It's the Father's Day weekend edition of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. On this week's episode, CareerBuilder gets slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit (yes, the dumpster fire rages on), Microsoft wasn't the only one who wanted GitHub and we find out what millennials really want and who's giving it to them. Enjoy, and visit our sponsors, America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX. They make the dream a reality.
Transcription
Joel: Who's your daddy? Welcome to the Father's Day Weekend edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman, flying solo for another week while Chad sips wine coolers in Barcelona. On this week's episode, CareerBuilder gets bitch slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit. Yes, the dumpster fire rages on. Microsoft wasn't the only one who wanted GitHub, and we find out what millennials really want and who's giving it to them. Stay tuned. I'll be right back after a word from Sovren.
Joel: Well, as I record this, the World Cup is on television, so I promise this will be as abbreviated a podcast as I can possibly make it, because I, just like you, really enjoy the World Cup and want to get back to that as soon as possible. Well, let's get to our shout-outs real quick. Number one, this is sort of the team Cheese shout-out show. Benji Goodrich, a corporate recruiter, fan of the show ... Hi, Benji. ... puts on Twitter, "Amazing how much leaner and efficient the Chad Cheese Podcast was today without Chad. Amen. Enjoyed the shorter format." Benji, I could not agree with you more. Chad clearly is a drag on the show, and, you know, whatever. What can I do? It's the Chad and Cheese Show. I can't fire him.
Joel: David [Dunesky 00:02:37] gets my second shout-out, Monster employee, loyal listener to the show. Quote, in a message to me, "Great solo podcast. Chad who?" David, again, could not agree more. Appreciate the note, and if you'd like a shout-out for next week's show, which, if my calendar's correct, is my last solo show until Chad gets back, put out #ChadCheese, how much you hate Chad and love me, and I'll give you some love in the shout-out part of the show.
Joel: Lastly, I wanted to just say hey, if you're listening on your iPhone, your Android device, we'd love a review. Whether you love us, hate us, whatever, getting feedback from you is our oxygen. We sit here, and we talk into a microphone. It's hard to know if we're sort of hitting the right chords with everyone, so a review is a way of really understanding that we are doing a good job. We'd appreciate that.
Joel: On with the show. It was a relatively quiet week. In fact, I was actually concerned that I would have enough news to talk about on the show, and then Wednesday night happened, and a report out of Crain's Chicago Business, fine publication out of the Windy City, had the headline, "Lawsuit alleges sex discrimination was 'the norm' at CareerBuilder." What happened here? A woman name Lori McInerney ... Hopefully, I said that correctly. Actually, we know Lori. She's done a webinar for the Chad and Cheese Show Podcast in the past, so we do know Lori, and it was ... I was kind of surprised to see her name, because I knew her, and that's rarely the case when you see lawsuits, but Lori is suing CareerBuilder, outlining at least three episodes where there was some significant sexual harassment.
Joel: In one, she talks about a sales guy sort of aggressingly approaching her, proceeded to follow her to her hotel room where the event was held. This salesperson said, "You know you want it. I'm coming to your room." He showed up at her door, and then he said, "What the fuck are you going to do? I'm not leaving." Lori was saved, apparently, according to the lawsuit, by a customer walking by, and the aggressor left, concerned that he would be found out. There's another episode in the lawsuit that outlines a married guy at CareerBuilder coming up to Lori, asking if she would ever fuck a married guy like him. From that point, she walked away from the conversation. There's also some alleged misconduct by some executives at the company, namely Mary Delaney, who is, I think, the background check screening executive. She was widely known, apparently, by this lawsuit, as someone who was not very nice to women, particularly to Lori. She sort of disrespected her appearance, what she wore. She just wasn't very nice, and she didn't sort of show the same behavior towards the males in her department or who she managed.
Joel: John Smith is named, who's sort of the chief sales executive. You might remember John from his El Chapo commentary on the podcast from a few weeks back in regards to CareerBuilder and all the stuff that's going on there. If you haven't heard some of our CareerBuilder podcasts, I encourage you to go back in the archives. That's some pretty good stuff. She also names Rosemary Haefner, who I talked about last week. Rosemary was apparently fired from the company after sort of confronting someone in the ... a manager in the technical department. Apparently, the consensus in the company is if you spoke out against sort of the old boys' behavior, you would be fired. A quote from Rosemary in a meeting, according to the lawsuit, was, "Well, you know. That's Mary being Mary," in terms of Lori expressing difficulties with working with Mary Delaney. After she did that, Lori was fired, I believe three weeks after the fact, according to the lawsuit. When she was laid off, she was told that quite a few marketing folks were laid off, as well. Lori found out after the fact that she was the only one that was laid off.
