Call it the International Women's Day episode, although it's mostly about Millennial-bashing. This week:
- Glassdoor sends out conflicting messages about a price increase
- Activision coddles its Millennial employees
... and a friggin' bunch more, yo!
Like always, go show out sponsors some love. America's Job Exchange, Sovren, Ratedly, Catch 22 Consulting and our newest sponsor, JobAdX rock the house! And special thanks to Nexxt and Jobs2Careers for sponsoring our monthly shows.
Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, rash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel: Yes, all right. We're recording this episode on International Women's Day.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: So what better way to celebrate than listening to a couple of meatheads talking about recruiting, beer and whiny-ass millennials. This week, United Airlines makes a U-turn with employees, Glassdoor is tinkering with its pricing model, and Jobu is not just one of your characters from the movie "Major League" anymore.
Chad: Jobu.
Joel: Wild Thing is coming out of the bullpen, kids. Get ready.
Announcer: Google, Lever, Entelo, Monster, Jibe. What do these companies, and hundreds of others, have in common. They all use Sovren technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovereign.com. S-O-V-R-E-N dot com for a free demo.
Chad: Free demo.
Joel: Happy International Women's Day, Chad. How are you celebrating?
Chad: I'm celebrating with a wonderful woman. Julie Sowash, yes, a very strong business woman who loves her International Woman's Day.
Joel: As do all women obviously. My wife a professor in college, far more educated than myself will be attending a smart woman's dinner tonight, and I'll be watching the kids. Three of them.
Chad: She's so smart, but yet she, you. I mean, I don't, I still don't get that.
Chad: Anyway, International Woman's Day. They deserve more than a day.
Joel: Glad you stopped there. Pretty much every day is women's day in my house.
Joel: Shout outs. Let's get to those.
Chad: Shout outs, right out of the gate, David Zaneski sent a zinger, where he said, "I was channeling my inner Xena yell during the Google Goes Latin podcast." Very nice, DZ. Very nice.
Chad: Here's the thing though. So I missed Remy. Where did Remy go? Remember we gave David and Remy shit on the same exact podcast, and David's still shooting snark at us. Come back, Remy. Come on man. The snark it's warm.
Joel: All the Recruitics kids are snarky, and then we hit back and they kind of curl up in the fetal position.
Chad: Oh, wow.
Joel: Zila that's for you.
Chad: All Recruitics kids. I can't believe you went there. So anyway. Snark is obviously, it's gonna be warm. It's gonna be very uncomfortable, but it's fun. It's good stuff.
Joel: They're all dead to me at Recruitics. They're all dead.
Chad: I still love you Recruitics.
Joel: What else we got shout outs.
Chad: I wanna thank Cory Kapner for pointing out. He actually did a screenshot of a Find.jobs fail. We talked about Find.jobs I believe it was on the last podcast, and Cory sent a screenshot. It actually showed that this new high tech Find.jobs platform couldn't even handle different location formats. I meant it's the very basics of job search. Location formats and their system couldn't even handle it. I thought it was pretty pathetic, and obviously Cory did too, so we shared it with the world. That was a big Fail.jobs moment. So thanks Cory for that, and Find.jobs whatever dot jobs. Get your shit straight.
Joel: I feel like we're enabling a whole new generation of snark, smart asses.
Chad: Why not?
Joel: What do you think?
Chad: One of the reasons why people listen to us is because they enjoy listening to no bullshit podcasts. They want to listen to, just cut through it, right? People have that need. It's a safe place. Come on. We're not getting personal here, right? We're talking about things that are actually jacked up, and to be quite frank, we're giving you really free consulting. So fix your shit, guys, and hell, I think it's healthy. It feels good and cathartic to me. How about you?
Joel: Hey the more people that are out there like us, I say the better. If we're helping enable a new generation of snarkists, then I think we're doing our job ultimately.
Chad: Here's another example. So Olivia added me on LinkedIn. I won't share her last name. She added me on LinkedIn, and then she sent me a note. Thanks for the add. I was just listening to your latest podcast, and added you after I pushed the invite button. She got into the millennial segment about adding randoms on LinkedIn, so apparently she was a random, without context or note. I couldn't help but laugh, since that's exactly what I just did to you. Keep up these kick-ass podcasts. Now that is how you save a bad situation right there. It's like, "Oh yeah, I'm just gonna be lazy and press invite," and then she was like, "Oh you know what? He just accepted. I should send back a nice note thanking him and saying he has a kick-ass podcast." Good job, Olivia. Very good job.
