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Death Match: JobSync


Welcome to Death Match, Europe 2020, GRAND CHAMPION EDITION.

This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features this year's champion Alex Murphy, CEO at JobSync. Unlike most Death Matches, this one took place online (thanks COVID-19!).

Never fear! The home bars were open which meant the pints were full and the Chad and Cheese snark was flying. Pontoon Solutions provided third judge Craig Rhodes ... and warning: that dude is a pit bull.

Enjoy this exclusive TAtech presentation, powered by Pontoon Solutions.


PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:

Chad: Welcome to Death Match Europe Digital edition and The Grand Champion edition. This Chad and Cheese Death Match start-up contest episode features grand champion, Alex Murphy, CEO of JobSync.io. Digital Death Match took place during TAtech Europe Digital on April 28th, 2020, with a virtual room full of TAtech practitioners. Judges Chad and Cheese were joined by Craig Rhodes of Pontoon Solutions. This is The Grand Champion episode. Enjoy, right after a word from our sponsors.

Joel: Hey Chad.

Chad: What's up?

Joel: Dude, all the cool kids are talking about RXO and I just have one simple question.

Chad: Yeah.

Joel: What the hell is RXO?

Chad: Typical Cheese, maybe if you'd stop dogging on millennials for two seconds you'd learn something.

Joel: All right. Stop busting my chops and break it down.

Chad: Okay, RXO stands for Recruitment eXperience Outsourcing.

Joel: Ah, so not rotten xenophobic overlord.

Chad: Uh, no. And nobody does RXO like our buddies over at Pontoon Solutions.

Joel: Poontang Solutions.

Chad: Okay. Stop being a 13 year old for a second. Pontoon Solutions transforms the overall candidate experience and recruiter experience with cutting edge technology and optimize processes. Pontoon Solutions doesn't just lift and shift operations, they architect better ones. Your brand and people deserve to be priority one. Your talent deserves more than just being a part of the process. They deserve a great experience.

Joel: I like it. But what kind of companies need RXO?

Chad: Well, if you're a hiring company who spends way too much on recruitment agencies and maybe have weak talent pipelines or you just have a non-existent or bad employer brand. And employers need to do more than transform their current recruitment processes, they need consistent and tech driven experiences. Those companies, pretty much just about all companies out there because they suck at it, they need RXO.

Joel: Nice. And with people on the ground in over 32 countries and six delivery centers.

Chad: Damn.

Joel: Pontoon Solutions strikes the perfect balance of global and local support. Dude, I'm down with RXO. Where can I find out more?

Chad: Hit them up at pontoonsolutions.com and transform your talent acquisition strategy now.

Joel: Roger that. www.pontoonsolutions.com.

Chad: Poontang.

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.

Chad: We're back.

Craig: It's heavy man.

Chad: Oh, it's a Friday and

Joel: Good workout, baby.

Chad: ... low on beer. Okay.

Joel: Very nice.

Chad: Hey, we've got a new addition to the panel here. I love this. For all

Joel: Craig, can I get fries with that shake from the drive-through right there.

Chad: All about the shake.

Joel: We have three Americans and I got to give the Brit a hard time.

Chad: Yeah. So for all of those TAtech stalkers that are out there watching, we appreciate you tuning in. Welcome to Death Match. Today on this segment we have Alex Murphy, not Robocop, CEO of JobSync. Quick overview of what Death Match is for all of you newbies, Death Match is a competition that pits four innovative early stage start-ups against one another. Four enter the ring, only one leaves with the grand champion, chain of champions, which Joel Cheesman

Joel: Underdome style baby.

Chad: ... has around his neck right now. Let me go ahead and introduce the judges. First and foremost, our main goon on this, because he's the one who

Joel: Pontoon hooligan.

Chad: ... going to be beating you up Alex, I can't wait. We've got Craig Rhodes.

Joel: He's still mad about the Revolutionary War.

Chad: Craig Rhodes. And see what Joel's doing, he's firing him up for you man. From Pontoon Solutions, he's the guy who gets to play with all the tech and he's going to be answering all the deep, dark questions about your secrets, my friend. So that's Craig. You've got judge Cheese, Joel Cheesman, judge Chad.

