AI Hype Machine w/ Rand Fishkin

Get ready, kids — this week, Joel finally got his fanboy dream come true. Yep, that Rand Fishkin — SEO wizard, SparkToro boss, and all-around data whisperer — stopped by HR’s Most Dangerous Podcast to talk about why “AI will replace all jobs” is just the same old tech bro marketing BS.

From fawning media clickbait to Sam Altman’s hype circus, Rand breaks down how fear sells, why Excel killed more jobs than ChatGPT ever will, and how the real danger isn’t AI — it’s stupidity, ego, and journalists chasing clicks.

Plus, we go deep on zero-click internet, influencer overload, and why every young marketer should start something, anything, before they ever beg for a job.

It’s snark, substance, and spaghetti carbonara.🍝 Buckle up, kids — Rand Fishkin is in the house.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Joel Cheesman (00:28.893)

Yeah, what's up boys and girls? It is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is writing shotgun as we welcome Rand Fishkin, SEO marketing icon, co-founder of SEO Moz, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro and Snack Bar Studio, author, speaker, thought leader. Rand, welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.

Rand Fishkin (00:48.334)

you

Rand Fishkin (00:55.532)

Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me, guys.

The Chad (00:57.42)

I never thought we would get on because Joel was fanboying so long for God's sakes before we even started recording. Jesus.

Joel Cheesman (00:57.575)

Thanks for making the, stop, stop, stop. I am a long time listener, Rand. we talked in the green room. I've been a fan since 2005 SEO Maas days and what you, what you've done. Real pleasure to have you on the show. aside from the business stuff, what should our listeners know about you?

Rand Fishkin (01:01.304)

Hahaha

Rand Fishkin (01:09.934)

you

Rand Fishkin (01:22.562)

gosh. Well, I mean, I have these like three jobs, so it doesn't leave a ton of time for other stuff, but I'm a moderately competent and passionate home chef. I, yeah, I do a lot of ingredient buying and cooking. I have an incredible marriage. I don't know if I recommend marriage to everyone, but I definitely recommend marriage to Geraldine. She is awesome.

I do a lot of Used to be historically for speaking. Now, a lot of it is to visit friends and enjoy life. yeah, that's pretty much me. Pretty much me.

Joel Cheesman (02:06.001)

That's pretty much it. for the old school listeners, Rand is in Seattle and remembers Jobster in that whole drama, which is not what this show is about, maybe on another episode.

The Chad (02:06.412)

One of the things that we...

Rand Fishkin (02:14.495)

sure.

The Chad (02:17.144)

which most of our listeners never heard of.

Rand Fishkin (02:18.631)

I,

Joel Cheesman (02:20.879)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (02:22.379)

I have a semi-regular Dungeons and Dragons game that I play with a couple of guys who were early Jobster employees. So there you go. Yeah. I will do, I will do.

The Chad (02:29.112)

Why does this not surprise me? Why does this not surprise me?

Joel Cheesman (02:29.847)

stop, stop. Well, tell them, chat, tell them we said hi, Rand, next time you see him. We are here because of an article that you wrote this summer for your SparkTero podcast. And the title of it was, AI Will Replace All Jobs is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing. So a lot of nonsense in your mind. talk about the genesis of the article.

some of the data, just summarize it for us and we'll get in a little bit deeper.

Rand Fishkin (02:57.964)

Sure.

Rand Fishkin (03:01.737)

Yeah, I think, you guys probably have heard the old adage that, a man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail. And the reality in my opinion is that a lot of these AI leaders, know, the folks that are from Claude to co-pilot to chat GPT in particular, right? Sam Altman and open AI every single time. Those guys.

Saw that their media coverage was getting a little light or they wanted to like bump their new. Oh, you know, chat, GPT four Oh came out and now, now we have the thinking model. Every time they wanted the media to intensely cover one of those and just, you know, uh, get widespread attention. They would say this new model is going to replace 10 % of all jobs or 50 % of HR jobs or.

30 % of all legal profession jobs or 90 % of all marketing jobs. Yeah, and they could do it over and over and over again with slight variations, right? So every time a new, they wanted to talk about a new industry or focus on some new wild number or make some prediction about a year. By 2025, there will be zero jobs left on the planet earth. And they would get...

