Remember liking that tweet 3 years ago expressing disdain for the president?
Imagine if it gets you fired 10 years from now? Well, welcome to the future, and the boys cover a company who’s monitoring your online behavior to facilitate such corporate behavior.
Additionally, this week’s episode covers
- Slack’s comeback,
- Indeed’s moon landing ad?
- Amazon ruins everything
- HEB gives employees 10 millions reasons to cheer!
and much more.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Jim Stroud:
15 minutes ago, the world changed. Companies are micro-chipping their workers. Robots are hiring humans, and brain-to-brain communication is a thing. This is all happening now. If you want to know what happens next, listen to The Jim Stroud Podcast.
Intro:
Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for The Chad & Cheese Podcast.
Chad:
Woo.
Joel:
All right, all right, all right. The week's big winners? Buttigieg and Parasite. As long as it's not a parasite on my booty. Welcome to The Chad & Cheese Podcast, kids. I'm your cohost, Joel Cheesman.
Chad:
And I am Chad Sowash.
Joel:
On this week's episode, those Twitter likes can get your ass fired, get ready for robot resources to join human research, and Slack bites back, along with your employee of the month. Time to go look in the mirror and judge my booty. We'll be right back after a word from Sovren.
Chad:
Not happening.
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. We provide technology that thinks, communicates, and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner.
Joel:
What's the line from Full Metal Jacket, when he says, "Pal, your ass looks like two pounds of chewed bubblegum," or something like that? That's pretty much my situation right about now. What's up, Chad?
Chad:
Too much information.
Joel:
Too much information. That's what we do on the show.
Chad:
Yeah. Don't just spread TMI like it's... Yeah.
SFX:
Hell yeah.
Chad:
You need protection to listen to this show. Good, man. It's been a good week. It's been an interesting week. We got a lot of good shit to talk about, so let's do this, though. Before we get into the really good stuff, we have a death in the family that we have to report.
Joel:
Okay.
Chad:
Employee Guide has finally...
Joel:
Oh, shit.
Chad:
... like a goldfish, needed the flush.
Joel:
That's nice. Employee Guide, for many that don't know, was a regional free paper, which I guess they still do in some parts of the world, where you go to the corner of the whatever, Main and 6th, and there's free papers you can take. This one used to be a free paper for jobs, obviously wasn't going to scale into the 20th century very well. They had a website that supported that. I actually was a keynote for them back in the mid-2000s. They had an annual event. I also did some SEO stuff for them back in the day. I sort of knew about them. They were like 100 employees strong. They were a big organization, but the jungle is the jungle, man, and they are apparently Audi 5000, G.
Chad:
They were grasping at straws. "Hey, let's get that Cheesman cat in here. Maybe he can throw some search engine tips."
Joel:
Yeah, if you're going to attempt to blame me for their demise, you got another think coming, pal.
Chad:
No, they're already on their way down. They could only afford you, is what I'm saying. That's how far down the rabbit hole they were.
Joel:
That's true. They were at the bottom of the keynote speaker list, for sure.
Chad:
There's somebody else at the bottom of our list. You noticed a stupid fucking article that led back to TheLadders, and they have this new logo or something.
Joel:
Oh, God, TheLadders, yes. We've talked about their, I guess, content marketing strategy a while back, and how they're kind of like TMZ and that shit, and trying to get paid views, and then once people go to the site. Every now and then I like to go check and see what kind of dumbass articles they've published, so this past week, I came across this gem title, "Doing This Many Pushups Reduces Heart Risk by 96%." Classic bait-and-switch, get that SEO traffic, and then get that resume mill, that profile mill going. Now, I also noticed that they have a new logo. It's ladders, and then... Hold on, give me a sec.
Chad:
100K Club.
Joel:
Yeah, 100K Club, which they really haven't pushed since their founding, their original business model, but if you do a search for jobs, many of the jobs are not 100,000K or more a year, so it's a nice marketing tool, but it doesn't quite hold mustard with the reality of the site.
Chad:
No, and it's interesting, because I don't know if they still do, they probably do, they used to charge job seekers to be able to gain access to this coveted list of 100K plus jobs, and as the VP of Business Development over at DirectEmployers, I dealt with all the partnerships, they were taking jobs from us. There was nothing there that was coveted by any form or fashion. You could find them on just about any job site, because I think we were feeding the exact same fucking jobs to 3,000 plus different job sites. "Here's the bait-and-switch. Pay me $19.95 a month," or whatever the hell it was.
