How a Bad CEO Hire at Boeing Led to 300 Deaths

Sean Weisbrot: Tom Verboven is Mercer Talent Enterprise's senior director. And his job is to go into other companies that are looking to assess potential leaders at the executive level to determine who is the best fit. In this conversation we talked about what is his job like? What does it mean to assess someone? What are the biases? That could potentially come up. What are the potential noise pieces that could come up? Things like, are they hungry? Are they tired? Are they hot? Are they cold? These kinds of things. Things that can be negatively, things that can negatively impact the experience,  or the,  way in which someone gets assessed. We talked about AI and its use in HR and hiring, and the future of what AI might look like and so much more. This is episode 202. I hope you enjoy it. What makes you interested? In assessing human psychology out of anything else you could be doing.

Tom Verboven: It's actually a career path bit by accident. I'm, I'm. I'm a sociologist as a background, and I just rolled in this, in this profession. I remember I was in a sabbatical because my wife was,  working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, and I was a headhunter at the time and I was a bit fed up with that profession.  my wife had her first mission,  I followed her sabbatical and then I saw a job description and I thought that that's pretty cool. let's call the CEO of that company. And I called him, I said, oh, yeah, actually, we, we are looking for someone. Let's have a chat. I didn't have a clue what, I stepped into. So when it comes to career planning, I'm not the best example,  in the world, Sean. But that's how I found actually my,  my passion 'cause it's a super exciting job. I'm doing by accident. So I rolled into it.

Sean Weisbrot: So then what was it about that post that made you said, I can do this, or maybe you didn't say, I can do this. Maybe you're like, oh,

Tom Verboven: let's give it a go. Let's, let's give it a go. But there were a couple of elements. So there was like,  was an international dimension to it.  so a lot of traveling and I'm excited about the traveling part. There was the, the. The people, the human aspect of it. I'm always interested. I, as a sociologist, I'm more like observer of dynamics and, and, and a bit of an outsider. Um, and it was actually, I don't remember exactly, but it was a pretty cool job description. So there were two, three elements that, yeah, let's do this.

Sean Weisbrot: And so how many years have you been doing this? Um,

Tom Verboven: now I. Almost purely so. 10 years in a company called Cubic, which is now Tegy, and then eight years in pwc, and I just started at Mercer, so almost 20 years that I'm assessing leaders, assessing and developing, but more assessing actually to be. So what

Sean Weisbrot: goes

Tom Verboven: into an assessment? Depends, um, because of course you start, you wanna measure a leader against something, you just not go in, okay, is this a good and a bad leader? So you need to first define what we call success profile. And of course that's really interesting because what is good leadership? If I ask a hundred people, you probably get a hundred different. Answers to that. So typically companies have competency profiles, et cetera, et cetera. But it's the, that's the very challenging part because what kind of leader do you need? What kind of leader brings you to success? And that's different for each company.

Sean Weisbrot: And I imagine that you've experienced instances where a company has a competency profile or a success profile, and you look at it and you go, this is not what you need. You've incorrectly profiled your ideal candidate.

Tom Verboven: Happens a lot. Old competency profiles. Yeah, totally not fit for what they're doing. Not fit for. Future happens all the time.

Sean Weisbrot: So how is it that they come to create an incorrect profile, and how do you determine that their profile is incorrect? Correct.