Joel Cheesman (03:58.493)

Klarna. Klarna.

Rand Fishkin (04:25.217)

fawning coverage for this, right? The media would not question these assertions and assessments and almost every outlet that they wanted to would write fawning coverage of them. So, in essence, I sort of blame the world of journalism, which in fairness, I'm sure you guys understand this, right? journalists exist in this world where they're very unable to get traffic because Google is shrinking the amount of traffic that they send.

The Chad (04:29.666)

Mm-hmm.

The Chad (04:52.839)

game. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (04:53.165)

LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you know, all of these places have dramatically reduced by like 80, 90 % the amount of clicks that they send out. And so anytime journalists publish an article and they see that it gets lots of actual traffic, they just triple down on that stuff. And an article that says that everyone's going to lose their job or everyone in, you know, the legal profession is going to lose their job or whatever it is. Aunt Sally reads that headline.

she's gonna click on it and she's gonna send it to all her nieces and nephews because it's scary, it's fear-mongering, it's attacking this core of this thing that we worry about. It uses the same sort of fear that artificial intelligence has in the movies and television. So effective. this is my belief about why they keep saying these things even though their predictions fail to come true quarter after quarter, year after year.

And even though, you know, the studies that have been done, I think the most recent one I want to say was a Stanford study. they, they said basically, so far about 10 % of, information jobs have been affected and something like 2 % adversely affected by AI. So we're talking about 2 % of the 20 % of sort of information and tech jobs in the U S.

The Chad (06:17.688)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (06:19.681)

That would not sell a lot of papers, Like that doesn't, it doesn't get a lot of clicks to say 0.2 % of jobs are going to be adversely affected by AI. Nope.

The Chad (06:31.064)

No, no Eddie we're not

Rand Fishkin (06:32.895)

And guys like, I bet you didn't even see that study. That study, which I think was actually quite well done. Nobody covered that. Cause Aunt Sally's not gonna forward it to the family.

The Chad (06:43.404)

I did see the MIT study though. And I mean, what happened with that one, I mean, you took a look at humans or it felt like at least the study was showing that it felt like humans are trying to force AI into systems without understanding processes, without understanding workflows. So it's creating additional layers of work. It's not actually helping. So it's not the fault of AI. It's not actually stupid human errors happening.

And not to mention, Joel's talked about this too, CTOs have God complexes. They feel like they can create anything, right? They can build anything for anybody. And they don't even understand generally what the problem is. They don't understand the workflows. They don't understand a lot of that stuff for different departments. And literally it just hampers progress. But we have seen, for instance, a company like GM, not a small company, a company like GM, they were able to take over 100.

interview schedulers and redistribute them, or at least that's what they say, redistribute them throughout the organization because now tech is doing that. AI is now doing that instead, right? So there are instances. The thing that I think that we're getting, I think, overshadowed by Rand is all the stupidity from the builder.AIs, the clarinas who are trying to go public, the companies who want to try to get more, the startups who want to get more funding.

That's the thing that is really getting all the attention, as you say, in the media and the companies who are slowly taking jobs away. That's bad for optics. GM's not going to say that. They don't want anybody to write about that, right? So I think it is happening and there's no black or white on this, but there is many different areas of gray where jobs are being not lost.

Let's say tasks are being redistributed, people are being redistributed, tasks are being taken away, right? So what do you think about that?

Rand Fishkin (08:45.153)

I mean, the history, yeah, the history of software, you're absolutely right, Chad, that the history of software overall is that it takes tasks either away or reduces the time complexity, you know, challenge required of those jobs. And that is true of all software. You know, I, I ran software companies for 20 plus years now and, every single one of them and every feature we ever added.

was designed to make the job of a person easier or remove part of the job so that they didn't have to do it anymore. And AI is software. It just does that same thing. I think this doom and gloom accelerationist sort of universe that a lot of these tech bros play in, it is entirely false.

The Chad (09:25.08)

Mm.

Rand Fishkin (09:38.766)

Sorry, it's not entirely false. is simply the same iterative nature of software that we've seen over the past 50 years. know, Microsoft Excel took away God knows how many tasks like I can't, you know, there were 10, 10s of thousands, hundreds of thousands of guys sitting, you know, and women sitting in drafting room tables, right? With slide rules.