Joel: Yeah, and I don't even mind just the sort of cold and corporate connection on LinkedIn. It's when you ask me for something that pisses me off. Like connect me with, great, but then 30 minutes later, "Hey what do you think about," blah, blah, blah, or "What are the ten ATS' in your opinion?" Like get the fuck outta here with that shit. That pisses me off.
Joel: But anyway, I appreciate the shout out, and yes it is kind to say something when you connect with someone on LinkedIn. Someone I'm connected to on LinkedIn that I want to send a shout out, and I can't believe I haven't yet, is Abby Cheeseman at Skill Scout. Not only does she have the best name in the industry, Cheeseman, it's spelled correctly, which is often, but we are not related in any way that I know of. She's married to a Cheeseman. Now he and I may in a past life be connected someway, but apparently a lot of people go to Abby and say, "Are you related to Joel," and she has to say, "No," and I get the same question too.
Chad: She says, "Who's Joel?"
Joel: I'm gonna clear it up right here on the podcast. Yeah, exactly, Joel who?
Joel: Elena as well. This is a startup out there that's run by two women. I know they're super passionate about that, and a big shout out to them out there in Chicago where they're based.
Chad: So Skill Scout? That's the one, right?
Joel: Yep, Skill Scout. They do video, which we love videos, so yeah. Call them up and support a women's business out there.
Chad: Where are we gonna be next week, man?
Joel: Dublin. We've just been talking about it for the last six months.
Chad: So excited.
Joel: We're finally gonna be there. I'm hyped.
Chad: No I'm totally hyped, and dude I took a look at the individuals who are going to be there. Not just the ones on the agenda, but you've got Nexxt, Zip Recruiter, SmashFly, Google, Clinch, Madgex, Lensa, PandoLogics/used to be Real Match. Candidate I.D. I mean you've got an awesome mesh of U.S. TAtech and Europe TA tech. If you're not there and you're in this industry, I gotta ask: What the hell are you doing? I mean are you in the fetal position in the corner? What's going on here?
Joel: Pete and re-Pete Weddle always bring it, so shout out to them as well. They always amaze me with their conferences.
Chad: Last but not least, go to the ChadCheese.com site. There's a little banner that says, "Meet us," and much like TA tech, Joel and I are going to be at different places. Joel is going to be at ERE in San Diego in April. I'm gonna be presenting in San Francisco in early April around the same time. Then, drum roll, SHRM Talent.
Joel: SHRM.
Chad: In Vegas.
Joel: Yes SHRM somehow let us into the party, and we're probably gonna break stuff and they may never invite us back, but at least we get that one shot to have our fun at a SHRM conference people.
Chad: I hope they've upped their insurance. That's all I have to say. Yeah, so we're going to SHRM , and then right after SHRM, I mean we're gonna spend a week in Vegas, man. Then right after SHRM we're going straight to TA Tech. So if you are in Vegas for SHRM, you should also take a look at TA Tech right back to back. You're already there.
Joel: It's Vegas.
Chad: Oh man it's Vegas. Stay. Have a good time.
Joel: By the way did I hear SHRM right in our call with them that they're gonna give us access to their Facebook streaming video accounts?
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Good God, someone drug test the folks at SHRM because something's in the water out there. I don't know what's going on. Cause chaos and rock like Amadeus.
Joel: All right, you ready to get to the show?
Chad: Let's do it.
Joel: All right, United Airlines new worlds of stupid this week, replaced quarterly bonuses with a lottery, okay. Workers who hit performance targets will be entered to win prizes including cars, vacations, I guess that's a free flight, or even a hundred grand for one lucky employee.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: About 1.6 percent of United's 86,000 workers will win something every quarter. That's not a lot. That's not a high percentage. Anyway, the new system replaces previous pay incentives, which have been anywhere from $63 to $7,589.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Ink Magazine estimates. Social media, at least in my circles, went sort of ape shit when this was announced for obvious reasons.
Chad: Yeah. Usually a lottery is something that you choose to do, right? In some cases you're gonna go. You're gonna spend a buck or $5 or $20 or whatever it is to go play the lottery for a chance, right? This isn't even giving you an option, right? This is, "Guess what guys? You're not gonna get a pay increase, but we're just gonna go ahead and throw you into this lottery, which only," as you had said, "1.6 percent will win." Just from a PR standpoint, this is one of the dumbest things, which is why they backed out of it obviously.
Chad: One of the dumbest things you can do. Hey look, we think this is really cool. So cool that we're gonna make sure that pretty much 98.4 percent of you are not gonna get anything, right?
