The career consumer with Bob Toohey – episode 11

Episode 11 summary

January 7, 2025 // 34 min, 47 sec

The future will see companies turning what they know about us as consumers into hyper-personalized, super-responsive experiences. Employees will demand that same personalized, flexible and immersive experience from work. 

​In this episode:

We talk today a lot about candidate experience. The reality though is we often know more about our consumers than our own employees. In this episode, Marissa is joined by Bob Toohey, former EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer at U.S. insurer Allstate, to look at the future demands of employees as career consumers.​

• In a world where we can buy a car or a house on our phone, what will easy, admin-light and friction-free employee experience look like?​
• How does our lack of knowledge about our own employees show up today?​
• How could a real-time digital passport that captures our skills and experiences replace the resume or CV and unlock real career mobility?​
• With employers knowing ever more about their employees to create more relevant experiences of work, what does this mean for privacy?

Episode transcript

Marissa Geist 

Welcome to “The talent time machine,” the podcast for talent leaders that takes you on a trip to the world of work in 2050. We're going to think about trends, possibilities, and new realities for talent. Any HR professional will tell you that employee experience has become a key way we recruit talent to our businesses. By 2050. I can imagine employees demanding the same hyper-personalized, super responsive, immersive work experience that they will be enjoying as consumers. 

So what does this mean for employers? I'm Marissa Geist, and here to explore that with me is Allstate's  

EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer Bob Toohey. Bob is also an advisor to business schools and centers for leadership and, in full transparency, a client of ours here at Cielo. So welcome, Bob. Thanks for joining. 

Bob Toohey 

Great to be here, Marissa. Thanks for having me. 

Marissa Geist 

Bob before we dive in, I'd like to know what drew you to a career in talent. How did you get into this? 

Bob Toohey 

Oh, well, that's a great question. I'll try to keep it short. So in my early days in a career, I'd tell the story. I was an auditor, and I was in an audit program at a company called GTE, and I was doing a bunch of audits. And at the end of my stint, because then you go off to get a job after two and a half years, the head of HR at the time said to me, why don't you come work in HR? 

I was doing a bunch of HR audits in the days when they were just starting to outsource. I mean, outsourcing wasn't even a thing, but pensions and 401Ks, and there was money and problems and he said, you should just come work in HR and do what you're doing at the moment. I said, no, I'm going to work in finance. 

And a little while later, since it was the head of HR at a big giant company, someone said you might want to rethink that. So it was a career lesson. 

Marissa Geist 

Was it a question or like a volun-told kind of thing… 

Bob Toohey 

Yeah. So when they call you up. So actually I did it in audit. I learned this and I carry this through my whole career. I've gone in HR and I've worked in the business and I've gone back and forth for the last 30 years. But at the end of the day, it's about people and enabling businesses through people. And that's really what I saw. 

And I saw that my early days of career businesses work for one reason: people. They can have great technology, they have other things. But if you can't get everything working right from a human perspective, it's usually not going to work out that well. So and I saw that for all my different jobs of how things connect, how you can motivate them. 

And it's been great. I've enjoyed it. And there's always a challenge. And 30 years later we still haven't figured it all out. But we'll get there. 

Marissa Geist 

Plenty of challenges still in front of us. New challenges though. Well, and in your career, you've had to understand employee expectations and employees as a consumer is a concept that didn't exist when I entered the workforce. And there will be new things coming in in 2050. What do you see on the horizon for the next chapter of employee experience? 

Bob Toohey 

Yeah, I think 2050 is a long way away, but I'd say the employee experience and we've been talking about it for 25 years, I think we're finally at the realism that it's going to really happen. I think companies are forced to do that. I think technology has sped up so much since the pandemic. In the last five years, AI and all the things that are happening. 

I always say everything that you could do outside of work buy a house, buy a car, watch a movie, go out to eat, pay your bills. You should be able to do the same kind of things at work. And why is it you can't just hire an employee at work on your phone? We've made it so hard and so we have to accelerate and just make it simple. 

I think that's the journey we're on now, is to make it a true consumer experience for your employees and a great customer experience. So I think we're going to get there quick. Now, I think in the next five years that's going to evolve. The stuff I think about people think is going to take 20 years. So I just think everything we do should be driven by AI. 

Everything we do inside an employee experience, everything should be persistent, and it just works. All automated, no humans involved. 

That's how the experiences should start changing. And then the word HR won't even be in it. 

Marissa Geist 

Well, H.R. is even a new thing, right? I mean, there was personnel before that, but businesses didn't have an HR department for a long time. So it's like we created this foreign body outside of the business. Really fascinating to hear that you've been in the business in HR and even the way you phrase that in the business and then in HR, that alien off to the side is should probably just be the way that we work. 

