Jobvite & iCIMS Attack!
As the world begins to open up from corona, it's refreshing to see companies in our space act like nothing ever happened like
- Jobvite and iCIMS are on the attack
- Indeed Bro-culture issues
- Modern Hire shaky relationship rumors
- UberWorks dives into the Dead Pool
and it's time to celebrate the number of female CEOs in the F500? No!
We cover all this, as well as a new round of investment and acquisitions in our space.
Enjoy and show sponsors Jobvite, Sovren, and JobAdx some much-needed love ... as long as it's from 6-feet away, that is.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Jim Stroud: Jim Stroud here, and you are listening to my favorite podcast. I listen to it every day, it's amazing, it's wonderful, it's ... Okay. Help me out. Who are you guys again?
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: Boom shakalaka. 2.4 million claimed unemployment in the US last week, bringing the nine week total to 38.6 million people. Oh, and the Indi-500 is postponed. So how's your day going? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast boys and girls, I'm your co-host Joel, someone mix me a quarantini, Cheesman.
Chad: And I'm Chad, I already have a bourbon, Sowash.
Joel: And on this week's show, iCIMS and Jobvite say, "Pandemic? What pandemic?" Grocery store, Kroger waffles and rape allegations at Indeed. Rumor has it, Memorial Day is coming soon, but I'm not even sure what month it is. Take a listen to one of our beloved sponsors while I go grab my Franklin Covey day planner and figure it all out.
Jobvite: Getting the right people to apply for the right jobs at the right time has always been a challenge. And now with an influx of candidates and increased workload, recruiters have to work smarter to provide a memorable candidate experience. Make moments matter with Jobvite, a comprehensive talent acquisition suite, built for the marketing inspired approach to recruiting, so that talent teams can more intelligently attract, engage and retain top talent. Combining the power of AI and the human touch. Jobvite, recruit with purpose, hire with confidence.
Chad: Are you feeling better? We had NASCAR and golf last weekend, which means sports is coming back. Not the two sports that I really get excited about, but getting the toe in the water, sports is coming back. And as we talked about before, would football make it back this year? Well, NASCAR ran in a track in an empty stadium. I think we'll see the same thing with the NFL.
Joel: Yeah. It sounded like California is just going to flip the switch and say, "Sports with no fans," and just say, "Fuck it." So, fingers crossed. But it does look like college sports will be much less easy to come by next season.
Chad: Yeah, possibly.
Joel: Possibly. And this week is the Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady Lefty Series, isn't it? Or did I miss that already?
Chad: I'm excited to watch this just because it's going to be so funny. And I think Peyton, he's just fucking hilarious. The dude is smart. He's hilarious. And we know that like the the on-mic times, they're going to be classic. This is going to be classic.
Joel: Yeah. Rumor has it, they're redoing some sort of Caddyshack scene or moment. So yeah, Peyton as Bill Murray. Who knows. Who knows.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Or Bill Murray could show up, for all we know.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Sure, he loves golf.
Chad: Bill Murray didn't show up to the COVID graduation that happened last weekend. Did you see that last Saturday?
Joel: I did. And this was the Obama speech, right?
Chad: Yeah. LeBron James actually hosted Jonas Brothers, all these names, a lot of them I didn't know because I'm not a teenager, I don't listen to that shit. But overall, at the end of this, trying to make the best out of lemons, making lemonade out of lemons, it was pretty cool. To see president Obama actually give that commencement speech is kind of a kick in the nuts to Trump and, we would have never had Obama even via video, do that file for our graduation. So yeah, pretty cool.
Joel: Yeah. Just make sure there's either a whisky or some vodka in that lemonade that you're making over there.
Chad: Always.
Joel: Yeah. It's interesting to see Obama take digs at a sitting president. That's pretty rare, I don't think I've, or we have ever seen that in our lifetime. But it's maybe well-deserved.
Chad: Have we ever seen what we've been through in the last three plus years.
Joel: Good point. Good point. Good point. My bad.
