Careerbuilder Jedi Mind Trick
Last week Careerbuilder launches a new slogan and ad campaign while this week hundreds CB employees are laid off or furloughed. What kind of Jedi mind f#%k is that? The boys get deep into that and also talk:
- Amazon does it AGAIN... and AGAIN!
- Facebook & LinkedIn in court after Zoom shenanigans.
- Marc Benioff does what the President won't
- "Hey Alexa, talk dirty to me" is really a thing?
Enjoy, and show our sponsors some love (but keep your distance): Sovren, Canvas, & JobAdx.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT sponsored by:
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 and Cheese Podcast.
Joel: Oh, yeah. 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the last four weeks, so how's your day going? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody, I'm your co-host Joel, still in a dark place, Cheesman.
Chad: And I'm Chad, work from home, Sowash.
Joel: On this week's show, our favorite dumpster fire of a job site drop kicked a whole bunch of employees this week. Amazon is still fucking up. And grandma, like all of us, needs a beer dammit.
Chad: Now.
Joel: Grab a cold one while you still can get them. We'll be right back after a 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. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner.
Joel: I'm loving my weekly time on the couch with my therapist, the Chad. It's nice. How are you doing man?
Chad: Good. It's been a busy week. This whole ... We work from home as it is, but this is just an entirely different fucking animal.
Joel: I am cabin fever to the max dude. Whew! Man. Well, I got a three year old with a fever that won't quit and he's on antibiotics that aren't working and now he has the shits. Again, the offer to trade your three teenagers for my three year old is still on the table, if you ever want to take advantage of that.
Chad: Yeah, I'm good right now. Yeah. Now is good.
Joel: Okay. All right.
Chad: Yeah. I have enough passive aggressive shit. I deal with higher level stuff, but yeah, I don't need the shits right now.
Joel: Shits are bad, shits are bad. Yeah. Should we get to shout outs? Get this thing going?
Chad: Yeah. Let's start out with holy Recruiting Brainfood moly, Cheesman.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: Hung Lee, I don't know if you saw the
Joel: My favorite pornstar by the way.
Chad: Oh my God. Yeah. The favorite pornstar of the recruitment industry. Hung Lee had this crazy idea, which is very standard for Hung of course, to have a 24 hour Brainfood marathon event, which was a virtual event on steroids. Seriously, he literally broke the damn internet. The event had over 2200 people on at one time. The Crowdcast platform was probably busting at the seams. There were just amazing people, amazing content and I'm not sure anyone else would have thought of anything this big and could have pulled it off. Congratulations to Hung Lee and kudos to everybody who participated. If you want to watch the recordings, just go to recruitingbrainfood.com, they'll be there. You can watch Julie and my discussion slash argument with Hung Lee. We argued whether technology and process efficiency makes good organizations less or more human, that was a fun conversation. It was a back and forth little spat. It's like a normal day with Julie and I. It was fun.
Joel: Yeah. Are we sure that the title Hung Lee Video Party didn't get out on social media somewhere and get mistaken
Chad: Should have.
Joel: ... for like pornstar aroma and have a bunch of people show up? I don't know, I'm not convinced.
Chad: It's good marketing.
Joel: Sounds like a lot of fun. Sounds like a lot of fun. I'm going to start off my shout-outs with a little counter punch to our favorite millennial Holland McCue. If you listened to last week's show, and I believe you took her side if I remember correctly.
Chad: Of course.
Joel: I didn't quite understand the millennial breakdown and how much hardship that they have seen in their life having gone through 2008. Well, a New York Times article came out this week talking about millennials and how they haven't really had much hardship economically up until now and that this is a real punch in the gut. The first sentence of the story was basically, so-and-so was in high school when 2008 happened and it seemed like something far, far away. You guys can be in one corner and the New York Times and Joel Cheesman will be in the other corner, and I'll take that bet.
Chad: Well, it's funny because I was speaking to Kyle, our show millennial this week.
Joel: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Chad: And a couple of others, and I think what we've all come to understand is that, Joel, you're really a closeted millennial. Whiner, always pointing the fingers at other people, I mean all of the basic things that you point at millennials, I mean it's one of those, oh, wait a minute, Trump kind of things, I'm pointing over there, but really it's me. Yeah. Thanks to all of our millennials for listening and connecting with me to really break this out that Joel is just a closeted millennial. Good job, guys.
Joel: I'm going to argue that I'm bleeding over into like Clint Eastwood, grand El Camino or whatever that movie was, where like, get off my yard. I feel like I'm less about being younger than I am getting into like, get off my yard stratosphere.
