The boys cover just about everything with Smashfly's Josh Zywien, Delta Airlines' Holland McCue and Fiserv's Julia Levy.
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Chad: I'm going to do you a favor. Instead of forcing you to envision Joel and me playing shirtless volleyball, Top Gun style, to the tune of Kenny Loggins "Danger Zone", or even hearing Tim Sackett scamper on and off the stage serving water and cookies like a good little emcee. We're just going to jump right into the conversational fray from Smash Fly's Transform 2019 conference, where we were lucky enough to score some time on stage with Julia Levy, director of talent acquisition and recruiting ops from Fiserv, Holland Dombeck McCue, head of employer brand and recruitment marketing from Delta Airlines, and last but never least, Josh Zywien, a.k.a. Jay-Z, CMO and all around branding and marketing stud from Smash Fly. Enjoy the banter, after these words from our sponsor.
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Joel: ...So, there's an argument, and we some video vendors in the audience. There's a debate between really expensive, professionally made, video versus just getting out the smartphone and sticking it in front of a recruiting or hiring manager and putting that online. Do you have and sense, or anyone on the panel have sort of, guerrilla, amateur style videos versus professional ones?
Josh: You say that as they have a professional videographer right here.
Julia: There's a time and place for both, and I think we've got a lot of that professionally produced video and photo content and when candidates come to the site, sometimes they think our career site has stock imagery because our associate photos look so good. That's, I think, a challenge, and I would prefer having a blended approach, and being able to use some of the user generated video content, besides what people might post on their own personal Instagrams and things like that, which will capture in a tent stream similar to what you were seeing on the break here, but also being able to be able to get some of that.
Julia: If I'm a candidate, I would want to see the hiring manager in a thirty second clip of what they have to say, or see what a colleague, someone else on the team would have to say. I think that candidates want to see that. I think that as a consumer that's what I would want to see.
Joel: Where are you putting it? So, you can put video in all kinds of places and James talked about YouTube in terms of the next generation. Where would you recommend putting videos? Where's it a waste of time? Social media, what's effective and what isn't for video?
Chad: Are you putting videos on Tik-Tok?
Julia: Not yet.
Josh: That's like, transforming two years. We'll have a Tic-Tok session.
Chad: We'll have a Tic-Tok session, remember that.
Joel: We've all seen your account, Josh.
Chad: So, how are you using video, and then, how are you guys video? I know you are.
Julia: Right now, we just have the produced video and I want to experiment and use video in our talent network forums, and I would love to use video against our job postings and in e-mails, a recruiter saying "hey, Julia." It could be a little creepy I guess. "Hey, Julia I saw that you did a, b, c, and d and I'm really interested in learning more. I'm a reciter at Fiserv. Let's talk."
Joel: So, you're not leveraging Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat?
Julia: We do, but some of it is in conjunction with our corporate account. Then, there's a lot of partnership with the global brand team, and brand... I don't want to say regulations, but standards that user generated video content wouldn't align with.
Chad: That's the big question. I was listening earlier IBM talk about how they have all this content. It's like, how to you QC that shit? I mean, seriously. You want to be able to use this, so you have all this content coming in, but you have to somebody put actual eyes on it.
Holland: One, if you're doing highly produced video, to answer your earlier question, I think where that come into play and why a lot of vendors in that space are successful is they really help you with the story arch. If you have a particular message that you are trying to get out, working with a producer who knows how to extract that from your people it's beautiful.
Chad: You have a purpose for that video, it's not just a video it's [crosstalk 00:05:43]
Holland: You have a purpose, you have a storyline that you're trying to hit. We used to work with this awesome vendor that used to talk about the spark line. The peaks and valleys and the message that you're trying to hit. In terms of that quality control piece, a lot of vendors are backing in to the back end. You send a message out to employee, they record video, and then you have someone who's physically screening that on the back end before you put information out.
Chad: Can that not be, like crazy overwhelming?
