An old URL with a lot of new ideas - including blockchain, paying job seekers and a credit card (yes, credit card) - but we'll see how the company does against 40 years of industry experience. Chad & Cheese run Job.com CEO Arran Stewart through the firing squad ... gotta listen to see how he does.
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Announcer: Like Shark Tank, then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a fox hole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level.
Joel: Oh yeah. It's been a while now. Firing Squad is back. We have one of the most elusive company's startups in the space-
Chad: Stealthy.
Joel: -job.com is with us today. Arran Stewart, who is the chief visionary officer. Puke. He must be a millennial. Arran, welcome to the show.
Arran: Hello, gents. Thank you so much for having me on the show and you are correct. I am a millennial. Yes.
Joel: I knew it. I knew it.
Chad: God damn it.
Joel: Oh, God. I know. That's just not a good thing. Arran, no one knows you that's listening. Give us a quick elevator pitch on you and then we'll get to the company.
Arran: Sure. So, my name's Arran Stewart. I'm originally from a town called Luton just north of London, but I live in Austin, Texas now. I've worked in recruiting and staffing my whole career. Previously prior to job.com, I was actually the owner of a business that was part of Hamilton Bradshaw in the United Kingdom, which is owned by quite a famous person there called James Caan, a king of recruitment especially in the United Kingdom. Yeah, I'm kind of obsessed and love recruitment technology and, outside of that, I'm married with four beautiful children.
Joel: Nice job. Chad.
Chad: Did he say James Caan like the Hollywood actor?
Arran: Yeah, the actor. Yeah. And do you know what's so funny? The name and spelling is the same too. Yeah. Same spelling, but if you Google James Caan, there's two. There's Caan, the actor, and Caan-
Joel: KAHN!
Arran: -the businessman, he founded Alexander Mann.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I do know them,
Arran: Yeah, he founded that and sold it for an inordinate sum of money.
Joel: So you love recruiting and you have four kids. Have you had a therapy session in the last 24 hours?
Arran: No, not yet.
Chad: This is going to be it.
Arran: I need it.
Joel: You might need your head checked. Yeah. Well, Chad's going to run down the rules for you.
Arran: Okay.
Chad: All right, Arran. You are going to have one minute to pitch job.com. Now, generally on the show startups come on, companies come on, they need the full two minutes. But when we got on the phone with Arran he said, "Fuck that. We are going to take one minute for the pitch." And at the end of the bell you know your minute is up, right. So the bell's going to start you and then obviously you have a minute to hit it. After that minute, Joel and I are going to hit you with rapid-fire Q and A. If your answers aren't concise and you start bumbling and stumbling around we're going to hit you with the crickets and tell you to tighten your shit up. At the end of Q and A we have a rating scheme here at the Chad and Cheese podcast. Big applause means you killed it, you nailed it, can't wait, we want to buy stuff.
Joel: Boats n Hoes
Chad: Yeah. Golf clap means you might be on your way, you need to tighten it up a bit. But the firing squad, that means you'd better take your boat-
Joel: Bye bye.
Chad: -and drive off shore as far as you possibly can and dump this business model into the fucking ocean.
Joel: Go back to that shitty town you're from in Scotland.
Chad: That is Firing Squad. Are you ready?
Arran: I'm ready, gents.
Chad: Excellent. Joel, hit it, man.
Joel: One minute, starting-
Arran: So, job.com is a automated permanent-staffing platform utilizing artificial intelligence and blockchain to deliver a permanent placement candidate for only 7% of the base salary. So we're 65% cheaper than the statistical average in the United States. The fee is the most exciting part. We split it into two. We take 2% of the fee and the other 5% is given to the job-seeker as a salary signing bonus to incentivize them and congratulate them on taking their hiring into their own hands.
Arran: Because of the use of blockchain technology we're trying to create a fully autonomous platform and by using rewards and incentives we allow users to take control of their own recruitment because they're the ones with the skills, the experience, and the education. They apply for the job, they ace the interview, why on earth aren't they the person earning the lion's share of the fee? And because of that we believe we have such a unique model which will drive and change the $150-billion-dollar-a-year recruitment industry of which $26 billion is being spent on permanent staffing.
