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Events are Dead, Long Live Events!


While the planet largely remains in lockdown, turns out, employment is still where a ton of activity is still taking place.

Plus, the boys chat about the future of events ... is the future virtual, in-person or a hybrid of all that shit.

Enjoy this quarantined episode, brought to you via social distancing and Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:

James Ellis: Employer brand isn't something you sprinkle on your recruiting like magic fairy pixie dust to kind of make it better. It is both a craft and a calling. If that's the kind of work you want to do with your employer brand, come join me James Ellis at the Talent Cast.

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: It's quarantine time boys and girls.

Chad: Still?

Joel: Another 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment this week, bringing the COVID total to 26 million, so how's your week going? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody. I'm your co-host Joel almost out of toilet paper Cheeseman.

Chad: And I'm Chad get me the fuck out of here Sowash.

Joel: And on this week show, Karen joins the ranks of the unemployed. Indeed embraces it's inner warm and fuzzies. And yep, layoffs, they keep coming.

Chad: Layoffs?

Joel: Going to check my mailbox now to see if Chad has sent me a pink slip. Be right back.

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.

Chad: Yeah. Now you'll probably get an SMS from me.

Joel: Do I sense a little cabin fever setting in there my friend?

Chad: Oh, no kidding man. I mean, I'm looking forward to the NFL draft tonight.

SFX: Hell yeah.

Chad: The numbers keep mounting as you were talking about the unemployment and I mean just everything that's going on. You're just trying to find shiny bits. Yesterday was gorgeous. We got to spend all day outside working, which is awesome. Today it's rainy, so I'm really kind of pissy. But yeah, this is a perfect time to do a podcast.

Joel: Yeah. We get a weekend of rainy, cold, nasty weather here in Indiana. So I'm looking forward to that. Shout-out quickly to Big Red Liquors. If you're in the Indianapolis area, they have a sale 25% off everything made in Indiana. If you're in the neighborhood

Chad: That's a good call.

Joel: ... good discount on some decent alcohol.

Chad: Yeah. Now that's a given. And we do beer and whiskeys pretty well. Shout-out to Daniel Fellows from Get Optimal. He gets a shout-out because he has an adorable kid that thinks saying Chad and Cheese is hilarious. And it was funny, you saw his face when Daniel actually said, "Chad's in the army." And the kid looked at him like, why did you make this not funny anymore to dad?

Joel: We used to have our kids do the outro of our show and hearing him say, "Chad and Cheese." In an English accent really made me opine and long for the days when the kids did the outro. Maybe Dan, we can convince him to have his son who I don't know his name, do a little outro or some sort of soundbite for the show because I think that would be fantastic.

Chad: Yeah. Now, I think I might be able to actually capture off that video. Not to mention his kids, I believe helped make him that custom Chad and Cheese t-shirt we've seen on social media. Double shout-out to Dan and kids.

Joel: No doubt. There's your teaser for the upcoming Death Match on TAtech's conference. I don't know exactly what we're calling it now Unleash Online or something, but that's Monday.

Chad: TAtech Europe

Joel: Digital. Okay. That's coming Monday. If you haven't signed up for it, head out to tatech.org and get registered. We have four awesome start-ups that we're bringing on to Zoom to Q&A. It's a lot of fun but a little bit different.

Chad: Certainly is.

Joel: And speaking of more events, there aren't enough online Zoom meetings out there. Our friends at Skill Scout are having their first ever. What are they calling it?

Chad: It's a film festival.

Joel: Film festival. Yeah. It's humans at work. The URL is unique. It's humans and then the word at, and then dot work. If you haven't signed up for that yet, got some great guests and entertainment and big brains presenting there. So check that out.

Chad: Yeah. I think with all the webinars, the COVID shit that we're hearing today and whatnot, we all need a break from that. This whole, I guess focus was really just bringing the humanity back into work. So very unAmazon like. Good job Skill Scout. Good job.

Joel: Who better than Elena and Abby Cheesman, no relation whatsoever, believe it or not, to bring a little joy into the industry. Thanks girl.

Chad: Somebody had to.

Joel: Somebody had to do the name Cheesman right, so I appreciate that, because I'm dragging it through the mud.

Chad: Thanks to Bruce Reed from PracticeLink for calling us a must listen podcast. Love the PracticeLink peeps, Ken and the gang over there you got to love it.

Joel: I'm going to give a shout-out to Ford Motors, sorry to bring it back to COVID. But the company is testing wristbands for their employees to alert you through good vibrations that someone is within six feet of you. Ford's doing a little bit of R&D I guess with protecting their employees, which is a good thing I guess.

