Indeed keeps building-up that moat against Google, but the latest acquisition of Resume.com has the boys shaking their heads. Plus...
Enjoy, and show sponsors Sovren, JobAdX and America's Job Exchange some love.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
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, splash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel: Summer's here, and the time is right for podcasting in the streets. See what I did there? Welcome to The Chad & Cheese show, HR's most dangerous podcast, I'm Joel Cheesman.
Chad: And I am Chad Sowash.
Joel: On this week's show, the Indeed mote gets a wee bit bigger. Someone swiped right on Dice's parent company, and Wal-Mart is sending the blue vests to school. It's gonna be a hot one. Stay tuned.
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Chad: It acts like a human; it can even tell you what your favorite drink is.
Joel: We laughed about the Sovren ad before the show, thinking it's our shortest add. It's basically, everyone uses us, S, O, V, R, E, N dot com. Thank you.
Joel: AI, all the buzz words, S, O, V, R, E, N dot com. Let's get to shout-outs.
Chad: Dude, first, I've gotta stretch here for a minute. Getting ready for a three week family vacation in Europe in June.
Joel: And I'm clapping because I don't have to deal with you for three weeks while you're in Europe because your wife has read the riot act that if you contact me at all, your ass is grass pretty much.
Chad: Yeah, I think I might be able to throw a few Facebook messages over to you or something like that, but that being said, we do have a killer line-up of podcasts coming up in June, so that's where I wanna start my shout-outs because, first and foremost Colin Day, CEO, founder, chairman extraordinaire of iCIMS is going to be on the uncommon exclusive in June.
Joel: It's a great interview if that's enough of it to use, but it was good.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: He's very honest, which is nice.
Chad: Oh, dude, you cannot get a CEO who can be that honest. I love the interview. Anoop Gupta, this dude has a crazy amazing background. He actually reported directly to Bill
Gates.
Joel: Yeah, he rose the IQ level on this show by about three X, easy.
Chad: Yeah, knowing that, we take it in the negatives. Elena Valentine--let me get that right--CEO of SkillScout, and I'm actually wearing her shirt right now. She was a real groovy, funky interview. It was a good time in Nashville.
Joel: Co-founder, right?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: She's Co-founder.
Chad: and CEO
Joel: To a woman named Cheesman, by the way, I just had to put that in there.
Chad: Yeah, so Elena and I, we are the other halves of the Cheesman group. Not too bad I guess.
Joel: That's cute.
Chad: James Ellis AKA Talent Cast Podcast. We actually had a great time talking about employer branding, tech, all this shit that we're hearing about tech stacks and shit like that, so he was fun.
Joel: Another overly honest guest on the show.
Chad: Love overly honest guests, and this next guy, Dan Sirk, who's the CMO over at Kununu, that's one of the companies that you really wanted to interview.
Joel: Yup, yup. That was interesting as well. They're making headway here in the States doing a lot of cool stuff on the employment branding side.
Chad: Yup. Last but not least, you're not gonna wanna miss the firing squad this month. Great firing squad, great young company, and it is a Talroo exclusive.
Joel: It is a Talroo exclusive. I'll send out a shout-out to Kaia Pesano, I'm saying that wrong for sure, but she is the content person at Smart Recruiters, who we know and love. She quoted me for a story, which was pretty interesting about American Apparel. If you know anything about them, they have a real sleazy former CEO, barely legal advertising campaigns. The story was, can they come back from that horrible brand and come back from the dead and be successful? So, shout-out to her for the story as well as quoting me for the story. I appreciate that.
Chad: Yeah. I would say you should appreciate that.
Joel: Yep, yep. I also got Russ Herl -- I think I did say that one right -- Fan of the show; he's a Google guy at the higher API cloud component, big fan of the show. Appreciate you, Russ. And my final shout-out this week goes to a former classmate in college. This is a non-recruitment shout-out because we like to educate on more than just employment. Shout-out to Tiffany Anton. Tiffany is a sex therapist, and she just launched a podcast. Came to me for some advice, not sexual but podcast.
Chad: Duh.
Joel: And so, it's called Tiffany, Turned On. So, if you're interested in this topic, go check that out. I've listened to a few episodes. Pretty intriguing stuff, so Tiffany, shout-out to you.
Chad: Joel is now the number one subscriber to that podcast.
