Well... what started out as a pretty slow and boring ass week gained some steam by Hump Day.
So what happened?
- Monster lands a new CEO (Get it? Travel... Lands?)
- CareerBuilder goes down
- Oprah is giving everybody a FREE job board (Ok it's not Oprah)
Glassdoor-for-women site raised $3 million. Enjoy, and checkout our sponsors America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
El Chapo: Evidently, when El Chapo was incarcerated, the code of ethics that he instilled in Cabo and throughout Mexico has gone away. There's no code of ethics, there's no code of honor. All of a sudden, there's a war for power. So you're seeing things happen that you haven't seen in the past, where people, gangs, drug dealers, will actually go into restaurants and shoot up the place. That never happened before.
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: Hey hey hey kids, welcome to another week in the wild, wonderful, whimsical world of recruiting and HR. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman.
Chad: And I am Chad Chatbot Sowash.
Joel: This week, that'd be much more fun to work with. This week, Careerbuilder goes down, Monster finally gets a fearless leader, and, oh yeah, Glassdoor gets acquired. Buckle up, everybody. We'll be right back.
JobAdx: How many times has someone said to you, it's the Uber of, or it's the PayPal of, maybe they're the Facebook of. In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality, or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot on, that it's synonymous with our work.
JobAdX: JobAdX is Google Ad Sense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, persistent, and smarter ad unit for job related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies and staffing firms realtime, dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. All this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click or application. We offer unique budget conservation to effectively eliminate spending waste. We are not set in regrets.
JobAdx: For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards higher web share than other partners through our smarter pragmatic platform. In many cases, 30 to 40% greater and more with our scalable model. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com or email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX. The best ad tool providing smarter pragmatic for your needs. Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX has just launched in the UK, too.
Chad: Very nice.
Joel: We symbiotically became classier and global with hat ad. That's nice.
Chad: Thanks JobAdX, for making us more classy. I don't know that you can do that though, really.
Joel: And they show up with Guinness for live shows.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Chad: Classing the joint up, JobAdX. We appreciate it.
Chad: Well, let's talk about classy. Let's talk about throwing axes. Let's talk a little bit about that. You got a shout out for Nexxt, right?
Joel: Oh, a double axe with two x's. Now I showed up with the incorrect footwear which was a major mistake because I would've enjoyed kicking your ass in competition but that will have to wait for another day, apparently.
Chad: Yeah. First off, never gonna happen, and second, who shows up to an axe throwing event in flip flops? Joel Cheesman does, that's who does. He shows up and doesn't get an opportunity to throw like the regular people who have appropriate footwear, meaning like, tennis shoes, but he did get a couple of throws in and luckily we got tape of that.
Joel: Hey, a burly bearded man comes in barefoot. I don't know what's more ax throwing than that.
Chad: Like I said, you're like a younger version of Santa, so don't play the viking role.
Joel: Everybody loves Santa, alright? Everybody loves the fat jolly man in red, alright, but thanks to Nexxt, they have an office here in Indianapolis which some people don't know about. They had some of the Philly crew come in. We had pizzas, beers, moonshine, for God's sakes, and we threw axes. What's cooler than that? So, thanks to the Nexxt crew. Double x.
Joel: That was awesome. That was awesome guys, thanks. Shout out to Chris Pickle. She gets a shout out. She said something pithy, something funny on LinkedIn. I can't remember what it was. Do you remember what it was?
Joel: I don't know but I love her last name and she loves us, so that's enough for me. Anytime you get food last names on the show, you get props.
Chad: Well, if you know Chris Pickle, you don't call her Chris or Christina. You just call her Pickle. That's what she goes by, by Pickle.
Joel: Now we just need a burger to comment on the show and maybe a tomato and some onions and we gotta full meal.
Chad: Oh, Jesus.
Joel: I got a shout out for Lindsay Sanford. A Ratedly customer with network. She was at a Career Crossroads event recently and we both know Jerry and Chris very well. If you don't know Career Crossroads, you should, but anyway they were asking about cool tools that companies are currently using and Lindsay gave Ratedly a thumbs-up to the audience there, so we appreciate you, Lindsay. Not podcast related, but certainly from me, you get a big shout out.