Joel: They took this flight back to the gate, yes. It did not get very far before social media and I'm sure there was an uproar internally that we don't even know about of people. Yeah, it's clearly sort of a cost-saving measure. Sure they wrapped it in sort of a fun thing. They wrapped it in you can win a car, a hundred grand, but people who hit bonuses, they just want average shit back for hitting their goals. I don't know what it says about human nature. We want what we've earned, and not put our name in a hat and maybe I'll win something big or I won't win anything at all.
Chad: Right.
Joel: This certainly exemplifies human nature and how companies really screw this up. I wouldn't be surprised if some HR folks got fired over this because of the outrage that followed. But dumb idea on all counts.
Joel: If I know that you really suck, you might have just barely hit your goals, right? But I totally crushed it, and you win a hundred grand, how am I gonna feel as an employee that got to see someone substandard to me win a hundred grand in the lottery. I'm probably not gonna be real happy about it.
Chad: That's gonna happen a lot.
Chad: So here's how you fix this, United. I'm gonna give you a little free advice. What you do is you keep the raises in place, and because you created this PR nightmare for yourself, some idiot within PR and/or marketing, what you do is you go ahead and you institute the lottery as well. You do both. Don't be dumb asses. You're gonna come out of this like dragging a guy off a plane for goodness sakes. You need to be smart about this. Go ahead and institute both. Whether you do it for one year or not, you've got to be smarter about how you do business. This is dumb.
Joel: This needs to be, again, going back to the International Women's Day, they need to find their inner Oprah and everybody gets something. So you get a car, you get a car, you get a something. Like give everybody something that hits it, but then have a few lucky winners that really strike it rich, right? I think everyone would be happy with that.
Joel: We're in agreement on that. United fix your stuff and you're welcome. That was free advice from Chad and Cheese.
Chad: You're lucky.
Joel: Also needing advice apparently is Glassdoor. What happened with them this week?
Chad: Well, you know, I think looking to position yourself for IPO does some weird things to companies, don't you think?
Joel: Yeah, people lose their minds in IPOs.
Chad: People do lose their minds, yeah.
Joel: Like where can we make money? They throw the couch cushions off, right, and they go looking for change. We need to pump up that first initial report to Wall Street. This to me is clearly them saying, "Okay let's flip up the staffing industry cash cushion and see what kind of dollars we can generate from this."
Chad: Yeah, so I mean this next segment actually started with a weird email that was screen-shotted and it was shared on Twitter, and it was asked to pretty much to Glassdoor, marketing communications in Glassdoor overall. What the hell does this mean? Here's what the email actually said. "I want to let you know effective April 1, 2018," I actually thought it was April Fool's at first, "Glassdoor's rate card will increase." Very nice. "If you're currently receiving any organic applies from Glassdoor," this is important. "If you are currently receiving any organic applies from Glassdoor, they will stop. That will no longer be a free feature. Again, that will stop. If Glassdoor is something that you're interested in, this is where the sale comes in, then you can call your account executive right?
Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chad: So I reached out to Samantha, I'm gonna get her last name wrong, Zupan, who is in charge ... She's VP of communications over at Glassdoor.
Joel: She's very nice. I will vouch for her. She's a good kid.
Chad: But the thing is, what she responded back with on Twitter totally contradicts what I just read. She said, "The changes reflect how we're doing business with staffing firms." Just staffing firms. "We're looking to set up paid business relationships with them to help boost their recruiting efforts." Go figure. "We're not removing organic job listings." Okay they didn't say they were gonna do that in the email, although job candidates will continue to be able to apply for free jobs on Glassdoor organic or sponsored, which is counter to what the actual message was. So I wonder, if this was a communications error kinda on the sales side that was sent out to be able to try to spur the sky is falling for staffing firms, say "Oh my God we've gotta buy this," or which one. Who's lying, that's the big question?
Joel: It's a rogue sales person obviously.
Chad: They're everywhere.
Joel: Dude, yeah, there's confusion here and no doubt to me, Glassdoor's gonna look at how do we bleed this turnip for more cash. Staffing industry historically has been the whipping boy of the whole thing, and even you and I have talked about the money that Monster made from staffing companies and Hot Jobs didn't do that. I forget what you said what percentage of Monster's revenue was staffing firms, it was like 70.
Chad: It was like 75 percent. It was like 75 percent, yeah.
Joel: Yeah, 75 percent. Like I can't fault Glassdoor for you know, "Oh shit. There's some money there," in doing it. But also to me it's a little bit confusing in that Glassdoor is built on sort of companies having profiles and having reviews and interview questions revealed, where if you leave a review for a staffing company, do they have profile pages? Is it for the company they're hiring for? If their interview questions, would you leave that question for the staffing firm or for the direct employer? Do they even know the direct employer?