Chad: All right. Let's do some shout outs. My first shout out, you're going to remember this kid, you love him. His name is [Luke Abral 00:04:43.23]. He has videos on YouTube called Luke's Views. He's an 11 year old who we met in Banff, Canada at the cult gathering. And he did a Yeti product review. Now, if you guys remember when we were in Banff, we were on stage with Bill Neff from Yeti
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: ... Wwho is like one of the best dudes ever. Well, he met up with Luke and Luke said, "Hey, I'd like to do some Yeti reviews," because what Luke does is he does reviews for camping from a kid's view, not from an adult's view, but from a kid's view. And Bill sent him a load of Yeti camping gear.
Joel: Nice. Nice. Nice. I'm still waiting on my hat, but ... Yeah, that's good Luke. That's good Luke.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: By the way, we don't have time, but one day we should do your Yeti cooler story. Not time on this one. Not time on this one. Shout out to Joe Rogan. If you're a podcast aficionado, and I know you are, if you're listening to our podcast, you're probably aware that podcaster, comedian and all around, good guy I guess, Joe Rogan, sold the podcast for $100 million to Spotify in a Howard Stern kind of moved to Sirius XM. Shout out to him, man, he's really rich, and hopefully, some of us little, bottom pit of podcasters can get a little piece of what you got at some point.
Chad: Shit, he had a stage already. He was a stand up comedian, the fear factor guy. So he had these things rolling for him already. So he had a leg up. Good for him and hopefully someday, we might be able to sell for, I don't know, a 10th of that.
Joel: Yeah. He's been podcasting for a long time.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I didn't realize 2009 was the first Joe Rogan Experience Podcast.
Chad: Not an overnight thing.
Joel: In a world where music is the commodity, buying up content through podcasting is a smart move. Juries out of whether or not Sirius XM has been better because of Stern, but, Spotify is a really popular service. But if you want to get people from not going over to Apple Music or any of the other competitors, you've got to have some unique content and buying a podcast, well, certainly, certainly does that.
Chad: Agreed. Agreed. Big shout out to Mike Stirfage, Stirfige.
Joel: Stiffy.
Chad: Stiffy. Yeah, there you go. CEO over at [Aaron 00:07:14.28], he just started listening to the show. Where have you been Mike? Jeez. But anyway, he said after listening to the show, he's an instant fan. Big fabulous. Big shout out to Jeff Smith over at SupportingLines, and Mike Warner, new addition to the Joveo staff.
Joel: Very nice. Very nice. I'm going to machine gun a few rumors, things that we've seen online this week or heard. I heard a rumor, Phenom People is developing some sort of a one stop shop to integrate with multiple platforms, like ATS's and CRM's.
Chad: It's called an API.
Joel: Yeah. Well, no one's done it. And how do you cost effectively do that? I don't know. I don't know. We'll see what happens. It's kind of like the HRNX platform for background check companies or something.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: So that's in the works. I'm hearing AllyO rumors that they are desperately hoping to sell the company at some point soon, but they're not getting a whole lot of interest to date.
Chad: Big shout out to the job board doctor. Big shout out to him for schooling you on the state of niche job boards.
Joel: Please.
Chad: Still very anecdotal, right? We don't have real numbers on this shit, but Jeff pays close attention to the rise and fall of job boards as closely as you pay attention to blow up dolls on the clearance rack. So I know he knows what he's talking about.
Joel: Oh, I got a story, and it's totally unrelated.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: And I don't know anything about it except the headline. But a soccer team was fined because they had sex dolls in the stands, because they couldn't have people for coronavirus. They were fined for sex dolls in the audience. Yeah, I just read the headline on that one. Anyway, shout out to our buddy, Kenny Hagar (Kyle), formerly of Hireology, now at Appcast. He loved the iCIMS interview, with their CEO. And if you haven't listened to that one, please do. He was particularly entertained by the CEO's reaction when you brought up acquisition to Microsoft. He thought his reaction was very unCEO-like. So if you haven't listened to that, make sure you go check that out.
