If you can't guess from this week's title, LinkedIn blew up!
- What the hell should ATS and job site vendors do?
Not LinkedIn Topics...
- AND no God, no! -- there's another Tinder for Jobs startup, Blonk.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
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 opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel Cheesman: LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn. That's my best Brady Bunch impression. Sorry. Welcome to Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman.
Chad Sowash: And I'm Marcia.
Joel Cheesman: On this week's episode, if you couldn't tell, LinkedIn did some shit. Amazon's robots are biased. Maybe they should stick to tweeting. And we rip apart another Tinder for jobs startup. God. Why? Get ready to swipe right on some solid podcasting goodness right after this word from Sovren.
Sovren: Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now based on that technology, comes Sovren's artificial intelligence matching and scoring software. In fractions of a second, receive match results that provide candidates scored by fit to job, and just as importantly, the job's fit to the candidate. Make faster and better placements. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N dot com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll wanna take it to dinner.
Chad Sowash: You know that's one of the guys from Sovren in the background actually playing the guitar.
Joel Cheesman: Is it really? They have such a talented bunch there.
Chad Sowash: They do. I know it's one of them.
Joel Cheesman: Everyone's a bartender serving bourbon at trade shows and playing guitar. That's nice.
Chad Sowash: I love that shit. That's good stuff.
Joel Cheesman: How did we get so many goddamn shout-outs today? I'm gonna apologize in advance.
Chad Sowash: People love us and we love people.
Joel Cheesman: iCIMS. We're going to Jersey next week.
Chad Sowash: Woo, Jersey!
Joel Cheesman: I'll start off with that. iCIMS, looking forward to it. You better feed us some good stuff, and we need lubrication throughout the conference. Just a heads up.
Chad Sowash: When he says "lubrication," he means alcohol guys. Just for all you idiots out there. Just in case.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, what else would I mean? Jesus.
Chad Sowash: Anyway, this month is Disability Hiring Awareness month, and the Chad and Cheese take this shit serious. So don't miss this week's podcast we dropped with Julie. It's an educational interview, "Hiring People With Disabilities is Hot," and she's a total bad ass.
Joel Cheesman: We are the nepotism podcast of recruiting.
Chad Sowash: Goddamn straight.
Joel Cheesman: Starring Julie Sowash!
Chad Sowash: Proof though, Steven Rothberg tweeted-
Joel Cheesman: Of course.
Chad Sowash: "Just finished listening. I learned way more about the recruitment of disabilities in 35 minutes than he has in 53 years. Bravo Julie Sowash. It was an unvarnished conversation about hiring people with disabilities, so listen."
Joel Cheesman: Yes. If you haven't listened, he's referencing a faux pas that I made during the interview process, which I made many, but that was the first one. So, thanks Steven, for pointing that one out.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, imagine that from an old white male. Carry on.
Joel Cheesman: HIREConf coming up as well in November, put on by HiringSolved, kids over there, Jeremy Roberts and team. We're gonna be doing something, I guess a show or a song and dance, or something. So, if you're going to that ... If you're gonna be in New York, make sure you check us out at hireconf.com.
Chad Sowash: This week, we actually got into Spotify. Spotify has a beta now for podcasts, but it's still kind of janky 'cause they're in beta-
Joel Cheesman: I'm kinda mad about being on Spotify because now, I might have to be nice to millennials 'cause they're all on Spotify, so-
Chad Sowash: Dude.
Joel Cheesman: If you've enjoyed the ripping of millennials, I might have to tune that down a little bit with the Spotify edition.
Chad Sowash: Dude, they love it! Some of our biggest fans are millennials. I mean, when we were in New Orleans, who brought us beer? Our favorite millennial, Kyle. Dude, they love it.
Joel Cheesman: True. True. I have some millennial degree on my wall about something or other. That's nice. Shout out to Chris Gamble, ya boy, former Indeed executive employee. Mentioned that I did a post on "indeededjobs.com" a while back, that was a total ripoff of Indeed, saying that it was a matter of time before Indeed took the site down. Shockingly, the site is gone. Chris Gamble gave me the heads up. So shout out to you, Chris, for mindlessly going to "indeededjobs" every day and seeing if it was down or not. I really appreciate that.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, really appreciate you taking your time there, bud. Louise Triance, once again, and this is for her actually saying that she listens to Chad and Cheese and it's "bloody good." So, if you're over in the UK-
Joel Cheesman: Go on, do the accent. Do the accent.