Joel: So from a usability perspective, I see this being potentially challenging from them, but hell, we've gotta raise money because we got an IPO coming up, so to hell with users.
Chad: So I actually reached out to somebody in the staffing industry and said, "Hey, what the hell's up?" They said, "You have to have a minimum $2,000 spend, and if you don't pay, your competitors sponsored jobs actually show up by your reviews." So obviously your jobs, over in that right rail, are not gonna populate because you're not paying to get your jobs into your profile, so they'll go ahead and slap obviously some competition over on that right rail.
Chad: This to me is really taking the brand hostage. It's not a great way to do business man, because nobody likes, I don't care if it's a staffing agency or not, nobody likes to be taken advantage of, and as soon as they see a window, they're going to fricking take their spend, and they're gonna run to somebody else. We saw this with CareerBuilder. We saw this with Monster. When Indeed starting to make their play, as soon as people had an opportunity to be able to take their money and go somewhere else, guess what they did?
Joel: They did. They went somewhere else.
Chad: You saw where I was leading there.
Joel: This feels like if you followed Yelp at all, and it almost feels like Glassdoor is taking a page out of Yelp's strategy, there were a lot of local businesses that complained about Yelp, sort of, you know, not directly saying it, but sort of around the way saying, "Hey if you don't pay us, your competition's gonna be more visible. Those shitty reviews are gonna be at the top of the page." Sort of subtly if you're a paying customer, if you pay us money, you'll be able to control those reviews, or maybe those reviews will go away or go lower down the totem pole.
Joel: This sort of blackmail business is real shitty, and it usually doesn't work long term, although again, if you have an IPO coming up, you wanna show growth, get that stock price and then everyone cashes out and who cares. Long term it's not a real great strategy.
Chad: No, and so I asked, "What the hell? Why aren't they doing the same? Why are the focusing on staffing and not talent acquisition?" Their response was, "If you had a shitty Glassdoor rating, would you sponsor jobs? If you did, do you think the cost per applicant would be good, or that your advertisers would even want to suppress," there it is, "The bad reviews." There's no question. We see trouble actually brewing for Glassdoor I think on a long-term scale, but again, if they're thinking short term just because they wanna get to IPO. They wanna be able to squeeze as much as they possibly can. The big question is if you're a staffing company right now, do you just tell them to go to hell?
Joel: Maybe. You got other options. But a lot of them, if it's successful, they'll stick with it.
Chad: Yep.
Joel: Time will tell, man. You know one company that's not short-sited, and looks out for their customers and users is America's Job Exchange, and you got something to say about that.
Chad: I was actually just thinking about them. They're starting to roll out a new website and new messaging, and it's actually pretty cool. The new messaging is, "Compliance is mandatory. Diversity is essential." I think that is very smart and really packages up, yeah.
Joel: I like that.
Chad: Good job America's Job Exchange.
Joel: They must have come up with that under the three feet of snow that's in the northeast area this week. Way to go, team.
Chad: So they're messaging. Great things happen when organizations embrace diversity. America's Job Exchange provides a simple yet effective solution that connects equality-focused employers with the talent they need to build successful teams and maintain OFCCP compliance. This is the big message that major Fortune 500 companies, federal contractors, they all need to understand is yes, yes, yes, yes. You gotta check the box. You've gotta do the recording. Compliance is mandatory. If you wanna continue to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases billions of dollars a year, from your client, the U.S. Government, then you have to focus on compliance, but the big key for business is diversity and how essential it is. Research has actually shown how essential diversity is to a working team.
Chad: A new idea is being able to really launch companies into the stratosphere of success. Big, big ups for America's Job Exchange. Check them out. New beautiful starting to roll out site, Americasjobexchange.com. If you do care about diversity because you know it's essential, go to chadcheese.com. Go down to the sponsors area, just a little scroll, and click on America's Job Exchange, and there's a 25 percent or some type of discount. There's a discount there to start using America's Job Exchange and focusing on compliance and diversity.
Joel: Did you just say, "Little scroll?"
Chad: Little.
Joel: I like that. Just a little scroll away.
Chad: Just a little scroll away. chadcheese.com, little scroll.
Joel: Of Fortune 500 companies only 10 percent are women-lead, so AJ fight the good fight. Get that diversity into the bigger companies as well as the smaller ones.
Chad: Amen.
Joel: Do we have to go to millennials. Damn it. I was having a good day, and now we gotta talk about millennials.
Chad: You're so excited about this. Okay so let's talk about the Burger King ad. Let's talk about this.
