Woah! Another BIG week with BIG news.
and we find time to dog Generation Z while we're at it.
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.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: It's on baby. Welcome to the Cross Atlantic edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman coming at you from Ghent Belgium, a city I didn't even know existed. Joining me is Chad straight out of Columbus, Indiana. Sowash.
Chad: That's right.
Joel: This week we got breaking news out of ZipRecruiter. Indeed continues to slide into their future. Chatbot continue to make it rain and much more meat on that bone. It's a fat free episode. I can feel the weight coming off right now. We'll be right back after this word from our friends at Canvas.
Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while canvas spot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiters' success. Request a demo at gocanvas.io, and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io, get ready to text at the speed of talent.
Chad: So dude, you are like in the place where beer reigns supreme?
Joel: Yes, I am in beer heaven. I got walks outside my room making beer.
Chad: I am so envious right now/
Joel: And I'm already jet lag drunk, so I'm going to be in bad shape in about five hours. But I have to do a keynote tomorrow so I can't get too messed up, which I guess should lead to our first shout out. Shout out to the E-recruitment Congress. I'm over here in Europe, congress is at Ghent this year. I'm going to be talking Google for jobs and SCO and-
Chad: Man, you really pull the wool over their eyes. Keynoting. Are you shitting me? Oh my God.
Joel: There are like 10 keynotes, so let's not point that a lot. I think that's how they do it here in Belgium. Everybody feels special.
Chad: Nice. Well, that's not a bad thing, to make sure that your people feel special. A big shout out to Fred Goff Garrett, Jen and the rest of the Jobcase over in Cambridge/ Boston, Massachusetts. Our interview with Fred will be coming out soon, but we had a blast. Baseball, Bourbon and a bunch of fun industry conversation.
Joel: Yeah. And I'm still trying to get the tootsie rolls and weed out of my nose from walking the streets of Cambridge. How does that combination... there's a tootsie roll factory right in Cambridge and everybody's getting high, awesome. Okay.
Chad: Yeah. And people are smoking weed and... yeah. Okay. Shout out to Josef and the gang at Comeet. Give us some love over the pod that we had with Nathan from AIA where we asked the question, who is making the recruitment process so goddamn hard. They liked that question so much, they actually gave us props and they wrote an entire article around it, so thanks guys. Appreciate it.
Joel: Can I throw out an odd shutout.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I know we have rules for shout outs now, but we don't have that many. I want to shout out to the eight Spelling Bee winners from the American Spelling Bee. Millennials have gone awry and I don't know what generation, I guess generations Z , they're even having eight winners for the fricking Spelling Bee. The world is over.
Chad: Yeah. Like they couldn't have pulled out another fucking dictionary and then just went to pages and wherever their finger landed, that was the next word, right? Come on. They ran out of words. Are you kidding me?
Joel: Yeah. If your test is so lame that you have eight winners, go to another language or something.
Chad: Yeah, it's a little bit much. A little shout out to Jim Stroud for pitching in and doing some shreds for us. He said, "Hey man, do you care if I do some shreds, some breaking news." Bring it on man. Everybody loves a little Jim Stroud in their day.
Joel: Yeah. It's like we're a band and he wanted to come over and play some guitar with us.
Chad: I love it.
Joel: We're going to be able to shred.
Chad: Jim Loves it. Job more doctor, he enjoyed my shum rant and it seems that Tengai is still trolling us. So you gotta love it. New Product. Everybody's either going fucking crazy because, oh my god, it's a robot doing recruiting or some are saying, oh hey, it's cool, but there's really no middle ground right now. And while all that's happening, Tengai, the robot is trolling us.
Joel: Such an asshole.
Chad: It's hilarious. It's good stuff.
Joel: And by the way, the Tengai folks, when you have a product that is one side or the other, you're probably onto something good. So keep hacking at it, don't listen to the haters. Keep doing what you're doing.
Chad: Yeah. Fuck them, do your thing. Jumping into events, we talked about Boston a little bit. We're going to talk Boston again because we're coming back to Boston for Transform. This Nash Quash show, we're going to have a totally dope panel discussion, and believe it or not, Holland Dombeck, who's a listener, and also works over at Delta Airlines and in the employer branding... I think she's like one of the big brand heads over there. She's going to be joining us on the panel, so it should be a blast.
Joel: Pretty sure our panels will never be described as dope by anyone.
Chad: Yeah. I stole that word from Elena over at Skill Scout. I thought it sounded dope, so why not use it, right?
Joel: Dope was dope before Elena was born, so I don't want to hear that bullshit.
