Want to build a world-class team? Start by thinking like a business leader.
Melanie Steinbach has led talent teams for several major brands—McDonald’s, Cameo, and now MasterClass—and she knows that talent strategy goes well beyond the common perception of HR.
In this episode, Melanie shares how she aligns hiring decisions with business growth, the compensation mistake most companies make, and why holding managers accountable for talent development is the key to long-term success.
Melanie also shares:
Connect with Melanie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melaniesteinbach/
About MasterClass at Work:
MasterClass at Work provides powerful and flexible learning solutions featuring the lived experiences and insights of the world’s top experts.
The platform offers a suite of at-work solutions for employees and leaders. Each video lesson is designed with the learner in mind, configured to enhance the personal and professional development of employees—from the field to the boardroom—to drive real business impact.
Each MasterClass at Work lesson is available at home, in the office or on-the-go on mobile, tablet, desktop, Apple TV®, Android™ TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku® players and devices.
Link: https://www.masterclass.com/for-business
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[00:00:00] Melanie Steinbach: If you're looking for the best talent, don't then hamstring it by saying, Oh, also I need the very best person in the world on this to be okay with accepting average compensation. That's just not how it's going to go.
[00:00:14] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent? Today, I'm Dave Travers, president of ZipRecruiter.
And on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses. Today's Talent All-Star is Melanie Steinbach, the Chief People Officer at MasterClass. Melanie's had an incredible career and she's done a little bit of everything.
Technology recruiting, check. Executive placement, check. Yep. Chief People Officer at one of the biggest brands in the world, McDonald's. She's done it. And all that before her last two roles at fast-growing online companies cameo and now masterclass. I can't wait to get into it all with her. So let's bring her in.
[00:00:58] Dave Travers: Melanie. Welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:01:00] Melanie Steinbach: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here today.
[00:01:03] Dave Travers: I know that focusing on getting the best talent, uh, is a passion of yours and something you use as a framework, uh, for, throughout many roles you've had. Tell me a little bit about how that came about and how you've applied that.
[00:01:16] Melanie Steinbach: It literally started in my first job. So, uh, the first job I had, I was at a software startup. Um, it was called Trilogy. It's not a startup anymore, but it was at the time. I think I was employee 147 and we were competing against all of the tech giants at the time. And. Our mission was to go get the very best people that we could find, and the recruiting team reported to the CEO.
So I didn't even know that recruiting was an HR function until I left that company, which is a whole probably another story. But one thing and one lesson that that CEO taught me that I kept with me to this day is The best talent really does create your competitive advantage as a company. I was in charge of recruiting our folks from MIT and Harvard, which were really big pipelines of talent for us.
And at the time we were really close to getting the number one computer science graduate from Harvard. And I knew that we had gone to the max that I was able to offer from a salary and that Microsoft had offered $10, 000 more. And I came and I told the CEO, yeah, we're going to lose that guy. And he said to me then, and I've kept this with me for the rest of my career.
If you ever tell me again, that we are going to lose a candidate for 10, 000 that is going to create our next 30 million product, you will be fired. And the reason that stayed with me is sometimes as recruiters, you know, we're like, This is the band. This is like the time I have to recruit this person.
These are like, we put all of these parameters on ourselves. And yet when you think about it in the context of the business, right? The way that the CEO was looking at it was this is a tiny investment. In what is going to be a massive product for us. And yet I was thinking, Oh, no, I can't disrupt my like the top of my recruiting band level.
We have rules and we have things that guidelines that we give recruiters and use great judgment. If you really found the person that you think is truly going to differentiate the company going forward, go for it, go to the mat for that person.
[00:03:42] Dave Travers: I love that. It's so powerful to think about when you, when you find perfect, you know, in, and it's intuitive to, uh, lots of people in startup world, when it comes to product market fit or something, when you find it, it's pure goal, but it's the same with talent, um, fitting in with a role in how important that is to find the talent.
