While the Google train keeps chugging along with positive news this week, things at Indeed are showing signs of unraveling Down Under, as well as other spots around the globe. Likewise, Facebook dealt recruitment marketing a blow this week and America, we have a staffing problem.
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Ed: This is Ed from Philly you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
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.
Chad: Bring it.
Joel: Bring is here and the time is right for podcasting in the streets. Heidi ho homeboys and homegirls, welcome to Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman.
Chad: And I'm the Jagger to your Bowie, Chad Sowash.
Joel: I'll deal with that. Although, one of them's dead. On this weeks show, Indeed's Australian meltdown, oh mate. That was a bad accent. Google goosesteps into Germany.
Chad: That's just not right.
Joel: And Houston, we have a staffing problem. Yes, we're covering the globe this week, so commute times will vary. Thank god for Google Search API. We'll be right back after this word from JobAdX.
JobAdX: This is the sound of job search. This is sound of job search defeat. Job search can be frustrating. Job seekers run into the same irrelevant ads, page after page, before they find a match. When job seekers aren't engaged, conversions are low. Budgets are wasted. Jobs go unfilled. No one wins. But job search doesn't have to be defeating. JobAdX's smart search exchange references 400 data points to select the most targeted jobs, and delivers what job seekers really want to premium ad units across our network.
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Chad: The whole job search thing, like road rage, so like job search rage instead of ... but really just getting pissed off. I think that can come out more in the ad.
Joel: Millennials don't rage, dude.
Chad: What?
Joel: They just click onto whatever new Instagram posts they can look at. Now, the people should know that before the show, you and I were waxing nostalgic about the '80s. And unbeknownst to me, Mr. Chad Sowash was quite the break dancer back in the day.
Chad: You have no proof.
Joel: And was keeping cardboard box companies in business with his stylish moves and waves and moonwalks and everything else. I forget all the moves that were hot at the time. Did you have like a bandana tied to your jeans, did you have the Adidas with the laces untied but tied at the same time?
Chad: Well first off there is no proof of any of this ever happening, number one. Number two, it was always Converse. Always Converse.
Joel: Was it Chucks or were you walking like the Weapons or the-
Chad: No, dude the Weapons. I never wore Chucks, those flimsy things.
Joel: You wore Chucks at some point in your life.
Chad: No, never put a pair on in my life. And, this is from the guy who actually lives where Chuck grew up, and played basketball. Yeah.
Joel: Another little known fact about Chad. He lives in the town that Chuck Taylor honed his first basketball skills I guess.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Every person in my household right now has at least two if not three sets of Chuck Taylors, I just never got into 'em. I rock the Adidas now, but back then, I was definitely all about the Weapons.
Joel: The Weapons were great except that they weighed about 18 pounds.
Chad: They did. Much like we were talking about the camcorders that you had to carry around to actually try to get any type of video whatsoever. It was like carrying around a cement block.
Joel: People don't know Larry Bird actually had a 44-inch vertical leap, but because he wore the Weapons it was more like a 23 inch vertical leap.
Chad: Oh shit. All right. We ready for shoutouts?
Joel: Shoutouts to the '80s. And beyond.
Chad: And who would be great with this would be the Job Board Doctor because I bet he could recall-
Joel: The '80s?
Chad: Just a ton of shit about the 80s. Oh yeah, possibly depending on how much peyote he got into.
Joel: He was not break dancing, though. I can guarantee that.
Chad: No I'm gonna go a hard no.
Joel: I see like a Rush concert, maybe a Journey here and there, maybe a Foreigner concert or REO Speedwagon, but yeah. He wasn't beatboxing and dancing on a cardboard box.
Chad: Oh, no way in hell. No way in hell. But big shout out to Job Board Doctor. Haven't heard from him in a while, but he's been blasting out some tweets and pretty much called Joel stupid yesterday.
Feffer: Such an asshole.
Chad: So thanks Job Board Doctor.
Joel: Well he's over in Europe, so he's feeling all socialist at the moment. I think he's at the AIM Group Conference, I think I saw that somewhere. He's feeling all warm and fuzzy with the government controls. That's what I blame his comment on.
Chad: People are being taken care of, I guess. I don't know. Shit.
Joel: By the way, last week you said ... Okay, I'm not gonna get into this. But-
Chad: You are. You're totally going to get into it.
Joel: The government's role is to take care of its people and I take a little bit of dissonance with that. The government's role is to protect people ...
Chad: Which is taking care of people.
Joel: ... not necessarily take care of people.
Chad: Which is taking care of people. I mean, that's ensuring that they're actually getting what they need.
