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Down Goes Slack!


Guess who's back.... Back again... Chad's back... Tell a friend...

After a 3 week vacation in Europe Chad is back and ready to jump back into the Chad & Cheese Podcast fray by talking:

- Step aside Blue and Watson IBM's "Project Debater" is here!

- while Slack and Mike Wolford have a "Come on Man!" moment...

Buckle up and get ready for the ride.... Provided by JobAdX, America's Job Exchange and Sovern AI.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

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, brash opinions and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.

Joel: All right everybody, our long national nightmare is finally over. Chad's back. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's Most Dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman.

Chad: Guess who's back, back again.

Joel: Back again. On this week's show, LinkedIn takes aim at ZipRecruiter and the SMB market, humans take on robots at your local restaurant chain and Google will probably in the end make all this news irrelevant. Thank God robots don't podcast yet. We'll be right back after a brief word from JobAdX.

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, consistent and smart ad unit for job related advertising. As the best ad 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 flirts truly responsive tool. All 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 are not set in regret.

JobAdX: For direct clients JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning, We also provide publishes and job boards, higher rev share than partners through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30 to 40 percent greater and more through our scalable model. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com or email us at joinus@jobaadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs.

JobAdX: Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent. JobAdX has just launched in the U.K. too.

Joel: I thought the British accent would ease you in to coming back to the states.

Chad: So many accents and so little time.

Joel: All right, let's get this out of the way. Welcome back.

Chad: Thank you.

Joel: How was your trip?

Chad: Wonderful.

Joel: Favorite parts, funny stories, anything?

Chad: Yeah. So go figure the beaches of Normandy were amazing. U.S. Cemetery. So many things that are just gripping from what we're able to do in Normandy. We stayed in Bayeux, France, it was just a little town south which is really cool. We're able to watch Germany beat Sweden with hundreds of other Germans in Weiden Square, little town in Germany.

Joel: Better be careful, the Germans might blame you for their ouster from the cup.

Chad: I had to leave some time, okay.

Joel: Chad's fault Germany.

Chad: I'll take the blame. No, no I won't because they really sucked. It was horrible. Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Prague Castle, The Louvre, The Ark, Eiffel Tower, Versailles, St Mark's Square in Venice. I mean dude, there was so much that we saw in such a compressed amount of time. Julie had us sprinting from place to place. She did an amazing job. And having three teenagers in tow, it was a pretty freaking awesome time in Europe.

Joel: So let's get to what our listeners really care about. What were the best beers that you had on the trip?

Chad: Yeah, anything that was Austrian or Belgian. I was really looking for good wit beers. France beer suck. They just did man. Italian beers were okay. Anything that I could get that was just legit and I knew would be out of Belgium, Austria or Germany, that's really what I gravitated to. Generally I tried something local but in most cases it just sucked.

Joel: Well, my part dude, three weeks without you, there were advantages, disadvantages but I'm overall glad that you're back and that the show is again the Chad and Cheese Show. So with that, let's get to some shout outs if you have any. I'll start it off. Shout out number one goes to Dan Cross, Capital One. In my capacity at Ratedly, actually went out and pitched Capital One on the product this week and Dan Cross is a fan of the show and it was awesome, like to pitch a company and have someone in the audience like I love your show. So Dan, shout outs to you. Appreciate the love out there in Richmond, Virginia.

Chad: Yeah, is he relation to Christopher?

Joel: That would be awesome but I did not ask that so I don't know.

Chad: He didn't have like the high pitch voice.

Joel: He did have kind of a yacht rock vibe so maybe Dan is related to Christopher.

Chad: Big shout out to Ed from Philly. He's always active, dude is always in fray. The big question is where the hell is Nancy from Philly? She's totally gone into radio silence.

Joel: That's a good point. I bet Ed more than anyone is happy to have you back on the podcast. So Ed, there you go. Thanks for sticking it out for three weeks without him.

Chad: Yeah, thanks man, I appreciate that.

Joel: I got a shout out to Laura Barkeiwicz.

Chad: Say that three times fast.

Joel: Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. Did a little ditty on Beamery and their investment last week I think it was. And apparently the Austin office of Beamery is just massive fans and they're spreading that fandom throughout the company. So Beamery, Laura, everybody in Austin thanks for listening.

