This is a UNCOMMON EXCLUSIVE Podcast from ChadCheese.com - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.
Chad: This The Chad & Cheese Podcast brought to you in partnership with Tatech. Tatech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Visit tatech.org.
Joel: Chad, why do recruiters spend money on unqualified or uninterested candidates?
Chad: Dude, I don't know, because they're recruiters. What in the hell are you talking about in the first place?
Joel: All right, stay with me here. PPC campaigns mean you're paying per click and the person who clicks could be qualified or unqualified. You don't know and you're still going to pay for that click.
Chad: Hell man, a subscription model is even worse because you're paying for all of the candidates, not necessarily qualified ones.
Joel: Bingo. So the answer is current pricing models suck, duh. So what if you handed over cash for only interested and qualified candidates. I'm talking about candidates that are actually qualified. The ones that meet all of your job requirements from years in the industry to specific skills.
Chad: I gotcha. Now you're talking about Uncommon.
Joel: Bingo. Uncommon is where the model does not suck, and right now Uncommon only charges 14.95, that's $14.95 per interested and qualified candidate. If you do volume hiring you'll get bigger discounts.
Chad: Man, that's cheap. So yeah, Uncommon is simple. You set your monthly budget and Uncommon only charges you when you get an interested applicant that meets or exceeds your job requirements.
Joel: And to sweeten the deal, just create your free account and get your first five qualified and interested candidates for free. Just go to uncommon.co to create your free account. That's U-N-C-O-M-M-O-N.co and get those fresh five free peeps with mega skills.
Chad: Haha.
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 & Cheese Podcast.
Chad: Hey kids, it's the Chad of the Chad & Cheese podcast and today we have a special guest. Colin Day, C.E.O. of iCIMS, founder, stud extraordinaire.
Joel: Pump him up before we break him down.
Chad: That's what we have to do. We have to lift him up, lift him up before we break him down. Colin, give the audience a little bit about yourself for all of those who've been in a corner in the fetal position for the last 20 years for goodness sakes, tell a little bit about yourself and about iCIMS.
Colin: Yeah, sure. So again, yeah, my name is Colin Day. I am founder and C.E.O. of iCIMS and really this has been my entire career. I came out of college, I started a job as a recruiter. I was a tech recruiter working at a staffing firm doing a lot of hiring for Bell Labs which headquarters in New Jersey so I was hiring for AT&T and for Lucent, for Telcordia. The company I was with had build the beginnings, they weren't even calling it an applicant tracking system. They called it, their name was Comrise's Information management system or CIMS. Yeah, just sort of figured I loved recruiting but my heart was in trying to start a business and wrote all these different business plans and sort of had these moments of eureka where I would be up at night writing a plan thinking it's the greatest thing in the world and then finally get a good night's sleep and wake up and think what the hell was I thinking there. There is no way I'm pulling that off.
Colin: I think they typically say the real opportunity is literally staring you in the face and for me quite literally I was waking up and logging into CIMS and using it and that really became the genesis of the idea for iCIMS. We actually bought the rights to that company's software. We spun it out, we funded it with loans from the parent company which I say thank God always. If we'd gone the VC route we'd be a tombstone because we had to go through the dot bomb era. We have been focused on recruiting ever since.
Colin: Started off as just kind of a pure applicant tracking system.
Chad: What year was that?
Colin: So, we officially sort of spun it out in '99 and then we incorporated it in 2000. Perfect timing, right, right before everything blew apart. So I had a near death moment in the dot bomb but very thankfully because of the organic beginnings came out of it and was stronger for it. And I've been fighting ever since.
Chad: So did you start out as a client server applicant tracking system or were you always, how did it actually work because obviously there were the RecruitSofts of the world where you had to do an installation on your servers or was it something that people just used the web to interface with. It's funny because that's how we do everything today but that's not how it started.
Colin: That's not how it started. The other thing I think they always say is timing is everything. Man, we just nailed the timing, we got so lucky on that. But to give you a sense of kind of how long we've been around, yeah, we were around in the days of Webhire and Recruitmax and all these other names. We were very lucky. Most of the existing competitors were having to make that really difficult transition from client server over to, it wasn't even called SAS at the time. I think they were calling it ASP.