Holland: It can be pretty time consuming overwhelming. I think the crux of that is, only creating content with purpose. Don't just do a mass blast to your employee like "hey, we just bought AllTrue, and we're going to put an article on our intranet so that all eighty thousand people create a video." That's not smart use of that technology. It's about being really intentional with the stories that we want to tell, sending prompts to individuals, having them record them, and then screening that on the back end and only pushing the ones that are true, and hit the storyline that we're trying to hit live.
Josh: I think that though is the point though. Right? There's this debate of highly produced video versus user generated video, and I actually don't think it matters, because user generated video can still suck. Everybody thinks that it's automatically authentic and it isn't always. If there's a good story and the person who's on the video has something to say, and you've thought through what the message is, then it's going to come across very well. If you're forcing somebody to read a script, it's going to come across scripted even if it's quick and dirty, authentic, user generated video. I don't think it's either or, I think there's a place for both, and it can be highly produced and very authentic, or it can be highly produced and feel like it [crosstalk 00:07:26]
Joel: From where you sit distribution wise, where do you typically send customers with distribution of video? Where should the definitely be and where might they be wasting time?
Josh: From a marketers prospective or from what would we advise our customers?
Joel: From a marketers prospective. If I'm an employer and we have this great video, where should we put it? What's your answer?
Josh: It's obviously multi-channel and that's kind of a cop-out answer.
Holland: It depends on what the essence of the video is. If you have videos that drive, tap a funnel but maybe talk about brand promise, culture promise, and then you have videos that kind of come into play that more are like realistic job previews. So someone gets attracted to you brand with video A, then they come, they look at the job opportunities you have, you want to serve up another video related to more of the intricacies of that role, and then as you go deeper down the funnel, maybe that's when you introduce the hiring manager, and some of these more off-the-cuff videos.
Joel: How involved is marketing, if at all, with the videos that you're making? Or any of the branding that you're doing?
Holland: Very
Holland: Yeah, I would say very. At Delta, our people at our product. What sets us apart in the consumer space is our level of service, so our marketing and our cons team does a really fantastic job of curating stories, and then producing content but bringing people like HR and talent into the fold so that we all make sure that we massage the storyline and we're hitting it from each angle of our perspective departments. It's not a one sided story. But then, content that we own, like Day in the Life, realistic job preview content, that's fully produced by HR and talent.
Joel: Was that your experience as well, Julia?
Julia: Pretty similar, but I would say I've been at companies that didn't have a strong global brand team and I've had to be really scrappy on my own, and kind of own it. Then, maybe talk to and reach out to people in marketing to get their feedback even though I was doing it off the side of my desk, which I'm sure, many of you here feel that way when it comes to recruitment marketing practices that you might not have the budget to do a sixty thousand dollar video and you need to be scrappy on your cellphone. There's products out there that can help you do it for a more reasonable cost, or you can do it on your own with a lot of research. Some of it's trail-and-error, and piloting in smaller places.
Josh: I hear you guys talk a lot about this, and I agree with you. We've talked a lot about how employer brand and TH should leverage corporate brand more. But, there's always this assumption that corporate brand has this big pile of cash that they're sitting on. My wife works for General Motors, everything's outsourced. They work with agencies that handle everything, and you might have a marketer that owns agency relationships. They kind of feed and protect and act as a filter there, but they don't control much of the budget. The agency actually controls the budget, so employer brand isn't going to get much of the attention from the marketing agency managing that corporate brand. At least, it's going to be more difficult than if you have a strong corporate branding team or corporate branding team that owns the budget and owns the execution of everything. Again, it's not a clean, easy way to divide things.
Chad: Nothing ever is in corporate America. It seems like you guys have direct lines into to marketing, do you have a regular cadence with conversations with marketing on staying on brand, purpose, all of those things. Do you find that is entirely different than most of your peers out there? Like they're disconnected. Or, do you feel like HR and TA, they're starting to come together with marketing more?