Joel:
I really wish these guys would just fucking go away. They're really annoying. They need to go the way of the employment guide.
Chad:
It's a slow death. That being sad, you also brought up Indeed's new Oscars commercial, because we've been talking about Gary the Groundhog, and how they can't use him ever again. As a matter of fact, we're going to pull him over to Chad & Cheese side of the house, but the new Oscar commercial was kind of confusing, wasn't it?
Joel:
I thought it was funny. For those who watched the Oscars, I'm sure they've been running it since that, but basically, the gist is they show the moon landing, they show Houston with all the screens and the scientists and the mathematicians, and they even show the janitor, but it was basically saying, "Hey, everyone pitches in. Everyone's important," sort of saying, "Hey, we have a job very everyone." Of course, as I'm watching this, I'm thinking to myself, "None of these people, back in 1969, got their job through Indeed, so the relevance of it is really stupid. Everyone probably got recruited, or found a job in a newspaper, and the internet wasn't even around." Why they chose the moon landing to pimp their internet job search site was just sort of stupid. Why don't you just have the signing of the Constitution, or maybe the Magna Carta, or some shit like that before Indeed was around.
Chad:
They couldn't find a big brand that everybody knew and do the same kind of thing where they actually helped them hire different levels of people in their organization, because everybody fucking hates them, so they had to make some shit up about a moon landing. I do like the signing of the Constitution, though. I think they should probably pick that one up.
Joel:
Keep swinging, Indeed. Eventually you'll get that TV commercial right.
Chad:
Okay, shout outs. I'm going to start the shout outs today with my Maya swag, the cool hat. I'm sure you finally got yours. Cool hat, T-shirt, beer glass. The company is sending better swag again. The trend continues to move on. I enjoy it.
Joel:
Yeah, I was hoping that because you got yours so much earlier than mine, that there might be some liquid refreshment in my box. However, there was not. Whatever, Maya, I appreciate the T-shirt. That's fun. Shout out to Tim Hawk, one of our favorite listeners. He loves the transcriptions, which a lot of people do, but last week, my line, "Old school rap," got turned into, "Old school rape," by our transcription service-
Chad:
Not good.
Joel:
... which, as you can imagine, caught the eye of a few people, including Tim, so Tim, thank you for pointing that out. That could have been really bad for my SEO in the future, for whatever reason, but no, it was old school rap.
Chad:
And it is old school rap now, because I was actually taking lunch and he messaged us, and I'm like, "Well, fuck." I made my way back home and changed it, but yeah, transcription service is good, but obviously not 100%.
Joel:
It's not perfect. Fortunately, Tim Hawk is perfect.
Chad:
Tim Hawk is pretty perfect, and staying on the error side of the house, I really shouldn't do math on the fly. We had to do a readjustment to the Indeed math that we shared last week from the Indeed switcheroo segment. It's $960 per year, not per month, for 30 contacts per month, so it's kind of a switcheroo right there. You're per year, then per month, so you've got close to $1,000 a year for 30 contacts per month, which equals about $2.70 per contact, so whenever you actually press that button, that's what's going to happen.
Joel:
Sorry math. Math just zones me out. I apologize for that.
Chad:
We have to make sure we do our corrections though, right?
Joel:
Yeah, talking about Indeed, ZipRecruiter, or at least one of their employees, loves when we talk shit about Indeed. He was very congratulatory and appreciative on, I think, LinkedIn after that post. Zip, this is to you, buddy. Shout out.
Chad:
We love it. Also, Rachel Rillings over there, who listens, she definitely, I'm sure, loved a little bit of that.
Joel:
No doubt.
Chad:
Also got some messaging from the people over at Tengai. Last year, we talked Tengai and the evil twin Sigmund, and here is the official statement, officially, "Our evil twin is not allowed to be used commercially, only allowed to be used in a research project at the university."
Joel:
Oh no, Sigmund.
Chad:
That squashes the market confusion, which is awesome.
Joel:
I love the viking cage match. That's always fun. Viking-robot cage match. Shout out to Walter Isaacson, much too smart to be on our show, but Walter wrote the biography on Steve Jobs. You may remember him from that. Anyway, he has a podcast called Trailblazers that's for Dell Technologies, which to me is kind of an interesting strategy for a company, to hire a podcaster and then create a series around that. I think it's a good marketing strategy, but the shout out goes to him because he had a podcast episode a couple weeks back about the early days of job search sites, and he specifically talks to Jeff Taylor and Richard Johnson, who was HotJobs and Monster, and that first year of Super Bowl ads, and how things evolved. If you're interested in the history of our industry, go check out Trailblazers, Walter Isaacson, and then search, it's like job search or something.
