LinkedIn Gets Touch-Feely
Falls is here and the leaves may be dropping, but it's nothing to the news-breaking and the knowledge-droppin' that's going down on The Chad & Cheese Podcast this week.
So what happened? Glad you asked.
... and what show would be complete without some Indeed rumors?
Enjoy, and write our sponsors - JobAdx, Sovren, and Canvas - a blank check while you're at it.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Tengai: Hi, this is Tengai, the unbiased interview robot. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I love these guys.
Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman 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.
Joel: Oh, yeah.
Chad: Hello.
Joel: Waxing chumps like a candle since 2017. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous and soon to be biggest groups of whinos. France here we come. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheeseman.
Chad: And I'm Chad Getting-On-A-Plane Sowash.
Joel: On a jet plane. On this week's episode, LinkedIn connects with its inner Meetup. TMP carves out more market share and opportunities in the cannabis industry are growing like a weed.
Chad: Woo!
Joel: See what I did there, Chad?
Chad: [crosstalk 00:01:10]
Joel: Anything less than the best is a felony, we'll be right back after this quick word from Sovren.
Sovren: Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com.
Sovren: We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it dinner.
Joel: Shout outs with a brand new invention. Can you believe how old that song is now?
Chad: God, stop aging us.
Joel: Sorry, sorry.
Chad: I'm already down because I'm down a Peepers.
Joel: Explain to people who the hell Peepers is because it sounds like a strip show or strip club.
Chad: Is your dog. So Mr. Peepers is your dog. You were gone last long weekend, you dropped the little guy off here. I have three dogs, girl dogs, and they just had a blast. We always enjoy having Peepers around.
Joel: Yeah, yeah. Took the family on fall break to paradise, also known as Cleveland, Ohio. Had a grand old time at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Many people don't know this, but A Christmas Story was largely filmed in Cleveland and the house that's in the movie is in Cleveland and it has since been turned into a museum. The Bumpus' house next door is now a hotel where you can stay overnight there.
Chad: The Bumpus'.
Joel: Across the street is a garage with the firetruck when Flick got stuck to the fire pole, or the flagpole. So the firetruck from that is there and also the car that the family drove where the tire gets flat and Ralphie says "Oh, fudge."
Chad: That wasn't quick "fudge."
Joel: So yeah, the kids enjoyed it, we did some other things. Peepers had some fun with your bitches there.
Chad: Yeah. Well, he understands that when he comes here he's apart of the pack and he has to listen to them. Because if you fuck with one of them, you fuck with all three of them and no guy wants that kind of shit. So he's great.
Joel: Where's his place in the pack there? Is he at the bottom? Because I feel like he beats up Amber enough that he leaps frogs her.
Chad: Yeah, but that's playing and they all kind of gang up on each other every now and again. But he knows better. He's a smart dude. He's like, "Yeah, I'm going to have some fun here, but I'm not going to take it too far."
Joel: I don't know about smart, but anyone, someone who is smart, our buddy Jamie Leonard from Recfest was sporting a Chad and Cheese t-shirt while doing a presentation down in Australia, I believe, this week.
Chad: Yeah, I think it's got to be one of his favorite t-shirts. I'm going to have to send him another half dozen or so, because every time I see a picture, not every time but most of the time, he has a Chad and Cheese t-shirt on. So I'm going to have to make sure we get him stocked up.
Chad: Along with Martine Radcliffe who is the VP of TA over at American Cancer Society. It was great meeting her at HR Tech, and she was one of those "I have to have a t-shirt" people. So she's wearing it, she's enjoying it, she's LinkedIn and tweeting
about it. So you're welcome Martine and thanks for listening.
Joel: Yeah, Martine was one of these nuts that actually went to both of our sessions at HR Tech. That's how fanatical she is about the show.
Chad: Love it. Love it.
Joel: So Martine, thanks for the fanatical behavior.
Chad: Exactly. So how do you say, Muir? Is it Muir? How do you say that? That's probably an English name but not an American name. Is it Muir McDonald?
Joel: Well, it's got to be some Scottish-Irish mashup.
Chad: Okay, I love it.
Joel: McDonald I get, I could pronounce that.
Chad: That's too easy, yeah.
Joel: Yeah, give us a shout and let us know how to pronounce that name. Muir McDonald.
Chad: M-U-I-R. There you go.
