think about PhDs, super linear thinkers, like everything has to be 100%. It can't be 80-20. It's that type of mindset. What was happening where quants hit a wall?

And a lot of these hedge funds and other organizations, where they started hitting a wall and they started bringing in sort of C-suite leadership to make the fund grow, it's because they didn't have that commercial DNA, what I'm talking about, because they saw things very linearly.

And so for folks that are, you don't have to be in finance or, you know, you can be in any given industry. You can be in retail. You can be in anything consumer driven. But if you can see the business outcome to which your job is relevant for, right? And being able to see that and then reverse engineer into what you're doing and why it's important and what outcome it's going to be for that business.

that is the way that you are going to get noticed and picked up on, right? Like I said, the data storytelling, that's where you will get ahead in these organizations. That's what they want. Yeah, very nicely said. Speaking of quants, you have worked in financial services and fintech industries a lot, as you just mentioned.

Now, you also mentioned earlier how in tech there's been lots of layoffs in the last couple of years. Have you seen that mean that it's been easier for Wall Street firms, for financial firms to be recruiting tech talent? Yeah.

So here's the benefit of being in the business so long, you kind of see cycles. So I would say during the dot-com years, you saw, or starting from the dot-com years way back in the day, the brain drain from Wall Street to the Valley. That went on for a lot of time.

until Wall Street started catching up and saying, hey, the Valley's doing something super cool. We need to take that tech and we need to implement it here. So what's happened is it's kind of gone full circle. I've had people that were at Goldman Sachs on the derivatives desk who have PhDs in statistics and econometrics go over to Uber and be in their surge pricing data team and

and now make their way back to a fintech because there's a robo-advisory business where they've learned super cool tech. And now they can apply their deep learning generative insights

AI models to a robo advisory, right? So like, so you're kind of seeing this circle and, um, I feel like the, the brain drain from wall street to, to the Valley has now shifted to, you know, the Valley creating super great products and going through that sort of life cycle of whether it's SAS products or, or whatever. And then coming back this way, because there is a lot of, you know, um,

appetite, right? So for those layoff employees that are kind of used to tech culture, I would say that, you know, FinTech and financial services and non-traditional, you know, non-tech cultures are very inviting to those folks because they want to know about product. They want to know about all of these other things. And so you have great opportunity to have an impact and you won't feel like a cog in the wheel at, you know, at a larger traditional tech firm.

Yeah, really nicely said. Now something I often wonder about is these big financial companies, they love Windows and they love Excel. And that's usually they're like, yeah, we're sticking with Windows because I know all my Excel shortcuts. But then people like data scientists, software developers, we all use open source tools. We need Unix-based systems like a Mac or literally like Linux, a Unix system.

And so this is mostly a joke question, but there must be interesting kind of cultural things as these companies, financial companies, fintech companies, the leadership is probably so used to their Excel hotkeys and Windows. It must create some kinds of issues. Oh, there's culture clash. You nailed it. There's definitely culture clash, tech clash. I think the one thing that most techies don't,

they don't bet on is the amount of regulatory and compliance issues that they have to face in

And that's just table stakes. Like they, they just have to get over it. Like they, that's just part and parcel of what the job entails. And so if you're saying, Oh, we got to, you know, do everything in the cloud and this and that, and like, you're going to go buck wild. No, they're going to taper you really quickly. That's not going to work. So you're going to have to have some sort of measured approach where I don't think that they're afraid of like,

running small pilots, quick wins. Let me tell you something. Wall Street loves money. Financial services firms love money. And so when they see a pilot go right, or there are quick wins, or we've had 30% increase in rent, they will go all in and figure it out. But up until that point, you know, you can't be a bull in a China shop there. Great answer. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

There must be a lot of painful Microsoft Teams interviews out there. I mean, the best example that I can give you, and I can talk about this now because it happened so long ago, but Kevin Turner, I believe he was the COO at Microsoft or he was running like a really insane unit. And Citadel, the hedge fund, Ken Griffin decided to hire him. And it was for an obscene amount of money. I bet. And

He started walking the halls of Citadel and could not connect, could not culturally connect. It was just oil and water. And Ken paid an obscene amount of money and he was blown out in the shortest amount of time. He was, I almost call it like the Scaramucci, right? It was, it was like that, right? Like Scaramucci six days kind of thing. Same, same situation.