Tom Verboven: So it's, it's, of course, it's a collaboration. I cannot tell them what's the perfect profile. They know their business better than I do. So there you have discussions, you challenge, um, sometimes they have created a lot of competency frameworks for different levels. Super complicated. Um, not easy to measure. So. It's kind of a collaborative approach, but you as a consultant, you do challenge them on what they have. Not always you have, you have,  companies doing it really well, but most of the time. You need to challenge and ask questions.  why it is, I

Sean Weisbrot: So do you go through the profile before anything else, or do you go through the profile after kind of understanding their goals? Like how do you come to the decision that the profile is correct or not correct? I. In that regard, I guess a bit more

Tom Verboven: specific. Yeah. So you basically, you start from, your mission is strategy and values. That's the core. What's your mission? What strategy? I mean, the strategy is very important to decide on your success profile of leadership. And then it depends, of course, which level are your board level, CS, O level, or a bit below. So that depends. And then also does that profile under, like underpins the values you have in,  the culture you wanna have in. The company, company. But of course it's all pretty, you wanna have clarity, but it is the, there is a pH I always, it, it's a bit of philosophical discussion. What, what is the culture you want, what's culture you shape? How much fit? Because you also want to change the culture maybe, so you need someone who kind of fits in but not fully. So, so that person or that leader can change the, so there's, there's a lot of, um, discussion around. What is now the ideal success profile of that specific,  leader?

Sean Weisbrot: So you said that it's collaborative and that you work as part of a, a company. So is there a strategist that comes in before you or with you, before you're able to then start assessing? Or are, are you, are you the one that collaborates directly with the company to assess the profile? Like how, how does that work? Like are you come in before, during, after that kind of assessment? So

Tom Verboven: how it works if you have the success profile ready after, sometimes it's just a, an hour call. Sometimes it needs more time. If you have that. That's our base to decide how we're gonna assess leaders. For example, if we decide like, I don't know, creativity, innovation is super important as a leader in this company, then we think, okay, how can we measure creativity or innovation? And then we can come up with, for example, a business case of psychometrics or something, or abstract thinking, I don't know. So that's. That's the base for deciding the assessment tools we are gonna use in that, in that specific case. Does that make sense?

Sean Weisbrot: Do you ever create your own tools, your own metrics? Like because you have a background in sociology, like are you doing experiments and publishing the results based on these things and then coming up with frameworks, you know, is there something special that you bring specifically?

Tom Verboven: So we do create our own psychometric tools, our own business cases, because that's, it's very tailored towards the company.  it's always you have generic psychometric tools like personality questions or, or abstract thinking or reasoning tools. But for example, a business case is something we most of the time, especially at the leadership level,  develop, tailored, totally bespoke for, for each client. And then of course we do research on what is now the perfect profile of what is, for example. What is a high potential? High What? What makes people move up quicker than other people? So we do a role of research around, around that. Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: Not to mention the fact that there's certain positions that are changing in the eyes of the global market. Like, for example, A CEO in the nineties is different from A CEO today. And you may come into a company where the CEO of a public company has been around for 30 years and what people expect of A CEO has changed. And so now the company has to go, this is what we want. And you're like, that's not what a CEO is supposed to do anymore. If you want your company to survive the next 10 or 15 years, or 20 years based on your average hiring time for A CEO, like you gotta change the role. Um, you know, there's like a. Chief security officer or something's like becoming, that's the new roles. Something new.  you know, they didn't have it before. So maybe they hire you to assess a CEO and you're like, well, hold on a second. You don't even have a security officer. Or like, you don't have a diversity officer, or you don't have this like, we need to. So do you. Does you and your, do you and your team kind of come in and also look at that and say, oh, you don't have this, we should talk about that? Or do you kinda just leave it?

Tom Verboven: Yeah, so we challenge them and then it's up. It's always up to them. It's like we assess someone and then we give a recommendation, but of course it's up to them to, to, to decide.  but we look at the org structure. If it makes sense, we'll look at strategy if it makes sense.  but that will be it. Different assignment. So I have colleagues who do org design, for example. Then I say, okay, you, you have to look, you should talk to my colleague who is specialized in org design. And then I bring the specialist in,  rather than, 'cause yeah, my, my expertise is, is behavioral leadership assessment and not org design. But of course, yeah. We've seen so many companies that we have, we do have something to, to say.

Sean Weisbrot: What does a typical client look like? Typical size, or, you know, are they public, are they private? You know, do they have a thousand employees? Do they have 50 employees? Like what, what do they kind of look like?

