How to Beat Burnout and Master Recruiting

Kara Miller:

Welcome to Instigators of Change, a Khosla Ventures podcast, where we take a look at innovative ideas, those who come up with them, and those who invest in them.

I'm Kara Miller. And this week, two views on the people who power organizations. First we'll ask why we're in the middle of a burnout wave, which started before COVID, and how you create a company that prevents burnout.

Jennifer Moss:

The happiest worker is in the office with their team one day a week, but they're all together in the team. Because you don't really need to see each other all the time, but you do need to augment your relationships with technology and not replace them.

Kara Miller:

Then we'll talk to a woman trying to chase down the best candidates in a job market that's frankly nuts.

Kelly Kinnard:

Once you give companies money, one of the first things they often need and want to do is hire, whether it's at the executive level or at the individual contributor level. So this massive influx of cash, I think, is partly driving that.

Kara Miller:

First today, burnout. If you work in tech or actually almost any industry right now, you know that companies are losing good people right and left because they're burnt out. They're reevaluating, they're not going to take it anymore. And the thing is, this moment, it's been coming for a long time.

Jennifer Moss:

I was a co-founder of a data insights company. We were looking at how to increase wellbeing, just in general.

Kara Miller:

That's Jennifer Moss, who several years back was helping leaders of companies essentially make their workers happier.

Jennifer Moss:

And we're doing interventions really based on positive psychology, to see how do we map to the data that matters to lots of organizations, like engagement, productivity, NPS, ENPS, sales, all of those things that make shareholders happy. How do we see what improves wellbeing to make that happen?

Kara Miller:

Executives were eager to know what they should do to have more engaged, productive, positive workers, but there was a problem. People weren't being treated well, paid appropriately, managed reasonably, given agency at work. And offering morning yoga wasn't really going to help.

Jennifer Moss:

Instead, what we're doing is we're giving ice cream to people that need water. So all of these downstream programs and tools that we're using, here's self-care, you just manage it yourself, it'll all be fine, but I'm not going to fix the systemic problems, that wasn't working. And it really led me to understand why it was very difficult for organizations to improve the wellbeing of their people, because they were tackling it way, way further downstream.

Kara Miller:

Plus, Moss started to realize something else that was pretty important.

Jennifer Moss:

The fact that I, as a leader of a company around happiness, was slowly burning out, and there was so much irony in that. And I think I had to reflect on what do I do as an individual that plays a role? What does the organization do that plays a role? And how does society write large play a role in increasing burnout? And that's where I started to dig into the research, which was very fascinating and prompted me, I think, to become a passionate advocate for people to understand where burnout begins and how we can solve for it.

Kara Miller:

In 2019, which was the last year of the pre COVID era though of course Moss could not have known that at the time, she wrote about her research on burnout in Harvard Business Review. What she had discovered was that burnout was an enormous problem. The World Health Organization included it in the international classification of diseases in 2019, and experts believed that excessive work was a leading cause of death in the US, and responsible for millions of a year around the world, in part because so many companies had forgotten about the basic needs of employees, what Moss refers to as hygiene. And we're not talking here about hygiene for your hands. In this case, it's more like hygiene for your brain.

Jennifer Moss:

You're not really as an employee supposed to feel it. You're supposed to just get paid well, you're supposed to go into work and feel safe. All those things aren't going to motivate you, but they're the underpinnings of how you can be motivated. And so, those organizations that do not have those underpinnings, that do not have the foundation of hygiene, no matter what they throw at you to motivate you, it won't work.

Kara Miller:

Moss was worried about where we were headed in 2019. And then of course, a massively stressful event occurred. The economy was upended. Kids got sent home from school. People lost their jobs. People quarantined. People quit their jobs. Kids were sent home again. Businesses couldn't find employees. Moss wrote about what was happening in the book, The Burnout Epidemic. She says that everything that she's seen has added up to what might be coming next.

Jennifer Moss:

We talk a lot about feeling symptoms of burnout, but actually reaching to the point where you are burned out takes time. And it's usually just tiny, incremental wearing down of people. And a lot of the research shows that it's almost an 18 month to two year process, where you show this dip and then rebound, dip and rebound. But an event like people just completely done happens at this two year point. And I really think we're at that 18 months to two year point, where we are really overwhelmed. And that's why you're seeing 40% of the workforce, according to a Microsoft survey, say that they are going to quit their job in the next year. We're seeing mass attrition highest levels ever across almost every sector, and people have faced their mortality for two years. They have developed priorities that are completely different than being totally identified with our jobs.