Chad: Good stuff, good stuff. Well, I am here today at Recruit Con in Nashville and I had another drive by hugging by Susan Vitale. Now actually, we had a chance to sit and chill. She gave an amazing, I don't wanna say speech per se, but presentation on millennials and Gen Z'ers so the Joel Cheesman aura was in the room. Also, talking about Google for jobs, texting, does any of this sound familiar?
Joel: Yeah.
Joel: So, good stuff. Good stuff from Susan and another shout out to Elena Valentine from Skill Scout. Thanks for the awesome T-shirt. Yep, nope. She gave me an awesome T-shirt. It says, "your job post is as boring as this T-shirt. Skill Scout." Good job.
Joel: I'm glad Elena doesn't work for Lever because we'd have a whole issue with that big time. Thanks for the T-shirt, Elena. I appreciate it. I'm still waiting on line, by the way. My last shout out is to Nicole from Thompson Creek Window. Now, this is sort of random, but when we were at SHRM Talent, I ran into Nicole. Never met her before, but we started talking about pragmatic solutions. She started talking about hating Indeed because it costs too much. Salespeople are paying the ads, blah blah blah, stuff we've always heard. I said, Nicole, you need to get on the pragmatic bandwagon. I pimped out JobAdX, our newest sponsor. She contacted them, they got a deal in the works, so it looks like we're gonna make a match here in Chad and Cheese dating land for customers, so shout out to her and JobAdX. Go make some money and go get some great candidates.
Chad: Dude we're like the Tinder form pragmatic.
Joel: I like that.
Chad: That sounds good.
Joel: It doesn't quite ring as well as HR's most dangerous podcast, but it could work, it could work.
Chad: Can we do the show? Yes.
Chad: Oh my God. A little bit of news came out in what was a pretty slow week until Wednesday. Glassdoor gets acquired by Recruit Holdings out of Japan, who if you don't know, also owned Indeed. A little job site here in the states. I could go a lot of different ways with this. Do you have any preference with what we talk about first?
Chad: No, hit it. Hit it.
Joel: Alright, $1.2 billion.
Chad: Nice.
Joel: They actually published the amount which was sort of, I don't know, odd, because when they bought Indeed, there wasn't a published number.
Chad: Right.
Joel: The whispered number was about $1.6 billion, which would put it in line with the Glassdoor acquisition. I'd like to talk about pricing first because some people think it's a great deal, others think it's not a great deal. I tend the side on the not so great deal. Glassdoor had $200 million in investment money. They had been rumored to go IPO, which I think Google for Jobs probably put a little bit of a damper on that and typically you want 10 X out of your investment cash, which would've put that at a $2 billion dollar event if my math is right. So, to me it was almost a half price on what they should've gotten based on their investment cash. What's your take?
Chad: So, again, going back looking at Google for Jobs, don't you think it was one of the tactics? Hey, we've gotta take a good price and that price isn't gonna be 10 X. We've gotta take something. Take it now before it drops even more.
Joel: Yeah, I think this was on both Recruit Holding's and Glassdoor driven by Google. I think Recruit Holding, I would say if a bully goes on the playground, what happens? The weaker kids get friends fast and to me, Google is the big bully that showed up on the playground and Recruit Holdings with Indeed said, holy crap. This shit's going down. We need some reinforcements. Let's look at Glassdoor who we know going public, they're looking for a cash out event. That spurred an easy conversation, I'm sure, with them.
Joel: Now on Glassdoor's side, I'm sure looking at, oh yeah, let's go public and as we are a public company, let's watch Google for Jobs grow and keep biting at our market share and valuation and watch our stock price go lower and lower. I think that's the future that they saw in their IPO and Google drove that deal, I think, big time.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: For both sides. Recruit and Glassdoor and I don't think Recruit Holdings is done. If you look at the small list of who they would buy, who would you put on that list?
Chad: ZipRecruiter was thrown out there pretty quickly and I thought that was very interesting especially from the SMB side of the house and I think that would be a smart addition. I don't know if they could get that done, but I think that would be a smart addition. I don't know. What other names did you hear out there?