Holland: I think we're seeing, and particularly consumer brands are really leading this,
Chad: It's money
Holland: ...it's money and a lot of consumer brands are using their people to differentiate their product. So, we're a commodity, you can fly Southwest, you can fly United, you can fly American, but you fly Delta because of the interiors of our cabin, because of our people, and so, marketing really leverages our people's stories as a means to attract people to our organization. What that requires is them to stay really in close alignment with TA and with HR to make sure that they're one, showcasing employees that are in good standing with the business, who are representative of the brand that we're putting out in the market, but two, that they're speaking to our values and our truths. They're not steering away too much from what we're training them in onboarding and our respective divisions.
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Chad: It's showtime.
Chad: I didn't hear you talk about actual your candidates, no question, are your customers.
Holland: Oh one hundred percent.
Chad: And if you treat them badly, then you're negatively impacting the bottom line. Is there a line to, to... big corporate?
Holland: To marketing?
Chad: Yeah
Holland: So, there is now, and I'm that line. That line did not exist before so, you were giving me some shit earlier in the lobby, like "what is your job?"
Chad: What do you do?
Holland: So, if you applied for job at Delta fifteen months ago before I joined, you were going to what, more or less, looked like a spam site. Corporate marketing had no idea. They weren't paying attention They had their own...
Chad: How do they not see this? The career site is the second to the homepage on the amount of traffic that a company gets. Their marketing, how do they not know this shit? They have analytics on the site. They have analytics on the site.
Holland: They have analytics on the site but I think what happens quite a bit of the time is, Smashfly is a product for this, TNP has product for this, is the career site is built separate of the consumer brand site. Ours is built on our dot com site, it's just a simple splash page, we have plans to blow it out a little further, but if your career site is dispersate from your consumer site, a lot of times corporates not picking up those metrics. They're not getting into their Google dashboards or their Adobe dashboards, whatever analytics platform that they have.
Chad: So, ar Fiserv that's not the case, really? Are your candidates your customers or not really?
Julia: Not entirely, our customers are a lot of the banks and credit unions, [crosstalk 00:14:44] so we're more business to business. I have to kind of show the value in partnership with the global brand team around the career site. They actually put us, when we were just a little careers blip on the header or the footer, when you go to our corporate site now, we have a huge hero image around careers, which has been fantastic and if you can get your employer to put careers front and center, it is one of the most highly clicked links on the main dot com site. Then, we outsource the career site from there.
Julia: We have regular cadence with them, but there still is some education both ways, because I'm very strong minded in my opinion around what the candidate experience should be and what the career site should be and I want us to do to really push the limits and be innovative, but then they want to protect the brand image. The disconnect is where the brand image is to our clients and what would a client think if they saw user generated video, and if it wasn't the same quality and polish of the content that we give to our banks and credit unions and business clients, and candidates don't want to see that heavily produced and polished because then they just think it's just corporate speak and someones just going over a script instead of what authentically Julia thinks of working at Fiserv.
Chad: So, how do you message that to them, and say that just doesn't work for us? And, do they care?
Julia: It is and ongoing dialogue.
Chad: So they don't care? That's what I'm getting.
Josh: So they don't want it in the front end of the career side? The reason I ask that is back to your question about how you use a video, I don't think that user generated video always has to be front and center on the career site. It can be used, I know Colin's talking about recruiter enablement tomorrow. There's a tool we use in sales and marketing called Vidyard and we can record personalized videos that will go anywhere publicly, but we can send them and say "hey, John nice to meet you. Can't wait to get on the demo call, really looking forward to it and here's what we're going to talk about." Follow up after the demo, "hey it was really great meeting you." That use case can be applied to recruiting. It's the exact same thing to where it's not publicly visible, it's not part of the brand, you're not exposing anything. You don't have to worry about the polish, but it still has utility.
Julia: I had, kind of, the big slash but it on the career site approach, but now I'm pivoting a little bit and just haven't had those conversations yet, so I'm building out that plan to understand how could we use this a little differently than our initial use case and still get a lot of value out of it. It is in other creative way, so I'm still figuring that out.
Joel: We heard a lot earlier about shiny object syndrome. We hear a lot about AI automation programmatic video, social media, etcetera. What are the shiny objects that you guys are testing do you think have promise? We might be talking about things five years from now.
Chad: Tik-Tok.