Colin: We started pure web and I'd like to think that we even started pure SAS. What we were seeing is that as people made the conversion over to like a web format, that basically we're still doing what we would call the no-nos of SAS. So even though it was web delivered they were customizing it, they were putting people on different installs of it. They were letting people put it on their own servers and then a host it via web. We went in saying we are going to go pure SAS, literally one code, one version, we will never customize it for anyone. We're going to kind of build for the good of the platform and if the platform is configurable enough over time it should be able to service all customers via one code.
Colin: I think you just talk about that moments where you came in, we didn't have to make a hard transition and then I think we just got the philosophies of SAS right early.
Joel: Colin, I'm really curious and I've always wanted to ask you this. The name. Tell me about the genesis of it. You had a perfect opportunity to brand it something other than iCIMS. Have you thought about changing the name over the years? Has is it been a hindrance? Do you think it's been a positive? Just talk about the name for a little bit?
Colin: You haven't been talking to our marketing department, have you Joel?
Joel: Oh, oh, we might have a scoop here. Everyone's rebranding.
Colin: I think what we like to say now is if you can make it with the name iCIMS you must have a really good product and service. It is a mouthful. For us again it was a name that we inherited as we spun out of a company. We rebranded the acronym as kind of Internet Collaborative Information Management Systems. We didn't actually see it at first as just a recruiting application. For that company, it was more of an ERP because it was a staffing firm. So they used it for work flows. So think of like a service now today. Much more of like a workflow management engine.
Colin: So we liked having this very generic name Internet Collaborative Information Management System versus, all of our competitors were recruiting this and hire that and they all had exactly the same name which is great. It said what they did, but the irony is is when they started to diversify and come out with other offerings, you must remember every single one of them had to go through a rebrand. RecruitSoft to Taleo and Recruitmax becoming Vurv. Absolutely everyone had to change their name.
Colin: We got asked all the time, hey, would you consider changing the name, it is a bit of a mouthful. Sometimes we have to explain it's not 'icims' or it's not 'I-C-I-M-S,' it's iCIMS. But I think at this point we have gotten to significant enough scale, significant brand exposure that the name is here to stay. We really think that we'll build a brand around it.
Joel: Thank God the video game The Sims has sort of faded. That must have been a hard, hard time for your sales people.
Colin: There was Sims and then ISIS didn't help for very long.
Chad: Throughout the growth we've just seen here lately you've acquired a little company by the name of TextRecruit. So going from back in the days of ASP to jumping forward, several what, about a decade, more than two decades for goodness sakes, to be able to talk about TextRecruit. So what did that mean to the organization and what does that mean for the philosophy of iCIMS as you guys move forward?
Colin: That was a really interesting one. I think maybe to give it a little bit of background, our viewpoint was that, call it seven, eight, nine years ago, maybe even before that, when ADP bought VirtualEdge and it was the first time that we saw okay, maybe there are going to be companies that aren't just going to try to do recruiting. They're going to try to pull together everything in H.R.. Our viewpoint was let's be the contrarian here. We don't want to look like everyone else. Recruiting just too damn important, it's too hard, you don't want to break it, you don't want to jam it into an H.R. suite and make it sort of your worst offering.
Colin: So we stayed focused on recruiting. We kind of built the ATS to have the CRM so that you could do the passive candidate kind of marketing and sourcing. We put the onboarding in to close the transaction. We're actually coming out with an offer management model. So we're trying to make sure that we're always building the core componentry of sort of end to end recruitment. But along the way we realized that, and I guess it's just a good thing about our industry, we are not it. The average customer uses god, it can be anywhere from a dozen to two dozen different tools to get their recruiting job done. So typically they sort of fall into sourcing tools where you might hey, we use Entelo, we use LinkedIn, we use CareerBuilder.
Colin: The screening tools is absolutely enormous. You can have companies, particularly at the enterprise level that are using two, three, four background checks, different assessments, WOTSI tools, video screening tools. We kept asking ourselves, our customers were saying, guys, we want you to do all of this, when are you going to build it all. I think just had a moment where you have to take a look at what did Apple do with the iPhone, what did obviously Benioff do with force.com. We do not need to necessarily own it all, we don't need to build it all but we do need to basically pull it all together in one core platform.