Joel: Well, the list is sort of straight up job sites is dwindling. I'd throw Talroo slash Jobs2Careers in there, although they are pivoting more toward technology solutions. I'd look at Nexxt, but again, same thing. Traditional job board pivoting out of bad business into more technology-based solutions. So, the list isn't very huge. I would definitely put ZipRecruiter at the top of that list and I'm sure they could be bought, but to me right now, if you put Glassdoor and Indeed against Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, are they even in the ballpark at this point? To me that's not even strong enough to tackle this trifecta.
Chad: No, it's not and I think a lot of this has to do with really corporate buying behavior first and foremost because for years companies were buying big names like Monster and CareerBuilder and their ROI wasn't even close to what it should've been to continue that buying. A lot it had to do with optics and having to do with those big names. So, being able to pull another big name in is big from an optics standpoint and when we're talking about not really focusing on our spend on statistics and analytics and those types of things, we're doing it more on how our recruiters feel and the big names that we van bring to the table and talk about.
Chad: That's our industry, man. That is our industry. We don't focus enough on statistics and all of our analytics and ROI. We don't do that and when we do bring it to the table, we still hear, yeah but we've been with these and this is something that's a part of our culture. Just bullshit, dude. So, I think just from my standpoint, Glassdoor and Indeed cannot, by themselves no question, stand up against any of these lifestyle platforms that we've been talking about for years. Facebook, LinkedIn, which is obviously now a part of Microsoft, Google, so on, so forth.
Chad: They do need to do more, but they are gonna have to pivot into being something that is more lifestyle because it doesn't matter what they do. They're gonna have to continue to plonk a shit ton of advertising dollars into the market constantly to ensure that they can keep their name out there and it's not sustainable at that point. Now, turning on the SEO juice from Glassdoor because Glassdoor's jobs are in Google for Jobs and the reviews-
Joel: For now.
Chad: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You depend on the life's blood of your traffic and obviously, the ability to get those eyeballs from a perspective competitor who could easily flip that switch. Keep you in the search rankings, but push you further down into page two, three, so on so forth. That to me is just a very bad strategy.
Joel: We gloss over it because they've been bought and things we're going on there, but CareerBuilder's gotta be on the table at some point. I'm sure Apollo would love to talk to Recruit Holdings. Monster at some point. Dice has a new CEO. All these companies are probably gonna be looking for exits and Recruit Holdings might be sugar daddy to a lot of those companies as well. What do you think this does to the employer review space and the branding space more broad?
Chad: Yeah, and I think it's more on the branding side of the house. I think, again, it's an optics thing for employers to now see these too big brands that they know coming together and now Indeed, depending on how these things actually transform between Indeed and Glassdoor, Indeed's going to be talking more and they're gonna be pounding the living shit out of all their prospects and clients about employer branding now and it might actually be a bigger subject because one of the bigger names will do nothing but use a sledgehammer to be able to do so and they need to. There's no question.
Chad: We talked about, last week, StepStone buying Universum and doing that because they needed to become something more than just a job board. They need to have that ability to focus on employer branding to look for more revenue streams. This is a new way of doing that. There's no question, but again, that's short-term changing, pivoting, versus long-term getting smacked over the head with the Google stick.
Joel: Yea, SHRM had called me, Roy Mauer, they're doing a story and what I told him was, do Indeed and Glassdoor become the employment branding brand? Is that their thing going forward? If jobs don't have a ton of value, then what do you hang your hat on? They already had a headstart on branding if you look at reviews and company profiles and CEO ratings. That is definitely one area where they are far ahead of anybody else in this game and if they turn off aggregation on that on Google and anywhere else, that becomes really tough.
Joel: I see where LinkedIn, with profile pages and I think they've been tinkering with reviews as well. I think that's the biggest threat to that, but I don't see Facebook or Google really caring about the branding piece anytime soon. What about you?