Powerful. That is when you do and prioritizing that,
[00:04:02] Melanie Steinbach: Can I say one more thing on that? You know, I, I started my career as a corporate recruiter. Then I went and I was in executive search. So 15 years on the search side. And one thing that was never, ever said to me when I was in executive search is. Please go find us an average person for this role.
Like, we'd like the 50th percentile of this job. No one ever says that. They always say, Go find us the best you can find. And yet, You know, with compensation, we set compensation at the 50th percentile. And so I always tell my recruiters, like, listen, that is a guideline. And now as a CHRO, I'm like, gold, you know, like that's kind of difficult.
But I will say to all of the recruiters out there, if you're looking for the best talent, Don't then hamstring it by saying, Oh, also I need the very best person in the world on this to be okay with accepting, you know, average compensation. That's just not how it's going to go.
[00:05:05] Dave Travers: Love it. Okay. So now theme back through your career, obviously.
Uh, trilogy, McDonald's, um, MasterClass, um, cameo, you've risen through the ranks over the period of that time where you became a leader and then a leader of leaders. And now you're in a position where you're cultivating new leaders and new leaders of leaders. As you go through that coaching, what is the most powerful piece of advice, or what's the one thing that is hard in that transition as you go from being that superstar individual contributor or having a small team of three people to all of a sudden managing a big sprawling team, how do you coach someone through that to become a great leader?
[00:05:45] Melanie Steinbach: I love this question because it's so personal for me.
I like, I feel like I have all of the scars from this. And I think one of the things that is really hard for leaders is the first transition where you are leading functions that you didn't grow up. And so all of a sudden you're a knowledge deficit. And that is really scary for people. That was terrifying for me.
I kind of knew myself as being an expert. And so then all of a sudden when you're not, it's like you're on very uncertain footing. And so the way I combat that and what I tell every leader that I coach is Curiosity is what is going to get you through. It is the thing for me that is my go to whenever I'm in a new role.
I've just taken on a new role here at MasterClass in addition to my Chief People Officer role. And what I've said is. Two ears, one mouth is one of my favorite things, you know, I'm going to listen more than I talk. And when I talk, it's likely going to be a question. And I do that because I'm going to learn a ton of information.
I'm going to learn how the person thinks. Um, I'm going to learn the things that are there that are important to them. I'm going to learn their motivations. So that to me is one of the, the most important things that, that I advise people. When I think about. The teams that I've led and the things that they say to me about working with me, I think there are two things that they really highlight.
Number one is blame accrues to me, credit accrues to them. And when you're leading a turnaround, when you're leading an innovation team, you know, a kind of new to the world stuff, if you don't have that philosophy as a leader, you are going to hamstring your team because they are going to mess up when they're doing new things in a turnaround like people are going to have to take risks and if they think that they're going to get punished for those, they're not going to take the risk that you need them to.
If the other one is, I don't ask anyone on my team to do anything I'm not willing to do. I think that it's, um, really important in today's day and age. We see so much emphasis on authenticity. I have a lot to say about that, but I would say the thing that people really want to know is, are you asking me to do something that you'd be willing to do too?
So those are two of my. Leadership philosophies that have really served me well.
[00:08:20] Dave Travers: So I want to go back to curiosity because one, I think it hits on a couple of things. One is as you go through your career, especially if you're taking on more and more responsibility, you're inevitably going to get thrown into situations for which you are not prepared.
And so having that idea that I'm constantly a learning machine and, and it's fun. It's not because I need to, I have curiosity where I want to know more, I think is an incredibly powerful tool for successful people as they're moving up. But to an earlier point. It shows incredible talent role fit for you because you are the chief people officer at MasterClass of all places.
Having curiosity is at the essence of the organization that you help lead. And so the harmony and the unity of those two, the, your management philosophy matches up with the organization. Um, you're working for is incredibly powerful. So if you can find that for yourself in your own career, it's powerful.
And as you recruit other people and you're looking to recruit, when you find, oh, this is a person whose whole philosophy about how they take on their job fits exactly with the company that we're trying to get them for. That is super powerful. Tell me about how, how you use that at MasterClass.