Colin: So we launched UNIFi which is really our sort of version of force.com for the talent acquisition industry. And literally we categorized about a thousand companies in the ecosystem. We just went through and figured out what everyone was doing and we sort of put them into a periodic table of elements and write, okay, these ones do sourcing and these do screening and then what we did is build API's and what's called S.D.K. software developer kits and really did the hard work over four years of reaching out and saying guys, we're one of the largest and fastest growing kind of recruitment software providers and we really want you to build off of our platform so that we can bring everything together that the customer needs in the world of recruitment.
Colin: And really happy to say that we got 600 different companies integrated in. 215 of them have formally gone through this program. I mean, literally writing their products to our API's, now beginning to use our S.D.K.'s to build a rich user experiences in the platform. It's a long winded way of coming to TextRecruit which was one of the companies that had done this. I think one of their first customers was actually an iCIMS customer in Cracker Barrel. They were able to essentially build a tool that worked really well for that customer. They built it in our marketplace, they used our API's. They kind of followed the prescription that we'd set out and then they started killing it. They were just the right player at the right time which was saying the way the candidates want to be communicated with is radically changing.
Colin: We knew we were very good and hey, it's the recruiter who wants to do the phone call, the recruiter who wants to do email. But candidates now they want to be texted and they're much more responsive to texting. They're expanding beyond text obviously into messaging, Facebook Messenger and WeChat and other mediums. And then what was really interesting is they were going even beyond that to a subset of candidates who literally just don't even necessarily want to talk to a human being.
Chad: Joel Cheesman.
Colin: They just want to go to a career site and say hey, I hope you have a bot, I want to have a discussion with the bot in order to help find jobs and learn about your company and your culture and your benefits before I even get on the phone with a recruiter.
Colin: So, we were watching them and that was the beauty of the UNIFi play is we got to watch them. They were pretty stand alone so there are some categories in our ecosystem where it's just ultra competitive. There's just so many background check providers. But TextRecruit was really unique and we thought this seems like something that almost belongs like [paz 00:14:38] infrastructure in our UNIFi program. That if we do this right, we can build it not just as a product, I mean, it is a great product but almost as paz componentry that can be extended out to any products or to anyone who wants to build a product off of our UNIFi framework.
Joel: Colin, talk about the decision to buy TextRecruit as opposed to just build a text messaging platform within iCIMS.
Colin: Sure. We do strategic planning every single year. We sit down and we take a look at just everything for the business. What markets are we going into, what geographies are we going into, what verticals. Obviously when we get to what product we try to lay out the product roadmap. I will tell you and I think it's the good thing about recruiting is we've been at this for 20 years and I could legitimately say I could probably line up at least another 10 to 20 years of things we would love to build. And so, it's just always for us going to come down to priorities.
Colin: Our biggest priority was to really continue both our TA suite and our TA platform. So we wanted to come out with the TA suite. We've been going upmarket signing larger and larger companies like now Intuit and Microsoft and Amazon. So making sure that we're building in everything at a very large scale multinational would need. So that was taking a lot of our attention, coming out with the offer product was taking a lot of attention. And then building in the UNIFi framework everything that the vendors needed to kind of start creating rich experience in our platform. So it was just one of those things that we knew we needed to do it but it was very hard to try to figure out how to de-prioritize anything on our existing list. So acquisition just made a lot of sense for us.
Colin: Culture was huge too. We were out there, we were co-selling with them. Once we saw how successful they were, we wanted to fuel and that's part of UNIFi. We put marketing resources behind these companies that are doing very well, sort of selling their wares to our customers.
Chad: So you talked about Microsoft and then it just automatically came to me, Microsoft's competition for you guys. They're creating this Dynamic 365 including talent, but yet, Microsoft from an enterprise standpoint uses the iCIMS platform, right?
Colin: They do, yeah. The classic sleeping with the enemy which we've gotten very comfortable with in this industry. I think it's the way obviously software goes particularly as you play up at the high level. So yeah, Microsoft is a customer and they are obviously working on relaunching Dynamics. Our view point is we see opportunities there. We really do think as long as we remain really, really good at what we do and sort of above some of the others, then there's typically good opportunities to play in other people's ecosystems or become part of their go to market strategy.