Joel: Yeah, yeah. Put us number one on his HR podcast list, so we appreciate that.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Shout out to him.
Chad: Love that. Along with, this is very, very interesting, Recruiting Future Podcast with Matt Alder and Talent Cast with James Ellis. A little tease, something very interesting happening with all of those three podcasts, so stay tuned.
Joel: It's getting kind of hectic people. Shout out to my mom on a little somber note. I'm just going to throw her in here. She's having a rough go in the health department. She's had replacement knees, one replacement hip. One of her knees acted up this week, she had to go under the knife to get that fixed, and then woke up this morning with pneumonia, so she's back in the ER.
Joel: So mom, shout out to you. As soon as I'm off this podcast I'm going to come down and say hi and hopefully lift your spirits. But man, she's on a losing streak. So if you're out there, just send some good vibes to Mama Becky.
Chad: Good vibes to mom please. My God, man. So big shout out to Louise Triance for pulling together a great Chad and Louise show with Thomas Prince from Talent Nexus. It was all focused on programmatic job advertising, why you should be thinking about programmatic, how to get things moving in programmatic, all that other fun stuff.
Chad: The only way you would've seen it is if you had subscribed to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. We put it in our RSS feed but we do some little special things for people who are already subscribed. So if you haven't subscribed, go to ChadCheese.com, click on the subscribe button or just pull out your app that you currently watch podcasts in, type in the Chad and Cheese Podcast and subscribe. You'll get all the cool stuff that the other kids don't get.
Joel: Does Louise have some blackmail on you? This is your twentieth webinar with her. Then I can't imagine you would do that that many times unless someone had some dirt on you.
Chad: Yeah, she's just a sweetheart. Not to mention, it's great from an EU expansion. They like to have a little dumb American every now and again, so I fit that bill.
Joel: Yeah, by the way, didn't they figure out Brexit this week? I've been kind of out of the loop in Cleveland. It seems like I read that they got their act together on that.
Chad: We've got enough shit on our side of the pond to fucking worry about let along that, right?
Chad: Some Indeed rumors real quick.
Joel: Oh. Everybody loves those.
Chad: Yeah. We won't go deep into it, because we're still tracking down some data and speaking with some sources, but the prospect of the Search Quality team is they're starting surface again. If you don't know, the Search Quality team is...
Joel: They're the party poopers.
Chad: They're like the Black Ops team that's just going to shut down your shit. Right? So if you have organic traffic, all that free traffic, when they come in and you hear "Search Quality team," with regard to your jobs, what's going to happen is your shit's going to get shut down. And the only way that you're going to get any traffic from Indeed moving forward, is to pay for that traffic. This is what I like to call, personally, a scam.
Joel: A shake down.
Chad: Yeah, a scam that they've been running very successfully. They did it with job boards. job boards came in, gave them a ton of content, they got a bunch of free traffic and then Indeed shut it down and started saying, "Hey, look, the only way that you're going to be able to get traffic from us, since now you're on the heroin drip, is to pay for it."
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: They did the same with staffing companies. Exact same thing. Now, they're looking for different actual corporate companies or service providers or what have you that they can do this with. So now that the search quality team isn't focused on staffing anymore, they're looking for you possibly, Mr. Talent Acquisition Professional, Mrs. Talent Acquisition Professional. So I think right now is a very good time to look at diversifying the traffic that's coming into your website.
Joel: You may want to embrace Google For Jobs if you're not currently doing so.
Joel: By the way, it always reminds me of the scene in Kindergarten Cop when he's an actual cop and he breaks into the party and they're like, "Who are you?" And he's like, "I'm the party pooper." That's the quality control group at Indeed. The party poopers.
Chad: Easily and if you're not doing programmatic advertising to be able to try to look for exit strategies on how to get the fuck away from having Indeed being pretty much all of the eggs in one basket for all your traffic, that's what you need to start doing. You need to start looking at the nice Indeed and the Neuvoo, that's how you say it. Neuvoo.
Joel: Neuvoo.
Chad: Yeah, and [Zunas 00:10:28], the Talroos, all these different organizations you need to start looking at. And I know that makes it hard, you and I have talked about this before, what's the role of an advertising agency today. This is one of the staples and one of the reasons why you should be working with an advertising agency.
Joel: It's time to wipe away the party pooper, because it stinks folks. Sorry I couldn't resist.
Chad: That was pretty bad. That was pretty bad.