Joel: Lori's looking for seven figures in this lawsuit, so she's not skimping on the damages. She is filing individually, although they are open to this being a class action lawsuit if more ... other female coworkers are willing to come up. In fact, in messaging Lori after the news broke, she made me aware that at least 10 other women had approached her about having a similar experience at CareerBuilder and that she was forwarding them to her lawyer, so there's sort of a consensus, I guess, that this will become a class action lawsuit against CareerBuilder and could end up costing them dearly as well as probably costing a few people their jobs. Everyone is pretty much named in the lawsuit. No one is spared, so if you were ... If you're interested in all that, the Crain's story has that. The lawsuit is also on Scribd, which is scribd.com, I believe. I also wrote a story for ERE that should be coming out relatively soon.
Joel: This was a bad week for a lot of people in Chicago, or at CareerBuilder. There's also a #metoocb hashtag to sort of garner awareness on social media, according to Lori when I talked to her. Basically, this story probably is not over. CareerBuilder is not commenting, which is pretty common with companies who are facing lawsuits, so they're staying pretty mum, but I expect to hear more, particular on the case, the class action lawsuit stuff as soon as that happens, which it looks like it will be, so stay tuned to the podcast. We'll probably be talking about this lawsuit in further detail in the weeks to come.
Joel: Let's get to ... Let's switch gears in a big way. Let's go to ... LinkedIn was in the news. Business Insider had a pretty lengthy story about the company this week. In fact, it was behind their paid firewall that I had access to. Basically, it was a really long story in regards to how LinkedIn is sort of getting away from the jobs component. Not getting away from it, but they're focusing very heavily on content, really becoming almost like Facebook and other social medias, social media platforms that are so popular. They have ... They're partnered with big name media companies. They're bringing in Forbes, Bloomberg, The New York Times in to develop strategies for sharing content on the platform, which is now actually 562 million users, which is growing pretty quickly.
Joel: Meanwhile, video, they continue to be really focused on, as well. LinkedIn talks about how video is, by far, its fastest growing ad format as well as its fastest growing sort of generated, user-generated content, and it's averaging 30% view through rates, which is really good. If you're currently not advertising on LinkedIn from a video perspective, I would encourage you to look at doing that. They've also launched a new ad feature, which is carousel ads, which you've probably seen on Facebook, where you kind of swipe through different images, maybe talking about different features. They're introducing that, which should be a greater level of engagement for their users, so if you are advertising on LinkedIn in terms of their visual ads, think about a different ad carousel, where you might have one that talks about the company at large, maybe when it was founded. Maybe the next is more culture related. Maybe more is more, if you've been awarded stuff, if you're a Glassdoor most favored employer. These are things you can kind of get to within one ad and get more engagement that way.
Joel: LinkedIn, ironically, by focusing on more content and more things around users, they are getting a better ... They're a better job platform, the greater usage there is from a content perspective. LinkedIn essentially wants to be the water cooler for professional networks. They want to be where ... the things that people talk about at the water cooler or at the office, that they go to for content from thought leaders, from the Elon Musks of the world, and by doing that, by getting more engagement, people going there outside of looking for a job, they actually benefit the jobs component. I give them a big thumbs up in really focusing on the content piece, the engagement, and I can tell you that, in terms of my own usage, and granted, I am targeting a recruiter/employer who are on LinkedIn for the most part, but I can tell you that over the last year, my social media shares, my posts, are getting a lot more engagement on LinkedIn than they do on Facebook.
Joel: I would say a year plus ago, Facebook was probably more engagement than LinkedIn. Twitter continues to be just a crapshoot in terms of engagement. I get very little from Twitter or Instagram, and I'm really not using Snap, in case you were curious. Let's take a quick break. When we get back, we'll talk about the other companies that were in the bidding war for GitHub, which we talked about last week, which was acquired by Microsoft. Obviously, they weren't the only ones, and some news came out in regards to who the other suitors were, so stay tuned.
Joel: Quick refresher for those that don't remember or know. Microsoft bought GitHub last week for 7.5 billion, billion, billion dollars. This was big news for a lot of reasons, primarily for Microsoft's cloud computing getting more programmers sort of in the Microsoft family or getting them acclimated to Microsoft technologies and cloud computer, et cetera, but for our purposes, the recruiting side of it was huge in that Microsoft basically bought ... Microsoft basically owns the top two professional networking sites in the world. They own LinkedIn, which you know, but now they own GitHub, which is probably easily the number one place for sourcers, I would say, to find software engineers, developers, programmers, et cetera. It's a place where those folks go to share code, get ideas, collaborate on whatnot, on stuff. They have 28 million users. A lot of those people aren't on LinkedIn, because they don't care about LinkedIn.