[00:09:35] Melanie Steinbach: It is everything at MasterClass.
Honestly, I tell people if you are not curious, you're gonna fail here. Period. Full stop. It's one of our values. It's in our mission. I mean, our mission is to unlock human potential by inspiring a learning lifestyle in everyone. I mean, we cannot be more clear that this is something that we value when you look at some of the research on the most effective leaders.
One of the traits that is most linked to high potential is curiosity. One of the traits that is linked to the most inclusive leaders is curiosity. And then I think the other thing is just the period of time that we find ourselves in. Things are changing. You can like talk about AI as much as you want and just be like, Oh, you don't really need to know so much anymore because now there's going to be a bot.
No, that's not true. The way that you're going to access the greatness of AI is through curiosity. So it's now even, even more important. And so. For me at MasterClass, when we're recruiting people and, you know, we say curiosity is really important. They say, Oh yeah, me too. And then I say, like, tell me the last thing you read that was super interesting.
Like, tell me the last new thing you learned. What's the show that you're like obsessed with right now, right? We try and ask things that are representations of that curiosity because it is a muscle that it can be developed and we believe, you know, it's not just, Oh, I say, I'm curious. We like to see that demonstration of it.
[00:11:11] Dave Travers: Love that. I think, you know, one of the funny things about working in the, in the talent business or in the recruiting businesses, people ask me, as I'm sure they do you advice all the time on like what, what young people, especially what career should I go into, what should I study in school? What are the most important skills for jobs of the future?
And my answer to that is. Honestly, the skill you probably need for the job of the future probably doesn't exist yet. No one knows it. So what you need to know is how to learn and that you can learn something really fast that no one knows yet, or you're one of the first people to figure out. Um, so that curiosity thing is so powerful.
Okay. Let's put curiosity to work here. You have risen through the ranks. You're Chief People Officer now. And I think there are, there are people who listen to this podcast who are interested in taking that. A similar journey to a similar destination. And so now let's apply curiosity. If you are a, someone who came from talent development first, and we'll do recruiting next.
But if you came up through talent development, you would get elevated to chief people officer. You're now responsible for the entirety of the people function. You're in charge of recruiting for the first time. How do you apply curiosity or recruiting? How do you get started? How do you attack that problem as someone who comes in not knowing what they're now responsible for?
[00:12:29] Melanie Steinbach: Okay. So here's my playbook. First, do not try and lie to people about what you know and don't know. Number one is be really clear on what you don't know, and then set up a plan to figure out how to learn that. So if I didn't know anything about recruiting, I would go to my head of talent acquisition and I would say, tell me your top priorities for this year.
X, Y, and Z. Great. Tell me why those are your priorities. Okay, good. Do you believe that those are the right ones? Because sometimes people get told that they have to have things that are not actually the right ones. Tell me how that shows up for you in day-to-day work. By asking that set of questions, Dave, like what I am understanding is like, okay, if I didn't know the first thing about recruiting and I knew that time to fill was one of their top priorities, then all of a sudden I'd be like, okay, I need to like really understand what's getting in the way of, of speed here.
You know, if they said to me, Oh, like our biggest metric is ratios of open searches to, to recruiters, whatever it is, like all of a sudden you're using those little tiny things to put together a narrative for you of like, okay, these are the things that are important to that group. And that's what I need to start, um, to understand better focus on what you don't know and ask the best person you can find for information on it.
[00:13:56] Dave Travers: So powerful to be the, the person who starts off by confidently stating what they don't know, because if you invert the problem and you're going to someone you're now managing for the first time, it's so obvious. Do you want them to tell you that they completely understand something that they're still trying to figure out?
Or do you want them to tell you they don't know? And if you want them to say, I don't know this thing yet, then you have to first model that for them. If you're going to hand wave your way through it, you should not expect a different result when you ask, start asking them questions. So I love that. Okay.
Let's flip it around. Now you came up Mel through recruiting, and that was a lot of what you did early in your career. Now you're taking over the people team as Chief People Officer. And now you're responsible for not just bringing talent into the organization, but developing the talent already in the organization.
