Doing the dirty work isn't easy, but industry education and being a change agent is a bitch. The boys continue their interview with Venkat Janapareddy, CEO of Jobiak, and talk:
- Google for jobs PPC? - Indeed - "the new Monster" - Ditch the schema - The Struggle is Real! - The Domain Matters - DUH!
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Morgan: Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine are smooth and confident. While on the other hand, The Chad and Cheese Podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album, you'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, y'all now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Try not to fuck it up boys.
Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Chad: Welcome back. We're picking the conversation up with entrepreneur and CEO of Jobiak, Venkat Janapareddy.
Joel: How does Google approach pay-per-click in Google for Jobs? And when?
Venkat: That's the million dollar question. That's been one of the toughest challenges, being dependent on Google for Jobs. They did a good job communicating in terms of API, but in terms of roadmap, it's a black box. It's free right now, anyone can publish jobs on Google for Jobs, but I'm pretty sure the pay-per-click is coming. I know they're worried about employer adoption. They're not happy with the ... If you look at Google for jobs right now, still almost 75% of the jobs are from job boards, especially LinkedIn, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter run off of it. So they want employer adoption before they start charging, they have to do something about this so schema and SEO, probably even get it off schema, partner with companies like us, pretty much scrap the job and apply our tag and get every single job.
I think they're trying to figure this out right, based on what we know. But Facebook and Indeed are looking for ways ... The reason they're not as successful as they are right now, it's been two and a half years, both of them came up with jobs products, but right now, many, many jobs from career centers are missing on Google because of the schema requirement. Facebook is even more complex, they have this complex API integration. I'm pretty sure, I can't get into the details, but both of them are looking for ways, how do we get the jobs? Indeed used to do. Indeed used to just go to career centers and get every single job. And if Facebook and Google does that, that's the product by the way, we are releasing next month. We are going to scrape all jobs from every career center, and we are going to become like Sabre in travel.
If you look at Sabre, I don't know if you guys know, every ... Expedia, Travelocity, none of these guys have any relationship with airlines, they just talk to Sabre, Sabre is selling the data. And that's one thing that we are going to become. We are releasing this product in May, and we are going to have every job in the world that's out there in real time, and we are going to start providing this job data to Google, Facebook, even companies like Indeed. So now you'll have all three big players having every single job, and as a result, now job seekers, right now, again, even though this whole candidate experience is bad, the minute they have every single job on Facebook and Google, the traffic will go up. Then they can introduce this all pay-per-click model, they can sponsor jobs, they can make billions of dollars. And I think this so Sabre model, our technology, which we built for Google for Jobs, we basically did the same thing, scrape and apply, labeling and generate the data. So we are very excited, we are already talking to some of these big players, and that's going to change the landscape. Right now, Indeed is still the king, Facebook and Google are playing the catch up game, but once the level field is the same in terms of number of jobs, it's going to change the whole game.
Chad: Well, won't Indeed just try to build that just as fast as you do? I just, I don't see Indeed, unless they acquire you because you've got that technology, but I just don't see Indeed taking jobs from anybody or losing that control because they are in a controlled environment right now. I can't see them leaving that controlled environment. Can you?
Venkat: Yeah. Indeed is like, you guys know Monster Worldwide, Indeed is like 20 years back Monster Worldwide. Everyone goes to Indeed, the revenues are going up. The big players are catching up the game, because both Facebook and Google made a big mistake of putting all this stupid schema requirements, instead of just going to career sites and getting the jobs. But once they do, I think Indeed is going to have major problem, I have a feeling they'll become like Monster Worldwide, there'll be the downfall. Because search traffic, everything starts on Google, mobile traffic, significant traffic is happening on Facebook, both these guys are damn good at targeting candidates, what they don't have right now is jobs. Once they have these jobs, that's not from job boards, once they have jobs from career sites, then they are at the same level field as Indeed and as I said, it will become like Monster, didn't have answers to it and they went South, and they're in a bad shape today, and that could happen to Indeed
Chad: Shouldn't companies just ... Seriously, they can't do this themselves. They can't. History has demonstrated they don't have the technical chops and/or resources to do it, so therefore, they should be investing in an RMP or a vendor to be able to demonstrate to Google that they have this information. Really get up into that top six by making sure that they have a vendor or a partner who can help them design for Google for Jobs.
Venkat: Absolutely. I think again, as it said, Google is not really doing a great job in terms of advertising this all Google for Jobs product. But once players like us, it's just not Jobiak, I'm pretty sure there's going to be a lot more startups and other companies that are going to come up with what we do, but once they start seeing traffic from Google, they will start investing. Right now the biggest problem they have is, okay, let's go with the schema. And then they've given up on that. That's the reason we're focusing a lot with partnerships because we go to, say an RMP and they put in this technology for all the clients, they'll see tremendous traffic, and that's when they'll value Google for Jobs. And that's going to happen very, very soon. It's going to change in the next six to 12 months. Google for Jobs is going to pick up the steam. I think they spent last two years just going live, country by country. Now that they are live, I'm hoping they'll come up with something, especially getting rid of the schema, making that optional. I think that will revolutionize, especially Google for Jobs platform. This is the beginning of Google for Jobs. I think it's going to take off, as we work with ATS's and RMP's, they will start seeing the value and more and more, and price will start investing in Google for Jobs.
