2021 Predictions
It's the return of Sackadamus! Industry icon Tim Sackett joins Chad & Cheese for their 4th annual predictions show with an eye toward 2021. Thank baby Jesus 2020 is almost over!
Enjoy this recap of 2020's predictions (spoiler alert: wrong buzzer soundbites aplenty), three predictions each for 2021 and even a listener question. Cheers to a New Year, and more of the same excellence from HR's most dangerous podcast.
All 2021 predictions powered by Sovren, Jobvite, and JobAdX.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire.
INTRO (1s):
Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR’s most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman 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 (20s):
Oh yeah. You want predictions? We got predictions and Tim Sackett to boot! What's up everybody? This is the Chad and Cheese podcast and 2020 is almost fucking over!
Chad (34s):
Yes!
Joel (34s):
I'm your cohost, Joel "crystal ball" Cheeseman.
Chad (38s):
And I'm Chad "Sacadama" Sowash.
Joel (40s):
And on this week's show.
Tim (43s):
You can't steal my name.
Chad (44s):
I had to.
Joel (45s):
We're doing our annual predictions with our special guest, as always, Tim Sackett. Get comfy people.
Tim (51s):
The original predictor.
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Joel (1m 54s):
Sacradamus, Tim's never coming back. Never.
Tim (2m 4s):
I know. I was just thinking like you guys get, like, I have to do a takeover show sometime if you guys ever went on vacation and didn't do like 250 shows a year, I could just come in and take my pants off and totally lay the wood to your show.
Joel (2m 16s):
That'd be a, that'd be a high moral ground for our show.
Chad (2m 22s):
It'd be hard to stand up to. Oh, so what'd you guys get for Christmas? Favorite gifts go?
Joel (2m 28s):
Ooh....
Tim (2m 29s):
I got an advent gin calendar.
Chad (2m 32s):
An advent gin counter? That's awesome. Yeah. I love that. Last year I got an advent, a whiskey calendar and that was one of my favorites. So awesome. You Joel?
Joel (2m 43s):
All right. I'm I'm totally going to emasculate myself, but I don't care. My favorite gift I got a pair of
Chad (2m 49s):
yoga pants?
Joel (2m 50s):
I got a pair of Ugg slippers and they're fucking amazing. Like lamb's wool, soft inside. They're like, you know, in Die Hard when Bruce Willis takes his shoes off and socks off and does little fists with his toes because the guy says, that's how you relieve stress. This is like that, all the time. Like it's like little fingers massage. My, my Ugg slippers are my favorite, gift that I got this year.
Chad (3m 20s):
Oh, my God, you see you're. So
Joel (3m 22s):
That's our starting off the show, everybody.
Chad (3m 26s):
I got a couple sets of Beats earphones, which is funny. One is for running and the other word, like the over the, over the ear, hopefully for this year, we'll be able to use them on, on travel during trips.
Joel (3m 43s):
I wear my Beats over the years when I'm curling pints into my mouth.
Chad (3m 47s):
That's a good call. I like that.
Joel (3m 50s):
Good, exercise.
Chad (3m 51s):
And you can do that with an advent calendar.
Joel (3m 53s):
Sure. Let's get this shit going. Cause I know we've got a lot of opinions and we got a lot of predictions. So we always, we always recap.
Chad (4m 1s):
Oh yeah.
Joel (4m 2s):
One the year prior. So
Tim (4m 4s):
Have we ever, we ever gotten one, right? That's the question, right?
Chad (4m 7s):
Right. Yeah. I think that that's debatable, but yeah, this year, this year, I think we actually might've hit one or two. So let's go into that for the first one, Tim in 2019 predicting for 2020 said Indeed would cut UK organic traffic. And I did check with, I did check with, yeah. I checked with some of my friends over in the UK, in the programmatic space, so on and so forth, that did not come true. So sorry about that, Tim. So Joel then predicted Google for Jobs monetizes.
Chad (4m 48s):
That's a big bugger. That's a no.
Joel (4m 50s):
I'm so forward-thinking though that's more like a 2024 prediction.
Chad (4m 55s):
Oh, don't worry. We'll continue to use it over and over. Then my first prediction was multiple chat bot acquisitions that did happen. Job Powell and Allenco threw it out.
Tim (5m 10s):
We'd be out there on the edge.
Chad (5m 12s):
Yeah. Well, yeah. That's, that's the only way you can get those is fishing with a net instead of a spear.
Joel (5m 18s):
And then the rest of them get gobbled up this next year.
