Live Show: Recruit Philly
What happens when you get about 100 recruiters in Philly to witness a live Chad & Cheese podcast? A whole lotta trash talkin' about CareerBuilder, Monster, Ladders, Indeed and anyone else who gets out of line, apparently. Grab a Yuengling and get jawn. You're bound to enjoy this live show.
Afterwards, give love to our sponsors Sovren, Canvas and JobAdx.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Keca Ward: How many of you do listen to the Chad and Cheese Podcast? Yeah. They're going to be doing it live, and you're gonna hear this I think tomorrow, right guys? Maybe?
Joel: If Chad sobers up.
Keca Ward: Okay. Depends on the sobriety level of these guys. Please give a big, warm welcome. It is 1:15, so we can get going to Chad and Cheese.
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: All right, Philly!
Chad: So, luckily, we got beer, because we almost left.
Joel: Yo guys, this is the weekly show, so you guys gotta represent Philly...
Chad: Right.
Joel: Because the whole world listens to our show. And all of you will be listening after today. But you gotta bring it for Philly in this weekly podcast.
Chad: Represent!
Joel: I just learned the word "jawn" so I'm going to try to work it in.
Chad: This is our jawn, so we're going to try to...
Joel: I'm a little gassy after that cheesesteak though, so I gotta work that in...
Chad: Sit over there!
Joel: How we doing, Philly? We doing all right? We have some great fans in Philly.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: For those of you who don't know, I am the Cheese segment of the duo here. My name is Joel Cheesman, believe it or not, that's not my acting porn name. This is Chad, which is pretty self-explanatory. But we do a weekly podcast, couple monthly shows, we do like a Shark Tank-style start-up interview. We travel a lot and do shows and interviews that way. Anything recruiting, you want to learn more stuff, who's out there doing cool things, we like to think that our podcast is the shiz. Or the "jawn", maybe, is what I should have...
Chad: It is, it is a jawn. It's totally the jawn. So yeah, we've got a world tour this year, it's been awesome. We just got back from Portugal, and now we're in Philly, love it, I mean, it makes sense, right? Right? But...
Joel: It's better in Philly.
Chad: What's that?
Joel: It's better in Philly.
Chad: Oh yeah, so much better in Philly. I mean, we definitely want to give some shout-outs. If you've listened to our podcast, right out of the gate, we like to give what we call shout-outs to people in the industry who give us live. Or we see some cool shit happening. Oh yeah, by the way, this is an explicit podcast/presentation, so you might have to do earmuffs every now and again.
Joel: I think we're okay in Philly.
Chad: I'm just saying.
Joel: I think Philly's all right.
Chad: Just saying. Gotta do it.
Joel: Montgomery, Alabama, that shit was bad, right?.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Montgomery didn't go very well.
Chad: I don't think we're going to Montgomery, Alabama.
Joel: Yeah, and if you guys wanna shout out questions or have anything, please feel free to engage. Our show's about forty minutes, this is an hour that we have on stage, so we're bound to run out of gas. So hopefully...
Chad: He won't run out of gas. That's for sure.
Joel: Well, not that kind of gas.
Chad: That's half a cheesesteak.
Joel: So, think of questions as we go on and we'd love to engage with you guys and have more of a conversation...
Chad: Yep.
Joel: ...than us just talking at you.
Chad: So big shout-out, first and foremost, the guys who actually brought us here. Not just the Recruit Philly peeps, because they've been kicking ass, taking names, give them a big round of applause. But Emissary.AI. They are the guys, they brought us here. Without their gas money... Yeah. So if you've seen...
Joel: My twelve-year-old told me about that app, it's awesome.
Chad: Yeah. Nancy, if you could stand up and show the...
Joel: Nancy from Philly!
Chad: Yes. Nancy from Philly.
Joel: Early fan, early fan.
Chad: There it is. Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Chad: Big Emissary logo on the back.
Joel: Nancy stocked us in the early days. We were a little freaked out by it.
Chad: Yeah, so her and Ed, who's not here. Ed, what the fuck, dude?
Joel: Everyone add Zatisky, -tasky, what's his...?
Chad: Yeah, Ed Z, right? Yeah, Ed Z.
Joel: No one knows Ed? He put this thing together.
Chad: Yeah, he's part of team. Love it, Ed's actually off his... His wife is graduating from, I believe it's nursing...
Joel: High school, right?
Chad: Yes. High school. Big round of applause. For Ed's wife.
Joel: I'm so mad he wasn't here to hear that.