Joel: Hey, a lot more people are listening to her topic than our topic.
Chad: I'm sure. No, I'm sure.
Joel: She'll have more listeners by the end of today than we have in a year and a half.
Chad: Yeah, instead of HR's most dangerous podcast, it'll be HR, Turned On.
Joel: We could have her on the show.
Chad: Exactly. We could do the show, HR, Turned On; that would be awesome.
Joel: All right. Are we done with shout-outs?
Chad: Yes. Topics.
Joel: Big news: Dice. How often do we start the show off with Dice? Wow. Well, they sold off one of their shitty job boards that they've been trying to sell off.
Chad: HCareers?
Joel: HCareers, hospitality careers. A hot sector. You're intrigued by who they sold it to: your cousin, Virgil.
Chad: Yeah, my cousin, Virgil, actually bought it. I thought it was interesting. I'd never heard of Virgil Holdings. I had no clue who this entity was. And then found they had a career site, virgilcareers.com, and it was interesting and interesting from the standpoint of, it really at this point is just a shell.
Chad: So, it has like six jobs on a ... Four of those jobs are pretty high level jobs for Virgil Careers, so they're eating their own dog food; that's awesome, but yeah, there's career pathing elements and some of those video elements, which from UX standpoints looks pretty cool.
Joel: It's like career assessments, so you're out of school; you're in school; what the hell am I gonna do with my life? You go to Virgil I'm sure. I hope to God Virgil turns into HCareers because Virgil is a horrible brand. So, you go there, you do this assessment, you pay for it, so I'm assuming that now they have a database of people to sell this assessment to, now they have jobs that they can get traffic to get people to take the assessments. So, I'm sure at the bargain basement price that they got this thing for that it was a good deal for them, and they'll do well with it.
Joel: My comment was that this space is changing so fast. We've talked about Snap before and interviewed him with their gig-economy work for multiple gigs. So, to me this whole hospitality, restaurant. This whole sector is going gig, so how Virgil reacts to that or does it with TaskRabbit and Shiftgig and all those guys. To me a job board for hospitality careers is sort of passe to say the least.
Chad: We spoke with Doug; I think it's Doug Johnson at Jobalign, and that is more of one of the high volume types of platforms, and we talked to them about some of the hospitality side as well, and again, that is more, I think, of a fashion forward type of a platform versus what we're seeing at the Virgil Careers. It doesn't see kind of a decade old or so. It looks nice; it's got a nice little UX on in, but still, that doesn't mean it's gonna get used.
Joel: Yeah, and I'd like to say that we'll keep our eye on this, and we'll update our listeners to what happens, but we probably won't.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: This thing'll probably just fade to black, and we'll be done. However, Dice also in the news--probably more exciting for their shareholders--A letter came out late last week about a hedge fund that has a 10% stake in the company, and they apparently have written a letter saying that there is an intent there to buy the company. What does that mean for the company that has been trying to sell itself since 2016? I guess that's good news.
Joel: If you bought in at $1.25 at the beginning of this month, your stocks are now worth $2 and 30-something cents as of today I would believe, so you've made a killing, and it looks like someone's finally going to buy Dice.
Chad: Yeah. You've upgraded the junk stock that you bought. I think it'll be interesting, though, for individuals who are working for Dice now knowing that a hedge fund could actually come in and buy them. I mean, at this point I would be looking for that eject button on my desk.
Joel: Yes. If you're at Dice, working at Dice, DHI, you have a new CEO, who I assume is making changes. You have companies being sold off; you have a hedge fund potentially coming into the mix. And from what I know Dice has a really good culture. They're sort of Midwest; they're based in Iowa; they have this Midwest values vibe. That could all go away really quickly with this buyer, so don't get too excited yet.
Chad: Yeah, we saw that with CareerBuilder, but take a look at what they're doing, though. They're chunking off, obviously, these different pieces, parts, and they're selling them off, which they said they were gonna do, so good on the new CEO to actually get that done.
Joel: Yeah. If he sells this thing, which I'm sure was in ... This has been a long process, selling this thing. And it probably took the stock getting down to a dollar basically before someone actually came in and showed interest, but yeah, we've been talking to Dice for a while. They're an old player. Looks like changes are coming for them just like it did at Monster and CareerBuilder.
Chad: Agreed, agreed.