Joel: Welcome to the all beard episode of Death Match Europe.

Chad: We are co-hosts and bad-ass podcasters of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. If you don't know us, I don't know what the hell your problem is, chadcheese.com. Here's how Death Match works. Alex is going to have two minutes to pitch his product. After those two minutes, guess what? Craig, Joel and myself will start rapid fire Q&A. I guess that's it. Are you ready, Alex?

Alex: I'm as ready as I'm going to be I guess.

Chad: Let's do it.

Joel: What are you drinking Alex, before we start?

Alex: A little bit of Sierra Nevada.

Chad: Nice.

Joel: I'd say it's a spirit in the face of the Brits, but the Brit is drinking Budweiser of all things, so I can't.

Chad: He's like, "I can't believe you just said that."

Joel: I got nothing.

Chad: Let's do it.

Joel: All right Alex, you ready baby?

Joel: In three, two.

Alex: All right, thanks for being here. Whether the unemployment rate is 3% or 30% companies need the best talent for their open jobs. When advertising their jobs, recruiters have two options. They can either have their application sent to them by email or they can send candidates to their career site to apply through their ATS, which increases friction and reduces applications by 75%. Based on Outcast data, 95% of those start down the apply journey don't finish. There is a better way and that's JobSync. JobSync enables both jobs and applications to be synced between ATSs like Taleo, Greenhouse and SuccessFactors with leading job sites like Indeed, Talent.com and even social sites like Facebook.

Alex: JobSync makes it possible for employers to fully use the native apply features on job sites that capture a complete application including custom screening questions. And then have the entire application delivered directly into the ATS rather than the recruiters inbox. Job sites typically get more exposure to these jobs and then when they surface the jobs and search results, they will include call-outs such as easily apply, all of which generates more distribution and exposure for those jobs. More distribution means more applications and a native applied process means more high quality applicants. So what's the result? On indeed our clients commonly see a 3X increase in applications along with a 50% reduction in their cost per application. On Facebook we make recruiting on the social network actually work. We have clients that generate thousands of applications with an average cost per applicant of up to 90% less than their next best source. Our pricing model is straight forward based on the volume of jobs, $200 dollars per month.

Joel: Thank you Alex. Get him Craig.

Chad: All you Craig.

Craig: I really want to understand how this works. I've been researching your site, but take me through the process. Now I'm Pontoon and I want to engage you with one of our clients, am I handing you my marketing budget to spend for me? Or are you linked in my ATS then deliver through Indeed? I really want to understand what your product is bring to me.

Alex: Yeah. Our product is essentially a platform with prebuilt configurations to facilitate moving the application requirements or an application schema up to the job site so the application can take place there. We plug in to whatever your model is around doing the actual job management if you will. We plug into tools like Clickcast and Outcast to facilitate making it so that agencies and other buyers can use that programmatic platform to actually manage the buy. So we're not doing like the campaign management. All we're doing is facilitating the actual delivery and transport of the application once it's completed on the job site. And then we essentially translate the data as it comes out of let's say Indeed or Facebook, and we convert it into the format that's necessary to go into that customer's implementation of say SuccessFactors. And we post it directly into their workflow virtually in real time. When an applicant clicks apply, we get that data and submit it and the recruiter sees it within about 40 to 45 seconds.

Craig: Have you delivered onto SuccessFactors already?

Alex: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Craig: I'll give you that one because I've tried doing stuff in SuccessFactors, it's not easy.

Alex: It's not easy.

Chad: It sucks.

Craig: It sucks.

Alex: I mean, that's actually an important point. Our main focus is actually with the hard to do, hard to execute big scale ATSs. SuccessFactors, Taleo Enterprise, we're rolling out Workday within the next couple of weeks, plugged in and ready to go so that the application can take place where the candidate is rather than making the candidate go through this multi-step journey where they're entering data into CRM forms, they're getting blocked by a login form, which really only professional job seekers understand how to actually navigate through. We're taking out all that friction in the process.

Joel: Alex, is it fair to say that you are what Indeed apply or connect with LinkedIn is on their site and you're putting that technology on an ATS.

Alex: Yeah.

Joel: Those are competitors, they're not necessarily partner, you're competing with that button space, yes?

Alex: No, no, no, not at all.