Chad: There'll be a Job Gate in Denver lurking in the shadows while Julie Presents. So in June, if you're going to be at Job Gate, look for me.
Joel: By the way, Chad will be the one in the Chad and Cheese T-shirt. So look for him there.
Chad: RecFest is sold out. 3000 attendees strong, sold out, and we're also doing something incredibly cool. We've cooked up something with the team over at
Talent Nexus.
Joel: We're not talking about it yet, are we?
Chad: We're just teasing it. We've got some really cool shit that's happening, doing some videos and whatnot. But man, I can't wait. It is going to be amazing. Five fucking stages, and we're headlining actually, we're the last show to go on. Everybody's going to have a few beers in them by then, which is going to be perfect for our show.
Joel: We're way more entertaining when everyone's drunk-
Chad: Goddamn straight.
Joel: Wow, sold out. So we can't even tell people, get that ticket now, because tickets are gone.
Chad: Tickets are gone, man. And while we're there, hopefully we'll still have some crazy awesome T-shirts available. So if we are at an event and you're there, come ask us for a T-shirt, who knows, we might have one. And then while you're at it, hop over to emissary.ai because if you're not using a texting platform to recruit, you just don't. Emissary.ai. On to the topics.
Joel: Let's do this. AllyO, making it rain.
Chad: Yes. The end to end recruiter 45 million in series B, they're up to $64 million overall.
Joel: Yeah. I think that's now officially more than Maya.
Chad: Yeah, it is.
Joel: They're the most funded Chatbot... although they will tell you they're an end to end recruiting solution. Chatbots are exceeding my wildest expectations for valuations.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I was thinking maybe 10 million for some of these Chatbots, but they're going to be pushing a hundred, 200 million, acquisition. [crosstalk 00:08:38]
Chad: With that kind of money, the valuation on it. So Sapphire Ventures actually put out on their blog that they believe AllyO is the perfect example of what the value of real AI is and their whole focus... and this is pretty much what the rest of the industry should be talking about too, is getting rid of all these boring repetitive tasks that recruiters don't need to do. And this is what we talked about at Jobcase, we had a great question in our Q and A, this actually makes the process more human and it sounds weird, but using technology to do all these bullshit tasks gives human beings more time to actually do a better job in connecting with the humans. So I think not only investors are starting to understand this, I also believe that the talent acquisition side and obviously staffing and RPO, they get it.
Joel: Yeah. Everything that we hear is that job seekers like these things, recruiters, and companies like these things. With the money that's being spent on these businesses, it's going to be a little war, it's going to be a little race for Chatbot.
Chad: Supremacy.
Joel: Someone high up at Chatbot texted me soon after this announcement was out with just money, money, money was the text message that I got. And it's true, there's going to be money flowing, people are going to get in this game that haven't before, companies, ATS, they're going to be building these things. It's going to be a war for chatbot's supremacy.
Chad: Yeah. And don't forget they were on our death match stage in New Orleans. We talked to Sir Hill, we've been talking to these guys for a while and he expects that the company's candidate matching suite will be used by 15% of Americans in 2020. And this got to me because it was like, okay, so they're actually now starting to say candidate matching, which I think is odd because the AllyO that we know is more of like a screen to match than actual like AI matching. Like the Opening.ios or the Uncommons or the HiringSolved. It sounds like they're starting to pull some of the other vernacular, the candidate matching in, but I don't really believe that they have an algorithm that does it like in Opening.io, who obviously just one death match in Europe, by the way.
Joel: Yup. Well, with $45 million in the bank now, maybe they can.
Chad: I think that would be a bad decision, but who knows. I think at this point that hasn't changed. And we'll get somebody, we'll actually get a little bit of a conversation going with those guys to see what they mean by that, but I'm interpreting it as the process methodology that they have in place from a screening standpoint gives better matches. It's not a matching technology, it's a screening to match technology. So that's what I'm going to go with right out of the gate, but we should definitely follow up with the guys on that one.
Joel: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they were a firing squad interview too, weren't they?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Yeah. You're putting yourself out there when you're on the firing squad. I remember these two guys, I guess that was two years ago. They were just these two geeky dudes from Google launching this little company with a, let's be honest, not a great name-
Chad: Right.
Joel: AllyO. And look at them now. So congrats to those guys. It's always fun to watch these little companies grow and become something significant.
Chad: Yeah. And they've got a great team too, so congratulations everybody and keep kicking ass. Stay focused and let's see what happens.
