Why Your LinkedIn Message Gets Ignored And How To Fix It

Entrepreneur

an hour ago

Entrepreneur

Grey Matters

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur United Kingdom, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. Imagine this: your 20-year-old niece is starting an internship as part of her sandwich degree course - just as your 51-year-old sister starts her own internship at a local law firm. Absurd? Or the future of recruitment, where midlifers' experience can be employed while meeting the growing demand for flexible, skilled talent. View any social media platform these days and you'll find a wealth of commentary on the perils of job-seeking in midlife. From senior executives being "let go" in favour of more junior (read: cheaper) staff to their roles being outsourced to low-cost countries, many midlifers are finding that the "older and wiser" label is not necessarily garnering the opportunities that it may have done in the past. Even the World Health Organization has admitted ageism is a global challenge with its report declaring that every second person in the world is believed to hold ageist attitudes. Isn't it ironic that experience can be considered irrelevant when you have so much of it later in life and yet its absence is a barrier to the newly educated struggling to get started? Just because your hair may begin to turn grey as the pigment melanin fades, it doesn't follow that the rest of you is disintegrating. Tell that to the respondents for my quick LinkedIn poll where 46% of midlifers described their job search journey as "hard work; so far unrewarding" with a further 31% saying "the worst my career has seen". It begs the question whether midlife job-seeking is less about serendipity or planning and more a matter of perspective. Relying on your grey matter Although many aspects of the brain remain a mystery, we're reliably informed that we can all benefit from neuroplasticity - an ability to rewire our brains to reorganise our thoughts and behaviours. Using smartphones, computers and the internet can also make a difference to our cognitive abilities. A meta-analysis of nearly 60 studies involving 410,000 people in people aged over 50 has found that those who spend more time using smartphones, computers and the internet are less likely to have cognitive impairment—and more likely to have slower cognitive decline—than people who spend less time using these technologies. It's a reminder of the importance of mindset in the process of being ready and resilient for work in midlife. As author of two employability courses known as 2B Ready, I see first-hand how midlifers are struggling with confidence and grit which is hindering their ability to ride the waves of difficulties and obstacles that can hamper job-seeking efforts. Redundancy and rejection are hard task masters. Yet, storytelling and narrative practice techniques can help to reinvent any career history. Midlifers have long ago embraced reliability, stickability and empathy - and in a world of artificial intelligence (AI) we all need to exploit these human capabilities. By bringing their unique qualities of ideation, innovation and intuition to the workplace, midlifers can excel and businesses can gain. A report from CapGemini found that 74% of executives believe emotional intelligence is set to be a "must have" skill in the next five years with returns on their investment in building emotional intelligence in their workforces potentially offering incremental gains of US$6.8 million. What if midlife candidates could take advantage of "silver internships" to share these hard-won qualities and improve their own health? Employers could offer temporary periods of employment for three-, six- or 12-months, to bring much-needed skills and experience at a suitable cost. Whether undertaking a one-off project or serving a broad number of departments, experienced midlifers can make an effective contribution - without a hint of age bias - that rewards companies while keeping everyone's options open. Realising the rewards of silver interns While the idea of silver internships may not be a reality, there are rich rewards, to individuals, to business and to the economy from embracing midlife skills: Benefits to individuals: Midlife candidates have so much valuable experience to bring to other generations. In research undertaken by the hotel and resort chain Hilton, 60% of over 50s said they can learn from working with those younger than themselves. And it works both ways: more than three quarters (77%) of Gen-Z respondents said they can learn from older colleagues, with leadership (44%) and problem solving (40%), communication (39%) and organisational skills (39%) being areas most cited where over 50s excel. Benefits to business: Although President Trump's recent closure of US diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes may be a blow for workforce diversity globally, DEI can lead to greater creativity, innovation and profitability. According to Forbes, firms that display culturally and ethnically diverse executive teams are 33% more likely to lead their industries in profitability. When people feel welcomed for who they are, they perform at a higher level which, in turn, enables the business to attract the best people. Benefits to the economy: By continuing to engage in the world of work, silver interns contribute to society in more ways than one. A survey from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that found that people in their 70s in 2022 had the same cognitive and physical function as people in their 50s in 2000 and their physical health was the same as 56-year-olds 25 years ago based on grip strength and lung functionality tests. Since they are sharper and stronger than they were a quarter of a century ago, midlife jobseekers could work far longer - and with an ageing global population that is projected to increase by 11 years between 2020 and the end of the century, the spending power of midlifers has positive implications for the wider economy. Instead of worrying about the grey hairs, let's put that grey matter to good use and not only refresh recruitment models, but also reinvent midlife careers with storytelling.