Bob Toohey 

And we're not alien. That's what I try to convince. I tell the teams everywhere I work. And it's funny you say that because I just did that. I actually say to folks, if the business and your customer won't buy it, don't give it to them. Let's go to another one. We all do performance management. Why? Because H.R. said so. Is it helping the business?  

I mean, I remember when I was leading different businesses, I hated that phone call at the end of the year. Oh, you got to do this. You got to do that. And all this. So in 2050, I would envision a day none of that is happening and things are happening just in the flow of work as needed. 

And it's just ubiquitous with what we do and how we operate. It's not a thing or a process. 

Marissa Geist 

And hopefully performance management conversations won't be on a forced curve. And all of the fun things that make everyone so excited to go through that conversation. 

Bob Toohey 

Yes, we say, let's develop and grow employees, but let's force them into a box. 

Marissa Geist 

As long as they can go in one quadrant, we’re totally getting it right. 

Bob Toohey 

Right. And then we say things like, it doesn't impact your pay, though. 

Marissa Geist 

No one's going to see this. Like it's like the adult version of your permanent record. That's very nerve wracking to do and participate in. 

Bob Toohey 

That's what happens all the time. It's like, oh yeah, let's just do that. But those are the things just this conversation. That's what people think of it. So why don't we just put common sense behind these things? 

Marissa Geist 

It is fascinating to me sometimes I think that the way we treat employees is a little bit like going to a doctor's office where you go to one room, they ask you five questions, you go to the next room, they ask you the same… is like somebody writing this down anywhere? Who is keeping my record with me so we can actually go on to the next level of conversation. 

And Allstate must have so much information on the people it serves. And so does that affect the way you think about HR? If you think about knowing all your customers, do you use the same level of data or insight to run your business, or should you or should we all? 

Bob Toohey 

No  it's interesting you say that. We just launched… We had probably five different platforms, a handful of different payrolls, data dispersed everywhere. So we really didn't know our customer. So it's interesting you say… we just launched and we just kind of went out to one platform globally. And so now we know our customer, we have the information on our customer. 

And by the way, they could tell us about themselves because it's always interesting how we want to hear about the customer. And so we use information. We've used AI to build out things, but we also want them to tell us about themselves. And so we now have that in one place. And I am a huge advocate of know your customer just like your consumer and things you buy and things you do, we want to know you. 

How do you like to work? Where do you like to work? What kind of things do you like to do? What interests you? You know, we all have this wonderful term about skills and capabilities. I tell our employees just what's interesting to you. That's all the skills and capabilities are. It's like, what are you passionate about?  

So let's simplify things. Talk in human-speak too when you're talking to the customers. That's what I found when I looked at the data sets that we try to bring in. They're not even a normal… like, they’re HR-speak. It's like, let's not have HR-speak and maybe we won't be that thing outside the business in 2050 because we'll actually talk like humans. 

Marissa Geist 

No one talks like that. Okay. And you know, you talk about your constituents in the business as your own customers, your external customers... Also, I think about, you know, the data that I supply Target every week when I go there and spend a small fortune, and the fact that they know when my birthday is.  

I'm a United Airlines client, and I've flown them for so long that I say no one loves me, not even my family, as much as United does. They know so much about me. So we think about like that passion and obsession. We haven't been that passionate, obsessed with employees’ information. I think there's been a bit of a fear like, is that a big brother? Is that invasive? How do you think employee experience and employee privacy will converge, or do you think we're always going to have this hesitancy to assumptively know employees like Target will send me a flier like, hey, it looks like you might be pregnant, which I'm not. Can't be. 

Bob Toohey 

That's one that once you start going on the medical side in that now you start to get into that, you know, you have to tell us first, we tell you. So there's always going to be that barrier just because of laws and HIPPA unless that changes in 2050.  

But do I think we need to know our employees like your consumer brands know you? Yes. Do. I think it's an invasion of privacy? No. Because at the end of the day, it's what you provide us. You know, I always say you go online and do things and you click the buttons on privacy. You don't even know you're clicking because the words are as tiny as they can be.  

They're basically telling you whether you're a Google, Apple. We just want to track everything you're doing. And we say yes. You go into your target app and do the same thing. So if you come into work and you do things on our work tools, why don't we learn what you're doing?  

If you're browsing our sites on careers and you're sitting there looking for a different career, wouldn't it be nice if we said, hey, Marissa, I see you looking at some marketing jobs. Let me see if I can help you. Or here's some that are open that we looked at who you are, Marissa, and we think you'd be amazing at these two jobs. And the computer just sent that to you.  