Joel: Yeah. And by the way, if you're looking for a job, all these Chatbots are hiring like crazy. So if you're unhappy with your job in the vendor space, fresh up that resume and send it to all the Chatbot providers because they're all hiring-
Chad: Another company that's been hiring is one that we've known for a while, and they're usually on the podcast waves, is ZipRecruiter. They have a new product that they've put out.
Joel: Nice transition. I like that. By the way, this is going to be pretty much breaking news by the time you listen to this for the show. I don't know exactly how to feel about this, but basically they've announced the quote unquote first of its kind solution that lets job seekers opt in to get recruited by employers across every industry in experienced level. So basically companies see talent that they like, they say, I want to talk to you, and then the job seeker decides, okay, I'm going to flip the switch as well and we're going to have a conversation. It almost sounds like a dating app. I won't call it Tinder for jobs because I hate that.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I don't know if it's that significant or how cool it is, maybe I need to actually see it to be that impressed by it.
Chad: It's a resume database. That's what it is. Because really the only way that you could get to candidates before was to be able to post a job, and then their magic algorithm actually did the outreach to see if individuals were interested. And then those interested individuals would obviously apply for those jobs. You couldn't go into a candidate database. So this is really a resume database on steroids to an extent, and talking about matching steroids, right? But here's the thing, it's a smart resume database, totally get it, but it's hire by Google's candidate surfacing tool. That's what it is. It's Opening.io, t's Uncommon, it's HiringSolved, it's all of those matching algorithms.
Joel: Right. And according to COE and Siegel, it's the best algorithm in the world. Screw you Google.
Chad: And it could be, but the thing is, in talent acquisition, staffing, RPO, the entire industry needs to understand that this tech is already available and you should be using it against your resume database today. And if you want to go further, which most should, you should also look at a candidate ID for Nurturing, who was also on death match by the way. But there's so many pieces of technology that are out there that can help you leverage the money you've already spent, the candidates you've already pulled together, the silver medalists who are probably now gold medalists that you need to connect with. This from my standpoint, I think is brilliant from Zip. Zip, great job. It's amazing. But what this should do to the rest of the industry is validate, you should be doing matching within your applicant tracking systems today. And if these other companies don't have, if the zips or the Monsters or the career voters don't have this type of matching algorithm, they're not fucking worth your time.
Joel: I won't go as far as to say brilliant, but I think it's a solid move by them. I think the AI component that we've been hearing about is coming to fruition. The head of product said this was three years in the making, so there clearly focused and working on this diligently. And I also think it's significant because it is a definite maturation from the part-time hourly folks to a more enterprise full-time employee solution. So to me those are the two significant things that I got out of the new product announcement.
Chad: Yeah. I totally dig it, good job guys. This again should signal to the rest of the industry that... take a look at some of the verbiage that they're using. They're not talking about this as a resume database, a better matching algorithm, but that's what it is. That's all available to us today. You should be looking for these and all the different types of tools that you're trying to leverage.
Joel: While we anxiously await the IPO announcement from ZipRecruiter, let's hear a word from a JobAdX and we'll talk about Indeed and LinkedIn.
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Joel: Oh, I hate it when we're right. Indeed getting closer and closer to that staffing business that we've been predicting.
Chad: Yeah, I don't see this as a staffing play. It's a total tech play, dude.
Joel: Enlighten me, please.
Chad: It's a total tech play. So what we're looking at here, which I think is pretty awesome and very smart from Indeed standpoint, it's an Uber for jobs. It's a UK play right now, but what they can do with it is pretty amazing because this is what we've been talking about for, shit, probably 18 months, maybe two years now, is can we take technology and use it instead of, in place of, a staffing agency. So I think what we're seeing is possibly the evolution in some markets of some of these smaller high volume types of jobs going away from the prospect of staffing and into an Uber like platform like this. Now this is just in the UK, and to be able to cross that pond in the US to make this work over here, it's going to take a lot of fucking work. I don't care how much data Indeed has, it's going to take a lot of work.
Joel: You may have convinced me. So they're definitely a temporary agency. The PR out of this was quote, Syft is one of the best temp agencies and is making waves in the world of work. And now they go on to talk about connecting employers and job seekers across the UK with a staffing app temporary. So they're definitely at its core staffing agency, which I guess all UK employment sites or companies are. So okay, I can be convinced that this is a tech play.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Indeed has a pretty high opinion of itself technologically, so to buy someone for technology reasons is interesting. The foothold in the UK I do think is significant from these guys, but Indeed doesn't make a lot of acquisitions, at least not ones that they promote. And this was one that they really got out in front of it and promoted, so they think that it's pretty serious and important. So I guess let's continue to watch and see what comes out of it.