Tom Verboven: Most of the time it's, it's, let's say, public, private,  can be both. Um,  but most of the time it's the, the larger companies that we're working for. Typically Fortune top 500 companies,  large government organizations.

Sean Weisbrot: Why can't they do this without you?

Tom Verboven: That's a very good question. Sure. But it's, take for example, you have to assess a new CEO, right? Let's give that example. It's probably one of the highest risk board members need to take. I. We see from research that it's success one out of two. It's like flipping a coin. They do it. Board members selecting a new CEO is not something you do every day. Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully they stay a bit longer on board, so it's, they have to do a job that they don't. Have really experienced and they don't have the expertise. Why would you do two, for example, take so much investment in due diligence in your financials, and not in selecting the new CEO? Because the, the risk of doing it wrong is enormous. Give you an example, a good and a bad look at booing. They had a culture of safety, of quality because if, if you're making a plane and it goes wrong, you have a big issue. Reputation. They hired a new CEO, didn't fully embrace the quality safety first, and you have a lot, a lot of problems with the quality of the planes. Even 300 dead people. So bullying, choose the wrong CEO, and their share price went down. They lose a lot of money. I cannot tell you how many, but I can guarantee you they're losing a lot of money by selecting the wrong ones. But you have examples that go the other way. I worked, I started my career at IBM, this go back to the nineties, Sean, this is a long time ago, but IBM, at a certain point they choose a CEO, Lou Gerstner. And he didn't came from the, from the technology sector,  but they wanted to have someone who was much more customer focused and by selecting. Gerner and there was a couple of board members who exactly liked your questions. They challenged like, why do we need the technology? Let's analyze what we really need. And they had the guts to choose for a, a bit of a atypical CEO for a company such as IBM. And he took them from a 3 billion loss to, I don't know, eight, 8 million,  profits in, in a couple of years. So. So the importance of selecting a CEO is, is huge. And then to come back to your question, why would they hire me? Because it's my day-to-day job. Why would you hire a, a financial expert? You hire someone who, who knows the job, who does this like, like, like almost like an on a daily base.

Sean Weisbrot: So how long do these assessments usually take from. Like, once you've figured out the profile is correct, is it your responsibility to go and talk to headhunters and find these people? Or is it the company's job? And then they go, Hey, we found someone. What do you think? Like how does that kind of,  process, part of the process work?

Tom Verboven: The sourcing is done by, or internal by, maybe they have fun, an internal candidate, or they go to a headhunter and then it's external candidates or a mix of both. So that depends. But we are not intervening that because we wanna give them an independent,  piece of advice. So then how long does it take? Also that depends. It's a, it's a, it's a 30 fact that. As a graduate, you probably spent more time in being assessed than a CEO because there's a perception of, okay, that woman or, or man went, was already a CEO. So they're probably intelligence. They probably know what they're doing.  so they spent two days assessing a graduate and, and one hour. Or a couple of conversations with, with the board. So that's the, that's a bit the own balance in, in this. But if we come in, what we normally try to do is like half a day of, of, of assessment because of course you don't want to, going to days, it's also not very realistic, but half a day I would say that, that you can do a thorough assessment and give, give proper, robust, um. Recommendations.

Sean Weisbrot: I figured it would've been like a few weeks. Yeah, because you were saying you, you can't, like you, you were saying that you take more time to assess other people usually than the board or an executive. No. So I figured, you know, you would assess someone for longer.

Tom Verboven: No, it's the other way around.