Joel: Yep.
Chad: Tell me about these Burger King ads, because you I think you put them up and I was like, "What the hell?" It looked like it was fake, didn't it?
Joel: So I get all kinds of news stuff, and marketing is obviously something I'm passionate about, and every once in a while on one of the Ad Week or advertising blogs or publications, there will be an employment-related story about advertising, and this story was print ads for Burger King, that were totally out of bounds. The whole gist of it was to get your attention. No shit. They had pictures of soccer hooligans, or football hooligans because we're going to Europe, football hooligans with like, you know-
Chad: Molotov cocktails.
Joel: -Molotov cocktails. Like throwing fire and fighting police and it was like, "Oh you like burning stuff? Come charbroil some burgers," or whatever it is. That was such an extreme message, but clearly Burger King ads to be so outrageous with their ads because millennials apparently won't get off the couch to go work at Burger King unless they see something really outrageous that connects with them. Apparently, by the way, I guess part of the advertising from the agency was like, "Look, young people are mad about government. They're mad about the man. They're mad about everything," so connecting pipe-bombing the government is equated to going to work for Burger King, which, let's be honest, is a relatively boring job I would think.
Joel: It just showcases the depths that millennials have driven marketers to get their attention.
Chad: Just allowing these types of ads to go out. I don't know who, and I think this was in Germany, right? Whoever is in charge of marketing in Germany, if they still have a job right now, I would be incredibly surprised. This is ridiculous.
Joel: It doesn't really matter probably because a company that you shared on our stream this week is developing flippy, which has a cute name, but is putting all these kids out of business because it's gonna do the burger flipping for us, like much of the things that will be automated. So flippy will be there, and we won't have these Burger King ads anymore because all the Burger Kings, Wendy's, McDonalds, etc. will just buy robots to flip burgers, which will also be to order from your mobile phone. You won't have to talk to someone to take your money. The future of fast food is interesting, but it's probably a lot with fewer humans I would think.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And that affects the millennials as well. Self-driving cars or trucks were in the news this week as usual?
Chad: Yep, so Embark Trucks. They've actually created a system that they've built with Peterbilt Trucks that had an autonomous truck drive from California to Florida. 2400 miles without a human driver. Pretty amazing. We're always talking about AI and machine learning for our industry, and there are a lot of people that actually scoff at, "Oh yeah AI and machine learning, whatever recruitment," blah, blah, blah. Listen guys, if they can do this on the road. I mean we're talking about AI machine learning to map everything around you to avoid obstacles, to know where you're going. Mapping obviously all the GPS, oncoming traffic and shit like that, it's like having robot situational awareness really. It has cameras everywhere. It's equipped with radar and lidar, the light detection ranging systems.
Joel: Lidar, geez.
Chad: Yeah, I mean it's got all the cool shit that's on it, and it only needs humans when it needs fuel. To be able to actually get off an exit, fuel up, do whatever it needs to do and come back on, or obviously go ahead and drop your load.
Chad: Yeah, right now, you "need" humans. Much like flippy, you know a human has to put the patties onto the grill right? That shit's gonna change guys. If you can actually make a robot that's going to flip burgers and drive, even more so drive from California to Florida, and right now it needs a human for off ramps, how long do you think it's gonna take for them to get that shit right?
Joel: Not long. In fact I heard a story this week as well as Dominoes how they're sort of secretly R and Ding self-driving cars to deliver pizza. You get a code on your phone to open the locker with your hot fresh pizza, and not have to deal with a deli very person. Yeah, the future is scary.
Chad: And millennials won't do those damn jobs, right? We can't find truckers. We can't find burger flippers. We can't find pizza guys. So who is going to take those jobs? Obviously have immigration problems and we think that obviously all of our jobs are taken. That's so much bullshit, man. We need to focus on where the need is from a workforce standpoint and long-term need. Robots are coming, guys.
Joel: Just give people their VR headset, hook them into Xbox and the sex robots will be delivered and we're all good. What else do we need?
Chad: Wall-E.
Joel: Something near and dear to my heart, Jobu, as a former Cleveland resident, love the movie Major League, but maybe not the best name for a job search site. Jobu Jobs is in Beta, and this is still on our Millennial rant. So a 22-year-old kid basically started this company. It's a "new Tinder for jobs site."
Chad: Oh God.
Joel: It's in Beta, but there are screenshots. They even have the whole like, "It's a match thing." The visuals if you've been on Tinder. It's been a while for me. I know you've never been on it, but you've seen screenshots I'm sure. We need to get away from this Tinder for jobs stuff because no one has the time to flip through right and left on candidates or jobs that they want. They want to search it. They wanna get to relevant results, and more and more on the recruiting side, they just want to automate the sourcing with robots. To think that we're gonna swipe left and right on candidates when there's so much more efficient ways to find people is ridiculous.