Joel: No. The government should give me the opportunity to take care of myself [crosstalk 00:05:58]-
Chad: Well, that in itself, there's a balance there, and you can be out of balance very quickly, so yeah, but it's to be able to take care of their people, protect their people and take care of their people. Yes.
Joel: Agree to disagree. Okay. Back to the shoutout.
Chad: Matt O'Donnell, gotta love this tweet from Matt O'Donnell. He said he's got four new entry level folks joining his team and he likes the idea of having the Chad and Cheese podcast being mandatory listening for all new hires. So do we, Matt. So do we.
Joel: Shout out to Nancy from Philly. Geez, Nancy, one of our biggest fans fell off the face of the earth. She's back, she's rested, she's ready, and she's back to listening to the podcast. So Nancy, welcome back. And I'll also wrap in a travel event in May to Philly, which I assume she'll be attending. So Nancy, get ready. Face-to-face. Let's do this. Selfie alert.
Chad: She's getting a little saucy, that Nancy, she tweeted, said very sarcastically, "I appreciate you thinking of me, ahem, since the hosts didn't," because Ed was talking about how we're going to be at Recruit Philly and we obviously didn't send out a tweet or something specific to Nancy. So this is your announcement. Nancy. We're finally getting around to it.
Ed: This is Ed from Philly. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Chad: A couple of quick shout outs to people who actually gave us some topics for this week, or least some insights. So Patrick Welch gave us some great Google insights we're going to be sharing with you, and also David Beaurepaire [Bow Repair], for some of the Indeed insights that we're going to be talking about. Good job, guys. Keep the insights, the data, all that shit coming. Our listeners, if you see something, hashtag Chad and Cheese on Twitter, share it on LinkedIn, our Facebook page, it doesn't matter. Just get it to us.
Joel: Did you say David Boat Repair?
Chad: I think it's Bow Repair, but it's French. So you never know how to fucking say it, but I think it's Bow Repair. I could be wrong.
Feffer: Such an asshole.
Joel: Shout out to some recent interviews that we did. Dan Finnigan, CEO at Jobvite, Steven Rothberg, which went live this week. If you haven't heard that podcast, check it out for some updates on Google. And most fun, I think, because it was in person, was Aman Brar, founder and CEO at Canvas, fresh off the acquisition. He rolls up in a brand new Mercedes. He's got security guards now. He's in Gucci and Coach and Dolce & Gabbana. So, Aman, we love you, man. That was fun. Look for that interview coming soon.
Chad: Yeah. And any interview we can do in a bar, especially a British-type pub is always amazing. So we need to do more.
Joel: A pub.
Chad: Shout out to the ladies from TNG who are trolling us once again, Candidate ID actually joined in to the gift/ meme Twitter trolling.
Joel: I have no idea Swedish women were so feisty.
Chad: Dude, that whole Viking thing. That's the whole thing that they're pushing. So, death match in Lisbon is going to be out fucking standing. So if you don't have your ticket to TAtech in Lisbon, dude, you're going to be missing out. You got to go, TAtech, Lisbon, in May. You can check obviously on Chad and Cheese sites, see when the events are, go to tatech.org. You can find the shit.
Joel: Yeah. And a rumor is Hung Lee is going to be on the voting panel.
Chad: Oh. I think, yeah, we have-
Joel: We're amping up the IQ this year.
Chad: Thank God.
Joel: And a much better accent by the way.
Chad: Yeah. No shit. So last but not least, to Louise Triance from UK Recruiter, she invited me again. So there must be a thing here, to actually be on Crowdcast with her to talk about AI. So whatever that means, that's what we're going to talk about. If you want to actually be involved, go ahead, go to any one of my or her social media accounts and I'm sure you'll be able to find the registration stuff there.
Joel: Dude, your surname French game is pretty strong today.
Chad: It's not too bad. Yeah.
Joel: A quick one for me, ERE as well is on my travel docket. I don't believe it is on yours, and I can't get away without pointing out that you published a graphic this week of our travel schedule and failed to include our travel sponsor, Shaker Recruitment Marketing. So Joe Shaker, apologies for me. It's all Chad. It had enough to do with me and we will make it up to you.
Chad: Whatever, dude. We give Shaker so much love, I mean above and beyond. And not to mention that was rectified literally within seconds. So get off my jock.
Joel: Dude, we actually have live footage from Joe seeing the image.
Feffer: Such an asshole.
Chad: So yeah, the Chad Cheese 2019 World Tour, next on the docket, SHRM Talent and Nashville, Staffing Tech in Nashville, TAtech Recruitment Marketing Summit in Chicago. And then, also, while we're in Chicago, we're going to be making, you might not know about this, that now you are-
Joel: I do.
