They say, “Never meet your heroes.” This adage may be due to the disappointment found when someone you idolize doesn’t match up to your expectations. There should be a corollary to this axiom: “Sometimes, you’ll be surprised and delighted to learn that a high-profile person is amazing.”

In a wide-ranging interview with Dr. Robert Langer, the multibillionaire cofounder of Moderna, the biotech startup that helped save the world from the Covid-19 pandemic.

As an executive recruiter, I’ve interviewed thousands of high-powered professionals over the last two decades. It's rare to find uber successful people who still possess humility and gratitude.

Langer, in addition to being a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a chemical engineer, scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. He famously cofounded Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech firm Moderna, and owns a roughly 3% stake, worth about $2.6 billion.

The MIT professor, who still regularly goes into the lab, has also founded more than 40 other companies. He holds around 1,400 patents and is one of the most published and cited scholars of all time.

Josh Brenner, CEO Of Hired, Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Improve The Job Search Experience And Increase Diversity Hiring

Job boards seem stale and old fashioned. A company posts a long laundry list of requirements, but neglects to share what job seekers want to know: the compensation range, what the boss is like, how much turnover the organization has and whether there is a future within the organization.

With the proliferation of job boards, online corporate career sections, job aggregation sites, LinkedIn easy-to-apply listings and other platforms, it makes it easy for job seekers to “spray and pray,” submitting their résumés everywhere, hoping for a hit, much to the chagrin of human resources personnel who have to wade through all of the irrelevant submissions.

Job seekers, hiring managers, recruiters and human resources talent acquisition professionals wonder why this area hasn't evolved, especially as tech is revolutionizing most aspects of business and life. It looks like one company is bringing the staid job board into the future.

I spoke with Hired CEO Josh Brenner to learn more about how his company improves the hiring process, and what he sees happening in the current job market. Hired, a division of one of the largest global staffing and talent firms, the Adecco Group, offers a better, more modern-day solution. The company is the largest AI-driven hiring marketplace that matches talent with top-tier companies, like Dropbox, Coinbase and Zillow. Hired combines intelligent job matching with unbiased career counseling to help people find a job they love and reach their full potential.

Brenner says that the Hired platform serves as the go-to platform for hiring managers, recruiters, and C-level executives to connect with the best talent. Hired is also committed to strengthening equity in the hiring process by offering “a more representative talent pool, using bias reduction features, customized assessments and salary bias alerts to help remove unconscious bias when hiring.”

Kenzo Fong is an experienced Silicon Valley tech executive. He helped build Google Maps and was an early member of Uber Eats. In these capacities, he dealt with globally distributed teams.

Fong found it increasingly frustrating that he had to juggle different incompatible platforms. These different tools aren’t linked to one another. This causes workers to waste a lot of time and energy, frustratingly toggling to various platforms and apps throughout the business day. He says that although many of the products are great, there is redundancy and not much of a major difference between Trello, Asana and other project management tools.

To remedy this situation and make it easier for workers to connect and collaborate, Fong, who often works out of his van, set out on his own to found Rock. The platform is a distributed work company that enables anyone to work from anywhere. Rock was created to work both synchronously and asynchronously. Rather than productivity tools that don’t work together and actually fragment the workflow, he’s developed an all-in-one platform to reduce anxiety and put everyone on the same page.

With Rock, employees from across the world can seamlessly interact via messaging, task creation and integrated video calls. Dissimilar to softwares that not-so-subtly pressure you to always be on call, there are no annoying “pings” late at night. They often create the expectation that we need to be available at all hours of the day. Fong is not a big fan of technology that makes you focus on presentism and face time, instead of doing the actual work that needs to get done.

It's an all-in-one affordable productivity platform for distributed work that combines messaging, tasks, notes, and files in one simple tool that anyone can use. You can start with a free option.

Here’s How Gympass Offers A Smart, Easy Way For Companies To Improve The Physical, Mental And Emotional Wellbeing Of Their Employees

Mental, emotional, physical and health issues have risen to the forefront for both business leadership and workers. We’ve learned harsh lessons during the Covid-19 outbreak. Life is short, frail and precious.

The effects of nearly two years enduring a global massive virus outbreak caused people to become depressed, dependent on drugs and alcohol. Stress and anxiety contributed to people eating too much and sitting on the couch binge watching Netflix. While many bought Peloton bikes, there were a lot of folks who led sedentary lives.

The pandemic made us think deeply about our work and lives. The ‘Great Resignation’ movement exemplifies this mindset. Workers abruptly quit their jobs when they felt that they’re not being treated or paid fairly. Now it feels like we collectively want to change our lives.

To learn more about how corporations can vigilantly look after and help their employees with their overall health, I spoke with Nikki Salenetri, VP of People at Gympass, a leading corporate wellness provider. Her company offers business access to Gympass as a life-improving benefit to their workers.

Formula 1 McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown Offers Candid Career And Leadership Advice

Zak Brown, the CEO of Formula 1 McLaren Racing, has been on a wild ride. As a kid growing up in Los Angeles, California, he attended car races with his family. Brown immediately fell in love with the sport.