That's what should happen. That's what we mean by knowing you. I don't want to know what you do at night, and I don’t want to get into the privacy of knowing your whole life.  

We need to know what matters at work. It's nice to know a little about you. Are you a morning person? Night person? Do you like to exercise? Do you like movies? If we're having an event at work, how do you start to bring cohorts of people together so that you have like communities? 

There's so much you could do with the data. I think what I'd say to employees at work is it's no different than in your consumer experience. And by the way, if you choose that you don't want us to know about you, just click the button and say no and you're shut out. That's okay. 

Marissa Geist 

But then you can't complain if you're not included in the events because it's a two-way street. 

Bob Toohey 

But that's what we say to people: privacy should be a choice. You know, if I want someone to not track what I'm watching on Netflix because I'm going to show me certain ads, then I say no, but then I'm going to get ads I don't want. You got to decide what's important to you. And, you know, you have to participate to be a part of it. It's not a magic trick. And I think the more transparent you are, the easier it is for employees. Just treat them like consumers. Let them make a choice. 

Marissa Geist 

It's a fascinating thing to actually put that on the table and be very transparent, because some of the lack of employee knowledge actually is because of that lack of an open conversation. So somebody might be looking for a job and if you as their leader actually want to retain them, it would be nice to know, hey, I'm not happy in my job, but you haven't created the forum to force that conversation to say, do you want us to consider you for other roles in the future? Yes.  

You know, and really not the old punitive system of you just have to act like you're completely happy and then you jump ship at the last minute and nobody has that conversation.  

So as a consumer, you never say like, no, don't send me ads or don't send me coupons or you try, but they send you ads and coupons anyway. But it is interesting, like a two-way street of privacy. 

Bob Toohey 

And if you're looking for a job, it may not be that you're not happy. It could be that you're just trying to do some more. Maybe you're bored. Maybe you just want to do other things. Maybe you're moving and you got to go live somewhere else. There's so many reasons that… and by the way, companies should look at it as a bad thing. 

I don't need to tell you that, though. People are looking for jobs. That's okay. I mean, internally we've gotten rid of all the rules. So if someone wants to look for a job internally, let them. They don't have to ask their manager. I don't have to ask my manager to go get to an external recruiter. So why do I have to do it internally? 

Like those are the things just we need to bring the outside in. 

Marissa Geist 

Bringing the outside in and being brave about it because if you're not, people are going to find a way. That's something that is true for all humans. And I think about the new generation coming into work. I don't know if you have kids. I have four boys. You know, their attitude about what should happen at work is totally different. 

I mean, I think I went into my first decade of a career every day thinking, is this today I'm going to get fired because, you know, something's happening. And they come in sort of with this idea of, you're lucky to have me. And if this doesn't work out, okay, cool. And they'll be leaders by 2050. So what does that bring in terms of what this all looks like in 2050? 

Bob Toohey 

That's exactly why the employee experience and the value proposition, all that has to be a two-way street, because we're buying them and they're buying us. They're coming to say, hey, do I want to buy this service and work with you? And they can decide the next morning, no, it wasn't that great. So I think I'm going to go somewhere else. 

You think of your kids and you think of just that generation or any generation. You hire folks at work and we give them a standard offer. Why don't I let you choose how you want to get paid? Why do I tell you?  

So in 2050, maybe you say, you know what? Cash is not that important, but benefits are. Can you do something different?  

And I know there was a day many years ago, we all of us in HR had choices and we said, let's do choices for... We have all these things that we tried to do, but if you really push it, just give them a menu and say you have choice 1, 2 or 3, it's your choice. 

I'm not going to force how you want to be credited … and why you're here. And if you choose to change.  

There's so much that goes back to that benefits enrollment. We've created the ecosystem because of our perception of what should be, not because what we think would be right for a consumer. 

Marissa Geist 

It's so true and it's so backwards, the way that we think about, oh, employees should be beholden to the company, whereas people retire as skills get more scarce and we think about reskilling. In the future, no one's going to work the way we work, no one's going to be writing documents. I mean, my kids look at me like I'm crazy for some of the things that I do. 

They're like, why are you doing that? Why don't you just get a bot to do that? Okay? I didn't even know about existed that could do this. It would take me longer to figure out how to write this bot instructions and just do it.  

Those days are gone. And so skilling and reskilling and what people will be doing at work is going to be completely different. 