Chad (5m 21s):
Yeah. Tim then said, end of human to human interviewing. I think that's an applause, right? That didn't happen. It was more pandemic, I think, than it was anything else. Right.
Tim (5m 34s):
Oh my God. Notrodomos, they knew the pandemic was coming.
Chad (5m 38s):
Then Joel said, Ron Stodd would sell Monster buzzer.
Tim (5m 43s):
Because theycouldn't find a buyer.
Chad (5m 47s):
Yeah. That was the only problem I then said, iCIMS acquires a programmatic vendor. They did a lot of acquisitions, but that was not one of them.
Tim (5m 56s):
They did. That might be a 20,21.
Chad (5m 58s):
Tim said team. He was very specific that Teamable would be acquired. That did not happen. buzzer.
Tim (6m 6s):
I actually recommend them quite a bit to people. And I've had multiple people reach out and go like, they're hard to get ahold of, bad business strategy. Somebody might've went and bought them, but nobody picking up.
Chad (6m 20s):
Yeah. It really sucked not just for acquisitions, but also just for the little thing we call revenue.
Joel (6m 26s):
Yeah. Maybe that's just a response on how bad the leads. Tim, maybe Tim's leads are a bunch of cheap asses who don't buy and just kick tires. So they're like, we don't want any more Tim leads.
Chad (6m 40s):
So then Joel said that Recruit Holdings would by ZipRecruiter did not happen. Buzzer. And then I crowdsourced my last predictions overall, Tom Kenny said, AI bites everyone in the ass, black. And, and I think he gets an applause on this because we saw AI move the needle from black box and to more of a transparency model. Dennis Tupper was on board with Joel's prediction that didn't happen. Google for Jobs starts monetizing. Buzzer. And then Richard Collins, believe it or not, I can't believe this didn't happen he said a major job board goes bust.
Chad (7m 24s):
And this year, I guess we could probably say Dice, but we weren't sure if that was a major job board or not so that don't even make the requirement.
Joel (7m 33s):
No one in Sweden knows who they are. So they're really not a major job board.
Chad (7m 38s):
So that was last year. We got a couple of them, which is much better than we did the year before. We'll go ahead and before we go to break and we get into this year's Steven Rothberg, who was Joel's favorite listener. He had a prediction that...
Joel (7m 54s):
Love you Steven.
Chad (7m 56s):
That obviously in-person conferences would not come back into Q4 and they definitely would not come back at the size and strength that they were in 2019. Let's talk about that after.
Joel (8m 9s):
So his bold prediction is vaccine is released, but we still don't go to conferences. Yeah. All right, we'll be right back. Everybody.
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Chad (9m 21s):
The first prediction comes from our listener, Steven Rothberg. I would say probably our number one listener might be him. Not sure, not sure.
Joel (9m 31s):
Gauntlet to the competition.
Chad (9m 32s):
His prediction was, we will start to see the return of in-person conferences by Q4, but attendance will remain low due to the long lead time. They required a plan and market. Everybody wants to get the hell out of the house. They want to go to conferences. That vaccine is getting rolled out. Do we all believe that in Q4 conferences, aren't just going to explode. Steven doesn't believe that. What do you guys think?
Joel (9m 57s):
I'll let our special guest start.
Tim (9m 59s):
No, I like, I think because, you know, Sherm has already come out and said, Hey, Sherm National Chicago in June. That, I mean, that's the biggest conference out there in our space. And they're already said like, Hey, we're going to do it now. And we all have obviously multiple opinions on the SHERM leadership. The one thing that they've been known is that I truly believe that they're going to try to pull this thing off. If they pull it off, you're just going to see everybody else. And we know that conference season starts in September, so that's Q3. So I would say that's, you know, we're, we're definitely going to see that happening, come Q3. Now, will the numbers be as big? I don't think so. Cause I think a lot of people will stay home, but I still think they're going to start trying to do them.
Chad (10m 42s):
I think it's going to be a vendor sausage party, what it's going to be, because you're going to be the only ones who are looking for leads. They're hungry for leads. Everybody wants to get out. But the problem is I don't believe talent acquisition or at least the people I've talked to are even going to be budgeting for travel this year for conferences.
Joel (11m 3s):
Yeah. I think June is really early.
Chad (11m 5s):
Yeah.
Tim (11m 6s):
Yeah. It seems early.
Joel (11m 7s):
I think they're setting themselves up for failure. I think the real test will be in the fall when HR tech and Unleashed in Paris and some of those conferences happen. I personally think that the big ones will, you know, will survive and sort of probably thrive as we come out of this. I think my question will be, you know, the EREs, the SourceCons, the TA Techs, the sort of the smaller ones where this is, all they do is, are these conferences and they don't exist without the revenue from them. And I'm curious as to whether those smaller niche conferences will evolve into sort of the corporate conferences, which I think have been gaining in popularity for the last five, 10 years, right?