Chad Sowash: I can't do the accent. I'm not gonna ...
Joel Cheesman: Bloody good!
Chad Sowash: That's horrible. Horrible.
Joel Cheesman: You're getting very popular there, across the pond. Shout out to
Talroo. We love our sponsors and we give them a lot of love, but Talroo turned that love around last week, and told people to listen to the show. So we greatly appreciate that, Talroo.
Chad Sowash: Well, I mean, they were actually just focusing on our banner week. We had over 4,000 listens in one week. It was our best week ever. Really happy to put that out there. And they were happy, being a sponsor, obviously, to push it out as well.
Joel Cheesman: Continue to be awe inspired and, getting all English on you, gobsmacked, about all the listeners that we're getting. We really appreciate that. Shout out to Uber and Lyft, who are giving free rides to voters here in the states. Coming back to America. A very important election is going on next month, and Uber and Lyft are gonna help us out with getting people to the polls. So shout out to them.
Chad Sowash: Damn straight. If you haven't listened to Death Match this week, we've got two of them out there. We've already had AllyO. Now we've got Talkpush, and Uncommon. Push it real good. Coming out this week, the grand champion Canvas will be out next week. So you gotta listen. Great pitches, and they do a lot of Q and A with us. And this is when they were onstage, live in New Orleans at TAtech.
Joel Cheesman: Feedback's been great on the Death Match stuff, so we're gonna do more of that in the future, for sure. My last shout out goes to, another English shout out, John Lennon, assassinated in 80, 1980, would have been 78 this week. And God only know what kind of impact he would have made on the world, but we'll never know, sadly enough. But happy birthday, John. We continue, or at least I do, continue to love your music, and listen regularly.
Chad Sowash: I remember when that happened, and they were playing John Lennon music on the radio constantly. And I just remember the song, "Wheels." So that's definitely a memory from our childhood, and amazing music in avant garde in that industry.
Joel Cheesman: Shockingly that album was sort of a come back album for him after a weird period, I guess, in his life. And, only knows what could've been. I think he would've been incredibly political. I think he would've continued to make music. I think he would've impacted more generations and more folks to make music. But, sadly enough, we'll never know.
You're excited about the Queen movie that's coming out. Hopefully that's good.
Chad Sowash: Goddamn straight. Bohemian Rhapsody. I mean, who doesn't love Freddie Mercury and Queen music? I mean, it is literally the soul of rock and roll. It is amazing, so I can't wait to see that.
Joel Cheesman: Any band that puts Beelzebub in a song is good stuff.
Chad Sowash: Can we do this podcast?
Joel Cheesman: We can. You had Indeed Job Spotter. Are we gonna roll over them?
Chad Sowash: Yeah. So I thought it was funny. Somebody actually forwarded an Instagram ad of Indeed Job Spotter, and I was like, "Is that thing still fucking alive?" It must be. So shout out to Indeed. I can't imagine the amount of content that you're getting from Job Spotter, but somebody inside of Indeed, if you would, reach out to us. Let us know how much content you guys are getting from that. Or, maybe it's just an ad that keeps running in the background that somebody forgot about.
Joel Cheesman: No, I think we've talked about this and I did a story about a year ago. I think if it's working, part of it's genius, because they're getting leads to small businesses that are hiring people. And they're getting the masses to do the work for them. So if they're doing it, it's genius. If no one's taking photos of "Help Wanted" signs in the window, it's kind of a big dud. But-
Chad Sowash: Well, I'd like to know if it's working. If it is-
Joel Cheesman: Alright, if you're the product manager of Indeed's Job Spotter, we wanna hear from you, get you on this show.
Chad Sowash: Well, yeah and this will be the only time that you'd probably get any time on a podcast, ever. The project manager of Job Spotter.
Joel Cheesman: It could happen. It could happen. Alright, well, let's go to the show. LinkedIn is holding their annual conference out in Anaheim, I believe. I'm a little pissed 'cause I didn't get invited, but whatever. I did watch the live stream. I got all the news, so we have a few things there. We're gonna talk about the ATS first. We have a soundbite from the conference that we're gonna play, and then we'll talk about it. Cool?
Chad Sowash: Play it.
Joel Cheesman: We don't normally do soundbites, so this is sort of a new thing. Let's give it-
Chad Sowash: Unless it's El Chapo. We love the El Chapo soundbite.
