The key to better hiring, why we should chat with our hairstylists, and more top insights

What’s happening in the world of work: The Saturday edition of the Daily Rundown highlights the business trends, perspectives, and hot topics you need to know to work smarter. Read on and join the conversation.

When it comes to hiring, we’re often in the dark:  A recent survey by Wharton professor Peter Capelli found that only a third of American companies evaluate their hiring decisions. And over two-thirds of firms fill their job openings with outside hires, despite the fact that such employees take three years longer to perform a job at the same level as internal hires, The Economist reports. What should employers do instead? Try to hire internally more often and take a long, hard look at the way they recruit and how well their recent hires are doing. ? Here’s what people are saying.

Low-stakes friendships can go a very long way: An occasional chat with a neighbor, your hairdresser or bartender may feel like a minor pleasantry, but such experiences can pay enormous dividends. Such experiences can increase your life satisfaction, happiness and help make you more empathetic, according to researchers. Plus, interacting with those outside your typical network exposes you to new ideas, the kind that can lead to new opportunities. How much time does it take to build such casual alliances? About 30 hours. With enough 20-minute chats over time, you’ll get there. ? Here’s what people are saying.

Talking like TED: The 35-year-old ideas conference, which took place in Vancouver last month, has in many ways set the standard for public speaking in the professional world. But what specifically makes a TED talk work? TED speaker coach Briar Goldberg offered LinkedIn’s Isabelle Roughol a few key pointers. ? Here’s what people are saying.

• Your idea is everything: If you can’t sum up your talk in a single sentence, you need to go back to the drawing board. The bulk of your preparation should be devoted to developing and clarifying that single idea or message you want to convey, Goldberg suggests. The script and slides can come later.
• It’s all about the audience: You may be the one talking, but what you’re doing on stage should be all about giving something interesting and valuable to your listeners.
• Practice, practice, practice: Run through your talk out loud, ideally with a trusted colleague or friend, so you can gauge how the audience might react. Then do it again, and again.

You Asked: “What do you do when you ask, ‘How can I advance? How can the people I supervise advance?’ and you get nothing but crickets?” — San Francisco-based reliability and test supervisor at Tesla

• “You have to figure out your path. One of the ways that you can advance is to learn from your peers. So if you're in imaging, and there's another department that does something different, spend time with that department. Understand from your peers there what they do, how they do it, what their backgrounds are, how did they prepare and learn to do that. You'll find your colleagues are quite generous with their time, and really appreciate the interest you have in what they do. It's amazing how much you can learn about a business by spending time with colleagues in other departments. Now, one of the reactions you get is, ‘Well, I'm not getting paid to do that. That's not my job.’ That's true, but you have to start with the belief that you are the single most important asset you own, and that one of your critical jobs in life is to make yourself ever more valuable. So, you might not get paid for that today, but you may very well get paid for it in the next job.” — Ron Williams, former chairman, president and CEO of Aetna and author of “Learning to Lead: The Journey to Leading Yourself, Leading Others, and Leading an Organization”
• “The problem is in the question. It implies you want to move forward, which is great, but it’s about you — and while your team leader may well care about you, it’s a safe bet that he or she cares just a little bit more about getting the work done. Two different questions will yield more useful responses. You can start with your passion: ‘Here’s what I love doing. Is there a way I can do more of it?’ Or you can start with the work you’re most interested in: ‘Here’s a piece of work I would love to be involved with. Can I pitch in?’ These questions lead to conversation, not crickets — and if you can broaden your impact, advancement will follow.” —Ashley Goodall, co-author of “Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World” and senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco

Looking for career advice from the pros? Submit your questions in the comments with #YouAsked and we’ll take care of the rest.

How to avoid an AI-leadership debacle: Algorithms — the kind that can assign the right employees to key projects or develop ideal worker schedules — can make managing large groups of people a lot easier. However, while algorithms are designed to optimize inefficiencies, they lack the necessary empathy to take into account the implications of their recommendations, writes author and consulting CEO Mike Walsh. To avoid the management catastrophe, Walsh argues, leaders should first imagine how they might feel if they were directly affected by such AI, and go from there. ? Here’s what people are saying.

One last idea: It’s all too easy for idealists — those among us with grand ambitions to change our surroundings for the better — to grow discouraged. But nonprofit founder Van Brooks argues that we should never forget the enormous impact a single individual can have on the world around them.

“One person can make a difference. It’s like throwing a pebble in a pond. You throw a pebble in a pond and the ripples that come from that expand long and wide. Often times, a lot of people think that the work that they do isn’t making a difference when it really does. So I encourage everyone to get out … and be that ripple.”

What's your take? Join the conversations on today's stories in the comments.

— Scott Olster, Ruiqi Chen, and Jasmine Teng