And we're saying we're done. And then it becomes up bottom line issue for organizations because there's power now in employees who are leaving and deciding that they might not just work at all for a while or start up a whole new career, and that's changing the landscape.

Kara Miller:

However, when you talk about all these people quitting, we've certainly heard those stories. And then, you're saying even more people have that in their sights. Presumably, those people are then going into a pool of people looking for jobs. But the jobs that exist are the same jobs. It's like playing a game of musical chairs. I may take your job and you may take mine, which means that we both have left our jobs, but it doesn't mean that the jobs that are available are really any, in some, any differently. It doesn't necessarily mean there's a lot of great stuff out there.

Jennifer Moss:

I love that you asked that because we're starting to see these taglines now or these headlines that say that instead of the great resignation, it's the great regret. And I think that is true in some ways, because people are shuffling from one place to the next, and I do warn, if you're leaving one burnout culture, you have to be really careful about just going right back into the same fire. But we are seeing people leave their jobs and make major career pivots. You're seeing C-level executives going into starting their own companies or nurses actually leaving the profession altogether and starting to freelance or taking more control around what they're going to do in healthcare and not dealing with the same amount of hours. Teachers... Again, we're seeing this exodus of teachers, not just going to another school, but they're going into a completely different environment and doing completely different things.

So I think that is what is most profound, is that we're not just seeing people reshuffle. We are seeing people change dramatically what they're going to do in the future. And they're taking more care about deciding what that looks like and being much more cautious.

And I think that's going to play out then in organizations having to respond with more empathy, with more programmatic changes, with more support for people dealing with mental illness. And that is also what we're seeing, too. So at least if people are going to reshuffle, they might go into a company that cares a little bit more about their mental health.

Kara Miller:

So let's look at it from the perspective of people who run companies. You see people leaving, people making changes, people quitting. I guess two questions. One is, what are those leaders thinking, and what should they be thinking? And is there a gap between those? How are people processing that on the leadership end?

Jennifer Moss:

Well, some leaders, and we're going to see this in the future of work. It was the past and the present and the future, where leaders just think, "You just have to come back to work and deal with it here. We're going to all move back into our Manhattan giant office, and you have to all come back, and who cares if you moved away? I don't care. You're here five days a week." You're going to see some of that.

But what has happened in response to that is a revolt, and people are just saying, "No, thanks." And a lot of leaders have come to realize that even if they wanted to and they thought they could, they can't jam the toothpaste back in the tube. It's just different for people now.

And so I am seeing lots of leaders, for example, Hewlett-Packard just announced how they're going to rethink their return to office. So first they're going to make it optional if you want to be back or not. And I'm seeing a ton of organizations at the...large organizations, small ones, where hybrid is the future. So that's a major shift. And like I said, Hewlett-Packard is making it so that instead of life on site, it's this concept of, here. I know you want to be home with your family as soon as possible, so I'm going to send you home with meal kits, or we're going to prepare food for you and your family, or we're going to localize the access to healthcare. We're going to make opportunities when you're on campus to feel like you can enjoy yourself and have fun with maker spaces.

And this is just one example, but I'm seeing this across the board, where companies are starting to say, I need to do something very different because I will be obsolete if I do not do this.

Kara Miller:

I know when I've talked to you before, you've said the answer is not just morning stretching or let's all do 10 minutes of yoga every day. So give me a sense, again, if somebody is leading a company or building a company, are the solutions... You talked about meal kits. Are meal kits the solutions, or is it something bigger? Is it these little things you can do? How do you help people stay? How do you help retention, and how do you help people feel better?

Jennifer Moss:

Well, I think in the meal kits, for example, it's just saying it's not about life on site anymore. It's more about understanding empathetically what people really care about now. And that's just a micro example of a whole bunch of ways that leaders need to treat this and companies need to think about it. It needs to be about empathetic listening, asking what people want, finding ways to gather information about what people are concerned about.

For example, people have real high levels of social anxiety, and returning to work five days a week is creating a lot of anxiety, enough that people will leave. So how do you manage for that? The fact that we are actually creating this environment where people can have flexibility. This used to not even be an option before, and now they have high level of flexibility and agency, which is really important.

And that is an upstream intervention. Downstream interventions are only offering people that week off, but still having them work 70 hours a week. Not managing workload. We're also seeing guidelines around right to disconnect, and when is it okay for you to turn off, and creating the real structured boundaries around that, so that people feel like when they go home, they don't need to dial back into work. Those are the things that need to be figured out. Lots of organizations haven't totally figured that out yet, but the leading ones, the ones that we're really listening to and following are the ones that are taking all of the data that they've gathered about what their employees' needs are, and then actioning that.