For our international listeners, this is a reference to the first Donald Trump presidency when his chief of staff, Anthony Scaramucci, was in the job for six days. Very detailed memory there. All relevant only because we just had the election, so all of these things start again. We are recording this the morning after the U.S. presidential election. That's right.

Are you sure you don't want me to pontificate on my political analysis? I think I'm dressed for it. I know, it's true. For people watching the video version, it does look like Tupali is ready for an NBC interview. It looks just like when they bring in the pundits to talk about these things. And yeah, we try not to get into politics on this show. No, definitely not. Definitely not.

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So moving on to our next topic, you are, in addition to your role at Korn Ferry, a huge executive search firm, you also are entrepreneurial. So as one example from your entrepreneurial portfolio, you are the founder of Profolios.ai. So P-R-O, like professional, folios, like professional.

I don't know, the end of portfolio. So portfolios.ai, we'll of course have a link to that in the show notes. And this is a groundbreaking, a groundbreaking, let me try to speak, platform designed to foster meaningful professional connections through critically, this is the critical point,

video centric profiles. And you already mentioned earlier in this episode, how you believe video is the future. And I guess this platform is you putting your money where your mouth is. Absolutely. Uh, that's, that's the entire reason why I decided, and actually, you know, the, this was sort of a long time coming during the pandemic, um, is really where the idea started percolating. Um,

We were all on Zoom and between Zoom and Zoom University for the students, if you will, right? Video between the younger generation of TikTok, Instagram, people are so used to seeing reels flipping through videos. What I felt in my seat was we have to be able to represent ourselves more holistically and

And what platforms do a good job but not a great job in representing us? I think that, like, everybody that I talk to has some grievance about LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is ubiquitous, right? And so it's something that you cannot avoid. And I use LinkedIn every single day. But in my seat, I truly felt like, what is the next generation of

going to need and look for when it comes to representing themselves better. And I kind of started to put myself in my client's shoes as well, right? And so I said, all right, as an executive search person, I have the luxury of interviewing people face-to-face. I'm assessing them. I'm asking them the probing questions, so on and so forth. And I'm on my soapbox about communication skills.

Now, if people do not use executive search, where does that leave them? Right. They don't have the opportunity to get it assessed by a leadership consultant. They don't have the ability to have me as their quote agent represent them to a very big role. What if you just don't have that opportunity or you're going direct or whatever? Right.

And kind of tying in my philosophy around commercial DNA, I think everybody has to have some level of commercial DNA. You have to sort of sell yourself and selling yourself means selling your abilities to do this job better than anybody else. And so to be able to articulate that in your own words and showing up with your personality, and I know my data science folks, I know you worry about, you know, video and, you know, I don't want to do that. But the pandemic changed all of that.

you're on Zoom. Guess what? You're on video. And so I want them to get used to the fact that you can do this, right? So that's the beauty of portfolios is that that link can be private and you can just share it with the people you want to share it with, or you can be as visible as you want to be and put it on your LinkedIn and amplify yourself, right? You're in control of

But my point is we are going to make it so easy for you to do a three-minute video elevator pitch about yourself. We'll provide you the questions. Our teleprompter experience is our secret sauce. We will never leave you high and dry. You will be able to pick the questions or you can speak freely. You can take notes. By the way, you can do it on your phone, John.

So you should be able to do a portfolio in 15 minutes. You can take your LinkedIn profile. We find you, we download everything on it. We do everything but the video.