Chad: Now that's a good question. I think you're right with regard to Microsoft and LinkedIn. There's no question they have the upper hand. It doesn't matter where these companies are positioned today from a Glassdoor's standpoint, because that could switch very quickly if there's an algorithm change. Just a slight algorithm change. Indeed, Glassdoor focusing, more on, again, being more of a platform that's not just jobs-oriented. It's more candidate experience-oriented and again, heard Susan Vitale speak earlier and it was mainly about candidate experience and taking care of these people. So, if Indeed and Glassdoor can make something like that happen in a symbiotic type of platform, then yeah I think they've got a good product on their hands but again, it's gonna be hard to fight these other organizations what are out there that do, I think, I should say a fighting chance to stay and fight in the employer branding space.
Chad: Look at all these agencies. That's what they do. They're creative, right? So, you get a TMP who was just bought and they partner with these other organization's review sites or even employer branding, candidate experience sites, platforms or what have you. There's a good war to be had in the employer branding space and I hope we see that. I really do.
Joel: Yep. So, In five years, what does the future look like, and I'll give you three scenarios that I envision. Number one, probably least possible is, these guys stay the same. Glassdoor and Indeed. Nothing really changes. They stay as is. The other one is they cross-pollinate each other. So, reviews go back and forth. You find the same reviews and the same jobs on both site, essentially, and the third one, which I think is probably most feasible is one of them goes away and basically consolidates the reviews, the jobs. It's basically one destination site.
Chad: Yeah. I think the latter would be easier to be quite frank, but I-
Joel: Meaning destroying one of the brands would be easiest?
Chad: It's one of those things and I think it's in Indeed's nature almost, but that's a good question. I really believe that if Indeed and Glassdoor, Recruit overall, understands that there are these systems pieces that need to be put in place and that's the Indeed side. The process being able to pull people under the applicant track with just one click apply, those types of things, and then the nice, warm, fuzzy review piece as well. The story-telling piece as well. Glassdoor, I think there is an opportunity to run two brands and to do it efficiently because you do have two pieces that are coming at you.
Chad: One is a more technical piece. The other one's more of an experience type of story-telling and branding piece.
Joel: I'm gonna go in five years. We're talking about one of them and whether they maybe change their names to InDoor or GlassDeed, but to me that's the future. I do think that Indeed will be the flagship. I think that renting out big buildings in Austin and building that out sort of tells me that they're really serious about building the Indeed brand and that is the bigger brand of the two, but I do think that Glassdoor's founder, CEO, is serious about sticking around whereas Indeed's were not. So, I think you'll see Indeed as the flagship, but I think you'll see a lot of leadership from Glassdoor come over to Indeed and basically run that one brand in five years, if I had to predict.
Chad: I think they're gonna stick with two brands. Again, this is the outside chance, it really is. I'm really leaning toward what you think, but the outside chance is they're gonna have two brands.
Joel: Alright, if will definitely be fun watching.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: We will be watching. Let's hear from Sovren and we'll come back and talk about Monster and CareerBuilder, those two companies we never talk about.
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Chad: Who is this cat?
Joel: So this was announced before we went on air. I read the press release. So, Monster finally has a CEO. I'm not even sure it took. Sal left after Randstad, right?
Chad: Yeah, I think it was before that.
Joel: So, it's been over a year.
Chad: It's been a while.
Joel: It's been a while. It's been way longer than a big company should wait.
Chad: Oh, hell yeah.
Joel: And it's also interesting that the CEO is almost the last piece of the puzzle. They brought all these other executives and now they have CEO, so let's hope to God that the CEO gets along with everybody in the C Suite because if he doesn't, it's gonna be bad news. It's gonna be like the Browns with the new GM when they kept the coach. It's not gonna work.
Chad: They still need to pull us in as co-presidents, and we'll make sure that everything's-
Joel: That's right pull us in as co-idiots to really get this thing back on track. So, he does follow the trend like a tech. He went to MIT, he's a technology, big picture guy from what I can tell. Similar to Dice. So, these guys historically have almost CFO type CEOs, right? They know the dollar figures, they know how to run an organization, how to run teams, but they don't don't really know grandiose, what's next, how do we look around corners? So, to me Dice and Monster their new CEOs are both attempts to get those guys that can look behind the corner and see what's coming to develop products and services that sort of compliment that as opposed to what they've in the past.