Chad: As I'd said before, I think you focus too much cohort groups. A super marathon shout out to Liz Van Zyl, or Zyl, Van Zyl, Van Zyl, she's in Australia and they probably say it a hell of a lot more sexy than I do, from PASS Technology. I was sitting just sitting back and watching the Recruiting Brainfood marathon happening, I was waiting for a vendor pitch to start.The vendor was late and Liz saw me over on the side. She brought me on screen to fill time, like comedy relief or something and then she kept me on asking vendors questions for the next half hour or so. Nothing is better than being an impromptu guest host, so thanks so much Liz, I appreciate that.
Joel: Nice. Nice. Did she have any Foster's? It's Australian for beer.
Chad: Yeah. No Foster's on her.
Joel: Shout-out for me from TikTok. TikTok this week released that they'll be hiring 10,000 people. And there was also a study by Piper Sandler, no shit, Sherlock News this week, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok are the favorite apps of teenagers and young adults. Shout-out to them.
Chad: I have to say I love me some TikTok. Some rapid fire shout-outs, new listeners, longtime listeners all the way around, Matt Stone, director of Talent Acquisition at Rock Central, Anthony Peter over at ZipRecruiter.
Joel: Nice.
Chad: Chris Richards and Jonathan Abreau over at iCMS.
Joel: Abreua.
Chad: Abreau, he's a bro dude. And last in my quick shout-outs is the shout out to the dude in Indiana who received $8.2 million in stimulus money.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: He walks into an ATM to pull out $200, right? And he looked at his balance and it was over 8.2 million in his account from the stimulus money that apparently our government is just throwing out in chunks and hoping that he will distribute it for them, I guess.
Joel: Okay. When I first heard this I thought, okay, this is going to be like a funny story, $8 million, he goes to the bank and like haha, fix it, then they fix it, right? Or I was going to say, he cashed it, whatever and went to Bora Bora and it's the end of the story. But East Chicago, is it East Chicago he was from? Not the best area, if you know Indiana or Chicago.
Chad: Yeah. North-West Indiana.
Joel: The dude is older, he's got meth mouth, he's a volunteer firefighter.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: You feel really bad for him and it feels like there's somebody sticking it to him.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: He's getting the carrot and then he gets the rug pulled out from him as he sort of thinks that life is good again. I feel bad for the guy. It's a funny story. But
Chad: It's what I like to call a Jedi mind fuck, is what it is.
Joel: Is that real? Yeah. He did something in the past life that was not good, looking at that guy. I'll switch it around and a shout-out to beer grandma.
SFX: Yes.
Joel: I'll paraphrase this story as I know it.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: A grandma was quarantined, lived alone, she ran out of Coors Light and put a picture out of her window saying, "I need beer", is this correct?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And Coors Light apparently sent her a lot of beer.
Chad: Yes. So 93 year old, Olive Veronesi of Seminole, Pennsylvania, she just held up a sign, as you'd said, asking for beer from Coors Light and the brand, actually the Coors Light people said that they sent 150 cans of Coors Light.
Joel: There is still good in the world, Chad. There is still good in the world.
Chad: There's still good.
Joel: And I actually talked to someone from Pennsylvania yesterday, who told me that liquor stores are no longer essential businesses. You can't even get Curbside delivery or drive through, you can only get beer and wine from the grocery store. I can sense Pennsylvania is probably a little bit stressed out, you can still get Coors Light, but if you're looking for a good bottle of bourbon, you're out of luck if you're in Pennsylvania. And apparently you can't even get it mailed to you, which I asked, they said, no, they don't deliver it to Pennsylvania, so fuck.
Chad: Ridiculous.
Joel: Ridonculous.
Chad: Ridiculous. Something else that we thought was ridiculous is when Indeed kicked their partner publishers to the curb. And we mentioned on the show, we're like, "A smart competitor should just swoop in and take all of this." Well, go figure, talent.com aka Neuvoo
Joel: Neuvoo.
Chad: That's right. Talent.com, they did just that. If you're a publisher and you just got the ritual Trojan Horse fucking from Indeed
Joel: Kick in the nuts.
Chad: That's right. You can go to employers.talent.com/publishers and you can sign up. You can go ahead and try to replace that Indeed revenue stream with talent.com. Again, it's employers.talent.com/publishers.
Joel: Shout out to the Cleveland Browns unis.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: Which were launched or released this week. They're going old school again. Love it.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: It's the traditional look, nothing fancy. Most importantly, they took Cleveland off the front, which is ridiculous because no pro team in the world in football has the name of the city on the front of the jersey. So good for them. The Colts as well, new Jerseys. Falcons are going old school again. The Rams are the worst, the new logo is awful. Any thoughts from you on the new jerseys, new logos, everything, new fonts that are out there in the NFL?