I have to think that whole contract with an employer will look different too. So, you know, what is an employee? No one's gonna identify with who they do some work for some time. So that goes into benefits as an identity issue as well. So I don't know if you're seeing that already with your workforce or thinking about that. 

Bob Toohey 

I see a lot of that. And I think in 2050, you know, do people walk around with their own little talent passport and just kind of check in and check out on different projects of what they're doing? You're raising the right question. Are people going to be tied to a brand or tied to a work event? Are they going to be tied to a location or tied to just what we're doing right now online, creating a different experience? 

I mean, it's happening so fast and we're all trying to get everybody back to what it was. I mean, right, just think of what we're doing. “When's everyone returning to the office? Are they all going to be in the office?” It's like we're not willing to just say, maybe it's time to be different, you know? 

Is it gonna be a three day week or five day week? Maybe in 2050, given the example you just had, it's going to be so much easier to do a lot of tasks and work. You might have a three day week and there are five days you're doing something else and volunteering and have two jobs. Maybe that's what you end up doing. 

You work two days, one place, three days another, I don't know. 

Marissa Geist 

And do you care as an employer? Do you care? I mean, why do we care so much as far as what people are doing when? It's an interesting nanny state that probably will go away?  

I think about I don't know if you ever watch Downton Abbey when they're at dinner one time and somebody said, I'll do it on the weekend. 

And the grandma was like, what's a weekend? That's a new concept too, you know, and our kids. They might say, I want to work for 16 days straight, then I want to take two months off, because that's what I'm going to do. 

Bob Toohey 

I love that. I think that's definitely something that might happen because that's a great point. It's like, I want to work when I want to work. You know, I don't want to start work at 8:00 because I'm a night person. I'm going to start my day at three and I'm going to get the stuff done. And it can't be every job because some have to interact with people, and you're going to have to help people understand that. And there's adapting, but it's going to be very interesting.  

But that said, go back 50 years now and think of how it was. What was the big dramatic change, technology and the way things were done. And it's evolved to the next thing every time. And we're just headed to the next... 

Marissa Geist 

The next ahead. Well, I did… as your return to work point, one of the tenets of this podcast was we could not make a podcast about return to work because everyone had made a podcast about return to work. That was one of the sentinel things, because the team was like, it's such a dead topic, but we just love to bring it up because it like makes us feel better that at some point it could come back as a thing. 

And it's not.  

Bob Toohey 

And I think it's great. 

Marissa Geist 

But I go into work all the time. I have four kids. If I'm home in the summer, I do not want to work around my four kids and my two dogs and my husband like, are you kidding? I go into work.  

So there will be some of us. Maybe we're dinosaurs, but we still need a place to work and everyone works differently.  

I do want to ask you, because Allstate is such a dynamic company. As we think about the workforce, who you hire now… and you said this, you know, new skills, new jobs, new way of working… it must look so different than it did even 20 years ago. 

And then fast forward 20 years. How do you think about skills and being prepared for the future, knowing that you don't even know what it looks like? But you know, we got to do something different. How do you even assess that? How do you get ready for the future when you don't have a crystal ball? 

Bob Toohey 

I think you just answered it at the end. No one has a crystal ball. I think what we encourage people is to build a learning culture. If you want to continuously learn every day, you're going to do just fine. You're not going to know everything, but if you learn every day, you're going to do fine because the pace of change that's going to happen… because it's happened already. If you just look back two years to today, it's just going to be so rapid. Nobody really knows. But you got to be willing to embrace change, wanting to learn and have that capacity to do that. And if you're comfortable with that, you'll do fine. Our job, then, is to help you learn more, help you get scaled up for that job. 

I mean, every company they're transforming and they're going through digitization. Okay, what's that mean? And then now it's like, AI what am I going to do?  

AI is going to bring great jobs to people. It's not going to all of a sudden say jobs are going away. The account rep who was selling something on a phone on a day to day basis, might become a prompt engineer. 

Maybe that's the new change. We have to train them to do that. Call center rep can change to the same type of thing. So how are these jobs going to change? Where's the capacity going to be needed?  

And then what we're trying to do, and I think a lot of companies, how do you guide people to where the capacity is going to be needed and start helping people learn those new skill sets? 

And I would just say the new ways of working. Sometimes it's just you're going to have to do things differently. You know, where you had five people involved in something. It might be nobody. And you're interacting with a machine all day. That's a new skill that you have to figure out. 

Marissa Geist 

There was a study in the University of Colorado, I think it was 2011. The economist just quoted it, and it was about pharmacists who are in the pharmacy. They were looking at the effect of automation, and the pharmacist loved the automation because it was an augmentation of their ability to process. Okay, what does this drug do? How does it interact?  