Joel: Okay.

Alex: Actually what we do is with Indeed Apply, and the most commonly used way that Indeed Apply is done is just simply with the one, the first form that you see, like main email, phone and a resume. What we do is we plug straight into what Indeed built and we facilitate putting the questions that the company wants to have answered for that specific job. We put the questions in behind it and it plugs into Indeed Apply, and we use their existing ... I refer to that as their native application experience. They productize it, call it Indeed Apply. Facebook has their apply, there's SEEK apply, there's Neuvoo apply, there's LinkedIn, and then there are a whole myriad of different ways that different job sites implement their own native apply experience. We plug into what the job world does and just help make that work for companies that have really typical to set up implementations that are using really big enterprise ATSs.

Joel: So I'll see your button on an ATS job posting, but I won't see it on an Indeed or LinkedIn job posting?

Alex: You're not going to see a JobSync button anywhere. We are sitting behind the scenes. We're kind of like SendGrid. You never see SendGrid with respect to email as a user. But companies like Facebook, you SendGrid to deliver the mail from Facebook to your ISP.

Joel: So if I'm on company A and I want to apply to a job and I've never registered with that company and I click your button, where are you getting the resume data?

Alex: Well, so first off, the apply click would happen on the job site, so you're on Indeed, you're logged in, you've got a CV that's on Indeed. You click, you run a search for a podcast host in Cleveland and you see a job opening and you say, "That's pretty cool. I'll apply." You click on the job, you click on apply and your data, your profile data shows up on the form. You answer a couple of questions. Are you able to carry a chain around your neck? How do you feel about being snarky? And you answer the questions inside of the Indeed Apply format on Indeed. And then you review the application, you click submit, and the data behind the scenes gets pushed through to us through an API. We catch that, and then we convert the data over into the ATS that The Chad and Cheese show uses. And then that shows up in the recruiters workflow within the ATS.

Joel: Okay.

Chad: On the screening question piece, is there an API for that or does an employer actually have to set all of that up with you?

Alex: Yeah. The simple answer is that it depends on the ATS.

Chad: That's your job.

Alex: At the end of the day what we build into ATSs is that direct integration to be able to extract and pull the questions directly out of the ATS for that specific job. So a company, let's say for example with the implementation that we're building for Workday, a company goes along or I should say a recruiter gets the job requisition and requirements from the hiring manager. They post the job, it goes to the approval process and it goes live. When it goes live, the job content and the application schema for that job. And by application schema I mean all the requirements and optional fields, so name, email, resume, what the questions are, what the options are for each of those questions for that specific job all comes to us. We package it up and we put it into a file and we deliver it wherever it needs to go in terms of where it's going to get listed in terms of which job works. It would go into an XML file let's say for Indeed or for Facebook, and we would turn around and we'd post it through an API that's going to go to SEEK.

Craig: How long is it taking you to work on this Workday API integration.

Alex: 400 years.

Craig: I figured as much. So if I come to you and said, hey, I've got ... You haven't said Avature, there you go. I've got Avature. I need to go live in six weeks. That's something you guys can do?

Alex: Oh yeah. I mean, so the spectrum is this, we launched as fast within 24 hours to get a program up and running on Facebook. And if you're on Taleo Enterprise, it's very custom for each customer that takes six to eight weeks to implement. For Workday, the end integration is actually effectively an app that gets installed into the Workday instance and gets configured and we have a kickoff call and it takes a few days to get it up and running on Workday.

Chad: Dude, that seems like a shit ton of maintenance. I mean that's got to be a shit ton of maintenance. How do you guys actually keep up with that?

Alex: Maintenance? I'm just kidding.

Chad: Seriously, how do you keep up with all the maintenance? I know just from being able to index and/or scrape 3,000 different applicant tracking systems, shit breaks all the time. This is even more complex. This has to break all the time. How do you keep up with it?

