This week, Google keeps googling, Juju (who? who?) pulls the ripcord on Glidepath and rumors are swirling around Snag.co (better known as Snagajob). And the funding keeps flowing. Enjoy and show our sponsors some love: America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX.
Transcription
Where's Chad? Welcome to another solo effort by yours truly. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman. This week, Google keeps Googling. Juju, or is that Huhu, pulls the ripcord and rumors are swirling around Snag, better known as Snag a Job for a lot of you. Let's dance after a word from one of our amazing sponsors, of course.
Well, for those of you who like the solo team Cheese podcast, you'll be disappointed to know that this is the final episode of this show. Chad, Clark, Rusty, Ellen, and the rest of the crew are gonna be back from Europe, hopefully, for a show next week. So yeah, if you hate the solo show, though, then this is the last one that you have to deal with. And I apologize for sucking, if I sucked.
Let's get to shout-outs real quick. Tara Carbert, hopefully I'm saying that right, it's not Carbert or something, Minneapolis recruiter, loves the show. Tara, thanks for listening. Adam Bogart, a recruiter from Apple living in Portland, Oregon, loves the show. Adam, thanks for tuning in. A couple Chicago dudes, Reagan Crawford and Chuck Loher, hopefully I'm saying that correctly, are fans of the show. Those guys are also former CareerBuilder guys, so it's amazing when you talk about sexual harassment lawsuits, how some of the CareerBuilder folks come out of the woodwork.
If you haven't listened to that show I encourage you to do so. That was last week, I think, in the archives. Shout-out to Stephen Rothberg, college recruiter guy. He's just really funny. He sends emails and Tweets and all kinds of stuff that are funny. His latest Tweet was something about Chad going into ... I don't know, living in some convent in Europe instead of coming home, or that somehow I have had him kidnapped in some Mission Impossible flick over in London or something. So anyway, shout-out to Stephen, I appreciate the comedy, and we appreciate the listenership. Lastly, shout-out to Chad's liver. Dude is in Facebook posting more pictures of beer and alcohol than really should be allowed by someone his age. A lot more pictures of beer than family, wife, etc. so I can only hope that his liver makes it back from the Old Country. Shout-out to Chad's liver.
All right, let's get to the abbreviated, efficient show. Well, Google Hire this week had a nice little announcement. They announced three new enhancements to their Google Hire product. For those of you who don't know, Google Hire is sort of their ATS solution. They are expanding it a little bit, bit by bit, as evidenced by the news from this week. So they launched three new features to their Hire/ATS product. One is smart interview scheduling. Essentially, you can easily schedule interviews with a candidate as well as the person on your team who will be doing the interviewing. They also allow, launched a click-to-call solution. So instead of looking up phone numbers or getting out your phone, you can just sort of click and call anyone on your candidate list.
They also launched auto highlighting of resume keywords. Some of the studying that they've done, research they've done with users is that recruiters were spending a lot of time clicking control-F, which allows you to search basically your screen, and searching keywords or highlighting keywords. So they've launched an auto solution to highlight the keywords that you're searching, which, these are all pretty small little iterations to the product. And in fact, one of my friends in the industry, when I posted this, just posted a bunch of Zs as if he was going to sleep. Tech Crunch, who covered the story as well, said something around ... something along the lines of "This wasn't going to be a game-changer or anything that was all that exciting."
Overall, I would agree with that, but I think there are two particular reasons why I think this stuff matters. Number one, first and foremost is, Google actually cares about this stuff. For those of us who are old enough to remember Google Base, when Google just sort of threw up a Craigslist type classified site up in the mid-'00s, they didn't do anything with it. They sort of threw it out there, I think they put a search box in the search results at one point, but there really was no effort to iterate the product, enhance it, evolve it. And Google clearly cares about employment. They launched three products in the last 12 months, Job Search, Job Search API, and then the Hire product. And they continue to iterate, they continue to ... I mean, there's outreach on this stuff. They're talking to bloggers and podcasters and press. They're giving firsthand looks, they're doing interviews, they're doing conferences.
Google really cares about this stuff, so I expect, although the steps are small maybe, for a lot of people, that this stuff is going to continue to evolve and continue to be a force in the recruitment space. Number two, why I think this continues to be important, is that Google has some mad awesome AI tools. And even if you don't like the AI solutions that they have, it's the best out there, or at least on par with the best out there. And I can only imagine the executives at ZipRecruiter or Indeed or anyone that's competing in this space just gritting their teeth, thinking how jealous they are about not having the AI resources that a Google has. And they will continue to be able to scale AI in a real way, not only on the recruiting side of the house, but also everything else that you buy that's Google, whether it's Android phone or Google Home. This stuff is going to be a juggernaut, and most companies in our space will not be able to compete on an AI level.