Chad: Oh, he'll hear it. He'll hear it.
Joel: I know he will. Love you, Ed.
Chad: Goddammit, Ed.
Chad: Patrick. Where's Patrick at? He got us the beer.
Joel: Patrick is...
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Patrick is so jawn. Thank you, dude.
Chad: Dude, yeah. Patrick is so jawn.
Chad: I need to hear stuff from up top, too. You guys just can't be lazy and go in food comas, thank you.
Joel: We've gotta raise the roof up top. I love it. Terry Baker's on his phone, dude, he's see this..
Chad: There you go. Arsenio woof woof woof.
Chad: Jesus, dude.
Chad: Mark Feffer from HCM Tech Report. He actually came down so he could meet us and actually report on this amazing event, first annual, right? First annual, right? Every year? Okay. Just making sure this wasn't a one-time go.
Joel: We won't be back, so enjoy it while we're here.
Chad: Like "fuck these guys."
Joel: By the way, saying we're from Indiana isn't very dangerous. These crazy cats from Indiana. We're gonna break shit up.
Chad: It's like stealthy.
Chad: Judge Group, and also I want to read a tweet from one of our friends, Jason Katcher. And if you don't know, and you don't listen, we hate The Ladders because it's fucking stupid. It's been around for how long...
Joel: And their CEO sucks.
Chad: I can't believe it still exists. Marc Cenedella, I know you're listening, dude, shut that shit down. Jason Katcher tweets: "The Ladders emails are like those magic birthday candles that never go out. No matter how many times I unsubscribe or mark as spam they keep on coming back." Good shit, Jason. Love it.
Joel: I see a lot of people relating to those emails.
Chad: How many people thought Ladders was like out of business, I mean like ten years ago, right?
Joel: They're not The Ladders anymore, they're just Ladders.
Chad: But if you go to Ladders.com...
Joel: Although... Yeah if you go to Ladders.com, it doesn't take you to The
Ladders. So they've kind of fucked up the marketing on that one.
Chad: It takes you to, well, what you would want...
Joel: Probably a ladder store.
Chad: To buy ladders. A ladder store, right?
Joel: Which is more helpful than The Ladders, by the way.
Chad: Yeah. It doesn't make any goddamn sense. I'm going to change my name but not my URL and drive people away to buy ladders. I can't even imagine. Their marketing sucks anyway, so probably nothing.
Chad: Next events, Jobcase, we're going to be in Boston next week for Jobcase Live.
Joel: No boos for Boston? Oh, I'm impressed.
Chad: I would have thought we got some boos from Philly. Yeah, didn't get any cheers. Then we're going to Boston again for SmashFly Transform.
Chad: Ooh.
Joel: Was that for Boston or SmashFly? Who? Oh.
Chad: This is Phenom country. Okay, good call.
Joel: Phenom country.
Chad: Well, then they need to fucking invite us to their shindig or some shit, right? Oh, you did? Awesome.
Joel: She runs the show over at Phenom. I didn't know that.
Chad: I didn't know that either. It's awesome.
Joel: Screw that, she's the boss.
Chad: What's your name by the way? Jen. Jen's the boss.
Chad: And then Recfest. Who's going to London? Because there's going to be three thousand recruiters in London. We're headlining this thing. It's like the Lollapalooza of fricking recruiting events. One day, five tents, five stages, and the bar opens at noon. This is going to be ridiculous.
Joel: It'd be better if the bar's open for everybody.
Chad: The bar is open for everybody... Oh, you mean for this?
Joel: Here.
Chad: Oh, they're good.
Joel: Because Chad sounds much smarter when everyone else is drunk.
Chad: Everybody does sound smarter.
Joel: Do you guys drink Yuengling, or is that like, whack here? Whack?
Chad: It's whack.
Joel: It's not jawn, right? Okay.
Chad: It's not jawn.
Joel: Not jawn.
Joel: It's commercial time.
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Chad: It's showtime.
Chad: Okay, so we're going to jump into topics for this week. We have, over the last six months, we've talked a little bit about CareerBuilder here and there. And we have so many...
Joel: Womp womp.
Chad: Probably like fifty different contacts within CareerBuilder, not to mention Glassdoor. Just seeing what's going on...
Joel: We got insiders.
Chad: In that dumpster fire. It has now turned into, or at least we're hearing from multiple contacts, it is now turning into a dumpster in-fucking-ferno.
Joel: Watch this. Who's still using CareerBuilder in the audience? Who's using it but too ashamed to admit it.