Colin: Honestly, Chad, the thing that we have, the benefit of being around for 20 years is we've just seen this play over and over and over where it was a bunch of point solutions fighting each other. Taleo versus Vurv versus VirtualEdge versus iCIMS. Then ADP launched the first shot. Everyone told us hey, you're dead because you just do recruiting and now this amazing sort of H.R. payroll company is going to have recruiting. I think we know over time they did not get that right. Monster, when they were the LinkedIn of industry decided that they were going to build an ATS, they just could not get it right everyone told us we were dead. The number one sourcing tool is building an ATS.
Colin: CareerBuilder bought their way in and everyone thought okay, another great job, boards getting in, that's going to kill everyone. They couldn't get it right. The list just goes on and on. I mean obviously Workday's thrown a product out there. We're not so sure they're getting it right. So I think it's a long winded way of saying, yes, the advantage is this is an enormous industry. It's a huge spent and everyone does want to get into it, but you've got to focus on it and you've got to go deep. You can't just sort of come out with an H.R. platform and say hey, we've got a basic kind of post and pray applicant tracking system and that should be good enough for you to do your job.
Joel: So what I'm hearing Colin is you're not afraid of Google. It's Past Prologue with big G. Are they not going to get a ATS right? Are they not going to get job search right because Chad and I are seeing a ton of reaction in the job board space where Google is clearly making an impact on the jobs side of the house. Are you not seeing that or fearful or see Google as a threat right now on the ATS side?
Colin: Maybe I'm a little bit of a contrarian here. I see Google as a savior. I really do. I see Google as a potential savior in the industry. From being around in 20 years there's always been two problems. Number one, candidates say, hey, finding and applying for jobs just sucks. I mean it just sucks. Sometimes the ATS gets the brunt of that because we're the end of the transaction but no one wants to talk about like hey, I started at Google, Google ignore me. They sent me off to some sort of middleman. I had to sift my way through, find this thing called Indeed, register with Indeed, put in all my data. Then it turned out that the link that Indeed had on a job was a dead link because they'd scraped it off of an ATS a week ago and they hadn't updated it even though the company had shut that job down.
Colin: So I went to that career site, started my search again, found another job and then had to basically start all over because Indeed had all my info but it wasn't transferred over. And it shouldn't necessarily be, it's just a horrible experience. And so, we are fantastically optimistic about what Google for jobs can do in terms of saying right. Let Google become the world's job boards, let them, 80% of candidates, I don't know if you guys hear a different stat but the most common I'm hearing is 80% of candidates start at Google.
Chad: It's behavior.
Colin: Yeah, it's natural behavior and Google just hasn't focused on it. They've been thinking about how do we build smart cards for restaurants and for travel and for shopping. I think the fact that they're finally turning their attention to the candidate, the job search and getting them directly to jobs is absolutely fantastic. I think we are very, very optimistic. We're working very heavily with them. We see an opportunity to do a direct connection of where the candidates starts the search to where they apply into the company. In my mind, if we can wipe out the middleman and I think that's what Google's got a long history of being able to do, we are doing something right for the candidate.
Chad: Well, and what you've seen or at least tell us a little bit about the actual attribution, so attribution. You work with a bunch of different job boards, job sites, sourcing sites, so on and so forth. Those sites are really scared what's going to happen with Google for jobs. So there's some moves that are happening out in that land per se where there's source attribution being stripped in some cases. Is that the case?
Colin: Yeah. I guess I would start off by saying that I would be afraid if I existed anywhere between the Google search and the point of application right now. I would be rethinking my model. It's pretty clear when Google came out with this and everyone sort of, are you going to embrace it, are you going to work with Google for jobs, are you going to get the jobs over to them in index and according to the data they need and the time frames they need, the algorithms they need. If you do, traffic goes up for us because we were one step away. We have the middleman in between. It spiked heavily. It went up I think about 90% the traffic for us.
Colin: What we're seeing is that the middlemen, the boards who sort of sit between the ATS and Google, if they're playing nicely with Google they're going up too to the tune of about 30, 40 percent and these are good candidates. These are candidates that as far as we can see from our data are a higher quality, which means that they stay on longer, they do apply, they have a higher application rate. What we are seeing is there are one or two out there. I think indeed being the biggest is decided not to play well and the traffic has gone down. Our data seems to show it's gone down about 30% since this.
Joel: Interesting.
Chad: Yeah, imagine that, right?