How do you approach that with curiosity?
[00:14:45] Melanie Steinbach: So one of the things about being an executive search is you do a lot of talent assessment. And so I felt like that was an area that I. I knew well at an individual level, but I didn't know is how to do it at scale. And so again, you know, I talked to people about, Hey, how have we been doing this?
How successful has it been? How do we know it's been successful? Right, because I'm looking at the results and I'm thinking that we're having to hire a lot of people outside. So it doesn't really feel like we've been doing a great job of developing all the talent that we need, you know, to me, one of the best markers of your talent academy as a company is that you actually need to hire at the senior levels way less.
Then you do it at the entry-level. It's like, I think recruiting and bringing in new ideas is essential to an organization, no matter how good they are. My view is that you want at least like 30 percent of a company like to be new within the last 18 months. At every level, it's a little bit of a provocative statement and some people like, Oh yeah, you say that because you used to be a recruiter, but I really do think that people, they get stale.
I don't know if you've ever done like a home renovation, Dave, but when you get to the end of it, there's going to be a punch list. There's going to be like five things that are not done and they're going to really annoy you at first. And then two months later, you're going to forget that they're not done.
And they're going to stay not done probably for the next two years. And it's because you get like old eyes on the things, you know, like they, they become part of what you are accustomed to. And we do that with, with ideas and with ways of doing things at work too. And so like bringing new people in who can say, Hey, I'm sorry, Dave, but did you know that your threshold into your, uh, bathroom hasn't been painted yet?
You'd be like, yeah, I know that's two years ago. I forgot about that. And they're going to call out that stuff for you. It's awesome. It's so good. Every organization needs it.
[00:16:50] Dave Travers: I love it. So as you're talking about measuring talent. And I love the framework you use that you're not needing as much senior talent as you are junior talent, because you're bringing people up through the organization that sounds like Shangri La to, to somebody who's thinking about talent development with a, with a fresh set of eyes.
So how do you get that journey started? How do you take where we are, where we're needing to, maybe we're in a position where we're needing to recruit a lot of mid-level and senior talent to this, you know, you know, Factory where we bring people in at the junior levels and they make their way up internally.
How do you get started on that?
[00:17:25] Melanie Steinbach: The most important thing to me, I attribute a lot of this belief to Mark Efron, who leads a group called the talent strategy group. And he like really tries to keep this very simple and the most important thing is manager accountability for talent development. If you hold your managers accountable for developing their teams, that is where the magic happens.
Oh, hey director, you want to get promoted to VP? Okay, have you developed a successor? If the answer is no, then we're, you're not going to get that promotion, right? All of a sudden, you're going to find people who are way more interested in developing their team, or they're going to tell you, I'm so sorry, Mel, like, honestly, there's no one on my team that is going to be like, that can take my job.
Okay. What's our plan? Is there anybody else in the org that we can bring over as, you know, a lateral and maybe they could do it now? Okay, let's go look outside. What are the gaps in your team? What is the gap on that? Your direct reports don't have that. We need to fill from the outside, getting really specific like that and holding the manager accountable.
[00:18:36] Dave Travers: So you referenced the buzzword of the day a little bit earlier, AI, when talking about how, how curiosity is only going to become more powerful in an AI-based world. And all of us feel this pressure to adapt to the working in a new and smarter way. Given that underlying technology has gotten, there's new and smarter tools available to us at a learning organization like MasterClass.
How do you apply this new set of tools and how do you use them in a, in a people framework as a people leader?
[00:19:09] Melanie Steinbach: The best learning that I have had on AI came through one of our MasterClass instructors, um, from our AI class. I had the chance to interview him, Don Allen Stevenson III. He's amazing. And he gave me two frameworks that I share generously because they were so transformative for me and how I view AI.
The first is, this is like how to use it. personally. Okay. And this one is think of AI like an intern. If you think of your of AI, chat GPT or whatever tool you're using as an intern, they're not going to be, you know, the person who is your peer. So don't expect them to do everything at the same level that you can do.