Chad: ... now you know now. It's a quick pit stop at Hireology, so we're going to participate in their Chad and Cheese Podcast Club/Discussion. They have a beer fridge and knowing Kyle, it will be stocked with delicious craft beer.
Joel: I feel like we're walking into a millennial ambush.
Chad: I can't wait. I love that kind of shit.
Joel: This comedy's jam packed with 20-somethings that like the show and want us to come visit them. This feels like a baseball bat to the back of the knee to me.
Chad: Luckily, I'm always ready for an ambush. So, not a big deal.
Joel: That is true. That is true.
Ed: This is Ed from Philly. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel: Let's do this.
Chad: Well, first off, let's talk about Google drops the translation and commute search into their API. Now, first thing. You can listen to the Google news podcast we did earlier this week with Steven Rothberg. But here's one of the things that I want to throw out here. I literally just received an email from Thom, the CEO over at SmashFly, and that boy is, I love it: Riding the Wave of this News. Here's how it starts out: "Hi Chad.
Joel: That's so Thom.
Chad: "Have you ever wished you could search for jobs within a 30-minute commute from your home? Even in the heaviest traffic morning? I live in the Boston area and I've experienced the soul sucking experience of bumper to bumper commute. The struggle is real."
Chad: So Tom, in this email, is starting to pull you in, suck you in like Tom does, and then talk about SmashFly's new Google search commute and translation piece, which is really fucking cool. And he also talks about Cox Enterprises, go to their career site and check it out. So he's really pimping what SmashFly is doing here. This is what companies should be doing if they're partnering smartly with Google.
Joel: I had no idea are some 4,000 job boards and employers that have integrated the search API. [crosstalk 00:13:51]-
Chad: Hopefully.
Joel: ... into their site. I was pretty surprised to see that. For those who don't know, the API is essentially Google is running your job search, so related searches, misspellings, all the things that, the duct tape search engines of old can't handle, Google can handle for you. It's been around for two years, early adopters like CareerBuilder, Dice, Johnson & Johnson are still using it, I think optimistically from our perspective in terms of what Google's doing, they continue to evolve the product to improve features. And these were two of the features. Now, a lot of people know the veterans search feature that they launched early this year, late last year, which you're not so great on or happy about or into, but I guess that's a different topic altogether.
Joel: But this past week, they launched, or actually on the 19th, on Tuesday, they launched, like you said, commute search, which we talked to Steve, and what I like about that is historically job boards will have, "Oh, this is five miles from your house." "This is 10 miles from your house," "... 20 miles from our house." Well, five miles in San Francisco is a lot different than five miles in Columbus, Ohio, right?
Chad: Yes.
Joel: From a time perspective. So Google actually now breaks this down to how long your commute will be from a car, walking or public transportation perspective, which is obviously way more valuable than just saying, "Hey, this is five miles from my house or 10 miles from my house."
Chad: Yeah. Well, and so I think the podcast with Steven was awesome because we talked about commute search, the new unveiling of commute search and also translation so that the actual translation that happens in search, not just on the page but also in the search, those are two great, I think, features that they've pushed out. But even more interesting to me were the stats that Steven shared. So, again, they have collegerecruiter.com as their job sites, what they were able to do to save money and also make money off the back of this type of a partnership, definitely go look forward the Google News podcast, listen to it, especially if you're a vendor to be able to better understand how this could prospectively help you make money.
Joel: I was most shocked at how many customer service calls they would get every week before the search, before Google search versus how few they get now. I had no idea, one, that people still picked up the phone and called companies, but number two, that they were actually getting, I think two to three a week of people saying like, "How the hell does search work?" Or, "How the hell does this thing work?" to now getting almost no calls and the time that they're saving from that.
Joel: And College Recruiters is still a fairly, would you call it a niche job board? It's college internship. So if you're a bigger national, global, whatever job entity, like the savings from a customer service perspective must be really nice, thanks to Google.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah. And that's just one aspect, right?
Joel: That is just one. Basically, in short, they're spending less money and they're making more money.
Chad: Yeah. So listen to the podcast.
Joel: Listen to the podcast.
Chad: So, yeah. Your favorite, I think, topic is Google goosestepping into Germany, and not only that Google is continuing this world domination, but you thought [crosstalk 00:17:11]-
Joel: The only way I'm letting you get away with that is because you were in the military and you're a veteran. I don't think I could have said goosestep without the thought police coming in and getting me.