Sean Weisbrot: My only real experience, my only real experience with hiring executives was for my software company. And to be fair, we all.  we had experience not as executives. It was our first time being executives pretty much. And because we couldn't afford people who had the experience. Um, and you know, I think it's quite common for startups. Fair enough. So I had to learn how to assess. The people I was hiring. 'cause I mean, I, I have a degree in psychology and I hired a lot of people before for different companies that I founded, or companies that I worked for. But I had never hired executives or I never hired someone for an executive role. So it was like totally different. Um, and I'd say for the, the person that I hired as a managing. Sorry. As the, the marketing director, he had marketing management experience and we were, we wanted him on track to become the CMO. So we, there's like a year and a half or so that he was in the director role. So we were like, all right, we'll give you a bump in, in the position, um, but we won't start you as A-A-C-M-O 'cause we're just not sure. I think we talked to him for probably a month before we hired him,

Tom Verboven: but these are discussions. So what I'm talking about is half a day of assessment as such. So that doesn't, I'm excluding a discussion with board members, interviews with the company, et cetera. So a purely four hours assessment, where we focus on the leadership qualities of that specific. So the, the real, the full hiring can, can take much longer than that, of course.

Sean Weisbrot: And so you go on site for the, this assessment each time or at

Tom Verboven: that level? Most of the time it's still physically in person. I'd say the most of the assessment now changed a lot since COVID, of course,  it's, it's virtual, but at that level there's still a preference for. In person,  assessments. Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: And so typically if the person is not living where the office is and you're not living with offices, you're both kind of flying in or they're already there because they've already been in process with them, or,

Tom Verboven: oh, it's effective. They have an interview with one of the board members and then. Let's, let's be effective and do the assessment at the same time.

Sean Weisbrot: And that person's been in that location and you've been in that location long enough where there's no sort of jet lag or any sort of thing where your energy is low, that might affect their performance.

Tom Verboven: That's a very good question, Sean, because you, you, you do have that, what we call noise. I don't know if you are familiar, you're psycho psychologist. Psychologist as a background, but you have kaman. Are you familiar with Kaman, the behavioral. Scientist. He died this year, I'm afraid. He wrote a book, Canman. He wrote a book. It's called Noise, and he did a lot of research.

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Tom Verboven: Exactly that. So you have a jet lag or even it can be as simple as your favorite sport. Team lost and he did research on,  judges, like how severe they judge people. It's amazing the difference between the winning favorite team or the losing favorite team. Or even having if they've eaten it. Yeah. Or if they've had coffee.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, exactly. And if they had coffee, how

Tom Verboven: many

Sean Weisbrot: hours ago was it?

Tom Verboven: Amazing. So that you have to get that noise away or the, the, the, the air code. They have air code, it's a hot tail and there's no air code and they're sweating. You will be much more severely punished.  if you have a judge who's,  who is, who doesn't. Need to judge in an air code space. So that's very important. Yeah. But to answer your question, what are we doing now against that? Because of course you have bias and noise. So bias, you, you are pretty aware, but noise you, it's not something you're always aware of. Um, so you have to. Into account a pretty strict process to avoid,  noise. But still it's,  you try to mitigate it, but it, it's never a hundred percent,  waterproof process because things going on where,

Sean Weisbrot: what are some ways that you try to mitigate noise,

Tom Verboven: for example? Same timing, for example. Um. Same kind of questions. It's almost like mathematics. Um, if you score someone to do it on a, like you, you almost don't want to quantify,  stuff and you want to make the, the processes fair and that it's equal for everyone who's going through the process.

Sean Weisbrot: I feel like that's more towards bias. No. Instead of noise.

Tom Verboven: Yeah. But like if you have trained assessors like myself, you, you're very aware of, of your own. Biases. Biases. So that's why you taken external. So in that sense, we don't, we are trained to not be biased. And again, I'm still biased, but I'm professionally keeping myself busy on not to be biased. Um, and if we talk about noise, it's more about the, the, the process as such. To afford that virus.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. So an example of noise could be the company offered you guys meals and one of the meals was too spicy for the candidate. How do you know that it's too spicy for the candidate and that it's affecting their ability? 'cause like their mouth is on fire. Right. And, and then you give them water, and then the water makes them feel like they need to go to the bathroom. Right. How, so how, how can you be aware of these things and how can you communicate that with the company and with the candidate so that everybody knows there's like no noise or, or very little noise.