A friend turned him onto karting, which started his journey. He began his racing career in the 1980s, winning 22 races in five seasons. Along the way, Brown honed his skills in marketing, business development and cultivating advertisers and sponsors. He built one of the largest and most successful marketing agencies in the racing space.

Brown leveraged his experiences to ultimately become the chief executive of McLaren Racing. In this capacity, he has overall responsibility for the racing business, strategic directions, operational performance, marketing and commercial development projects.

Brown shared his leadership style and offered career advice to both young people starting out and experienced professionals seeking out new directions.

Larraine Segil is a seasoned business woman whose career has spanned multiple industries and functions. She has been CEO of companies in healthcare, financial services and aerospace as well as building the leading consultancy in Strategic Alliance Services.

She is a world renowned keynote speaker in Alliances, Supplier, Customer and Outsourcing relationship creation and management, and also talks on topics such as Corporate and Board Governance. Her talents are many also in the creative world of chlidrens music and storybooks, and she runs a family held agricultural holding company making cheeses, jams and relishes, and managing an urban farm.

She is an author of 5 business books, multiple articles, cookbooks and a novel. She is passionate about giving back and mentors young women through her foundation and scholarships and through the Committee of 200 Women CEO's foundation. She presently serves on multiple boards, public, private and not for profit and provides services as an Executive Coach to selected CEO's. She is Founder, Chair and CEO of the Exceptional Women Awardees Foundation. She is featured at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larraine_Segil

Billion-Dollar Unicorn And Artificial Intelligence Career-Tech Startup Is Improving The Job Search Experience

In this tight, hot labor market, artificial intelligence is gaining attention as a compelling and effective way to improve the hiring process. Phenom, an Ambler, Pennsylvania-based company, effectively uses artificial intelligence to automate tasks and personalize job searches.

Usually disruptive tech companies are found in Silicon Valley or major tech hubs. Phenom, based in a small town outside of Philadelphia, the startup has quietly become a billion-dollar unicorn.

Phenom CEO Mahe Bayireddi said that his company relies upon AI to match people with the right jobs. This is achieved by helping companies find on-target talent at their companies and promoting them internally. Bayireddi says that his AI enables recruiters to find the right fits faster and job seekers searching for a new opportunity to find appropriate roles without wasting a lot of time. His goal is to find jobs for over one billion people.

Instead of having one platform, its software is embedded into an array of job sites with some of the best and largest companies in the world. The career-tech company has 300 million users and one million jobs posted in 130 countries. With millions of pieces of data, Phenom is able to predict and guide job seekers to the roles that fit their background.

Bayireddi spoke about the current job market, stating that the Great Resignation is a movement that shows the shifting demands and expectations of workers. Employees are in pursuit of greater job flexibility and the desire to feel valued and appreciated.

Mathieu Stevenson is the CEO of Snagajob, one of the largest U.S. platforms for hourly workers. The platform uses sophisticated software to match hourly workers and employers.

There’s been a remarkable turnaround in the demand for workers compared to the millions laid off during the pandemic.

According to Snagajob’s most recent hiring report, about “99% of employers reported they are currently hiring,” and “92% do not have the staff they need to operate at full capacity.” This raises the question; is it a worker shortage or case of not paying enough, or are there other issues at play. “Overall jobs are up 61% compared to pre-pandemic norms,” and 101% year over year growth.” The study shows that the labor shortage we face today is “multifaceted.”

Working with a remote team requires companies to think about much more than where the work happens. The best remote teams operate on a foundation of communication, transparency, and trust. Without that foundation, the productivity increases and improved work-life balance that remote workers enjoy are more difficult to achieve.

The first step to working with remote employees is ensuring you can hire and pay them legally. That’s what we do at Remote: help businesses of all sizes employ and pay their global teams in compliance with local labor laws. If you can’t legally employ someone, you can’t very well work together.

Whether you can legally employ a remote worker depends largely on whether you have a legal entity in the country where the worker lives. Without an entity, you need some help. As you look at solutions for global employment, make sure your chosen partner is an owned-entity provider and not a partner-dependent provider. Pick the wrong type, and you could be in for some nasty surprises down the road.

Becoming a remote-first company simply means coaching your team members and managers to communicate in a way that makes it equally easy for co-located and remote employees to do their best work.

This means holding conversations in ways that allow remote employees to participate at the same level as co-located employees.

There are many different ways to develop culture remotely.

Social Recognition, promoted by Workhuman, is the act of publicly acknowledging people for their contributions. The company takes it a step further by posing the accolades on internal social media.

Others will see this on internal social media, creating an inclusive environment. In addition to posting the kudos online, the person will receive a financial reward to show appreciation for their efforts. It's a way to show that others in the organization recognize and applaud their contributions.

Workhuman offers their platform to a large number of top companies that want to help create a positive, happy and motivated workplace. Peer-to-peer programs create a stronger sense of belonging, and compared to “e-thanks,” and “programs funded at 1% or more of payroll are 86% more likely to be rated as good or excellent.”