Joel Cheesman: The El Chapo or really bad ... anyway. Alright, here we go.
Talent Connect: Every year, you come to TalentConnect and you ask, "Is this the year LinkedIn's gonna announce they're building an ATS?" This is the year! But it wasn't enough for us just to build an ATS. We asked ourselves if we could reinvent what it means to be an ATS in the era of tele-intelligence. We challenge ourselves to imagine what an ATS could do when built on LinkedIn's data.
Chad Sowash: That's enough. Oh my god.
Talent Connect: And so, over the last year, we've partnered with 20 customers who are helping us to design the product, that brings source, manage, and hire together in one place. And it's called "Talent Hub."
Chad Sowash: Trojan horse. Talent Hub.
Joel Cheesman: They couldn't just call it ATS. They had to have a special LinkedIn-y name.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, of course.
Joel Cheesman: So we've been talking about this, speculating about LinkedIn doing this. I think, Hire by Google made them have to do it, even if they weren't thinking about doing it. Initial thoughts on this. 'Cause it's big news. I think we can go a lot of different directions with it, but what're your initial thoughts?
Chad Sowash: So the initial thought is, why are they creating a applicant tracking system, when Microsoft already has one?
Joel Cheesman: Which no one uses.
Chad Sowash: But they're not gonna get rid of Dynamic 365, the talent piece, so what does this actually morph into? What does it look like? Personally, I thought, "What you're going to see, is what you saw some of the other Dynamics pieces, is taking the LinkedIn info, data, and just sucking it up into Microsoft Dynamics. But that's not what this is at all. So, how does that change? How does that morph? I mean, I don't know.
Joel Cheesman: I think Microsoft's, aside from being integrated with Microsoft stuff, is sort of more like what you think of an ATS today. Whereas, I mean, LinkedIn is leveraging their data in terms of profiles because they can, and no one else can.
Chad Sowash: Microsoft can.
Joel Cheesman: With LinkedIn data?
Chad Sowash: Yeah! What do you mean, with LinkedIn ... They fucking own LinkedIn.
Joel Cheesman: Well, that's what it will be. And you'll eventually get GitHub profiles synced into here somehow, and maybe Glint data. We'll talk about that in a second. But, I mean, all these things will eventually come together. I think that LinkedIn will be the hub, if you will, of this whole thing. I mean, the experience will be the same, whether you log in with LinkedIn or use your Microsoft account. It'll be the same data. It'll be the same experience. I mean, but it's simply their advantage that no one else has.
And we talk about Google sourcing your current ATS database, or sourcing the internet, which we think they'll eventually do. But only one really has half a billion professional profiles that it can do this and actually make as a big a wave as they can. The product head, that gave the speech, she described it as, "Imagine ATS with, sort of, preloaded, interested candidates," right? And that's essentially what it is. Now, you could argue that your current database is the same thing. You just have to energize them, and you have to build technology that says, "This person's interested," whereas LinkedIn, they actually say, "Hey, I'm open to new opportunities. The resume that's in your ATS is three years old." You have no idea whether they're interested or not.
Chad Sowash: They're not truly interested until they apply for the job. You can say, "Hey, these guys have been reading about their interest level as higher," but they're not truly interested until they apply.
Joel Cheesman: Well, there's literally a switch on LinkedIn that says, "Am I open to new opportunities or not? If you are open to new opportunities, you're gonna show up in the search results, or the whatever, the automated search that you get when you post a job on LinkedIn."
Chad Sowash: Legally, it doesn't matter what that little, fucking switch says. Legally, you have to apply to actually be seen as interested. So yeah, I don't think I'd change that on my profile. When's the last time you changed that on your profile? When's the last time you changed that on your profile?
Joel Cheesman: Would a recruiter rather contact ... Well, I haven't looked for a job in a while. If I was looking for a job, I'd change it.
Chad Sowash: I doubt people even think about that.
Joel Cheesman: I think, well then, they deserve to be unemployed.