Chad: Yeah. They're just taking those haptic bracelets that Amazon had to be able to track their people when they went to the bathroom, and they're using them for good instead of for evil like Jeff Bezos does.

Joel: This is going to be really bad for office romance. It's going to be really bad for office romance.

Chad: Ariel Lou Biag says to keep our insights and perspectives coming. We appreciate it Ariel. It sounds very French Canadian.

Joel: Yeah. We have the strangest names that love our show. Ariel Lou Biag.

Chad: We're global.

Joel: Global. Yeah. And speaking of global, the folks at Adzuna let me know that in light of our story of Indeed crushing former publishers of their content, that talent.com was an option. Adzuna wanted our listeners to know that they were also an option if you needed some content for your job site.

Chad: That's exactly right kids, get away from the evil empire we know as Indeed. Checkout Adzuna or talent.com today. Caroline Auto from Berlin won the HR hackathon selfie challenge. She and the wonderful [Eva Zilz 00:07:09.29] who actually orchestrated the entire hackathon event online will be wearing brand spanking new Chad and Cheese t-shirts.

Joel: Love it, love it, love it. Shout-out to my mood, which is pretty good right now. And in light of the NFL draft tonight and the Browns picking 10th, it's definitely an absolute yes that they will fuck my mood up later today. I'm going to give a shout-out to my current mood, which is relatively good considering the circumstances.

Chad: While we'll be watching, I'm sure Julie actually made a mention while we were watching TV the other night and I guarantee you we're going to see it tonight too. The COVID ads are all over the place and it's almost as if every company out there, every brand is going to the exact same ad agency and they're getting pitched the exact same thing. And all the brands are like, "Yeah, that's exactly what I want." And then it's like a week later all their ads come on TV and they're all watching the same damn ad with different brands on them.

Joel: Yeah. If not the same agency, definitely the same copywriter.

Chad: Oh yes.

Joel: Somebody on Fiverr is getting rich with all these COVID ads because they are ... Who published the YouTube video that had the snippets of all the ads and how similar they all were.

Chad: I can't remember but it's hilarious. We'll share it in our transcription. But yeah, it actually puts all those brands together, at least the bigger brands. And it demonstrates how they are all the exact same ad. They might have different imagery or what have you, or a little bit different music, but they're the same damn ad. And that being said, we also saw the same damn ad from Indeed.

Joel: We did. However, I will give some credit that with 26 million Americans unemployed, it's a pretty good time to advertise your job site if you have the money to advertise your job site. I will give them some credit for that. It is a good time to do that.

Chad: If anybody can actually make it through the whole ad without falling asleep. That's one of the problems I have with these COVID ads.

Joel: Yeah. They don't really bring tears to my eyes anymore.

Chad: Yeah. No. And last for me, shout-out to Jimmy Stroud for always sharing the best stuff, especially the El Chapo medical masks that seem to be quote unquote popular in Mexico right now. I wonder if the CareerBuilder staff have to wear those, at least the ones that are left.

Joel: Can we talk about this trend of design face masks? I think that's not going to go very well historically.

Chad: I don't think it's going to go away.

Joel: Yeah. Oh, it's totally going to be a thing. Yeah, the El Chapo, the serial killer face mask. I want Ted Bundy on my face. The whole thing is pretty disturbing, but it is a sign of the times.

Chad: That said, don't forget Death Match we've got going on next week. And if you miss it, you shouldn't. But if you do, it's all going to be recorded, go figure.

SFX: Hell yeah.

Chad: Death Match contestants get ready kids. Daniel Fellows, CEO of Get Optimal. Alex Murphy, not RoboCop, CEO of JobSync.

Joel: Nick Gray.

Chad: Yeah. Nick Gray, CEO of not SBOJ, but cloud RPO.

Joel: But he was happy to see us.

Chad: Yeah, of course he was. And last but never least, Mikhil Raja the CEO of SonicJobs. Just go to chadcheese.com and click on the Grim Reaper to look more. If you haven't registered to attend the TAtech event, go to tatech.org for the Europe digital event. And then there's also the North American digital event that's happening May 19th. Register for all of them, be there and there's also another Death Match that's going to happen in May.

Joel: Did you ever think you'd say click the Grim Reaper ever in your life?

Chad: I was always hoping that I could.

Joel: News. Layoffs.