Joel: Now, I will say specifically, Germany usually goosesteps and to other places. It's not usually goosestepping into Germany, but we'll forgive that this time, particularly when Google for Jobs is involved.
Chad: Yeah. But I mean, this is Google goosestepping into Germany, so
that's different, right?
Joel: Is there goose?
Chad: Is there goot? So thanks again to Patrick Welch for sharing some analytics from Google Analytics that I guess they had set up, which was showing Google was moving toward Deutschland. And that's pretty awesome to just to be able to see, in some of these different areas where work is different in Germany than it is here in the US, so Google is figuring that out. It took Google a while to get into England. It's interesting to see them thoughtfully moving into these different countries.
Joel: Arbeiten ist gut. So what countries are we in now? We're in America. We're in Canada. We're in Japan, which is my favorite, because that's where Indeed's sugar daddy lives. UK, we're in Ireland, right?
Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joel: We're in India?
Chad: Yeah, I believe so. Yeah.
Joel: And now Germany, and you've got rumors that there's a new country on the way.
Chad: Well, I mean, doing testing in France, and this is where David Boat Repair comes in from Hello Work. He actually not only showed that they were doing testing in France, but this is the cool part. There was an Indeed citing in Google for Jobs.
Feffer: Such an asshole.
Joel: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Indeed who does not play with Google for Jobs, you're telling me we have a sighting in the wild of a search done on Google for Jobs in France, where Indeed is a supplier of said content.
Chad: That is correct. And we will share the screenshot out. Let me tell ya. I think this is incredibly interesting, just from the standpoint of knowing that Indeed had really gone cold Turkey on Google and said, "No, fuck that. We're not playing this Trojan horse game that we played on the rest of the industry. We're not playing this." But I think there are areas throughout the world where they just don't have the dominance and they're going to need help. So therefore they're going to call upon Google. That's my opinion. What do you think?
Joel: I think that they were very, naïve to think that they wouldn't be able to play with Google on some level. I think if they did it in the US, there'd be a lot of 'splaining to do because they were very adamant about, "We're not going to play in this game." They can sort of get away with it in non-American countries. Although as we've seen, the Internet is a small place and people talk. So we're gonna catch wind of it. But yeah, I mean, Indeed globally is a powerhouse, but they're not exactly Hercules in every single market. So obviously in France there's some work to do, their employers that post jobs need a little bit more traffic and where better to go than Google for that traffic?
Joel: I also do think it's a nice little acquiesce to say Google is awesome because we're willing to go against our public persona and actually use it in certain countries.
Chad: So if they start getting addicted to this crack overseas, what makes anyone think that they're not going to jump on board everywhere?
Joel: Well, I believe you and I have a running bet of over and under 12 months from January 1st of this year as to how long Indeed can hold out. And I think you went under, I think I went over and it's looking more and more like you might win this one as they roll out certain countries on Google for Jobs.
Chad: Yeah. I would say that, my thought was global in the first place, so I've already won that, but still, it's ...
Feffer: Such an asshole.
Chad: But that takes us to another conversation because we're getting news that Indeed APAC is coming apart at the seams. You talked a little bit about that.
Joel: Yeah. You and I, as you've mentioned, we get insight information, we get tips, I'm sure we get a lot of absolute bullshit. So some of it when we say rumor or maybe or we heard, take it with a grain of salt. But I got an email last week, I've never gotten anything like it because it was from a service where there was a timestamp on the email and it's set to blow up in a couple days. And you can't forward the email. I'm on Gmail, so the forward function is disabled. Oh Shit. Which I've never seen before. You can't copy and paste the texts, which I have seen before, but this was unique. And then the email disappears, the content disappears from your email at a certain date. In my case, it's live for about a week.
Joel: So I actually had to take a screenshot of it to keep it in the archives or keep it as fact that I actually did get this. So, I'll read the email as I received it. Basically, stuff's shit outside the US according to this person. Now keep in mind, this is anonymous. Take it for what it's worth, but a lot of it seems pretty legit and we'll dig into some of the pieces of the email here in a second. But I want to just read this to our listeners.
Joel: So this reader says, "If you've not seen it recently, I check out Indeed's reviews on Glassdoor," Indeed and Glassdoor are sister companies, by the way. "In the first quarter of the year, 25% of the staff walked out of the Australia office and more are on the way out. A direct quote from one of the top salespeople, 'It's so bad, it's unreal. It's like living a nightmare.' Have a look at their views on Glassdoor in Sydney, which we have and we'll talk about.