Chad: Yeah. And not to mention Austin, I'm sure we have just so many listeners at Indeed as well. So yeah, you're making Austin strong.

Joel: Don't forget Talroo, sponsor.

Chad: That's right. Christine Shaw from Down Under. She was actually listening to the pod on the way to an event and we were talking about VERVOE, and no shit, one of the first people she meets at the event is Omer, the co-founder and CEO of VERVOE. So yeah, Christine, that is Chad and Cheese magic.

Joel: Bringing the world together one podcast at a time.

Chad: Shawna Williams. She loves the show. Says it's helped her stay updated in the ever changing world of sourcing and recruiting. Thanks Shawna, keep listening. Get all your friends and family listen as well. Give us some reviews, we'd love that.

Joel: We actually have a lot of reviews.

Chad: Oh, that's cool.

Joel: That's just iTunes. You're the Google guy, I don't know what they're doing over there but at least on iTunes, and we actually have a pretty good set of reviews so yay for us. In fact so good hopefully that people that listen will go out visit chadcheese.com and see the link to vote for the show as the best I guess blogger/podcast at the upcoming TAtech show in New Orleans which we will be attending in September. So yeah, get out there and vote. Go to chadcheese.com and give us some love.

Chad: Yeah, they're going to change the name of that because three out of the four who are nominated are podcasts. So I think the whole blogger thing's kind of going away. Podcasts are the future people, that's what it is.

Joel: How dare you bash blogging, you bastard.

Chad: Job or doctor, just so you know man, it's not and it will never be called a “jobby moon” full stop. Steven Rothberg, nice jib jab on Twitter, really appreciate you going the extra mile. And last but not least from my side of the house #TalentTalk. I'm going to be on #TalentTalk with a bunch of rogue recruiting sourcing CEO just talking shit I guess. We're going to talk about technology and how recruiters jobs, sourcers jobs, all that shit could be taken by AI. We'll probably argue a little bit about it. You know that animal guy is going to be on there as well so we're probably going to have to hit the mute button on him a lot.

Joel: Yeah, have fun with all that. Is that a Candidate.ID sponsor thing?

Chad: Yup.

Joel: At least you'll have the nice Scottish accent to counterbalance the animal in there. Anymore shout outs?

Chad: That's it.

Joel: All right, let's start with the small companies as we always do. LinkedIn announced this past week that they are seriously getting into the SMB market and I thought it'd be worth talking about. It sounds a lot like Uncommon. You've read the story, basically, small business, post your job, we'll provide the candidates to you. One click messaging. You can thumb up or thumb down the person that you want to recruit.

Joel: I have two thoughts on this is as I wrote about it in ERE and thought about it. Number one is like what this does to the whole sourcing business, if I can just post a job and LinkedIn or whoever magically just gives me the candidates that are fits for that, that sort of sources for me, as well as the distribution side of postings. What are your thoughts on that?

Chad: I automatically thought it sounded more like zip than anything else. But the big difference and I can see kind of the similarities with Uncommon as well. But it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like they're doing it within the actual LinkedIn ecosystem itself, that's it. So, when you take a look at Zip and you take a look at Uncommon, they go out beyond I guess you could say their ecosystem. So they're doing things I think a much more aggressive, not to mention they don't have database the size of LinkedIn but still, LinkedIn doesn't house every piece of talent that's out there, period, they don't.

Chad: So one of the reasons why Microsoft very smartly bought GitHub, when you take a look at what they're doing I think it's smart, there's no question. Being able to utilize the data that you have within your system. It makes a hell of a lot of sense. They should have done this a long time ago. Apparently they just didn't have the developers that could pull this off.

Joel: Yeah. Ever since Microsoft bought them, the development is coming fast and furiously. Now they would argue yes, the distribution isn't the same but their claim is that, they have 57 or so percent of potential candidates that will never go to a job board or haven't gone to a job board any time recently. So I agree with you like the distribution they don't care about, they just want to leverage their 550 million or 600 million users to then plug into your job posting. I do think the GitHub purchase is going to be interesting because if they start crossposting or crossing the streams and having GitHub profiles come into your LinkedIn job postings, then that's a pretty interesting way to leverage the GitHub universe.