Chad: Greenhouse and iCIMS baby. Whoo. Yeah, we've got two, I would say two big names in our industry. Number one iCIMS is I'd say top five in our industry from an applicant tracking system standpoint, Greenhouse about top 20, right? Greenhouse cut, they have a much smaller staff, but they cut 28% of their staff, about 120 people. iCIMS, been around forever man, I mean since I think 1999 they were founded, had a 10% cut and so about a hundred people. And I think it's interesting because the way iCIMS really didn't come out publicly with it, but Greenhouse did. Did you get a chance to actually read the Greenhouse letter?

Joel: I'm sure it was a CEO blog post, wasn't it?

Chad: Yeah.

Joel: It was definitely a post from the company, which I'm pretty sure the CEO had quotes in it or something but

Chad: No, it was from him.

Joel: Okay. Talked about hiring the people, they're great people, it's a shame we had to let them go, yada yada. The layoffs don't even faze me anymore. It's almost like a surprise if someone isn't laying somebody off.

Chad: Yeah. I actually reading the letter from Daniel thought it was interesting. And if this wasn't a crisis situation, I'd be a hell a lot more heavy handed around his response. Because if you read into it, it actually, I'm hoping that PR and marcomms actually did this and this is not coming directly from Daniel. The reason being is, it wasn't really human to see in this time of crisis. It was more focused right out of the gate on our customers, right? And if I'm a customer, I really want to make sure that your people are getting taken care of. That's because if you're taking care of your people, then I know that your people are going to take care of me. And really the main thrust of most of this letter was the customer, right? And everything's going to be fine, the customer, the customer, the customer. And it's like, I kind of stepped back and I was like, I think in a time of crisis like this, you shouldn't be focusing on the customer. You should be focusing on the people and the customers are going to understand and that's what they're going to want to see.

Chad: And I don't think that this letter until the end when he really started talking about the people at the end, it really to me fell flat. And I know Greenhouse is still a very young company for ATS, being in the ATS space. They're incredibly successful and I've heard nothing but great things about their tech, their ability to partner, working there and those types of things. Again, not going to be heavy handed about it, I just think that from now on marcomms and PR and Daniel and whoever the hell is out there in your messaging, make it more about your people and less about your customers because your customers will appreciate that. Onto the iCIMs side. I mean, Steve Lucas comes in, he hasn't even been in the chair, I don't think six months yet, and he's smacked in the face with this. I'm sure as a new CEO this is definitely not something that they were, anybody was planning for.

Joel: No one was expecting this.

Chad: Yeah. As I'm sure with all tech vendors, they planned a big growth for 2020, and that's obviously not going to happen. Everybody is dialing back expectations. The big changes that we've seen over at iCIMs, Colin stepping away from CEO, going onto the chairman of the board, having this equity money coming in, really pushing some things around. I believe they have made a ton of the changes that they were going to have to make at this point. Luckily, they made them beforehand. From my understanding and not a formal knowledge, but informally I've been told that this is more than likely going to be the last that they need to do this. Most of the work was already done upfront.

Joel: Yeah. I think one of the points that you landed on that struck me was the comment about people over everything, right? And when I think about the government's policy of letting businesses get money in return for not firing people. It'll be interesting how we look back on this period, but I feel like that was a big mistake. I feel like you can protect people, but you can't protect jobs. And I think a lot of these companies, number one, I think a lot of them needed to cut back anyway, and they were going to do it no matter what. But they aren't obviously keeping people in light of getting money from the government.

Joel: I think a lot of people are losing their jobs. They're getting very minimal help from the government, whereas businesses are, we talked a little bit about Harvard getting 9 million which they gave back. I mean, also in the news recently it was like Shake Shack got a bunch of money.

Chad: 10 mil.

Joel: They got hammered for it. They returned the money. Ruth's Chris was getting money, a lot of businesses that are fairly rich and public and have a lot of resources are getting money. And I think when the autopsy is done on this period, that's not going to be a very favorable outcome. We're putting corporations and banks, giving money to corporations over giving them directly to people and that's probably a bad thing.

Chad: Yeah. It's what happens when we're ill prepared not just the government but companies and individuals were all for the most part ill prepared for something like this to happen. I mean it's not that blame goes across to all because I mean that person who only has $400 in their bank account right now and they weren't being paid a living wage, those are the issues that are really bubbling up now that we're going to have to take care of. And if we don't, we're going to get further down into this hole of disparity.