Holland: So, not necessarily testing it, we use Hirevue, they're pretty embedded in our process. We get a ton of volume. We're a volume shop, and so we really need partners who help us do down selection. We have an IO psychologist and a PhD who helps with assessment strategy and selection strategy, which really refines our pipeline, and Hirevues been a really integral part of that story. We've actually seen more inclusive pipelines since we've implemented their AI solution, which has been fantastic.
Chad: Can you write that up for the state of Illinois?
Holland: I know, I listened to your show the other day. I think that's one that we're closely monitoring.
Chad: Who knows about the new AI regulations? Sentiments? Facial recognitions? I told you all this was a podcast, you need to listen to the show.
Holland: I have a bigger beef with the government on that front. The fact that we have to push jobs in the first place really...
Chad: Being a federal contractor
Holland: Being a federal contractor, but it really impacts the ability to do some of this next level marketing. When you post a job you have an apply cycle coming in, which really requires us to get more refined with assessments and selections versus, I prefer someone to go to a landing page and opt-in so I can more manage a pipeline, but we just don't live in that world.
Chad: Right, I mean that's the thing is that with all of this new technology, you know it scares the shit out of obviously not just the government but the people, so therefore, we start to see these regulations pop up out of no where and if you haven't checked it our, all you should have to do is Google "state of Illinois interviewing AI," or listen to the podcast.
Chad: These are the things GDPR, not to mention next year 2020, California's coming out with their own GDPR so I mean, these are things that are going to happen and these questions that you have to dig down deep, I'm sure Josh hears this a lot. Are you dealing with this at all Julia?
Holland: Yeah. Talking about tools, and I'll it back to the GDPR and the clients.[crosstalk 00:20:08]
Josh: I mean there's nothing sexier than GDPR compliance.
Julia: I've had to deal with GDPR and we use Hiring Solved, so talent rediscovery is and are we've been involved in and that's been evolving. There is several players that can help.
Joel: Explain what that means.
Julia: Talent rediscovery, so you're spending thousands or hundreds of thousands, or millions or dollars investing in attracting talent to join your talent communities and your ATS. I recruited for a number of years and as a recruiter, it was very hard to see all the candidates that are in the ATS, so you can't fish in your own pond. Being able to view that nice talent pool of people that have already clicked apply, know your brand, were excited about your brand at some point, and if you have a good positive candidate experience may be excited to reapply or re-engage. So, how do you pull all of those people out of your ATS or CRN and get them reengaged in your brand and your opportunities and continue that dialogue.
Joel: Let me underscore, people you have already paid for. You've probably paid for them six time over by the way.
Julia: So, with GDPR we set up processes within our ATS so that we can remove people from the process after certain time periods, and that also has downstream implications into, so a report gets run and we review it and then say "okay, delete these records." But, then we have downstream into Smash Fly around who we have to delete in all those European countries, and then also, I have to then look into Hiring Solved, and that's all manual on myself or a colleague. There's definitely a lot of work to be done around that.
Julia: When you think of AI or talent rediscovery, machine learning, I wish I had that little sparkly disco ball that could tell what the future is around the best tools.
Joel: Josh sees, you see all these tools, so what are you ghoulish on?
Chad: Really quick those, you guys have a partnership with Hiring Solved now, what are you seeing? Are you seeing a lot of what Julia's talking about? They understand we have an asset that we have allowed, just to atrophy, spent hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars in our candidate database, are companies starting to see that and realize that we need to go back into this database and try to harvest it?
Josh: Yeah, and I think it's a lot of times it's easy to blame practitioners and be like, "gosh this is so obvious, why haven't you done this?" And in reality...
Chad: It's not? No seriously is it not that obvious?
Josh: Well it is obvious, but the technology limits that. So, if you've ever searched in an ATS, stab your eyes out. It's horrible. To a certain extent, I don't blame recruiters or users of the ATS for not wanting to do that. It requires a lot of time to find, I think our head of sales has separated our wheat from the shaft, which I don't know if that's a great analogy. To find those top tier people that you want to follow up with, an ATS is not a great tool for that. This whole category of technology that was born out of that need is absolutely relevant.