Joel: All right, lawsuits, one of our favorite topics. Facebook is in trouble for, I don't know what you'd call it, racism or prejudice in advertising ...
Chad: Ageism.
Joel: I don't know. This is one of your hot buttons.
Chad: Yeah. I think that Cambridge Analytica is really screwing with everybody's minds at this point, which I understand. I mean, the optics behind that and how you can use data perspectively to do different things, but in this case, I think it's something that we have to step back, and we have to better understand as an industry.
Chad: So, the actual article actually said the Communications Workers of America is suing on behalf of union members and other job seekers who allegedly missed out on employment opportunities because companies used Facebook ad tools to target people of other ages, okay?
Chad: So, let's break this down real quick, and let's understand this is not Facebook's fault, okay? This is on the actual company who is using that targetability within the actual platform itself to look for younger workers. They need to be more diverse. Totally understand that, but if you think about it, companies who are heavy, and there are some very large companies who are heavy in college recruitments and being able to pull college graduates into full time positions. We don't look at them any different, right? But do you think we're gonna find old white men on college campuses? No, we don't, and that's how we've done things forever, and this is the same thing. It's just ... We're blaming the tool as opposed to the individual actually using the tool.
Joel: I mean, if anybody should be in trouble, it's the companies, I guess. It's definitely not Facebook's fault. You mentioned job fairs, right? If you go to a college job fair, there aren't gonna be 80-year-olds looking for work at the college job fair. They're gonna be young people looking for jobs.
Joel: If you advertise in an African American magazine or a women-centric magazine, you're targeting that demographic. This has been going on forever.
Chad: It's no different.
Joel: I'm not sure why, unless they think it's just gonna be an easy buck to put Facebook in the headlines about a lawsuit, that Facebook should be in trouble there. I think if you have a company that you suspect is only targeting young people, you can audit their advertising and say, okay, why was your ad dollar on Facebook only towards people that were 25 and younger?
Chad: This is a deeper rooted issue than just somebody using Facebook. Again, Facebook is one tool. If you're just using these other vehicles that are focused on specific demographics, and you're not being more diverse ... This is not a Facebook issue, although, from my understanding, Facebook might also be looked at by the EEOC for these same types of recruiting tactics, so using their own tool to be able to target more of a younger crowd. So at the end of the day, it might be Facebook's fault but not because of the tool.
Joel: Yeah. I agree. I think this ageism is a real thing.
Chad: It is.
Joel: I really do believe that companies are laying off people over 40 because they're too expensive, and they could get the same work cheaper. Now, I think long term, a lot of it's gonna be contract. So, whether you're 40 or 20, if you can do the work, we'll contract out. I just think when you have full-time employees it becomes really hard to justify paying them twice as much when you get two people that are more tech savvy, maybe, or have newer skills to do that. So, it's a real problem. I'm not sure how it works out, but I wouldn't blame Facebook for the issue.
Chad: No. Well, and there are some people who are quote, unquote, "over-qualified", who will take those positions maybe because they wanna scale down, and they don't want to big responsibility of the bigger salary and/or positions of having a ton of director reports. Who knows? There are different reasons. If you're actually filtering them out because of that, that's wrong too.
Joel: Yeah. A lot of companies do the opposite; they'll hire more experienced workers to do more experienced jobs or come in for train- You know, whatever the job may be, just like on your side, you see veterans, right? There are companies that just are committed to veteran hiring, and that's what they do although a lot of companies shy away from that, a lot of companies don't just like with older workers.
Chad: What it comes down to, talent acquisition and anybody out there who's in the vendor space, it's not about the tool; it's about the process; it's about the intent. And I see the EEOC and perspectively OFCCP down the road, using this date to be able to prove that your practices, your practices, not Facebook's tools, your practices are the reasons why you have the workforce that you have, which is not a diversified workforce.
Joel: Yeah. So, if you or your agency are targeting ads on Facebook towards a certain age or race or any of those things that'll get you in trouble, you better make sure there's some diversity there that you can prove, yes, we did target them, but we also targeted a diverse candidate pool, or else you could get in trouble.