The Chad (09:52.598)

Okay, pivot tables did, yes.

Rand Fishkin (10:05.791)

And, and, know, accountants and financial analysts who had to do it all by hand, all this, all the spreadsheet stuff by hand and Excel didn't put any of them out of work. That field grew.

Joel Cheesman (10:17.041)

Yeah. Rand, when you see, when you see headlines, I mean, we talked about the year of efficiency that sort of took off after the pandemic and you saw Elon get rid of 80 % of Twitter. saw Mark Zuckerberg get rid of tons of people. know, Mark Benny off at Salesforce, talked about how many developer jobs are done by AI and Amazon and your neck of the woods talks about this regularly. When you hear that, what do you think is it?

Did they over hire and now they're just sort of rebalancing? Like what goes through your head when you see those, those headlines and those, those bullet points.

Rand Fishkin (10:53.197)

Yeah. I mean, it's always skepticism. And then I just, I just go and look at back at, Hey, let's take a look at Salesforce's hiring and you know, total workforce, uh, workforce as a percent of revenue over the last 10 years or 15 years or whatever it is. Boy, it sure looks like exactly as you said, right? The pandemic period, right? Like 2021 and 22 tech, you know, grew the number of jobs and jobs postings by

massive numbers. And then in 23, 24, you see them sort of going back to a level that looks like a historical average growth rate. To me, that doesn't say, you know, it doesn't say much about what's happening. Twitter is an outlier on this. You know, I think that, Elon really did want to get rid of almost everyone at Twitter and sort of have that small group of loyal lackeys there. as a result, you know, I, I think

You can look at Twitter's growth. have shrunk by 30 % in terms of user and usage. They've shrunk by more than 80 % on their revenue, right? The advertisers don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole. Yeah, that place is, I think he mostly bought it to try and buy an election for himself. And you could argue he succeeded, right? So that might've been a good ROI. But whether, that is not a...

The Chad (11:58.584)

Mm-hmm.

The Chad (12:16.098)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (12:20.801)

It's not a company that's being run to make money or to grow. So it's, pretty weird. Amazon I think is, you know, they, when you look at Amazon's growth rate to their hiring and sort of those kinds of things, again, it looks really similar to historical averages. I think the weirdest thing Amazon does is back to return to office. is deeply strange, hard to figure out. It looks like productivity.

The Chad (12:26.823)

It just, yeah.

Rand Fishkin (12:48.897)

was higher when people were remote. I'm surprised, you know, the Amazon team historically has been very data driven. And so to see that they're more interested in people being at an office physically than they are in productivity, that surprises me. I don't really understand the dynamics.

The Chad (13:06.392)

Well, it feels like we're trying to paint too broad a brush in all of these different areas, right? Because Facebook does not act like Twitter, does not act like Amazon. I mean, from a hiring standpoint, from a leadership standpoint, from a culture standpoint, everything's different. But yet, but yet again, back to your point, Rand, we hear and we see people writing in broad strokes that, you know, everybody's going back to the office.

Rand Fishkin (13:10.764)

Yeah.

The Chad (13:33.82)

or everybody's losing their job to AI, so on and so forth. And culture's changing for everybody, and that's just not the case. So I guess as we start to look at this, and after reading your piece, which was really good, we'll definitely share it in the show notes. For me, was more what's happening behind the scenes with the real world versus this bullshit that we're hearing from fucking reporters. mean, that's the...

Rand Fishkin (14:01.645)

Yeah, and I, I struggle. I wish that I could blame the individual journalists like that. That is something I would like to do because I get very frustrated when I read these pieces. I think they're Yeah, but it's the click economy. Yeah, they're they are merely cogs in the wheel, right? If they write a well balanced, thoughtful, you know, 20th century style journalism piece,

The Chad (14:02.914)

That's the question, right?

The Chad (14:15.84)

It's a click economy, right?