Chad: There it is.
Joel: Wow, very nice.
Chad: Very nice. One thing we didn't get though, if people want to find out more about this wonderful service, where do they go, Arran?
Arran: Very easy: it's called job.com.
Chad: That is very simple.
Joel: Which is where my first question comes in. What is the history of job.com? Because you weren't the first to own it. What's the history of it, how did you guys come upon it? What kind of check did you have to write to get the name? Talk about that.
Arran: Okay, so job.com was founded in 2001. It was founded by a guy called [Brian Algin 00:06:27], who still works with us in the business today. It was originally a job board and had quite immense success, actually, towards around 2009, 2010. And then as time's gone on there's been increased competitiveness with Indeed's Hit Recruiter, Glassdoor, and so when we were on our acquisition trail coming here to the US we kind of heard on the grapevine through mutual connections that Brian was looking to exit the business. He'd reached the point in his career where he's been very successful and he's been one of the founding fathers of job boards in the United States. He already had offers from another major job board that we all know, but he was kind of interested in what we were looking to do for the future of recruitment. We went to see him, pitched our vision, what we're trying to achieve, and the changes we were going to make and so he agreed to exit the assets of the business to us and that completed in September 2017. Now sadly, gents, I cannot tell you-
Chad: Damn it!
Arran: -the size of the cheque that we wrote. But I can tell you [crosstalk 00:07:35] but I can tell you this, let's do some, let's do some head maths. Job.com had $60 million double opt-in registered job seekers listed on the platform. They had thousands of clients and also had a domain name called job.com which arguably could be the most expensive domain name in the world, easily, because of obviously, talking about an industry that's pegged to be worth a trillion dollars globally by 2021-
Chad: Plus it's three letters, it's on the dot com domain.
Arran: Three letters on the dot com, at, yeah, top domain. And also it has a very high Moz ranking and domain reputation ranking because it's such a legacy domain. So there's many different factors that kick in and tick, more money, tick, more money, tick, more money.
Joel: I don't think anyone's dropped D Moz in a Firing Squad, ever. So, good for you, to bring that up. Yeah, this is. Every URL is dot I-O and dot I-I and we've sort of forgotten the whole arms race of dot coms. So this is sort of an interesting story.
Chad: Where did job.net come from, though? It sounds like this was also a part of the deal. Job.com and job.net. I mean those are both, dot net obviously not worth as much as dot com but-
Arran: Still expensive.
Chad: Job.net's been around for a very long time and it has a hell of lot of trust as well.
Arran: Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. And what we've done is we've kind of split them into two because my background has always been recruitment and staffing, but specifically job boards, so we were like, "Right. Let's introduce an automated permanent staffing solution with job.com." So job.com is not a job board. We're a staffing agency. We operate as a staffing agency. We only get paid if you get successfully hired. All the typical things that a staffing agency does. But then job.net is our typical job board. It's what I would call an aggregator. So we aggregate content. Jobs can be posted on us, there's resume database search, because we also own Zillion Resumes, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but we own that, too. And so all of that's kind of packaged together to offer just a traditional job board solution, aggregated solution, and then the other tier is job.com.
Chad: So, that leads me to my next question. Job.com, different model than job.net, different model than ActiveHire, different than Zillion Resumes, different than MyJobMatcher. I mean, you have so many companies that are going right now. How are you not spreading yourself too thin?
Arran: It's funny you should say that. Look at it this way: it's like they're all shop windows to one central database. You know? So they're all parts of the supply chain. So when you think, and you guys know this, I mean, everything starts in life as a click through Google, typically, looking for a job, then it turns to an aggregator, then it turns to a job board, then it might go to a staffing agency, then it ends up going to the hirer. What we've tried to do is create channels and windows that take a bite out of the cherry at every possible journey of the job-seeker's process. So, MyJobMatcher and job.net are pretty much the same. MyJobMatcher's very much legacy, it was the business we started, but job.net operates in exactly the same way but with a much better domain name. So we kind of shifted everything to that. ActiveHire, again, very similar. It's still there, still attracts traffic, still attracts users, but the effort's into job.net. Zillion Resumes, which is just a database resume service has then just powered the resume database servicing job.net, and then you've got job.com, which is staffing.