Joel: Stop the madness. This company out in Boise, which I understand is a beautiful place, find something else to do than launch Jobu Jobs/Tinder for employment, okay?
Chad: Don't waste our time and your money. Don't do it. I literally thought this was a joke when you threw it out there at first because I read it and I'm like, "This has gotta be a bullshit joke." I mean since eHarmony for jobs is now dead, it's proven to be dead, now we've got a fall back position. It's Tinder for jobs. Everybody now is going to be Tinder for jobs.
Joel: Yeah. Still with the Millennial rant, Activision Blizzard, great company, have friends there, anyway, they are giving new parents that are employees, a $1,200 baby crib. This crib will change your kid, rock your kid, feed your kid, talk to your kid, white noise it to sleep, etc. This is what we've come to with Millennial coddling is giving new parents at the company this $1,200 baby crib because I, Millennial need my sleep and don't want to wake up at 4:00, I want this machine to raise my kids. Again, this is going I guess where the world is going. To me this is a sad statement on employment that we're giving cribs away because we want our nice young employees to get their sleep at night.
Chad: Well Activision ... Did they develop this crib?
Joel: No.
Chad: Okay, okay yeah that's pathetic then. Yeah, so at the end of the day, it's back to the millennials just wanting things handed to them. Yeah, I shouldn't have to do that. I shouldn't have to raise my kids. Does it really change the kid? I don't think it changes the kid. Does it change the kid?
Joel: No I was kinda being facetious about that, but you know that's coming.
Chad: Yeah, but again I don't want to do any of this, right? I just want some machine to do it for me, and that is ridiculous. How do you believe people become successful? They have to do the dirty work. How do you think that you become a successful parent or ... It doesn't matter. You gotta do the dirty work, right? That's the fun part about it.
Chad: I look back into those sleepless nights that I had with my kids, some of the best memories I've ever had, and you're just screwing yourself out of them because you're a lazy ass.
Joel: Do you think people choose Activision Blizzard to work because of something like this? Probably right?
Chad: I don't think they [crosstalk 00:32:39].
Joel: I bet all the new parents that get this crib are like, "Activision is awesome. They bought this crib for me. I sleep at night. I don't see my kid, but hell, I'm sleeping at night."
Chad: Yeah, I don't know.
Joel: Lastly on the Millennial rant thank God is Phil Strazzulla, I think I'm saying that correctly, who works at Next Wave. He put up a video on LinkedIn. I got no problems with that. It was a whiteboard Wednesday video, which is sort of getting popular or has been popular for a while. Anyway, he made a statement like SEO for employers is dead, or they don't have to worry about it, yadda yadda. You and I both know that, I mean look. Are there other options? Yes, but you know your point, and I would have made the same point is that Google for Jobs is creating a whole new sort of discipline around optimizing your jobs, right? I even wrote a post on ERE. You can go search for it. It's like seven optimization tips for conquering Google for Jobs or something.
Joel: It's all very practical, organic search result optimization tips that will affect your search. So he sort of glossed over that. He was looking at sort of old, general job search stuff even though he does mention Google for Jobs so it was around.
Chad: Sort of, I mean it was over a four minute video, and it mentioned Google for Jobs. And it's like, dude, what the hell are you talking about when you're talking about optimizing for job content. You're not even gonna go ahead and spend a good portion of your video on optimizing Google for Jobs.
Joel: He spent no time on that.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: He said it was there, but he didn't, he just said SEO was irrelevant. No company should worry about that, which is a relief for I'm sure a lot of companies to think that. To also think like, you shouldn't care about it because Indeed and Glassdoor and everybody else has those top rankings, is sort of dangerous. I could take any decent company and compete and most SEOs could with those rankings. So it's not like, "Oh well, so-and-so ranks for it, so you're screwed. Don't even worry about it."
Joel: The video's gotten 20,000 views so kudos to the kid, who I've spoken to and seems like a nice guy. Kudos for the 20,000 views, and that sort of helps his argument that focus on social media stuff because it's more pertinent and relevant, and you're gonna get more traction, which was the case in this. My problem with him was, you kinda sort of really lightly with gloves went to him and he called you, no reason to be a jerk, and it was this whole thin-skinned Millennial stuff like, "Oh don't, wait." If you have an opinion, get ready to be called out on it and defend it. You and I deal with this everyday, right, maybe because we're old and grissled and angry at the world, but deal with it. You got an opinion, you own a company, don't call someone a jerk because they're putting you on the mat for something. Come back with more ammunition. Come back with an opinion. Come back with facts, and don't just curl up in a fetal position and call someone a jerk about it.