Joel: Another think I wanted to point out was they're pushing this service as sort of a money back guarantee on the condition that you send, the only candidates are LinkedIn candidates. They have to use LinkedIn profile and you have to send them through your LinkedIn job posting page. So in other words, this is sort of a really subtle move to me by LinkedIn to kind of be the SMB's applicant tracking system. So in other words, they'll give you the money back guarantee if you don't flow the candidates through another service, which incentivizes companies to use LinkedIn as their applicant tracking system basically.

Chad: Small business can do that right but your larger businesses they just can't do it. This also provides validation I believe for all of those companies that are out there that are looking at the same model but doing it within their applicant tracking system because they already know within their applicant tracking system if they refresh a lot of that data and then they start to target it, that those individuals in most cases are going to be more targeted toward the positions that you are opening up versus just going into a general database like a LinkedIn.

Chad: Now, again, the ability to target within LinkedIn I think will be much better than most of the other job boards per se that are out there, job sites that are out there. But I really think this validates why companies should be focusing on their own applicant tracking systems, their own data. They've spent millions of dollars over the years to be able to pump up their own database just to let it sit there and wither and die away. So yeah, this is great stuff. But again, we can use this I think as talent acquisition professionals in many different ways.

Joel: Yeah, and I think services like Crowded, what Google is doing with Hire in terms of oh, here are 10 candidates that are already in your database that are probably good fits for this. The issue is even if you had a million people in your database it still pales in comparison to the 600 million that LinkedIn's headed toward.

Chad: Yeah it does but the thing is that in most cases those candidates that are in your database are going to be much more targeted to the positions that you have available than the huge general database that LinkedIn has.

Joel: Long term, what do you think models like this do to the recruiting sourcing profession?

Chad: I mean they kill it, that's all there is to it. The sourcing piece in itself it's starting to learn. I mean that's the machine learning piece of it. So you start to understand what types of individuals are perfect for jobs because you can see who's getting hired into those jobs. The system itself can start to cater toward those types of individuals with certain backgrounds and so on and so forth. So yeah, from a sourcing standpoint, this is going to start to cover that ground without having an actual human being needing to take days or hours per se because it will be done in seconds.

Joel: And also shows the importance of, at least to LinkedIn to winning cases like the one against HighQ to help protect its data. Because if other companies can start accessing profiles, this service that LinkedIn has launched and other services it will launch become much less valuable because other services can just pull those profile. It makes clear sense why LinkedIn is so protective of this data because all their products are going to be revolved around the data that they have and the profiles that they have.

Chad: Yeah, but they're public profiles. The defense of that is going to be interesting. The optics around what happened with Facebook obviously with Cambridge Analytica. There's so much that's happening right now that could sway a decision away from what we think it perspectively could be. It's going to be a very provocative conversation.

Joel: Do you think stuff like this enhances the value of an Uncommon and will we see more of those?

Chad: Oh God, yeah.

Joel: Or do you think it squashes it?

Chad: No, no dude. This validates right here because Uncommon once again goes out and it does more in a different way and so does Candidate.ID and Crowded and all these other, they've got different nuances per se to what the actual technology does. Now, if LinkedIn starts to turn this technology on corporate databases which I really don't see them doing, they might do it within the actual Microsoft applicant tracking system itself but going beyond that I'm not sure. They might prove me wrong. But being able to have those other organizations that actually, that do that, the Crowdeds, the CandidateIDs, so on and so forth, I think that just validates. Look, don't go to LinkedIn and do this for goodness sakes. You have all this data, this talent within your system that just needs to be refreshed, reengaged and that's really what I see the future being.

Joel: Let's keep this thing going. Pared, spelled P-A-R-E-D got 10 million dollars this week in a Series A. They are essentially the on demand gig platform provider targeting restaurants. We've talked about Snag/Snagajob in the past. Snagajob historically known as sort of the hourly post a job, fill positions through sort of a traditional posting job platform has actually changed its entire brand and focus by becoming sort of an Uber for hourly workers. So, just to refresh everyone, it's an app system. Let's say a restaurant owner needs a couple line cooks and some waiters, they can go onto the Snag platform in this case, look at who are those workers that are doing that. They can post the opportunity. The worker can select to take advantage of it. There are badges that provide the restaurant knowledge of who knows what they're doing, who can actually make a hamburger etc.