Chad: Yeah. Then the new Colts alternate, not symmetrical, I know we love as human beings things to be perfect and symmetrical, it's actually pretty cool. The negative spaces is the state of Indiana. The new Colts font, again, little changes, but the news Colts font is pretty stellar. I like Tampa Bay's change. I don't think that the Falcons are that bad. Everybody's bitching about the Falcons. I haven't seen the Patriots yet, I know that's coming out. And the rest of them it's just like, man, you're making subtle changes, okay, cool. But I just want to see fucking football.
Joel: Yeah. And actually like I mentioned the city on the front, the Falcons actually have ATL on the front on some of the jerseys, which I think is cool, like the ATL.
Chad: It is the ATL, yeah.
Joel: That's okay. But if it was Atlanta, that would be kind of cheesy. And the jury's out of whether or not we'll actually see Tom Brady play in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers uniform because the mayor of LA is saying nothing sports-wise until 2022. Yikes.
Chad: Yeah. That seems a little ridiculous. It seems a lot ridiculous.
Joel: A little bit of California drama for you. Little LA drama.
Chad: Yeah. Just what we need. My last shout-out is going to go to our listeners. Last but never least, thanks to all of our listeners who helped us break into the top 100 in the Chartable business podcast rankings, number 54 in the US, number 75 globally. And they're like 800,000 podcasts out there. I have no clue how we did it, but we couldn't have done it without you. Thank you.
Joel: Yeah, this is clearly like the guy who got 8 million in his bank account. Like, obviously Chartable fucked up
Chad: Why are you jinxing us? This is killing me.
Joel: ... And put it on the top 100, and they're going to realize the mistake at some point and put us back in the top million. All right. I'll go through my final shout-outs quickly.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: A restaurant called Dig out on the East Coast, lays a bunch of people off via SMS.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And then I think they got a voicemail, if I remember the story correctly. Anyway, employers out there, don't lay people off via text message. It's just a bad look.
Chad: How do you have to tell people that? I mean seriously.
Joel: I don't know why. I don't know. Especially, this is a people business, right? Service and dah, dah, dah. Anyway, that's fucked up Dig, bad on you. You suck. Shout out to Sean Horton, an Indianapolis resident who's a big fan of the show and works at Jobs in Logistics, which I'm assuming is one of the few job sites or networks that's actually having a good time right now, with trucking and logistics and warehouse workers and everything else.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Shout out to him. And then lastly, the gang at HiQ. I know we haven't talked about them in a while, but the HiQ versus LinkedIn case is still on. And I've been told that by August of this year, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not to hear the case. That could be an interesting development as we get out of summer, they'll keep us abreast. But shout-out to HiQ for continuing to fight the fight.
Chad: Yeah. We have events, and one of the events are Chad and Cheese Virtual Travel brought to you by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right, our friends at Shaker Recruitment Marketing want to keep us safe and said, "Keep your asses at home."
SFX: Hell Yeah.
Chad: "Do whatever you can virtually." The very first one is actually one that's going to be happening next week, it's the HR Hackathon. So Eva Zils puts on an HR Hackathon every year. And this year
Joel: Is she German?
Chad: She is. Yeah.
Joel: Is it German?
Chad: You listened to some of her videos, they're in German or they're in French.
Joel: Yeah. They're good.
Chad: And the only thing that you can understand are the American curse words that she uses, so I love her. But she had to go virtual this year, go figure, which I don't think it's going to hurt at all, to be quite frank. Because think about it, you don't need to be in the same room to do a hackathon. Plus you can pull hackers in from all over the world, who couldn't afford to travel before. I believe this is going to be pretty awesome. I'm going to be one of the judges, Bill Boorman, a couple of other smarter people who are going to help Bill and me out. But it's around building apps, prototypes, and technology, which can help in this new COVID world we live in. There's already been 40 plus project pitches thus far and are pretty stoked. If you want to get involved, you want to just linger and lurk and watch and see what's going on with the hackathon, you can go to hrhackathon.net. That's hrhackathon.net. Eva, you are a one woman band. You're just killing it man, just killing it.
Joel: Let me understand, is this for start-ups or new sort of sandbox beta projects that people will pitch?
Chad: Anybody who wants to come in, pitch a concept and develop. That's what it is.
Joel: Okay.
Chad: Yeah. And if you're bringing some stuff in that you already have to repurpose and you have the code, great on you as well. But it's all about re-purposing around this new purpose which focuses on obviously the COVID community.