Chad:
I have to jump in too and probably add some color, because I guarantee you he didn't get all the angles right. My last shout out is to Tim Sackett, who will be emceeing SmashFly's Transform event again this year. He had a 10% discount code for registration, and go figure, I guarantee you he created this. The discount code is Tim Rocks, so here's what I say. I think we're going to work with SmashFly to get our own discount code, and our discount, for the same, probably, percentage off, is going to be Tim Sucks.
SFX:
Hell yeah.
Joel:
Ours needs to be an 11% discount just to be preferential for people. My last shout out... Well, I got a couple, I guess. Roopesh Nair from Symphony, we interviewed, which we published this week, it's a great interview. We also interviewed Batman, who most people know. Michael Cohen.
Chad:
Michael Batman Cohen.
Joel:
Not that Michael Cohen. The heavy speaker on the circuit, a lot of people know him. We had a really frank conversation about recruiting, sourcing, automation, all that good stuff, so check out those podcasts. My last shout out, a headline came across my screen this past week. It was, "GoJob Raises 11 million Euros." Jonathan Duarte, his old site was GoJobs, which I think he still runs, so when I saw the headline, I thought, "Holy shit. Duarte just raised 11 million euros," but no, it's some French company. Take out the S. It's GoJob. It's worth a shout out, but
Jonathan, sorry. I got real excited for you, but that faded really, really fast, unfortunately.
Chad:
So close. So close. Event. Okay, next week, kids, February 19th through the 21st, we, again, are going to be lucky enough to go to the gathering of cult brands. We're going to be in a castle at the base of the Canadian Rockies. Dude, it is sick. Go to CultGathering.com if you want to check out what's going on, tickets, whatever, but we are going to be onstage with Bill Neff, who is the VP of Consumer Brand and Marketing from Yeti. That's right, from Yeti, and then we're also going to have Tyler Weeks-
Joel:
Our bad, Tyler.
Chad:
... and Allyn Bailey from Intel, so we're going to have a really frank discussion around marketing and employer brand and big brand, so we're going to have that discussion onstage. It's awesome to be able to get in front of heads of consumer marketing for huge brands, and to be able to have these discussions.
Joel:
It's going to be an awesome, awesome panel.
Chad:
It's going to be pretty amazing. Then UNLEASH and TAtech and their mega conference. Mega conference in London.
SFX:
Hell yeah.
Chad:
In London, in March. Currently we're going to be at TAtech for Death Match. We have JobSync, Optimal, and S-B-O-J or SBOJ-
Joel:
Spooge.
Chad:
Yeah, spooge. Jobs spelled backwards. That's what everybody should start off with. We have one spot left to compete for the European Grand Champion, and that Grand Champion will get the Chad & Cheese Chain of Champions.
Joel:
Already ordered, my friend. Already ordered.
Chad:
That's what I'm talking about.
Joel:
By the way, I make great Valentine's Day gifts as well. If you really want to make your significant other feel special, get them a big old championship gold chain. It's awesome.
Chad:
That's right, just have HMFIC on it or something. If you're in and around London and you're not going to TAtech or UNLEASH, what the fuck's your problem? TAtech.org, UnleashGroup.io. Get your tickets. We'd love to see you there. We're going to be there at UNLEASH, and more than likely, doing some interviews and whatnot, but really excited to go to both of those shows together.
Joel:
Nice. Nice. Looking forward to it. Let's get to some news, shall we?
Chad:
Topics.
Joel:
Oh, so this is a good one. You and I are fans of the Joe Rogan podcast. I don't listen regularly, but I listen enough to say I'm a fan.
Chad:
It's hard, dude. It's like three fucking hours long.
Joel:
Whenever I think our podcast is long, I think, "Well, damn, fucking Rogan's is three times as long as ours." Anyway, they actually talked about some employment issues in a recent episode. Somebody tipped us off. Basically, someone got fired from a job because the company was using a service that was looking at every employee's social media footprint, if you will, sent the company 300 pages, sort of activities on mainly Twitter, I think, was what was on the show. They were pointing out stuff that he liked, tweets that he's made. They were tagged as racist, sexist, violent, which was really out of context for a whole lot of the tweets. The fact that I guess there are two issues here is one is these services exist, companies are using them, how do we feel about that, and number two, how do we feel about, I guess, the gray areas of social media activity and being pinched for, I don't know, liking a tweet from someone 10 years ago that is somewhat subjective to being naughty.
