LinkedIn's Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth on the impact of creators & AI

Hi, and welcome back to WP Studio here at CAN. I'm Sarah Gu, president of Washington Post Creator. And today I'm thrilled to be joined with Dan Roth. He's editor-in-chief and vice president of content at LinkedIn. Welcome, Dan. Hey, Sarah. Thanks for having me. Okay, so let's get started. Dan, LinkedIn just made a big announcement ahead of CAN about a new creator marketplace where you're going to be connecting more directly brands with creators on the platform. And I want to hear a little bit more about this and why you decided to do it. Yeah, sure. So we actually had three big announcements this week, all of which tie into an overall effort that we're doing with creators. So we've seen the number of creators on LinkedIn double between 2021 and 2025. There has been this kind of change in how professionals talk on LinkedIn and where they go to get their information. Increasingly, people are kind of building these creator businesses in the world and on LinkedIn. And we're seeing professionals turn to them for insights about almost every niche. Unlike previous generations of creators, you know, before we had influencers and then kind of had this like the proto creators who were just sort of in it for themselves. These creators now are building small businesses. They are mostly solopreneurs but then growing to kind of larger companies. And they need to be, they need to monetize what they're doing. That is what they, they are not just counting on sponsor deals. In fact, it's often even better if they can just line up someone to put an ad within their content and they get to focus on their content and someone else focuses on the ads. The creator marketplace does exactly that. So number one, from the creator front, it enables creators to be able to make a living focusing on their niche, especially on LinkedIn, their kind of niche B2B areas. On the other side of it, the advertisers increasingly want to be with creator content. So advertisers, and you hear this beyond just LinkedIn, and I'm sure you've talked to a million people that can this week who have said the same thing, which is that they, brands want to put their content with a creator because it's more trusted by consumers and by other businesses. This is someone who they feel like is authentic and has skin in the game. And if you look at the latest Edelman Trust Report, the trust in sort of creators' voices is higher than almost every other institution. And so these brands want to be around creators. It is difficult for, I think it's probably pretty easy if you're running a skincare company to figure out who to go to. But if you're running a B2B company, if it's a SaaS company, if you're in the software business or logistics business, finding the right creator often who has the audience that you want to reach as a brand is tough. So, and we've heard that from brands, we've heard from creators that they want to be attached to those brands. And so the idea of having a marketplace is what makes sense. So it sounds like LinkedIn is clearly trying to go into this B2B creator space and own it. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, we're already in it. And yes, we want to, we definitely want to be a major player here because the demand is both on the creator side, on the content side and on the advertiser side. And the way that we often do stuff is just by listening to feedback. And the feedback was, we need more creators and the creators were, we need more businesses. And it just made sense to build this. It does make sense. And so what does this mean in terms of the kind of content that we're going to see and that you'd like to see more of on the platform? Does it mean that you're going to lean more into video from these types of creators, from newsletters? I know that's the kind of stuff that you've emphasized in the past. Yeah. I mean, it really just starts with the content. First, the topics. So you want to make sure that you have the topics that members want more of and that advertisers, actually really you want the content that members want more of. And the advertisers that will be part of that. Video is an incredibly important content type in the world. And on LinkedIn, it is our fastest growing content type. For if you, we have advertising programs called BrandLink and InStream. These are ways for creators to directly monetize their video content. Those only exist for video, but we are not at all. We are not saying that video is the only way to be able to talk about what's going on in the world. It is one super important medium, especially for younger generations. But text, newsletters, absolutely. Images, infographics. I mean, when people come to LinkedIn, they are coming with a sort of investment mindset that they're investing in their careers, they're investing in their companies, and they want to make sure that the time they're spending here is a high, is a good use of that time versus just kind of a, you know, scroll they're doing while they're waiting to check out at the grocery store. And so when they're doing that, they want the right information at the right time that's really useful for them. And that could be in any kind of format. So we do not have any, you know, overall. When we're talking to creators, we don't say like, oh, we do video, or lean in on this, lean on that. It's whatever is the best way to be able to get your message out is what you should be using. Mm-hmm. Other social media platforms have gone, have worked with creators in terms of a rev share. Yeah. And so why did LinkedIn decide to do a marketplace instead? We have rev share programs also. So the marketplace really solves that brand need to be able to find these people. So we started there. And the idea is the most pressing demand that we hear. Is not, hey, how do I do rev share better? It is, how do I find these creators? You know, for these brands, especially small companies, medium-sized companies, they just don't have a way to be able to find credible voices who can reach the audience that they really want to reach. So we start with the marketplace. We'll figure out the economics after that. A lot of times the important thing is just bringing these groups together. And then from my side, I really focus on what kind of content we're getting on LinkedIn. The more the creators