Joel: Got you.
Chad: And again, not just developing the product, but also pitching the product to the judges as well. If you're just bringing in your shit and saying, "Hey, this would be great for the new COVID world too." It's like, "Hahaha. Get the fuck out of here."
Joel: TAtech Death Match coming up as well.
Chad: Yeah. TAtech Europe Virtual Death Match.
Joel: TAtech Europe from your computer. April 28th?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: April 28th. Yeah. We'll be doing those in the next couple of weeks obviously. Three companies Get Optimal, JobSync, Supersonic...
Chad: Sonic Jobs.
Joel: And SBOJ who's getting a new name apparently.
Chad: That's right. That's right. I have a new update on that one. First off, none of this people could happen without the support of Pontoon Solutions . That's right kids.
Joel: PoonTang Solutions.
Chad: Call and meet RPO professionals at pontoonsolutions.com. We're going to have, Craig Rhodes is going to be judging with us. We had a conversation with them earlier this week and I think we're all going to be drunk on every single one of these.
Joel: Oh, that's a guarantee.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: Yeah. The Death Match contestants are Daniel Fellows who is the CEO of Get Optimal.
Joel: Former Indeed guy.
Chad: Yeah. Alex Murphy, not Robocop, CEO of JobSync. Nick Gray, who's the CEO of SBOJ, oh wait a minute, not SBOJ anymore, they're changing to CloudRPO. Let it sink in. Let it sink in. It's a dot com, so you got to love it. CloudRPO.
Joel: It's a dot com.
Chad: It's a dot com. And last but never least, but of course Mikhil Raja, CEO of Sonic Jobs. Just go to chadcheese.com, click on the reaper, find out a little bit more about what's going on. You can even listen to some past Death Matches, which are pretty cool. Listen to Aman Brar, who was the CEO of Canvas at the time. He won the very first Death Match. He's now the CEO of Jobvite. You can listen to Anoop Gupta. You can listen to Andreea Wade from opening.io and many, many others. Check it out, chadcheese.com, click on the reaper.
Joel: Cavalcade of champions is what you'll be listening to. And is it true that Craig Rhodes is related to Randy Rhoads, former guitarist of Ozzy Osborne?
Chad: Yeah. We're going to have him riff while he's on. I think that'd be awesome. I think that'd be awesome.
Joel: Nice.
Chad: And then May 19th, we have North America coming up too, so we have, again, slots open for four, that's right, only four start-ups. I think we have two of those possibly already filled.
Joel: Yeah. I think we verbally promised one. Talk about that yet or not.
Chad: Yeah. If you want to get on the virtual stage with Chad and Cheese and do a Death Match, this is a time for contestants. It's free of charge because our friends at Joveo are sponsoring this bad boy. Again, making sure that the virtual vibes keep happening for TAtech.
Joel: The fact that we have start-ups is a good thing, we should celebrate that no fee. Is it news time yet?
Chad: Topics.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Joel: Let's get to the news. All right. Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs. No surprise
Chad: Layoffs.
Joel: We've covered ZipRecruiter ... Yeah, layoffs.
Chad: Lay offs.
Joel: We've covered Zip. I think we've talked about ALIO.
Chad: Lever.
Joel: ... and quite a few others. Indeed shutting down businesses. Lever. If you haven't caught up, check out our latest shreds where we cover most of this stuff. But anyway, Careerbuilder, our favorite dumpster fire, job board world, has laid off, rumors have it, just under 200 people. We've heard 60%. We've heard a lot of furloughs that probably won't be coming back speculatively. I do have to their credit an official statement
Chad: What?
Joel: Which I'll kind of paraphrase now because it's pretty standard, but it's, "The spread of COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to the economy, which has adversely impacted the talent acquisition and human capital management space." No shit. "As a result of these rapid changes, we made the difficult decision to lay off or furlough a limited number of our employees. Careerbuilder is committed to supporting the individuals impacted while continuing to serve clients and job seekers through this extraordinary time."
Chad: Huh. I wonder if it was a difficult decision because last week we just talked about CareerBuilder's new slogan that they rolled out, and commercials on last week's show.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: It feels like a real, again, Jedi mind fuck that's happening here. They come out swinging with commercials focused on helping everyone in this time of need, during COVID and the very next week they lay down the chop. Again, I feel no balance here whatsoever, and I wonder again, they're CareerBuilder, the monkeys are definitely running this bitch.
Joel: By the way, Irina, our favorite CEO, is at a whopping 36% approval rating on Glassdoor. You know shit's good at CareerBuilder right now.