Kara Miller:

I want to pick up on the idea of working at home, which obviously there's so much turmoil right now about. Are people going to be fully back on site? This is mostly for white collar workers, obviously. And only for specific kinds of workers. If you're a doctor, if you're a nurse, if you're driving a bus, you really never went home, you were always at work.

But I want to talk about this issue of hybrid or home or whatever, what direction we're going to go. We talked about the idea of people quitting their job a lot over the last couple years. And if you look at... Certainly a lot of office workers have been home much of the time for the last couple years. But if you look at the general social survey, which is given Americans since 1972, and for 50 years, it's basically asked people how happy are you, the most recent data, 2021, you just see numbers that we haven't seen in 50 years, where the number of people who said they were very happy plummeted. Number of people who said they were not happy surged. These are just, again, like nothing we've seen in 50 years.

I wonder what that says to you. Does that mean maybe we should be back in the office because maybe we were happier seeing other people? I don't know, but something about the last couple of years has been really tough on people.

Jennifer Moss:

You're absolutely right. Loneliness has increased dramatically. There's lots of data that show that we are the loneliest demographic that we've seen across in history. Significant increases in loneliness. We've swung the pendulum out of necessity, but we swung it so far in one direction that we need to go back to what I call a Goldilocks zone, and that is in the middle, where we don't need to be seeing each other five days a week. Ideally, there's a great study done that shared the happiest worker is in the office with their team one day a week, but they're all together in the team. Because you don't really need to see each other all the time, but you do need to augment your relationships with technology and not replace them.

And that's what's happened, is a lot of young people, and this is in our research too that we did, a lot of young people said, "I've started this a job in the pandemic. I have not met my coworkers, I have not met my boss. I'm living alone." And their wellbeing is just so at risk. It's plummeted. And it matches what you're reading in your data too, or the data that you're citing.

And so, I think that we need to figure out a way for there to be an opportunity for everyone to be together on the team. Again, it doesn't need to be the whole company, but the team gathers one day a week, or even for two days every couple weeks, and just then go off and do the work that you need to do, but find time to gather.

Kara Miller:

And you think people, your sense is people will not be too lonely if they don't see their colleagues six out of the seven days, they only see them that one day. Obviously, they can do things together, meet, have lunch, the whole thing, but you think one day is enough to stave off the loneliness.

Jennifer Moss:

It is. And I think also recognizing that some people require more, and there is a value, particularly for women who were deeply impacted by the pandemic, disproportionately working so much more unpaid labor. We societally need to change that, but in the meantime, making it so that whoever wants to come back into the office whenever they want to. And there's still the need for primary caregivers, which tend to fall on women, they end up really needing that flexibility more. So what there's a fear of, is that they continue to deal with a lack of fairness within the organizations. So it has to be prescribed, it needs to be scripted, but we should be able to offer those people that want to go in more to be able to have that opportunity to make those connections.

So this is a very tricky space for us in leadership and that anyone that's running a company right now, is to figure out how do we make sure that there's equity in these decision? How do we make sure that those people that are extremely extroverted, that get fueled by being with other people, are still being supported? And then we also make sure that there are people, because we have just dealt with the global pandemic, that probably need a very long runway to feel comfortable going back to work more frequently.

Kara Miller:

Yeah. Well, let me ask you a couple of those groups. One is the people who need the runway. I definitely have heard from people that, especially people who for a couple years really did not see that many people and not have a lot of social interaction, that if you work in, let's say, a place where you're going in two, three days a week, and there's hundreds of people there, that is a big, big shift from being at home with three other people.

Jennifer Moss:

It's a massive shift. And I've studied the neuroscience of happiness, really great books by Dr. Rick Hansen and research done by of quite a few others at neuroscientists in his same vein, focused on just how we develop the habits of happiness, and conversely stress. But what has happened is we've created a very comfort-driven habit of being at home. Our brains have literally changed to the way that we take on stimulus, to how we start going in the morning, how we come home at night, and there's byproducts of that that have not been healthy. We've stopped, what is the stat, that showers are down by 30% in 2021. So that is not necessarily good either, but this is where...

Kara Miller:

People are saving water, but otherwise...