Joel: "The guy who took over marketing for APAC moved from Australia to Singapore to take the new role, has been demoted in the face of multiple HR complaints, now has no direct reports, and is 'under review.' You mentioned Europe doing well, which we have on the show. They're growing in Ireland and whatnot. That may not be the case in all countries. Did you hear the SVP of EMEA, his name's Chris McDonald, just left after only being in the role for around eight to nine months? A number of reasons why, but basically he took a look under the hood and didn't like what he saw.
Joel: "You may also notice Indeed is not on TV, radio and print or even spending on pay-per-click in Europe. I wonder why? The recent posts about Indeed London and it's drugs, drinking and bullying culture have been removed from Glassdoor," which should be pretty easy for Indeed to do, "but they were up long enough for people, including clients to be aware. To say things have changed here in the last six months would be an understatement. It's not the place it used to be." And that is the end of the email.
Chad: This is beyond APAC. I mean this is a me as well, then.
Joel: According to this email, this anonymous source, yes. Things are bad all over the place, minus, I guess, America, North America.
Chad: Gotcha. Okay. So yeah. Now we're taking a look at some of the Glassdoor reviews. And just one of the reviews cited drinking slash / bro culture, job is like Groundhog day with fixed account sets, senior leadership clock watches and are literally positioned to watch people walking in and out. Don't dare to zip up your bag at 4:59, before five o'clock. The same leaders encourage you to work overtime without reward. Extraordinary and unjustifiable increase and revenue targets quarter after quarter.
Chad: So it sounds like the squeeze is on and the leadership that they have in place, I don't know if it's young, I don't know if it's inexperienced or whatever it is, they're dealing with it in a very, very bad way. This is at least what it feels like from the Indeed reviews, and some of the titles: Rubbish. Promise the world, delivers very little. Sydney office going downhill fast. Terrible. Toxic.
Joel: And what's the current overall star rating for the Sydney-
Chad: Let me scroll up here. It is ...
Joel: It was about 1.5 the last time I checked.
Chad: 1.9, so they're almost at two stars out of five.
Joel: Man, that's not good. In terms of Chris McDonald, who I believe was over in Ireland just for reporting sake, his LinkedIn profile still says that he's at Indeed. So for whatever that's worth, apparently Chris McDonald is still around in that role.
Joel: Now, I also found curious that there's no TV, radio, print or even PPC over in Europe. And why would that be? And I was trying to think why would that be?
Chad: I think you have a dominant share here in the US, and they're trying to keep that. I could see where they would want to focus their defense here, to be able to build that moat. But again, I've said this forever. This is unsustainable.
Joel: We have listeners over across the pond. If anyone finds evidence of Indeed on Google with pay-per-click or advertising somewhere in the print paper, please let us know. Otherwise we just have to go on what this source tells us. But I agree that, look, when things go bad, you take money away from where it's not as valuable anymore and you start putting it in resources where it does work, which would obviously lead to North America and particularly the US.
Joel: To me, though, this feels very reminiscent to stuff CareerBuilder and Monster were going through right around the recession time. You see spreading yourself too fast, too thin. You see offices going rogue. You see officers going rogue. And to me, we've been talking about the demise for a long time. To me these are the buds starting to show of things coming unraveled, whether it stays that way or not, we'll find out. But to me, this stuff is a really bad sign for Indeed.
Chad: Yes. And again, just historically, you take a look at Monster, CareerBuilder and that global spread, and then what happened?
Joel: Yeah. Keep in mind, Dice left Europe late last year in terms of its operations. So it's a tough place to do business and maybe Indeed's finding that out the hard way.
Chad: It's an entirely different culture. I mean, staffing culture entirely ... I mean, dude, if you don't go in with an entirely different strategy overall, you're definitely going to lose.
Joel: Well, who's not losing?
Chad: Who's that?
Joel: Our sponsor, Sovren.
Chad: God, damn straight.
Joel: Let's take a quick break, hear from them and we'll talk Facebook discrimination complaints.
Chad: Oh, Jesus.
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Chad: Silky smooth sounds of Sovren. As always.
Joel: As always. Gets me in such a good mood when I hear that sovereign ad. Yeah, life is much better than it is at Facebook, apparently. Times are tough. Now, I love this because this was actually a topic back in the day, in terms of being able to target advertising for employment based on age, location, sex, college degree, marital status, et cetera, et cetera, which Facebook has historically done, and they've done it very well and they do it in a way that no one else really can because they have so much God damn information about all of us.
Chad: And they're making a shit ton of cash doing that.