Josh: I think this is where, to me, this whole debate of AI is kind of, you just talk in circles. It's more about does it solve a problem that exists, and if it does than it's valuable. I know it's helped you guys quite a bit. There are a lot of tools out there that do the same thing. I think it's one of those problems that is an obvious problem, there are some companies that are very clueless about it and are happy to keep spending money on job boards, and keep paying to re attract people but, I do think it's a limitation of the technology that's been around. It was just never designed for that.
Holland: I think it's a limitation of the technology but it's also and what other pieces of tech you've enabled. If you are not hovering good lead qualification going into your ATS, if you're not building in basic qualifiers or pre-qualifier questions that help refine that pipeline, you're just going to be reengaging or resurfacing up garbage anyway. So, do you really wan tot engage something, granted you've paid for those individuals getting into your pipeline.
Chad: Yeah, so garbage from your standpoint is actually customers. That's what you have to look at.
Holland: I rescind the comment of garbage. What I'm saying is that we need to be a little more stringent on the front end. We're at a marketing conference, if you're really thinking about being a marketer, when was last time you went and shopped technology? I went and I shopped an ATS last year, I filled out a white paper, I learned more about that tech. They sent me a lead qualification form, I filled out that form, I told them about when I was looking to buy parallel to when I'm looking to leave my job. What attributes do I have as a buyer? What attributes do you have as a candidate? And that qualified me, and what I from them was a rejection. We didn't fit their buyer set, but we need to be more stringent on our side as marketers to think that way. To qualify leads that are coming into our database so that we don't have disappointed customers to candidates.
Josh: There's, I think a lot of times, candidates, even if they sometimes, are aware that they're not qualified, and they just want very clear communication. Outside of the spammers. There are spammers too that will just like, often called the serial appliers, that will just apply to jobs. I think Tom had a slide on that earlier.
Joel: It's commercial time.
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Chad: It's showtime.
Julia: It's like the dating apps, and you're saying the jobs really don't like and you're like "ugh," you're right away saying no to that, but everything else you're saying yes to, and then the reciters have to weed through this huge in flux of people.
Josh: To your point there, the quote unquote garbage, it's not that, right? It's not that you mean that, it's just that they're not a good fit, but there's a way to disposition those people elegantly, and I think that's one of the biggest problems.
Joel: Speaking of influxes of huge amounts of candidates, listeners of the show will know that chat bots are getting a ton of money currently. Anybody using those, testing those, general opinion around chat bots, and [crosstalk 00:28:08]
Josh: Plug for Emerson.
Joel: No sales pitch up here.
Holland: I'm going to save my good chat bot story for tomorrow but we're using chat pods in another instance. We're actually using a chat bot out of an accelerator that Delta sponsors, so keeping in the family, and really investing back into these tech communities that we believe in. What we're found is that, we don't have a formal employer referral process, it is on our roadmap. We do get referrals, but in terms of recognition or rewards, that's just not built in right now.
Holland: What we also have a lot of is, "I met this person at this dinner," or "my friend's son looking for an opportunity. He just graduated from X University." We're getting all these messages kicked to our recruiters, and what it was creating for them was extra administrative work to screen these individuals and learn more about them. So, we actually stood up a chat bot service, we call is "referrals concierge," where we can reply, "thank you so much, please have them go here if they've not sat in on our training." Where people can go, they can type in the candidate's information, they can type in how they met them, why they think they would be good for Delta. And then, that's actually going to a coordinator to screen and even further qualify, and only send those that are a fit and ready to engage the recruiter, over to our recruiter.
Julia: I've been watching it for a while, but I've not dipped my toe in. I think that if you're in a high volume area, like the first time I saw a Paragon or Emerson, I was like "Oh my God." At my last job, we did a lot of high volume I was like, "this could have been perfect" because these candidates could text in a couple of things, go right into ATS, and then we can get them into our process, or into a serum and then have a work flow for a talent network forum. I thought, that's perfect. They've evolved with interview scheduling and stuff like that, but for highly technical professional roles, I get annoyed at Alexa and Siri all of the time. And look how good they are, right? Although they have a lot more of information to go through. I see the value in interview scheduling. If they do it well, that could be something, at least for basic interviews, but the complexities of our business, I don't think it's there yet.