Joel (11m 48s):
Like everybody wants to go to LinkedIn's conference and now it's, now it's more, I want to go to Smart Recruiter's, or I want to go to Jobvite. Or I want to go to SmashFly or Symphony Talent. You know, they've been, they've gotten really good at the sort of niche conference. So I think the big ones come back in a big way. I think they have the resources and power to do it. I think the corporate conferences gain in strength as we come out of this because they didn't rely on conferences for revenue. The real question for me is the, the small niche standalone conferences, like the Source Cons and those guys
Chad (12m 21s):
Do we see consolidation in this space?
Joel (12m 24s):
You should.
Tim (12m 25s):
Yeah.
Joel (12m 26s):
I don't know what assets they have that the big guys don't. The lists are probably the same. I mean this, the sales calls and who they're calling are the same. So I don't know.
Tim (12m 35s):
Well, I think 2020 proved out to like the virtual conference thing now isn't necessarily, I mean, here's the hard part, is it? Didn't the people who put them on don't make money. The vendors I talked to actually like them because the number of attendees, the lead generation has been huge. But the reality is, is you're not going to see those continue because the vendors weren't willing to pay the money as they were on the in-person stuff. Now that changed over and they were like, Hey, for a 5,000 person list, I'll pay X. Then maybe that would work. But like, we are all in the same stuff. Like we saw that, like we were, we actually spoke at a lot of these virtual conferences and the numbers were giant, but nobody was paying anything to be there, attendee or vendor.
Joel (13m 16s):
Be curious. I'm sure the marketing people liked it, but I wonder how many sales guys and gals said, Oh, these are really quality leads and I closed a lot of deals. Whereas I think the value of the face-to-face is you can build a little bit of relationship. You can, you know, buy drinks and meals, which you can't do via, you know, email marketing. Yeah.
Chad (13m 35s):
Yeah. And I think that any of these conference companies who understand, obviously there's a huge difference between in person and the online, the virtual, but there, there is that lead generation piece that Tim talked about. If we're not just doing PowerPoints and just the same old bullshit, we're actually providing premium content, those guys will win. So I think Jamie in the Recfest crew over there, those guys actually put out awesome premier content and they were experimenting with things, where at other conferences, they weren't as much, they were just trying to keep it as, you know, same as it ever was.
Chad (14m 15s):
And that will not get you what the actual sponsors the vendors need.
Joel (14m 21s):
Thanks for your prediction, Steven.
Chad (14m 23s):
Good one Steven, good one. We love that.
Joel (14m 25s):
So let's get into our predictions.
Chad (14m 27s):
Let's get into Tim's predictions. Smackadamas.
Joel (14m 30s):
That deserves the bell. Smackadamas man, what you got start us off. Yeah.
Tim (14m 37s):
So my first one is, is about SAP and their need to acquire someone in the talent acquisition space. And when I say someone, it's not just a chat bot, it's something bigger than that. So it's like a Greenhouse, a Smart Recruiters in Avature, a Jobvite, a Lever, an Eight-fold, Loxo might be the cheapest one they could go out and get, but I was on a Workday call and Neil was answering a bunch of questions and he pretty much just laid out like, Hey, it's us in Oracle. SAP is so far back. We don't even really consider them competition any longer. And so I think they're going to have to do some acquisition stuff to kind of catch up into that space. Otherwise, you know, Workday and Oracle are just eating their lunch at this point.
Joel (15m 19s):
If you held the keys to the car, who would you acquire or who would be the smartest acquisition for them? I liked the Greenhouse and I like that.
Tim (15m 28s):
Well, except that except they're so, you know, leveraged with money that it becomes super expensive to get to buy them. Avature is still private so I think you could actually get the most bang for your buck out of them. And, and their tech is actually a really, really good. Jobvite is already private equity so we probably could make that deal happen. Lever you could probably get on the cheap. Again, I love Smart Recruiters. I think there are really good tech as well. I, you know, I just don't know, if they want to be acquired.
Joel (15m 56s):
I like the Eightfold too, that could do good too.
Tim (15m 58s):
Yeah, that could really do well. And again, I mean, Loxo is same tech is Eightfold, but it probably a cheaper price point. So again, if they were smart, they would go that way.
Chad (16m 7s):
I would say same on premise, but not same on scale and power.