Chad: I see one up there. I see one. Yeah, room full of people, arena. Guess what?
Joel: It's like ten years ago when you said who's still on Myspace. No one raises their hand but, they kind of were, sort of.
Chad: Friendster. I'm still on Friendster. Yeah.
Chad: So, we've actually been hearing... Getting information over the last six months about little things happening at CareerBuilder but it seems like everything's coming to a head. They're going to start selling off pieces of the business. And that, in kind of not conflicting but kind of like a range of numbers that revenues are actually
down 35 to 40 percent.
Chad: Yeah, did you hear the audible "oh"?
Joel: Ohhh.
Chad: So, it's pretty amazing as we see Apollo came in...
Joel: Yeah, does everyone know the history?
Chad: We're going to give it to you now.
Joel: So CareerBuilder acquired, a couple years ago, 2016...
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Private equity firm called Apollo who has a nice history of slashing and burning and making things profitable and selling off the pieces.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: They're doing that playbook right now.
Chad: Except for the profitability piece.
Joel: Yeah, profitability piece. Well, they keep cutting enough people, maybe they will.
Chad: It's possible.
Joel: Everyone that has been at CareerBuilder a very long time has gone. They let their CEO go about a year ago. Their new CEO is a... what did your source say? A 33-year-old finance...
Chad: Yeah, P and E... PE investor.
Joel: P.E. hack, puppet or something.
Chad: Trying to run a software company with no software experience. And that was multiple people saying, "This person does not have the experience to be able to do what's necessary." She knows how to lean up an organization. That's pretty easy, right? All you assholes are fired. But she doesn't know how to actually turn it into revenue. And that's what we're seeing from CareerBuilder, not to mention we heard so many rumblings, I think it was last year, my prediction was that either CareerBuilder or Monster was going to come back. That was so funny.
Joel: That was two years ago.
Chad: Yeah, that's two years ago. And I mean, they...
Joel: She's not really an R&D CEO.
Chad: Well, no. She slashed and burned R&D.
Joel: In fact, what's been the most innovative thing they've done in the last year?
Chad: Pokemon for jobs. Everybody know Pokemon for jobs?
Joel: Right? So you download their app and you put your camera up to downtown Philly, and they'll show you augmented reality-style, all the jobs and companies of people that are hiring. That's been the height of innovation at Career Builder in the last twelve months.
Chad: Pokemon for jobs. Yeah. So was anybody at HR Tech last year? Okay, a few people. Yeah, so had like this huge...
Joel: They were so excited.
Chad: Huge space. I think it was like, at least estimated, spent over a hundred thousand dollars. We're just not seeing CareerBuilder make smart decisions at all. And from, again, from the inside, we're hearing very soon, which is one of the reasons why we're talking about it now, because we've been hearing things, again, for the last six months, that they're actually in the process of trying to chunk up and sell off pieces of the business. And that many of the...
Joel: Probably not a ton of takers at this point.
Chad: Yeah, no. And many of the executive leadership is actually getting ready to eject as well. We've seen some very big names run. When you have companies like Broadbean and Textkernel, about five years ago, those were on-the-edge technologies to an extent, right, Distribution? But Broadbean now is pretty much what I call done-distribution. It's not programmatic, it's not focused on your needs, it's not targeted by any means. And in most cases, you can't do any type of paper performance. Right? So, it's like going back to the late nineties or early 2000s and doing the exact same thing, just pray and spray and do it over and over and over. As opposed to really be targeted and be focused.
Chad: What they have to sell off...
Joel: Quantity over quality.
Chad: We're losing great, yeah. We call that spam. So obviously the drop in revenue, you're talking about 35 percent to 40 percent prospectively, revenue. They've lost over ten thousand accounts. And again, I see a lot of head-shaking. From what I've heard...
Joel: Were any of you the account that they lost?
Chad: Yeah. From what we've heard is that even a lot of the agencies are like, "Yeah, we're kicking a lot of our clients out of CareerBuilder everyday because they're not getting the ROI." And in today's analytics-focused industry, man, that's gotta be a bitch for a company like CareerBuilder.
Joel: I'm just here to support you. I'm just the face guy.
Chad: That's some scary shit. So the funny part is, right, in my prediction two years ago, it was Monster and CareerBuilder, one of those two, they're actually going to make a charge. And this week, what happened? Monster Studios...
Joel: I'm glad you said no to drugs a couple years ago by the way.