Joel: Yeah. Which is probably why I think it'll be interesting to see how much quicker Europe bounces back from this. People aren't afraid to go to the hospital if they're sick. Whereas people in America who don't have health care don't go to the hospital. And who knows how many more people they infect because they're not going to the hospital. They're giving money I believe more directly to folks. People in general are more better off. I think companies are less apt to fire because there is the safety net and it's a lot harder to fire people in Europe. One of the things we do really well in America is fire people which we're doing really well right now. It'll be interesting to see how we bounce back versus Europe as we start coming out of this thing.

Chad: Yes. Well, let's end this segment on a positive note, shall we?

Joel: Sure. Let's do that.

Chad: Alexander Mann Solutions, a very big RPO organization, unveiled a conversational hiring experience called Hourly, which was created to drastically simplify recruiting hourly workers. And we remember months ago when AMS acquired Karen and apparently Karen was put to rest. Now Hourly is the new thing.

Joel: You had some comments about her hair on The Shred and I don't remember what her hair looked like.

Chad: Karen basically always has bad hair.

Joel: Fair enough. And it was one of the many female names of chat messaging that were out there at the time. This is a shift from Olivia, Karen, Maya, et cetera.

Chad: Yeah. What I like about it is it's more shifted and targeted toward the hourly workers segment, who are big users in the SMS and messaging space. It has Jovial on the front end to start the engagement through programmatic ads. Then it leads into a conversational experience, complete with screening from Tradify and SMS interview scheduling just in the first launch. As we talk about chatbots and everybody loves chatbots, and then we talk about conversational AI or whatever it is, right? I think we've spoke way too broadly about how the applications could be used in AMS in a very, very smart way. They're focusing in on where they can do the most damage right out of the box. And if that works, they can spin that into other areas, other industries, et cetera.

Chad: I think if you're a start-up and you're looking for models to mimic, and whether you're a chatbot or not, it doesn't matter. This is a good one to mimic.

Joel: It essentially launches next month, I think I saw on the press release that went out. And I'm curious to see sort of how it flows. Because if you go to the website, I think it's wearehourly.com is the URL for the new site. If you look at the screenshots on a mobile phone, part of it looks like, I'm guessing either a web based service or hopefully not a native app, although it looks sort of native appy on the site. But then as you scroll down, there's obviously an SMS text messaging component to it where you're sending scheduling info, directions for interviewing and things like that. I'm curious to see how the flow is from I'm clicking on a job and then clicking on apply to what happens from that piece to the actual SMS and connecting with people that way.

Chad: And I'm sure very soon we'll get a full demo. You hear that AMS.

Joel: I smell a DEMOpocalypse.

Chad: Full demo, with the Queen of Chatbots more than likely.

Joel: Quincy, talking to you babe. DEMOpocalypse, got your name on it. Quarantine episode of demo apocalypse.

Chad: Beautiful.

Joel: Canvas.

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Joel: Linked or online events.

Chad: I think LinkedIn working from home.

Joel: For sure. LinkedIn has been churning out the data, the infographics, the surveys, as have a lot of other people.

Chad: Content.

Joel: Yeah. Because the marketing folks need something to do. But so they did a recent survey basically entitled, goodbye office, remote job posting surge 28% in March. And they also found that remote work jumped 28% as I said. And then job searches involving the keywords remote or work at home were up 42%. Clearly that's not a surprise to anybody. But the question for me is, does this hold firm or do people eventually go back to the office and lick trees and do everything that they did before?

Chad: That's a good question. Do people want it? Yes. Do employers want it? I'm not sure. The current landscape has the employers in control. And usually when that happens, the candidates wanting to become the employee gets screwed. Or the employees who just want to retain their jobs get screwed too. The big question is, will hiring companies see enough during this quarantine time of possibly money savings or what have you to change their behavior overall and stop this bullshit 1950s, 9:00 to 5:00 kind of work ethic kind of scenario. I'm not sure, again, I think we're humans, we're all about routine and control and I think most of this goes right back to where it was before, even though it wasn't what humans do best.

Joel: Interesting from the survey. The biggest boom in applications was for customer support representative which saw a 400% increase for the month of March, so just little tidbit there for you. And there also was a story out this week about how the workplace is going to change. And one of the biggest takeaways for me was doorknobs need to go, either get rid of the door or have automatic doors or hooks that people can just use their elbow to open up and close.

Chad: No more doorknobs. Not to mention you make it easier for the dogs to get in and out because they don't have opposable thumbs.

