On this episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, host Diane Brady talks to Indeed CEO Chris Hyams. The interview was conducted live in front of an audience at Deloitte’s Next Generation CEO Program. During the discussion, the conversation covered Hyams’ nontraditional route to the C-suite, which included jobs at an adolescent psychiatric hospital and a two-year stint as a full-time (aspiring) rock star. The hospital job, he says, taught him lessons in empathy that he has carried forward throughout his career. Hyams also talks about the surprising impact AI is already having on the job market and the reason his 27-year-old daughter is top of mind when planning the future of Indeed.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Diane Brady: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte who, like me, are exploring the changing roles of business leadership and how CEOs are navigating this change.
Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I’m Diane Brady.
Chris Hyams started his career as a teacher, a drug addiction counselor, and a wannabe rock star. Today, he’s CEO of Indeed.com, one of the world’s largest job sites. He tells us how he got that job, but also what he’s discovered from the treasure trove of data that Indeed has collected it that tells us so much about how we work, what gets people hired, and how the world of employment is being shaped by forces like demographics and AI. Take a listen.
[Interview begins.]
Hello, everybody. For those of us who are on our podcast, that we are down here in Texas at Deloitte University, and I always love doing it before a live audience. We are with Chris Hyams of Indeed. And we are with the Deloitte Next Gen CEO program. So we are sitting with the leaders of today and tomorrow. Chris, good to see you.
Chris Hyams: Good to see you. Thanks for having me.
Brady: And those who can’t see, of course, you know, this is a between-the-flowers moment with you and I. So I feel like the first question I should ask anybody who is in charge of one of the world’s premiere job sites, you’ve got all kinds of data, what was your first job?
Hyams: Well, my first job ever was I grew up spending a lot of time hanging out in my grandfather and my dad’s offices. For some reason, I just thought that work was, I don’t know, it just seemed so exciting to have this place. And so the first job that I ever went to regularly was working for my dad in his office, which was getting coffee for…
Brady: Did he pay you?
Hyams: He did not pay me. It was getting coffee for people and making the Xerox copies and collating Xerox copies. That was that was my first job. My first job out of college — I did a bunch of stuff during high school —my first job out of college, though, was working at an adolescent psychiatric hospital on a chemical dependency unit, working with young addicts and alcoholics. And that set me off on a on an interesting path of doing a variety of different things.
Brady: And I think, okay, so that’s that’s one of the more unusual ways to start working, working with adolescents with addiction problems. How do you pivot from that into both being an entrepreneur and then of course, your career at Indeed.
Hyams: I think pivot suggests like a quick turn. So a pivot is the wrong word for me. I ended up basically pursuing a number of things in succession that at the time just seemed like the next right thing. The most interesting and fascinating thing, I started doing this work I wanted to do work with adolescents. I had this job. I spent six months working in this program, and it was extraordinarily challenging, unbelievably rewarding, eye opening, I worked with a bunch of really incredible people, and it really helped, I think, to develop a lot of compassion for others and their challenges. Part of what was going on, though, in a lot of maybe some of the threads of where I ended up jumping from place to place was that I had met my now wife, then girlfriend, and I ended up following her around a little bit and so I ended up having to find another job.
So I moved from Los Angeles, where I’d grown up and was working in this hospital. My wife and I had met in college. She moved. She’s from New York, I’m from L.A., so she moved to a small town in Vermont. Woodstock, Vermont, 3,000 people. And after six months of being apart, I just packed up the car and drove to Woodstock. Wanted to find work in the same field, could not at the time and so I started substitute teaching on the side, waiting for something to happen. And then I ended up getting hired full time in Woodstock as a high school special education teacher. And again, just sort of threw myself into it and was completely bowled over by, again, the people that I worked with and the opportunity to really connect to at deep level with these kids. I got hired by another program and taught another year the next year at another high school, Hartford High, in White River Junction, Vermont. And then Lizzy, my still-then girlfriend, soon-to-be wife, went to graduate school in Los Angeles. And so moved back to L.A. and at that point I decided to try to pursue another passion of mine. I’ve been a musician my whole life and basically played music full-time professionally for two years, tried to become a rock star, did not become a rock star.
Brady: We should mention you have the shoes of a rock star for those who can’t see you.
Hyams: And my standard line is I would do it all over again. I mean, it was, I left nothing on the table there. And then what happened, so again, there’s no direct connection between those other than I was following Lizzy around, which turned out to be, oh, we’ve been married 32 years now. Those were good decisions at the time for my life. She got a job at Rice University in Houston, Texas, as an academic librarian. And so that brought us to Texas. We moved to Houston in 1993. I could take undergraduate classes as the spouse of a staff member, and this was 1993 and a little bit out of left field, I thought, you know, this computer science thing could be interesting. So this was before anything that looks like the tech industry that we have today.
Brady: It’s even pre-Netscape, isn’t it?
Hyams: Oh, yeah, it’s very pre-Netscape. It’s pre-Mosaic, which was the first web browser, but that’ll happen. So part of my story is also very much right-place, right-time. So I decided to study. I took five classes my first semester, about three weeks in and realized this is what I was going to do for the rest of my life. But at the time I had no interest in business and there wasn’t really a software industry, so I thought I’ll get a Ph.D. and I’ll teach, I’ll teach this. And somewhere along the way, basically in the three years that I was there, Mosaic came out, the first version of the Java programming language, the Linux operating system, and Amazon.com all launched in that three years. I ended up with a master’s in Computer Science and Austin Startup had hired a bunch of young people from the graduate program that I was in, and I figured, okay, I’ll go there for a couple of years and then go back and get my Ph. D. and never came back.
Brady: Never came back. Well it’s interesting because serendipity is such an importantSource link