Joel: The SVP doesn't want to talk to a chat bot one on one.
Josh: Here's a use case though. So, I was at a conference, it was a talent board workshop I think. I think it was Andy, was her first name but she worked at a company called ProCore. ProCore's a technology company. I was talking to an analyst that worked at United that just built their own stuff. So they built their own chat bot but their use case was around this concierge service for booking travel for interviews. They had a landing page for candidates, so it had a map to where they need to park, and the office they were going to, some answers to some frequently asked questions, and then this chat bot that was on there where they could book travel through the chat bots. They didn't have to go to a travel booking site, they would just say "hey, I'm traveling on Tuesday." Okay, well here are four flights that are within the budget for you, timeframe, suggest that you pick one, went ahead and booked a flight for you. All in the back end for the candidate.
Josh: So, those little touches I think for an SVP or something like that, that's super elegant. To where it feels like you have your personal assistant, and it's adding value, versus certain use cases where you try to fit it in there, and it just doesn't work, and it actually creates a worse experience in some cases. So, I think sometimes understanding how you want to use the technology and what you'rr actually solving for, versus just being like "oh my God, chat bot, let's just do it." And then it's like [crosstalk 00:31:47]
Chad: It's the bright and shiny one. That's totally the bright and shiny case. You're not focused on the problem, you're not focused on trying to get process. Most of this technology we're talking about should be able to take out some tasks. Some of the mundane tasks that recruiters have, or even hiring managers have in some cases. If you're not trying to solve for something, then you're just fucking wasting time, right?
Julia: When I first got to Fiserv video interviewing, everyone's "oh, candidate experience, video interviewing," and they wanted to apply it to our Java developers, like our technology fields, and I was like, "A. What problem are you trying to solve? Just candidate experience. And then, I was like, "do you really think a software developers going to go through this video interview before they've even spoken to someone." So, we never went down that path. I feel it has a good place in a lot of specific role, but again, you need to know what problem you're trying to solve and what results you want to get from
them.
Joel: But like messaging, text recruiting, things like that, you guys still utilizing those?
Josh: I was just going to say, for hiring too, my wife at General Motors uses CodeView, so do you know their product? I don't know if you guys have used it, but she said the developers actually enjoy using because they feel like they've gotten a fair shot, to a certain degree.
Holland: Do you guys know what that is?
Joel: It's for when you're coding a lot of [crosstalk 00:33:12]
Holland: We demoed it, it's on our roadmap. Same response. Even our hiring managers were big fans. It eliminates the need for the candidate to come down.
Joel: And talk. I'm curious, we talk a lot on the show about, sort of the platform wars, and when we talked IBM, like all the shiny things and there's so much out there. There seems to be a battle between big guys like LinkedIn, Microsoft, Google, Facebook to some degree. We heard recently that sales force is going to sort of get into the work force. Slack went public today. ISIMS and Jobvite are buying everyone they can to create one platform system. Are you guys a buyers of the one platform, or do you think that's a dead end strategy?
Josh: I'm not answering that.
Julia: We did a big RFP last year, it had been several years since we looked at our tech stack. We had put some add-ons on and we did an RFP last year, and after coming through it, I decided to stay the course, so we've got Smashfly as job distribution, CRM recruitment marketing and e-mail marketing. We've got TMP as the front end of our career site. We've got add-ons like HiringSolved and Textio, and we use LinkedIn Elevate for social advocacy. There's no one who does all of that, or at least does all of it well. Some people say they can do a lot of it, but then when you look under the covers there's big things that are missing that are critical components to what we need to be successful.
Julia: The challenge sometimes is around data, and reporting and seeing the full picture, apples to apples or oranges to pears, and so that's where I struggle with that approach, but it for the most part works. Although recruiters have a little bit of fatigue sometimes, so we could have gone with a different social advocacy tool, but we chose Elevate because people know LinkedIn. But, how many different systems do they need to know and learn and log into? So, that is one of the bad sides of doing that approach.