Joel: It becomes a win-win for both because for the worker when I want to work I just flip the on switch and I can get opportunities. If I'm the hiring manager I don't have to post a job, I don't have to interview, I can just, hey, I need a couple people, fill the roles and you're done. All the payments go through this platform etc.

Joel: Basically Pared is that kind of business. They launched in 2015. They were focused primarily, exclusively actually on San Francisco market. This past April I think they launched in New York. So this money's going to help them scale this business, of course Shiftgig, Snagajob, Task Rabbit is probably in this category as well are pretty well funded and established already. What kind of chances do you give Pared to make it?

Chad: It's anyone's ballgame at this point. I think Snag has the best chance just because they've been around longer. They have candidates in the database. They know obviously what the candidates have done over the years. They have that experience and the candidate database which is huge, huge positives and advantage on their side of the house. I was watching a video on the Pared site and it was really cool because the individual that was actually a restaurant owner and she said, hey look, I needed dishwashers, I just went into Pared and I was able to get somebody who would actually come and work a shift.

Chad: It's incredibly interesting because we sometimes forget how unpredictable this line of work is, restaurant life, right? The turn and burn that happens, the individuals who don't show up for work. How can you have that kind of like Uber app per se to be able to say hey, I need a dishwasher, can I get them in an hour, two hours or what have you. I think it's incredibly smart. The hard part once again though for them I think and we've seen this maybe with the Shiftgigs and whatnot is scalability and being able to build presence in a market. Are you going to be able to go out there and do a shit ton of programmatic. How are you actually going to build presence in a market?

Joel: Yeah, and how do you pay for that. Like how do you pay to access all the restaurant owners in a particular city. San Francisco and New York are ideal because they're so consolidated in a really close knit area. But if you go to middle America you have a much bigger problem to kind of get that done. I think ghosted which you mentioned people not showing up for work I think is a huge problem that not only with restaurants but probably every kind of job these days. There was an article this week about that.

Joel: What I love about this system is that restaurants start rating workers so you know like who's a really good reliable worker and who isn't.

Chad: It's like Uber.

Joel: It's a self-policing kind of system that really works for everybody. So, I agree that this is where this space is going. I'd be really curious to see would this work with trucking, would it work with nursing or health care or other professions. I think it would, there might be regulations around some of that, but I see this as being a trend that we'll be seeing in the future and announced today I think, Amazon is basically setting up affiliates or franchises to deliver Amazon boxes. So anyone can go out and I think for 10 grand start the process to be an official Amazon distributor. So all these things are really interesting and happening and being driven by this sort of platform model, driven by corporations and vendors.

Chad: Yeah. And again, market penetration is going to be key, that is hard. Scaling that is going to be hard to get candidates as well as getting clients. You really have to focus on what the strategy is to be able to get to that point where you can start providing the types of individuals that your clients are looking for. What I like about Pared is that they are hyper focused on restaurants and hospitality. That in itself makes it so much easier for them as opposed to saying we're just going to help small business. Oh, okay, well yeah, try to go ahead and herd those fucking cats for God's sakes.

Joel: Yeah, if they can be the brand that is connected to restaurants, they're going to be way ahead of the game because Snag and everyone else has sort of brands of all kinds of gigs and jobs. So definitely that is where I would go. It reminds me a little bit of when Groupon came, the sort of daily deal emails. It was really popular and people loved it but then once people found out that oh, I can just, that's a WordPress plugin I can have my own little Groupon here locally, they popped up everywhere. I'd be concerned in this industry like, once it becomes sort of out of the box have your own a gig platform solution, these things are going to pop up like local job boards all over the place and make it harder for few players to be to be successful at least in the short term.