Joel: The number of questions I have just doubled when you dropped that announcement, but I'll try to be brief. So let me understand, you're not becoming a destination site?
Venkat: Our goal is work with partners, RMP's and ATS's. Of course, we are continuing to work with enterprise customers right now, where we put in the pixel, we make them top 20, is live. Our goal right now, ATS's and RMP's are struggling with Google for Jobs. They're putting the schema and they're getting no value.
Joel: Okay. Got you. So the business model is, you're going to go scrape as many ATS's, RPM's, not job boards, correct? You're going to go right to the source, they still have to set up subdomains for it to be like Deloitte or IBM, et cetera, are you guys going to solve that problem, with scraping?
Venkat: To answer your question, once, let's say Deloitte, if I have all of their jobs right now, if I somehow make them available to Google, today Deloitte has to go to this all index APA site, there's a lot of technical work. If they don't have to do that, and I go and scrape all of Deloitte jobs, scrap their career site and give it to Google, Google can go have them available, show up on Google for Jobs and go straight from Google to the career site. That's the beginning. Our goal is to sell this to Google and Facebook, first get all the jobs.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: So ultimately we're going to see a whole lot more of apply with Jobiak button?
Venkat: Not Jobiak, see again, we want apply on career site, the company name.
Joel: Right. But you have to have the company set that up for that to happen. Correct?
Venkat: No, not if Google already has the data. Let's say there are 100 jobs in deloitte.com, and Google gets this hundred jobs automatically, because the jobs came from deloitte.com, Google automatically puts apply in Deloitte. They don't even know, Jobiak is behind the scenes. We are like a OEM partner. We are going to be working with Google, Google will say, "Hey, give me every company in the United States, every single job, we'll pay you a million dollars a month." Once they have all these jobs from career site, Google now has every single job and the apply button goes straight to the carrier site.
Joel: So you're doing a search that Google can't do.?
Venkat: We can scrape and figure out what the job is all about. If you give me a URL, magically I can tell you without looking at it, what is the job title? Skills requirements, occupation, everything. That's our machine learning platform. That's what Google doesn't have. That's what Facebook doesn't have.
Joel: So your goal is to be the search engine within the search engine?
Venkat: Exactly.
Chad: Well, and really the goal is to be the career site, the anointed career site by the company. Getting that sub-domain and being the place where, if you go to the homepage, which is what Google does, they go to the homepage, they hit careers or they hit jobs, where does it go? Where does it land? If it lands on the applicant tracking system, well that's "the source of truth". If it lands on Jobiak or an RMP, well then that's the source of truth, correct?
Venkat: Yes.
Chad: Okay.
Venkat: Our goal is to land RMP's or career sites, less on Jobiak.
Joel: Have you made these already? Or are you in discussions? Or have you not started anything at this point?
Venkat: we are in discussions. I can't get into the details, but yeah.
Joel: Okay. So this is not pie in the sky, you're laying a little groundwork for this to happen?
Venkat: Yeah. Actually to be very honest, the idea came from them. They gave us this idea, you have the technology, they're trying to compete with Indeed, they want to have the same number of jobs Indeed has, the only company that has this technology, what Indeed has is us. We can go and scrape and apply. So the idea came from them. We've been working on it for the last seven, eight months, hopefully we launch it. And our goal is to sell this data to all these big players and stabilize all these big players in the market have every single job.
Chad: Yeah. Who wants to fuck with all of this? Seriously, it's like, let's have Venkat and his team go do that shit, do all the dirty work. Right? And then we'll reap the rewards through the experience and maybe purchase them or maybe somebody else, another vendor, RMP, ATS purchases Jobiak. Either way, it's the dirty work, right? They don't want to do the dirty work, because that's a bitch.
Venkat: It is. It is a lot of, lot of dirty work, Chad. It's scraping and putting the machine learning. You're probably wondering why we have
Chad: The maintenance behind it.
Venkat: ... Yeah. That's why we have 120 people, they work like crazy. The good news is, it's all machine learning, the technology is at work so much now. When I sold my last startup to Monster Worldwide, five years back, most of these technologies were not available. Now with machine learning and deep learning, you can do a lot of things. We are very excited about this new product that we're launching in May. That's going to create a big competition between Facebook, Indeed and Google. We are very, very optimistic and hopefully everything goes well for us.
Joel: And now we know why he needs 120 techies.
Chad: Yeah. We could definitely dive a little deeper into that. I'm not sure I want to get into those weeds.
Outro: Look for more episodes of Voices, this Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com.