Chad: Yeah. We actually talked about this last week too is, what is the Zip and the Lever and what do we think is going to happen with Monster and CareerBuilder? And we just thought, CareerBuilder would fade away, we wouldn't even hear much about them. We were wrong about that. It might be the other way around. Monster might fade away and CareerBuilder goes out with a big chop.
Joel: I'm still convinced Monster energy drink is going to drop 25 million and just take the domain and it'll be over. That'll be the announcement.
Chad: Yeah, that'd be good enough for them.
Joel: And Baird will just take all the resumes and whatever and it'll be over. That'll be it.
Chad: Randstad.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: That being said, we're talking about layoffs and trying to get the good vibe in here. Our friends over at Candidate ID this week or last week created a platform called Talent Pipeline. It's a not for profit talent acquisition industry initiative to connect furloughed or redundant TA and employer brand professionals with employers looking for their skills. It's free to use and it takes no time whatsoever to get registered. If you are from one of these organizations that we've been talking about or if, even more important, if you are the employer who's doing the laying off and the furloughing go to talentpipe.org. You can sign up, it's free, and you can start to hopefully make these connections for your employees that you're either laying off or furloughing. This is a really important thing. Knowing that ... And I think we're talking about Lever where they said, "Yeah, anybody who gets these people, that's awesome, they're great people." That's great. What are you doing to try to help make those connections? What kind of partnerships are you making as an employer to make those connections? This is just one example. Talentpipe.org, where you can go in and you can start pushing your furloughed candidates that way. Contact Candidate ID, I'm sure they would love to try to help you out. Not to mention if you're an individual you can just go in as an individual, so check it out. If you're an employer and you're looking for good talent, this is the time to find it because they are out there.
Joel: Yeah. And even in our industry, I mean stories still about chatbots still hiring, programmatic, a lot of the newer players, they are potentially looking at people to add to the roster. It's not super dire, but yeah, it kind of sucks out there for sure. Over the last time the world ended, some of our greatest start-ups were born out of that time. Keep your eyes open for maybe the next great thing. But yeah, Amazon continues to fuck shit up.
Chad: How?
Joel: Hates workers with an opinion and the need to unionize and try to make things better at the company.
Chad: They fired two Seattle based employees who publicly criticized safety and working conditions at its warehouses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Washington Post reports, "User experience designer, Emily Cunningham and Marin Costa were both fired on Friday after they tweeted criticism of the company and offered to match donations to warehouse workers. Both had previously criticized Amazon's climate policies, as well as circulated a petition internally calling for improved sick leave policies, hazard pay and childcare for warehouse workers." According to the New York Times. They're trying to advocate for themselves and obviously for all of their peers, their employees, the people that they share a lot of their time with, right? And these are essential workers. But yet Amazon doesn't want them to have a voice.
Joel: Yeah. And don't forget, last month they fired the warehouse worker who helped organize a walkout in the New York office, I think it was Staten Island. This is a long time trend of just basically being combative with the workforce. I think that it's going to be one of two things, either the government is going to step in and unionizing is going to become a thing and government's going to realize Amazon is this huge juggernaut of a retailer and has to be put in check, whether that's via paying taxes in a way that's fair and treating workers in a way that's fair or robots are just going to replace all these people and it doesn't matter.
Chad: That's what Jeff wants.
Joel: That's what he wants. He'd love to have people out of the process all together. And it's additionally hard because you have all these people out of work and Amazon is still hiring tons of people. It's a catch 22 for everybody, Amazon's great because they're hiring, but then they're also a minister society because they're fucking shit up with taxes and they're making shit really bad for their workers. I don't know what to do, it's a tough problem.
Chad: They are a big piece of our infrastructure. The supply chain, if you think about it, you can't treat people like this. I don't care how big a part of any system you are, I don't give a flying fuck. You can't do this from your ivory tower. We have to treat these essential roles like they're essential. Like for starters, paying them essential wages. It's ridiculous that everybody's talking about 15,16 dollar wages. People, that is $30,000 a year for an essential worker, that is ridiculous but yet acceptable. No, it's not acceptable. And that's what we have to get away from. Suppression of voice is not acceptable and saying it's against policy is total bullshit. And then they try to smear, as you'd said, Christian Smalls, they tried to smear him because he was trying to do the right thing.
Joel: Yeah. I think we focus a lot on Amazon and fairly so, but things like Uber and Lyft are doing. They're not employees, they're not beholden to benefits and paying certain taxes, they're contractors.
Chad: Yeah. They're gaming the system.