Chad: Yeah. I think one of the reasons why you see this pitched as a temp staffing kind of play is because that's what people know, so it's easier to parallel up against that. But now people are starting to understand that Uber is really just a temp agency for drivers. I need a driver, I need it now, it's on demand, the same kind of thing. You're looking for somebody who needs to fill some shifts for next week or maybe later today. I don't want to screw with payroll and admin on this, I'll just go to Syft and if these individuals do incredibly well, I give them great reviews and I can add them to my team. I'm assuming that'll happen on the other side too, because if the talent didn't like the experience that they had, they could say fuck you and give you a one star, and that would just pretty much disengaged from any further activity.
Joel: So it is basically a staffing platform. You said Uber for work, and we've seen other platforms like this, so-
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Indeed will eventually, they'll grow this brand as an Uber for placements and temporary workers or grow it into the Indeed products, big picture wise. I'm trying to think through this, but yeah. Okay. I wasn't super interested in this, but you've gotten me sort of interested.
Chad: Yeah, it's a total tech play dude. And we've been talking about it. I think that if staffing, especially on the high volume side evolves, this is where it's going to evolve, and I think it's very smart for Indeed to be able to pick up in an area that already has a foothold, Syft, in the UK, at least that's the way it sounds, that they have somewhat of a foothold, to be able to grow that. The hard part is being able to get that to translate over to the US. That'll be interesting to watch, when they do it and if they do it.
Joel: We need to see if Syft representatives are going to be at RecFest this year. Maybe we can corner them and get an interview with them. That would be-
Chad: Yeah. I'm making a note right now to see if we can hone them in.
Joel: Yeah, right. If you can combine tech and staffing business in this way, that's interesting.
Chad: Yeah. And something else that's interesting, LinkedIn acquires Drawbridge, which is a mobile marketing cross acquisition technology. This is interesting from my standpoint because, wow, Google and Facebook dial down their tracking on candidates and people, it looks like LinkedIn is dialing it up a notch or maybe 10.
Joel: Yeah. So this is being able to track people essentially across multiple platforms-
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Your iPad, your phone, your desktop, who knows what other devices they can track you across, and then target advertising based on your behavior and what you do. Obviously that's interesting on many levels, and I think the founder was Mob-ad. The founder of Mob-ad, which 10 years ago was a super hot mobile advertising platform, which then grew into other devices. What I did find interesting though is they, essentially it looks like shutdown their whole European operation because of GDPR. So I'm not sure if you believe GDPR is coming to the world, how impactful this technology is, but if you believe that it's not necessarily going to come to places like America or Asia, then this kind of technology helps boost your ad platform significantly. And let's be honest, anyone who advertises on Facebook, Google and LinkedIn knows that LinkedIn is way too expensive and also a little bit not quite up to par with those other players.
Chad: Right. So from LinkedIn standpoint, I agree the GDPR piece, not to mention next year coming to California, coming to a state near you, is GDPR like types of compliance measures that you're going to have to focus on. And I think LinkedIn is already doing that. They are way too big and they are way too widespread not to already be doing that. So to be able to bring in Drawbridge and say, okay, we already have a plan in place to be able to check these boxes, I think that's where they're at. So I don't think that's an issue for LinkedIn. To be able to get the cross device attribution is an issue for LinkedIn, and you're right, if they can't provide cross device attribution now and they're charging so much, it's like you can't deliver or even start to understand what the ROI looks like, right.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: So I think it's a good move. We'll see how it plays out.
Joel: Yeah. And don't forget recently we talked about Chrome having a function that tells you how you're being tracked and who's tracking you.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: So that could be a real negative for businesses like this. Who knows, maybe Drawbridge saw the writing on the wall and discounted the price to the point where it was a no brainer for LinkedIn. Maybe they got some good talent out of the deal as well.
Chad: Oh, they saw the writing. They pulled out of the UK because of the GDPR. They had an oh fuck moment and LinkedIn's like, hey, come here. No, don't worry. We've got that figured out, here's pennies on the dollar big guy. Give me that shit
and let's go.
Joel: Here's a cheque, you write a number on it and we'll see if it matches ours.
Chad: Nice.
Joel: Someone who's not worried about such issues, let's hear from sponsor Sovren, and we'll end the show on Dice of all people.
Chad: A laughable note.