Joel: Shit ton of cash doing it. But they've been under major stress about privacy, fake news, all kinds of shit going on. So anyway, word comes out this week that because of discrimination complaints, Facebook will now disallow employment ads that are specifically targeting the things that you shouldn't target, or at least historically shouldn't like sex, age, yada, yada. So I assume that you're not real happy about this and don't really agree with the move.
Chad: It goes beyond employment, but yeah, if we can take a look at employment itself, it's a knee-jerk reaction, and instead of vetting the actual people and companies spending money and / or the fucking content that's going on to Facebook, they are dumbing down a platform that could help companies target individuals with disabilities. And that's just one sliver. But they're talking about in the article, in WaPo, they were talking about how individuals with disabilities were being discriminated against.
Chad: And so, it's the bad actors that are what's fucking the system up. But still, they're going to dumb the system down. These same bad actors will be using the system with the same content, just more as a blunt instrument instead of a surgical tool. So I think they are focusing on the wrong areas right out of the gate. They shouldn't be focusing on making a dumber tool. They should be focusing on the auditing piece and ensuring that the individuals who are spending money with them are who they are. And they can do a lot of that, obviously, through the infrastructure that they currently have set up. I just don't agree with taking these types of tools away from employers who perspectively want to focus on hiring females in tech in certain areas. It makes no fucking sense.
Joel: I agree with you. I don't think it will affect Facebook monetarily a ton, because this is a fairly small group in the big picture. And I think Facebook has bigger issues with perception and legal issues. I mean, Google was just fined $1.7 billion this week in Europe for its practices. And I think Facebook's looking at that saying like, "Good God, we don't want any piece of that." But I think for small companies that really rely on micro targeted advertising, and their budget won't allow for anything else. I think they're the big losers here. And ultimately they're going to walk away from Facebook advertising, which also includes Instagram and the rest of the Facebook network. I think all ad pricing could go down if demand by advertisers fall, which I guess is good for everyone.
Joel: But I question where they're going to go. I assume that there were some high fives given it Snapchat's headquarters, when this news came around. And actually, like I shared this week that Snapchat was upgraded because of their new ad platform actually being really effective. So if you were advertising on Facebook in that way and can any more, I think Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn to some degree are maybe where these folks go.
Chad: Possibility. I don't see advertisers pulling right out of the gates. But once again, everybody's going to suffer because Facebook doesn't want to actually stop the real fucking problem. It's the bad actors. It's the content. That's what they should be focusing on, not the actual tools themselves. And that just fucking drives me crazy.
Joel: Yeah. Ultimately it's the employers that are discriminating.
Chad: Yeah. But here's the thing, there are auditing parameters around those employers in most cases. So whether your EEOC like 50 employees and above or your OFCCP, where you're a federal contractor, they have enforcement agencies to find this shit out. So we have regulations in place, we have benchmarks in place, and these tools could perspectively help companies hit those benchmarks much faster because of the targeting. But yet instead of focusing on where the fucked-up-edness is in Facebook right now, they're focusing on the wrong shit. It's not the tool, it's not the methodology, it's the actual bad actors and the bullshit content that's being pushed into the system.
Joel: Yeah. I think ultimately it's a legal thing, it's a public perception and it's a government regulation thing. Because if you look at all the industries that were targeted or that were on the no good list, you had jobs, but you also had a housing and loans, which all look discriminatory just on its face.
Chad: It is because the way it's being used. And I'm going to tell you somebody who's incredibly pissed about this, Julie, my wife. She helps companies build hiring programs for individuals with disabilities, so that companies, major fortune 500 companies in most cases, can pull in individuals with disabilities, and they use Facebook. That is a tool that they use. So I'm going to pimp them out real quick. The Crazy and the King podcast, I can guarantee you they will dive into this on the diversity and disability side much deeper than we're going to.
Joel: Yeah. Do think that this move flows into other platforms? Because ultimately if Facebook does it, they're going to look at Twitter and say like ...
Chad: No question. Yes. Yeah. And that's the problem, is Facebook is taking this step, now everybody else is going to be expected to take the step and this is a dumb fucking step. Facebook, with all these goddamn PhDs and smart fucking brainiacs are doing a really stupid fucking thing.
Joel: Tell us how you really feel, dude.
Chad: It's not fair to those people who want to try to do good for the system.
Joel: It's weird to think we could live in a world where you couldn't advertise on any social media platform to new college graduates in engineering. You have to like take a sledge hammer to your advertising as opposed to a scalpel. And the whole benefit of social media advertising was it was a scalpel. Though it's weird to think in a world where you have this benefit, that it's going to be taken away from under.
Chad: Yeah. And there are agencies that their whole job is to enforce, to ensure that the discrimination is not happening.