The Chad (14:30.71)

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (14:31.391)

It's going to get nothing, you know, like it's not, it's not going to, you have to in a world where, especially social algorithms and sort of human, human brains have been conditioned by social algorithms to only respond to the most outrageous content, right? So things that trigger fear response, that trigger hatred and anger, maybe humor that it's very tough to say, you know, the statistical

analysis on this piece was very thoughtful. That doesn't trigger anyone's clicks, except maybe yours and mine. Like, no, no one gets two craps about those, but. You know, this, this, optimizing for engagement thing, that's the game that all these folks are playing. And that's why you keep seeing bad, worse and worse and worse takes from media who's desperate to just try and stay alive in a world where a lot of people are going to Google, going to chat, GPT.

And getting, getting, and social networks and getting news via sort of headline and paragraph descriptors that are taken from the aggregate of these pieces and essentially, you know, disintermediating the, the creators from their work. I think that is taking a lot of jobs. think the, concentration of wealth broadly, right? That is absolutely taking not just jobs, but like entrepreneurial opportunity and opportunity to.

build a field, I don't care how creative you are, how smart you are, how much money you have, no one's trying to build a new media company these days. it's, that's a brutal field. And then of course, like there's lots of, I think the other thing that AI is doing is there's a lot of incentive for politicians and those in, you know, sort of political commentary and leadership to say,

Joel Cheesman (16:09.403)

Yeah, ran.

The Chad (16:24.258)

Mm.

Rand Fishkin (16:25.389)

our jobs going away. that's AI that has nothing to do with tariffs. It has nothing to do with like our regulations has nothing to do with these executive orders has nothing to do with pulling us aid has nothing to do with firing half a million government workers. It's AI. And that you know, that is a very politically convenient narrative. And as you know, you know, the the current sort of White House administration is very active in terms of

Joel Cheesman (16:34.17)

immigration.

Rand Fishkin (16:53.549)

prohibiting or preventing access to organizations that don't toe the line, which they did, you know, whatever it was six years ago as well. But yeah, I think that's a somewhat new policy in US government, A little more Eastern European, Russian style relationship between journalists and administration.

The Chad (17:18.604)

Autocratic, yeah.

Joel Cheesman (17:20.411)

Yeah. Rand, you live, you live kind of on the cutting edge of marketing and I, I'm sure you talked to lot of young people just getting into marketing or figuring out what my marketing career will be. And we're seeing a lot of stories around entry level jobs suffering more so than a lot of other jobs. What are you hearing? Okay. So if, if are you hearing that personally as well as reading about it? And if you are.

Rand Fishkin (17:34.955)

Yeah. I think the Stanford study confirmed that actually. Yeah. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman (17:45.189)

What sort of advice are you giving young marketers and how they should look at a career in marketing versus what you maybe said 20 years ago?

Rand Fishkin (17:53.418)

yeah, interesting.

You know what the weird thing is, Joel? I think my advice is really similar. Actually, maybe it's just that my advice was weirder 20 years ago, which was that if you want to break into marketing, my strongest recommendation is to do something yourself. Right? So sort of build a website, a social media presence, a, an e-commerce business, consulting, but you know, like any, any kind of thing, and then try to market.

It and yourself and figure out which channels and tactics you're great at, what you enjoy doing, learn software, learn tactics, learn techniques. You can, all of this information is now open source on the internet, right? My big frustration back in my Mars days was that it wasn't sorry.

The Chad (18:43.96)

Well, and it's influencers. Yeah, it's influencers, right? I mean, we're really seeing a lot of that as it is. people are becoming quote unquote influencers are trying to become influencers.

Joel Cheesman (18:56.925)

or they're becoming fractional workers and saying, I'm the best screwdriver in the tool chest, I'm gonna work with multiple companies to provide that screwdriver, that tool.

Rand Fishkin (18:57.003)

Yeah, I think.

Rand Fishkin (19:06.625)

Yeah, man, think, I love the idea of specialization, but I do think if you can get a...

By forcing yourself to create something, even if it doesn't make you very much money, even if it's something you're only putting a few hours into every week, you know, on the side or whatever, but by forcing yourself to build something and attempt to market it, you have to think holistically. You're like, oh yeah, should have some analytics around this. Oh yeah, I'm gonna need to set up some email marketing. Oh, I'm gonna need to do content. I'm gonna need to do social. Even a little bit of all these things. And therefore, you know, in an interview or a job setting, when someone says, well, have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this?