Joel: In terms of a sourcing, recruiting perspective, those two sites were huge, and it was obvious that other sites were in the running to buy GitHub. I mean, there's no way to have a property like that, and you just knew that other sites were out there. CNBC had a story this week outlining how Google, not surprising, was a big bidder for GitHub. The story also outlines that Amazon was interested. Some Chinese companies. Tencent, apparently, was interested in the platform, as well. Now, what ... The deciding factor of why GitHub went with Microsoft was two-fold. One was just the people. Satya Nadella, which is the CEO at Microsoft, he's been there for a few years. He's apparently a really cool, nice guy, and he gets tech. Microsoft is obviously very interested in acquisitions, how acquisitions fit into their business model, which was the second reason why GitHub really chose Microsoft, is that the vision there of how GitHub would be able to exist independently, for the most part.
Joel: I think that looking at how Microsoft had treated LinkedIn for the past two years, that LinkedIn is pretty much their own entity. They obviously tap into resources and expertise that exist within Microsoft. They're integrating their product with Microsoft products, and I think GitHub CEO and ownership looked at that and said, "Hey, if we can still be GitHub, if we can get integrated with the biggest platform in the world, that's a really good thing, and if this company's really focused on acquisitions, this is where we need to be." Google, on the other hand, doesn't make many acquisitions. They tend to think they can do it themselves, and particularly, in the employment side, they're building Hire pretty much on their own dime. They're building ... I mean, they tap into their own search engine for the job search component, and their job search API is pretty much homegrown.
Joel: Google's DNA is not to acquire, and I would say with the acquisitions that they've made in the past, they're not that great. I mean, they don't have a tremendous track record of having happy founders. Foursquare comes to mind. Excuse me. Foursquare comes to mind, which they basically killed, and some others. Amazon was in there. Salesforce, in the cloud computing realm, you see them making a lot of acquisitions. I wouldn't be surprised if they were sort of looking around GitHub, as well, but yeah. Google was in there. Google lost. I think, ultimately, losing the social media war is going to hurt Google. I mean, they lost to Facebook on the social side. They lost LinkedIn to Microsoft, and now they've lost the programming network or software engineer network to Microsoft, as well. I think that will eventually hurt Google, but time will tell to see how the chips fall on that.
Joel: Shifting gears to millennials on our next story. Of course, you know millennials are my favorite thing in the entire world. Indeed had a survey, I guess, of the top employers for millennials ... I will read those off in a second. ... as well as sort of what millennials are looking for in an employer. None of those will shock anyone who is a millennial or knows millennials or is recruiting millennials, but I will also briefly talk about those, as well, because I got a lot of commentary on this when I shared it on social media. Your top 10 list, in my best David Letterman top 10 format, from 10 to one goes like this. Number 10, in terms of millennial friendliness, is the Dow Chemical Company. Number nine is Ernst & Young. Number eight is Capital One. By the way, I'm going out to visit Capital One in a couple weeks, so excited about that. We can talk about millennials, I guess.
Joel: Number seven is Pfizer. Number six is Apple. Number five is Southwest Airlines. Number four is Delta. Number three is Kaiser Permanente. Number two, Discover Financial Services, and number one, Northrop Grumman. Not much surprise there. The only one in the top 25 that was sort of employment related would be Upwork. Upwork, if you don't know, is where you hire freelancers, basically from everything from development of apps to writing to sales. It's something that I use, personally, but they were the only one that was sort of loosely associated with employment that was listed. Congratulations to those companies. Interesting to see two airlines and not more tech companies, which was actually something that the story talked about, is that they're not just looking to work for tech companies. They were looking for a lot of different things, which include ... Number one is growth opportunities. No shocker. The story revealed that 59% of millennials say opportunities to learn and grow are extremely important. The percentages were much lower with boomers and Xers.
Joel: Number two here is make an impact. The study ... Deloitte found that 83% of millennials think that a company's success should be measured beyond just their financial performance, so yeah. Do good in the world if you want to recruit millennials. Number three, support flexibility. Time flexibility, maternity leave, working hours, working virtually, et cetera are all important to millennials. The next is health and family. Prioritizing family is important to millennials. Companies that made the top 10 go well beyond the basics in those areas in terms of benefits, et cetera. Lastly, which is one that we've talked about on the show quite a bit, is tuition reimbursement. Paying for college is very important to younger folks, obviously, and the study found that only 3% of employers currently offer some sort of tuition reimbursement. However, almost every company on the top 10 list offers some sort of tuition help. If you want to recruit those millennials, help them with their education paybacks.
Joel: Let's shift gears now, before we take a break, to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter, as you know, is sort of that outlier job site. You have the big three, Facebook, Microsoft LinkedIn, GitHub, and then Google. Then, you have Glassdoor, Indeed, and then you have ZipRecruiter sort of out there doing its own thing, fighting the good fight. They're in the news this week in terms of launching an AI component to their solution. It's a new feature launching in the next couple of weeks called Candidate Calibration. That's a mouthful. Basically, employers can rate potential matches for a job, so it's sort of a thumb up, thumbs down kind of a thing. As they look at applicants, they can rate ones positively or negatively or not rate them at all. As they rate them, ZipRecruiter will surface the job postings that have been sort of approved positively to similar candidates in their database.