Chad: Yeah. So, Scott is the CEO of Amadeus which is a nice size company. 15,000 employees, so it's not like he was a little, small time CEO. The company really focuses on the traveler and travel provider marketplace in proving technology to them, and what we're seeing here is, is Monster looking for parallels in the market and saying, hey look. We need to see something that has happened in the market. Not our industry, but in a different industry. This being the travel industry, and hopefully steal a person, pull them over and have them recreate the magic that they had in travel. Yeah, it's interesting.
Chad: Guy obviously has done things, no question, in travel, but it just doesn't have the industry chops on our side. I don't know if that matters or not, especially from a Monster standpoint, but really what I think what we're looking for, at this point what they're looking for, is really the Expedia for jobs.
Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We're gonna get him on the show and find out exactly what's going on.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I think we can get Monster's CEO on the show, do you?
Chad: Yeah, I think we could. Especially we could do this as an interview. We can interview him because we wanna talk a little bit more about being co-president of Monster just to make sure that we deal good working with him on this endeavor.
Joel: We can quiz him on the history of the industry to see how well he does.
Chad: Well, and he needs somebody. He needs a couple of idiots like us who have a couple of decades a piece of industry-
Joel: We'll play a little industry jeopardy. I'll take failed start-ups for $500. I was founder of Jobster. Who is Jason Goldberg? Ding ding. Good stuff. Well anyways, Dice and Monster both have tech-heavy CEOs who have no industry experience for the most part. We'll see how that works. We'll pay attention. One CEO with a ton of industry experience and not much tech industry experience probably wishes he had some more tech experiences because his site went down this week. Tell us about that.
Chad: Last week, I start getting ... my phone blew up literally. I had so many texts and messages via LinkedIn, Messenger, and it was just this picture of a site that had pretty much gone offline, and I'm like what the? What the fuck is this? Well, it was CareerBuilder and they were dead. It was well over an hour at least from what I saw.
Joel: It's one of those little orange pylons like in construction, right. That's great.
Chad: When you are a brand the size of CareerBuilder and you're trying to claw back and you obviously were just acquired, we hear all these things about being squeezed, which is again, what happens after acquisition, but to be able to squeeze enough where you don't even have the engineers or the bandwidth or whatever it actually took to keep your site up, this to me seems like a bigger problem than most people probably think it is.
Joel: Well, when you close your doors because you're going out to lunch, that's obviously a bad thing. I literally have photos that engineers, former and current CareerBuilder folks, have sent me of empty offices, empty cubicles as far as the eye can see of places where that used to host engineers and development folks. I instantly, when I saw that, just laughed to myself thinking I wish they had a few more of those engineer back in those cubes because something went very wrong. If someone the size of CareerBuilder in the middle of the day goes down, it's bad and I loved that the message on the screen was, "We're down for basic maintenance," or "general maintenance. We'll be back up as soon as possible," and I'm thinking, no one goes down for general maintenance at 2:00 P.M. on a workday in the employment industry,
Chad: Not a brand like CareerBuilder. You're doing maintenance behind the scenes and you're not pulling this down. You're not doing that. So, yeah it's interesting, and I've definitely heard a bunch of engineer stories on the CareerBuilder where, again, many of them have either left or what have you and it's funny because one of the engineers that I was talking to actually said when you go into really the big space where all the engineers sat, it is literally a ghost town and what happened was that everybody that was on over by the windows who were leaving, they left and obviously, everybody migrated toward the windows which is away from the actual entrance.
Chad: So, it's like you walk in and it's like, cricket cricket and there aren't any people.
Joel: Hold on. Hey everybody. Live from CareerBuilder's design and engineering department.
Chad: So, we also received an email that was originally sent from Jason Gold. He's the CareerBuilder director of client services and support he pretty much was saying, hey guys. Quit sending tickets to us. We know this is going on. We're already overloaded. Seriously, it was like this. Number one, please do not submit any more cases around this issue. Number two. Check. internal.Careerbuilder.com must be the internal, the intranet, for what we've got going on. If customers call, they can always route these issues, so on and so forth.