You can say, yeah, I had to do that to figure out this and I had to figure out that to do this. And here's how I. Satisficed to, you know, solve this problem. But my specialization is on XYZ and specialization is awesome, but it's, that classic T shaped, you know, marketer that I think still is very effective, which is I have a broad understanding of almost every part of the marketing infrastructure. And then I'm really, really good at this one.

The Chad (20:14.23)

And then the gig side of the house. I mean, because you're you're looking at being more specialized, which means you don't and again, maybe fractional, you don't have to work for one company, right? You can work for yourself and you can actually contract out to other companies and companies obviously love that because they don't have to pay you benefits and whatnot. But and you also have control of it. So do you see the growth happening there as well? Because you have a side hustle, you're an influencer, and then you're also doing fractional.

Is that, does it look like we're going to start creating portfolios at that?

Rand Fishkin (20:51.085)

I, one of the things I would recommend to young folks, even if that is not the broad direction, I can't say, you if I fast forward 20 years and we look at percent of people who are employed by gig economy or have multiple jobs or those kinds of things, I don't know whether that's going to accelerate or decelerate. Like maybe we'll be in a world where big companies continue to employ the same person in the world that they do today. But I would say you massively increase your,

The Chad (21:14.424)

Mm.

Rand Fishkin (21:19.935)

ability to survive risk and problems and, you really prevent employers from being able to take advantage of you. If you are also building up your credibility and your presence in the broader industry, and you have multiple things going on, right? If you're, if your main gig, whatever that is, treats you absolutely terribly, you can walk away from it and focus on your.

side hustle, your creator gig, your personal project, your side e-commerce business. That's a great thing. I can't recommend that enough.

The Chad (21:59.222)

Well, we don't have loyalty anymore. So, I mean, it's not like you're looking to try to work for a company for 40 years like, you know, like maybe my dad or grandpa did. So therefore, I mean, again, that loyalty is going away dramatically.

Joel Cheesman (22:11.997)

Yeah. Ran, we touched on influencer marketing and I want to sort of wrap that into, talk about no click search a lot. And it seems to me like companies are trying to figure out how do I get my message out to the, audience that I want to attract. And it feels like from your, your commentary that that's becoming less about creating articles on our website and then hopefully getting found in search and getting clicked on and people find us. Talk to me about.

how you see the influencer economy, how companies are embracing that, how it will unfold, what you're seeing. And feel free to go into no-click search and kind of what a lot of our audience won't know what that even is, explaining that and how it impacts, particularly the job board space, which our industry relies on so heavily and is, I think, challenged with or struggling with.

Rand Fishkin (22:55.757)

Okay. You guys have like two hours for me to explain that, right? Okay. I'll try and, I'll try and go briefly. So first off this thing, Joel, that you're talking about of zero click search, that is part of a broader trend of zero click internet. So go back in time 10 years, you know, and Google was answering 25 % of all searches without sending a click. Right. So you, you know, you type in.

Joel Cheesman (23:03.047)

Sure. Sure.

The Chad (23:03.464)

Hahaha!

Rand Fishkin (23:24.993)

whatever, weather Seattle and they give a little weather, you know, applet or, or, thing up at the top. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So, you know, now they do it for events. They do it for movies and television shows. They do it for how old is Paul Rudd? Unbelievably, he's much older than me. That's very embarrassing since I look like this and he looks like him. and, then they do, you know, they, they're doing it so much that I think, just about two thirds of all searches today end without a

The Chad (23:29.08)

Banner, yeah.

Joel Cheesman (23:30.205)

Seattle jobs, Seattle jobs.

Rand Fishkin (23:54.126)

So we've gone from 25, 30 % to 65 % in a decade. Google is only one of the culprits here. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, these all used to send considerable traffic. Twitter used to send a ton of traffic out. There was a time when media was competing for, is Facebook and Twitter going to be bigger than Google in our referral bucket?

And of course, all the social media platforms realized that they could make a ton more money by keeping people on their platform. And so they designed algorithms that suppressed posts that contain links and encouraged people to post the content directly to, to the platform. Twitter now, you know, since the only took over, they have like this long form text thing. So people don't even link out to their blog posts. They just put the blog post on Twitter.