Chad Sowash: I think that piece, in itself, doesn't really fucking matter. Being able to identify qualified candidates is the big key, number one. And what you're talking about is just fluff and bullshit, okay? So the big piece is actually being able to qualify individuals, you find those qualified individuals, and then you get real interest, which is applying for the job. That's real interest. All that other stuff's just bullshit and fluff. So, first off, apparently Microsoft Dynamics sucks. If Microsoft dynamics talent was good enough, this wouldn't have happened. I thought it was interesting because on a story that a recruiter wrote, I think it was on SourceCon, said, "I can't recall a time when any sourcer or recruiter has ever uploaded a requisition into their ATS and has had immediate access to full pipeline of qualified candidates."
Well, that's because you're obviously not doing enough research. There are plenty of platforms that are powered by HiringSolved, now the Uncommons of the world who are popping these things out, the Intellos. This already is working, but it's not happening in one system, it's happening from vendor to vendor. So, iCIMS doesn't do it, but it can with some of these other vendors that are actually included. So here's the big question. Do we now see the iCIMS, the Taleos, the applicant tracking systems of the world start looking to acquire this type of technology, because it's already out there?
Joel Cheesman: I think yes, but I want to go ... I want to go back to just agree to disagree on your whole premise that LinkedIn's shit is fluff. I think there's real ... I think people do update their LinkedIn when they're looking for a job. I do think that as a recruiter, I would rather call 100 people that have said I'm open to new opportunities as opposed to calling 100 people where I don't even know, I don't really know. I've got to convince them, I've got to play phone tag, etc. So we can just agree to disagree on that component.
Chad Sowash: Like I said, if they apply, they show intent.
Joel Cheesman: Fine. We can disagree. We've got a lot of show to cover. We can visit this later. To your other question of consolidation.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: absolutely. Yes. I mean, you know, world of a three pronged monster of Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook becoming the end to end platforms for companies to hire is happening, and it's going ... it's not gonna happen overnight, but it's gonna happen, and these companies are gonna choose are we a LinkedIn house, are we a Google house, etc., and the stand alone ATS, particularly the little guys are not going to last.
Chad Sowash: No.
Joel Cheesman: So the little ones are gonna get gobbled up by the big ones and the big ones will eventually get gobbled up or go away from the even bigger ones, but I think the future of the ATS is, whew, man, if I'm not, you know ... if you're not awake at night thinking about this as an ATS owner, and I love that we're going to iCIMS next week because I'm going to totally get into this, but if you're ... to me, you're just ... you're walking blind without a cane because the future is ... whew ... it's clear as mud to me that this is the future of the ATS business.
Chad Sowash: Easily, and let's make it very simple. A recruiter posts a requisition. That requisition automatically gets matched against the applicant tracking system database, number one. That's priority one for the candidates that you've already paid for. Number two, then it goes into the paid database. In this case Linkedin, right? That's number two. Then number three, if you don't reach the threshold of qualified candidates who have applied for the job, then you start the programmatic outreach, right? This is, it's actually happening today, but this is ... this is really just a big splash in the water to tell all these applicant tracking systems "I know you want to have a "hub" and not really say, you know, "We're not gonna pick a winner." You better fucking pick a winner. Pull together a platform that can do all of those things so that it makes it that much faster to surface qualified candidates and get them into your seats.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah. If Hired by Google was Nagasaki, LinkedIn was Hiroshima.
Chad Sowash: Oh yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Not to use a bad World War Two reference, but another reference would be these are like the two asteroids, if there were two that, you know, eventually killed the dinosaurs. Like, you need to really be thinking about your business and you talk about a lot like, the resources that they have you just can't match. Period.
Chad Sowash: No. Well, okay, so say that you're a CareerBuilder or a Monster. What do you do from here? You try to do the same thing. You have databases that are fucking huge. So what do you do? You overlay technology on top of it that if somebody posts or feeds jobs into your system, they automatically take that data and they match it against your database, and then maybe you pay per qualified applicant, who the fuck knows? But guess what guys? This whole pay per click thing, a click isn't qualified. An application is not qualified. You guys are already years behind. You better catch up.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, I mean, if I'm Monster and CareerBuilder, we talked about this last week, I think. I think LinkedIn has, and you could argue, a fairly vibrant, a community of
people who use the site.
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Even if you don't think people go to LinkedIn, you at least have to agree that it's more active than the resume database in Monster.
Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. Easy.
