What can new grads build in 90 days? This cohort has quite a story to tell

A little more than a year ago, Ashleigh Nelson and Jeremy Leary were still in college. Now, they’re starting their careers at a major U.S. corporation. This past April, they joined a five-person Zoom call centered on building a new podcast-outreach strategy. They were the youngest people in the meeting, by far.

Usually, newcomers like Nelson and Leary sit quietly in the background, but not this time. Once introductions were made, the two took command. The moment of truth had arrived for their strategy. Clicking through a slide deck, they identified the market opportunity, explained how to segment it -- and spelled out a five-step plan for connecting with potential partners.?

The rest of us, including podcast producer Sarah Storm, became the soft-spoken coaches, taking it all in. Near the end, we shared feedback and flagged a few gaps in their plan. All the same, Ashleigh and Jeremy weren’t just skating through a simulation. Their ideas quickly became a real project that tested their ingenuity, nonstop, until the end of June.?

How did Jeremy and Ashleigh get there? Their journey takes place at LinkedIn, but it’s a universal story about the ways great careers are born. After all the chaos of the past 18 months, we're now seeing a rare chance for both major employers and new graduates to race ahead. Opportunities are huge. Everyone just needs a reliable, fast-paced way of building skills and trust together.???

Most media attention today focuses on the startup track, which is thrilling when everything goes right. But I’d like to talk about the way that bigger companies do something quite different -- and just as valid -- in terms of creating early-career acceleration at scale.?

Say hello to initiatives like our Business Leadership Program, which rotates about 100 new hires a year through fast-paced assignments in different areas, before settling them into significant jobs, chiefly in sales. This spring, for the first time ever, our News team became an official stop in this rotation. The photo above shows Jeremy, Ashleigh and eight other BLP associates who joined us for a 90-day rotation.?

In this article, you’ll get some big picture thoughts about such programs’ focus on universal skills, ranging from program management to communication. You’ll also sense the exuberance of new hires coming into their own. Don't just take my word for it. As the first BLP/News rotation neared completion, Jeremy Leary emailed me, saying that our time together had “truly proven an invaluable rotation, mirroring a sales cycle but without the stress of a hard-set quota or commission.”

It would be great to see such opportunities open for emerging talent everywhere. In that spirit, I’ll share five key learnings from our BLP/News collaboration.?

Pinpoint what you want each rotational stop to teach. When BLP director Tiffany Poeppelman and I held our first planning meeting in December 2020, it was as if we were bridge-builders who had started on opposite sides of a canyon. From faraway starting points, we had suddenly met in the middle, connecting each others’ worlds.??

Our meeting point: the growing importance of communications. We both recognized that business success -- especially in sales -- depends more than ever on being a clear explainer and connecting well with other people in formats ranging from email to webinars, group presentation, social platforms and more. Tiffany was on a hunt for ways associates could find “the right teams to teach the high-impact skills of the future.”?

“We can do that!” I replied. Our News team writes snappy 40-character headlines and finds eye-catching nuggets in data spreadsheets. We don’t have sales quotas, but we’re prospecting all the time, trying to get sources to agree to interviews, trying to get expert guests to come on our video shows and more. We’re storytellers. We work hard at getting other people to “Yes.” And we’re glad to explain how it’s done.?

Tiffany saw a lot of promise, but she wanted to make sure that anything we tried would map well to BLP’s exact needs. So the two of us began sketching a suite of communications-related ideas -- with a particular emphasis on prospecting, tailoring messages and doing competitive research to learn someone else’s story. One way or another, such skills resonate in both sales and journalism.?

Meanwhile, a key manager on Tiffany’s team, Ali Chard, began showing me all the steps that we’d need to be a good destination. Together, we took a shot at week-by-week calendars for the associates’ time with us. We also set up performance trackers and coaching systems, aligning our News workflow with BLP’s classic priorities. That’s more process than I’m used to, but it was the right call. Our 90-day timeline whizzes by fast. If we aren’t locked in on what we’re trying to achieve, that sense of start-to-finish achievement slips away.

Share the vision. My boss, LinkedIn editor in chief Dan Roth, is a busy guy. But knowing how critical it is to develop talent, he cleared out two hour-long sessions -- one at the beginning of our BLP/News rotation and the other near the end -- to field associates' questions and explain how a robust News team strengthens LinkedIn’s overall mission. He briefed them on our commitment to give members the news and views they need to be successful in their professional lives.?