Which is great for Twitter and sucks for every other person. Right? Like it's, it really is terrible. It's very tough to remember who posted the thing on Twitter. And if you can't capture a cookie and you know, you're not allowed to do retargeting and remarketing to them. Like they've just, they've taken away a ton of the value of the creator economy. That's the zero click internet, right? Essentially traffic to everyone significantly down referral traffic way down. The other part of that.

The Chad (24:52.194)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (25:18.931)

is that the, of course, incentives for creation have diminished, right? The value, when you and I were coming up in SEO, Joel, like the value of creating stuff on your site and then building an audience from that was absolutely massive. And the difficulty was, even though it seemed high at the time, incredibly low compared to where it is today. And that is just, know, nowadays you are seeing fewer and fewer people be able to build

their brands and companies and books and personalities through that. I think this is one of the reasons we see stagnation in the, you if you look at the digital marketing world and you see who's on stages and who's, you know, blogs and websites are successful and who has a big email list. It's the same people as it was 12 years ago. It bothered, that bothers me a lot. Like where's the new fresh talent? What, where are they? And the answer is they exist. They're probably better than me at a hundred things.

The Chad (26:18.647)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (26:19.085)

but they don't have the brand name from back in the day when it was easy to build a brand name. And that breaks my heart. So that's kind of the overlying world that we're in. As far as job seeking goes and job boards go, here's the relatively good news for job boards is to a, if you're a company that's posting jobs, I post a bunch of jobs for Snap Bar Studio, right? So we've done hiring.

The Chad (26:32.472)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (26:46.409)

I get a lot of applicants for those roles. And what's great is I don't care if they ever come to our website. Like they never need to visit snackbarstudio.com. don't have to see the job posting on the site. If they just see it on LinkedIn and they apply there, it's fine, right? Like the whole transaction can happen on platform. The only thing that really matters is that good candidates are seeing the post and applying.

The Chad (26:59.138)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (27:14.293)

And so you're just playing a kind of different game where you are essentially attempting to create.

Joel Cheesman (27:18.033)

How many applicants know who you are and you are a driver of applicants?

Rand Fishkin (27:23.693)

Well, in video game world, am not. Not at all. No, because nobody knows me in video game world and I have no presence there. But thankfully, the good news about video game world, well, if you're a creator is that supply and demand are the complete inverse of tech world, right? Like in tech world, oh, it's really tough to hire, you know, software engineers and great marketers and that kind of stuff. In video game world, you can hire. My co-founder at Snackbar Studio is the lead game designer from Assassin's Creed.

Joel Cheesman (27:26.353)

None, okay.

The Chad (27:31.298)

Mm-hmm.

Joel Cheesman (27:34.691)

It's cool.

The Chad (27:36.534)

you

Rand Fishkin (27:52.878)

and Just Dance and his last one was the Warhammer game that did a billion dollars in revenue. Like Nicholas is insanely incredible and he was getting so underpaid. You guys, can't explain to you how bad video game world is because people want to work in it desperately. There's this, know, everyone underpays and overworks and it's just kind of terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The Chad (27:54.163)

damn.

The Chad (28:12.044)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

The Chad (28:16.952)

especially the big studios. Yeah, especially the big studios. Now back to the...

Rand Fishkin (28:21.119)

Especially the big studios. I mean, even indie game world kind of takes advantage of this to a certain extent. But, you know, back on topic, the create the great thing, the great analogy about job boards is like Joel Chad, when you put up a job post and you don't care about the traffic to your website, you only care about the applicants. That is exactly what I tell people they have to do in zero click Internet world. You can't.

You can't keep caring about getting traffic to your website. You have to instead figure out how to create influence in the platforms themselves. So rather than thinking of LinkedIn as a place to drive traffic to your site, think of LinkedIn as a place to build your brand and build brand affinity. It's your, it's a new kind of website. It is a home on the web where you create influence and drive people to be interested in your product and services.

the same way you drive job applicants to the LinkedIn job board and your job post and get them to apply right there. I think we have to break out of the mindset we held for a quarter century that traffic is the ultimate goal.