Jennifer Moss:

Yeah, saving water. They're also not changing their clothes. But that's the thing, that routine's really good for us. But so getting up and going to work, there's these benefits to our wellbeing. And yet, we're also getting benefits of being able to do certain things in the day and being able to pick up our kids at three o'clock in the afternoon if we want to.

And so, you need to be able to recognize that we have changed, and our brain patterns have changed because our habits have changed, and it's changed the neuroplasticity. And asking people to just get out of that safe stasis, because we do, just generally our bodies and our minds really like to have things to feel neutral, and major shifts like that are terrifying for a lot of people. And then you add in that long term fear of a virus potentially risking your health and your family's health. So it isn't just I don't want to go into work because I'm uncomfortable about seeing people. It's also, I've been ingrained with this mindset of being afraid or fearful. There's just a lot of impact that this pandemic has had on our mental health. And if organizations don't address that and really understand that and give people the ability to build up that habit of safety and feel comfortable over time, then it's just going to dramatically fail. People won't be able to respond in a positive way to it.

Kara Miller:

We talked about how some type of hybrid might be the optimal scenario. You said that on those days when you're home, 10 to 12 hours of video conferencing is not sustainable. I think that's a quote. To be honest, though, isn't that a description of life for a lot of people?

Jennifer Moss:

It is ridiculous how much more we're collaborating. Just really great data. And this is Microsoft Teams data, so you can imagine extrapolating this across the other platform. So just think Microsoft Teams and office data that we sent, from 2020 to 2021, we sent 40 billion more emails. We're collaborating, we're meeting 128% more than we were. We've doubled the amount of time we're meeting. There's 60% increase in doc collaboration. It's just unbelievable how much more we're using technology and how on we are. And the fact that countries creating right to disconnect guidelines and laws, so that you can sue your employer because it's so unsafe how much people are working on their devices at home over time, this is becoming almost a potential safety issue within organizations, because it's so bad. So I see that as being a major issue that will have to be addressed.

And people working at home are actually working 30% more each day to hit the same goals, so that can't be sustainable. People having flexibility are appreciating that, and they have this indebted servitude to their organizations for feeling like, well, I have flexibility. So I'll just work all the time. And we can't have that. That's why people are quitting. Even though they're working from home, the flexibility just isn't enough to keep them. But I haven't seen a slowing down in a lot of organizations yet. We're seeing people leaving, and that's making people respond, but I haven't really seen people doing a good job of managing growth and stretch goals and thinking about that differently inside of what we're in right now.

Kara Miller:

When you say, I think you said people are working, who are working at home are working 30% more to achieve the same results. I wonder what that says to you because we could have talked five years ago, and we would've said that people working all the time was a problem. There's no question we would've said that people having meetings all the time was a huge problem.

Jennifer Moss:

Meeting fatigue was a major problem beforehand. There's really great... Dying for a Paycheck, Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote that excellent book. I think we talked about him and just his work, but-

Kara Miller:

He's at Stanford.

Jennifer Moss:

Yeah. And it was a major issue before. We were already meeting, and there was very little etiquette around people standing around and talking in a meeting and leaving people to be late for their next one or back to back meetings. But now it's like we can't solve anything without getting on a video conferencing meeting, and we have to book them for an hour, whereas you could just go by someone's desk and solve something in five minutes. And we're using these tools to the point where they lack total novelty, and our brains are not tuning in because our brains start to just tune out after it lacks complete novelty. And that's why you see people on meetings doing a million other things, not on camera, distracted, disengaged.

And so, we need to read think the way that we are collaborating. We should be thanking people when we don't get invited to meetings, instead of feeling like we're put off. We should create a mindset that I don't need to be looped. Over looping is not necessary.

And I keep saying that, think about this as a currency, the amount of resources you're using in a meeting. Spend two weeks and do an assessment of how much time you're spending. Every time you go five minutes over, what does that cost the organization? And do a good audit for two weeks. And you'll be shocked at how expensive it is to be over collaborating. And then we need to reduce the time, we need to reduce the amount of attendees, and create a culture where you feel like it's a gift to not be invited to a meeting.

Kara Miller:

When you think ahead maybe three or five years, how do you think things will be different? And I'm interested in both how you hope things will be different, but also feel free to put in things you fear may not be different because you don't see any sign they're really changing.