Joel Cheesman: So that alone makes the data fresher, better. I also think there was ... there was a really sort of small comment that they made in the LinkedIn announcement that you had to sort of, if you caught it or not, but one of the algorithmic elements of people ranking well or people coming up in the searches for LinkedIn users for recruiters was not gender, was whether or not the person followed the company on LinkedIn. So if job seekers catch sort of knowledge of that or know that, then you're going to see a lot of people start following companies on LinkedIn just to show that, "Hey, I'm interested in the company," which is going to help with branding, which I think kind of ties into this whole Glint acquisition.
Anyway, there's just ... there's an activity level on LinkedIn that you just don't get with any job board, and I just think that's impossible to match.
Chad Sowash: Yeah. I don't think it's impossible, but I think it's hard
Joel Cheesman: For sure. For sure. Well, LinkedIn did a few other things. Diversity was one of them, which is your hot button issue. What were your thoughts on that?
Chad Sowash: Yeah, it's interesting. To be able to take a look at the diversity insights of your organization, the talent pool, and then start to compare that against competitors. I mean really your industry across the industry, so being able to take a look at that and then a gender weighting system. And this is ... I mean this is where we get into some really interesting conversations because Facebook and all the shit that facebook is taking for being able to target ads to only young females, let's say, right? And then the old white male gets pissed off and says, "Oh, that's it, we're going to court." This is the same kind of shit, that's not different.
Now I believe that companies to be able to diversify their talent pools should be able to do this, although you have to remember, you'd better be able to defend why you're doing this. Right? So I think it's good. There's no question. The insights provide more intel that you definitely need, especially against the industry, but at the end of the day, I think these are great mechanisms for companies to be able to diversify their platforms, or their workforce. The thing is, they better be ready for old white guys who are pissed off and have a lot of money to take them to court.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah. The whole day was sort of an Oreo cookie of announcements for LinkedIn, right? Like they had ... they had the cookie of the diversity. You had like the creamy white center of the ATS, and then you had LinkedIn Learning announced, which is sort of an internal mentor solution, but as we all know, the goodness is right there in the center of the milky white creamy substance. So good stuff from LinkedIn.
Glint acquisition happened at the beginning of the week. Glint is a solution for engaging employee happiness, sentiment, etc. This is LinkedIn's largest acquisition ever. Lynda was their biggest, which we don't hear a lot about their whole educational stuff very much. They paid like 1.4 billion I think for, for Lynda. TechCrunch I believe, or Bloomberg reported that they paid between like 400 to 500 million for Glint. It's their first and biggest. So definitely their biggest acquisition since Microsoft has come to town.
Thoughts personally I'm struggling with ... I guess it's just they want to be an end to end, they don't just want to be a recruiting tool. They want to be with you forever in your recruiting employment process, and certainly engagement and happiness play into that. They also, you know ... we talked about insights as well, which they're very serious about and it's a very cool product, but employment branding is part of that insight solution that they have, so I gotta think that eventually insights will also encompass how are your current employees from a morale standpoint?
Chad Sowash: Yeah. It's all about retention. I mean it's what it is, about retention. It's about being able to gauge whether your people are happy or not. So if you ever go to an airport and you see the happy or sad face buttons that you can tap.
Joel Cheesman: I love that.
Chad Sowash: To tell whether you're having ... whether your experience in that airport was good or it was bad or it was shitty. You find them everywhere. But it's interesting because they have 200 employees and I'm like, "Why the ... what do they do with 200 employees? What are they doing over there?" I mean there must be some things behind the scenes that I'm just not getting, because that's a hell of a lot of resources to put in to happy or sad faces.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah. There may be something there we don't see or a vision for the future. The happy and sad faces that you push in the bathroom scare me a little bit. I'm worried about hepatitis, whatever, being on the frowny face if I were to punch it. So I tend to stay away from it.
Chad Sowash: That's why you always have a towel on your way out to be able to do one of two things.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, I get the little nest thing from the toilet that you can ... Anyway, yeah, I think it's a longterm play. Four or five hundred million is quite a bit to pay for what they've got. Hopefully there's something really going into the head there. But LinkedIn continues to move onward in the march of supremacy with the big three, and this week was an evidence of that.
Chad Sowash: And last but not least, I mean they paid four to five hundred million, 400 to 500 million for this platform. So all those other startups that are out there right now start to see their valuation going higher because they're more than a happy or sad face. Right. You know, and I mean this is what it does.
Joel Cheesman: Well, millennials like to be loved, you know. Retention is hot so the time is right for this stuff.
Chad Sowash: I like to be loved.