Chad: Oh, yeah, and what do you expect a company to do if we've got nothing but old white dudes programming or doing a specific job, right? You have to be able to build for the future, and you have to be able to diversify, so if I am, I look at my current talent pool population, and I want to be able to diversity that. Well, how in the hell am I gonna do that just by sending it out generally to everybody. And as you'd said before, there are job boards that are specific to just women, job boards that are specific to just black female engineers, right? This is the same exact thing. Companies are trying to diversify their talent population, their talent pool, and this is how they do it.
Chad: Now, here's the key, though. Don't trip yourself up by getting too much of that talent in one place and not diversifying; that's the big key.
Joel: And speaking of diversity and tools, let's here from AJE, which ... What a great segue to our sponsor that covers this just sort of thing, right?
Chad: That's exactly right.
AJE: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our 10th year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our 1,000 plus customers 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.
AJE: Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com.
Chad: Yeah, Gary Cowan over there at AJE, that's the guy who actually used to work with the OPCCP. You need to have experts that you can reach out to when you have these types of questions. When you have an oh shit, moment, who the hell do you reach out to? That's why you wanna be able to engage with an organization like AJE because they have the Gary Callens of the world, who are experts and have great experience in this.
Joel: Yeah, it's a complicated world. The Europeans aren't making it any easier with GDPR, which we'll talk a little bit later, but yeah, governments are getting a little bit squirrely, and you need to be prepared for it as an employer.
Joel: Speaking of feeling a little squirrely, Indeed buys Resume.com this week.
Chad: Huh. Yeah. So, we talk about building a fortification, right? And dude's gonna build there, and this feels like they're building it a pebble at a time, doesn't it?
Joel: Well, okay, for those who don't listen regularly, Indeed and their parent company, Recruit Holdings, have been on an acquisition buying spree lately. Workopolis, in Canada they bought recently. Before that, Simply Hired, they sort of gobbled up, Glassdoor, which was huge. If you haven't heard that podcast, go back and listen to that one. This is just another acquisition, and both of us I believe feel strongly that this is a reaction to Google for jobs, inch by inch killing their business or gobbling up their market share, and this is a way to sort of, let's buy a bunch of stuff; let's get a lot of friends to fight the bully on the playground, and hopefully it'll work out for us.
Chad: Well, what does this do? What does this do for them though? That's my question.
Joel: Well, okay. So, Google has yet to do resumes really, right?
Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Joel: So, to me it's like ... So, it's a good URL. I don't think we can debate that. Resume.com is a pretty good URL.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: According to the news that I read, they're getting 40,000 resumes weekly. So, if your thought is, okay, Google will eventually have a resume component to their Google hire employment system platform, which I think we agree they will. They can't have an ATS really without that. Then you're looking at this going, holy crap, what if Google is the platform for posting a resume, and they're not gonna come and post a resume on our site? Or Glassdoor or any of our other parent sites, but if we have this thing called Resume.com we could brand that thing as the central resume platform to combat both LinkedIn as well as Google. That's the only thing that I can come up with. If you got something better, I'm open to it.
Chad: Yeah. I mean, again, I see that not as a long term strategy because if Google starts to pull resumes in, it's what they do; they index, and they already have so much data as it is. I'm wondering if part of this is not a short term play for just adding revenue and perspectively exploding revenue around the job seeker side of the house and actually building resumes and charging for the build of resumes. Monster does it, and that's something that they're promoting now on some of their little 15-second funny ass videos. But 40,000 a week, I wonder how much they have to pay for that kind of traffic because that's not happening organically; there's no way.
Joel: Well, I'd have to do keyword research, but I'm sure a lot of people are searching resume writing tips, resume writing, how to write a resume, and they probably have pretty good rankings for that stuff, and those are also searches that aren't related to job search, so that is a way to flank Google searches that are job related to get traffic to your site for resume writing traffic.
Joel: I also think if Google is interested in going in and scraping or getting profiles from sites, if this was a potential site that Google was gonna rely on to get resumes, Indeed just cut that off. So, it is a source of ... Google could've gotten resumes that they won't have anymore.
Chad: So, building that mote around these resumes, but still, there are so many goddamn resumes out there as it is, not to mention, I wonder how much information Google has from LinkedIn.
Joel: Yeah. It's speculation from us at this point.
Chad: It is. It is. I gotta say, man, they're making the buys, the Workopolis, I mean, yeah, it's Canada. Glassdoor, that's big, no question. It's just, this one was really interesting because I just don't see much there.
Joel: So, not interesting but a little bit intriguing?