The first time you ask them to do something, it's probably going to be pretty lumpy. But if you tell them, Hey, here's what was good. Here's what was not so good. It'll get better the second time. It'll get really good the third time. By the fourth time, you will barely need to touch it. And that's because interns are really good with direction.
You know, you don't ask an intern to write your business plan for the next year. You ask your intern to like, write the response emails that you have to send to a bunch of people. So number one frame is like, think of it as an intern. Second one is as a people leader, I think one of the things that we really worry about, and I think a lot of employees worry about this if I'm being honest, I don't think it's just people within the people function, is AI coming for my job.
And what I took away from my time with our instructors is that AI is coming for your tasks that you hate to do. It is not coming for your job. And so for me, the way that I help people think about this is, hey, what parts of your job are just like the mindless tasks, the thing that you have to do over and over every week that are really like, they're important, but they don't really need you to be like actively thinking on those, try to train Um, a GPT to do that in recruiting, that's, you know, that's sending a lot of emails and outreaches that it is candidate scheduling and interview scheduling like hallelujah.
Now I will tell you if you're a recruiting coordinator. And that's your job 100 percent of the time. Now is a really good time to start adding new things to your job. And so to me, it's about using AI to free up time to do more of the creative thinking that we all like to do.
[00:21:56] Dave Travers: Yes. Oh, that's so smart.
Because if you see a task that is a core part of your job coming your way, be the person, your organization, who's now the expert at automating the task that it used to take you and humans to do, because there are going to be lots more projects like that, where we're implementing that successfully. If you're the person who just did that, um, you're going to be highly employable for a long period of time.
Okay. So what I would love is to get. A rapid-fire MasterClass from you on a couple of different questions. So we always close out an episode. So I know there's, there's a, there's a David in your organization too. So let's assume you're David, the CEO of MasterClass gets into the proverbial elevator with you.
You've got 60 seconds and he's like, Oh, Hey Mel, you know, I was thinking, how should we be thinking about measuring. The people team over the next year, what are the key things we need to get done or the key KPI or something? How should I think about that?
[00:22:51] Melanie Steinbach: So I believe deeply that, uh, if our company is meeting our sales and our profitability targets, then your people teams doing their job period.
Full stop, stop looking for all this nonsense, people, teams, align yourself with the business objectives. That is what your job is. It's to make the business go
[00:23:10] Dave Travers: amazing, total alignment with organizational, not a parallel universe where, where you're off doing something else. Love that. Next elevator question.
What's the next thing we can do to level up our recruiting strategy? So we're getting even more talented people in the building,
[00:23:26] Melanie Steinbach: deeply understand your competitors. Where are they going? Where are they pivoting? How is that going to impact the kind of talent that they need? And therefore the kind of talent that we might need.
If you're going to be a real. Rockstar recruiter, you're going to know what's going on in your whole industry, not just what's going on in your company.
[00:23:43] Dave Travers: Who are your competitors? Are they your learning competitors? Are they your, your talent competitors who you're going up against to recruit?
[00:23:51] Melanie Steinbach: Yes. And yes,
[00:23:52] Dave Travers: yes, of
[00:23:53] Melanie Steinbach: course.
Come on. I mean, that is. When, when I was at McDonald's, it was not just the, the big, um, quick serve restaurant companies. It was also everyone that was a major employer in Chicago, you know, because that's who we were competing for, for all of our corporate talent at MasterClass. It's not just like people who were in the learning space.
It's anyone that is in a premium consumer, you know, tech brand. It is. Anyone that is hiring engineers in San Francisco and Waterloo and Kitchener and in Canada. So I think it has to be both.
[00:24:29] Dave Travers: Mel Steinbach, it is abundantly clear why you are a Talent All-Star. Thanks so much for taking the time of this today.
[00:24:36] Melanie Steinbach: I had so much fun. I'd love to do it again.
[00:24:43] Dave Travers: That's Melanie Steinbach. She's the Chief People Officer at MasterClass. We'll put her LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. And if you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at talentallstarsatziprecruiter.com. I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. We'll see you right back here for the next one.