Chad:
Over 300 pages. 351 pages, and there were more than one tweet on each page, social media post, what have you, of anything that they thought could have been disparaging, if it said, "Fuck," on it, or something like that. Here is an example. It actually has a side-by-side. On the left hand side, it says, "Why it flagged," so it was good or bad, "Flag reason," and this one was, "Language, bigotry, and sexism," and then the reason was that the post type was liked. Didn't create the post, didn't share the post, didn't retweet the fucking post, liked the fucking post.
Chad:
Here's what it said, "To this day, this is still the most big dick energy I've ever seen in a video." That was it, right? You can look at big dick energy, and that's what Joe Rogan was talking about, what that actually means, and it doesn't mean, really, I think what the algorithm thinks it means. Is that bad language? Possibly. Is it bigotry? I don't fucking think so. Is it sexism? I doubt it, right, but yet, this is the kind of shit that's going to an organization, prospectively about you, because you, out there, might have accidentally liked something. You might have fat-fingered something.
Joel:
Yeah, if you really want to screw over your ex before you break up with them, go get their phone, get on their Twitter account, and go search really bad shit on Twitter from five years ago, and go like stuff, and get them fired. That shit will happen once people find out that this is a thing.
Chad:
The thing was, that person went home and there was a package on their doorstep containing the printout of all 351 pages, which I thought was fucking crazy, but the company's name and the service is called Fama, F-A-M-A. I've reached out to their CEO. I've already contacted him. He might actually be on the show, so we might get an opportunity to talk to him through this, but this is from their website, "The smartest way to screen toxic work behavior. Fama. Fama is a talent screenings software that helps identify problematic behavior among potential hires and current employees by examining publicly available online information." Hence, your tweets, your Facebook, whatever you have that's exposed that you're allowing just the public to see. From my standpoint, as somebody who believes that individuals are individuals and we're not trying to fit them into our brand box, because our brand is who they are, right, this is really troublesome to me, because it really seems like big corporate America saying, "You're not wearing the right suit, so you can't work for IBM."
Joel:
Yeah, it goes well beyond, "You've emailed something to someone internally, or you've done something on the corporate account." This goes beyond, "We didn't hire someone because of this," and I'm sure Fama, Fama?
Chad:
Yeah.
Joel:
It can also be used to pre-screen people, although I don't know if they have to sign permission or verify what their accounts are. That's a whole other can of worms that you can open up on people, but yeah, it takes social media monitoring to a whole other level, and it's probably a level a lot of people don't like too much, for the very reasons that we've outlined.
Chad:
Yeah, and on the website it says, "Compliant, comma, AI-based online screening for the enterprise. Our technology helps businesses identify thousands of job-relevant behaviors, such as racism or harassment, without exposing hiring managers to unnecessary risk or manual work." I think we've already pointed out at least one example of, "Was that really sexist?" I don't think it was anything to do with bigotry, but I think if you are a company and you allow a company to do something like this, you have to think of those 351 pages, and every single tweet and/or LinkedIn post, Facebook post, whatever it is, and now you are going to have to defend all of those and why they were either bigoted or sexist, or whatever it is. You're going to have to defend that shit.
Joel:
Yeah, have fun with that. 300 pages. Can you imagine that meeting? "All right. Let's start with page one. Okay, let's look at this one."
Chad:
Hopefully, Ben will actually listen to this podcast. We're going to try to get something scheduled with him fairly quick, the CEO of Fama, and really just take him to task on this and ask him about it, because obviously, he feels there's a need, and people are buying this, so there obviously is a need. The biggest question is is this the way it should be executed, right? Is this really the way it should be done?
Joel:
Yeah, and by the way, if you're listening and you use Fama, it's Fama.io, I think, is the URL, please hit us up directly, or hashtag us at ChadCheese.
Chad:
Let us know. Robots.
Joel:
Robot resources. I thought this was an Onion story when I first read it.
Chad:
There are two stories that are coming in here. We've got robots are coming, and job openings are sliding. The first one's from ZDNet, and the other one's from Barron's. ZDNet said, "Retailers are increasingly adopting AI and robotics, both in brick and mortar shops and in warehouses, and with a new robot workforce means the need for new management methods,
so this goes beyond HR," which is what Joel is talking about.