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's blunt truths about Klarna's AI-first future

Yahoo

2 hours ago

Yahoo

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's blunt truths about Klarna's AI-first future

'Sorry if I'm being blunt,' says Sebastian Siemiatkowski as he explains why he delegated Klarna's last financial results announcement to an AI-generated version of himself. But 'I have yet to meet a CEO that's excited about the quarterly earnings reports and calls with investors.' The Swedish payments company's co-founder and CEO doesn't fear his avatar replacing him any time soon, but says even executives may yet find themselves in the robots' path, as 'it is definitely easier to replace the CEO than it is to replace a nurse.' Bluntness comes easily to Siemiatkowski, particularly when he's explaining how artificial intelligence threatens employment in his own business and beyond. Siemiatkowski is a pioneer of the $560 billion 'buy-now-pay-later' industry. He now stands on the cusp of a New York listing that could value his creation at a reported $15 billion and validate his 20 years of proselytizing for its business model. He has also become a standard-bearer for the notion of 'AI-first' companies, after saying last year that the technology could replace 700 customer service agents. Klarna reduced staffing by 39% over two years to cut losses Siemiatkowski blames in part on his own overhiring. It is still shrinking by 10 to 15 people a week through natural attrition, he says, adding that he uses LinkedIn to track his fellow CEOs' headcount as a 'bullsh*t detector' of how serious they are about automating work. AI's disruptions to workforces could cause a recession, Siemiatkowski posited this week, but he thinks companies are not leveling with employees about that prospect. Some Silicon Valley CEOs reassure audiences that new jobs will replace the ones being lost, he says: 'And then I talk to them in private rooms and it's like, 'Oh my God, the jobs are gone'... I feel that is dishonest.' Several 'AI-first' executives have faced pushback, with Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn having to reassure users that the language-learning app would still hire humans after a social media backlash. Siemiatkowski, too, has tempered his plans and is rehiring some flesh-and-blood customer service agents. 'Obviously, AI today can pretend to be empathetic and express emotions and stuff, but at the core, people crave human connection,' he says, predicting that offering a real person at the end of the line will become 'a VIP thing' for which customers pay a premium. Transparent, not top-down The risk of branding your company 'AI-first' is that staff hear 'employees second.' Siemiatkowski says Klarna has used savings from shrinking its payroll to increase compensation for the 3,422 employees it has retained. But he thinks managers are too often afraid to tell their people how much change they see coming. 'We think we're protecting them,' he says. 'But over time, you realize that it generally leads to bad outcomes and lack of trust. I've learned that it's better to be honest and transparent, and trust my employees to be grown-ups who can deal with complex, threatening information.' Siemiatkowski is a fan of Toyota's ethos of enlisting employees to improve processes, and Klarna has been gathering 200 staff at a time on video calls to ask where technology could eliminate inefficiencies. Managers are not imposing recommendations from on high, he says. 'The team members saw it themselves.' The process can leave dozens of employees out of a role at a time, he says, but normal churn means the company usually has other positions to fill. Klarna puts sidelined staff 'on the bench' to be able to fill jobs as people resign, he says, adding that 80% of them find a new position within days. The hands-on path to growth It's a misconception that executives can't scale up a company by being hands-on, Siemiatkowski says, pointing to in-the-details executives from Walmart's Sam Walton to Apple's Steve Jobs. 'The truth is that hands-on is the only thing that truly scales.' He has regulators and credit committees to worry about, he notes, 'but I can't let that eat the whole agenda. I need to have two or three days a week where I can go deeper in specific areas and accept that, maybe for a few months, this is where I'm going to spend more of my time.' That was the approach Siemiatkowski took early in the pandemic, when Klarna realized that it was at risk of ceding the US market to Afterpay, an Australian competitor. Unable to travel, he and his team began furiously tapping their networks — anyone from investors and employees to LinkedIn contacts — to arrange virtual meetings with US retailers. It soon concluded that 'nothing beats the CEO sales pitch.' Siemiatkowski made 1,000 sales calls to US retail executives in 2020. 