Joel: It was all right, it wasn't too bad.
Chad: Okay, so one last one, I'm going to throw this one in there. You did mom, I'm going to throw in...
Joel: Oh, a curve ball.
Chad: A curve ball, yeah. So Shout out to my wife, Julie Sowash. She was actually in Plano, Texas yesterday, where she was actually brought in by the OFCCP, for my understanding, for a best practices session. Her company, Disability Solutions, actually works very closely with PepsiCo, one of their clients. And they presented together about how they've been able to actually hire over 15,000 individuals with disabilities into Pepsi alone. This is big for the OFCCP because they're like, holy shit, companies are actually doing this and they're not doing it in onesie, twosies.
Chad: She actually has three legs of her trip, but what she's doing today is she's in San Francisco with SmartRecruiters doing a reverse recruiting event, where at the end of the event they're going to have 50 individuals with disabilities that are hopefully going to be matched up with companies who have jobs and then those additional people get jobs. Again, that's a SmartRecruiters event, so good on SmartRecruiters.
Chad: The big shout out here is we talk about a lot of shit that's really cool from a tech standpoint, but impact and outcomes are what we should always be focused on and organizations that are helping individuals actually get fucking jobs is what really matters overall. So she's literally changing the world and that means a lot.
Joel: Do she get free Cheetos for working with Pepsi?
Chad: Fritos, I think. Maybe Cheetos, possibly.
Joel: Oh, Fritos. I thought Cheetos was a PepsiCo product.
Chad: They might be, I don't know.
Joel: Fritos definitely is. You're right.
Chad: So yeah, we're flying.
Joel: Dude, I'm so pumped to go to France for Unleash.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Arguably the best conference this month. I don't want to piss anybody off. Many people consider it the top conference in the world for this thing that we do called recruitment.
Chad: And we've never been to it. Have you ever been to it?
Joel: We've never been.
Chad: I've never been.
Joel: Never been. Paris in October, although it does look rainy and cold.
Should be nice.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: My wife is joining me, as I think yours is you.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: We're going to get a little vacation time as well as business. You guys know how that works. Definitely looking forward to it.
Chad: Yeah, so Unleash World in Paris, France, brought to you by Chad and
Cheese brought to you by SmashFly.
Joel: SmashFly.
Chad: SmashFly.
Joel: Have you got your swag yet?
Chad: Yeah. No, I got my swag. The ball cap's awesome, got the t-shirt.
Joel: I do love the cap.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: The cap's good.
Chad: Yeah, you know Josh, JZ, had something to do with that fucking ball cap because he's like a ball cap fiend.
Joel: Well, I hope he had something to do with the old style snap sizer on the back, because you don't see those too often anymore.
Chad: Yeah, exactly. October 22, coming next week at 11:45 Paris time, we're going to be on the influencer stage with Chris Ray, group head of recruitment at Sainsbury's, Adam Yearsley, global head of talent management at Red Bull, and also Brandi Ellis, head of recruitment marketing strategy at the SmashFly.
Chad: We've got a pretty awesome crew that's going to be up there and were going to be talking about why pretty much most company's recruitment branding sucks, why the experience sucks and the impact on the actual big brand itself.
Chad: We don't talk enough about talent, and that's what we're trying to do with our Cult Brand series of podcasts; is we have to understand in talent acquisition how big of a role we play in bottom line, in everything, in big business, and we need to better articulate to the C-suite that without us, you're fucking dead in the water.
Joel: Following that, I think is it iCIMS in November next?
Chad: iCIMS. Yep. In November.
Joel: So we're going to be going down to sunny beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona.
Chad: Goat yoga.
Joel: And it is beautiful in November, I can vouch for that. Yes, yoga is on the schedule. So geez, I got to start limbering up now or otherwise I'm going to just kill my back or legs. Whatever body parts you actually use in yoga I'm going to fuck up.
Chad: I asked Susan Vitale, who's the VP of marketing over there to make sure that we could do goat yoga. So hopefully she'll have the goats in play and we can do this right.
Joel: Do they have goats in Arizona? That sounds like Diamondback food to me, but we'll see.
Chad: I can see this, yeah.
Joel: Then little side note for me, RecruitCon in Nashville, I'll be there in November doing a little presentation on SEO for Google For Jobs. So if you're going to be at Recruit Con in Nashville in November, come down and say hi.