Joel: And I think it also hurts Facebook's initiative into employment. I think part of their overall goal would be, "Hey, post a job and then advertise that job." Well, now what does that look like? Is it just like the old boost your post where you say, "Hey, I'm going to boost my job and not really know where it's going, but I'm just going to boost it?" Do you remember that, when you could actually boost your little-
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Yeah. That probably makes a comeback because you're not targeting, you're just saying like, "Hey, I just want to send this ad out into the world."
Chad: Yes. And the whole system gets dumber because of this move.
Feffer: Such an asshole.
Joel: America, we have a staffing problem. [crosstalk 00:37:54] I found this very interesting. But we have this perception that baby boomers are going to live forever, they're not going to leave the work force, millennials are just [crosstalk 00:38:05]-
Chad: They're stubborn as hell. [crosstalk 00:38:07] I'm telling you.
Joel: ... going to ride Ubers and live in their baby boomers parents houses for their entire life. But apparently, there's some real government problems in making sure that there are enough people to staff the jobs. So, side note, what better reason to build a wall and keep people out of the country? But I digress. You really like this story a lot.
Chad: Yeah. Again, I think you were saying that sarcastically.
Joel: Totally.
Chad: It's like we need people, assholes, why are you trying to keep people out when we need people? So that's one thing. And the number two, this provides the Bezos of the world to say, "Ah, man, we don't have the workforce. We're going to automate." Well, he wanted to go there anyway, but from an optic standpoint, guess what? Makes it much easier for him to do that? Not a bad move. Not a stupid move from a dollars and cents standpoint, but from an automation and actually taking jobs, that's exactly what's going to happen.
Chad: But yeah, I mean, this report actually said American working or looking for work stabilized around 63% from 2015 through 2018. That's 63%. So they pinpointed certain areas, like let's say for instance, the women's labor force participation rate is lower than men, and a problem was the lack of affordable childcare options, which, I mean, we talked about, I think it was last week or the week before, about Amazon's Mamazonians, and if a company wants to actually provide a differentiator and start to draw those individuals into their workforce, that's what they need to do right out of the gate, man.
Joel: Yeah. And the story also mentioned altering the criminal justice system. I mean, let's admit, there are a lot of people out there that have done their time and paid their debt to society, but can get work or can't do things that they should be able to. I know here locally, there's a pizza shop that actually only hires ex convicts to make the pies, which I think is really interesting.
Chad: Yeah. Ban the fucking box. That's all I got to say about that. Okay. So that's not all I have to say. It's fucking stupid that somebody goes to jail, the go to prison, they do their time, they come out and they can't get a job, and they can't vote, but yet they've paid what's been due to society. It's not fair, not only to that group of individuals, which socioeconomically if you take a look at it, are the individuals who need work most. It's fucking ridiculous.
Chad: So yeah, the government finally saying, "Yeah, we should probably change this whole stance that we have on the criminal justice system and maybe try to help make it a little bit easier for people to get in the workforce." No shit.
Joel: Can we call it the Andy Dufresne bill? By the way, I have a conspiracy theory I just thought of. Federal government increases minimum wage to get more people into the workforce. Maybe they're solving this problem by making companies pay more money to get more people started in the workforce.
Chad: Yeah. And I think that's a nice way to lure individuals who we know $7.25 an hour is not going to pay what they need, so they're going to live with mom and dad and maybe they have a kid and maybe they are the earner, the main earner, and they're working part-time jobs, which is actually what we saw from this report as well, to be able to get them to full time, not to mention those dollars do what? They go back into the fucking economy, which helps the economy grow. So it doesn't hurt, especially if everybody's doing it as opposed to just companies here and there.
Joel: Are you saying you agree with my conspiracy theory?
Chad: Yeah. I don't think it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a great strategy.
Joel: And I feel like we may have found common ground in the minimum wage debate. If the debate is to get more people off their asses and not play Fortnight for 20 hours a day, let's give them more money to start out in that hourly job, maybe I can get on board with that.
Chad: Well, and as we saw from the last report, last a report that was put out, most of these individuals who would be receiving the up to $15 bump are actually the prime wage earners in families. So from our standpoint, again, it's the government taking care of its own. We have to make sure that our people can feed their kids, they can put a roof over their kids' house, or then get out of mom and dad's fucking basement.
Joel: And to make sure that we can still feed our kids and shelter them, let's take a quick break and hear from Canvas and we'll talk about who was just named the number one ATS in the market.
Chad: Holy shit.
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Chad: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yeah, we know that our friends over at iCIMS was incredibly happy to see Arcadia Insights State of Recruitment, Tech industry.