Chad: So, this was obviously such a big deal that there was a broadcast message out to everyone saying, don't submit anymore Goddamn tickets. We know there's a problem.
Joel: By the way, for the listeners, Chad made me take down the baby crying sign, but this would be perfect for that crying baby, so I'll just, wah. Yes, again, lets breve this that the engineering department at CareerBuilder.
Chad: In the wild.
Joel: Wow. It's just too much fun. Alright, should we move on or beat a dead horse some more?
Chad: Nah, I think we're good.
Joel: Alright. Okay. From Back to the Future news releases, something that should've happened in like 2008.
Chad: Yeah, no shit.
Joel: There's, and there probably was free WordPress job board software back then, but there's a new one out and we're not so much touting that as much as why.
Chad: Yeah, when I saw the actual article or the write up about it, I was like, who cares? Free job boards. It was almost like Oprah. You get a job board, you get a job board, but who cares because job boards are getting killed right now. They're not getting traffic which means even though this job board platform has Indeed backfill, which pretty much everybody would just start it up and use Indeed backfill, if it's not getting any traffic, it's not getting any clicks. So, if it's not gonna get any clicks, it's not gonna generate any money and all you are is noise on the Internet and nobody's gonna care. It's ridiculous. What is happening?
Joel: And on the other end of the market, you have the jobboard.io. There I said it, right? They're the ones helping out the association sites, the education sites, the government sites, et cetera, who already get traffic and just wanna throw up a job board to make more money. Those folks don't care or have the resources to work on a WordPress theme and URLs and blah blah blah which seems easy to a lot of people, but to the head of an association, no freaking clue. I'm just gonna call this jobboard.io or job mount or whatever and I'm just gonna let them do it and do the processing of the money and yadda yadda.
Joel: This board probably gives you the ability to via PayPal, buy job postings, right? How many people really in the real world are using PayPal to buy stuff? Not a ton.
Chad: Not at all and take a look at history one more time, people. So, we're gonna go back to the .jobs thing, okay? DirectEmployers had 40,000 domains in which there were job sites. In which there job sites, and if that was a complete fail, then how in the hell are you going to just take some free job board technology, plug in who knows what the hell it is, and actually make it successful? Seriously guys, don't waste your time. Quit screwing with this shit.
Joel: I'm adding to my heaping pile of hot garbage.
Chad: There it is.
Joel: I'm shooting this idea down. Let's hear a quick word from America's Job Exchange and talk about mind-blowing new technology from Google.
AJE: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our tenth year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand plus comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, and minorities, and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community-based organizations. What to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com
Chad: Diversity, baby.
Joel: Let's talk about Google Duplex.
Chad: Dude.
Joel: The name sucks, but I have to tell you my mind is rarely blown at 46 years going on 47 soon. My mind was blown watching this Google Duplex.
Chad: Dude, Google Assistant has Duplex technology I think is what they're calling it.
Joel: Sure.
Chad: Google Assistant kicks Alexa square in the fucking face on this thing, dude. It is amazing. The natural language process that they have this goes to incredibly new heights. Now, if you haven't seen it-
Joel: A lot of people have no idea what we're talking about, so tell them what duplex is and what it does.
Chad: So, if you haven't seen it, you've gotta go check out. Just go to YouTube or something like that and look for Google Duplex and Pinchai, the CEO of Google, goes through this amazing, stupid demo of what we're talking about and here's what it is. So, I ask Google Home, my Google Home, to set, and this is gonna be funny, a haircut appointment for me. It actually goes, makes the phone call behind the scenes. You can't hear it making the phone call. Makes the phone call behind the scenes, and like a real human being, it sounded like a real damn human being.
Chad: It made an appointment and it wasn't just a straightforward, we would like to have a 5:00 appointment, it actually collaborated with the person over the phone to find out what was better for the schedule, had great real pauses and "um's" and things like that and it was freaking amazing and after that appointment was made, and there was an affirmative action at the end of that then, guess what? It goes straight to your Google calendar. It was ridiculous, and there was another one that was making an appointment at a restaurant.