Chad: That's a big question, is how many platforms are they logging into? Because, that's not efficient at all, right? How many browsers do they have open? Having to go from one page to the next. If that's not something that you can integrate, is that really worth your time?
Holland: I would say no. I think that we in the marketing space, we're in an interesting position in our field. We do a little bit of brand, a lot of marketing, and then we're tech as well. We're rolling up our sleeves, we're sometimes programming on our own, we're building and I think we talk a lot about the relationships that we need to foster with marketing and communications, but for me, my best friend right now is my HR TS teams and making sure that we have those integrations so that our point solutions talk to each other, and then making sure we have single sign-on enabled, and share dashboards, so that if you are using point solutions you can access them all through a single interface. So, I think you can get around some of what you're talking about, but you have to...
Chad: That's internal development though.
Holland: It's totally internal development.
Chad: How many people have that many internal resources for that? Two, I see. Yeah. Two. I mean that shit just doesn't exist. You're in the utopia of all this. They're all looking at you going...
Holland: I think there's two sides to the coin of that. I'm not in a position to use a tool like it's a greenhouse for example. Where it's a simple ATS, it's a simple serum, it's all integrated, you could build landing pages. I think it was the woman at IBM who said that she looks at these small companies and they're able to rewrite every job description and that she doesn't have that luxury. I would love to walk in someones shoes where I could use a single, all encompassing solution that allows me to that and not to have to have these deep relationships with IT, so I think there's trade-offs on both sides of the house.
Chad: But you've had to do that with Textio, and you're on the journey right now in actually rewriting all of those for... so talk about that a little bit.
Julia: It's been an evolution in the very beginning of Textus. If you don't know Textio, it's a natural language processing tool where you can take your horrible job description and put it into their tool and they analyze it against millions of other job descriptions out there, and they give a score of zero to one hundred, and tell you how good or bad your job is. Then, they give you suggestions on how you can make it better, and it's fabulous.
Julia: The challenge is, some people feel comfortable writing and others say, "I'm a horrible writer," and recruiters are trying to fill the req, and when you have a really poorly written job description, and you put it in and you have to spend, next Textio will tell you ten minutes, but when you're spending thirty to forty-five minutes of your time rewriting your job description to make it engaging as a job posting, and attractive to candidates, it's frustrating, because you want to just get in and get out.
Julia: Now, what I will say to some of the recruiters is if you're spending, we have a team of people that feel comfortable that can help, so we put that together, but we have seen the evolution. We now have hundreds of jobs descriptions, job posts that are already in there, so the largest hurdles and pain are a little bit behind us. I can go in, if I'm a recruiter working on a software developer role and see probably fifteen other jobs that are scoring well, and go and pull that to start from, so it's almost like a job library now. But, what they also added was recruiting e-mails, so that first e-mail as a recruiter that you send to someone to try to get them interested and get their attention, they now are giving you score son that. We've seen from our recruiting and sourcing team that they've gotten higher response rates after using Textio than they did using before, and they're integrated now with Outlook and with LinkedIn, so that's where you're going to be creating those first e-mails.
Julia: We analyzed our data from the year before we used Textio to the first year in, and then they've taken a lot of key learnings and put them back in too, so your candidates respond better when you use this kind of language, and this kind of language responds, men appreciate these wordings, women appreciate these words and phrases.
Chad: If you're looking for more gender specific.
Joel: Women like bullet points, something like that.
Julia: It's really helped us remove some gender bias, and it helps us know what words and language speed up the process, and what words and language slows down the process. [crosstalk 00:40:06] The word "collaborate," which I would think we're a really collaborative environment, that word slows down the process by three days.
Julia: Who knew?
Chad: That's interesting.
Joel: Speaking of job postings, there's been a lot of disruption in that space in the last couple years. So, Google for Jobs launched a couple years ago, Indeed, of course, has decided not to participate in Google for Jobs. We have Programmatic rising in popularity. Where do you guys sit on the job posting spectrum and what do you see in the future?