Chad: Yeah. The Steve Lucas interview was a pretty legit conversation. We didn't ask easy questions, there might've been a few in there, but we also hit him between the eyes a couple of times. And you got to dig that man. Susan Vitale, who was on as well, she knows how we do business. We've known her for years and she still brought her new CEO along. That was really cool. We had a great conversation and pretty transparent.
Joel: Yup. Yup. Shout out to Jobiak. If you haven't listened to our Voices series, with Big Cat, their CEO, I encourage you to do that. And shout out to them for knowing how to fucking promote a podcast, they're doing it right. So, companies take note of how Jobiak does work.
Chad: They understand SEO and that kind of shit as well. So yeah, it just makes sense. So you got content, you want content, we keep saying content is king, well, fucking use it. Big shout out to Death Match Grand Champion, XOR. Aida Fazylova
Joel: Aida.
Chad: ... She win, she takes home the Chain of Champions.
Joel: Riding on a grizzly bear, chain smoking and doing shots of vodka, like a true Russian.
Chad: That's all she needed to do to win. A chatbot, that was for Joel, we call it conversational AI these days. It was legit, so we appreciate everybody who was a part of it. Definitely TAtech for having us on their virtual stage once again. But I definitely got to say, Bradley Clark, Aida, Adam Chambers, our Irish-Mexican
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: ... They are probably the best Death Match contestants ever. And Joveo for creating more prepromotion stuff, the Zoom backgrounds, those types of things. Good job guys.
Joel: All contestants, dope. But my money still belongs with the Scotsman who wore a kilt and the Swede who wore a Viking costume to Death Match. That's going to be hard to top. That's going to be hard to top.
Chad: Very good point.
Joel: And by the way, it's going to be a chatbot forever, conversational AI is not catching on. And in light of that, shout out to Paradox who was a repeat winner of the Stevie's, some sort of an awards thing that goes out, I've never heard of, but they won it anyway, so shout out to them.
Chad: Now Joel, you can get off your knees and we can do topics.
Joel: Shout out to Indi first, top five city to start your career, as was many other Midwest cities. So yeah, sure. Let's get to topics.
Chad: Jobvite partnership with Ultimate Software. This doesn't seem
Joel: Pandemic. What pandemic?
Chad: ... To be that big of a deal, unless you look a little bit harder. Because these integrations and partnerships, every core platform should be doing them, period. Right? But let's face it, Ultimate Software needs an ATS because there's a shit, enter Jobvite. Right? So, do you think that, I'm reading a little bit too much into this, that there could be acquisition possibilities? Or is it just your normal, let's have a press release out for a partnership?
Joel: Oh, I think acquisition possibilities for sure. I think in a world where data has incredible value, what this integration, as far as I understood it, and the news just came out this morning, but they're basically helping companies understand the data between the recruitment process to the onboarding and beyond, which has incredible value. And yes, it integrates very nicely with Ultimate Software as a whole who's consolidating, as they were anyway before Jobvite. So yeah, I think acquisition is definitely on the table. We've talked about a Microsoft iCIMS acquisition in the future, something like this would not surprise me either. And as data gets more valuable and automation, which Jobvite is getting very good at, becomes more valuable. And that's certainly something that we could see in the near future.
Chad: Yeah. And if you see bigger organizations like the Microsofts of the world, start to use this data, go figure, LinkedIn data, now applicant tracking system data. You anonymize it. Yes. Then they have the whole wide world in their fucking hands. And if you think of it from the standpoint of sales data, that's huge, right? Yes. For talent acquisition, for retention, for all of those things. But you can take it beyond that, once you have the data. And I guarantee you it's exactly what the Microsoft's of the world are thinking. Not to mention, iCIMS buying an organization like opening.io who
Joel: Death Match winner, i.e.
Chad: That's right. Death Match winner. ... Who grinds that data. They had about $700,000 US, in funding. They've been working very closely, opening.io has, with Microsoft. Which I think started in Dublin, the Dublin Microsoft office, and grew from there. But this to me, is a big grand slam for iCIMS. What do you think?