And when that video prompt prompts you, like I said, you can select the questions, take notes. It's teleprompted to you. You look good. You sound good. We even have music that we kind of thread all the videos through. So now you have a polished profile. You're able to display your data science work. You're able to tell a story. You're able to

it's almost like a mixed media of like LinkedIn meets Instagram meets TikTok. It's like this modern version of being able to share the things that are important to you. But more importantly, the reason why I named it Profolios is because I think the future of careers is actually going to be a portfolio career. I think people are going to have multiple careers over their lifetime. They may start at point A, but

but they're going to end up somewhere completely different, right? I started in recruiting. I'm not doing the same type of recruiting I was 20 years ago, right? And so I've had a non-linear career path, even though someone might bucket me into saying, Deepali, you're executive recruiting. I don't feel that way.

I'm advising clients, so I'm a consultant. I'm coaching leaders. I'm now a career coach. I am doing executive search, so I'm still doing that part of recruiting. But that's only, I feel, 30% of my job. So that's where I'm going with this, where I feel like infusing sort of future technology. And we have AI enablement. And for those of you that are intimidated about creating your bio,

we'll help you do that too. So that's where I'm thinking it's next gen. And so that's, that's really, it, it, it was, it was built out of sheer sort of, I don't want to say frustration, but more disruptive mindset of, of what I want my employers to, to expect and what I want my candidates to advocate for. And you're spot on with people having these portfolio careers and shifting a lot. And AI is a big part of that. AI is,

causing roles to change rapidly, no more so than in roles like data analytics, data science, software development, where if it's possible to do your job remotely, where you interact solely with a computer, with the buttons on the keyboard, video, audio, all of that in the coming years will be, to some extent, replaceable. Low-level code generation is going to get easier and easier

most of our listeners, if they're writing code, are using generative AI tools to assist with that code writing. And so it means that, as an example, you said you're still in recruitment 20 years later, but the way that you do your job is different. And so for data science people, for example, something that's happening right now that everyone needs to get used to

is that you don't need to be typing out every character anymore in your code. And instead, you can be thinking more about how to architect this efficiently, how to deploy it, how to have more commercial relevance, and how to be able to sell something internally or externally for it to be successful.

And that's where, you know, I was listening to my other favorite podcast besides yours, John, the all-in boys that I had an opportunity to meet and, you know, do all of that early on. Yeah, they're super cool. But they said, we're in an era now with data scientists and AI specialists that are

there might be billion dollar companies run by a solopreneur. Think about that. So what you just said about, you know, code writing itself and, and if, if a technologist can build a billion dollar revenue generating company in their home with a computer, what do you think is, what do you think they're going to need? Right. It's,

It's not the technical skills. It's going to be everything else that makes it a billion dollar company. They're going to have to sell. They're going to have to market. They're going to have to network. They're going to have to do all of these things in order to get it there. The tech stuff is just table stakes. They already know how to do that. Really well said. So yeah, so I think this portfolio stuff is really cool. I love that you're doing this entrepreneurial stuff.

and something that occurred to me as you were describing it, it sounds very easy to use. I'm going to have to create one right after this. I'm embarrassed that I didn't do it before we started, but I bet a lot of people after they create these, you mentioned how it kind of blends LinkedIn with social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok.

There probably are. You probably know lots of cases of people sharing these publicly when they're looking for a job on, say, a TikTok profile. Absolutely. You know, it was interesting where my thoughts got a bit validated. So when there was an article that went viral about a...

a recently laid off young woman that basically did a TikTok video as her resume and it went really viral and she got picked up by a couple of, of, of companies. And so I thought about that and I'm like, well, why, why did that happen? It's because she was able to express everything that you really couldn't express in a,

written in written form, right? Like the emotion of it, the what happened, you know, all of those things in honestly, I think it was like a 90 second or maybe three minute video.

And so if you think about that, there's so many like videos, but what, what is the, um, I don't know this. I'm ashamed. I should know the stats because you guys are, are a stat community or the data community, but you know, a video speaks 10 million words versus what, you know, what's on paper. And so, you know, the mannerisms, the, the emotion, all of that is getting articulated as someone is watching you.