Sovren: Sovren AI Matching is the most sophisticated matching engine on the market because it acts just like a human. You decide exactly how our AI matching engine thinks about each individual transaction. It will find, rank and sort the best matches according to your criteria. Not only does it deliver the best matches, it tells you how and why it produce them, and offers tips to improve the results. Our engine thinks like you, so you don't have to learn how to think like the engine. To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com
Chad: Let's hope that Dice has actually hooked up with Sovren for this new product.
Joel: Because quote from our Zeal CEO and president, it's another step demonstrating Dice's commitment to developing best in class matching algorithms to make recruiting top candidates easier. Yes, the trendsetters of Dice continue to pull out all the stops and have given us it's big style matching from 2008. We're very excited.
Chad: This again I believe is going to become table stakes. We just saw the new product from Zip, which is matching, and that's what Zip's whole platform is predicated on that matching algorithm. Being able to know what good looks like, what that qualified individual looks like. The big question is, does Dice, are they developing this themselves? If they are, that's probably a mistake because there are many other matching algorithms that are out there that I'm sure are light years ahead of what these guys can do. Is it a Sovren, did they partner with a company like Opening.io or HiringSolved or Uncommon.
Chad: We're talking about matching a lot this episode, but it's getting to be incredibly important that companies understand and these vendors understand that they become the brains behind the brands that are out there. They don't have to have that big brand that everybody says, hey, I want that matching software. They have to be the brains and the algorithms behind it, which I think Sovren, from my standpoint, has done an amazing job doing because nobody really knows who Sovren is. Unless you're obviously a listener of this podcast then you obviously know who they are, but they're incredibly stealthy and they're not focused really on their brand unless they can provide the brains or the parsing that your technology needs.
Joel: Yeah. The press release on this pulls out all the buzz words, automation, intelligent automation, unconscious bias, which is becoming a very hot product, I guess.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: So that didn't surprise me at all. A quick review of what this thing does according to the release, it goes beyond traditional keyword matching by looking at job in the candidate data whereby the best match allows recruiters to sort applicants by match within five classification levels. I'm not sure if that's good or not. While many competitive services offer only one or two levels of classification. Well, there you go. There's the clarification.
Chad: Wow.
Joel: Learns by leveraging the input and expertise of tech recruiters, HR professionals, tech professionals and tech hiring managers, they got to include everyone there, to continuously improve the outcomes of its match machine learning algorithm. This comes straight out of Monster's acquisition of talent bed. You could have basically put a lot of those same features.
Chad: Yes. And that's the problem, it's learning from people, right?
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: And if it's learning from people the intelligent automation results in better matches and removes unconscious bias, how the fuck is it removing unconscious bias if it's actually learning biased from people? That's the big question that most of these companies are going to have to answer and defend right out of the gate. Okay, if you're learning from my people who we already know our bias because we're humans, how are you going to take the bias out? Because from what I'm reading here, all you're doing is putting bias in to the algorithm.
Joel: Yup. Everyone who's doing this is grappling with this issue of, if humans are making the hiring decisions, the algorithms are going to act accordingly and there's going to be bias over time. There may not be that much initially, but over time... and Amazon I think learned this through their mistake is that bias is going to creep in as long as humans are involved, it's going to be a very challenging problem to solve.
Chad: And here's an important announcement to the recruitment industry. This is becoming an arms race. Let's just get this straight, you're looking at Chatbots matching algorithms and you need these things in your core products, whether their applicant tracking systems are CRMs or RMPs, whatever they are, you need these things to be able to have that differentiator. You can see this from Dice trying to do this as a job board, Zip is trying to do this as a job board. You also need to have this in your core systems. These need to be table stakes. So if you're in town acquisition, these are the things you should be asking for.
Chad: If you are a vendor and you think you can develop these things, number one, you're probably stupid. You should look at partnering with many of these different organizations that are out there to make it faster, quicker, cheaper, and then take a look at what iCIMS and Jobvite did. They said, "Hey, look, this does work. We're going to go ahead and acquire that organization." It seems like the recipe is out there and most companies don't understand, even the startups in some cases, this is an arms race. Who are you going to team up with to be able to enter this arms race?
Joel: What I think is cool is the consumers in our space. The employers for the most part are becoming smarter than they used to be, if that makes sense. They're pushing vendors quicker, they're asking tougher questions, they're making them tackle these issues and challenges. And I think that's a great thing because our industry changes when customers raise their voice and ask for these things.
Chad: They're listening to Chad and Cheese. That's what's happening.
Joel: That's exactly right. And I have a message for recruiters as well. I think that was what your message was.
Chad: Yeah.
Pirate: Yee bee poo without Talroo.
Chad: We're out.
Joel: We're 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 checkout our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit chadcheese.com.