Joel:
Yeah, I mean, in some ways it makes sense, right? I love the story, how it says, "There won't be AI holiday parties or robot retirements." Someone in robot resources is going to have to be, "Procuring, maintaining, training, taxing, decommissioning, fixing, disposing of obsolete machinery, et cetera."
Chad:
Yeah, yeah.
Joel:
I don't think we think of that as a robot/human resources job. It's probably just some engineer in the back room that fixes robots and shit.
Chad:
"With AI powered robots being particularly suited to the retail industry, Gartner's research predicts that 77% of retailers plan to deploy AI as early as 2021." That can be around floor cleaning, data collection, security. There's just so much, not to mention we see Walmart, for example, with Alphabot, a robot for their fulfillment systems, and they have... What is it? The systems, "Implemented in retailer's 20,000 square foot warehouse in New Hampshire."
Joel:
This reminds me of the Jawas on Star Wars, the big truck that would just go and take robots from the desert and shit. Someone needs to start a company called Jawa, and then just be like the outsourced robot resources for companies.
Chad:
Yeah, and I think what they were trying to do with this whole human resources and robot resources thing is that all these different examples, like Kroger's signed a deal with UK company Ocado to build huge automated robot warehouses, but there are going to be humans that are there, that are actually packing the bags. Amazon's Kiva robots transport pallets. They work together with humans, so this is really a human hybrid with these robots.
Joel:
Companies will need liaisons to work between people and robots, probably. We just added a million jobs to the economy with this robot resources position.
Chad:
No, I don't think so.
Joel:
Which is good, because we've got slowing jobs, which is bad. This was also in the news this week.
Chad:
That's the thing. We are going to see, there's no question, some of these jobs that we have now, which are undesirable, to be quite frank, taken over by robots. That's not such a bad thing, until job openings dropped in December to the lowest level in almost two years, a sign that demand for labor may be cooling. It's the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report. The DOL said openings fell 8% in December to 6.4 million. That's the lowest it's been since January 2018, and it's down from a record high, 7.58, that was hit in January 2019.
Joel:
This is great, Chris Rupkey, Chief Financial Economist at MUFG, said, "Something is happening out there to the economy, and while we can't be quite sure what it is, this collapse in the need of labor on the part of companies is not a positive development." Thanks, Captain Obvious. By the way, do you remember Jolt Cola from the '80s?
Chad:
Oh yeah.
Joel:
That was like eight times the sugar of Coke, and 10 times the caffeine.
Chad:
I had one and my heart almost exploded, so I didn't have another one.
Joel:
You could feel your teeth deteriorating as you drank it. Oh, the '80s. Great decade.
Chad:
Last but not least on this, okay, so let's think about the last story. We're talking about Amazon and Kiva. Well, Amazon said that if installed in each of its 55 US fulfillment centers, the robots could eventually replace 1,300 humans, and you can't tell me that's not exactly what Jeff Bezos wants.
Joel:
You don't think so?
SFX:
Hell yeah.
Chad:
I know he does.
Joel:
All right. Well, let's take a break and hear from Canvas, and we'll continue this Amazon conversation, because they're in the news with another story this week. Be right back.
Canvas:
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Joel:
Amazon Flex drivers. I have a little bit of insight on this. My sister's boyfriend, which sounds weird because my sister's in her 50s, and when you say boyfriend, you think they're like 17 or something. Her boyfriend... Get married already. He's in the trucking industry, and it's pretty fascinating. Basically every morning, they wake up, and there's a bunch of opportunities to take shit places, right? Warehouse A is saying, "Hey, take this to warehouse B. We'll pay you this much," and then you try to gauge which job, which pays the highest, which one is the easiest drive. You try to manually make sense of this. When I heard him say that, I was like, "Somebody's got to be automating that," and sure enough, this story comes up that yes, third party apps have been created to help these drivers basically automate the shit out of the best opportunities, and leverage the best revenue opportunities to take shit for Amazon to other places to be delivered.