'I would go to the office in the morning, do my job in Swedish [working hours], come back, eat dinner with the kids, and then log in,' he recalls. By the end of that year, Klarna had deals with roughly half of the country's 100 largest chains. It took until this year for him to secure an exclusive deal with Walmart, after giving it warrants over Klarna shares. The world's largest retailer is a great negotiator, he says, so 'any deal you make with them is going to be a tough deal.' A disrupter meets its skeptics From the start, Siemiatkowski was driven by an urge to disrupt the finance industry's incumbents. 'I dreamt, since I was a kid, about going after the banks,' he says. The debt collectors' letters he recalls his parents receiving fueled his 'crazy obsession,' he says. Regardless of personal grudges, he also saw that 'banks digitally sucked' 20 years ago, creating lucrative opportunities for new entrants. 'We weren't like, 'Oh, we're going to start this corporate social responsibility bank,'' he says: 'It was: 'We're going to make a lot of profit.'' Two decades later, Klarna has just reported a fourth consecutive quarter of profitability, albeit on an adjusted basis. But Siemiatkowski still routinely has to reassure commentators and authorities that Klarna's 'pay in four' model is not leading consumers to spend money they don't have. He blames some of that on the lobbying and messaging power of the industry he set out to disrupt. Klarna's core product generates lower profit margins than credit cards, he notes, 'so this model is threatening a very, very large profit pool of incumbents.' Klarna has yet to find a report on its industry that it thinks is entirely unbiased, he says. Last month, the Federal Reserve reported that late payments by BNPL borrowers had increased sharply in 2024. While the Trump administration has said it will not regulate industry members like credit card lenders, Democrats and UK regulators want more oversight. When Klarna struck a partnership deal with food delivery group DoorDash in March, journalists seized on the notion of consumers paying for pizzas in installments as evidence of BNPL lenders tempting customers to overextend in a fragile economy. 'It lends itself to amazing headlines and a lot of clicks,' Siemiatkowski says, but 'it has nothing to do with reality.' Klarna's average BNPL user has outstanding debt of under $100 and can think for themself, he says. He is not arguing for no regulation, he insists, saying: 'I love capitalism — as long as democracy puts some limits to its most shameless actions.' A country cousin crosses the Atlantic Klarna is a rare European startup to crack the US, and Siemiatkowski jokes that he feels like 'the cousin from the countryside' in Silicon Valley, even with venture capitalist Michael Moritz chairing his board. 'When I go to San Francisco, I always feel like I'm — 'Hello, I'm from Sweden!'' he says in an exaggerated accent. Building a global business from Stockholm has been hard, he says. 'We grew very successfully, but in a very small market, so the success in Sweden could never support the success in Germany. And the success in Germany could never support the success in the UK. And the UK couldn't support the US.' He sees Europe's higher tax rates on the kind of people who make enough money from one startup to invest in others as holding back future Klarnas. Entrepreneurs need early-stage backers, he notes. 'Who are these angel investors? Well, they are rich people. Where do you get rich people? Well, people who don't get taxed too much.' Sweden's prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has been among those urging Europe to make its capital markets more competitive with New York. But Siemiatkowski seems unswayed. The US is Klarna's largest market, he says, and more than half of its investors are there. 'How are we Swedish?' he asks bluntly. 'Because I happen to live here?' A New York initial public offering would put Klarna head-to-head with Affirm, the payments rival led by PayPal alumnus Max Levchin. Affirm's stock has been on a wild ride this year, halving between mid-February and early April, then staging a strong enough rally to rise above January's level, in bouts of market volatility that have deterred many companies from listing. Siemiatkowski says he and Moritz decided early on that Klarna would have to be well-known — and profitable — in the US for it to list there. It met those conditions in 2023, he says: 'Now it's just a question of when you feel the market conditions are right.' Klarna has already weathered extreme swings in the private markets, with its valuation spiking as high as $46.5 billion before coming down to earth to $6.7 billion after a funding round. 'I've been very gifted to get a very rocky ride,' Siemiatkowski says, reasoning that he has learned from failure and is now enjoying applying those lessons. On one particularly frustrating day, he remembers jumping in his car, cranking up the volume to , by Queen and David Bowie, and realizing that he had chosen this challenge. 'If you're Zlatan [Ibrahimović], the biggest Swedish soccer player, you want to play in the Champions League finals,' he remarks. You may not win the finals, but you have to appreciate the experience regardless of the pressure, he says. 'I mean, this is what I signed up for, right?'