Joel Cheesman: Just like the time is right for JobAdX
Chad Sowash: And a new ad.
Announcer: As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX has been providing job board publishers, direct employers, agencies, RPOs and staffing firms, dynamic job bidding and real time ad delivery through our programmatic job advertising exchange. When we started, we described JobAdX as AdSense for jobs. Now, we offer much more with switchboard and live alert, completing our full suite of dynamic programmatic advertising tools, but the best of consumer ad tech. Switchboard offers our dynamic technologies to all partner job board feed management and live alert eliminates latency and expired job ads via email. For more information about any of our ad solutions, please reach out to us at joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs.
Chad Sowash: Oh, it was quicker. More to the point.
Joel Cheesman: That was efficient.
Chad Sowash: I like that. I do like that.
Joel Cheesman: But if you're not ... if you're not leveraging programmatic as a vendor or an employer, you've got to go check out JobAdX. They're great.
Chad Sowash: Why wouldn't you? That's the big question.
So why would Amazon shut down their AI? I mean why would they do that?
Joel Cheesman: Chicks, man, sorry.
So Amazon is regularly known as an innovator in recruiting, and they're also known for their ability to create efficiencies, cut fat, etc., and they were leveraging a recruiting artificial intelligence solution that I think was homemade actually.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: And over time, as I know the story, it started leaning toward men, particularly on the engineering side and it became biased against women, and the company to their credit, shut it down.
Chad Sowash: So it, it says the algorithm began to filter out applications that included words such as women's and also down ranked graduates from all female colleges.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah.
Chad Sowash: The company's experimental hiring tool used artificial technology, so and so. See, this is the problem. We try to make things that are easy way too fucking complex. There's no reason. Doesn't matter what college an individual came from. If your qualification says bachelor's degree or master's degree or it says associates, it doesn't matter, the individual should be qualified because of that, and when we start getting into these algorithm matching types of things, once we get over complicated, this stupid shit starts to happen. So we need to really back up and say, "What are we here to do? We're here to hire qualified individuals, not negatively impact our talent pool by pretty much chucking qualified women out the door." Makes no fucking sense.
Joel Cheesman: So my question, it wasn't really clear from some of the news that I read, but as I understand it, the algorithm was sort of driven by the results, right? So, so who was actually hired and the hire became sort of weighted against the algorithm. So essentially, as I understand it, if the human beings were only hiring people that were, you know, algorithmically not from women's college or not in women's groups, then the machine is simply learning from the humans and the humans are kind of the dickheads in this scenario, and the machine is just sort of learning from that. From my perspective, the machine was doing what it was supposed to do, it was just learning from humans which is where the error happened.
Chad Sowash: Yes. It's learning bad behavior. So we've got to know where to shut machine learning off, and if it's bad behavior. So, again, we're still ... we still have to focus on what is it there for in the first place? To deliver qualified candidates, that's it. That's it. Not to be able to go through and see what kind of donuts Jeffrey likes on a Wednesday so that we can get the right person who will fill that job, who actually drives past a donut shop on the way to fucking work.
Joel Cheesman: Well, frankly, anyone who only likes donuts on Wednesday should never be hired, because donuts are delicious every day.
Chad Sowash: Here's the thing, we're looking for AI to solve all of our ills and that shit's just not going to happen. What a company like Amazon should do is they should take their, use the bazillions of dollars they have to solve the actual problem and build a training program to pipeline candidates into those positions. If they're not getting enough females and/or diverse types of candidates, then they can fix it. They shouldn't be looking at the US government or any other government to be able to fix that fucking problem for them. It's their talent that's going to build their product and making them money, so they should figure it out, not think that an algorithm's going to do it.
Joel Cheesman: ... Never be hired because donuts are delicious every day.
Joel Cheesman: Clearly, we have a long way to go with AI and recruiting because Amazon is at the forefront of this. This stuff is going to get figured out. It'll take a while, but it will get figured out and AI will be, as we believe, a major component to all hiring and sourcing.
Chad Sowash: Yeah. Again, we're thinking way too complex when this is a simple equation.
Joel Cheesman: It's basically saying don't use words like "women" or certain colleges as a filter for not letting someone through.
Chad Sowash: Your primary focus should be the qualifications on that job, and does this individual, no matter religion, ethnicity, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the qualifications. And are you looking to relocate or not? So it's geographic. Once you get past that and you start looking, and algorithm's start looking at those types of terms, then you've already fucked up.
