Experts in Residence

The Talent Playbook Is Broken.

Most leaders know something is off. Attrition is up. The best people leave after 18 months. Recruiting feels harder than it used to, even when compensation is competitive. And no matter what perks you add, loyalty seems to evaporate faster than you can build it.

The problem isn’t your team. It’s the playbook.

The rules that built great companies in the last decade were written for a world that no longer exists. Today, your employees can see exactly what your competitors pay, what their cultures look like, and who just left your company and where they went — all before lunch. The market is fully transparent, and most leaders are still operating as if it isn’t.

On top of that, AI is reshaping roles faster than any job description can keep up with. Skills that were valuable 18 months ago are already being automated. The leaders who are winning aren’t the ones offering the biggest salaries or the most elaborate benefits packages. They’re the ones who’ve completely rethought what it means to attract, develop, and keep great people — and made their people more valuable, building a competitive advantage the market can’t replicate with a better offer.

Steve Cadigan spent more than 30 years inside that problem. As the first Chief Human Resources Officer at LinkedIn, he helped scale the company from 400 to 4,000 employees — 10x in three and a half years, competing for talent against Google, Facebook, and Apple — during one of the most ferociously competitive talent markets Silicon Valley has ever seen. He did not do it by outspending the competition. He did it by making his people more valuable — building the Human Advantage, an organization where people came because of what it would make them, and stayed because of what they were becoming.

This course, built in partnership with Augment, is the distillation of those lessons. You’ll be challenged on assumptions you may not have known you were carrying — about retention, about culture, about how you hire, about what you owe your people and what they owe you. Some of it will feel counterintuitive. That’s the point. The intuitive answers are the ones that are no longer working.

If you’re still playing by the old rules, this course was built for you.