Yahoo

2 hours ago

Yahoo

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's blunt truths about Klarna's AI-first future

'Sorry if I'm being blunt,' says Sebastian Siemiatkowski as he explains why he delegated Klarna's last financial results announcement to an AI-generated version of himself. But 'I have yet to meet a CEO that's excited about the quarterly earnings reports and calls with investors.' The Swedish payments company's co-founder and CEO doesn't fear his avatar replacing him any time soon, but says even executives may yet find themselves in the robots' path, as 'it is definitely easier to replace the CEO than it is to replace a nurse.' Bluntness comes easily to Siemiatkowski, particularly when he's explaining how artificial intelligence threatens employment in his own business and beyond. Siemiatkowski is a pioneer of the $560 billion 'buy-now-pay-later' industry. He now stands on the cusp of a New York listing that could value his creation at a reported $15 billion and validate his 20 years of proselytizing for its business model. He has also become a standard-bearer for the notion of 'AI-first' companies, after saying last year that the technology could replace 700 customer service agents. Klarna reduced staffing by 39% over two years to cut losses Siemiatkowski blames in part on his own overhiring. It is still shrinking by 10 to 15 people a week through natural attrition, he says, adding that he uses LinkedIn to track his fellow CEOs' headcount as a 'bullsh*t detector' of how serious they are about automating work. AI's disruptions to workforces could cause a recession, Siemiatkowski posited this week, but he thinks companies are not leveling with employees about that prospect. Some Silicon Valley CEOs reassure audiences that new jobs will replace the ones being lost, he says: 'And then I talk to them in private rooms and it's like, 'Oh my God, the jobs are gone'... I feel that is dishonest.' Several 'AI-first' executives have faced pushback, with Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn having to reassure users that the language-learning app would still hire humans after a social media backlash. Siemiatkowski, too, has tempered his plans and is rehiring some flesh-and-blood customer service agents. 'Obviously, AI today can pretend to be empathetic and express emotions and stuff, but at the core, people crave human connection,' he says, predicting that offering a real person at the end of the line will become 'a VIP thing' for which customers pay a premium. Transparent, not top-down The risk of branding your company 'AI-first' is that staff hear 'employees second.' Siemiatkowski says Klarna has used savings from shrinking its payroll to increase compensation for the 3,422 employees it has retained. But he thinks managers are too often afraid to tell their people how much change they see coming. 'We think we're protecting them,' he says. 'But over time, you realize that it generally leads to bad outcomes and lack of trust. I've learned that it's better to be honest and transparent, and trust my employees to be grown-ups who can deal with complex, threatening information.' Siemiatkowski is a fan of Toyota's ethos of enlisting employees to improve processes, and Klarna has been gathering 200 staff at a time on video calls to ask where technology could eliminate inefficiencies. Managers are not imposing recommendations from on high, he says. 'The team members saw it themselves.' The process can leave dozens of employees out of a role at a time, he says, but normal churn means the company usually has other positions to fill. Klarna puts sidelined staff 'on the bench' to be able to fill jobs as people resign, he says, adding that 80% of them find a new position within days. The hands-on path to growth It's a misconception that executives can't scale up a company by being hands-on, Siemiatkowski says, pointing to in-the-details executives from Walmart's Sam Walton to Apple's Steve Jobs. 'The truth is that hands-on is the only thing that truly scales.' He has regulators and credit committees to worry about, he notes, 'but I can't let that eat the whole agenda. I need to have two or three days a week where I can go deeper in specific areas and accept that, maybe for a few months, this is where I'm going to spend more of my time.' That was the approach Siemiatkowski took early in the pandemic, when Klarna realized that it was at risk of ceding the US market to Afterpay, an Australian competitor. Unable to travel, he and his team began furiously tapping their networks — anyone from investors and employees to LinkedIn contacts — to arrange virtual meetings with US retailers. It soon concluded that 'nothing beats the CEO sales pitch.' Siemiatkowski made 1,000 sales calls to US retail executives in 2020. 'I would go to the office in the morning, do my job in Swedish [working hours], come back, eat dinner with the kids, and then log in,' he recalls. By the end of that year, Klarna had deals with roughly half of the country's 100 largest chains. It took until this year for him to secure an exclusive deal with Walmart, after giving it warrants over Klarna shares. The world's largest retailer is a great negotiator, he says, so 'any deal you make with them is going to be a tough deal.' A disrupter meets its skeptics From the start, Siemiatkowski was driven by an urge to disrupt the finance industry's incumbents. 