I will remind you of Google Duplex. We did a show about that a while ago. Basically, Google has a AI tool that will talk to people on telephone and it sounds like a person. It sounds like you're talking to a real live, flesh-and-blood, carbon-based being. And when you talk about putting these interviewing ... scheduling interviews and whatnot, and wrapping that into an actual voice assistant that sounds like a real person, then this stuff starts becoming really, really amazing. And I think that's where Google is going with this.
So it's a bit of a snoozer, I guess, for those that expect the moonshots from someone like Google, but I think this is the continuing, soldiering on of Google sort of owning a big piece of employment.
So keeping with the big boys, I won't shift gears too much. LinkedIn had some interesting news this week. They launched a small business solution. So I'll tell you how it works and I'll tell you after that why I think it's important. Basically, how the new solution works is, so a small business posts a job on LinkedIn. After they post the job they'll get access to a series of potential candidate profiles whose skills fit the recently posted job description. If the employer's interested in the candidate, they use a one-click messaging solution, then they can send a personalized inmail to the candidate. If it's not a fit they can simply click "not interested" and move on to the next profile card. With every message, every action that the employer takes, LinkedIn's AI, again with AI, and that machine learning algorithms, learn more about the job poster and what they're interested in, to then present better matches, better candidates over time.
So obviously this is pretty cool from just an AI-related searches, automation, you know, continuing to just say "Hey, post a job and we'll just serve up candidates that work right away." I will add that this is very similar to Chad and Cheese sponsor Uncommon. So if you know about Uncommon, if you're a fan of the show, you've probably checked out the company, it's Uncommon.co. They have a solution very similar. You post a job and they deliver interested and qualified candidates. I'm not sure how interested the candidates are at LinkedIn. I guess we'll learn more about it as things unfold. But the AI part is sort of an obvious really cool thing.
To me what really stands out in this news item is that it is targeted to small businesses. Historically, LinkedIn has been all about the enterprise, large company thing. Now, you could argue that anyone can use LinkedIn, and that's definitely true. You can definitely say "Hey, small businesses, recruiters are going into the database, contacting people with inmails." And that's certainly all true, but in terms of just straight PR, promotional language, targeting SMBs is really interesting, because I can't remember a time that LinkedIn really did that. And to me, it is LinkedIn's sort of first dip into the SMB pool. I think they're probably looking at what Google's doing with Hire and really focusing on initially the SMBs. I think that Facebook has a very good position with SMBs knowing that every small business has a Facebook page already. So to me, this is going after a logical extension of their business and saying "Hey, you know what, we don't want Facebook and Google to get all of the small business market share. We're gonna go after it as well."
So I think this is a really good move by LinkedIn. Time will tell if they can go beyond their sort of buttoned-up, white-collar brand and really connect with small businesses. But I think the idea of "Hey, small business, post your job, we'll deliver candidates that are on LinkedIn, you can quickly inmail them and talk to them similarly to how Facebook has messaging with candidates." I think that's a good move, so we'll keep our eye on this. But LinkedIn going after small businesses, I think, is a pretty solid move.
Let's take a quick break and we'll switch gears into some smaller companies that are getting some nice inflow of cash. Be right back after this message.
So let's talk about Juju for a second, a company I don't think we've ever discussed on the show. I like to describe them as a poor man's Indeed, or a poor man's Simply Hired. No one talks about Simply Hired any more because they're basically gone. They're just a shell for Indeed content. But anyway, Juju has been around for a long time. I stop of saying they're a lifestyle business, but they're definitely not ... they've never made a move to say "Hey, we're gonna take over the world." They've been sort of a nice business charging lower per click than, say, an Indeed or another competitor. They've been pretty lean and mean, they've had some pretty good salespeople and continue to have pretty good salespeople in their midst.
But anyway, I have to expect that the vertical job search business ... if we agree that it's tough on Indeed, and when we have people like Ism's CEO saying that he's seen a 30% decrease in Indeed traffic since Google for jobs launched, I have to think that it's really hell for a site like Juju to keep that traffic flow going and keep those clicks going.
So in 2015, they launched a software solution called Glide Path. It was a small business sort of do-it-yourself, I think, solution to have a career site, have jobs distributed through a large network of job boards, etc. They brought in some decent talent, they brought in one of Beyond/now Next sales guys who's been around the industry for quite a while, just sort of run sales. They had a full staff at one point, or ... I mean, they had a CEO, I think, at one point, or someone managing the whole system. They had a sales team, etc. Anyway, about six months ago it looked like they pulled the whole thing. They just dumped the whole thing. People were being let go, social media shares died, it was just sort of on autopilot for the most part.