Colin: Yeah. Then last but not least we're really interested to see who's doing this, as a middleman who's opting to work with Google for jobs. There's a short term spike in traffic which obviously looks good. I think you only have to look at Indeed's clay. When they started as a company they sort of had the same thing which is hey, Monster, CareerBuilder, everyone else, let us be an aggregator, we'll get the traffic, we'll win Google SEO, we'll get the Google traffic, we'll sort of sift it over to you, you'll win until we decide not to sift it over to you. It seems like Google is playing Indeed's playbook here.
Chad: And the thing about it is when Indeed was playing their playbook, Monster and CareerBuilder could have squashed them in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, there's no way in hell Indeed is going to be able to squash Google. But that being said, going back to iCIMS and user experience, you guys have actually adopted the Google jobs API. So the job search, the Google job search within your platform. Is that a standard, is that something that one of your clients has to ask for? How does that work within your platform and why did you make the decision?
Colin: Yeah, so good question. We're treading lightly. We always believe in kind of crawl walk run. What Google did, I don't think anyone realized. They launched three things all at once which I think maybe confused the market. Like okay, Google's in but what is Google for jobs versus Google Hire, this ATS that they're putting in the G-suite versus Cloud Discovery, which seems to be this sort of AI machine learning matching engine.
Colin: It is a very cool combination but we're having to do a lot of education with our customers, that guys, this is in fact three totally different things. Google for jobs is just going to completely change how people advertise their jobs and how candidates find and apply for your jobs which we're huge fans of. The Cloud Discovery, the sort of AI job matching, we also think is very interesting.
Colin: So if you think about those two problems I was alluding to, the two biggest issues in our industry over the last 20 years. Number one, finding and applying for the job sucks and that's Google for jobs. Number two, the ATS seems to be a bit of a black hole which means that thousands of candidates can apply in but only if you're so lucky to sort of make it to the next rounds and not get the formal ding letter. You sort of feel like hey, I'm not sure what's going on.
Colin: Cloud Discovery has an opportunity to kind of do some pretty amazing things for large databases like ATS's and sort of talent CRM systems which is to surface matches much faster and much better. So on one side yes, when candidates come to our career sites, we want that to be able to be powered by Cloud Discovery so that they can get the absolute best matches. No frustration in sort of having to sift through with manual searches looking for the right jobs. But on the flip side, when the recruiters in the ATS and you might be sitting on and some of our customers quite literally are sitting on millions of candidates in their applicant tracking system. To be able to have an AI machine learning engine just immediately service up some of the more interesting matches that exist in your database is sort of like finding gold that you didn't even know you had. So we are big fans of those two things.
Colin: You start to think about, as Google comes out with more of this kind of paz componentry. So I think they think of that AI machine learning, that cloud discovery as paz componentry that can be embedded into software out there. I'm sure you guys saw the duplex.
Chad: Voice assistant.
Colin: But if you think about that, there is so much of recruiting which is very simple calls in. Hey, I'm calling in. I just wanted to know if you got my application. I wanted to know if I'm still in consideration. Begin to think about some of the really cool things that can be serviced up by some of this kind of AI machine learning paz componentry that they're building. So we're we're pretty excited. I think the big question was always great, they've come out with Google Hire so that makes it now look like competitive. So instead of these two amazing things that we want to work with, they've launched out an ATS.
Colin: In our mindset, we see ourselves as in two very, very different markets. I think iCIMS services the enterprise market. So we go from typically a company that can be about 500 employees all the way up to well north of 100,000 employees. I think Google Hire higher will be a great ATS lower end of the market. Put it in the G-suite, people that are very comfortable using sort of docs and sheets and hangouts. We've got a high degree of confidence that getting enterprise recruiting right is a huge endeavor. And so we see ourselves as kind of with Google Hire playing in two different markets.
Joel: Colin, in most technologies we see commoditization and certainly in our industry it's been similar even with the job posting market as well. Are you seeing that in the ATS market? How are you going to combat commoditization? What's sort of your take on that for the future?
Colin: It's a tough one. We've been told for, I don't know, the better, I keep getting told that I'm dying. I don't know if it's something about me but for 20 years people have loved to tell me that what I do and what my company does is dying and commoditizing and-
Chad: Is that why you cut out caffeine?