'I dreamt, since I was a kid, about going after the banks,' he says. The debt collectors' letters he recalls his parents receiving fueled his 'crazy obsession,' he says. Regardless of personal grudges, he also saw that 'banks digitally sucked' 20 years ago, creating lucrative opportunities for new entrants. 'We weren't like, 'Oh, we're going to start this corporate social responsibility bank,'' he says: 'It was: 'We're going to make a lot of profit.'' Two decades later, Klarna has just reported a fourth consecutive quarter of profitability, albeit on an adjusted basis. But Siemiatkowski still routinely has to reassure commentators and authorities that Klarna's 'pay in four' model is not leading consumers to spend money they don't have. He blames some of that on the lobbying and messaging power of the industry he set out to disrupt. Klarna's core product generates lower profit margins than credit cards, he notes, 'so this model is threatening a very, very large profit pool of incumbents.' Klarna has yet to find a report on its industry that it thinks is entirely unbiased, he says. Last month, the Federal Reserve reported that late payments by BNPL borrowers had increased sharply in 2024. While the Trump administration has said it will not regulate industry members like credit card lenders, Democrats and UK regulators want more oversight. When Klarna struck a partnership deal with food delivery group DoorDash in March, journalists seized on the notion of consumers paying for pizzas in installments as evidence of BNPL lenders tempting customers to overextend in a fragile economy. 'It lends itself to amazing headlines and a lot of clicks,' Siemiatkowski says, but 'it has nothing to do with reality.' Klarna's average BNPL user has outstanding debt of under $100 and can think for themself, he says. He is not arguing for no regulation, he insists, saying: 'I love capitalism — as long as democracy puts some limits to its most shameless actions.' A country cousin crosses the Atlantic Klarna is a rare European startup to crack the US, and Siemiatkowski jokes that he feels like 'the cousin from the countryside' in Silicon Valley, even with venture capitalist Michael Moritz chairing his board. 'When I go to San Francisco, I always feel like I'm — 'Hello, I'm from Sweden!'' he says in an exaggerated accent. Building a global business from Stockholm has been hard, he says. 'We grew very successfully, but in a very small market, so the success in Sweden could never support the success in Germany. And the success in Germany could never support the success in the UK. And the UK couldn't support the US.' He sees Europe's higher tax rates on the kind of people who make enough money from one startup to invest in others as holding back future Klarnas. Entrepreneurs need early-stage backers, he notes. 'Who are these angel investors? Well, they are rich people. Where do you get rich people? Well, people who don't get taxed too much.' Sweden's prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has been among those urging Europe to make its capital markets more competitive with New York. But Siemiatkowski seems unswayed. The US is Klarna's largest market, he says, and more than half of its investors are there. 'How are we Swedish?' he asks bluntly. 'Because I happen to live here?' A New York initial public offering would put Klarna head-to-head with Affirm, the payments rival led by PayPal alumnus Max Levchin. Affirm's stock has been on a wild ride this year, halving between mid-February and early April, then staging a strong enough rally to rise above January's level, in bouts of market volatility that have deterred many companies from listing. Siemiatkowski says he and Moritz decided early on that Klarna would have to be well-known — and profitable — in the US for it to list there. It met those conditions in 2023, he says: 'Now it's just a question of when you feel the market conditions are right.' Klarna has already weathered extreme swings in the private markets, with its valuation spiking as high as $46.5 billion before coming down to earth to $6.7 billion after a funding round. 'I've been very gifted to get a very rocky ride,' Siemiatkowski says, reasoning that he has learned from failure and is now enjoying applying those lessons. On one particularly frustrating day, he remembers jumping in his car, cranking up the volume to , by Queen and David Bowie, and realizing that he had chosen this challenge. 'If you're Zlatan [Ibrahimović], the biggest Swedish soccer player, you want to play in the Champions League finals,' he remarks. You may not win the finals, but you have to appreciate the experience regardless of the pressure, he says. 'I mean, this is what I signed up for, right?' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

Why Your LinkedIn Message Gets Ignored And How To Fix It

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CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's blunt truths about Klarna's AI-first future

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's blunt truths about Klarna's AI-first future

Why Your LinkedIn Message Gets Ignored And How To Fix It

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Grey Matters

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's blunt truths about Klarna's AI-first future

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's blunt truths about Klarna's AI-first future

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