can build their businesses on LinkedIn where they feel like this is, and just feel like they recognize that LinkedIn is the place where they earn a living, they reach an audience, they build a community. That pays off incredibly well in getting people to just come more often throughout the day, more often every day, because the information that they need is on LinkedIn. So the flow is make sure you have the right creators who are saying the right things, who are deeply involved and deeply knowledgeable, and they care about their particular niches, their particular topics. Make sure that they get monetized, that they have an audience that they care about, and that they keep creating more and better content. And that then reaches more members to be able to come and spend more time on LinkedIn and find they're having a more valuable experience here. How does this all change the experience on LinkedIn for those of us who used to thinking of it as a place we place our resumes, look for a job, connect with new people and network? How do you see that evolving experience? And how should we all think about where LinkedIn is going with more of this creator content on the platform? So first of all, I've been doing this for 15 years. I joined LinkedIn when LinkedIn wanted to move into content. And the question that you're asking is one that I have heard every single, anytime I talk to anyone over those 15 years, but thankfully I'm beginning to hear less now this week it can, it's my first time it can. And so many of the creators are, and the people I'm talking to here are just using it for content or that is primarily for content. And they mentioned that my profile is there. And it is a wild experience for me from having to tell people like, no, no, LinkedIn has tons of content. It's amazing content. You should be coming and checking it out to now hearing them start with that. But I would think about it as the world of work is changing fast, as you know. And we see it in our data where people have more composite careers. That is the normal way that you work now. Solopreneurship is through the roof. We've seen something like a 60% increase in the number of people who are saying they're founders on LinkedIn over the last year. This is a massive number of people who are starting their own thing, whether they want to, or whether they're forced to. You're seeing people using AI to be able to kind of change careers or get new opportunities within their companies by adding new skills and doing new projects, improving the prototypes. Everything, every single thing that I've talked about with you has content as the way that powers it. So if you are starting a small business or have a side hustle, the way that you scale that is by talking about what it is that you're doing. The way, if you want to get into a new line of work, you talk about these new skills that you develop. You post your prototype on LinkedIn. And so the content becomes a way that the working world talks. That wasn't true five, six years, probably seven or eight years ago, let's say, where you work within a company, you need to be known within your company. It's time for you to change a new job. You apply for a job somewhere else. You go and you talk to them. Everything kind of happened offline. That has changed. Everything is now happening online and your voice is what opens doors for you. So that is what has changed the content experience of LinkedIn. It isn't like that we've built great stuff. I'm super proud of what we've built. But what's really happened is that the world has changed. And so you see these professionals, small businesses, large businesses needing to be able to use content to be able to open new doors for them. And LinkedIn is the place to do that because we're authentic. You have, it's real people. There's not bots here. You can talk about these kind of nerdy, deep areas. You can go really deep on things. It's not an entertainment platform. It is a place to like, have these kind of meaningful conversations or they don't have to be meaningful, but like to have conversations about what's going on in the world today with other verified real people who are in roles that might be able to help you or where you can help them. So I think of content as being kind of the underlying need for this new world of work. And that's how LinkedIn has changed to be able to support that. Got it. Okay. And you talked about AI. So you have an interesting window at LinkedIn to understand how AI is changing work and also how it's changing the process of getting a new job. And so I'd love your insight into that because you've offered a lot of tools on the platform to both create a content in terms of writing resumes and things like that. And we also know the job search process has been transformed by AI. So I want to understand how you, what you think in your point of view is about that. How has that job process changed from what you're seeing in terms of the authenticity of it? It seems like there's a process that we're using AI to create our resumes differently. And then also we know that AI is reviewing those same resumes. And so it's like, what part of this is human anymore? And how does that change the actual outcome of how we're getting good candidates, good hires? What's your insight into what you're seeing? It's completely insane. You have, when you talk to recruiters, one of the things they say is that there are no bad resumes anymore and there are no bad cover letters. Everything is perfect. It's all perfect. It looks great. So you have, you can apply to jobs faster. You can look amazing. People get rejected faster. Yeah, they get rejected. If you ever hear anything back, it is a really brutal process. It is, if you are looking for a job, if you haven't looked for a job in like the last five years, I think you'll be shocked at what it's like right now to go through that process. It is all AI all the way up and down. And so what we're seeing is that for candidates to be able to break through the noise, there's a couple of things. One is what you're seeing is recruiters increasingly using skill-based hiring to be able to do their processes. Something like 50% of recruiters now said they start their search by searching for skills. And in the old days, where did you work? What was your title? Where'd you go to school? None of that matters anymore. None of that matters, right? Now