They could spend more time with clients and at the counter. And the pharm techs hated it because it took all of the thinking out of their job, and now all they did was move the physical product from one bin to the other. So we think about designing workplaces that are places that people will want to go, jobs that we want to have, and skills that are at all stimulating to people's intellect. 

How do you think about that in 2050? Are we going to have two classes of workers, the people that work for the robots and the people that give the work to the bots? How do you think that's going to evolve? 

Bob Toohey 

Oh, I think the robots will be integrated with all of us. It'll be like The Jetsons. You ever watch The Jetsons? 

Marissa Geist 

Yes. 

Bob Toohey 

That to me is where we're all going to be. And it's happening just I mean, just watch it. Technology and humans will intersect and the work has to all intersect. I just think it's going to keep intersecting more and more. 

Marissa Geist 

Until we can't see each other. Yeah. 

Bob Toohey 

And it's just going to be ubiquitous in how we do things. We're not going to think about it. I think in 2050 we're not going to be oh, that's a chat bot. And there will be robots. Let's be honest, in 2050 there'll be people walking around that aren’t human, you know, we'll be like having them do something. I mean, go back to 20 years ago when you had the male bingo around your old office and it was dropping off the. 

Marissa Geist 

Interoffice memo, the manila folder with the like, yes, yes, yes. 

Bob Toohey 

And now you fast forward and here we are. But to that point it kind of shifting this a bit going back to the consumer and candidates. What do you see as the candidate experience is changing? We're talking customers and your employees but your customers are candidates. What's changing. What's the demand. How do you see that as we go forward? 

Marissa Geist 

I think it's the hyper-personalization and the expectation of hyper-personalization. We've had such a strong economy for employment. I think it's been a nervous economy for employment. But if we take a step back and think about what employees expect now relative to ten years ago, people expect you call them back right away or call them back. How old do I sound? Text them back or get in touch with them.  

People expect real answers. They expect transparency. They do not want canned responses. And that is all about the consumerism that you were talking about. I can only see that increasing if they don't feel like you respect them. What is effectively on your first date of employment in the candidacy? They do not assume it's going to get better when they walk through the door, and that expectation just continues to go up and up and up and up. 

And quite honestly, they don't seem to mind if they know it's through an automated system. They just want to know if somebody invested the time to ingest what they're giving and play it back in a respectful way. I can imagine, I'm hoping that by 2050, our employee practices will have kept up with, or at least kept pace with the consumer experiences. 

But what do you think? Do you think we'll still be lagging always? Or do you think we'll have merged into one sort of employee, candidate, consumer experience? 

Bob Toohey 

I'm an optimist in this. I believe we will merge, but it takes everyone willing to just let go of the ways we think we're supposed to do things in HR. I think we will definitely merge. I don't think we have a choice.  

I'll go back to your candidate experience. I would imagine candidates want to know the answer, like the minute they walk out of the room. 

Do you see that immediacy and that need for like, okay, what's next? Versus we'll get back to you in three weeks. 

Marissa Geist 

Three weeks is an eternity. They've already accepted and quit two other jobs. And when I think about to that speed, you're right. That's the other change is the speed. I remember when I was in university years ago, they said somebody will stay an average of eight years in a job. And it was like, what, only eight years in a job? That company invested so much in you and you're only going to stay eight years.  

I will be ten years with Cielo, and I'm one of the longest tenured employees at Cielo. We have definitely the old guard. And then we've got so many new folks coming in. But it's not like you look at a resume anymore and say, wow, you were there eight years. What made you such a job hopper? That's like, look at this person. This candidate's been there.  

So the immediacy, the speed, the pace, and they want to know what you're investing in them because they don't expect you're going to take care of them through retirement. So it's you have to invest as much into them as they get back out of you in that tenure. 

And they want to see that as a candidate, like, what am I going to leave here if I take a job here or whatever, a gig, I'm going to leave more employable than when I came. What are you going to do for me? Because I know I'm on my own after 3 or 5 years. So I think that's definitely a different sort of employee employer contract going into the interview. 

Bob Toohey 

Yeah, I think that 50-50 handshake is definitely something that needs to be clearer across the board, which is another modernization, if you will. It can't be. What are you going to do for me, it's, I'm going to do X, you're going to do Y, we're going to have a handshake and let's just make this work.  

And you mentioned people staying at jobs eight years. It'll be interesting. How do you think employers, what are you hearing your employers say? I mean, at the end of the day, some people get very upset that they left the company. Should we think about people leaving as they don't like us anymore? It's turnover. They're not loyal. I love when people say they're not loyal. I'm like. 