The face time alone was nice, but the key impact was more strategic. We wanted associates to see how their projects fit into something bigger. That’s a defining factor in morale and productivity. It’s also the key to remaining a desired destination in a world where top talent always has a lot of choices. In hindsight, we could have done even more in the way of training and orientation. But at least we made an important start in the right direction.

Be willing to learn from the associates, too. We’ve got a lot of proven expertise in our News team, in areas ranging from feature writing to content curation. But we don’t know everything. That’s especially true as we take stock of the fast-changing ways that top independent creators are interacting with the big social platforms.?

To our surprise and delight, we discovered that one of the BLP associates, Alexa Herskowitz, has become a TikTok star in her spare time. We couldn’t let the moment slip by. Her insights about what she posts, why she posts, and what recognition matters to her -- all these helped us move up the learning curve. We also had way too much fun watching her irresistible Bernese mountain dog video, again and again. (Go ahead. Take a peek. See why a staggering? 2.1 million people have already clicked “Like.”)?

Treat feedback as your No. 1 obligation. On our News team, we’ve done fine with a twice-a-year cadence of formal feedback for full-time hires. After all, most of them come to us with 5+ years of relevant experience. They know (at least partly) how it all works.? When we built the BLP/News partnership, however, Tiffany and Ali made sure we offered our newest team members a lot more.?

Associates got weekly 1:1 sessions with coaches, with conversational time to evaluate their performance on five aspects (execution, communication, initiative, reliability and integrity). This turned out to be a win for coaches, too, who tended to be top-tier individual contributors with a chance to practice their future management skills. Written feedback every month provided associates with extra alerts on areas for improvement -- and how to get there.?

Did it make a difference? Yes indeed. People just starting their careers don’t have fully built internal gyroscopes that signal how they’re doing -- or what they need to sharpen up. It’s on management to provide that guidance. When all the rotations were done, the most satisfied associates tended to be the ones who got the most feedback.?

Make room for newcomers who want to do more. About halfway through the rotation, I chatted with associate Daniel Malynowsky, who was sharpening his prospecting skills by contacting a flurry of thought leaders, inviting them to join each day’s on-site conversations. Daniel is deeply interested in sales, and I asked him if his outbound messaging included any effort to get top sales experts to speak out.?

“Not yet,” he said. But as we talked it through, it was clear that he had both the tools and the interest to make our outreach program stronger. A few weeks later, I discovered that Daniel had identified -- and activated -- seven of the sales sector’s thought leaders to become more active contributors on our platform. He’d taken a useful role with us and made it more powerful -- which is a great habit to build in any career.

Similarly, when associates Kyle McKinney and Alexa Herskowitz rotated into our video team in April, they started by booking guests for our daily LinkedIn News Live video show. That’s a good job in its own right, tapping into one’s imagination, organization and persuasiveness. But video team leaders Stephen Valdivia and Florencia Iriondo soon realized that both of them could aim higher, too.?

Toward the end of their rotations, Kyle and Alexa were creating their own videos, such as this and this. Look for even more from Alexa soon; she helped support the coming launch of Rapid Fire, a newsletter that will feature interviews and videos with celebrities and business executives.

My favorite example of the BLP associates’ initiative involved Sebastian Camacho, who helped support our big Top Companies rollout. When that project had some minor delays, Sebastian asked me for ideas about where else he could have an impact. I was working on an article about college students’ networking habits at the time, and I asked if he’d be willing to do some research for the piece -- mostly tracking down recent Fordham University graduates who might be good examples for the piece.

Boom! Sebastian came back a few days later with an elegantly built spreadsheet of names he’d identified via LinkedIn Recruiter. His recommendations were great, and his spreadsheet design was miles ahead of the patchy versions I usually build. He’s headed off to a new rotation now, and I’m sure he’ll be a star there, too.

As for Jeremy and Ashleigh, the associates at the beginning of this article, they took their podcast-outreach initiative to the finish line, with valuable results. Our goal was to encourage podcasters to do more on the LinkedIn platform. The BLP associates assessed more than 140 prospects -- and got at least a dozen to step forward in the ways we were hoping for.?

We’ll be getting another wave of BLP associates in October. It’ll be great to build more opportunities with them as well.?