Joel: Yeah. And it's an even bigger win for opening.io, who can buy a lot more Guinness with whatever they got from iCIMS. Ireland's crushing it dude. I don't know what's going on, Adam Chambers, Andrew ... Anyway, again, it goes back to data, right? These companies are doing a great job of buying companies that add feature sets to their business, that make them more valuable. And in a pandemic environment, these acquisitions are going to be much more amenable to companies that have money. Last week we talked about our buddies at Paradox getting 40 million and saying in the press release that they're going to use some of that money to actually buy companies, which is a pretty rare thing to put in a press release on getting investment dollars. So companies are on sale, companies with money are going to be buying. I think what is odd, last year we were talking about Jobvite and iCIMS moving into like a tier-2 below the big guys in the ATS world, and staking a claim as a platform. How the worm has turned quickly and that these guys are now acquisition possibilities for even bigger fish, I don't think I saw that coming. I'm not sure about you.
Chad: I thought the possibility was there, that's for sure. But the thing is that we are not used to these types of companies playing offense, right? We're used to them doing a half-ways decent job at best, and then looking to get acquired. These guys are not doing that. They are going out, they're playing off offense. They're doing business the right way.
Joel: We will see where that ends. And we'll also see where allegations at Indeed ends, here at some point. Sadly, we had rape allegations this week come out, reported by Vice, which was interesting topic for them, they usually cover like dictators in Africa and prostitution in Asia, but they were covering an Indeed allegation of rape at the company. A little back story on this, 2015, new sales rep, female comes on board. There's some training, followed by what's pretty common, drinks and celebration. A male counterpart who was a manager at the time, I don't think he was her direct manager, but still someone in management.
Chad: It doesn't matter.
Joel: No it doesn't. I'm just stating some of the facts of what we know at the point from the story.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: The dude started kissing her in an elevator, followed her to her room. According to allegation, she said, "I'm good," when he asked if he could come in. He came in anyway, had sex with her, even though she responded with, "I'm so drunk," and asked him to stop. He got done, threw away a condom and walked out of the room. And she filed a lawsuit, here recently reported by Vice, go check out vice.com if you want to learn more about that. It is horrifically similar to what we talked about, at CareerBuilder last year, in terms of a similar case, where sales guys get a little too drunk and stupid and things like this shit happen. And it's very unfortunate. Additionally, the allegations talk about Indeed having a culture where the women who sleep with upper level management are the ones who get promoted. Certainly if those allegations are true, that's an incredibly unfortunate predicament and incredibly unhealthy and dangerous, to say the least.
Chad: Yeah. This is leadership and management, they have to get on this. When you have that "bro culture", it's toxic. It really is. And it doesn't matter if they're high performers or not, right? It doesn't matter if they're making the cash or not. You have to ensure that the culture doesn't turn into something like a bro culture. Now that COVID's happening, maybe we start doing a lot of this shit online. Who knows. It is a hell of a lot less cost and risk.
Joel: Yeah. There will certainly be less environments like this where people get drunk and in close proximity to each other. I found it interesting as well that the accuser is still an employee at Indeed. Usually these sorts of allegations and lawsuits come out after someone leaves. I can imagine that's really weird for her to have these come out and still be an employee. And she's also alleging that Indeed HR was not very proactive, and really dismissive when she reported this to them. So if the allegations are true, Indeed really has some work to do to get its house in order.
Chad: Also heard some rumblings at Modern Hire, that the two cultures between Montage and Shaker International are not melding, and that we're starting to see individuals from Montage eject. So, not sure what the culture issues are, but I've had a few people actually send some rumblings, i.e., rumors, my way, saying, "There are some culture problems between those two organizations" And you'll remember, probably a little over a year ago, Shaker International and Montage merged to create Modern Hire. I remember when we were talking to Douglas Atkin about the culture at Airbnb and when they were actually going to look to acquire organizations, they turned a few of them down just purely on culture. And this could be an instance where that might've been a good idea.
Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Shaker, not to be confused with Shaker Recruitment Marketing, sponsor of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Yeah. Modern Hire is a stupid name, just go back to Montage. Shaker's like, whatever, but Montage was a good name, they should have kept that.
Chad: Modern Hire, is it modernhire.com? Those are two words you can spell, they're easy. So I don't hate it.
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: It was nice to talk to Robert this week, wasn't it? Sovren CEO.
Chad: It's always nice to talk to Robert, the dude is incredibly smart. And this week we talked to him about work from home, which they have been doing exclusively since 2006. So all of these companies that are thinking about it now, and they haven't hit the potholes yet, he was able to talk through some of those things. And that was really cool to get him on.
Joel: Yup. Some incredibly good tips, if you're a new to the work from home thing, listen now.
Chad: Everybody should be excited about this next story. Let me go through this real quick. Let me do this. Let me do this.
Joel: I'm so excited.
Chad: I'm so excited. The number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 hits an all time record. Now, that's the actual title in Fortune Magazine. Now get ready, drum roll please. We have 500 CEOs and guess how many are females?
Joel: 250.
Chad: 37 is the new record. Break out the champagne baby. No, let's not do that. So 7.4% of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are female.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: We're talking about setting new records. 8.1% of that 7.4% are women of color. Or, here's a better number for you, 0.6% overall of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women of color. Thanks to Adam Gadomski for checking my math on that one.
Joel: You do math good, Chad.
Chad: But my God, dude, we're talking about hits all time records, and we have shitty ass numbers like this. This is nothing to be proud of. This is nothing to write about. This is something that we should be focusing on and having an article that focuses on why we only have 7.4% of the fortune 500 are female CEOs. Why the fuck aren't we talking about that? No, we're going to talk about all time records. Are you fucking kidding me?
Joel: Yeah. I love that you took a celebratory article about the rise of women and turned it into a total downer. But you're right. Now, devil's advocate, the number was two back in 1998, which wasn't that long ago. So we are at least trending in the right direction. Let's say, if we do the math on that, what? It will take another 25, 30 years to get to a hundred?
Chad: Yeah. Exactly. And going deeper into this, there are four, yes, four men of color serving as CEOs in the Fortune 500. So yes, they want to put this big thing out. There were only two, so many years ago. Fuck that. I don't want to hear that bullshit. We're talking about equality. We're talking about equity. But guess what? That's all we're fucking doing, is talking. We're not actually making those moves. The boards are not making the moves. And we need more solid commitments from companies to get females, and females of color, and men of color into these positions, period. Because they're qualified. You can't say that only white motherfuckers are qualified. You can't say that.
Joel: True. True. In terms of solving that, any ideas? The NFL, we have the Rooney Rule, where you're required to interview an African-American for a open head coach job. Should we do something similar in corporate America if companies take federal dollars to any degree or if they're public companies?
Chad: Well, yeah. There are definitely many steps. But this is a leadership step that should be taken. And this is not just about the CEO. Yes, we want to be able to demonstrate that we're putting the right people in front of the board or what have you for the hiring process, but overall this is about the entire C-Suite. This is about all of management. And this is also about pay. So as leaders in these organizations, being again, the boards and being in the C-Suite themselves, this is something that will cascade down, and we have to force it. And all of those people saying, "Well, you're just putting quotas on this." Guess what? Fuck you. They've been getting screwed for years. Okay? Women, men of color, they've been getting screwed for years and now you want to talk about quotas? Guess what? Fuck you. This is what we need to do to ensure that equity happens.
Joel: Fair enough. Fair enough. And fortunately, we have technologies out there. We talked to Telvista, it was a Death Match participant. And we have a startup this week called Syndio, S-Y-N-D-I-O, interesting, they received 7.5 million in funding for pay equity algorithms and technology. Sounds like a pretty promising idea to me. You?
Chad: That's exciting stuff. And it also gives CEOs and companies an out when you're talking about pay transparency. Because no company wants to talk about pay transparency, right?