Joel: Yes. I've never of Arcadia, and have you?
Chad: I have not. I have not.
Joel: Okay. So we're not going to vouch for them. They do research, so we'll just assume that they know what they're talking about. But iCIMS gets touted in an Arcadian Insights report on the state of recruiting technology. The headline is that iCIMS is now the number one in terms of market share ATS in the world, which still doesn't even put them at 7%, but it's still number one now.
Joel: The number of the number of services that are declining are many, which means there's a lot of choice, a lot of segmentation, fragmentation, but the two glaring companies that are just getting killed, is your Connex and your Oracle.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Oracle and IBM, man.
Joel: Yup. And those two have gone from nearly 10% to almost 5%. So if you look at their market share cut in half, that's a bad day, and that's happened in the last three years. So that's bad news for them. Many of the others that are listed are just stagnant or declining slowly. You got your SuccessFactors, your PeopleFluents. The ones that are growing, Workday is probably second to iCIMS in terms of penetration.
Chad: Growth. Yeah.
Joel: Jobvite growing slowly and Cornerstone also growing fairly slowly. And both of those are still at under 2% market share in terms of this. So a lot of room for a lot of players, consolidation, I think is still going to happen. What was your takeaway from the growth of the ATS market?
Chad: Well, you see Oracle and IBM, they bought into the market, right? And they want it to become these huge ERP along with talent acquisition types of ATS systems. I think what we've seen historically is when companies start to get into this mode, they do a really shitty job of it because they don't focus in one area any more. They are focused in all different areas, which means they don't do anything well. I like that iCIMS and currently Jobvite, they have acquired, like iCIMS acquired TextRecruit, and they're still keeping it separate so that they're running it pretty much like a separate company, they have the whole org chart and whatnot that's focused on being able to push that product along beside iCIMS, but also a way from iCIMS into other applicant tracking systems. That's a different strategy than Oracle and IBM took.
Joel: Yeah. I think that the statement and the insights report or the executive summary, the quote from the blog post quote Oracle and IBM in particular market share and customers are now demanding that their core recruiting platforms do more than just process applicants, which, how long have we been talking about that? "They must also become global marketing platforms that engage their audience, drive corporate initiatives such as diversity and inclusion and support career and pay progression." So I think we totally agree on that. I think the whole swing for the fences move by Jobvite to bring on three platforms that are all focused on global marketing, audience engagement, diversity inclusion. Like to me, the Dan Finnigans of the world, the Colin Days of the world, they see that that is the way to go in the future. And I think that they're building those platforms. And to me it's no surprise that you're seeing growth in what they're doing.
Chad: Still strong caution to all of those systems that are out there that are looking to buy up, which I think is smart, but it's all about execution and strategy, and again, take a look at IBM, take a look at Oracle, take a look at SAP, take a look at all those guys, man, and see how they did what they did, how they executed. And don't fucking do that.
Joel: And to me this is ripe for consolidation. The little guys of the world that have less than 1% market share, they're not going to be able to keep up technologically with what's going on, so they're going to have to sell and they might as well sell while they still have clients and still have some market share. Because a player like Jobvite or iCIMS can start really ramping up the percentage market share by consolidating and buying up some of these smaller players.
Joel: And by the way, the report talked about the investment that's going on in recruitment technology. And it's nuts. There's so much money. From 2017 to 2018, I mean you're looking at a 400 million spend to almost a billion dollars in this space being dumped. So there's money there, there's going to be acquisitions, there's going to be consolidation. I think we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg on some of that stuff.
Chad: I think the actual playbook is fairly simple at this point, is get aggressive and start rolling up partners to judge performance toward acquisition. So don't just go out there and buy shit.
Joel: Yeah. If you have an app store and you can integrate some of these services and find out which ones are the most popular, you can gobble those up and enhance your marketing platform. I'll be interested to see, the Greenhouses of the world weren't represented in this study, unless their market share was so small they didn't get included. But I have to assume that some of those levers, the Greenhouses will at some point getting to that scale where they're getting 1%, 2%, 3% market share.
Chad: Yeah. If they can eat that Oracle, IBM, SAP market share, then yeah, I think so.
Joel: This was a good week. By the way, we're recording this on Wednesday. I'm amazed we have enough news to fill up an hour show, although Chad'll edit down to like 20 minutes. But we got a lot of stuff. We'll see you next week, I guess.
Chad: You got it, man.
Joel: We out.
Chad: We out.
Stella: 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 get buckets of money to our sponsors. Otherwise, I may be forced to take that coal mining job. I saw at monster.com. We out.