Arran: So really, we actually only have two businesses running. You've got a job board, and you've got a recruiting staffing agency.
Chad: That job board has matching in it though, too, right? I mean, the MyJobMatcher, is that another piece of technology that's different, or not?
Arran: Yeah, no. No, so it's the matching technology that powers all of the platforms. All of the platforms use the same artificial intelligence and again, they all have opportunities for machine learning points, different touch points. We like to kind of say, and I'm happy to kind of talk through this, "We're a technology business that happens to work in recruitment." And we very much are. I mean, I'm a big tech evangelist and geek and that's the key to what we believe is our innovation and success, is our technology.
Joel: Arran, I'm curious about you embracing blockchain and early on that was a big differentiator for you, and maybe it was the height of bitcoin doing what it was doing a while back. Do people still care about this in terms of the employment space? What is the reason for the passion around it and why is it important?
Arran: Yeah, that's such a, I'm so glad you've asked that question. So, blockchain in the beginning, when we started using it, was in its crudest and simplest sense. We were using it to create what's called a private hyperledger fabric smart contract between job-seeker, candidate, and us, automatically, as it, almost like agreed terms, like recruitment terms, automatically, on auto-pilot, on a blockchain for just trust and transparency. But really there was this huge buzz, this huge hype, and it was great for us because we, not lying, we rode with that buzz, but we really are blockchain evangelists of what it can do for the future.
Arran: So we actually are utilizing blockchain in three ways. The first one is the
private hyperledger fabric that I told you. The second one is a public blockchain, which is where we keep the record of when people are successfully hired, the signing bonuses, salaries, et cetera. But the third, which is our most prized possession, which is what we're working on, is Equifax for resumes. We are creating a trustocracy, a meritocracy credit scoring for resumes. And how that works is people have been giving recommendations to each other on LinkedIn for over a decade, but how can I trust the recommendation given by the person on LinkedIn? Or even the person in your reference? Statistically 30% of profiles lie on LinkedIn. 85% of candidates lie during the hiring process. How can I give context to the hirer behind the trust of this resume?
Arran: So it requires to create a meritocracy and trustocracy score for both the person with the resume and the person who gave the recommendation. Then they get what's called a TM score. I can't go into the exact details of how it's going to work, because I can't give it all away yet, but what I can tell you is our goal, utilizing all of the users we have and everyone that comes onto the platform, when they request references there will be a score given to both of those users that are involved in that process, and when they get hired, if they successfully remain in place, their scoring will go up and that will be recorded on the public blockchain which we will then make available to the entire online recruitment market. Doesn't matter if you're a job board, staffing agency, you'll be able to query and reference. Just like you do, like banks do to Equifax to know whether or not this resume's true.
Arran: Why would I give you a bank loan and give you money if I don't know who you are? Why would I give you a job, and put all my trust, training, education, and money behind you if I don't know if you're the real thing? You know? It's time to move recruitment on and utilizing blockchain, the transparency ledger, is a way of doing that and that's what we're working on: to create this massive central database of trusted resumes.
Chad: So when you have companies like [ICEMS 00:14:36] that are talking about building a passport system, which is obviously the same kind of scenario, are there going to be all these different systems that are going to share data or are they just going to be different systems that you have to actually join into, kind of like databases today? I might be in one site's database or, hell, I might be in twenty different sites' database, but it's different information. Will this all be shared so it's the same information, whether I'm using the ICIMS passport system or the job.com system? How does that work?
Joel: Yeah, who's going to standardize all this stuff?
Arran: Yeah, I mean, so when you say, "standardized model," think about how many credit referencing agencies there are and different data points in order to reference people on their financial situation.
Joel: There's two.
Arran: I think, well, there's not because you've got multiple datasets that obviously pulled against that in order to kind of reference people. The feedback that comes into that. You know? Like I might have X amount of different people that I've got credit with and all of those data points going into that as well. So I would say that, for example, [ICEMS 00:15:42] and their passport, by their concepts, and what they're doing is fantastic and what we would look to achieve with that is, let's compliment it. This isn't actually a competition for us. This is actually about improving and bringing forward recruitment for the benefit of hirers and job-seekers.