Chad: Then December 6, Talent Net Live in Dallas, Texas.
Joel: The coup de grâce, the Naughty or Nice Show live from Dallas.
Chad: Yeah, we're doing to the Naughty or Nice show. I reached out to Carrie Corbin over at Dell, known her for a long time, I've known her for a long time, to be able to join us on the stage to do Naughty or, not Naughty and Nice, so we'll see.
Joel: I'm sure you did. And what'd she say?
Chad: She said she'll look at her schedule, so we're going to continue to press on that one.
Joel: It's a nice of saying, "No thank you."
Chad: She lives in Dallas, she better fucking come.
Joel: That's what saying, "I'll look at my calendar means." She ain't fucking coming.
Chad: Topics!
Joel: Topics. Top news from this past week, agency TMP made an acquisition. What the hell did they do?
Chad: AIA, otherwise known as, also known as, you know as, TMP.
Joel: AIA, aka TMP.
Chad: This is kind of quietly to an extent, this is their fourth acquisition this year. They acquired CKR Interactive in February. And CKR is still under the CKR banner. Just recently, Maximum, who is remaining under the Maximum banner, and Perengo is the only one so far that we've seen that has actually changed over to TMP Programmatic Jobs. So Carve, which is a social media agency, also has technology.
Joel: Carve.social should tip you off as to what they do.
Chad: That'll tell you something. So they were actually pulled into the fray and their team's going to stay intact. To me, it's really interesting because you're kind of looking for something that is simple and to me, none of this looks simple. I mean, I love the opportunity to perspectively pull some of this Maximum technology into TalentBrew, some of the social Carve technology into TalentBrew. But there are all these different brands that are floating around that just make this as confusing as fuck.
Joel: Yeah, we continue to talk, aside form Perengo is the acqui-hires that sort of get spur from these acquisitions. I think this is another example. I mean, Carve is not hugely well-known. I mean, I know they're in London. I know they're fairly well-known there.
Joel: But to me, there's no specific technology that they bring to the table or maybe even deep customer integration or things that they're doing with them. I think this largely a step into Europe, a step into acquiring folks that understand the agency business and all the intricacies of the technologies that are used in agencies now. This just continues the trend for TMP of consolidating a lot of these smaller fish and bringing them into the large ocean that is TMP/AIA.
Chad: I think Carve does have technical assets that they're bringing to the table that is specific to obviously social with analytics and whatnot. So they're trying to pull everything together into a platform. If they were trying to capture and kill, then they would pull them under the TMP brand, but that's not happening. They're getting great talent, from whether it's Carve or CKR, it doesn't matter, they're getting some really great talent. But I just don't see this consolidation because it's not happening under one branch. I understand there's another TMP in the EU, so therefore, it's really hard to become TMP, which is why they have AIA.
Chad: But still, you would think that they would migrate under one of those umbrellas. Whether it's more of an AIA acquisition, which this was, because it was in the EU, versus a TMP acquisition. Again, it just doesn't feel like that to me. But it is confusing as fuck because of all the brands and all the labels and then all these great people who are still working in running these brands, right?
Joel: Yeah, and the acquisitions you mentioned are all within the last year, I think. So there's nothing saying that they don't pull all these into one brand next year or who knows when.
Chad: CKR would've been the easiest to do that. Let's make this very simple, Recruitics acquired KRT how long ago? KRT is now Recruitics.
Joel: Right.
Chad: Okay?
Joel: But Recruitics is much smaller than TMP, right?
Chad: Well, it doesn't matter. You can still make those things, especially when you're acquiring a much smaller shop. There's no reason why you can't go ahead and start to relabel or at least start that transition process, right? You're not seeing that. I think it was really smart from the Recruitics and KRT standpoint to say, "Okay. We know who we are. We're going to be one brand. Boom, let's do this."
Chad: I believe TMP and AIA know what they're doing with all these pieces, parts. But here's the thing, just because you know what you're doing with it, doesn't mean the fucking market does. And that makes it so much more confusing when you're trying to articulate a message.
Joel: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, if you were god of the organization for a day, would you put everything under TMP or AIA or create a whole separate brand that can be global for all of the products and services.
Chad: It depends on who you're bringing in, in this case, but I think from the social standpoint, these guys, that's what they do. They have a platform, they have a whole team. Then you bring them underneath TMP or AIA as AIA social or something to that nature, right? To be able to really show this combined force. As opposed to what it looks like now is it's just a bunch of scattered pieces, parts. Again, like here in the US, what's CKR doing? What are they actually bringing to the table? How does that works?