Joel: It was a reservation.
Chad: Yeah, right? And the lady had a very thick Asian accent which was really cool just showing natural language processing and the technology went back and forth with her several times because they only had four people and you have to have five to make a reservation so you had to be a walk-in. So, there was the understanding of that and it was really cool.
Joel: So, I have two thoughts on this. First is, this is going to alter the world of sales, recruiting, and customer service.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: In a major, seismic, asteroid hitting the industry way because this goes beyond. My other point is this may kill chat bots particularly in recruiting, but my first point is, imagine being able to sell a product without a salesperson or at least not as many salespeople.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Or have an entire customer service team where the voice on the other end isn't, hello. Please press four to ... he's right. It sounds like a person. They have "um's" and "mm, yeah, okay," and I'm sure at some point we'll figure out what is automated and what isn't , but customer service, sales, and recruiting are gonna change drastically because of this and my second point was, yes. Does this make chat bot solutions obsolete because this is essentially chat botting with an actual voice?
Chad: No, it doesn't. What I think it does is it could prospectively make that experience more rich because not everybody wants to have a conversation on the phone or a voice conversation, so I think using that technology, this just demonstrates how far Google has come and they can use that same type of technology, exactly the same type of technology just in straight-to-text and that was one of the things that he had actually outlined, that they were also on the voice text side of the house. So, I think that you were 100% right. This is going to impact us in a very real and crazy way especially for recruiting, sourcing overall standpoint. Scheduling, all those tasks, but I really believe it will enhance the chat bot side of the house.
Chad: Just the messaging side of the house, and how we do things. How we do things. It was truly amazing to watch and they had said that they had just plucked a couple of examples and these were real-world examples. These weren't just something that they had staged. These were real-wolrd and they said they have hundreds of them. It was.
Joel: I think it was an actual call. I think it was an actual call during the event, yeah.
Chad: Yeah, I see that there's going to be a huge swing in the market and when we start to talk about AI and natural language processing and those types of things, the world is going to look at Google for these types of things and again, I go back to the Indeed, Glassdoor conversation. This is why you're going to get your asses handed to you, guys.
Joel: Yeah. Google, Microsoft, these guys are going to be API-ing all this stuff. There's gonna be cool products and services created from it. It's very interesting and exciting and I do think it's a no-brainer to build this stuff into Google Hire.
Chad: Yep.
Joel: This will take a while to happen, but let's agree this is happening and this is where the road is going. By the way, I hate to go back to the last story, but for the people who were like Chad and Cheese are idiots, they don't know what they're talking about. Indeed had their best year ever, they're making more money than ever, their traffic's going through the roof, you know what? This is proof that we're right because their own company knew enough and saw enough to say we need to get reinforcements to go out and buy Glassdoor. So, for me it's a little vindication that we're right about what's going on and their holding company saw the same thing.
Chad: Dude, I don't care how cocky they sound. They are waking up with the night sweats.
Joel: Let's end on a lighter note.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: FairyGod Boss, basically Glassdoor for women, I guess that's fair to say. I won't get in trouble for saying that, and apparently the employer review space is a profitable one with $1.2 billion exit. FairyGod Boss, not even two years old I think, got $3 million to build out their Glassdoor for women website. So, I know their comment with that, but good for them. I think you're gonna see a lot more start-ups in this space because Glassdoor just proved you could make a billion dollar company out of reviews and we'll probably see more money flow into not only FairyGod Boss, but in her site and comparably in probably some new ones that start up, to me this is just the start of this industry in where the transparency and branding and reviews will go from here.
Chad: Agreed, and having these types of specific kind of tribal sites, review sites or what have you, just specific for women or what have you, being able to better understand how your brand impacts that group is more than important, right? Especially, not just form a recruiting standpoint, but also from a branding, sales, revenue standpoint. So I think there's some really good upside, obviously, for companies like this.
Joel: Alright, man. Good show. You're in Nashville for the RecruitCon conference, so get us some good content, some good insight for next week's show. We out.
Chad: We out.
Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad, and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad Cheese podcast. Make sure to subscribe on i Tunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Make sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com