Marissa Geist 

Do we say that? 

Bob Toohey 

I'm not sure if it's about loyalty, but like, it's hard. I mean, you’re CEO in your company. People leave. Are you like, oh my God, they left my company. What did I do wrong?  

But should we be thinking that? Is it more about, well, they have a new opportunity. They've decided to do something different. We don't look at the learning, the growth, the movement. 

We kind of take it as a, you know, we on them. Where are they going? 

Marissa Geist 

I know well, we've even had a debate about talent acquisition. Sounds like it's a horrible term.  

We’re like talent connections or talent connectivity. And I think that embracing of Boomerang employees, that's one of the biggest things that we've said. You know, you want this experience. You actually can't get it here. You grew up here. It's good for you to take a break, go someplace else. 

And to your point about treating people like adults, having real and honest conversations, we never could have those conversations ten years ago. You know, it's crazy. It's going to ruin the company.  

And now we're saying it's a failure if somebody leaves and we don't know why. If somebody surprises us, that is the worst thing. It's not that they left, it's that they potentially had an opportunity here that we didn't talk to them about. 

And you didn't feel comfortable as a leader having that conversation. That's the failure mode that I see is we have a different skill set and we have to empower our leaders, new ones and seasoned leaders to say this is not only an important conversation, it's a mandatory conversation because you need to know what's going on in your employee’s head.  

Ask, how much longer do you think you can do this job? How much longer are you interested in doing what you're doing? That is not a… you have to make a judgment call. It doesn't imply you're here or someplace else. But as humans, we don't tend to like to do the same thing for 25 years every day. 

So it's an okay question to ask. So yes. 

Bob Toohey 

I think that's right on. And at the end of the day, what's going to happen? This whole point of people leaving and coming and going. And it's funny… talent acquisition is an archaic term. Now, you know Sean who runs that for us? Now he's going to change his title. So Sean he's going to change it to talent connectors which… that's exactly what they do. And I'll give him credit.  

So you talk about external mobility and internal mobility. We're using our recruiters right now and we call them talent agents. They should be able to call all our employees just like they call external people and say, how are you doing? Are you interested in something new? And the person's going to say, well, I really wasn't looking. 

Well, no kidding. That's why I'm calling you. So you could start thinking about it because you're going to do it one day. We all do it. It's human nature. Because you just said it. I don't want to do this for 25 years. The exact same thing every day. Maybe one out of every ten people do. But I think that day is far away. 

So when you look externally, I think when people leave and you asked earlier in this discussion here, how do you know your consumer? So think about when someone leaves a company and especially you're pulling people in and out. They should have a talent passport. What's on that passport? How do they take their ID and put it in the next place. 

How do we know them so that it carries with them to their next? I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Like, if we had something like that. So everybody's not writing a resume every time they have to go do something. It's literally always on, always there. And it's the fingerprint about you. And it's just it goes with you to the next job, and it knows what you've learned and it knows who you are. 

It knows that you like to start work at 7 a.m., and now an employer just says, you'd be perfect for this job. You don't need an interview, but imagine that. 

Marissa Geist 

That would be phenomenal. Especially for internal talent, that when you interview them, sometimes they're offended. Like, how come you don't know that I am perfect for this job? Why am I interviewing?  

I think that idea of a talent passport is really great, and I think it is something that needs to be more ubiquitous and more real life than LinkedIn, because you can still curate and you can still sort of push out to LinkedIn what you want, and it doesn't really connect people. 

You're still doing this odd dance because there's this old fit of employer, employee, candidate, marketplace. It's not there yet. So I definitely think… 

Bob Toohey 

Takes out the human factor. 

Marissa Geist 

It does. It takes it out. And I don't know what your LinkedIn inbox looks like, but mine's unusable when you get a bigger title. And all of a sudden you get all the sales calls coming in. So it's really it's not a great place to have a real conversation. So I would love to brainstorm what that could look like. 

What does this really look like if it's working. 

Bob Toohey 

And it should be on your mobile device, you should be able to get somewhere, tap your mobile device like you do a credit card. And all of the sudden when I walk into your company, you know who I am. I don't have to sit there and tell you. You now know me. I think we could get to that point. Is the interview needed?  

Marissa Geist 

Is the interview needed? And I think that goes back to your original point of opting in and opting out. Like, is this shareable experience? I noticed you just did this. Is this something you want to add to your digital passport? Yes or no. Because people also should have a choice of like, no one should ask me about that job that was not something that that set of activities relates, not at all.  