And so that's where I thought, okay, well, I think I'm on the right track. And by the way, John, I might be too early. You know, I might be really early where there's sort of, I'm in the early adopter phase of, of maybe it's, you know, really senior folks that want to do this versus early entrance or whatever. But,

I do have some empirical research to share, and I think you'll enjoy this. When I was kind of on my research journey as we were building features of this platform, we talked to the meta team. And so some good friends of mine at meta, they had meta workplace, they ended up sunsetting it. But that team said, Deepali, I think you're onto something. They said, there's two groups that love video.

Can you name those two groups? Two groups that love video? Video. Like demographic groups? Demographic groups. Young people love video for sure. And then I feel like the second one is going to be a surprise. Boomers. So they found in their empirical research that

Gen Z obviously love video. They've grown up. They're the quote, TikTok generation, right? So they're not afraid to do video. And I think even in hiring practices, like if they were asked to do a video, they do it, you know, as part of the process and, you know, they wouldn't think twice about it or they're not afraid of there's, they're not, there's no intimidation factor, but the surprise group were the older generation. And, um,

It's a surprise and it's not a surprise. The older generation has a lot of experiences and they're the generation that they're definitely not going to write it down. They're going to tell stories. And what better way to tell stories than on video?

And so they really adopted it really, really well. So like I said, I might be early because we're kind of in two different factions. And so the middle, right, the millennials, the older millennials, the Gen Xers are kind of like head down, I'm doing what I'm doing, you know, and, and, you know, this is what I'm all about. And I really don't need this. But what I'm saying is that

The next generation of talent, if you're not developing your personal brand, which is why I started this, like everyone's going to have a personal brand because they're going to have a portfolio career.

You are not going to just work for your company. You're going to work to build your internal and external brand so you can take it from one company to another. Very cool. It makes so much sense to me. I think you're absolutely spot on. If we have people out there listening who aren't Gen Z or baby boomers...

What can they be doing to overcome camera shyness? Do you have any tricks? Yeah. So think about how you're interacting on Zoom calls, right? Are you multitasking? Are you looking at the person? Just observe yourself behaviorally when you are on video.

And I think, you know, go, no one is telling you to go on TikTok and do videos and start, you know, a viral movement, but it's part of the reason why. And again, I'm kind of coming back to sort of what, what the thought process was in the video creation piece of portfolios is the, the record and the rerecord. I didn't like that. Do it again, do it again. So I think it's, it's the same

Tips and tricks that we would ever do, rehearse your answers for an interview, talk about it with a friend. And so we make it unintimidating with those prompts and teleprompters.

And you organize your thoughts so you don't feel like it's intimidating for you, right? And so I think having those conversations, knowing that you've appeared on Zoom many times, what if that meeting is recorded? It's going to go somewhere. I think, you know,

it's something that people are just going to eventually have to get over, right? I mean, it's table stakes now. Yeah, I'm sure it will get easier and easier because of the way that we are so remote. We're used to at least hybrid working most people in tech, although some fintech companies, I'm sure, require you to be in five or seven days a week. I won't name names. As a bit of an anecdote on that,

Prior to Nebula, I was the chief data scientist at another HR tech company called Untapped. We, like you, thought video is going to be really important. Video interviews would be great. It would allow our talent to showcase themselves. All of the talent that we had in the platform were software developers and almost nobody used video. But that was years ago. That was pre-pandemic.

And I'm sure it is shifting for sure. Slowly but surely. As we often discuss on air with guests, deep learning is the specific technique behind nearly all of the latest AI and machine learning capabilities. If you've been eager to learn exactly how deep learning works, my book, Deep Learning Illustrated, is the perfect place to start.

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If you don't already have access to O'Reilly via your employer or school, you can use our code SDSPOD23 to get a free 30-day trial. That's SDSPOD23. We've got a link in the show notes.

All right. So speaking of young people, in 2021, you launched Fearless Plus. So just the word fearless with the addition sign at the end, Fearless Plus. And this is a firm aimed at helping teenagers prepare for life after graduation by creating resumes and connecting them with educational and professional opportunities. And so in your entrepreneurial journey, I think Fearless Plus actually came before portfolios, right?