Jennifer Moss:

I have a fear that there's a demand right now because of the employees that are leaving. But then once that... We always see cycles in unemployment and employment rates, we see cycles. And once that cycle starts to shift more where the employer has more power, that we'll see that, again, just we'll fall back into old patterns. And that worries me because that's typical. We in general fall back to the same patterns, as human beings, so why wouldn't a large group of human beings still follow that same trajectory? However, the things that are being embedded right now are responsive and reactive, but they are probably going to end up being part of the culture going forward. And it's not something that I see a lot of organizations just pulling back on, offering a certain tool in the toolkit and then taking it away once they have power.

A lot of organizations know that and are starting to measure and understand, that if you have higher levels of wellbeing, you have more success. And as we start to map that, and as we start to gather data around that, because of this shift, then they'll realize it's important to continue to implement. You'll see more case studies, you'll see more examples of how that measure and that data is increasing performance. And then, that means it's more of a long term plan for these folks. But my hope is we're going to see over the long term, slow, evolving changes that make for a better, and I may be cautiously optimistic, but a better experience of work.

Kara Miller:

Jennifer Moss is the author of The Burnout Epidemic. Jennifer, thank you so much. This is great.

Jennifer Moss:

Thanks so much, Kara. It was great chatting with you.

Kara Miller:

And I'll be right back in a moment with another perspective on managing people right now. But before that, a message from Khosla Ventures.

Speaker: 

The job market is filled with endless possibilities today. If you are ready for your next adventure, consider joining a company in the Khosla Ventures portfolio. KV companies aim to fundamentally change health, finance, the future of work, transportation, energy, even space. Check out khoslaventures.com/jobs. That's khoslaventures.com/jobs. And now back to Instigators of Change.

Kara Miller:

I'm Kara Miller. Welcome back. My conversation with Jennifer Moss got me thinking, if companies are having trouble keeping talented workers, where are those workers going? Sometimes, of course, they're dropping out of the workforce altogether, putting out their own shingle, but many are taking new jobs. Sometimes even changing careers, as Moss mentioned, which is where recruiting comes in.

Kelly Kinnard:

So I run the talent team at Khosla Ventures, and we have 380 active portfolio companies. And so, our team works with the portfolio companies and helps them with all things related to talent.

Kara Miller:

Kelly Kinnard works with companies as they seek out executives that are going to help them get to the next level, maybe from tiny to small or small to medium or medium to something a lot bigger. When I talked to her, she said, much like Jennifer Moss, workers have been through a lot over the last couple of years, and expectations for new jobs have changed. People are coming in with strong views on perks, on salaries, on commuting. For recruiters, this churn in the labor market means it's super, super hard to get the candidate you want. Consider this.

Kelly Kinnard:

I had a startup that was really trying to recruit this senior executive, and the senior executive needed to relocate to San Francisco for the role. And he was pretty willing to do it, but his wife was very hesitant for lots of different reasons.

Kara Miller:

But Kinnard says these days, recruiting's like dating. You've got to woo people. And it does not hurt to turn on the charm.

Kelly Kinnard:

And they came out to San Francisco. So we created this whole trip and this whole itinerary around how we could basically woo her and sell her, even things like whenever they needed to travel up and down from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley, we had them drive down the 280, which is much prettier and scenic, versus 101, which is not. Full of billboards.

Kara Miller:

Still, Kinnard and her team, in an economy that she said is red hot, they weren't taking any chances.

Kelly Kinnard:

And so, we found out things that she was excited and interested in, like museums. And then we literally went and took her to museums and showed her around San Francisco. And we were very, very conscious about which hotel they stayed in and which restaurants they went to. Basically, tried to curate this trip to woo his wife. And then right after they got back from the trip, we sent her flowers, not him.

Kara Miller:

The offer was accepted. The couple ended up moving to the Bay area. But to Kinnard, the story is emblematic of how much the employer/employee relationship has shifted.

Kelly Kinnard:

And so, some companies, I think, understand that, and they approach recruiting from the outset with that understanding and with that attitude. But if companies don't get it, and they basically think that they should be able to open a role and have lots of amazing people be interested and apply, that tends to be very naive. The market is just incredibly hot, and good people are being approached constantly about new opportunities. And especially if a candidate has a great background, and they start to pick their head up and look around a little bit and maybe just whisper to their network that they're starting to interview, they can be deluged with opportunities. And so, the best companies understand that from the very beginning, and they essentially treat recruiting like dating. And I tell them things like, "You need to woo, and you need to bring flowers on the first date, and you need to pull out all the stops." Because the best people just have a tremendous amount of options right now.

Kara Miller:

Do you feel... Talk about the way that you recruit people for executive position versus maybe... You've been doing this for a while, not just in the last couple years. How is that different from the way you dealt with things five years ago or six years ago, let's say?