Joel Cheesman: I also think it's interesting to think that we believe AI is going to solve all our problems, like you said, and yet we have so long to go from that.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: So a company that hasn't had any issues with women, although they were in the news recently with diversity for throwing out an African American man for just hanging out, waiting for his buddy.
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Anyway, they're in the news, childcare, applaud this story. Starbucks will begin to offer subsidized backup childcare for all of its US employees, sorry rest of the world, including part-time workers. The program will give Starbucks workers 10 days of backup care. The story said just four percent of employers offer similar programs. The move comes as the labor market in the US grows increasingly competitive with employers boosting their benefits to attract and retain workers.
Chad Sowash: Just smart business. And the key piece here was including part-time workers. They understand that a good amount of their workforce is part-time, so they have to include everybody. And one of the things that I keep seeing from companies that are out there who are bitching and complaining about not being able to find the right types of talent is they're not willing to change the way that they're doing things. They're not willing to change. And again, this is an expense. There is no question of benefit, but it also keeps individuals, retains individuals into those positions so you're not having to spend a shit ton of money to try to replace them. So I mean, that's the thing. Think outside of the box. If you're only hiring full-time employees and you can't find enough full-time employees, guess what? Start thinking different. Start looking for gig workers. Start looking for part-timers, start looking for all these different ways to try to get the job done.
Joel Cheesman: What shocked me was that only four percent of employers offer a similar sort of benefit. And so to me the question is, does this go towards gig economy? Come in and work, then you're done, you get no benefits, versus a few select employers where they say, "We honor your abilities. If you come in and work full-time for us, we can count on you, we're going to give you benefits like this," and that's going to retain some of the best workers. To me, it'll be interesting in the future how that sort of dichotomy works out. And I think ultimately, employers like the big brands, the Starbucks, the Walmarts, the Targets, those guys, Home Depots, will probably offer stuff like this, but the small mom and pop restaurant, laundromat, et cetera, they won't be able to and they're going to embrace the gig economy.
Chad Sowash: And again, you're right. It's going to be different from mom and pop than it is for the Starbucks of the world.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it's a serious issue, employment. I was at a restaurant the other day. Every waiter was wearing an I Love My Job t-shirt. Like when did that ever happen? Holy shit. All the waiters are recruiting people.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah, yeah. "Hey, here. Wear this today."
Joel Cheesman: Yeah, it's the, was it swag? What was Office Space? What did the Friday's restaurant workers wear?
Chad Sowash: It wasn't bling. What was it? Oh shit.
Joel Cheesman: It will come to us maybe. But yeah, yeah. Waiters are going to become recruiting billboards in the future. Benefits. My job's awesome. I tweet about how great it is. All right dude, Canvas. Let's talk about that. Second week in a row we have not gotten an ad from our new sponsor, so you and I are just going to freestyle some stuff about Canvas. Great company based here in Indianapolis nearby both of us. Aman Brar founder, Cha Cha, Cha Cha DNA, texting is in it, great company. Everyone's getting on messaging. What other buzzwords can I throw out there?
Chad Sowash: Yeah, I think they love us talking about them so much.
Joel Cheesman: They do. I think they're not going to give us an ad because they just want us to freestyle every week.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, because they get more mileage out of it. So talk about process automation. So on average, Canvas recruiters complete screens in 4.4 minutes. So actually, candidate screens, they disqualify in 52 seconds, which is saving like 922 hours per year. So what they're saying is if you automate the grunt work and focus on the actual connections themselves, let the chat bots do some of these pieces and then what you can do is you can focus on the actual connection with the candidate. You can be a brand ambassador.
and a platform like this, as we talk about chat bots and we talk about texting platforms and all the messaging, if you can find areas to automate and allow your humans to actually be human to other humans and be a brand ambassador, this is the exact type of platform you need to look into at gocanvas.io.
Joel Cheesman: What I got is they want our Death Match competition at TATech. I don't know what else better to say. They beat back some stiff competition, quality organization. And by the way, you want to recruit millennials? How about bitmoji recruiting with canvas? Put bitmojis in your messaging, attract millennials. What could be better? Gocanvas.io. Okay, getting back to the news.