Tell us about that journey. How did Fearless Plus come to be? Why did you found it? This is actually a great story and I think you'll enjoy it. So yes, you're right. Profolio is sort of the version two of Fearless. So where I really intended, you know, when the pandemic happened, I have a now teenage son, if you would believe. But at the time he was 10. And

We obviously all were at home observing each other's behaviors. And I started thinking about what can I do with all of this sort of experience that I have and just noticing what young people were doing and not deliberately learning, right, in school. And it was really the emotional intelligence that no one deliberately teaches you.

And in my job, it's all about emotional intelligence. Leadership is all about emotional intelligence because the IQ and the technical know-how is sort of the expectation. But you become a stellar leader when you also have the EQ, the self-awareness and all the other things that I've talked about today. And so I said, all right, well,

I have all of this knowledge. I should do something to help young people bridge the gap. Because at the time, I was also hiring very young people at, you know, Korn Ferry and in my previous role at Hydric and, you know, all the other firms that I've worked for. I still felt a pretty big disconnect between, you know, those young college students entering the workforce and still being a deer in headlights about, you

These skills that you and I have come to know as, you know, just you need to know them. You need to know how to write an email. You need to know how to, you know, do all of these things. And so...

I said, all right, I'm going to curate all of this. I'm going to lean on my industry friends and I'm going to bring this to the younger generation. So that's where it all started. And so I said, okay, I'm going to teach them this content around emotional intelligence. And so what happened was we built a content library of EQ skills and it took off. And we had a partner. We do still have a partnership with American Student Assistance. We have over 30,000 students on our platform, so on and so forth.

What happened though, two things happened. One, I was in, I had a, I had a, I was working on a high profile board search. And one of the reference calls I had to make was to Bob Iger at Disney. My son, and I promise I'm not a tiger mom, but my son happened to

have started reading Bob Iger's book, Ride of a Lifetime at 10 years old. I know what your audience is going to think of me. I'm not that person. But what happened was at one of the book fairs, he had picked up the book because it said Disney and he thought it was going to be something fun for him to read as opposed to a business book. Anyway, so he read it or see, he was reading it. He probably got 10% of it, but whatever.

So he heard me that I was going to be on the phone with Bob Iger. So his eyes went like, what, what's happening? And so I talked to Bob and I said, Bob, you know, my son happens to be here. It's the pandemic, whatever. He would love to talk to you. And he's actually read your book. He's like, are you kidding me? And Bob's actually a New York guy. So he knew my son's school and all of that. And he's like, I'd love to talk to him.

And so they get on the phone and he's like, I actually didn't write the book for a 10 year old, but I'm so glad you're reading it. And there was this moment, right? And when they hung up the phone, my son was so excited. We sent Bob a picture of him holding the book and all of that. And it was an indelible moment for Bob and for my son. And it was in that moment where I was like, fearless is the right thing to do because I felt that

My son, the only reason why he had access to Bob Iger is because he has a mother that happens to be in the business. But what about all the other kids?

And so the mission of fearless was to democratize access, right? I wanted to democratize access on all the stuff that these leaders already know how to do well. And I wanted to bring it to the younger generation. I wanted to teach them these skills as they kind of come into the market. And by the way, like that's why it evolved. It's not just for young people. It's for everybody, right? All of these things that you and I know, right?

of what works in corporate America or in entrepreneurial land or whatever, these skills that are table stakes that are not deliberately taught. That happened and I said, all right, well, even if I'm teaching all these wonderful skills to these young people, how are they going to show it?

So then I had to build it. I had to build the fearless profile, which now, you know, over 30,000 students are using it. And the version two now, as you see, because all of my professionals got really jealous of the fearless video profile that they said, Deepali, can you please make a version for us? And I said, fine, we will. And that was the evolution to portfolios. So

So in terms of logistics, I mean, so first of all, amazing story. Absolutely love that. I was completely enraptured the entire time and really cool story. But something that just occurred to me right at the end of that whole explanation is, you know, with you having a full-time role at Korn Ferry,

creating Fearless Plus, creating portfolios. Logistically, how do you, when you were just talking now about creating a fearless profile, like creating the concept of that so that 30,000 students now keep using it, what kind of process do you go through to efficiently develop these apps while also having a full-time job? Yeah, look,

The short answer is it's not easy and it's a roller coaster and not every day I'm winning, right? When people are like, oh, it's in balance or I'm not going to tell you that I wake up at five in the morning, but I will tell you I work on the weekends. It comes at the sacrifice of dinners with my family and so on and so forth. But I also have found a really great team.