Colin: That may maybe why I cut out caffeine. We'll see if it helps. I think at the end of the day, listen, I think commoditization is the wrong word. The ATS is still fundamental, it is the fundamental building block. You cannot exist without an ATS, I'm sorry. I think people are going to say, hey, we can just build a talent CRM or whatever. That's not going to be a compliant, GDPR compliant. It's not going to interface properly with kind of the job, location, dynamics of your HCM system. It's not going to have the EEO, the OFCCP. Like all the regulatory components that you need.
Colin: The ATS is certainly not dead. I think I've heard a lot of people who want to say it's dead. It is not the sexiest part of recruiting. Recruiting has just moved on. So what you sort of believe is hey, your fundamental building block despite not being the sexiest part is the ATS. We say it's for the ABC's of recruiting. It's not sexy, the ABC's. The automation, the branding, the compliance. You got to put it in for those three reasons.
Joel: I'm not necessarily building your tombstone but we're seeing trends where smart recruiters had a free product forever then they went paid only and now they have sort of a freemium model sort of post Google Hire. We see Indeed sort of launched their own sort of free ATS, I'm sure LinkedIn. I'm not calling you dead, I'm just saying, like are you seeing, it seems to me like there's pressure on ATS now to sort of reduce the pressure, reduce the entry into their product. So you're saying you're simply not seeing that, you're not concerned about that.
Colin: No no. I would say I'm seeing it Joel. So definitely. But I think that pressure believe it or not has come from the HCM industry. That came a long time ago when ADP bought VirtualEdge and started throwing it in their bag. That then came when Ultimate built a very basic ATS and threw it in their bag. When Workday built a basic ATS and threw it in their bag. When Oracle acquired Taleo, kind of throughout the pricing sheet and said, hey, you can take it down to zero as long as we're getting some of the surround services from Oracle.
Colin: So the ATS became sort of the punching man. That is why we diversified. So it's not dead, you have to have it. It's just you can get it from low cost from just about anywhere. So obviously that's where we focus on, well guys, RTA suite has the CRM, it has the offer management. It has the onboarding, it has the entire ecosystem so that literally you'll never have to worry about integrations with background providers, assessment providers, video providers. We've done all that hard work. So, I think it's just forced us to say that the value and the innovation doesn't necessarily lie in the ATS. But what I will tell you Joel is these free ATS or these ATS that are getting thrown in by HCM systems, there is no other way to tell you, they are just bad. They're just bad systems.
Chad: They just suck.
Colin: I heard the boo, I thought I'd get a cheer for that.
Joel: All right, I'll cheer you. For your comment and for them the boo.
Colin: You can get a low cost or a free or a freemium but you're going to get what
you pay for. And so the question is do you value recruiting. So what we see is the entire market has bifurcated into two. If you value recruiting and it's quite obvious when we're meeting with customers and they say hey, we're growing rapidly, getting talent is the hardest thing, we've got to do it, then they tend to go best and breed. They will choose a sort of full TA suite. If they don't value recruiting then they're either going to go to this kind of free one coming out of their HCM provider or really out of their payroll provider or anyone else out there.
Colin: So our viewpoint is we're building the best tools for people who value recruiting. But that is not the entire marketplace. There are those who just don't.
Chad: So, we start talking about some of the sexy things that are happening out there obviously, going out and buying TextRecruit, that was sexy. We're seeing obviously finally companies starting to focus on their applicant tracking system database and being able to mine that in a very smart way obviously because companies have spent millions of dollars on creating this database that is just withering away. My question to you, knowing that Google Hire now is using the, I think they're calling it the Google Candidate Discovery kind of process, that's going to turn into an A.P.I. much like the jobs A.P.I. did. Are you working with Google or are you in the early kind of stages of working with Google and being able to help them prospectively integrate or create one of those A.P.I.'s so that iCIMS can benefit from it as well?
Colin: We're definitely looking at it. We're very interested in it. So I do think you're right, that sort of the next phase. We kind of see two next phases. One is hey, with Google for jobs programmatic advertising is going to get a hell of a lot more interesting and then number two, mining your own database particularly with what's coming out with Google but not just Google. There's a war at the highest level for AI machine learning matching engines. Amazon will have one and Google will have one and Microsoft will have on and Watson will have one. This will all just become paz componentry and you'll sort of, just like you choose right now am I going AWS or Azure, you'll choose which one that you're going to your kind of matching engine.
