On this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, we sit down with Donald Knight, the People & Culture guru from Warner Bros. Discovery—because apparently, Hollywood still needs humans. We dive into:
🎭 Why AI won’t be writing the next Oscar-winning screenplay (sorry, ChatGPT).
💰 The job market’s 2022 déjà vu—big money, big moves, and even bigger headaches.
🤖 Why CHROs are dragging their feet on AI, and why that’s a terrible idea
.🎨 How recruiters should be grabbing their AI paintbrushes (no, not literally, Bob).
And of course, there’s plenty of snark, whiskey references, and moments that’ll make your HR director sweat.
Enjoy!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Podcast Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HRs most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right wherever it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
[music]
Joel: Who are you and why are you here?
Donald Knight: Who am I? First of all Chad and Cheese fan.
Chad: Yes.
Donald Knight: Donald Knight. I serve as group senior Vice President for People & Culture for the Warner Brothers discovery. And more importantly, I'm Daylen and Avery's dad. So that's a little bit about me.
Chad: Very nice, very nice.
Joel: Let's go back to this Chad and Cheese fan.
Chad: There we go.
[laughter]
Joel: I wanna hear more about that.
Donald Knight: Or more.
Chad: Question is, do you mandate that everybody listen to it? That's the big question.
Donald Knight: It's funny you say that. So, Ariana Moon hit the stage earlier today with Tim Sackett, she used to be on my team when I was at Greenhouse. And yes, I believe that anybody inside of our profession has a responsibility to do what I call inbound and outbound leadership. So the inbound is what leaders are sending to you right? So whether it's Bersin or Chad and Cheese or anything that people might be reading, CHRO daily. The outbound though, I think we have a responsibility to go figure out who are the folks that are bringing the right conversations and elevating the right subjects in our profession for us to learn from. And in my opinion, y'all are doing that, and so that's why I'm a fan. And so, yes, it's not mandated, but it's strongly encouraged voluntarily.
Chad: Other than Chad and Cheese, what nugget of advice would you give to your peers that they should really focus on in this upcoming year?
Donald Knight: The advice that I would give to my peers for the upcoming year is, I believe it's gonna be 2000... My prediction, my hypothesis is that the talent market is gonna be 2022 all over again. What I've seen this year, myself included, is this has been the year where we've seen executives making their changes, there's been a lot of scarcity on going public, companies have not been able to perform, thus the hiring has been lower. So you've seen companies start poaching executives, those executives are gonna have to build out their teams. And so I believe next year, that's when you're gonna see greater movement from the VP all the way down to the senior manager level. So it's gonna be some topsy-turvyness if you will, similar to 2002, when you could go literally across the street and get $40,000 more for the exact same job and the exact same job offer at company B.
Donald Knight: So, the things I need our teams to focus on, and this is what I just told our team in LA, I just left a lot in LA. The thing that I've been telling them they gotta focus on is really two things. The first one is go clean up all of our terrible processes, if you are not deploying automation right now, if there's a process that you feel like has been painful for your team, you gotta go fix that now because next year it's gonna affect way more people. The second thing I think that they have to figure out is what is our value proposition? Everybody's talking about employer branding. I'm like, okay, that's cool, but like your benefits are no longer part of the value proposition. Most companies have the same set of benefits, you gotta be able to dial in on culturally and from a growth and development perspective, what can you offer me at Chad and Cheese that I can't go get at anywhere else?
Chad: Did you hear.
Joel: We have no benefits that anyone wants.
Chad: He didn't leave the office, he left a lot. [laughter]
Joel: He left a lot. I wanna dig into this 2022 prediction. Money was free, tech companies were loading up on people just so other people couldn't get them. Are you envisioning that or are you envisioning more of the exec poaching, getting leads of the company or all of the above?
Donald Knight: I mean, if we're talking specifically tech, there are tons of people right now that are at companies where they're waiting for a liquidity event right?
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah...
Donald Knight: That's part one. Part two, there's tons of companies that raise money with bad evaluations. So they raised money prior to this dip. Give you a good example, I believe that Instacart, CEO, she's a phenomenal human being and she just took on CEO within the last few years. But Instacart, before they went public they thought they were a $30 billion valuation, only to find out from the market you're a $7 billion valuation. And so... They're not the only ones though, there's other companies out there where people are still checking in every day, 'cause they're waiting on a liquidation event or liquidity event, and then the other half of the tech community in many cases, they have a bad valuation. So what does that tell me? That means talent is ready to move, they're just waiting for the right reason. One good reason is, oh, my buddy Chad, who had the greatest growth and development on two, three years ago, just became the CHRO at a new company. Chad says, Hey Don, I want you to come work for me.
Chad: Yeah man, movement.
Donald Knight: That's movement. And so I think you're gonna see a lot of that. I've already seen the executives playing the musical chairs this year. Again myself included, you're gonna see those folks next year.
Joel: I'm still waiting for that Peloton stock to bounce back.
Donald Knight: Start building their team.
[laughter]
Donald Knight: Look, that's a good example though, right?
Chad: It is.
Donald Knight: Peloton founder starts a company after his 40s, has a $4 billion valuation. Right now he's worth I think 300 million, which is still again rich people problems, but that's not nearly the same $4 billion valuation as before.
Chad: Yeah, no, no.
Donald Knight: And so I think you'll also see greater consolidation in the market, particularly in our field.
Joel: Yeah, we're seeing that now, yeah, we're seeing that now.
Chad: Yeah, easily, yeah, easily. So in 2024, thus far what's been the biggest surprise for you that's happened in our space?