Joel: Millennial rant over.
Chad: Yeah, it was fairly simply. The guy didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He was looking for something. He might have read a book from the late 1990's on SEO or some shit like that. Maybe he watched a video, but he truly didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I just threw out there, "Hey dude, you're glossing over the biggest piece of this, and then maybe you need to listen to a Chad and Cheese podcast," and yeah. I've been called much worse than a jerk. I actually kinda chuckled about it because yeah, he is a kid, and he needs to be whipped around a little bit.
Joel: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. You're gonna get hit, dude. Just get up. Don't jerkify it. I gotta move on from this because I'm getting irritated.
Joel: What better way to do that than to thank a new sponsor from the show.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Yes, we're very excited.
Chad: Coming in April.
Joel: In April, Job Ad X from the folks that have given you Recroup have a new programmatic solution for your job advertising needs. I won't get too far into it because they'll have their own message for you, but we're both very excited. We have officially sort of filled all the spots on the show for sponsorship, but we also want to take this quick ad spot to talk about our own stuff.
Chad: Oh yeah, so you obviously know us for the Chad and Cheese podcast. We both have together collective 40 years in this industry and we've seen a lot of shit obviously, and we know a lot of people. That's the big key. So one of the things that we can help most businesses out with, whether you're talent acquisition or you're a vendor, is to be able to innovate, compete and really just focus on your business. In most cases you don't have the experts in-house to be able to do that, and you don't have the cash to hire them full time. Go to chadcheese.com click on Huddle, and we have consulting, obviously, opportunities where we can sit down with you and we can have a huddle, and we can start to talk about some of these things.
Chad: Again if you're on the vendor side of the house, in most cases, your big focus is how do we increase sales, right? We can help with that, so look at Huddle.
Joel: Sales, marketing, you're a startup looking to understand the business better, the demographic, the customers that you're hoping to nab. If you're an international company looking to crack into the United States. Chad and I have 40 years I guess combined experience in this space. We have incredible networks to sort of help plug you in to companies or contacts.
Joel: Yeah, if you're looking to take your business to the next level, chadcheese.com click on Huddle. Check it out. We'll come out and spend a day with you. If you're looking to take your conference to the next level, click on Roadshow, and we'll come out and shake up your event for sure. With spring and summer, a lot of conferences are starting to come out and looking for new ways to entertain and titillate their audience.
Chad: That's a big thing, right? You definitely want to drop knowledge on your audience, but you don't wanna do it in a boring-ass way. That's one of the things that we've been able to do, right?
Joel: It's a no-cricket process.
Chad: Put our asses on stage. Live podcast. No PowerPoints. No sales speel. No yawning. We're gonna invigorate the crowd. We're gonna have fun, and we're gonna talk about shit that matters. So go to chadcheese.com, click on Roadshow, have us at your event.
Joel: All right closing the podcast, iCims ATS, popular ATS. We've talked about on the show and had their wonderful Susan Vitali, marketing person on the next exclusive a few months ago. Had an interesting blog post that we thought we'd talk about. Tell us about what he said?
Chad: It was entitled, "How Google Begins and Ends the War for Talent," and pretty much to kinda paraphrase what he's saying in this is, "Hey TA tech industry, you created the gap. Now Google is going to fill it." Job search sucks. Remember that Monster said that. We talked about that last week. Imagine that. Monster says job search sucks. Applying from one site to the next, throwing all your information out there on the web, It isn't fun. It isn't easy. It isn't safe. The candidate experience just falls flat, and it sucks, right?
Chad: So all these different pieces of it. There's an opportunity, and you've left room for Google to come in and take market share. That's really-
Joel: Drink your milkshake.
Chad: - yeah, drink your milkshake. So TA tech industry, you had one job, one job, and Google's now going to take that job.
Chad: What are you thoughts about that?
Joel: To me, he makes a great point. We've talked about it on the show in terms of Google data. Google knows that people were clicking on job pages and finding duplicate jobs everywhere. Google knew all that, and part of I think the inspiration for Google for Jobs was to help the users better navigate the duplicate content issue. The multiple sites issue and going back and forth. They sorta brought that upon themselves. They needed money, and multiple postings, and the distribution model is a great model for profit. It is biting them in the ass.