Chad:
It's more the latter than it is the former. First off, let's talk about what a Flex driver is. Flex drivers are contract workers, not full-time workers, who use their own vehicle to deliver packages to customers' doorsteps. Think like UberEats. You're picking up a package, and you're delivering it, but in this case, you're given a window of time to complete that task. Say, three and a half hours to deliver 45 packages. Flex drivers can make 18 to $25 an hour, depending on the actual blocks. This is an interesting conversation, especially around the app, because I agree, being able to take logistics and move it is incredibly helpful. The problem is these guys, they can see that there are jobs open, they can see the time frames, and they can see the dollar amount, but what they can't see is where it's at, and they can't see how many packages. They can't see, really, the necessary information to say whether I want to take this job or not. It's pretty much just covering your eyes and saying, "Okay, let's see if we can do this one."
Joel:
Right, and I think a lot of the Flex drivers are in what's called the final mile. I'm no expert on this, but apparently the final mile is the most expensive, because it's drivers and insurance, and it's people, and it's labor, and yada yada yada, so this is a little bit different than the truckers that go 500 miles to deliver cars and produce and shit like that.
Chad:
Yeah, I think the big story for me in this was that this really is much like their warehouse jobs, but unfortunately, it's not full-time. You don't get benefits, and you have to use your car, and own gas money, and maintenance and stuff. They have tight windows, no bathroom breaks, in some cases, to be able to try to make. Remember the conversation around warehouse workers who had goals, quotas to meet, and they couldn't go to the bathroom, so they were pissing in the garbage cans?
Joel:
Yeah, not good.
Chad:
These guys are talking about making sure they take their bathroom break beforehand, because if they don't in that three and a half hours, they might not be able to take it. It is so Amazon. I see Amazon going full automation like I had said, with the warehouses, and then the delivery drones being able to take care of this last mile piece.
Joel:
Yeah, in Jeff Bezos' perfect world. If you're a shareholder, you can't hate on this. It's like self-driving trucks, self-driving delivery vans, drones to deliver packages, little bitty vans that we've seen on college campuses delivering beer. Basically, the whole thing's automated and profits are optimized to the fucking roof, for sure.
Chad:
And we are the laziest motherfuckers in the world.
Joel:
Yeah, we are. Speaking of profits, Slack, the popular messaging service, bit back this week after being on the Wall Street blacklist. They revealed that IBM was going all-in on Slack to handle the messages internally with its employees. Wall Street loved that, and this week, Slack is up 15% on that news, originally trading around 22.50. Right now, they're around the 26, $27 per share mark, so good for them. They've had a rough year with Teams, so this was a good bit of news for them, and yeah, we'll see if it keeps on keeping on.
Chad:
Somebody's got to buy Slack. I mean, there's got to be a merger. There has to be a buy. Something has to happen, because I don't see Microsoft Dynamics and Teams slowing down. The reason why, again, Slack fell was because Microsoft announced that they had 20 million daily active users.
SFX:
Hell yeah.
Chad:
I think Slack had like eight million, so it was like, "Meh, look at what we can do overnight."
Joel:
Yeah, and if Amazon would just listen to my predictions every year, they'd go buy Slack and clean up, but no one has done that yet. If you think Pepsi's a bad place to be compared to Coke, I mean, you're probably right, but Pepsi's not the worst place to be. I think Slack will have its little corner of the market. I think, to me, the interesting thing with Slack is how do they move beyond messaging, and how do they get into bigger things, software. I think their app store solutions, which we saw at UNLEASH last year, has a lot of potential. They're not monetizing it currently, and they certainly could, but yeah, it's an interesting story to watch. IBM was also on our radar this week. We got some inside scoop on some of their love for Workday, and they're not so much love for somebody else. What went on there?
Chad:
Yeah, so this one, for me, is hard to believe, unless you've ever worked at or closely with an applicant tracking system, because it's a bitch. We've heard rumor... Say that out loud, rumor, that IBM will be sunsetting BrassRing Kenexa, and another part of it that's really hard to believe, not that it's not a shitty applicant tracking system, because it really is, but OnGig's ATS report of Fortune 500 companies showed that the ATSs that they were using, Kenexa BrassRing had 10% of the market, number four in the top five, and twice as much as ISIMS did. I mean, can you get behind this rumor? That's a lot of money to dump. Yes, there is consulting on the Workday side. Can you play both sides of the ball and still make money? I think so.
Joel:
Yeah, we're watching you, IBM. Big Blue's in our cross-hairs, baby. Let's hear from JobAdX and talk about Benjamins being handed out at HEB, a popular grocery store down South.
JobAdX:
Nope. Nah. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs, just half-heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it. We live in a world that is all about content, content, content, so why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions? Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic, enticing video that showcases your company culture, people, and benefits, with JobAdX.