However, you could say, yes, add it. And it's like gamification. It's like your kids doing any quest. Okay, add to the treasure chest you check that off. You like filled in that circle, that box. Right. And that would get you out of your own industry too. I mean, think about how narrow it is. It's like, what makes you think you could do this job? Well, I don't know. Look at the things I've done before. And this job has never existed. 

Bob Toohey 

I think most people can work in any industry. I think most people don't agree with it. I think the industry is just a different product or a different service. But at the end of the day, the stuff that's happening inside of it, it's all the same. You're building something, you're in sales and selling something or you're servicing a customer. 

It's not that complicated. I think we're like, oh, you've never worked in the airline industry. We're sorry, you shouldn't apply here. It's like, and then you take every young person applying. They've never worked anywhere, so why can they work there? But mid-career can't. 

Marissa Geist 

Make the jump. 

Bob Toohey 

It's like we have this odd view where if you just have a digital passport, knows all about you, and you just plug it in and it matches you up, it's like, you know, your own personal…  

Marissa Geist 

Talent agent.  

Bob Toohey 

I almost say that it could take you kind of on your own career learning journey. 

Marissa Geist 

Yes, career learning journey. I like that.  

How did you get into your industry besides audit? Like, what made you think audit was the place to be? 

Bob Toohey 

Well, that's because I was in finance. And then when I was in there, there was like a management development program. So it was the old fashioned, you know, do this. It's two and a half years. You'll learn a lot, which you did. It was great, great experience. You learn a ton.  

Then when I got into HR and through all my different jobs, I was very fortunate just to try new things. 

I tell everybody that.  

I remember when I had one job running a business, and I went back to HR and more people said to me, why would you do that? You just had a great title. I'm like, I don't know. I guess just this seems like a bigger job and more impact. So I'm going to go do this. 

And the person who asked me to go do it, I like to work for them. I'm like, let's go try this. And off we went. It's the impact you make. What are you going to learn? Do you have a challenge? Everybody listening to this could do a job. I think it's about what do you want out of your job? 

Marissa Geist 

Yes. And different things at different points in your life too, right? There was a time when I was like, I'd really love to manage people and travel for work, and those are like my biggest aspirations. I told all my bosses, well, I checked those off and now I'm still doing those things. So it's just really interesting. And like, that's not something that would be fulfilling if someone's like, well, here's a job where you get to manage people and travel for work. Like that's not enough anymore. But for a while that was really important to me. That I could say that I've done those two things. 

Bob Toohey 

Yeah, you don't want to be behind a desk. A lot of people are like that, and some people want to be behind a desk. And that's where you have to have people. They have to explore and try things and I actually think anyone in early career coming out of school, even if and coming out of high school, whatever they are, how do you let them try new things and just keep trying? 

That's another opportunity. And if you think in 2050, is there a place that people are trying so many different things and it's the norm, and then people aren’t saying to themselves, oh, I left a job and I'm not going to interview because I was in a job six months, six months, six months.  

That was the way we used to train, the management development programs. That was the cool thing.  

Now… why can't you just do that with companies and try different things, and the company doesn't look bad on it. It's a cycle because we always have a reason why. And I think all these reasons are things we created. We could fix the reasons why and make this much more simplified, if you will. 

Marissa Geist 

Much better connection of your purpose at work and your interaction as a consumer at work and as a leader too. I think it makes everything a little bit easier. So this is actually a good lead into. I always ask three quickfire questions at the end. Are you ready? 

Bob Toohey 

Go ahead. 

Marissa Geist 

First one is tech has unleashed a sharing economy for consumers, from Airbnb to Uber. By 2050, do you think we'll see a sharing economy for work as well? 

Bob Toohey 

I think you'll see a part time sharing economy. I think the whole idea that completely sharing, and this could be just my bias to still believe that companies are companies and they want to create that, you know, it's almost until companies are sharing everything in a ubiquitous company strategy. You know, you mentioned Uber and Lyft. Are they going to share drivers? 

They kind of do today, but they still have loyalty to one or the other in the company. So that's what I mean by there is going to be this ability to share. But I think it's… I'll go back to the passport, ability to shift and move more frequently versus sharing everybody's workforce. 

Marissa Geist 

That's interesting that you mentioned that in a lot of ways. Yes. It's like you share people, whether you know it or not, in the gig economy, but not professionally. Like if I said, oh, I'm working at Cielo. And I also gave part of my job away so I could take a shift over at a competitor that I won't name, I’d get fired. 