Arran: So with the passport system, because we're all from the same space, we all know that there's pretty much very similar criteria we're all looking for. We've all worked in staffing, we know what hirers need, we know what we need to tick off. So I would imagine without having oversight of exactly the data points they're using to create that standardized passport, there'd be huge amounts of overlap. So why wouldn't you cross-reference databases with each other? Why wouldn't you have that cohesion between two platforms? [ICEMS 00:16:25] is an accurate tracking system, jobs.com is a talent and sourcing platform, both of our platforms generate data that allows us to verify who people are, you share that data together to create a much more accurate blueprint of what people are doing and the fact that they're doing it honestly. So I think it's great.
Joel: So this'll be almost a score in terms of how trustworthy someone is?
Arran: Yeah, well, trustworthy and meritocracy. So, it's trust and merit. It's like, how trustworthy are you giving a reference, and how do we know that those merits that you gave that reference for are legitimate? Because they're the two things that matter: can the person do it? And is the person that said they could do it trustworthy?
Joel: And how transparent will that be? So, with a credit, obviously with credit check I know, well, if I'm late payments, if I default, if I go bankrupt, all that has a negative impact. Will job seekers understand and know, "Hey, here's what your score is based on and here's how you can improve it or why it's not high?"
Arran: So actually it's based on, sorry, my wife's just walked through the door [crosstalk 00:17:29] so it's based on, so we can't ever do anything that negatively impacts your score, legally, because potentially there's the opportunity that if we were to prevent your or inhibit your opportunity of getting a job because we'd given a negative reflection on you, that in itself... We could be liable. But what we can do with it is it shows you the opportunity to pick the skills that you are particularly good at, your experience, and various other many components as we know that make up a person's employment make-up. You can then have all of those bits verified. You don't get a perfect score just on one successful placement. This is about building longevity. Statistically people in the IT space, for Amazon and Google, I read, there's a 12-month turnaround. They come and go within one year. Which means over the course of the next five years, if people are using platforms like this, like [ICEMS 00:18:23] platform, they will begin to build a very accurate blueprint on whether or not they've been a good work person or someone that maybe needs some improvement.
Arran: The only thing that you can give the hiring manager [crosstalk 00:18:34]-
Joel: All right everybody [crosstalk 00:18:39]. Let's move on to the next point. I'm curious about your revenue share with job-seekers and the 5% reward, I guess. Talk about that. How much have you paid out? How much of importance is that to a job-seeker? I mean, don't they just want a job? They're not looking around just for the bonus, right?
Arran: Yeah, so they are just looking for a job. I think, realistically, we appeal to a particular audience set at the moment, specifically IT, but also legal and finance. I can't divulge at the moment how much we've paid out [crosstalk 00:19:11] sadly. There's reasons and logic behind that, as you gents probably know. But what I can say is job-seekers that do come to our platform are typically, are quite often passive as well. They're people who are currently employed but if they're shown an opportunity where they could earn a 5% salary signing bonus by going and moving, it's something very appealing to them, especially in IT and technology.
Chad: So you can't share aggregate numbers?
Joel: Or what percentage that get the reward?
Arran: Oh, so percentage that get the reward, roughly, so of the jobs that actually get posted, rather than actually people that are with the database, of jobs actually get posted, we're around about a 20% fill rate. So, 1 in 5 jobs are getting filled at the moment. And I think, more than anything, it's because we want it to be higher, we know it'll be higher, it's still relatively new. It's a relatively new platform.
