When Google launched their job search engine, dubbed Google for Jobs, a lot of people scoffed, remembering past failures from the world’s largest search engine dipping its toes into employment. Hello, Google Base and Google for Hire? Well, no one’s scoffing now. Google seems to be all-in, with a pay-per-click (PPC) offering coming soon. Optimizing for search results can be challenging. That’s why we invited Alexander Chukovski, founder at Crypto Careers, to take a look at the ins and outs of optimizing for Google when job postings are in play. Crypto Careers connects professionals and businesses building digital assets and blockchain technology, so Alexander knows how to tackle the tough segments. If your jobs are on Google - and they probably are - then this is an episode you don’t want to miss.
TRANSCRIPTION SPONSORED BY: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level.
Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel Cheesman: Oh yeah. It's your high school gym teacher's favorite podcast, AKA the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman and joined as always, the O to my J, Chad Sowash is in the house. And we are happy to welcome Alexander Chukovski.
Chad Sowash: Oh, he's excited.
Joel Cheesman: Founder at Crypto Careers.
Alexander Chukovski: Guten Tag.
Joel Cheesman: Alexander, Guten Tag.
Chad Sowash: Long-time listener, first-time caller.
[laughter]
Alexander Chukovski: Yes. Thank you for having me. Such an honor.
Joel Cheesman: And what bunker are you calling in from for the podcast?
[laughter]
Alexander Chukovski: Oh man. I'm calling from this weird country called Bulgaria. Probably no one has heard of it. It's somewhere in Eastern Europe, around Turkey, Greece, somewhere there. Just pick up a map.
Joel Cheesman: Pick up a map. Yeah, I'll go to Borders and get me a map and find... [laughter]
Chad Sowash: I love that Alexander thinks that Americans are so stupid, they don't know Bulgaria is a country. [laughter]
Joel Cheesman: Pick up on that.
Chad Sowash: I appreciate that, Alexander.
Joel Cheesman: So Alexander, they don't know Bulgaria and they probably don't know you, so let's get a little Twitter bio about you and what makes Alexander tick.
Alexander Chukovski: Alright. So I run niche job boards in Web3, crypto and soon AI, and at the same time, I consult companies in the HR tech space around topics like SE optimization, Google jobs optimization, job classification with machine learning, AI programmatic job advertising, product development, anything you can think of for HR tech. And before that, I don't know, I worked in all kinds of roles in TA tech. I've been in this industry for 15 years.
Chad Sowash: Why? Why'd you get into this industry? Why? Why, why, why...
Alexander Chukovski: Oh man.
Chad Sowash: Poor kid.
Alexander Chukovski: Oh, it was just pure chance. I didn't know that this industry actually existed. So I started working as a student at a German job board called Experteer in 2007. So think about that. And Experteer was a paid membership, only white collar, high-salary jobs. Something like the Ladders, but cool. I promise you. It was cool. [laughter] Hey, what's happening to the Ladders? Do these guys still exist?
Joel Cheesman: Who gives a shit? People in the US are listening and they hear Crypto Careers, this dude in the eastern block and they think shady as hell. So help us, bring us back to some level of legitimacy with crypto, it gets a bad rep, blockchain. Get us up-to-speed why we should trust this industry and what you're doing.
Alexander Chukovski: Well, Crypto Careers is like the top three job boards in crypto. It's been around for five years now. We have had over, I don't know, 25,000 jobs. People think that the crypto industry is very shady. And I mean, partially it's true, [laughter] but whenever...
Joel Cheesman: But not you.
Alexander Chukovski: You're in a bull market. No, not me. But whenever you're in a bull market, hiring just explodes. And we built it a little bit from a job board to like a placement agency. It's been going great. So, there's a lot of money to be made.
Joel Cheesman: So I would guess it spiked in '20 to '22 and it's crashed since then. Am I wrong about that? Is there still a hot, hot stove for crypto jobs and careers?
Alexander Chukovski: It's picking up right now again.
Joel Cheesman: Okay.
Alexander Chukovski: So in summer it was pretty bad, pretty dire. But now jobs are still coming in. I think we have about 5,000 jobs open in crypto companies around the world. So at the top of the market cycle, I would say it was 10,000 in 2022. That was like the best time.
Chad Sowash: So hyper niche.
Alexander Chukovski: It was amazing.