Joel: My challenge with the post was that he sort of, his context was that nothing would change going forward. That job search would continually be, I go to Google.com, I search for jobs, there are the jobs. That's end of story. It's a little more, potentially ... It is more complicated than that, and I think the future of job search will continue to evolve, and I'm not sure how Google's place in that new world is going to evolve with it.
Joel: I still really think that voice assistance will have a place with all this, and I'm not sure Google is gonna be there. I think mobile devices, automation stuff. I just think searching for a job, when you and I were doing it, we bought the Sunday paper, we looked at the ads, we sent out letters, we made phone calls. That was our reality. It has evolved significantly from that. No one does that anymore, so can we say ten years from now people will still go to Google?
Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joel: I don't know. They probably will, or a good number will. I think Facebook has a good opportunity as a lifestyle business and a place where people spend most of their time, to be a juggernaut in terms of job search. I think Microsoft LinkedIn component in terms of the workplace enterprise software has a place in this. Ultimately, my problem with it is it sort of puts us in the mud and we're not changing and Google has won.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And I think that that's not gonna be the case in the future.
Chad: Yeah, I think we're seeing a ton of startups, really cool startups, really push some of these old codgers in the industry, and that's great. One of the things that Collin does cite is some CareerBuilder research that said 80 percent of job searches actually start on Google. I don't know if it's that high, but I know it's high. To your point with regard to voice and mobile, I think, to be quite frank, voice and mobile, Google has those covered. They have an amazing voice assistant. They own probably the lion's share of operating systems on the planet for mobile.
Chad: I think they're good there, it's all about that lifestyle piece like you're talking with LinkedIn and more so with Facebook. Where I think Collin is amazing, but I think where he misses the mark is his real focus is, "Hey Google is going to be sending these job seekers to the corporate career site." That's pretty much what it's all coming down to. Yeah, you can go to Glassdoor and their little buttons and all this other fun stuff, but it's gonna be so much easier for a job seeker to go directly to your isem system or what have you. That's not what we're seeing now. If you do a search, and you check out some of the options when you click on a job, it won't say, "Career site." It'll say, "Smart Recruiters." As a job seeker, I don't know what the hell a Smart Recruiters is. I do know what a Glassdoor is. I do know what LinkedIn is. I'm gonna use one of those, right?
Joel: Or Taleo, or Kenexa or iCims.
Chad: Yeah, I don't know what iCims is because I'm a candidate. I don't know these things. To think that it's already kind of figured out is wrong. I think the way that Google is going after things right now is very smart to ensure that they're not focused on creating a "monopoly". They've gotten in trouble for that before. There are still a ton of wrinkles to iron out, so Collin I agree there is a huge gap in the market. That's why Google is here. That's why they have pretty much the trifecta of products that are out there right now. I don't think they're anywhere close to where they need to be able to offer a great user experience.
Joel: Yeah, and brand still means something. I think ease of use, right? A lot of these ATSs still suck ass in terms of applying. If I'm a job seeker, and I see jobs that I like, if I like applying through Glassdoor or I love how Monsters interface works. By the way, if you're Monster, you should really be working hard on making that as easy as possible. Like whoever's gonna Amazon the apply process is going to win because just like buying a product. If you think Amazon is super easy, which it is to buy stuff. If you did the search for products, and you could buy it from either Walmart, Target, Buy.com or Amazon, if you are an Amazon loyalist, you're gonna click Amazon. You're gonna click one-click buy, and you're gonna be done.
Joel: That's how this is gonna work. The job search site that is the most seamless, frictionless process is going to win. I totally agree. It's not just gonna be Taleo or iCims or anyone else because it's the corporate site, although I think there is some relevance to that. If you can make it easy as possible to apply, you're going to win.
Chad: That's the charge. That's the charge for every company out there. Really for every vendor out there is to be able to make that one touch so that I don't have to worry about pushing my data out from site to site to site to site to site to site.
Joel: By the way, I would put LinkedIn as the front runner in that race. People already have their profiles there. It's already pretty easy on LinkedIn. No upload or resume thing. It's already done. Personally for me, I think LinkedIn is in the pole position in terms of that environment.
Chad: Facebook is coming up fast.
Joel: 50 minutes dude, although you'll probably edit down to like 30 minutes. Anyway, we've been on a while. I say we out this thing, and go on with our lives.
Joel: I do want you to introduce the outro because it's your daughter and it's awesome. So any intro to this? Intro to the outro?
Chad: Yeah, it is awesome that it's International Women's Day and my daughter is actually doing the outro. A very strong, young lady who's gonna be a strong woman one day. So here's Ema.
Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, The Chad and his buddy Cheese. This has been The Chad and Cheese podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com.