it is, what can you do? And which is, that's kind of a good thing. This sort of democratizes it. You can be like, oh, it doesn't matter where I went or what my title was or if it was a small company or a large company, this is what I'm able to do. And so employers are looking for that skill, that kind of skill base to understand that people have these skills. But that's just the start because you can, just listing skills doesn't mean anything. So they wanna be able to see proof that you've done that. And this is where it goes back to content. We're seeing more and more people do things like posting prototypes on LinkedIn where they say this is, or I mean, and you're a journalist, so you are used to having a set of clips that tell your story better than you can. And it's very easy to hire journalists. You just look through their clips and you're like, oh, this is what people have done. And a lot of industries and most industries that doesn't exist, there is no public record that shows exactly your work. So now people are showing their work through their content. Hey, I built this. Here is a new, here's something I vibe coded or here's a project I worked on. They're listing their projects on their profile. They are talking about their posting. We just, I was a can and here is our incredible campaign. This was my role in it. And here's what I'm really proud that we did. So the sort of like showing your results has become essential. And then when they get in the interview process, you kind of have to talk about AI. Like the employers, we hear this from employers all the time. They don't need AI experts. They wanna show that you are agile enough to be able to say that I am using AI at work because they need people who are gonna be with them through the massive changes that these companies are going, not just be with them, who are gonna lead the changes that these companies are all going through. So it's a pretty different world. Yeah, massively. And then I'm sure you get this question a lot, but I still wanna ask it. What are you seeing in terms of what's changed with the kinds of jobs? I said, this is someone whose kid is going into college. Like we know that we've heard a lot in the headlines about the jobs that are available today, but what changes do you see going forward? And what do you expect that we'll see in the next several years? Yeah, I mean, there's a number of new jobs that are, there are a number of new jobs that have come up because of AI. So prompt engineering was not something that existed a few years ago. It's a ton of data center jobs that we're seeing really grow, although that's not happening as fast as it was. There are technical jobs around AI, and then there are jobs around implementing AI. So we've seen a massive growth in the kind of jobs that are responsible for bringing AI improvements inside companies. So that's kind of the AI focused part of it. But the other, the bigger change that we're seeing is not a destruction of jobs or a creation of new AI jobs. Well, even though all those are both happening now, and probably the other one I should have mentioned is forward deployed engineer, which is a massive new job category. This is where you like put engineers at someone's company to be able to help them do these kinds of AI implementations. But the huge change in how jobs are done and what's required to be able to do them. So when we look at what skills are in demand by employers, the things that are rising to the top are very human skills that are required to be able to work in a fast changing environment where companies are competing with other companies have never competed with before, or getting into businesses they've never been in before. We were talking about this before we started, the Washington Post, very similar to this. This is happening everywhere where you're like, oh, I've got to change how I do it, but interact with different industries and competing in a different way. And so we can see the skills that are in demand are things like conflict resolution has become a massive skill in demand because you've got not enough resources and a lot of different things going on and you have to be able to deal with that inside of the company. There are people who are storytellers. We're seeing, I think it's like 100% increase in job listings that are asking for storytellers in the last year. A lot of just human skills around communication and then they're looking for agility and people who can kind of either bring change or be okay with change. So what I would tell, you said it was a son, your daughter? My son, yes. I would say like really focus, unless he's like getting into a technical area, the thing that you want to do is show that you're a good learner, that you are able to change quickly and that you work well with other people. These are like not bad. Human skills, right? These are human skills, yeah. So these human skills are becoming more important in the AI era. Wow, who would have known? Okay, good. I guess that's reassuring, isn't it? Yeah, totally. Okay. Solar role for us. Well, getting back to storytelling on LinkedIn, I think that we've all heard about how leaders of companies need to change how they're communicating on this platform as well as brands. So we've also seen some examples where this doesn't go very well, right? When executives try this to seem more authentic, to come across and tell your story. So what's your advice for, let's say the leaders of companies who have to also do many things in terms of representing their brand and also recruiting the right people to their company, telling their story of who they are as well as who their company is. What's your advice of how to do this well? Yeah. First of all, you have to be authentic to you. So you're going to get, I think if you're a leader, you're going to get people in your company saying, we need you to do this or that or stand in front of the camera and do this. So you got to know who you are first. I would then say, take lots of swings. Try things, be willing to put yourself out there in kind of uncomfortable areas and just see how you do. So my favorite example of this is John Gray of Blackstone. John Gray posts, I don't know if you've seen this, he posts these running videos. He goes, he travels around the world constantly. He was recording whenever he would travel, he would record a video while jogging, on his