And I think surrounding yourself with like-minded people or motivated people, you know, I happened to catch a friend of mine that actually the tech guy behind the platform is someone that, one, is a very good friend of mine, was in my Rolodex for 20 plus years, happened to have an exit. And he happened to have delivered digital experiences to the NFL, NASCAR, and PGA Tour. So I knew he was the right person.

tech guy to believe in this. So I invested my own dollars. He was at a point where he was a technology guy that like the serendipitously understood that as a technology guy, he did not have the personal development that he needed to be even better. So although he's had these successes, he wanted to now take the time to work on himself and

And so when we came together, these two worlds collided and I was all about like leadership and brand and, you know, all the EQ and he was very linear. And so when we collided, it was like, he was learning from me. I was learning from him and we built this thing that was so beautiful. And, and, you know, he taught me so much about product and, and,

you know, phased approaches and things that we don't need because being creative and being sort of on the non-tech side, I was like, I want everything. I want everything, put everything in here. And he's like, Deepali, you can't. So, so he tempered me as well. And so we only did all the good stuff. Right. And by the way, we started raising money, something that he had never, you know, done in a way of like, he had done it for the companies together that he,

built, but he had already had sort of a head start. This is like starting from zero. Right. And so, yeah, it was, it's been a tremendous experience and that's where we are today. Very cool. Thank you for giving us that insight. It was, yeah, that's personally very interesting to me. And I'm sure there's a lot of people out there. It sounds like it's clear that the key there, you know, if you're somebody who has, you know, you're from, you're more of a kind of business co-founder, then

than pairing with a more technical co-founder. And if you find the right person, the right team to work with that you can trust, it might even be possible to bootstrap that application, that startup, while working full-time and raising kids. Absolutely. And look, it's never in balance, right? And I disclosed everything when I was working on this and I never...

you know, defaulted on my fiduciary duty to my day job, right? That was number one. I was still doing everything and operating at the top of my license for my day job. These were things that I were working on the background. And by the way, my day job actually empowered me with my Rolodex

to do more of this, right? Because they validated what I was doing and they encouraged me to do it. So I'm just very lucky in that sense. Nice. Yeah. It's great to have a supportive firm like that for sure that sees the value in diverse experiences, improving your Rolodex, getting out there and talking to our tens of thousands of listeners. We appreciate that. Look, I mean, it's an excuse to talk about it, right? And so it's great. Yeah.

So backtracking a little bit from the technical stuff around Fearless Plus and getting more into its purpose to allow more access to these EQ skills, regardless of background. My next question follows on from that, and it's one of these tricky questions. So

Diversity is not just a checkbox to TIC. And you've championed diversity as part of Korn Ferry's Diversity and Inclusion Council as an example, as well as partnering with startups like Correlation One on diversity initiatives. And of course, Fearless Plus and Profolios also have these accessibility elements to them, which are inherently, yeah, encourage diversity as well. So how can organizations...

effectively measure and incentivize diversity and inclusion initiatives, maybe say specifically in hiring? So, for example, do you think that AI algorithms should be

deliberately surface people from diverse backgrounds, have a boost for people that aren't typical in a particular industry? I guess it's a two-part question. The first one is, how do we as an organization manage DEI correctly, in your view? And then second, how do we do that in the context of AI tools? Great question. For the first part,

I encourage my clients to always consider a slate of candidates that have diverse candidates, right? That is honestly, I will never present a slate for any role without having diverse

gender, racial, or any level of diversity that you named on the candidate slate, right? That's just our practice. This way it gives room, right? We're not, it's not a zero sum game. We're not replacing one for the other. We're opening the table for more to be seen, right? So that's one. Okay.