Joel: And is it like, I have to be on the job for 90 days, do I have to [crosstalk 00:20:11] paperwork-
Arran: Yeah, you have to be on the job for 90 days, feedback has to come from the client. So, there's a chance where people can drop off, there's many things that, which is good for the hirer. Because we wanted to build it, as well, to avoid any bad actors from job-seekers because you know they exist, too. People who are just like, "I'm going to go there, get my signing bonus, move again, move again, move again." We didn't want to create a kind of burden for the employer. We wanted to create an incentive that maximized their talent attraction, got someone that was definitely wanting the job who would stay for at least 90 days, and that allows for the maximum immersion process within moving to a new job. Which is sometimes one of the biggest reasons why people fail. They join a new environment, they feel a little bit out of place, and they leave. Whereas if you know there's a 5% salary signing bonus three months away, you'll probably see it out and during that time you might learn to get to know people and like the place. Sadly we don't have any stats on that actual thing now but I'm dying to get them because I genuinely think that's a real thing. That's a real reason why people will be more highly retained, because they've given themselves the opportunity to get used to somewhere.
Chad: Don't you feel like this system, right out of the gate, would be perfect for the gig economy? Because when you have-
Arran: That's what it's for, yeah.
Chad: So, mainly for the gig economy. How much money is actually in the gig economy on the staffing side of the house? Because what you're really doing, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're pinpointing staffing and saying, "We can do it better, faster, and much cheaper with benefits on the backend." How big is that nut that you're trying to crack?
Arran: Well, the nut is probably an undetermined number, nut, should I say, because I don't think it's actually been quite done per se so much. But let's look at just quick stats for just staffing and recruiting. There's over 20,000 staffing agencies in the US, it's worth over $150 billion dollars a year, and one thing I just want to throw out there is we're not actually against the recruitment staffing agencies that it might apparently seem like. Like we're just undercutting them and we're going to beat them. We're actually a support tool as well. We work with staffing agencies. So, you might have a relationship with your client who wants the white-glove hand-holding, but at the same time, why not utilize an autopilot system like job.com which will bring you the candidate you need to place, gives a signing bonus out of our fee to them? And yeah, we split the fee, but it also allows anyone who might want to become a at-home remote-working recruiter all the tools they need, with no risk, using us. Because you pay us nothing unless someone is successfully hired and we work to staffing agencies, you know, small recruitment, big recruitment, whoever's turn.
Chad: Yeah, but that percentage is going to be a lot less for them, right?
Arran: Yeah, but if you're making 13%... Let's say you're charging 20%, you give us 7%, you make 13%, and I didn't have to pay anything up front, I didn't have to find any job boards to post on, I didn't have to pay for any AI or technology, I had everything done for me, all I had to do was focus on BD, which as a recruitment consultant is what I really want to be doing. So it's kind of broad strokes. It's [crosstalk 00:23:23] courses. Some people are happy with that, some people won't be happy with that.
Arran: But I think that the uptake from staffing agencies has been huge. To give you an example, we are now about to announce and I can say it, we're working with Talent Fusion and pairing with Talent Fusion's RPO with Monster. So Monster will be powering their jobs through Talent Fusion through job.com. And also, we will be upselling Talent Fusion which is their 15% RPO through job.com, too, because there are, as you guys know, there will always be a company that wants a white glove. That want some hand-holding. A person. Someone to talk to. Or roles that need that. So we've got this corporation with Monster now and its partnership, which will be in the press, of how we've got this deal working.
Chad: From the payment standpoint, where we start talking about flipping it over and that 5% going back to the new employee, the bonus, right, is that paid in Bitcoin? Or are we getting hard American cash on that?
Arran: So we were originally going to do tokenized economy, as they call it, which would have been paid against ether and we were going to do that. It was, being brutally honest, a fad. It just didn't work out and we couldn't make that work. So it's going to be cold, hard American cash and it's paid to-
Joel: USA! USA!
Arran: USA! Oh, I love the USA. It's paid to the job-seeker on a preloaded Visa card. Job.com Visa cards. So if you go onto job.com you'll see the picture of what the card looks like and it's with Visa. We are doing a press release as well to announce that that will be powered now by Visa. So we're delighted with that.
Arran: And so they get their cash on this preloaded card and also with that card, we want them to keep it because it's a branding exercise. Cause you imagine, I just got a signing bonus. Fantastic. I'm at the dinner table with my husband or wife and I'm like, "Darling, I got the signing bonus." Brilliant. And you tell your mother, your father, your cousin, but also, every time you go to use those, because statistically the average signing bonus will be around about $2600, every time you go to use that you'll pull it out and you'll be reminded of job.com because it's on the card. We feel that that, even as a branding and marketing exercise, is so much stronger than the traditional, I go to a job board, I find what I'm looking for, I'm gone. Or I go to Robert Half, I get a job, I'm gone.