The Chad (29:34.636)

I agree to some extent, but you have to remember that when you start to work within somebody else's walled garden, they have you by the short and curlews, right? Period. Period. I mean, you could be fucked.

Rand Fishkin (29:46.741)

Well, OK, my my response to that would be not if there's lots of them. Right. So if LinkedIn is. Yeah.

The Chad (29:55.094)

Yeah, well, that's the problem. We have LinkedIn and Indeed. I mean, those are really the two big, massive, which are both turning into walled gardens, right? And they are starting to push, push, push more and more and more of their prices up. I mean, and they're trying to get more data from you. So they're asking for, they're demanding more.

Rand Fishkin (30:13.773)

Well...

Rand Fishkin (30:18.221)

I mean, I would argue that Google is also competing in this field, like very.

The Chad (30:22.412)

Yeah, but Google's actually pushing more traffic to corporate career sites, directly to corporate career sites.

Rand Fishkin (30:28.321)

Well, I'm just saying, right? Like Google is competing directly in this field. And then all of the small niche job boards, right? If you're hiring in any very particular industry, for example, I'm hiring in indie gaming. All my, of the five people, four people we've hired for the team in the last year work with Indy sent three of them. Work with Indies.com, right? It's this tiny little job board is very specific to exactly what we do. There's a marketing job board that, I think.

The Chad (30:31.533)

Mm-hmm.

Joel Cheesman (30:51.165)

Hmm.

The Chad (30:52.438)

Nice. Yes. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (30:57.899)

a latest solace runs that, that like, is where a bunch of people in my network find their particular, you know, digital marketers for their agency roles. So I just, I would just say it's a really good thing to have competition. I agree with you that the, LinkedIn indeed problem exists, but there are big players.

The Chad (31:04.704)

niche.

Joel Cheesman (31:17.265)

What's your take on social media in building a brand as an employer? you seeing anything or have advice on that?

Rand Fishkin (31:26.901)

yes, but gosh, that's another like, my God, that's such a huge, huge question. Okay. Yeah. All right. All right. I'll try and I'll try and give like my lightning round answer to that, which is, if social media is a priority for your company and you think it's a great way to reach your audience, you should find a.

The Chad (31:29.624)

Yeah.

The Chad (31:34.614)

the episode should we do?

Rand Fishkin (31:56.618)

a hook for your social presence that you can consistently invest in. is, you know, something like first Mark Toro, right? Our, our hook is research and data and like, you know, really interesting on, on like topical stuff, things that people are thinking about with AI, things that people are thinking about with like, where do they find their audiences on the web? You know, blah, blah, blah, of charts and graphs for Miriam Webster. It's

The Chad (32:08.918)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (32:23.477)

Let's be funny and pithy and our word of the day will always be relevant to sort of what's going on in the American politosphere. For, you know, plenty of brands, it is visual content that is just, you know, hard to look away from, whether that's, you know, individual humans or it's, locations and travel or that kind of stuff. Find your hook. You, you've got to find that hook and then you're going to play it, over and over.

Consistency really matters, right? If you invest sporadically or poorly, you will do sporadic and poor results, right? The platforms do really reward consistency in terms of visibility. You can see algorithmic streaks are a very big part of social visibility. So that's my advice.

The Chad (33:00.523)

Hmm.

The Chad (33:03.842)

Yeah. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman (33:18.437)

Rand Fishkin, everybody. Rand, thank you again for your time. For our listeners that want to know more about you, maybe plug in, find out more about Spark Tour or your other businesses, where do you send them?

Rand Fishkin (33:29.387)

Yeah, sparktoro.com. Anyone can create a free account for forever. No credit card needed and play around with the product. If you want to check out the blog there, that's where I do most of my writing and including the one, the topic that we covered today, which I appreciate you sending folks to. And if you want to play a chef in 1960s Italy,

who has to fight magical boars and then bring your guanciale and your pancetta back to your restaurant so you can make your spaghetti al carbonara, you can check out snackbarstudio.com.

The Chad (34:03.096)

I love that.

Joel Cheesman (34:05.885)

That is Rand Fishkin, everybody. Chad, that's another one in the can. We out.

The Chad (34:10.136)

out