Bob Toohey 

Read all the stories during the pandemic we read. Right? I mean, you heard a lot in developers. How many developers work there in the day at one company and another one at night? People have got fired and you're saying to yourself, unless it's the same industry, who cares? They're developing. So they wanted two jobs. But if they went and got a job being a developer and they decided to go be a bartender at night, they'd be fine. 

Think of what we do. We’re like they can't have two jobs, but they can if it's part time. So we've created these rules. 

Marissa Geist 

Yeah, it is fascinating. And it's hard for us as the creators of many of those rules to even think of a different way, because of course, they're in our heads. Okay. Good answer. Second question, we've seen AI creating resumes. We've seen people lie on resumes, CVs till the end of time. Exaggerate, if you will. If we go to a digital passport, will people be able to lie on those, exaggerate, game the system? 

Bob Toohey 

I think you can call it lying, exaggerating. People are always going to put their own spin on all of their information, but I think you could have more checks and balances in it with a digital passport. And I think resumés should go away. I think a resume is just a lot of work for people to put it on a nice piece of paper and write a really nice thing about themselves. We should be able to figure out how to do that with technology, and that's why we should go to a digital passport. 

Marissa Geist 

True. Yes. I guess anytime you create something, there's always somebody who's looking to game it a little bit. 

Bob Toohey 

So yeah, I mean think of skills and capabilities. AI can infer your skills and capabilities. But then you can say, well, no, that's not really true. These are some other ones. Now you're into this. And then my friends all agreed with me. Is that the validation? Because your friends are great. 

Marissa Geist 

I'll give you a reference of some person that will say exactly… They're going to call. I need you to say that I was doing this.  

Bob Toohey 

Right. Exactly. 

Marissa Geist 

So humans are humans regardless of better technology or not. That's what I'm getting out of that. 

Bob Toohey 

Yeah. 

Marissa Geist 

Okay. Last one, you've talked a lot about employers being able to learn from consumer experiences. What do you think that consumer businesses could learn from us in talent? 

Bob Toohey 

That's a good one. Don't forget the human. There is always a need for a human interaction somewhere in the process. So things can be automated, but somewhere there's a human in there.  

I mean, you can probably think of 20 experiences that consumer companies put you through, whether it's a call center that'll never let you talk to a person and you want to throw your phone or you're in a store, and the way they kind of put the goods, it's you can't find what you're looking for because they have a special way of doing it. 

It's like, how do you create that human interaction and don't lose sight of that? 

Marissa Geist 

The human interaction, yeah, always give the escape hatch to go find help. 

Bob Toohey 

Right? Because I say that because talent. I mean, at the end of the day, if I talk to a recruiter, a recruiter is proud because they're the sales agent. They want to talk to somebody because that's the value. There's a bunch of companies out there trying to automate every recruiter in the world, right? You know that I mean, they're all out there. 

You can automate the work that a recruiter has to do, but you can't take away the human interaction to make that final determination, sell to a company, whatever it may be. 

Marissa Geist 

That is true. We've all seen over-automated processes that is actually a much bigger deterrent than just waiting a little bit longer in a line. And in many ways, you know, is your candidate going in for a job? Like I said, it's the first date. That's your storefront.  

If your storefront looks like I care so little that I'm not even picking up the phone to talk to you, the candidates are not going to want to walk through the door. 

They're going to say, what is it like to work at this company? So that's a good one.  

All right. Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been really an interesting conversation and thanks for keeping it in 2050, but anchoring it to today.  

So a couple of key takeaways I learned. Knowing more about our employees is mandatory. Not that this is new information, but just the fact that it's moving at a pace that the best companies are going to be the ones that know the most about what their employees want to do. Make it easy for employees to talk to you about what they'd like to do. 

And then that we need to give the same experiences that'll be standard for consumers. By 2050, the worlds will have merged, hopefully, and that your employee experience is as good or better than a consumer experience.  

And that a digital passport should be coming. We should be advocating for digital passports, throw away the CVs, have a better discussion enabled by better, more interactive ways of knowing our current employees, candidates and just the talent out there in the marketplace. 

So thank you for joining us on the podcast. This has been great. 

Bob Toohey 

It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. 

Marissa Geist 

Join me next time on the trip to work 2050 in “The talent time machine.” 

To catch the next episode or hear from my previous guests, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform.  

This episode was edited by Emily Kaysinger and produced by Dusty Weis at Podcamp Media, with the support of Sarah Smelik, John McCarron, and Laura Pykett of Heavenly and the team at Cielo of Sally Hunter, Annamarie Andrews and Susie Schuppel-Paul. 

For Cielo, thanks for listening. I'm Marissa Geist.