Alex: So scraping ATSs is torture, been there doing that. And the thing that creates that torture is when you are bound to specific field names in HTML. We do rely on API integrations which are much more stable and then they get published around like the changes and changelogs. They are much more stable than say scraping is. But at the end of the day people ask like, what's this kind of business and what's it like? And then insiders will say, "Why hasn't this been done 19 years ago?" And the answer is it's difficult and it's difficult because of that maintenance side. And that's why we add value in the ecosystem, right? If it was simple and easy and straightforward, there wouldn't be a need for our company. But in the end of the day, that maintenance piece and the back and forth and the data translation actually adds a lot of value because it's really, really difficult work. We have a lot of regression testing and other unit testing that gets built in. So we can test as we build, deploy and monitor whether or not the systems are working properly.

Joel: Alex, you started your pitch by saying it doesn't matter if it's 3% unemployment or 30% unemployment. And I'm curious in the current environment where employers may not want an easy apply environment. How do you guys fair in that? I mean, is it just adding prescreening questions to help dam the flood of applicants or what are you seeing in the last 30, 45 days?

Alex: Yeah. First off, we had a churn rate 60 days ago that was near zero. And we have had companies pausing this because they have nobody working, so they're not recruiting. The people that are still live and that are engaged, even though your unemployment rate is huge and growing remarkably, they're in a position where they're even more desperate for a service like ours because the people they're recruiting, there's less of them or there's less availability. If you about it like supply and demand type of thing. The supply of candidates in the highly sought after categories, those candidates are overworked. They're at home, their kids are at home. They have no time to look for a job. They have no time to go through all of the extra steps, they have no desire. So if it's easy and they just got reprimanded by their boss. Or if they're a warehouse where they're not taking care of them, all of a sudden they're like, "This sucks. I'm out. I'm going to go find another job with somebody who gives a crap." And they are more likely that more sought after candidates, more likely to complete if the process is better. That's number one.

Alex: Number two, the genie's out of the bottle on this. The Amazon experience is the Amazon experience. And it doesn't matter how long COVID lasts, people don't want to have a bullshit cumbersome process, period. And that's never going to change. And there's no reason to revert back, which I'll get to my third point, which is, yes, there are more people out there to apply, so you need better screening.

Joel: The irony there is it's the warehouse workers at Amazon that hate their job and want the Amazon experience when they go apply for another job.

Chad: It's an entirely different discussion.

Joel: I blew your mind, didn't I?

Alex: No, it's true. It three different businesses, right? Warehouse and then the consumer experience and then AWS, crazy different.

Chad: So 90% reduction in cost per application. How is JobSync driving down the CPA?

Alex: The 90% reduction is really around being able to recruit on Facebook at scale, right? So you think about Facebook, you have some ATSs that have an offsite click experience in the organic jobs listing on Facebook. And then you have the ability to post your job manually and then you manage that process through Facebook Messenger, which is not really feasible at scale. So it's a comparison cost, not a reduction in cost in this case, because we're enabling companies that have let's say 700, 1,000, 1,500 job postings to get those job postings up onto Facebook and deliver their applications through our service into their ATS. The net net when you take in our fees is by comparison 90% less expensive. We have customers that get CPA of like 25 cents and that's running at a comparison in an open marketplace where they're looking for 253, $5, $10 CPAs. That's that comparison level. The other side on Indeed

Joel: And what is you fee structure?

Craig: I was just about to ask that.

Joel: Yeah, your fee structure.

Chad: Fees. Pricing. How do I pay you?

Joel: How do you make money?

Alex: Oh, it's all a 100% free. I'm kidding.

Chad: Lie.

Alex: We have a one time implementation fee, it's just 9.99. It's true with any of the ATSs. And then our pricing per month starts at $200, covers the first hundred jobs, and then It's a per job cost for the number of active jobs during the month. Starts at, goes down to a dollar and then less and less.

Joel: Go ahead Alex, finish.

Chad: And then less and less and less.

Joel: A dollar a job, right?

Craig: Until it's free, right?

Alex: A dollar a job down to 5 cents a job at scale.

Joel: Thank you, Alex.

Chad: Excellent.

Craig: Thank you, Alex.

Alex: Let me get ... I'll send you my address by text.

Joel: Cocky American. You cheeky bastard.

Chad: So we can send you a box of dog shit. We'll get that right out.

Alex: I'll light it on fire.

Chad: Thanks for coming on Alex. We appreciate it man.

Alex: Thanks guys.

Chad: We out.

Joel: We out.

Chester: Thank you for listening to podcast with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

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