Joel: That's right. I didn't know that materials like copper and bronze kill germs. Apparently the other thing is if you do have doorknobs, make them copper or I think bronze also kills viruses. I've learned so much this week from medicine and architecture I guess. Get out of the house please.

Chad: Get me out of here. One thing that's not going to happen is you're not going to get out of the house to go to an ERE event.

Joel: Yeah. That was a great segue to this story. This isn't really a story, but there was a conversation on social media where David Manaster, head of ERE, and a lot of our listeners have been to the ERE conference or know about it at least. And that David's comment was essentially that they were moving to online only even before the coronavirus whole thing happened. I sort of disagreed with that and you said I was missing the bigger picture. I'm curious as to what that is because you said let's save it for the podcast.

Chad: Now you said that that does it for the Chad and Cheese tour bus and I was like, "No, I don't think so." I think we might be on the same page here. I mean we've been talking about consolidation and events dying off for a couple of years now. This is just another progression I believe of that conversation. If David and ERE can get $1,500 a ticket for an online event, then there'll be kicking ass and taking names. They'll probably bring the price down. But if they can't, it will all be a part of the evolution and, or extinction process, what we've been talking about for years. I mean, we've been talking about either events dying or being consolidated and bought up acquired. I think this is just another piece of that now, right? It's like, okay, well, instead of can we cut costs and go to online.

Chad: And then again, I think it's definitely going to shake out, if you can create an online event like Hung Lee did, a marathon, 24 hours of content, which was ridiculous and it was cool. And he had, I think when we first got online it was like 2200 people in the room watching shit. And I was like, "Wow, that's amazing." Could that be taken the next step? I don't know. That's what I think we're going to have to see.

Joel: David's comment and partial comment was until they, being the attendees, feel safe again, my company being ERE is not going to be able to make a living running in person events. The question is, Hung Lee who's super cool dude. This is pretty early in the whole online thing can hold an event, a lot of people show up. But at what point does he charge 199 to attend and he gets a lot smaller audience? I think virtual events suck for the most part. You're at your desk, you got, your dogs wants out or whatever, you get alert on your phone, you got an email. There are way too many distractions for me and I think I speak for more than just me that the virtual thing is just really hard to get into.

Joel: And let's face it, for most people the best part of the event isn't even the event, right? It's the after hour stuff when you're networking and talking shop with people and meeting new people and that's where the magic happens and that's where all that gets lost in a virtual conference. I for one hope that this is not a long term trend that we start going back out in the world meeting people talking about stuff because it really is at the bar over a few drinks or at lunch that you really get to know people and really get to see opportunities and find things to make it happen man. Shake and bake does not happen in a virtual environment.

Chad: No, I agree. I agree 100%. It's going to come back. The question is how many of those brands that we knew and we loved are going to be coming back as well. And that's going to be the big difference.

Joel: Yeah, it's survival really. I mean it's, can these companies who exist because of conferences survive in a virtual only environment until the world comes back. Because we're a long way from people getting on a plane and going to an event with hundreds of people that they don't really know.

Chad: And I think what you're talking about with content versus actually meeting people are two entirely different components. Being able to get really good content at a virtual event. I believe you can do that easily, not to mention I think there are a lot of times I miss really good stuff because I'm either out having conversations prepping for something or there's a reason why I just can't be in the room. And in a virtual event I can go back later and I can watch it or watch it again. I think that is really cool that you don't get from a live event. I think virtual events will get better and smarter from a content standpoint and it's going to be more just content focus. Now what we're going to have to do is look for other vehicles to be able to get that face to face moment that we're looking for, because those are important to everybody I believe that goes to a conference. But they are two different components. You've got the content piece and then you have the obviously face to face doing business piece.

Joel: Sure. And I think the other piece of this that's huge is the vendor side of it. For a lot of companies, I mean trade shows and expo halls are a big part of how they get in front of prospects and customers. And that just isn't going to happen in a virtual setting.

Chad: I think they can because if you think about it

Joel: Really?

Chad: Yeah. Because I was thinking about this when Hung was pitching the whole marathon event, I thought, this could almost be, especially if it's taped like a TV show. You're sitting there and you're watching the content and now a few words from vendor A or whoever it might be. And it almost becomes kind of like integrated into the actual content itself, which Hung Lee actually did with some of the pitches on some of the different tracks. But I think there are ways to smartly do that. And that's how you pay for the event as opposed to asking attendees to do so.