Tim (16m 11s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, but again, I, you know, it just depends on what SAP has from a standpoint of how much money they want to spend and what they want to turn into. Again, I would also go if they didn't have already acquired well, back in the day, Success Factors, you know, Cornerstone would be a great acquisition for any of those really. I mean, Workday could really use Cornerstone on their learning side, but you know.
Chad (16m 36s):
Now this to me is interesting, cause you just mentioned in December of 2011, SAP acquired Success Factors for $3.4 billion. Okay. And they could have, if they focused, they could have been up with the Oracles today. If they wanted to, if they actually focused on this segment of the business, what they didn't, they let it atrophy.
Tim (16m 58s):
Yup.
Chad (16m 58s):
At that point or goal Oracle acquired Taleo in 2012, IBM acquired Brass Ring and Connexa in 2012. Do you think this'll trigger that same kind of domino effect for some of those bigger players?
Tim (17m 12s):
Well, I mean it could, I just don't think Oracle or Workday have any desire to go out and make big acquisition around their core HR talent suites. I just don't. I mean, I think they feel good, Oracle Recruit Cloud is a good product. Workday clearly is, is confident in what they, what they have. And I think they're more kind of interested in building out the partnership network at this point, SAP, they, eh, they just have some real like needs. In the next that's factor is just, they never put the time and money into actually making and continuing to, you know, continue to kind of raise their game. And so now at this point now they're like, well, either we totally rebuild success from the ground up or we just go purchase somebody and make it work better than what we know what we can do.
Tim (17m 55s):
So, yeah.
Chad (17m 56s):
Agreed. I mean, that's what happens when you spend a shit ton of cash. And we saw, we've seen this with Monster, with all the products that they bought and they threw in the closet and they didn't pay any attention to that's what happens when you just allow the car to sit in the driveway and rust away.
Joel (18m 10s):
Sacadomus has spoken everybody. All right, now it's my turn.
Tim (18m 15s):
Do I get a commission fee on this, by the way, come on, everyone that got mentioned, give me something, bottle of gin.
Joel (18m 22s):
My prediction is no. How about that? That's my prediction. This is probably a little bit further down the road, but what the hell I'll go ahead and predict it for next year. I think that Airbnb launches Airbnb Work. Knee jerk would be okay this is like a Rework thing. So WeWork was onto something with, with what their business was, obviously it was a train wreck and a lot of different ways where I think that they probably overextended themselves was that they were actually buying the properties or leasing the properties that they were then turning around into workspaces. I think what Airbnb is going to do is look at all this commercial real estate, all these owners that have leases that are going defunct or people that are just going away.
Joel (19m 6s):
And they're going to try to figure out how do I lease this space? How do I get butts in seats? How do I, you know, get money in the door? And I think Airbnb is going to create, leverage their platform for these commercial real estate vendors to create even if, even if it just desk by desk or workspace or conference room for people to be able to go and just basically rent, you know, for the day for a couple hours, whatever, to leverage Airbnb's technology to go in and leverage this commercial real estate. That's going to be just not in use from the pandemic and they're going to make that work. And then I think that companies will then buy credits for their employees or their contract workers to then leverage Airbnb, to go into the office for a day or whenever they want to and use those credits accordingly.
Joel (19m 56s):
So my prediction number one for next year is that Airbnb Work is launched and that's, that's what it is.
Chad (20m 3s):
Hmm
Tim (20m 3s):
I like that, it's actually two predictions in one though. Cause you're also then predicting that this remote work thing is going to continue and companies aren't going to want their people to come back, which I think is complete bullshit.
Joel (20m 14s):
Right.
Tim (20m 15s):
Which, I think is complete bullshit. I think what we're going to see is like bad business results in Q1 Q2, and that the CEOs are going to stand up and go, Hey, remote work failed, get your asses back to work and let's get some shit done. So,
Joel (20m 27s):
So, so a couple of things, one, I think a lot of companies will be like that, but I think some companies won't want to pay for the real estate that they're paying and every everything that comes with that. But you can also say, Hey, we're going to give you X amount of Airbnb credits and you need to use them. You need to be in the office. So there is a way that you could sort of be on both sides of that coin and say like, Hey, we're going to be virtual, but we are going to require you to be in the office and be amongst each other for a certain period of time.
Chad (20m 55s):
Okay. So they're, they're not actually, they're not putting up the overhead?
Joel (20m 59s):
And they're not buying these commercial spaces. They're giving the people who own them and need to fill them up. And the easier way to fill those spots through technology and Airbnb obviously has the best technology as well as the best brand to get that done.