phone, he's falling out of frame. And he would just say, I'm in Sydney, I'm doing this beautiful run. And he would send those videos to his kids. And his head of comms, I think, saw this and said, John, you should start posting this on LinkedIn. And John was like, why would, he's fine. This doesn't make any sense. It's about running. He's a big master of the universe finance guy. And he was like, what the heck, I'll do it. And he posted it on LinkedIn and it blew up. And then he started doing these more and more. And it blew up in a couple, with a couple of different kind of constituencies. His employees love it. It is a connection to John as a real human leader. His customers love it. He was saying that he, when he goes to any meeting now, they open with the running video. I just saw you running here. They asked to go run with him. They want to shoot content with him. So he's, we talked about like being a creator. He's become a creator in this world. And it changes the experience you have with him and with this company. So not everyone's going to be able to do this, but find what it is for you. And what I, when I talk to executives, a lot of times what they want is they're like, all right, I understand video is important. I've got to start doing this. I've got to be out there talking. I'm going to build a studio. I'm always like, don't, you don't just, just get your camera, prop it up on your, on your desk and just start talking to him. Like the CEO of McDonald's, one of my favorite examples is he was just doing, he would talk to his interns. And then after he was done, he would just take his phone, put it up there and say, hey, just talk to the interns at McDonald's. Here's what I told him. And again, bad angle, you know, but super authentic. People are like desperate to cut through the noise and they want to hear from these executives. So I would just say, do it. It doesn't have to be video. Daniel X, another great one at Spotify. And there's a million examples of this. And these people have outsized impacts because they are willing to put their voice out there. So you just got to do it. The key is to be imperfect. Yeah, it is definitely the key. I mean, you don't want to end up in one of these videos that looks like you're reading. You don't want to look like you're reading from a teleprompter. One of the things that I oversee is LinkedIn Learning, which is this massive enterprise learning platform. And we recently took all the teleprompters out of our studios because for our instructors, it's the same thing. People don't want to see them staring and reading a script. They want to hear them flubbing and they want to hear the, you know, it's the imperfect. You can get perfection by going to ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot or wherever, but you can only get humans from other humans. And so those mistakes and that is like what people are craving. So I would just say this is true for leaders, but it's true for everyone. Like don't be afraid to just hit the microphone like I did. Very, very authentic moment, Dan. All right, well, let's end where we started with creators. You launched some really ambitious moves around trying to encourage more of this content on your platform. How do you know that you're going to be successful? What kind of goals do you have set for yourself and KPIs and, you know, where are you headed next? How are we going to know that you've achieved what you wanted to like in a year from now? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we want more and higher quality all the time. And when I talk about quality, I think about quality as being something that starts a great conversation. So I think when people hear the word quality, they're also like, oh, this is LinkedIn. I need to write really long posts that answer every single question. No, like a meme can be high quality if it starts the right conversation. And so we want more creators in more topics, diving deeper into a lot of different areas. We look at the KPIs, like how many creators do we have? How many creators do we have in particular topics? What kind of conversations are they starting? Are people coming back to interact with them more often? So you just want to know that your content is starting a flywheel. One of the things that I've been most excited about in the last few months is we really leaned in on sports content. This is an area that LinkedIn has historically not touched. We've had some creators, some sports creators have come in. In fact, you can almost always tell when an athlete's about to retire because they'll start posting on LinkedIn. That was always our sign that they were, that their career was just about done. Ready to start their business. I got to figure out what I'm going to do next. But that has now changed and we're getting the number one draft pick for the NBA. Jess started posting on LinkedIn a few months ago. He's had amazing videos and he must have this whole incredible content on there. At Cannes, I've been talking to all these athletes. We're seeing a 50%. We see 50% more engagement on the sports content than we do on other content on LinkedIn. And that moving from topic to topic and making sure that we have this breadth of inventory of content that talks to the, still talks to the professional world, but is coming from a lot of different areas rather than what is LinkedIn's, what has historically been LinkedIn's sweet spot. Leadership, management, tech, marketing, consulting. Like that is, those are like, that's the, we have pure product market fit to use the technology wording in those areas. What we're seeing is that there's demand in these other topics. So growth in creators, growth in breadth of creators, growth and engagement on this kind of content. And then personally, I just want to see more people leaning into this idea of posting. So I spent most of my life at like, when I talk to anyone, I'm at the park, I'm at kids' parties, I'm at dinners. They tell me stuff and I'm like, you should post that on LinkedIn. Also, I should just have a card that just says, you should post this on LinkedIn. Everyone, it's all great content and I'm just desperate for people to get it out to the world. Well, great. Well, I can't wait to be here at Cannes next year to check in and see how all these things perform and I'm sure you'll achieve that. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me.