Tom Verboven: Yeah. But you can, for example, say every interview is as. Just before lunch at least.

Sean Weisbrot: Wouldn't that make them hungry then? And the, yeah, but the later into right before lunch, the tired more, the more tired they feel and the less likely they are to respond fairly

Tom Verboven: it, because it's for everyone. The same 11 o'clock, so it's for everyone the same, like the judge. The assessor will not be. Have the same feeling of hunger almost. And of course you cannot take into account maybe they skip breakfast or not, you know, so there's, there's always elements in it. You cannot eliminate noise. So that's. Impossible, but you can't put a process in place that that reduces the noise.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. For example, I love to play table tennis and usually I play on Sundays and I'll play for two hours and I will fast from about six or 7:00 PM the night before until about one or 2:00 PM the next day. So I will play table tennis with no, no calories and a little bit of water and. I know that I don't perform as well as other people that I play with who have eaten. And I, I don't tell them, oh, I'm, you know, excuse me, I'm sorry I'm hungry 'cause I didn't need, no, it's my decision to not eat. Um, I. So I'm sure you may have people that are that fast or are used to fasting when you're like, oh, make sure you have breakfast before you come so that you have the energy for the test. 'cause lunch isn't until noon and they could go, well, I'm used to fasting, so that doesn't affect me. So in terms of bias, you could, for example, potentially have someone that they're like, look, we've got five candidates, but like this one is the one we like the most. Right? Do you tell them like, Hey, don't tell me. You know, if you have any favorites, keep that to yourself

Tom Verboven: explicitly. I don't wanna know anything,

Sean Weisbrot: but do you decide what order to interview people or do they tell you the order they want? 'cause that could also have some sort of bias. 'cause the first one could be the one they like the most, or it could be the person they don't like and they just wanna get 'em out of the way.

Tom Verboven: Yeah. So just to be clear shot so that this, like in the optimal world, you have a, you, you, you put them all at 11 o'clock every single day. You know, reality kicks in. Mm-hmm. And we, we foreseen one day for the interview. So you start at then and you have a slot at 11 and a slot at 4:00 PM  so that's reality doesn't help or efficiency doesn't always help. So, yeah, of course we are asked and to, to adapt and, and we not always going to say, no, that's not the, because we, we need to eliminate No. So. Yeah, reality kicks in there.

Sean Weisbrot: So what are some other things related to noise and bias that we're missing maybe, that we could touch on?

Tom Verboven: That we can improve?

Sean Weisbrot: That we can improve, or that we just haven't mentioned that is interesting. Something you've learned or that we didn't talk about.

Tom Verboven: Yeah, it's, I think that's also linked to the whole AI discussion is, is, and that's a bit the problem with ai. If you AI will use, I mean, they will probably. Leadership again who are successful CEOs, then you end up with a wide male, 45 plus. So that's then your success profile in your AI system, excluding women,  and reinforcing positive. So, but then you could say, okay, if you are very aware of that, then we can influence AI system. So maybe AI might be a solution. But then again, I'm,  I don't know. I'm also not an AI specialist, so I dunno, but it. It, it very well designed. It actually could exclude bias in an ideal world.

Sean Weisbrot: So I'm not an AI expert, but I love talking about ai and I've had a number of conversations with people who are focused on marketing or they're focused on sales or customer service or product, and we talk about AI and what is currently happening in their vertical within. You know, business and I haven't really talked about AI so much in hr, just a little bit, and the, the consensus I've gotten from experts in that, that are involved in HR is that AI should not be used because, as you mentioned, you may get a thousand cvs. And if it's a female and the AI is biased against females, you might end up with zero female applicants. Even if you say, I want female applicants, or females aren't good at this job because they're female, males typically do better. So, um, I'm only going to show you males. Um, and they may say, oh,  the AI may have been programmed by a white guy, and so you may only get white men in their twenties and thirties who are young and, and,  open-minded, right? And so you lose all, all of the other people that would be there. Um, so I feel like AI has a, a really long way to go, and I feel like ai, you say AI has the potential to remove bias, but I think AI has really only the potential to make bias worse because. You're enabling someone who could potentially be racist or potentially be sexist or potentially be ageist to program the thing that's going to determine the future of the company and the applicants that it sees. And. Someone could miss a, a period or an exclamation mark on their CV in, in their opening message, and that could get them disqualified. Oh, they're, they're messy. Oh, they're, they're not,  clear about what they want because they, they missed this punctuation. Like, it's, it's so easy to disqualify people, and I know companies are desperate to disqualify in order to surface the best applicants, but I, I've only ever used my own eyes to determine if someone was worth talking to. And I haven't made all the best decisions, but I feel like I've hired some pretty great people. You know, so I, I am a proponent of not using AI for HR related matters personally.

Tom Verboven: Yeah, I understand that.  I think we still have too little data available. Of course, that can also change if we have a lot of data. Of course, the program can be, because you said it can be programmed by a white guy. 40 plus. But you can also argue that you make sure that you have diverse programmers in programming an AI system to make sure that they are not discriminating against race, gender, whatever. And then you have to think, of course, which eliminates the most. Is it is the, is it the human judgment or is it the ai? Because maybe we are thinking about, okay, AI should be perfect. Well, once AI is better than. An average human judgment, we should stop using the humans and use AI systems, of course, but who determines what is good judgment. Yeah. Still. Yeah, exactly. But I, you can, I, I think it's, it's an ongoing process in the sense that you have independent researchers who then look at, does this, does this work? Yes or yes, or yes or no at the moment. I, I will not use AI at the moment, but maybe in five years I will have totally different

Sean Weisbrot: opinion. Right? I, I always continue down this rabbit hole of questions because you say, oh, there's, well, there's researchers who are the researchers who hired them, who determined that they were the right people to do that research and make those decisions based on the data that they were given. You know, it's so easy to. Be unsure that I would always err on the side of questioning the results and questioning the people and questioning their motives because you say, oh, we could have a diverse group of developers that are coding the ai. How do we know that they're diverse? How do we know that the company is not just saying they're diverse, but they're not?

Tom Verboven: Yeah, because you don't know what the algorithm is, of course,

Sean Weisbrot: because

Tom Verboven: that's all

Sean Weisbrot: hidden. Yeah, yeah, right. Most of these algorithms, there's different weights and and measurements, and we don't know how they're designed. We don't know what they're looking for. We don't know why they're looking for them. We don't know how they work. So how are we supposed to trust them? I personally don't really use AI for anything. No, because it's, it's scary. I mean, there are certain things that you're forced to, like the YouTube algorithm and the, the Google algorithm for search. Um, you know, there, there's some things you have no choice. Yeah. But,  you know, I don't use a Google Assistant. I don't have a Siri. I don't have an Alexa. Yeah. I don't use assistant. I, I don't use Chachi pt. I've tried it. I know what it is and I know what it can do, but I just, I don't, I mean, like, I'll, I'll use a generation machine for, um, timestamps for my YouTube channel, but I. I also then have to go back because it's so awful and like turn it into one word or two words. Like I have to look at the results and then fix it so that it's human readable.

Tom Verboven: Yeah. I think if you use ai you always have to double check and quality check, et cetera, but it can help you be more protective,  in, in some cases. But I'm also rather skeptical around the, the hiring with ai. But it's, yeah, I think we're gonna use it more and more, especially in on the, the, now if you have thousand applicants, you're gonna do all the interviews or you're gonna use an AI system than to, to sift and then end up with two, three interviews at the end of the day. Also risky because you exclude certain type of people, um, like hu. I think HireVue tried it once with non, I don't know if you know HireVue, it's this interview platform and then you talk to the camera so you don't have human interaction, and then they, they assess the tone of voice, your facial expressions.  based on that,

Sean Weisbrot: that's not fair. 'cause I'm not good at smiling. That doesn't mean I'm not happy or I'm not enjoying myself. I just don't smile that much.

Tom Verboven: But that, that fired back for HireVue. So, yeah, so they were, they used technology Good. Yeah, exactly. It's good. Yeah. I think the more we learn, the more we develop. I think at a certain time my job will be replaced by an algorithm, so I'm afraid I have to think of my retirement.

Sean Weisbrot: You are not wrong for. Thinking about that, and I applaud you for being open to the idea that it's a possibility because there's a lot of people that have no idea that AI is coming for their job. And when I first came out of college is about 16 years ago, AI wasn't a thing. Smartphones weren't a thing. The internet was like. You know, still kind of, you know, Facebook was, when I finished college, Facebook was be like becoming a thing then. And people didn't really think about, oh, I need to reinvent myself. They thought, oh, I'm gonna go to school for this and you know, I'm gonna spend my career doing that like my dad. You know, he's been a dentist his whole life. That's what he was trained to do. But my generation can't afford to do that, and my dad even is like. They are using stem cells now to like regrow teeth. He's like, we're not going to, you know, dentists aren't gonna be needed. He's like, the next generation is, is screwed. You know, they're, they're gonna be out of work. Lawyers are gonna probably be out of work. Doctors are probably gonna be able, there, there's gonna be so many things that AI will be able to do and before the end of this century that so many humans are going to be unable to work. And I think it's going to cause a huge problem economically, globally speaking, if you couple that with the,  kind of deglobalization and,  just less humans being born. So there'll have, there'll be less people to do jobs and there'll be less jobs for the people that are alive to do so. Where is everyone gonna get the money to buy things, to keep capitalism going? I, I, I seriously, I, I look at the rest of the century and I, I don't know what's gonna happen. And it's kind of scary, I think, because I don't know where we're going. No, me neither. I have an idea, but I hope it's not,

Tom Verboven: I don't, I don't, it's not gonna happen. But I think we have to embrace, that's a bit of a paradox, but I think we have to, to to be end very human, but also embracing. Technology. I, I, I think both. I think now it's going more towards technology. I think what we miss is just like a good conversation also at the workflow, like, look at how many calls you have. Everyone is, the attention span is like nobody's following. Everyone is on their emails. They don't listen anymore. Communication. So I think there's a high need for, for just. Having a serious conversation. I think there's a high need for more philosophy in our, in our world, even in the workspace, but that there'll be an, an eye for that. But at the same time, we have to embrace technology as well, as long as it's, it's, it's, it's human. We need to human interaction. And that's also I think, my job as an assessor. Technology can help us in giving up some data points, but we always need this, this a conversation always. And also putting myself as a candidate, I would at the mo I, I would hate it to be assessed by a computer or an AI system. And even if it was fair, I would never feel like I'm treated correctly or. I need as a candidate also a conversation and a good conversation. Not a 10 minutes,  like, Hey, what's your motivation? Why are you, or like, you know, like something more depth. I think that's, that's what I've missing sometimes,

Sean Weisbrot: but depth. There was one interview that I did where I asked Chachi PT to look at the profile of the guest. Yeah. And all of the things that were on the internet about them and come up with a series of questions that they would've never been asked before. Okay.

Tom Verboven: Yeah. Interesting. Right?