Chad (21m 13s):
Yeah.
Tim (21m 13s):
It's a Wework model without owning the real estate. So it's yeah, it makes sense.
Joel (21m 18s):
Yep, without any long-term leases by the folks that are in the company. So yeah, I think, I think it's a no-brainer really.
Chad (21m 24s):
I think it's gone smart for anybody who doesn't understand Airbnb's mission. Cause this is not Airbnb's mission. Airbnb's mission is belong anywhere and they want to be able to ensure that they actually drive people into spaces where they feel like they belong. So I like that idea with regard to being able to do this in other people's homes, just like they have Airbnb now, but being able to go into a corporate structure, I don't think that aligns with their mission. And then they just become again, another WeWork. So I like the idea. I just don't think this is an Airbnb idea because it doesn't align with their mission.
Chad (22m 5s):
And they've been very solid in disciplined with their mission.
Joel (22m 10s):
Well as a public company their new mission is to make shareholders happy. So we'll see if they stick to that, to that warm and fuzzy.
Chad (22m 17s):
Imagine an old white man saying that.
Joel (22m 22s):
All Right, Chad, you're up buddy?
Chad (22m 23s):
Oh, you're going to love this one. Okay. Kids now I actually, actually did some, some coordination and some crowdsourcing for all of mine. So this one was sent in from Dennis Tupper and his prediction, which I believe is Glassdoor's going to take a dirt nap. So all signs point to the demise of Glassdoor revenues are down. Their best revenue stream jobs has been handed over to Indeed and Indeed has more reviews and will take over the reviews mantle as well. So I think what we're seeing is indeed strangling Glassdoor with the pandemic happening.
Chad (23m 5s):
They've automatically started that atrophy not to mention they don't have that revenue source that they had before. So overall the glass door brand, dies in 2021.
Joel (23m 17s):
So there's the prediction that if I go to glassdoor.com, I just get redirected to Indeed like there's no Glassdoor Branding whatsoever.
Chad (23m 24s):
Kind of like that Simply Hired model. Yeah. The simply hired or what they did with Workopolis. But to totally deep six the Glassdoor brand I think is a stretch.
Tim (23m 34s):
Hey, do we know how much they paid for Glassdoor?
Joel (23m 36s):
1.6 million? Something like that.
Tim (23m 38s):
Now do you think you could sell that to like a LinkedIn or a Microsoft or somebody like? That would say, Hey, there's so much value in that brand, we think we could actually keep it as the Yelp of Jobs and still create it because of that traffic, is that worth 2 billion or whatever?
Joel (23m 54s):
No.
Chad (23m 54s):
They wouldn't because the traffic that's being driven there now is hitting Indeed jobs. Right. So it's masked right now instead of having Glassdoor. Yeah. Instead of having Glassdoor jobs, they have Indeed Jobs. And they're the only thing I think right now that is worth anything are the actual reviews pieces. And that's what's driving a lot of that traffic, right? So it's kind of like you can't rip one away from the other. So they've got to come together. I think it, it would stay if it did, they would do a Simply Hired model like Joel was talking about. But overall, why have so many fucking brands? Get rid of that shit, own it yourself.
Joel (24m 31s):
Well, the other addiction that Indeed has is organic search traffic and Glassdoor is still a cash cow if you will, of organic traffic and even Simply Hired is still I think a cash cow of free traffic. So that would be hard for them to say goodbye to as well. And those reviews are nice juicy content for search engines.
Chad (24m 49s):
They are juicy. They're juicy.
Joel (24m 51s):
All right, let's go to round two of predictions. I'm leading off this round. I believe that we're going to see an incredible amount of investment acquisitions. Consolidations happen the low rock meter in terms of dollars that come into this space are going to blow up as we start to reemploy people and get people back to work. But I wanted to throw out three specific acquisitions. Again, again, Tim, I'm getting greedy. I'm putting like multiple predictions into a prediction, but fuck it.
Chad (25m 22s):
He's casting the net wide.
Joel (25m 25s):
This is my podcast, by God damn it. So, so number one, I think, I think Seek out of Australia acquires Talk Push in Vervoe. They're already an investor in Vervoe and they've just partnered with both of them. I think that that acquisition would be very smart for them. And I think it happens next year. I think the other thing that happens is that Dice goes private. We've talked a lot about dice on the show, their stock prices virtually done nothing since our, our boy Art Zeal took over. I think they're going to be continually just stuck in the quick sand and the only way to sort of get out of it. They should go private. They should probably get private equity to come in, fix the company.
Joel (26m 5s):
If they go private, I think they can start making bigger bets