Colin: We're big fans of Google. We really like what they've built. I mean obviously they got a leg up because they built it for themselves and they've built it for Google for jobs. Our viewpoint is yes, we will ingest A.P.I.'s and whether it's from them or we can let the customer control. We see a day where you might be able to go to our marketplace and say what engine do you want to use to turn your talent acquisition platform into a smart talent acquisition platform. And we might have three or four options. We'll say hey, Amazon, again, they're a customer but we can be sure that they're building things in this industry too or Watson or Microsoft or Google. Sorry. I don't know if that got directly to what you were asking but we're very interested.
Joel: So Colin, you dropped some futuristic terms and we talk a lot about that on the podcast. What's your sort of sense of, in five years what does the ATS market look like. Are we looking at more consolidation, are looking at more growth, more people getting into this. What does this space look like in five years?
Colin: The interesting thing that we've taken a look at. People always assume hey, iCIMS, you're a recruiting platform so you must compete with like a Greenhouse, a Java, a Lever, SmartRecruiters. We actually internally we just don't see it that way. When we look at the data, so we can take a look at our market, the enterprise market. When you take a look at the enterprise market the top five players are, there are four HCMs and iCIMS. And then in the majors, so what most people call the low enterprise mid-market. And then in the high end of the enterprise it's four HCMs and iCIMS.
Colin: The point that we're trying to make is at the enterprise side of the market there's a war where people are saying like if I value recruitment hopefully we'll go with an iCIMS. If I don't value recruitment we might take the throw in that our CTO has negotiated in the workday contract. So I think you'll still see this classic kind of full suite versus HCM battle and I think it's or viewpoint to out-innovate them and continue to show that recruiting is just too damn important to break. It can't be the worst part of your offering. It's the front of the funnel. I mean who cares what your payroll system is if you've got the worst recruiting software.
Colin: I think that's number one. I think the second trend that you'll see and you're already seeing it is the low end of the market's going to get decimated. Literally, the second Google announced, every single recruiting competitor we saw put out press release like we're going enterprise.
Chad: Run to the hills, run to the hills.
Colin: It took us 10 years to even start to get somewhat good at the enterprise market so I don't think a press release necessarily should be the thing that announces it. I think you will see at the low end there's just so many options. I mean there really are. At the very low end you don't even need an ATS. Just go get a zip recruiter and have them blast you candidates and like put in a spreadsheet. Maybe you'll get it out your payroll company, something very basic out of a paycheck, a pay com, a Paycom, a Paylocity. You'll get it out of the Levers, the Greenhouses etc.
Colin: It really is at the high end. And so again, I just think you'll see this, there's just a myriad of offerings and many of them are free. But at the high end I still think it is a value play. You just can't afford to break recruiting if you're an enterprise organization.
Joel: So speaking of the future, when are you guys going to file for I.P.O.?
Colin: We get asked all the time. I think the beauty of our company is it's all organic. So I'll give a little bit of explanation to that. We do have an investor but it was all liquidity secondary. So we always like to say that everything we've built in the company came from the company's money. We're not a classic raise money, burn it as fast as you can in marketing and sales grow as fast as you can. Run out of money and then go public when you're out of money. We've done it all by ourselves. We've never spent anyone else's money and we're very profitable. We're buying companies through profitability right now.
Colin: So there isn't a huge need to go out for public market money and I gotta say sometimes just being under the radar and private thinking about the long term and not necessarily kind of quarterly results just seems like the way to go right now.
Joel: So you're saying there's a chance.
Colin: My favorite Dumb and Dumber quote.
Joel: I had to throw that one in because you are talking to Chad and Cheese.
Chad: So Colin, we appreciate you taking all the time this morning to talk to us. I have to say in working with iCIMS since I think like around 2004, so you guys have been incredibly easy to work with, probably one of the easiest organizations to work with when working with talent acquisition and technologies. But we appreciate you coming on and sharing your story and definitely would love to have you again.
Colin: It's been my pleasure. I'd love to come again.
Joel: Thanks Colin.
Colin: All right. It's a pleasure. Thank you guys.
Joel: Remember to visit uncommon.co.
Chad: Where the candidate model doesn't suck. Right now Uncommon only charges $14.95 per interested and qualified candidate. Plus, if you're into volume and I know you're into volume, there are bigger discounts.
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Chad: Uncommon.co, do it.
Chad: Thanks to our partners at Tatech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Remember to visit tatech.org.
Chad: This has been the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome.