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Why Your Former Employees Still Matter with Steve Cadigan [Episode 452]

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Episode Description

Many nonprofit leaders treat turnover as a problem to solve after someone resigns. The organizations that handle it well plan for it before the hire, in how the job itself is designed.

Sarah invited Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn's first Chief Human Resources Officer and the person who grew the company from 400 people to 4,000 while the median tenure on his own staff was nine months, to talk about how to build an organization that works when people come and go, and how to stay connected to the good ones after they leave.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

  • Why Steve says no job should take more than six months to learn

  • How to design a role around a hire who will stay three years

  • What to do with a good employee after they leave, and why it pays off

  • Why Steve hires for how fast someone learns, not what they already know

  • How to make a major donor relationship belong to the organization, not one person

Who This Episode Is For

• Executive directors who just lost someone they were counting on
• Leaders whose roles take eighteen months to ramp when staff stay three years
• Anyone about to have a hard conversation with an employee who has outgrown the job
• CEOs who have decided the sector cannot attract talent, and built accordingly

About the Guest

Steve Cadigan is  a globally recognized talent strategist, culture architect, and author with over 30 years of experience helping organizations navigate growth and transformation. As LinkedIn’s first Chief Human Resources Officer, Steve helped scale the company from 400 to 4,000 employees, building a culture that set the standard for tech companies worldwide.

Today, through his firm Cadigan Talent Ventures, he advises high-growth companies, venture firms, and global leaders on how to win the talent war, design future-ready workplaces, and use culture as a competitive edge. He’s a sought-after keynote speaker and the author of Workquake, a #1 Amazon bestseller that reimagines how we work in a post-pandemic world.

Steve’s insights have been featured in outlets like Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg, and his work has been the focus of business school case studies

Connect with Steve:

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