Chad: You can see a staffing company buy this thing up. I mean seriously, because staffing companies that focus really heavily on these types of positions within hospitality and then being able to start to grow that beyond, because they have that penetration point. They have the candidates, the candidates are already coming in. They have the clients, they already have a Salesforce going out after the clients. See that's the big, it's building infrastructure, not just technical infrastructure but actual people infrastructure to get those candidates and to be able to get that business in.

Chad: So yeah, seeing a company like Pared being bought by staffing, like Kelly Services or something like that I think makes a hell of a lot of good sense.

Joel: Well it also makes sense that the founder and CEO of Yelp is an investor in this company. Pared is a perfect buy for Yelp in my opinion. Just start providing hiring services for all the companies on Yelp, all the restaurants on Yelp.

Chad: Yeah, totally agree.

Joel: All right man, let's hear a quick message from our buddies at AJE and we'll talk about I don't know, CRMs and Google and IBM and all kinds of shit.

Chad: And stuff.

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 thousand 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. Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com.

Joel: So you're big on the story about CRM voice assistance. Tell us about that.

Chad: I think it's pretty big. Hell, I mean, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and Comcast actually threw some money in the pot for a company called-

Joel: Some small companies.

Chad: Yeah, those small companies. Called tact.ai, another AI domain. It's pretty simple. In the actual article that I read, really just focused on two words, voice recognition and being able to actually take a CRM, which, you know, I've been in sales for most of my life and I know CRM is a pain in the ass because when you're on the phone or in front of somebody you always have to try to get that data, that call, that information, whatever it is into the CRM. And that's good for the company to be able to have history, not to mention it's good for you to be able to have that history so that next time you go back you can you can remember.

Chad: So being able to do all that through voice recognition and really it's like a salesperson, just an account executive having their own personal assistant which I think is incredibly cool, and then being able to attribute all of that voice recognition, that data back into the system, to be able to set up calls, to be able set up tasks. All those different things. And you know as well as I do because we actually saw with Microsoft here in the last month or so when they started pushing out dynamics sales information and they were using LinkedIn data for their sales CRM. That is huge, big money for a company like Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, anybody who's out there.

Chad: So I think this to me is incredibly exciting because using voice recognition like we talked about before for not just for sales but being able to start to do this for recruiting as well, setting up scheduling and things like that, isn't as far away as we thought it might be.

Joel: How do you envision this service fitting into recruiting? Is it as simple as just recording the conversations? Is it like, hey, related candidates based on the conversation. How would you see this? In sales it makes sense because you're going to necessarily record the phone call on a sales call whereas like we talked to our buddies at Honeit who do interviews and they create transcription from that. Where do you see this exactly fitting in for recruiting?

Chad: I think from an interview standpoint it's kind of like the Honeit. But also, again, we're talking about it being your personal assistant. So being able to set up tasks, being able to make calls, being able to do all these different things that a salesperson does on a daily basis without actually having to really lift a finger. Just saying tact, call so and so or call company or whatever it is. Set up an appointment for so on and so forth. That's on the sales side. You can do the same damn thing on the recruiting side of the house. So really having that personal assistant per se that's there for you to help you just facilitate the whole process.

Joel: Now Tact.ai doesn't do a Google Duplex like calling for you, does it?

Chad: Not that I know of, not yet. But that's a very good point.

Joel: The names you mentioned were not Google but I'm sure they're looking at Duplex and saying holy crap, we better like spread some money around and figure out how we're going to compete with this. So Duplex we read this week is rolling out faster than Google expected I guess. They're already making it available to sort of the most valuable developers and friends of Google and things like that which is a very Google thing to do. Let it out slowly and get everyone all hot bothered.

Joel: In light of the three new services or features that Google released last week in regards to click to chat, smart scheduling etc, to me Duplex probably faster than we think, probably next year, will start having hiring tools within Google Hire that it will call people for you to schedule interviews and things like that. Yes?

Chad: Yeah. Well first off, let's get through this real fast because I think this is hilarious. Duplex and the actual Google CEO demonstrated obviously scared the living shit out of people. It really did. Couldn't believe that we had come that far that the Duplex system could understand as well, actually take in the information, reprocess it into context and then back out and communicate with a human being.