Chad: Yes.
Joel: Okay. Yeah, I mean, maybe they know something we don't, what Google's gonna do. This was maybe a smart move to outflank them on that. I guess we'll have to see. But yeah, I love the acquisition binge. I can't wait to see who they're gonna gobble up next.
Chad: I enjoy it too. I enjoy it too. I'd like to see them take somebody bigger though. Again, I really would. I'd like to see them ... The Glassdoor thing was really cool. I see that again; we were talking about StepStone Universum; that's almost like a parallel, but being able to go further. What's next? And this, to me, was just like, hmm, okay, yeah, whatever, what's next?
Joel: I am also hearing a lot of people in the practitioner space more so than usual talk about Indeed face to face meetings. So, they're building a more personable face to face thing I think, and they think that's probably another way to counteract Google's technology face. I don't know if you're hearing the same thing.
Chad: I've actually heard from some salespeople that, that's being forced, that the actual in-person meetings, they're starting to really ramp those up and force that to happen, which I don't see as a bad thing, although, from an overhead standpoint, again, it's one of those things. I agree; you have to be in front of the customer, but if they're not qualified and ready, then what are you doing other than wasting overhead?
Joel: Totally, and you look at going, you know, back to the future. I mean, back when Indeed started, it was very in vogue to have face to face meetings locally with people.
Chad: Didn't happen.
Joel: And you had local job boards all over the place, and of course, the recession happened, which doesn't help, but that model is incredibly expensive. You gotta pay for people, and they're out of the office and blah, blah, blah. Indeed succeeded because they were tech focused. All their call centers were out of one place. They did lean and mean, so it's sort of ironic that they're becoming what they killed 10 years ago by becoming a heavy focused face to face expensive organization to combat Google.
Chad: And CareerBuilder is going the entire opposite direction. They're not doing face to face. It's one of those things where we're seeing with Apollo, they're squeezing, right? They're squeezing as much as they possibly can, and it looks like Indeed's doing everything they can to spend money, so good for them. Let's see how that works for them.
Joel: Yeah, and they've spent a lot of time pissing off a lot of employers over the years, which, let's be honest, they've had really aggressive salespeople that have ... There's a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths, so hopefully for their sake, they can smooth that over and make nice, but at the end of the day people want results. The bottom line is important, so I'm not sure how important face to face meetings are when it comes to dollars and actual results.
Chad: Yeah. I just don't see the nice as a part of Indeed DNA.
Joel: Yeah. I agree. Their DNA is tech, and they've done that really well, so ...
Joel: Well, another company that they probably won't be buying is in the news. One of your favorites: ZipRecruiter. Tell us what they've done.
Chad: Yeah. I mean, they're expanding; they're actually ... They've had an R&D team in Tel Aviv, which I think is probably bigger than some of the bigger names that we know that are actually out there that are actually focused on machine learning, AI, and doing what they do incredibly well, doing it better, right?
Chad: So, they're expanding, new location in Tel Aviv, and I think this is really just a shot across the bow to everybody: Indeed, Careerbuilder, Monster. It's like, look guys, we're takin' this shit serious; we're not ... We're hunkering down, and we are putting money into our R&D. And again, going back to Careerbuilder, I hate to make Careerbuilder my whipping boy for this.
Joel: That's okay.
Chad: From my understanding and talking to some of their engineers, that group is shrinking dramatically on the R&D side, so again, to see Zip do something like this and to really show strength, I think is pretty frickin' awesome, and they are investing in the future. That is cool.
Joel: Yeah. I mean, where so many companies in our space are lookin' to get sold or scratchin' back from the depths of hell, whether it's stock price or just market share. Zip is one of the wild cards to me. I mean, they're sort of stand-alone. They've only made one acquisition that I can think of, which was JobBoard.io. They haven't done anything since then, but they continue to be a force. Traditional marketing, they crush it globally.
Joel: I don't think they have a real huge presence. We do believe they made a play for the Workopolis deal in Canada, so yeah, I think it's awesome. ZipRecruiter could be that underdog that we don't really pay attention to that really comes out swingin' and makes a lot of waves, and this move to me also says, yeah, we're not goin' away, in fact, we're bigger and better than we were yesterday, and this is a show of strength on a global scale to Indeed and everybody else.
Chad: So, how big to you think Monster's R&D team is? Do you think it's as big as Zip's, or do you think it's smaller?