Donald Knight: Too many CHROs are laggards when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Chad: Yeah, explain.
Donald Knight: They're allowing their fear and anxiety to be the reason why they won't go test and figure out practical applications for the tools. And while they're doing that, their competitors who are more excited and eager to test the tools are creating such a wide divide between them that I don't know if they're ever gonna be able to catch up. Like there's companies, right... If you're still trying to figure out how to build an AI policy you're behind, you're behind.
[laughter]
Chad: In the velocity of tech right now, if you're behind you're fucked.
Joel: To AI real quick, you're presenting tomorrow on this topic...
Donald Knight: Yes.
Joel: What are you gonna be discussing?
Donald Knight: So tomorrow, I believe, we're at RecFest shout outs to Jamie and the team. So we're here at RecFest. I believe that it's incumbent on talent acquisition leaders and recruiters and sourcers to grab their own paintbrush. And to me that tool meaning AI the A and the I inside of paint, I believe that tool can allow them to figure out how can they drive their own value as an individual, even if the company is choosing to lag behind. And so the idea tomorrow is to try to figure out, okay, at the company that you're at today, and the way that you contribute to bringing amazing talent to your organization, what are you trying to paint? What are you painting on your canvas? Because if you don't use AI tools today, or your company doesn't have an AI policy or they've chosen to be a laggard and not deploy AI inside of the organization, effectively they're harming your career. And if you wanna be marketable moving forward, you need to go grab your own tool, and figure out how you deploy that for your own growth and development, regardless of what Jersey you have on.
Chad: Well, much like we've seen with most of the best sourcers that are out there, they learned boolean string, they learned how to dig into Google, they started to find. I mean, really they were curious, intellectually curious about how they could use this new tool, and they are the best in the business, and it wasn't because the company told them to go do it. So I appreciate that 100%. So looking forward 2025, what's your main focus for 2025? You already talked about ripping stuff apart and all that, but what is...
Joel: He's getting a paint brush is what he's saying.
Chad: What's the main focus for Donald?
Donald Knight: My main focus right now for 2025 is, I work for one of the greatest storytelling companies of all time.
Chad: You do, yes.
Donald Knight: At Warner Brothers Discovery. And I believe in 2025 from a people and culture perspective, there's so many new talented people that are entering the storytelling business, and I want them in a Warner Brothers discovery jersey. I want the greatest writers and the greatest producers to seek out our production houses to be able to bring their dreams to reality. And so, in order to do that though, that means I gotta go find them. When the people are saying, like, I was laughing with Brian Fink, who's a great TA professional earlier today, and we were talking about all of us remember when you sourced that one talent where you were like, they're gonna go on to do great things, I wanna go find those people. And the only way I'm gonna find that is I gotta make sure that we equip our team with not only the tools, but the time needed to invest in those tools to figure out how we can go uncover who those talented human beings are so we can build relationships with them.
Joel: So I'm curious about that. The Rider strike recently, Hollywood, AI fears. I'm curious, what I'm hearing from you is like, there's never been a better time to be a creative, but on the other hand, why do we need writers when we have ChatGPT? Why do we need artists when we have DALL-E or other tools like that? So make a case for the future of humans versus all these tools that are coming out to replace them.
Chad: Or mid journey.
Donald Knight: I don't even think that's a hard case to make. AI did not think of itself. I believe if you look at large language models today, which most people are using it from a prompt engineering, right?
Chad: Yes.
Donald Knight: So you enter a prompt and it feeds you something back. All it is doing is looking at mega parcels of data and regurgitating a new piece together, puzzle for your consideration. But the greatest creatives and the greatest stories have always came from humans. I believe the opposite which is, this is the time that you want to get closer to human creatives because the stories that we can now envision of the future, now you have tools that can help you somewhat test out better plots or better scripts, or better storylines, or how do I write a story, a romance story that appeals to both boomers who are living longer and have tons of money, but also Gen Z who is openly willing to talk about their feelings in the workplace, how do I write that movie? And I don't think I'm gonna go get that from a tool that's just regurgitating pieces of information that's already out there.
Donald Knight: So I believe if we deploy these tools the right way, the human experience should become a better experience, whether you're a recruiter, a sourcer or even a storyteller, it should become better because now you can actually submerge yourself more into the creative side of the house and a lot of like the mundane routine things. Yeah, go deploy some automation for those things.
Joel: I think you just wrote next year's Oscar award winner, baby Boomer meets Gen Z.
[laughter]
Joel: Get off my yard and tell me how you feel or something.
Donald Knight: I mean, look we're trending, we're already trending. We got Beetlejuice, which just did 145 million last week in the box office.
Joel: Not creative though, it's digging up an old movie from the '80s right?
Donald Knight: Have you gone to see it?
Chad: I have not.
Joel: Alien same thing, you could...
Donald Knight: You have to go see. It's a reimagination, it's pretty cool. And then we got some other great movies on the way, Penguin, we got the Joker, she's gonna be really good, so I'm excited. I think it's a great time to be a creative. And I believe on this planet, we have more creatives who have not been able to tap into their creative genius because they've been bogged down in careers that have not allowed them to flex that creativity. My hope is that tools like AI will encourage them to embrace their full creative selves.
Chad: Well even without AI, a great storyteller, a great creative Donald Knight. Donald, thank you so much.
Donald Knight: Thank you for having me, it was amazing.
Joel: Thanks for hanging out man.
Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there is no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. Let's save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful trainwreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.
Comments