I emailed their founder and CEO, a guy named Ewen, about what's going on. He said "Hey, we're switching gears, refocusing, sort of soldiering on." So anyway, I kept my eye on it. Six months later to today, I emailed back, said "Hey, it looks like this thing's really dead. What's going on?" And they finally admitted that "Hey, we're sort of shuttering Glide Path, but we're also releasing a site called Emissary." The URL is Emissary.AI. Those .AI URLs are incredibly popular, predictably, in our space. Emissary AI is looking to capitalize on the whole text recruiting phenomenon. I like to describe the solution as sort of text recruit meets Canvas. We interviewed Canvas's CEO a while back, I encourage you to look at that archive, as well as Paradox, who some might remember as Olivia, there's also Maya, there's also Allyo.
So that's great, it's a technology solution, they're getting on board where that's going. So we'll see where that goes. There's not a lot of information about it. There's a website, but if you click "Learn more," I think it just opens up your inmail, or your email solution to email the company. So there's not a ton of information. There's no pricing that I saw. So we'll keep our eye on that, but for the meantime if you're paying attention to Juju news, then you know that they have dumped Glide Path and they've launched Emissary.AI.
Keeping on the text recruit news cycle, TextRecruit launched drip campaigns recently. The news is a couple weeks old, but I thought it was relevant with the Emissary launching. Basically, if you're not familiar with drip campaigns, it's sort of a marketing strategy or term. What it is, basically, is you have messages drip out from the first time that you message someone. So you could put a phone number into the database. From that point they could get an email a week after that, they could get an email again if they reply, they could get a separate email or separate text message, sorry, from that response. So it's a further step from recruiting going into marketing. And as we look at some of the funding from this week, you'll see that the hub spot for recruiting, if you will, is becoming a very popular item. And to me, the TextRecruit drip campaigns are another element of marketing creeping into recruiting.
Well, let's get to the funding real quick. There were two significant ones to talk about. One is Beamery. And again, this is sort of in line with the hub spot for recruiting phenomenon or trend. Beamery is essentially a marketing platform for recruiting. So we're talking about messaging candidates, we're talking about having a database of folks, segmenting them, sending messages, etc. Beamery, a London-based company, recently received $28 million to expand their service, hire salespeople, get into more markets. So Beamery, relatively new company, I think a year or two, maybe a little bit, maybe three years old. They look like they're making some real waves into the industry, so we'll keep our eye on them.
The other funding news came out of Hired. Hired.com got $30 million in funding this week, an announcement. So Hired is basically, job seekers go to the site, they submit a profile, and then companies can message them based on their profile, and then there are a series of interview questions from those companies to those candidates. I don't know a ton about Hired so I did a quick little look before I came on. It's, I guess, sort of a version 2.0 Job Board. I mean, you're still posting a profile, you're still talking to companies, but they've added some quirky technology about answering interview questions and sort of messaging with employers as you do that. So $30 million to them, $28 million to Beamery. The money continues to flow into sort of the tech-based businesses, in this case marketing technology. And in Hired's case, sort of a newfangled way to interview folks.
Let's take another break. Let's hear from JobAdX, our sponsor. And when I return I'm gonna talk about a new rumor about Snag that you don't want to miss.
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So midweek I get an email, Chad was included on that, about a rumor out of Snag, or Snag a Job, as many of you in the industry know. The source was legitimate and their source was, according to them, very legitimate. They wanted to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. So the rumor is that the CEO out of Snag, who I interviewed for a story for ERE, which you can check out, has been fired, or was fired, in exchange for an executive or former CEO from UpWork, I believe, was the official rumor. So I reached out to Snag's comm folks, and they said "That's news to us. We don't know anything about it, or we have the same CEO that's been here, he's still here." So it's a rumor. The sources are pretty solid, there's a good chance that people don't know that this is coming. We'll see.
But it is interesting that Snag a Job appointed the former ... a former UpWork CEO to their board of directors in 2017. So there is at least one little puzzle piece there that would indicate that, hey, this UpWork former CEO is on the board. Makes sense that they would bring an UpWork, bring him into the fold maybe to run the company.
What I've also heard from the same source is that revenue under the current CEO is down ... not down, but it's significantly lower. It's not in the negatives, but it's lower than what it used to be. I'd be a little surprised to see a new CEO come in so close after the company has started to change its brand and change its focus. A quick refresher, Snag a Job is a traditional sort of post jobs, get resumes, or candidates come in, and the new Snag.co, which isn't released everywhere, they're rolling it out as sort of a Uber-type platform, where let's say I'm a burger flipper. I can turn myself on for opportunities to flip burgers tonight or wait tables, and restaurants can use the platform to bring workers in for a shift. And then Snag a Job, or Snag basically handles all the payments.
Which I think is a really interesting business model. But to have that and then switch up CEOs would really cause some havoc in the organization. So again, this is a rumor. We'll keep our eye on it and talk about it. If we find out for sure that it's not true I'll let you know, determinately, if it is false. But I just thought I'd throw it out there 'cause that's kind of what we do here on HR's most dangerous podcast.