Chad: So I think one of the reasons why they're getting this out into testing is to be able to start combing those fears. Jim Stroud actually talked about it, he did a little piece on whether, and people have been talking about this about whether the system should actually tell the person that you're talking to a robot or not which I don't get. Does that make any goddamn sense?

Joel: Well, I remember we talked to Anoop at Seekout and he was a little bit skeptical around robotics having conversation with human beings and where's the transparency there. There are definitely concerns around Duplex and I think those will only become more and more. But for me just if it's a scheduling tool, it's hard to imagine in the near future that it will be something that actually interviews people although I think long term it will. But to schedule something or reschedule, make rescheduling calls I think that's something that can happen pretty easily.

Chad: Yeah. I don't think that interviewing is actually that far of a moon shot for this technology.

Joel: Technology no, but societally and culturally it maybe.

Chad: It might be. But you know what wins every single day?

Joel: Technology and progress.

Chad: The all mighty dollar, man. And if a company can save money and they see headcount from the standpoint of how many people are actually making calls per day to actually do scheduling or emails. How much of your time during the day is allocated to these tasks, where we can have Duplex do this. That in itself will change companies' minds because it all comes down to the almighty dollar, you know it as well as I do.

Joel: Yeah, efficiency, shareholders. I agree. I just think where our government is, sort of where we are societally in terms of government and privacy and what Facebook did and it's fake new, like if now there's just another thing that people have to deal with of like oh it sounds like a person you're talking to but it's actually a robot, like I could see a lot of people freaking out and government saying hold on a second, let's figure this out before that may trump, pun intended, any dollars that could be made from utilizing this technology.

Chad: And if this didn't scare the shit out of them, the new IBM Debater Project did.

Joel: No kidding. Tell us about that.

Chad: We've seen blue played chess and obviously Watson has been on Jeopardy and so on and so forth. The new debater project that IBM has is incredibly amazing because it's actually on the debate stage and it's going against these different individuals who are debating different topics. So for a technology to be able to take in, obviously recognize voice recognition, taking in all this information, to be able to put it into context and then to be able to go into obviously all the different points of data that are available to it and then pull back data in arguments. And then to be able to articulate those arguments is ridiculous. It's cool and man it was scary to freaking watch.

Joel: Would you call it a master debater.

Chad: No. Actually I think you have a T-shirt that says that.

Joel: Zing.

Chad: Boom.

Joel: All right. I got nothing to add on that. Let's hear from Sovereign and wind it down. Cool?

Chad: You got it.

Sovren: Sovren AI Matching is the most sophisticated matching engine on the market, because it acts just like a human. You decide exactly how our AI matching engine thinks about each individual transaction. It will find, rank and sort the best matches according to your criteria. Not only does it deliver the best matches, it tells you how and why it produced them and offers tips to improve the results. Our engine thinks like you so you don't have to learn how to think like the engine. To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com.

Chad: You don't have to think at all because we're doing all the thinking and the computer is smarter than you are, have a nice day.

Joel: Yeah, they just need to speed up this virtual reality stuff so I can just sit at home and visit Europe instead of actually going to Europe.

Chad: So Jack Ma, he did an interview and it was a couple of weeks ago. And he just pretty much told everybody you're not going to be able to compete with AI. These machines are smarter than you are, that's all there is to it. So just embrace it. Yes, we're going to lose jobs but obviously this is an evolutionary point. We will see other jobs created from this as well. But guess what guys, you're not as smart as the computers are, they're going to be faster and they're going to do things much more efficiently than you are so just get used to it.

Joel: I love that you're the resident Jack Ma expert. I think that's the second or third time you've brought him up, the Ali Baba founder. Well in the news, Slack, the popular business messaging solution went down this week and Twitter freaked out. There was a big deal by a lot of people. I use Slack minimally with my consulting gig with ERE but I don't use it that often. I think the two things to mention on this are one is Facebook was probably happy about any sort of outages at Slack because they have a competitive products called At Work and it made me think about putting your corporate communications on to a third party provider. Good or bad?

Chad: What corporate communications today are not on a third party provider right now?

Joel: Email.

Chad: No, it's not. Generally people are pushing that stuff through Google. The big corporations probably have their own servers but they're on the cloud somewhere dude. These companies don't own these clouds. We are dependent on other people's third parties, period.