AI tools got a bad rap a few years ago when, I don't know if you saw the article, but Amazon had an algorithm that was actually creating biases for white men technologists. That was the bias towards them because they had uploaded a resume saying,

And any other, you know, resumes were basically surfacing similar, you know, it was unintended, but it happened. And so if I think about AI tools and what you said, actually really important, you know, should they push up, you know, diverse candidates?

Yes, I think they should. I think the, the algorithm should be written that, you know, X amount of diverse candidates should be on that slate. And again, not a zero sum game. It's not one replacing the other. It's opening up the aperture. Very cool. Makes perfect sense. Um, my last kind of technical question here, uh, before we start wrapping up, cause I want to be mindful of your time as well on the slot that we booked. Um, but, uh,

I mentioned earlier in this episode a CNBC article that you had. That article, which I'll have in the show notes for people to check out in its totality, it was primarily about green flag behaviors in bosses. I'd love to hear what

what these green flag behaviors are that we should be looking for in our employers? Yeah, so I would say green flag behaviors are the collaborative discussion

right? The ability for bosses to be inclusive in their, um, decision-making, right? Consensus building, transparent discussions around, this is what we're going to do. Do you all agree? How should we go about doing it? I think those are the green flags that people should look for that. That's what we really call sort of inclusive bosses, right? Um,

It's allowing a preview on how decisions are being made above your level or above their level, and then being able to tell their team, this is how this decision is going to be made. So let's work back into how we can get things done.

I think where the red flags show up is the non-transparency, right? I'm telling you to do this because I'm telling you to do it. And then I might take credit for your work and I'll keep climbing and you'll stay where you are kind of thing. I think the green flags are equal recognition, right? Team recognition in those meetings, inviting the team to the meetings where they are able to present and

bosses that are green flag bosses are the ones that give credit and sort of are the last to speak, right? So they promote their team. Those are the bosses that are not insecure. So they should be really secure in their role. They're in that position for a reason. But if you are not

trying to train your team to replace yourself, you need to free up your role in order to move up. So why wouldn't you include your team to rise to your level so then you can move beyond that? So those are some of the things that I talked about in there. Nice. And something, given how impressive you've been throughout this entire episode, all these insights, all the way through to the green flags just now,

And something that I'm really excited to be able to tell our listeners about is an opportunity that you mentioned to me at the beginning of this episode, or just before we started recording, which is that you're creating a new network that will really be interesting to our listeners. It's about data. It's a network for people who work in data, in machine learning, and AI. And so they can go to signupformultiply.com. That's signupformultiply.com. I'm

And people can fill out a type form and join this community. So tell us about this data machine learning and AI network that you're developing. Yes, so thank you for sharing that. This actually...

into everything that you and I have spoken about. And so I felt that while I'm helping these students with fearless and, and all of that, um, you know, I've always gotten guidance on starting with a community in, in a really highly focused community. Um,

And for me, the natural community for me is my data and AI community, which is I was so excited about, you know, coming on here. It was like insane.

insanely timely. And so as nerdy as we are, we're going to call this community the Multiply Graph. So if you know, you know. But as fellow data nerds, we really couldn't resist the name. But the idea behind it is, one, we want the power of connection. John, as you're doing, bringing these resources to this particular community, we want them to have connections for growth.

for opportunities. We want, you know, people that want to be mentored or they want to mentor. They want to look for potential board roles or exclusive events or, you know, speaking engagements, all the things where they are, this particular community is, is going to be very high profile for the next, you know, year.