Chad: Again, it's one of those things, and this is my call to our friends at TMP and AIA, we need a better understandable message on what you're actually doing with all this shit. Because, again, back in February, That's when all this started happening. Which is awesome, we love it. Don't stop. The thing that you have to stop doing is you need a unified message on telling the market what the fuck you're doing.
Joel: Yeah, you're like a teen with a new credit card just buying shit. Help us understand what your reasoning is on all this stuff. We'd really appreciate it.
Chad: It's the Gemspring Capital card.
Joel: That's right. No fees for three months.
Chad: No fees. That's right.
Joel: And everything you can.
Chad: Yeah. So the next thing that has no fees currently is LinkedIn's Event platform.
Joel: Events, yeah. Everyone's into face-to-face now. So LinkedIn launches Events, what?
Chad: Everybody's into face-to-face now.
Joel: It's all the rage. This isn't sort of Events that you would think of for job fairs or what-not. This is sort of a Meetup competitor. Right? So groups can get together, and this is quoting the release from the company, "With this launch, our members now have a safe and trusted avenue to engage with their network online and offline."
Joel: This is from the product manager, "We see them using this feature to host networking meetups, workshops, alumni meets, product launches and other fave-to-face gatherings."
Joel: More from the news release, "Members can create private or public events while additional invite filters enable members to create events that target specific industries and job titles." That might be significant. "Currently, there's no official way to promote events on LinkedIn besides members sharing them on their profiles. LinkedIn Events is the first feature to be built at the company's new R&D Center in Bangalore," I think I said that correctly, "India. The features available in English only. Company's starting today with a global rollout. Expect it soon." How do we feel about this face-to-face stuff?
Chad: Yeah, it's not really as much the face-to-face stuff as it is there are already platforms that are out there that do this and they do it well. Meetup.com, Eventbrite.com, right? So you have to start asking yourself as a bigger player. I like the whole idea of LinkedIn taking it further and saying, "Look, you can meet here. You're going to meet locally too or you can meet locally. Let's go ahead and let's try to spur that from this platform."
Chad: Because they're probably seeing people sharing Meetup.com and Eventbrite events on their platform already. So it's like, "Hey, it's already happening, let's make it organic and see what we can do to perspectively monetize and then maybe monopolized on this shit."
Chad: But from Meetup and Eventbrite's standpoint, I would love this because it's more validation and I start going to competitors and saying "What are you doing? We already have a base, we already have the technology, why don't we go ahead and do this together."
Joel: Yeah, this feels a little lame and haphazard to me. I think there are platforms to do this already that are, let's admit it, sort of lame anyway. I mean, they're not really setting the world on fire, they're sort of just nice to have. I mean, if Meetup was so great it's old enough that it should be really hugely profitable just it's not.
Joel: To me, people are just now figuring out how to share QR codes on their LinkedIn app to swap information with each other. Now we expect them to meet in places and organized events through LinkedIn. So I'm not super bullish on this.
Joel: I think, the fact that this was an R&D effort, fairly telling, I don't know how serious they'll be with this it doesn't take off. I do like the fact that they have an R&D Center that throws out stuff like this, but I don't think it's going to be something worth talking about in any significance twelve months from now.
Chad: So Eventbrite had, in 2017, other $200 million in revenue and that was an increase of over 50% from years past. So they could be taking a look a the market and seeing what they could perspectively plug in, obviously to their ecosystem.
Joel: Yeah, I mean, if the goal is an Eventbrite things where you register with LinkedIn, your profile integrates who you're already connected with et cetera, there's an eCommerce system that you can get money, the organizations can make money from this, it's synced in with payment systems within LinkedIn or something like that that makes transferring money easy. Then scheduling where it's hooked in to Outlook or whatever your calendar system is. That's fairly interesting.
Chad: It just makes it easier. So I think it's ease of use and there's an opportunity because you can see that there are platforms making money and they can perspectively make more money out of it.
Joel: So the key here is, how serious do you think LinkedIn is about this? You think they're fairly serious. Whereas I probably think no so much.
Chad: Yeah, I think they're serious enough to put a team on it and to be able to pilot it. And they're rolling it out kind of like in beta form to an extent, right?