Joel: When AWS goes down the whole internet goes down.

Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end of the day we don't have a choice. We're going to have to use somebody else to communicate, period. So it's all about who do you trust. And this is a big stab into the side of Slack. It happens. There's no question. We've seen happen to everybody before. But when you've got a, what was that nine billion dollar valuation, this is the kind of thing that you don't want to see happening.

Joel: Yeah, and people don't like it when communications platforms go down. It's one thing to have your ATS maybe go down for a while or my career sites down, but if you can't communicate internally or externally, it kind of sucks for people. So, hopefully this will be a trend for our friends at Slack.

Chad: Lost time, lost money, especially if sales is using it.

Joel: No kidding, no kidding. Let's shift gears so this. You read an article by Mike Wolford this week entitled Sourcing is the New Recruiting that sort of got you bent out of shape.

Chad: Not really bent out of shape. It made me laugh because you and I are talking about I mean really just the process methodology of how AI computers are going to start taking over the world on the recruiting side of the house. The first place is guess what, sourcing because we already see companies that are sourcing incredibly well efficiently fast. Mike is a sourcer and his whole article was predicated on the death of recruiters because of AI which I thought was pretty hilarious.

Joel: Did it remind you at all about sort of the late 90s, early 2000s when Newspapers and radio were touting like their strength in the face of everyone knowing that the end is nigh for a lot of their business practices in future? Because to me when your business or livelihood is at stake or under threat, you start rationalizing how no it's not, we're perfectly fine. The burning building is nothing to worry about. To me sourcers are more at risk than recruiters because recruiters at least can use AI and automation as their tool to then filter out people from then on but if sourcing in terms of just finding people, dude, if we get to a place where the LinkedIn's and Googles and whoever else just on a silver platter find everybody that you need for a job, then sourcers become null and void.

Chad: You're seeing it already. You talked about Uncommon. Their whole platform is predicated on qualified and interested. So, you don't pay unless the individual is qualified and interested, period. What do sourcers do? They identify and engage qualified and interested types of individuals. We just talked about LinkedIn earlier. They're trying to serve up qualified and interested candidates. So yeah, to be able to sit there, Nero, fiddling while Rome burns, that to me, it just, it was actually kind of funny because as I read down through it at first I was like this guy's got to be fucking kidding. No, he was not kidding at all.

Joel: Yeah. I think privately you and I know a ton of sourcers who tell us, yeah, we're fucked.

Chad: Yeah. And they understand and most of them are more broad than just being sourcers, they can do more and they understand they're going to have to. Even recruiters. Recruiters are going to have to change who they are because many of these tasks that they have to do on a daily basis are going to go away. Process is going to change, technology is going to change it and they're going to have to change and evolve with it. There's no question. But from a sourcing standpoint, that entire position, goodbye.

Joel: Yeah. I mean recruiters, it's who's going to be the best users of tech, who knows the best tech etc. It's just like, it's similar to marketing. Marketing even though you have these tools, programmatic ad buying etc, it's just who knows those tools the best is going to be the one that's employable, not the one who's stuck in the old times.

Chad: Yeah, you still need a liaison, internal liaison with these hiring managers. That's all there is to it man, you do. Technology is going to be able to do a lot of what recruiters do today. Just the task that takes up most of their time. So they're going to be freed up to do some really cool shit I believe from being more of like a brand ambassador to the actual candidates themselves to make sure that those candidates don't go into a damn black hole even if they're not qualified for the position as well as ensure that the hiring managers know exactly why they're getting the candidates that they're getting.

Joel: I agree man, and again the good news is robots aren't podcasting yet.

Chad: Not yet. Google Duplex, you stay the fuck away from podcasting.

Joel: Chad, welcome back man and I guess we out.

Chad: Good to be back. We out.

Stella Cheesman: Hi, this is Stella Cheesman. Thanks for listening to the Cheese and Chad Podcast or at least that's what I call it. Anyway, make sure you subscribe on iTunes, that silly Android phone thingy or wherever you listen to podcast. And be sure to give buckets of money to our sponsors. Otherwise, I may be forced to take that home renting job I saw on monster.com. We out.

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