Josh: Like Google as becoming a search engine destination for people to start their search?
Joel: So, I want to post a job, what recommendation would you give to somebody to get, like is Programmatic the best solution? Is Indeed only okay for most companies?
Chad: I feel like we're going to get a multi-channel answer.
Joel: Probably. [crosstalk 00:41:07]
Josh: No, I think it's, you guys can probably speak, but I think it depends on what you're hiring for.
Holland: Yeah, it depends on what you're hiring for, and I said in a Tweet the other day that I know you were like, "oh we'll talk about it." Programmatic is becoming Post and Pray 2.0.
Joel: Explain that. [crosstalk 00:41:28]
Holland: It got some traction, but I think Programmatic is a fantastic solution. So, historically people have been married to these big contracts. Back in the day you were married to Monster and CareerBuilder, as Indeed came on board you got away form the contract model, but you were an insertion orders and you kind of got hooked on the value that they were bringing to the top of your funnel, and now we're seeing this paradigm shift where Programmatic is coming in and it's disrupting all of that, in tandem to Google, so it allows you to have freedom and flexibility. Over time, Programmatic vendors, ones that have correctly learned what performs for you based on the different profiles you're sending out. It also let's you a b test different...
Chad: So why is it Post and Pray? It sounds great.
Holland: So, what I'm saying is, what I'm seeing happen though is in a lot of these conversations around Programmatic is you invest in Programmatic, you're able to reduce costs by this, you're able to cut your contract spend by this, but they're not talking about the full circle. Yes, you're able to get more refined in terms of bringing people to your brand, but you shouldn't preach that to your leadership in that way. You should position taking those dollars and using them on storytelling, or re engagement, or rediscovery technology, so what I'm saying is that people are only hanging their hat on Programmatic because it's delivering results, but it's only one piece of the earned, owned, paid puzzle.
Holland: We started doing Programmatic and moved away from, a lot of the... we're still posting jobs on LinkedIn, but Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster sponsor, like all that kind of stuff. We've moved towards Programmatic and have a bucket, and we meet with the vendor pretty regularly to review and make sure that it's...
Joel: Do either of you have job board contracts currently? No?
Holland: I have a LinkedIn contract.
Holland: Yeah, how do you want to frame LinkedIn?
Josh: We have like a minute and forty-five because this things yelling at us, but I want to ask question just to wrap up but like, what happens when Google turns on, within the Google for Jobs when you can advertise there, how does that blow up everything? And what happens when job seeker behavior changes to where like, Indeed wants to be a destination, and they're spending a ton of branding and marketing dollars on being a destination, but I don't know that you're going to change user behavior [crosstalk 00:44:00]
Joel: By the way, Google just launched tracking for your jobs on Google for Jobs, so it's a hop, skip, and a jump between that and "Okay, give us your credit card and boost these certain jobs, for a lot more views."
Holland: And a lot of the Programmatic success is still on Indeed, it's still in Glassdoor, because of what you just described. They're pumping lots of dollars into the market place to tell candidates to look on their site, and we should reap the reward of that still. Programmatic is still capitalizing on that. You shared outcast report, their data is showing it, it's still Indeed and Glassdoor. So, we're not moving away in full, I just think we're seeing this evolution.
Chad: Do you feel like it's sustainable though? Because, how much of Indeed's traffic was on the Google side of the house?
Joel: Ten years ago, you could have replaced that with Monster and CareerBuilder, right? So, ten years from now, will it still be Indeed and Glassdoor?
Chad: Five, I'd say five. [crosstalk 00:44:56]
Joel: So, I don't think that it's any accident that Indeed is getting into a lot of different things to put certain bets on the platform for gig workers and staffing and a lot of other things, because they're aware of that.
Chad: I think we just ended right on time.
Joel: You got a broom man?
Sackett: I got one last question.
Joel: Okay.
Sackett: How fast can you get your asses off the stage?
Joel: Depends on how long it takes me to get that beer.
Sackett: Chad and Cheese, Holland, Julia, JZ, give them a hand, awesome sauce.
Chad: Thank you guys.
Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad, and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors, because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com.