Kelly Kinnard:

That's a good question. I think one of the main changes is that candidates are getting more and more sophisticated, and they understand their worth in the market. They also have a lot more, I think, savvy and access to things like compensation data, for example. Smart candidates are constantly going out to their network, if they're beginning to look for a new role, or they're actively interviewing and asking people like myself and others, what's the comp market? What should I be paid for this role and the roles that I'm interested in? So I think the candidates have gotten more savvy and more sophisticated. And then there's just this incredible war for talent. Just every time I think the market can't get more competitive, it just seems to get more competitive.

Kara Miller:

When you say it's so competitive, why is this? Is this because there's just more opportunities than there were a couple years ago? Is it because some people have left the labor market, meaning that the people who are still in it are in super high demand? How do you explain to yourself why it's so to get talented people?

Kelly Kinnard:

I think there's been this massive influx of venture capital money into the technology market. And so with that, there are lots more companies being funded and lots more companies being started. If I just look at what's happening at Khosla, we're constantly investing in new companies. And once you give companies money, one of the first things they often need and want to do is hire, whether it's at the executive level or at the individual contributor level. So this massive influx of cash, I think, is partly driving that. The economy has also been very strong for the last couple years. The tech market in particular has been very strong, and there's been just this robust need for growth. And when there's growth, that means there's hiring. And that means management teams look around, and they often need up level. Often the people that help start a company and get it from zero to 10 million is a very different group of people that can take a company from 10 million to 50 million, and then 50 million and beyond on through an IPO.

So you just see companies go through those cycles, but I think it's just driven by a lot of factors, just in the broader market. But I think the venture capital money being poured in is one of the main drivers.

Kara Miller:

Do you think, because of all this competition, there is more churn amongst talent than you would've seen a few years ago?

Kelly Kinnard:

Yes. One thing that I think myself and others have noticed is that there used to be this understanding that people needed to stay in jobs for, let's say, at least two years or three years before they could leave and look around. And it was unacceptable if people had what we call short stints, where they changed jobs every year or two years.

But I think because the market is so hot and companies are so desperate to hire, they often don't even care if somebody is jumping around frequently because they just need that person. So there's less emphasis on people that have stayed in a role or at a company for multiple years. Now it's just more acceptable. So people are getting approached by opportunities, even when they're maybe six months into a new role, which is crazy because if somebody's only six months into a new role, unless they're miserable and deeply unhappy, why would they even consider an outside opportunity? But because the market is so hot, a lot of people think, "Well, I'm happy here. I'm relatively happy here, but perhaps there's something bigger, better out there for me that would pay me more." So they take the call.

Kara Miller:

In the, whether it's the recruitment space or HR people you know, are there stories that people have told you that stick with you as like, whoa, that's emblematic of the moment we are living through right now?

Kelly Kinnard:

Well, there's been a huge push for diversity over the last few years, which is really good. So a lot of companies are really making a huge effort to hire diverse candidates. And that's been something that has been, I think, very constant and especially important over the last couple years. Companies just can't get away with having an entire management team of all white men or an entire board of all white men, because they get a lot of pushback and criticism. Whereas maybe five or 10 years ago, some people didn't even think twice about that when they looked at a company's website and noticed it was entirely male. So things like that are happening in terms of diversity, but there's just a lot of talk in the industry about even good recruiters, getting them to do searches for your companies is very difficult right now, often they have a queue and a waiting time of six to eight weeks before they can even start a search, which is crazy.

Kara Miller:

Wow. And it's just they're so backlogged, basically.

Kelly Kinnard:

Yes, they're so backlogged. And so whenever portfolio companies are reaching out to me and saying, "Hey, we'd like to kick off this search next week. It's super important. It's super critical," I have to be the bearer of bad news and tell them, "Okay, well the best recruiters I know have a waiting time of basically six to eight weeks before they can even kick off a new project." And they're turning away a tremendous amount of business, and they can be very selective of and picky about who they work with and who they don't because they had to have so much business coming their way.

Kara Miller:

Kelly Kinnard is an operating partner at Khosla Ventures. Kelly, thanks so much. This is great.

Kelly Kinnard:

Thank you.

Kara Miller:

As always, thanks so much to you for joining us. You can grab our podcast on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcast, and stay tuned for a brand new episode dropping every Wednesday morning. I'm Kara Miller. This is Instigators of Change from KV. Our show is produced by Matt Purdy. I will talk to you next time.