Joel: Yeah. I mean a hybrid would be interesting and companies are going to have to go to more QVC style shit to sell stuff. There's going to have to be a clock and they're going to have like a whole thing. And I mean that would be interesting and that could definitely happen. Maybe at the end of this we have a hybrid of the physical event mixed in with some sort of a virtual event and there's interesting ways that people can market. I'm also intrigued at how much money flows to alternative advertising mediums if there isn't the money going to conferences. Obviously as podcasters we'd love to see more money come into podcasting, not just for us but everybody. And hopefully that'll happen for the podcasters, kind of bad for the conferences though.

Chad: Yeah, that's interesting for us because we are seeing an uptick and we've always had companies coming to us, but we're seeing more companies coming to us because they're looking for alternatives to get into the heads of people that they want to be able to reach. And just real quick side note, Hung Lee, I have an idea, it's called Brainfood TV. Call me.

Joel: All right. Now we're off the hook. And speaking of who you'd like to get a call from and a great sponsor, let's hear from JobAdX and we'll talk about people getting money and maybe somebody getting sold soon.

Chad: Whoo.

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Chad: With JobAdX.

Joel: Money is still flowing, although I'm sure most of these deals were in the making before the COVID phenomenon. But we've got two companies getting some good money. This is seed money by the way, both out of the Valley, Oyster and Remote. Oyster Is getting 4.2 million in seed and Remote is getting really a whopping 11 million in seed money. Remote definitely sort of like how it sounds onboarding all that stuff through virtual means and not physical means.

Chad: It's funny because I think I know why Remote got 11 million and Oyster got 4.2.

Joel: The name.

Chad: Maybe. Remote can easily articulate what they do, Oyster not so much. They pretty much do the same thing, at least from what I'm getting here. And here's what Remote does. Remote takes care of global payroll, benefit, compliance and taxes so you can focus on your people. That's their tagline. Here's Oyster's, Oyster is a distributed talent enablement platform that lets companies hire, manage payroll and get local benefits to their full-time employees anywhere in the world. All that gobbledygook of convoluted distributed talent enablement platform. It's like all that shit we don't need. They pretty much do the same thing.

Joel: Yeah. If you go to Oyster's website, which is oysterhr.com, the headline is talent without borders. So yeah, same thing, pretty much.

Chad: But they're both remote and I mean if you're a start-up, especially a global start-up, this is definitely something that I would look for right out of the gate so I wouldn't have to deal with all this, mainly for that one word called compliance.

Joel: Yeah. If you have a remote work thing or a video thing or something, you're going to get money. I'm trying to remember, shit, somebody bought a Zoom competitor.

Chad: BlueJeans. Yeah, Verizon. I think Verizon just bought BlueJeans. I mean, BlueJeans I've only been on a couple of times, didn't really like the experience but to be quite frank it doesn't fucking matter. I mean from a remote standpoint if Verizon can do something with this company, great, don't see it happening. But yeah, good for them.

Joel: Yeah. A little side note, Linkedin uses BlueJeans, at least they used to. I'm sure they use something from Microsoft now. Anyway, good for them getting money, man. I thought that shit would dry out, but I guess if remote work is your game, some checks in the bank. Speaking of banks, the bank accounts that won't be getting full I guess post COVID world is some recent rumors that Bullhorn was on the block. Insight and Genstar, their investors, look like they were prepping a sell. This out of a story of PE hub, which we have talked about before. They seem to be a pretty reliable source for M&A activity. Anyway it goes into quite a bit about Bullhorn in terms of sort of whisper numbers of revenue. The company generates apparently 200 million in revenue each year EBITDA ranging from 70 million to a hundred million. Valuation at right around a billion dollars. But like you and I talked about, this story is from February. We're just now getting it because PE Hub is not exactly read extensively in the HR blogosphere.

Chad: Should be.

Joel: But yeah, dude, a sale was probably in the works, but post COVID I don't see it happening.

Chad: Yeah, timing is a bitch. From a good standpoint, I mean if you think about it, Clinch, our buddy Shane Gray last year, Clinch was bought, it was great timing. SmashFly was bought by Symphony Talent. I mean the timing means everything in the market. And unfortunately for Bullhorn the market, the bottom fell out.

Joel: Yeah. Thank God for Herefish who Bullhorn acquired in January I think. They just got into the wire, so way to go Herefish.

Chad: Here fishy, fishy, fishy.

Joel: And with that Chad.

Chad: Get me out of this house.

Joel: Another one is in the books. We out.

Chad: We out.

Walken: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? 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 shoutouts to 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 cheeses and not one word. It's 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.

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