I would say umpteen amount of years. I don't even know, but every employer on the tip of their tongue are saying the words data and AI. So we want to create a space and place for this network to one learn from each other, grow with one another and,

have opportunities come to them. And so we want to do it in a way where I'm offering the portfolio product to them and so on and so forth. So I think it's a culmination of all of these things and it's my way to kind of

not only give back, but bring people together. So that's the idea behind it. I'm filling out the form right after this call. And yeah, so that's very exciting. It's only seven questions, not intimidating. We just want to know who you are. We're going to be looking at all the applications and we're going to be kind of, you know, soft launch in January. But right now we've had a tremendous amount of interest. And by the way, for those that are listening, our board members are

are really something. So you definitely want to join and be a part of it. If you're leading it, Dipali, it's hard to imagine anything but success. Everything you touch turns to gold. So definitely something to get involved in here. Sign up for multiply.com. Very cool. Before I let you go, do you have a book recommendation for us, Dipali? I do. I actually have two. Of course I would have two.

One book that really kind of changed me was this book called Superbosses by Sidney Finkelstein. I don't know if anybody's recommended it before. He's a professor at Duke. I'm a super fan. You know, I've met him. He's wonderful. He's had podcasts and everything. The Superbosses is really interesting because we talk about like, you know, um,

admiring different personalities and different types of leadership behaviors. And so Super Bosses really digs into what makes a really great boss. Or maybe personality-wise, they might not gel with you, but they're really good at amplifying your career. So I think it's a really interesting spectrum of just learning about different personalities in these leadership positions.

And the second one I'll say for those entrepreneurs out there, I read a, you know, the most recent book I read was Backable by Sunil Gupta. I think it's Sanjay Gupta's brother, Sunil Gupta. He was originally at Groupon and whatever, but his book Backable was very, you know, it was storytelling. And so he's a product guy and it was just fun to learn about his experience, like raising money and, you know, failing and then getting back up again and,

It was fun. So for my entrepreneurs out there, that's my second recommendation. Very nice. And very, very last thing before I let you go. And you have gone over time with your time being so valuable. I appreciate you. We all really appreciate it. But so the very last thing is, how should people follow you after this episode? We know that you have this viral TikTok account. So we'll be sure to include that in the show notes. Where else should people follow you?

So on my TikTok, I'm known as elite recruiter. So that is what it is. And then I'm, you know, completely searchable on LinkedIn. I have my portfolio. So portfolios.ai slash DePolyBias. You can, you know, Google me. I'm around. Easily findable.

Nice. All right, Deepali, thank you so much. Can't wait to get this episode out. Really appreciate your time. And yeah, we'll have to check in again maybe in a couple of years and see how the multiply graph is coming along. Love it. Thank you, John. I appreciate it.

What a superb episode in it. Deepali filled us in on how job applications have increased from about 250 per posting to 2,500 per posting. It's a 10x increase due to AI tools helping candidates optimize their applications automatically. She talked about how two groups

that show the highest adoption of video profiles are Gen Z, which we might have expected, but also boomers, which is a surprise finding. But boomers apparently particularly value the storytelling aspect of video. She also talked about how while technical skills remain important, the ability to see business outcomes, tell data stories and demonstrate quote unquote commercial DNA, her words, are becoming crucial differentiators in the AI era.

She talked about how financial services firms are increasingly open to hiring tech talent, but candidates need to understand regulatory constraints and avoid being a bull in a china shop. She talked about how effective leadership requires transparency in decision-making, inclusive team involvement, and willingness to develop subordinates, and how the future of careers will be portfolio-based. Professionals will need to build personal brands and adapt to multiple roles over their lifetime.

All right. As always, you can get all the show notes, including the transcript for this episode, the video recording, any materials mentioned on the show, the URLs for Dipali's social media profiles, as well as my own at superdatascience.com slash 837. Beyond social media, another way we can interact is coming up on December 4th.

when I'll be hosting a virtual half-day conference on agentic AI. It'll be interactive, practical, and it'll feature some of the most influential people in the AI agents space as speakers. It'll be live in the O'Reilly platform, which many employers and universities provide access to. If you don't already have access, you can grab a free 30-day trial of O'Reilly using our special code SDSPOD.

We've got a link to that code ready for you in the show notes. Thanks, of course, to everyone on the Super Data Science podcast team for producing another enriching episode for us today and for enabling that super team to create this free podcast for you. I'm so grateful to our sponsors. You, listener, can support this show by checking out our sponsors links, which are in the show notes.

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