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Facebook is in the news. TechCrunch reported that they're poaching folks from a site called Refdash. Wow. Speaking of bad names, Refdash is your typical sort of employment site connecting job seekers with employers, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, from from my standpoint, it sounds like the company's in the crapper. They're winding stuff down and Facebook is there, conveniently, to pick up some of the talent. That's not so much the news to me as the fact that Facebook continues to be serious about its sort of jobs. Offering and poaching these folks to work on the job solution tells me that they continue to be serious and will continue to be a player there up there with everybody else that we talked about.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, so I think this was TechCrunch. "Facebook just snatched some talent to fuel its invasion of LinkedIn's turf." Personally, I think it's just TechCrunch manufacturing shit to talk about. I don't see anything here. I think it's just the normal kind of sway of the day and where people are coming from. Yeah, it might be because Refdash isn't doing great and they're all ejecting to go to Facebook. It could be that Facebook is actually doing something worth a shit and hopefully they'll be able to share it with us here sometime soon because I'm sure they are. But from my standpoint, yeah, I think it's just TechCrunch looking for clicks.
Joel Cheesman: Are you saying TechCrunch and bloggers in general are embracing hyperbole to get clicks and readers?
Chad Sowash: I would say yes.
Joel Cheesman: Outrageous. Outrageous.
Chad Sowash: Because we don't do that.
Joel Cheesman: Outrageous. And what else is outrageous this week?
Chad Sowash: Yes.
Joel Cheesman: Oh God. Why? A new Tinder for jobs startup is out there. This one from your favorite country, France, home of the nonstop cavalcade of great startups in the job space, has launched an app called Blonk, B-L-O-N-K. Okay. So they've got nothing going for them at the moment. Tinder for jobs is crap. France is still France and Blonk is a horrible name unless you play football.
Chad Sowash: Yeah. So I don't know if Blonk means something in French or not.
Joel Cheesman: It's French for F America. That's what it is.
Chad Sowash: It's French for this is a stupid fucking idea. So one of the co-founders actually said, this is hilarious, "We use AI to connect talent and hiring managers directly in a few swipes, just like Tinder. Personal chemistry is involved." This is the stupidest shit. Who comes up with this? And the big question is, who is actually providing funds for this shit?
Joel Cheesman: Let me clarify this. So when you date, okay, you're single. You will put up with multiple folks because the chance to have sex is on the table. Employment is not that.
Chad Sowash: No.
Joel Cheesman: Remember like when Jobber first came out and you would swipe through jobs that were totally irrelevant aside from the fact that they were nearby. Right? Totally irrelevant, total waste of time. Now, I will swipe right and left and whatever if it's women who are single that want to go out on dates.
Chad Sowash: You would. You wouldn't anymore.
Joel Cheesman: I'm speaking in generalities. The whole argument of dating should be like finding a job is totally ridiculous, and I wish these companies would stop doing this, but they will continue because people will give money to them and around we go.
Chad Sowash: And these companies obviously do no research whatsoever. They didn't see all the dead companies who said that they were going to be the Eharmony of jobs.
Joel Cheesman: Right.
Chad Sowash: This is the same shit, guys. This isn't different. I don't care if you swipe or you fill out a 20 minute frickin survey. It's the same stuff. The motivations are different. And "chemistry", it's not the same chemistry. That's for God damn sure.
Joel Cheesman: For God damn sure. I'm so tired of tinder for jobs sites. And by the way, I shared this on LinkedIn. It's gotten like 7,000 views and interactions and shit. So clearly other people see this and why these companies don't. Do a little research. Right? Do a little intel on the market before you launch this stuff.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, Vincent.
Joel Cheesman: It's pronounced Vincent, by the way. And I know that because my wife is French Canadian and she has a brother named Vincent.
Chad Sowash: Let's go over something real quick. I'm an American, so it's Vincent and it's a stupid fucking idea, Vincent. That being said, the outro today is going to be done by my daughter, who turns 17 today.
Joel Cheesman: Woohoo.
Chad Sowash: Ema.
Joel Cheesman: Yes. Are you taking her to like Benihana and Cold Stone for her birthday?
Chad Sowash: So I already have birthday donuts waiting after she finally wakes up, which will probably, we're on fall break so she'll probably get up like around two for God's sake. Then it's going to be a birthday weekend. That's what it's all about.
Joel Cheesman: Nice. All this food talk, man, I'm going to go get lunch. I'm out and we out.
Chad Sowash: We out.
Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad, and his buddy, Cheese. This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com.