Arran: We want to build a long-lasting, recurring relationship and take people on a journey throughout their career which is why we want to do the Equifax resumes and why we've got this entire what's called autonomous ecosystem powered by blockchain that we're building. Again, I won't bore you and get the crickets with that one.
Joel: I do love that the credit card on the website is not a metaphorical credit card. You literally have a credit card-
Arran: We literally have a credit card.
Joel: -which you'll be giving people. That's very interesting.
Arran: Yeah, yeah, literally have it.
Joel: You maybe broke a little bit of news, particularly news for most of our audience, that you guys will be filing for an IPO here soon.
Arran: Yes.
Joel: Give us the lowdown on that.
Arran: Yeah, so we just completed our pre-IPO funding. We are going through our audit process now. It's nearly complete and we'll be filing [RS1 00:26:39]. We will be listing on the NASDAQ. It's not public knowledge as in we haven't PR-ed it out but to be honest we've had so many conversations now in the market that it wouldn't take long for you to find out that news. Other things that we are doing at the moment: we are rolling up staffing agencies. So we have had a number of conversations and deals that are going forward now where we are buying out and rolling up staffing agencies. As a plug, if any of you out there have a decent staffing agency with good EBITA and revenue, message me. Please do.
Joel: We want 15% of all those deals, by the way.
Arran: Sure.
Chad: Hashtag- [crosstalk 00:27:15]
Arran: Gents, if you bring-
Chad: Chad, Cheese.
Arran: Chad, Cheese, bring me any deals, trust me there'll be a kickback. But, truthfully, but nonetheless that's what we're doing. And honestly I'm going to call it how it is. We believe that we are what Uber was to cabs, we are to jobs. We have every intention, and that's why we're filing to go public, we have every intention of becoming that big. That's why we have 380 shareholders. We have a name like job.com, and we have technology, proprietary technology, a differentiator. Because the market's so huge we feel that we can definitely cut our niche, notice how I said niche there, not niche like we do in England, but niche, we can carve our niche out of the market most certainly.
Joel: All right, so, these are some pretty chesty statements that you're making and Chad and I talk extensively about the 800-pound gorillas that are now in our space: Google, LinkedIn/Microsoft, Facebook sort of putting their toe in this thing, we already have established players like Indeed, Glassdoor, et cetera. You have some pretty lofty dreams. Are you really going to be able to compete with the names that I just mentioned as well as the big staffing firms that I didn't even touch on?
Arran: Yes, so I actually don't think we are competing with them. I actually just think we've carved out our own market. Indeed is all about aggregation. It's volume. It's churn, it's SEO perfection and we couldn't beat them at that even if we tried.
Arran: But we have our own part of the market. 60 million people move work every year and based on our model if we placed 1 million of them we'd do $3.12 billion dollars in revenue. Can we capture that part of the market? I think we can. I think we can because we're a candidate's advocate. We're offering a 5% salary signing bonus. We're offering cheaper staffing in a $150 billion dollar a year industry. We're looking at an industry that's hugely fragmented with over 20,000 staffing agencies. Can we carve out our own part of it? I think we can.
Arran: It all comes down to partnerships. One of our major partnerships is Office Depot. We're working with company.com and Office Depot on Workonomy, it's been on CNN, it's been on TechCrunch, we've been advertising everywhere this week. The Office Depot's moving to business services and they are selling it to their 12.7 business customers. They are announcing a multi-million-dollar budget towards marketing that to customers and one of those services is recruitment and we power that, it's our service. They're reselling our service for three years to 12.7 million business customers in the United States. We have this partnership with Monster which is massive and you know they're run by Randstad. We've just announced our partnership with SmartRecruiters, it was in Yahoo! Finance yesterday, in the press. SmartRecruiters. We are working with the leading staff-providers of technology and they love our model
because they see the value in it. They understand where we fit in the market.