Sean Weisbrot: And then I, and then I told the guest, I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I'm not gonna tell you if it was written by me or an ai, and I want you to guess afterwards which ones were from me and which ones for the ai. And you got about half of them, right. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. But I also, I, it took me a few rounds of coaxing the AI to give me interesting questions because the, the first round was like, I, I could ask those questions already without knowing anything about the guy. Basic human stuff. And then like the second one around the second round was a little bit better in the, I think it was the third round where I was like, okay, these are like starting to get interesting. I don't really want to spend any more time on this, but I never did it again because I always feel like the human thing is, it's. It's good for your brain to like just sit there and listen to someone talk and then think about what they're saying and how it affects you or how it doesn't affect you, or how it might affect the audience and what you might wanna know from them. That I just don't think an AI is capable of at least yet. At least not yet.

Tom Verboven: So, but it might help you in getting better into your questions.

Sean Weisbrot: Maybe, but I'd rather not use it. I'd rather use my mind. Use your mind. Because the thing is,

Tom Verboven: and put them together. It can be

Sean Weisbrot: The thing is. My style is, I don't like to prepare anything because if I prepare, then I'm not gonna be flexible because I'm gonna have these questions and I'm gonna wanna ask these questions and it's gonna change the outcome of the interview. 'cause my goal is to always have the guest feel like it's unique for them, that they're not gonna have this kind of an experience with another podcast if they go on another one. And when I use the ai, I am kind of. Yeah. You know, I can say, I can ask things I might normally ask and not ask things that I don't want to ask because the, the guest is different than the other guests, and so this thing might not work with them or this thing might work with them. And, um,

Tom Verboven: yeah, but you can, you even have AI who says like matching profiles. That tells you at the spot. Okay. But. Talking to Tom.  best way to approach him is, I don't know, ask detailed questions. I've seen those.

Sean Weisbrot: I've, I've seen

Tom Verboven: those.

Sean Weisbrot: so I. I don't remember the name of this tool, but it's,  connected to LinkedIn and it gives you a psychographic profile,  or a psychometric profile of people that you're gonna contact, like cold outreach or if you're gonna interview them or whatever. So I, I've seen it, but I've barely used it. Um, 'cause I don't, I don't do a lot of cold outreach, but. It was interesting and I said, well, yeah, you know, I normally look at this stuff too, but I, I don't normally look at someone's LinkedIn profile and look at the words they write and think about what kind of other personality. If I, if I needed to, I could, I. But I try to reserve my brain power, so I, I don't like to do that if I don't have to. Um, I like to just kind of as, you know, like have this intro call and get to know them through that, and then use that information to make the interview happen in a way that's as fluid as possible. So natural as possible. As spontaneous. Right. Because you were saying humans need long form conversation, so. If I have a series of questions that I'm prepared to ask you, then it feels not really so much like a conversation. It feels like an interview and an interview feels like work. And I don't, I don't know about you, but I don't wanna, I don't wanna work.

Tom Verboven: That's very true. I'd rather I agree with that.

Sean Weisbrot: I'd rather play, you know, it's almost 5:00 PM here like. I've been working all day. I don't really wanna work. I want to, I want to talk with people. So for me, like the natural, fluid, flexible aspect of it is what I enjoy. So in all of your years of doing this, almost 20, what is the most important thing that you've learned about humans?

Tom Verboven: I've seen so many people, everyone is so different. I think that's, that's the, that's, that's the first. I think it's also, if we talk about leadership, what is good leadership? I think we have, we can talk about it for, for a week. I think the one thing that. That is very important is the in integrity of the, of leadership. I think that's, that's an important point. Um, and people can be so different in so different situation. You can have the most asshole toxic leader and he's the most lovely bad in the world.  so it's very complex. That's, that's, that's what I learned. And the more I, I, I know, the more I feel like. I don't know. Um, I don't know. It's, it's so impressively complex and that's only individual. So if when interaction with other people comes in, it becomes even more, and we are social human beings, so there's always interaction and dynamics change all the time. So it's a constant, it's, it's, it's never linear. It's always complex. That's also the beauty of it. I, I think, I'm not sure if that answer your question because that's not what I learned about human beings, but special, special pieces, that's for sure.