Joel: Basically, if someone has skills that I really like, ZipRecruiter will show that job to other candidates that have similar skills and abilities so that your job gets a little more greater, a little greater exposure. Candidate Calibration drove a 50% increase in the number of employers who found a candidate they liked enough to invite them to apply. ZipRecruiter said, in a release ... The CEO basically said, "Hey, our first iteration was sort of a shotgun blast strategy." People would post jobs. The jobs would go everywhere, every job site, forum, social network they could possibly get it out to, and some of their clients just got too much stuff, and they didn't ... They wanted a more curated experience, so that led ZipRecruiter to launch this new feature, so there you go. If you're using Zip and you experience this, have any comment about it, like it, don't like it, feel free to visit chadcheese.com and let us know your experience. Well, let's take a quick break from JobAdX, and we'll talk about some acquisitions and the fact that Idiocracy is actually coming to fruition.
Joel: I had an email cross my desk this week, and it was RelishCareers acquires TransparentCareer, and when I read it, I thought, "Is that like a pickle relish job board site? I had never heard of RelishCareers or TransparentCareer, but as we shotgun through some acquisitions here quickly, those two acquired each other. I don't know either one of them. Apparently, it's sort of ... One is a culture engagement tool or site. The other is sort of college career placement help. The terms were not disclosed, which usually, in my experience, means that it was a fire sale. Somebody got on the cheap. Somebody was getting out of business. Investors were leaving, and these guys picked this site up. Good for them. Hope that works out.
Joel: Additionally, in the acquisition news, TrueBlue, which owns PeopleScout, I believe, over in the UK, bought TMP Holdings, which has nothing to do with the TMP that most of us think about, particularly in the states, TMP Worldwide. There was a little bit of gray area in terms of what in the world ... who was buying what, and people didn't know what TMP and Holdings was, but anyway. In fact, I got a comment from an expert saying, like, "That's really shitty that they did that. They sort of made it look like TMP got acquired," although TMP just ... The TMP we know, as you know, was acquired recently by a private equity firm here in the states. Anyway, TrueBlue, way to go. Again, the Madonna song is what I think of when I hear TrueBlue. I'm dating myself again, but anyway.
Joel: Lastly in the acquisition space, probably much more worthy of talking about, is Workday, who everyone on the podcast knows acquired Adaptive Insights recently for $1.6 billion, which is a huge, for our industry, a huge acquisition. It didn't get a ton of press, but that happened ... Adaptive Insights, for those of you who don't know, which I actually did not know, is a financial planning platform, so yeah. Apparently, they'll be integrating some of that into Workday, which makes perfect sense to me. Adaptive Insights was also set for an IPO before Workday came in and grabbed them up, so there's clearly a long-standing strategy with Workday to get these guys, and they did succeed in doing that, so good for them.
Joel: Lastly on the show, a study came out just recently that we are getting dumber. It's true. Idiocracy, the great movie from about 10 years ago, is coming true inch by inch, and if you haven't watched the movie Idiocracy, I encourage you to do so. I think the guy that did Beavis and Butt-Head and Silicon Valley wrote the movie. Basically, the idea is that we get dumb, and people who are educated don't reproduce, and the people who are really dumb reproduce way too much. At the end of the day, we get people who are named after brands like Starbucks and Adidas, and the smart people just eventually evolve out of the system.
Joel: Anyway, this study consisted of 730,000 IQ tests over the last 40 years or so, 45 years, and they found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation. This is a reversal of the so-called Flynn effect. I don't know what that is, but it's apparently IQ is seen as rising ... IQ was seen as rising during the first part of the 20th Century. The Flynn effect says we should be getting smarter. Apparently, we're getting dumber. The decline may be due to environmental factors, but the story says researchers couldn't find consistent trends among families, and so they discounted things like parental education, family size, immigration increases, genetics, et cetera. Essentially, the more likely culprit, according to the story, is our Cheeto eating, binge watching, video game playing, never reading lifestyles, so there you have it. It makes sense to me.
Joel: Kids, go read a book, or if you're me, go have a pint and enjoy the World Cup. For those of you dads out there ... I am one, as well. ... happy Father's Day. Hope you get what you want. Hope you get a break if you want one, and dad's matter, guys, so call your dad. Hug him. Love him. We out.
Stella Cheesman: Hi. This is Stella Cheesman. Thanks for listening to the Cheese and Chad Podcast, or at least that's what I call it. Anyway, make sure you subscribe on iTunes, that silly Android phone thingy, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to give buckets of money to our sponsors. Otherwise, I may be forced to take that coal mining job I saw on Monster.com. We out.