Joel: Right now, it's smaller I would say for sure.
Chad: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think Monster. I think CareerBuilder, a lot of the names that are out there; they are not really building for the future like Zip is building for the future. Now, don't get me wrong. I know that they do have R&D out there, and they're trying to stitch together some of the technologies that they've acquired over the years, but this is something entirely different, and I think this is cool.
Joel: Yeah, and it's also interesting because Zip has traditionally been a online job add, right?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: It's sort of ... It's lowest common denominator; it's your service provider; it's your retail space, and so, to have an R&D tells me that they have a bigger vision for what they're going to be than just an SMB or your local mom and pop hiring solution.
Chad: Yeah, there's no question there.
Joel: All right. Well, let's take a quick break and hear something from JobAdX, speaking of high-tech, and when we come back we'll talk Wal-Mart, Google, Alexa SEEK, and GDPR.
Chad: Rapid fire.
JobAdX: How many times has someone said to you, "We're 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 is Google AdSense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, persistent, and smarter ad unit for job related advertising. As the best job tool in the industry JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs and staffing firms, real time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first, truly responsive tool. All of this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click, or application. We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We're not set in regret.
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JobAdX: JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX was just launched in the UK too.
Chad: So, does that mean, every time they launch in a new country they're going to have a new accent? I think that's what they're saying. I think that's ... We're getting set up for all of these new accents.
Joel: We have to push 'em on that. Yeah. Totally. Totally. I want some eh's when they're in Canada. Yeah, I definitely want a little French thing going on when they go to a French ... Ze Germans.
Joel: All right, Dude, we haven't had it in a while, but let's do a little ... Little rapid fire and get on with our lives.
Joel: Wal-Mart is paying for college for their workers for a dollar a month that a worker has to pay, which I guess you have enough workers that Wal-Mart has, that can be a little bit of money, but they have three colleges, one that I knew of. The others are online based colleges, so you can get your college education by working at Wal-Mart, which I think we both agree is a great retention and recruiting tool.
Chad: Yes. Amazing for attraction; amazing for retention, and if you're looking for ... I mean, it's a big brand, and for a company to say that they care about your career, no matter where you start ... I think this is incredibly smart. We talked about it last week. This is a strategy every company needs to take a look at, and they need to add more to it, but this is a great start, I think, for Wal-Mart.
Joel: Don't you just love the warmer and fuzzier Wal-Mart? 20 years ago Wal-Mart was going to destroy the country, and put every little mom and pop out of business, and just kill everything, and then Amazon came along, and now Wal-mart is the underdog. Paying for college, and increasing minimum wages, and giving maternity leave and all that good stuff, so good for you, Wal-Mart. Keep it up.
Chad: Yay, Wal-mart.
Joel: Let's talk about Google, one of your favorite companies and topics, voice assistance. You're really bullish on Google in this aspect.
Chad: Yeah, so Alexa was kicking ass and taking names, right? On the Amazon side, but Google last quarter shipped 3.2 million Google Homes and/or the new mini speakers that they have versus Amazon shipping 2.5 million Echos, so we talked about this. We've talked about really how Google just takes a market, so first off, obviously, there was the iPhone, and then Google came out and said, we can do that better. We're gonna do the software; we're gonna be on more phones, and now they're killing, obviously, IOS with Android. That's exactly what's happening here, not to mention, foreshadowing Duplex, right? We talked about Duplex and being able to use it as your actual assistant. This is cool shit. It really is, and somewhere that Alexa hasn't gone yet.
Joel: Yeah. Duplex, which we talked about ... By the way, our interview with Seekout was interesting because he had some thoughts on Duplex that were sort of negative, but yeah, the day where we just have conversations and not just order this thing to do something, Google, I think is probably way ahead of the game in that. And also, I bet the story didn't mention much about Siri and HomePod, but Apple is way behind in terms of people using it or buying it. And part of that is because it's like a $350 device when everything else is under 100 bucks now, so I assume that will change.
Joel: But yeah, this whole voice assistant thing, it's evolving quite interestingly. I don't know how it's gonna impact our industry. We've had Tim Sackett on, talked about, hey, find me a PHP developer within 10 miles of me and set up some interviews for next week, not like that will happen. We're not there yet, but how this will affect recruiting and employment ... You know, we'll see, but it will be interesting.