JobAdX:
Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection, and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel, begging to be discovered. Why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team? Help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com. Attract, engage, employee with JobAdX.
Chad:
Okay, so this next story just seemed too good to be true. I do know that HEB, which is a very well loved grocery store chain in the United States, they're really good to their employees. They call them partners, right? Again, words matter, and we heard that they won the National Grocer of the Year Award-
Joel:
Nice.
Chad:
... and that they gave all their employees a $100 bill. I was like, "Wow. That's pretty fucking
cool."
Joel:
$100 cash money bill.
Chad:
Yeah, and I thought, "That's really cool." I mean, because all the different types of individuals who work at a grocery store, $100, that's not bad for anybody. I was like, "Wow, let's see how big HEB is." I did a search, and it's 100,000 employees, and then, check my math if you would, because I'm not great at it.
Joel:
I'm not checking math.
Chad:
I did the math on that, and I'm like, "Oh, dude. That's $10 million." Okay, I haven't heard much about this, right, and if a company gives out $10 million, why the fuck wouldn't we? I reached out to HEB, and they confirmed, "For clarity, we call our employees partners, and we shared this with all partners," so all of their employees/partners received $100 bill, which equates to $10 million.
Joel:
My father, who lives in Texas, when he retired, he took a part-time job at HEB, so I can confirm that he enjoyed his experience there. He was treated really well. He was the morning produce guy, so he would get there at like 4:00 in the morning and the produce truck would show up, and he'd dole out the bananas, pun intended, and whatnot, so he can confirm that. Now, the second part, I think, which is genius, is number one, every employee that got $100 is guaranteed to tell five to 10 people that HEB, their company, gave them $100 bill.
Chad:
For winning an award.
Joel:
The free advertising they got on that alone and probably the recruitment benefit that they got for people that wanted to come work for HEB, yeah. Then the second one is imagine all the stories that were written, the PR that they received from the $100 gift, if you will, or reward. I'm promising you the PR they got, the recruitment advertising they got, the good will they got, was worth well more than $10 million, although that is a mighty sum to give out to partners/employees. I think they got their money's worth. I think that spending $10 million on TV advertising would have been much less impactful than giving $100 to every employee, so from a marketing perspective, it was pretty genius.
Chad:
Yeah, not to mention giving to your employees, like, I don't know, raising their wages or what have you, gives them an opportunity to spend more money with you.
Joel:
That's right.
Chad:
They feel good.
Joel:
This is unconfirmed, but I think Torchy's Tacos received at least 20% of that $10 million. That's unconfirmed.
Chad:
Yeah, good stuff.
Joel:
The consummate dog person, you love this next story.
Chad:
Yeah, so a man who works from home keeps naming his dog Employee of the Month. This is out of UNILAD. Michael Reeg from Georgia, he's a distribution sales manager, says his dog Meeka is a real asset when he is busy working in his home office, and has helped to ease the transition to telecommuting. I think it's hilarious, because we have dogs. We have three dogs, and every now and again they're a pain in the ass. They need to get up, they need to go to the bathroom, that kind of stuff, but that gets me away from my desk, because I would be chained to this thing if I wasn't, not to mention they want to play and that kind of thing. They actually uplift my mood during the day, and it's really funny, because this dude has a picture of Meeka on his wall, and they're all different pictures. They're not the same picture. He takes a different picture every single time, and awards her the Employee of the Quarter, and that, to me, that made me smile and happy, and I know exactly how he feels.
Joel:
Yeah, I agree with everything you said. To me, the funny thing is he has one dog. It's the same dog every quarter. At least you could mix it up every so often, right?
Chad:
Well, he has two dogs, and here it is. "Sadly, Meeka's glass ceiling breaking attitude has failed to rub off on the other dog of the house, Kya, who is reportedly much more of a lady of leisure." So Meeka comes to work, man. She comes to work.
Joel:
That's nice. That's nice. Well, if you don't have fun doing this shit, you go crazy, so major applause for Meeka and Company. I love it.
Chad:
That's right. That being said, I'm going to roughhouse with my dogs, so we out.
Joel:
We out.
Walken:
Thank you for listening to... What's it called? The podcast with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing, just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know, and yet, you're listening. It's incredible, and not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar, blue, nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss. There's so many cheese, and not one word. So weird. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way, you won't miss an episode, and while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.