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: So, now Syndio, can go and say, guess what? You're getting all this pressure for pay transparency, you don't have to do that with our system. Just put everything into our system and it will automatically tell you where the inequities are. Right? You can report against it. But here's the key. You don't have to worry about pay transparency. Nobody needs to know. Right? So I think it's smart, but I also think it plays against what we need in this country, which is pay transparency.
Joel: And someone who didn't like parent transparency this past week was Kroger, who had one of their collections letters for Hero Pay leak out to the internet. I found this crazy, and how anyone let this fall through the cracks is unbelievable. So Kroger was like many others, with essential workers in the COVID pandemic crisis, giving Hero Pay. I don't know, did they overpay people? Or did they give pay an extra couple of weeks? Well, aside from that, they sent out collection letters to their employees saying how much they owed back to the company. Someone obviously, shared this on social media. The backlash was crazy. And Kroger, to their credit waffled, and given up on trying to collect the money and have just given it away without trying to collect it. But what a boneheaded PR move at Kroger?
Chad: The big question to me, and let's break this down, why is Kroger, Amazon, and other companies taking away this extra pay, when they have been monopolizing the fuck out of this? Sales for fourth quarter ended on February 1st for Kroger, at least the reporting did, came in at nearly $29 billion. Plus, remember that money does no good to the economy when it's not being spent. And how can you get that money into the economy and driving it? Well, you pay fucking people. That's what you do. Not to mention, these individuals have proven they are vital, when it comes to the supply chain. It just took a crisis to show all of the motherfuckers out there who look down their noses, at truck drivers, shelf stockers, cash register operators, and all the other vital positions we walk by without saying thank you every day. Say thanks. Pay those fucking people. They deserve it. So not only did they deserve the pay in the first place, but you shouldn't have taken that shit back anyway.
Joel: Oh, for sure. For sure. And for those who haven't seen the letter, let me just summarize it real quick. So it's actually from the Kroger payroll department, there's no name on it. And the letter says, "As you may be aware, you were overpaid by emergency pay in the gross amount of X," in this case it was $461.60. And then they're requested to make either one payment of $461.60, three payments of $153.87 or five payments of $92.32, which I assume would come out of your paycheck, and then they select how they want to pay back the money. Signed with love, Kroger payroll, blah, blah, blah. That's just really bad.
Chad: Yeah. Well, and again, with all the fucking profits that Kroger is seeing right now, they can afford to Institute this pay increase, as an increase. Not as a momentary increase. Right?
Joel: Every one of these jobs should be getting hazard pay.
Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Not even from a hazard pay standpoint, they have proven that they are a vital cog in our economy. Period. The crisis just demonstrated that, right? That money that you up to them for their "hero pay", carry it forward, carry on. There you go.
Joel: And who needs Jimmy Hoffa when you have Twitter to mobilize against the word for us.
Chad: Yeah. Apparently, we need it badly. If you're watching Netflix, I think it's called the American Factory or something like that. Check it out, it is ... This is one of the reasons why we need unions. That's for damn sure. Because Twitter can't do it all.
JobAdX: Nope. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Urgh, 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. 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-DX.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX.
Chad: Let's jump right into the dead pool real quick, because I want to make sure we hit this one.
Joel: Oh, it's warm in the dead pool these days.
Chad: Oh, it's warm baby. Yeah. Uber Works closes. And from my understanding from people who were on the inside, it was a fucking mess. So, this was a platform that Uber was going to provide staffing, and that's how Uber was going to make their money off of the actual software. And they wouldn't even get back with staffing, they had no fucking clue what they were doing, dude.
Joel: Yeah. These companies are struggling to be profitable anyway. I know we talked to ... Who was it? Last year, from Lyft.
Chad: Mason.
Joel: Mason Wong.
Chad: Yup.