Arran: I won't take business from Indeed. I will take business that decides it needs to operate in the silo that I am in and because of that, I think, as you probably appreciate, the market's so big, there's room for all of us [crosstalk 00:30:28].
<BELL>
Chad: There it is.
Joel: Aright, Arran. Our time here has come to an end. It's time for you to face the firing squad. Are you ready?
Arran: Oh, I'm ready.
Joel: He just got really calm, just then, went from this, anyway, vivacious chief visionary officer to very quiet-
Arran: Humble.
Joel: -scared guy. All right, I'm going to go first, Chad, if that's okay.
Chad: Sure, hit it.
Joel: All right, so, Arran, dude, I love your passion. I love the domain. I mean, people kind of poo-poo domains these days and it is very diluted from what it was ten years ago but I still think there's a lot of value in having a domain like job.com and the other domains that you have. I think going public is very audacious, I think the revenue share with job-seekers is, same thing. I think blockchain, the verdict is still out on blockchain in terms of searching for a job, how important it is, do people care, and I think that's the same with blockchain on just about everything that's going on right now.
Joel: That being said, I think that you have an incredible mountain to climb. The competitive landscape... I think you have a lot of pieces moving in your business, to sort of make it all work, I think, to see a day where people are carrying around your credit cards and getting a piece of the pie from when they get hired, that's a very big dream and as an American I can respect that a lot, but I still think, are you too big for your britches? I think that maybe you might be. I think that at some point you might have to scale the vision back, simplify, make it easier for job seekers and employers to understand what you guys are doing. I'm by no means poo-pooing the business. But I'm also by no means saying that this is a slam dunk and it's gonna take off regardless of what happens.
Joel: For me, I'm going to love watching this story unfold, I'm going to love you guys ringing the bell at NASDAQ if that's something that you'll be able to do and see what the stock does over the years and if this credit card thing takes hold. But for me, I'm just very cautious about what's going to happen, so... I got a golf clap. Good for you man, I like the vision, what you guys are doing, but I think you have a long road to go and a high mountain to climb.
Chad: My turn. Prepare. All right, first and foremost, adoption is the biggest bitch. I mean, you can have amazing tech, amazing partners, but if you don't have a scheme to be able to ensure that you can bleed into the everyday routine and life of candidates and obviously employers, then you're fucked. It doesn't matter, right? Back in the days, going beyond adoption, also thinking about evolution, back in the day the newspaper should have embraced job boards and evolved their model. They didn't. They lost tons of cash. But I believe staffing is smarter than that and I believe from the pitch that I've heard today and some of the Q and A that we've gone through that you're positioned to help them evolve, which means their partnerships are incredibly vital.
Chad: When I was at Monster back in the day staffing was 75% of our revenue. I don't know if that's the same key today for them but I do know that that is a huge market to be able to partner with, not to compete with, so your pitch made a hell of a lot of sense with regard to partnership versus competition. And I also believe in saying, "Look, look at all these different pieces of tech, look at all these domains" and so on and so forth. Also a great answer because the tech is behind the scenes and the key is to make sure that the candidates and the employers don't have to worry about blockchain. They don't have to worry about ledgers. They don't have to worry about smart contracts or an Equifax kind of a thing. They don't have to do anything different. The system does it for you. And last but not least, you're paying in cold, hard cash. So from my standpoint, that's a big fucking applause.
Arran: Yay!
Joel: Congratulations Arran. How do you feel?
Arran: Yay! Oh, I feel great. And listen, do you know, both of you gents, your feedback is fantastic from both of you. Because obviously you're super experienced in our space and I actually take everything on board because being honest, Chad, thank you so much for the major applause, but Joel, in all honesty as well, your feedback is very correct because we are very much on a journey that we're very confident on but like any journey there will be fluidity. Change. Might have to go back on things. May need to be dynamic. But what I can say is we have a firm commitment to innovation, improving staffing, because you know what I care about the most, and I mean this, I'm a father of four, married man, and I understand how important it is to feed your family and pay your bills. And that is what my mission is, is to make that better for people that are looking to do that.
Chad: Beautiful.
Joel: And with that if you guys want to know more, check out job.com at job.com. Chad?
Chad: We out.
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