Chad: There are many companies in our space right now that are specifically focused on the formula to create a solution to this for recruiting. I know that for a fact.
Joel: Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of my predictions was that this voice assistant thing will happen this year. We'll start seeing seeds planted for voice assistant recruiting.
Chad: Yup.
Joel: VAR. I just made it up; there ya go.
Joel: SEEK out of Australia versus Indeed; you like this story that came out this week.
Chad: Yeah. It's interesting because we always talk about Indeed building a mote, right? Well, SEEK has been building a mote for a hell of a lot longer than Indeed has. I mean, SEEK didn't take ... They didn't play the game with Indeed like everybody else did. They focused on their own little island, pun intended ...
Joel: Boo.
Chad: ... And they've been doing business differently, so in this case, we're taking a look at the Indeed interview assessments piece versus SEEK putting money into Vervoe, who is actually our first firing squad, and I think that is incredibly interesting because in going down parallel lines I see with two entirely different types of technologies.
Joel: Yeah, and you look at voice from a job seeker's perspective. How soon before you have your resume on Google, and you see an ad for a company you wanna work for, and you say, hey, Google, send my resume to ABC Inc., and that's your resume. To me that could be a future that happens. I think the Vervoe side of it with the automated video interviewing stuff, that's definitely interesting.
Joel: Whereas Indeed tends to be sort of old school with their resumes, which a lot of people support as well. A lot of people say, don't change the resume. I'm probably one of 'em. I mean, we both are bearish on video resumes. No one's gonna sit through a three minute video, maybe a six second video, like Snapchat or something like that, but yeah. I do love the fact that SEEK turned off Indeed early on. Craigslist was smart enough to do that as well. I did not know that, so good on SEEK for having the wherewithal and the knowledge and the vision to shut off the aggregators early on and keep that mote in Australia strong.
Chad: Yep, and it's good to see Vervoe, I mean, a startup holding hands, I guess you could say, with big brother SEEK and being able to build that interviewing type of technology. It's not just video, I mean, they're tests. It's a pretty deep kind of a platform that I think, like you'd said, you could perspectively use one day with voice assistant as, you know, the voice assistant is actually asking you questions, and you're answering it, it's going into the system, which is really cool.
Joel: Yep. Lastly GDPR, which, have we talked about on this show yet? I don't know.
Chad: In passing, I think. Yeah, Facebook and Google, I mean, they got nailed with lawsuits on the very first day--go figure--which accuses both companies of coercing users into sharing personal data. Now, Facebook was a hit with 3.9 billion, Google with 3.7, so right now Facebook is leading Google in the lawsuit side of GDPR.
Joel: To me GDPR is a total big company money grab. I got so many e-mails, and I'm sure you did too last week ...
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: ... About our new privacy policy. We're GDPR compliant, and these are pretty small American based businesses. Europe is not going to come after those companies; they're gonna go after the big guys that can write big checks really quickly to get the European Union off their backs.
Chad: Because it's resources.
Joel: And this exemplifies exactly what I knew what gonna happen.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: Everybody that's a big company is gonna get pinched.
Chad: So, I'm mean, the resources that the EU has to actually enforce this, is spread amongst all of the EU. It's not just one force, and they're trying to sew this together, so yeah. They're not gonna have the resources to go after everybody. They're going to focus on the big names where they see they can perspectively get those big winds, and that's where it's really gonna sit to be quite frank, but yeah. I agree.
Joel: Yeah. They might go after a small company just to keep people honest and scare people, but your odds of that are very, very small. And if it happens, it could happen in our space because a lot of resumes are out there that are really old, and so if it does happen, it could be our space that sees a little bit of pinching by the EU.
Chad: It could. It could.
Joel: Are we out?
Chad: We're out.
Joel: We out. You have a show next week, right, and then you're done? So, I don't wanna say goodbye if you're here next week too, right?
Chad: No, I'm not. I'm not here next week.
Joel: Oh, so you're gone.
Chad: I'm gone.
Joel: All right, Dude. Have fun in Europe. I'll have fun holding down the fort.
Chad: Enjoy.
Joel: We out.
Chad: Later.
Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristan, thanks for listening to my stepdad, the Chad, and his goofy friend, Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss out on all the knowledge droppin' that's happenin' up in here.
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