Joel: And he talked pretty candidly about the challenges that they have. Aside from the airlines, the restaurants and some other businesses, ride sharing is right there in terms of the hardest hit during this pandemic. So it was no shocker, that in the midst of layoffs at Uber, that they would now start shedding some of these businesses that weren't profitable and really didn't make sense. It felt like a tag on, or attack on anyway, to try to make some money when things were good, it makes a lot of sense that they dropped it when things were bad. So in a statement by the company, they said, "Given the dramatic impact of the pandemic and the unpredictable nature of any eventual recovery, we are concentrating our efforts on our core mobility and delivery platforms and resizing our company to match the realities of our business." Obviously Uber Works had to go.
Chad: Yeah. At the end of the day, it was shit, no matter what.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: It's easy how we're seeing some companies, and I'm not saying that all companies are doing this, but some companies are definitely blaming COVID for their shit sucking. And it just sucked in the first place, it was not where they should have gone.
Joel: They're lucky that they have variability in their costs and they can fire people and just wait for things
to get better and not pay drivers because they're not driving anywhere. But, it's not a good business to be in right now.
Chad: And overall economics of it, obviously it's not proving out either. But what is proving out, is that apparently, as we talk about this whole COVID hitting, especially SMBs, incredibly hard, Snagajob snags $8 million and launch a new rebound campaign.
Joel: Yup. And hired a new chief revenue officer, who was one of the main guys from TripAdvisor. Yeah. Snag is nicely positioned to, when things improve, and if you assume things will come back to life at some point, restaurants will open, hourly jobs will come back. Snag has gotten an investment and made some hires and created a platform that they hope will get them back on track because they were sort of off-track, to say the least, in the past year. They're a good brand still, people know who they are, particularly in their core competency around service jobs and hourly jobs. When things come back, they should be in a pretty good position, and this helps a lot.
Chad: And it seems like they're prepping for that. Again, the rebound, your reopen plan starts here. Get your team back in place with Snagajob. It looks like a lot of RPA. Virtual hiring, complete end to end solution with sourcing, screening, scheduling, interviewing, which could be incredibly fast. Video interviews, only pay for scheduled interviews. It's pretty interesting. Performance hiring statistics, being able to dip into your talent pools, and we're talking about alumni, people who used to work for you, so people who you might've laid off, but you have that core pool ready to be able to reach back into. It's pretty interesting.
Joel: Yup. Agreed. Agreed. And we also had another, video/remote/work from home acquisition.
Chad: Cammio.
Joel: Cammio acquired by StepStone, who listeners will know, acquired Appcast, last year, a German company. Video is going to be hot. And I think this won't be the last video company to be acquired, talking to you Vervoe. We'll see what happens in the future, but the world is good for video. And the world was pretty bad for video. Just six months to a year ago we were talking about privacy concerns with HireVue, facial recognition issues, but now, video's the hot chick on the block. Good for them.
Chad: Yeah. Digital job interviews, automated video interviews, video formats for motivation letters, video pitches and video meetings. I mean, they're really just trying to be the video platform. You mentioned Vervoe, I see those guys as something even larger. Which is really cool, that we're seeing Cammio is coming out of the Europe, Vervoe is coming out of Australia. We're seeing all these really cool pieces of tech all over the world, not just here in the US, so that's cool. StepStone, obviously have broadened up, being more than just German or European company and buying Appcast, this video technology, who knows what they could do with it.
Joel: Yeah. And more sort of video, work from home, don't come in our office, I don't want to touch you technologies. Tradify raised 12 million in series B funding this week as well. I didn't know much about them, but they're a visual based personality assessment platform. So again, visual based assessment, don't come in the office, hiring tool. It's getting more money and they won't be the last.
Chad: So this is the assessment tool that is integrated into hourly. Alexander Mann Solutions new platform that's focused on hourly workers. I would assume, I could be wrong, but I would assume that they might've got a bump to get this cash through that killer integration and partnership with a huge organization like AMS.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Joel: Good for them. And with that, we out.
Chad: We out.
Outro: 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.
#iCIMS #Jobvite #ATS #HCM #UltimateSoftware #Openingio #XORai #ModernHire #Montage #UberWorks #Cammino #StepStone #Traitify #Snag