Joel: So, Monster's on the innovation trail as well. A year ago, they announced that they were going to add videos to their job postings.
Chad: It was at HR Tech.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: October of last year.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: They had a hundred beta clients I believe.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: And it's only taken them a year to get it out of beta. And create Instagram for jobs, I guess is what I'm calling it. This is a company that has a new CEO, almost a year, he's a tech CEO. They have a new tech head. And the most innovation that we saw out of Monster this year was partnering with VideoMyJob to put videos on
job postings.
Chad: The big product.
Joel: That's kind of sad.
Chad: So how many of you today are actually using videos on your job descriptions? Anyone?
Joel: Or video at all.
Chad: Okay, so, very few hands raised. I mean, it's incredibly low adoption, because...
Joel: You should, haven't you guys heard all internet traffic in 2020 is going to be, like, video? You guys gotta get on TikTok immediately, is what I'm saying.
Chad: You should see him at the airport. Like thirty minutes of TikTok and he just can't get off.
Joel: Don't play like I'm the only one.
Chad: The problem we're having, that we've always had with videos, we love video, but it all comes down to adoption, and making it easy for a company to integrate these videos into their job descriptions, their websites, whatever it is. And I think that through VideoMyJob, they've been able to make it as easy as it's ever been thus far. The problem is, it's not going to do it itself, right? And until you can easily empower your people and trust your people to actually do videos that are going to be worth a shit, number one, and then also hit on all the points that you need for your brand. Because you want to make sure they're conveying the right brand experience. That's really hard, right? And I know it's easy to say, "Hey, look, we're just going to go ahead and give all of our people their phones and they're going to go out and they're going to create these videos, and then we're going to have a ton of content."
Chad: But the biggest question is, how are you going to go through the content? And can you use the content? That's the hard part, right? From my standpoint, I think that from Monster's standpoint, partnering with another company instead of trying to build, is incredibly smart. I think from a shortsighted standpoint, it's adoption. Adoption is either number one, going to be quick and easy because that's what the product is designed for, or it's going to be incredibly hard, just for the reasons that I just talked about.
Chad: You love video.
Joel: I want to talk about their shitty new ads.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: Has anyone seen the new Monster ads?
Chad: Monster, just so you know, Monster marketing guys are like curled up in fetal positions because we've been giving them shit about these things...
Joel: Are they?
Chad: They are.
Joel: Well, I assume an agency made that for them. I hope to God they didn't...
Chad: Yeah, but they're responsible.
Joel: Well, yeah, they're responsible.
Chad: Yeah, and they bought into it.
Joel: Yeah. If you haven't seen them, it's irrelevant for me to talk about. But they're really... They're shitty. They're bad. Like, if you're Monster, you roll the dice, and you say, "We're Instagram for jobs." And you can see videos from employers, and that would at least give people a reason to go to Monster and see like what are the fucking videos that they're talking about.
Chad: Yeah, yeah.
Joel: But instead, it's the same old, "Daddy, what's it like to work?"
Joel: "Well, you go to work, and your soul gets sucked out, and then you die."
Joel: Like that's basically the ad.
Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kid's going to sleep, no shit, kid's going to sleep, and the dad's walking out. And the kid says, "Daddy, what's it like to work?" And he goes into this... You want to take the kid's shoestring and belts away from him and stuff like that. This is not good, this is like suicide watch stuff. This is not... What's going on here?
Joel: It's like Super Bowl 2005 ads, that they decided to just [00:20:13].
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And basically, it's what it feels like. It's like, these ads didn't make the cut in 2006, so let's dig 'em up and throw 'em in because we've already made 'em, and put them out there.
Chad: Remember that idea we had, back in the... Yeah, it's so shit.
Joel: Yeah, just throw that shit out.
Chad: So shit.
Chad: So, Joel is incredibly happy right now. Because we've heard, and some of you will be, Brandon's happy too. That Google Glass is actually coming back.
Joel: Crickets.
Chad: It's the stupidest shit ever, dude.
Joel: I'm a VR guy. Not necessarily a Google Glass guy.
Chad: Who said, "What is it?" There it is. See, you don't even know what Google Glass is. Tell 'em what it is.
Joel: Because you're so young you don't remember the first iteration of Google Glass.
Chad: Right. That's right.
Joel: So it was...
Chad: That's right.
Joel: Ten years ago, Google had this thing, and they go like, "We're going to put a little camera on your glasses." Oh, yeah. They didn't even have lenses. It was just like the frame part.