Chad Sowash: Hyper niche, which is to be quite frank, not a bad place to be because there aren't gonna be many competitors that are out there, obviously. Top three. Top three. That's awesome. But today kids, we're talking about Google for Jobs. That's what we're talking about. Why? Because Alexander knows a little bit about this, okay. So Alex, let's talk a little bit about a basic intro for Google for Jobs. What is it for anybody who's been locked up in a closet for the past five years? A little bit about the basics of Google for Jobs right out of the gate.
Alexander Chukovski: Alright. So if you're a recruitment marketing professional, I would say this is this nice thing out there where if you play well with Google, you put some schema on your jobs, they'll send you high quality converting job seeker traffic to your jobs for free. So you're not paying anything for that. You just have to play by the rules, optimize them a little bit and you get traffic. And if you're a job seeker, it's just this thing that pops up after the sponsored search results when you type in something like retail jobs near me. So, it gets a lot of attention from job seekers, right? And people are really focused on optimizing this 'cause it's really good traffic.
Joel Cheesman: So if I could add to that, historically, you searched sales jobs in Google and you would get a bunch of links to websites that have sales jobs on their websites.
Alexander Chukovski: Hopefully.
Joel Cheesman: Today I search sales jobs, it automatically locates where I am and gives me the actual job listings and then where I can go to apply to those jobs. So it's basically vertical search takes out some of the middlemen of the job board going to that site, you can go directly to the job posting. Just wanted to add that. And you've been putting your jobs on Google for Jobs since it began, 2017?
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah, pretty much. The crypto job board has been there since start. It's been going pretty well.
Joel Cheesman: And I know Chad and I, when it first came out, I was like, "This is kind of shitty." [laughter] Talk about what it was then and how it's evolved and maybe where it needs to go from here to even improve from now.
Alexander Chukovski: Oh, man. I can write a book about this one. But [laughter], let's focus...
Chad Sowash: I think you have already on LinkedIn. Jesus Christ.
[laughter]
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. So I mean, in the beginning, everyone thought that Google is going to go all-in in recruiting 'cause they had an ATS, they had a job-matching product and they had Google Jobs, and then suddenly they got slapped with this monopoly suit from 2017 and that was confirmed in 2019. And pretty much the whole team disband. Everyone left. And then Google Jobs...
Chad Sowash: That's not the reason why they did it, but yeah, that was external pressure. They did it because they were short on resources and Google Cloud was gonna make a hell of a lot more money than fucking job postings.
Joel Cheesman: Yep.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. And some of the key people left and then they joined other companies. Yeah. But eventually there were a lot of promises and I think all of us went to conferences and were like really scared what these guys are gonna do. And I would say when it comes to what they promised to build, we're probably halfway there. They do release new stuff now and then. There was a large update, I think October, 2022 when they introduced new metadata into the schema. So if you follow these, these are of course, nice ways to optimize your performance. But to me, it feels like the product is stuck in 2019. That's where it is, unfortunately. So there was always this existential threat that they're just gonna turn it off. But I think we're past this point now. I think it's here to stay.
Chad Sowash: So talk about your clients, what you're seeing, traction. I mean, is it even worth it? Because I remember back in the day, and this is, I think even before 2007, I could be wrong, but Google Base came out and they were asking everybody to put their jobs in the system...
Joel Cheesman: Spam. [chuckle]
Chad Sowash: And then it just... It was spammy, it was nasty, it was horrible. So tell us what you're seeing through the data that you're collecting from your clients. 'Cause that's the big key right now.
Alexander Chukovski: I think the big key is that if you already have a good domain ranking, technical SEO is fine, you're most likely getting traffic and that's good. And there are always like ways to optimize this. So you can probably get a few clicks per job per month on top of it.
S?: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: What got really hard in time was that if you have a lot of jobs, from let's say Appcast or Zip Recruiter or like any type of backfill and you try to push this into Google Jobs unless you have like very high domain ranking, it gets really hard to get indexed, right? So today if I start a new job board, get a feed from Appcast and then just start blasting them into Google Jobs, probably not gonna get any traffic at all. I mean, it depends a little bit on the country and a little bit on the niche and if you have a little bit of content on the site, but it got really, really hard, especially in the US.
Chad Sowash: Duplication is hard.
Joel Cheesman: Is that because the algorithm is really good at your site, is nothing and this is duplicate content, and so you're not gonna go show up? Or is it because users didn't click on options that they didn't trust? They're clicking on LinkedIn and Indeed and the corporate site? What was it that pushed out the spam?
Alexander Chukovski: I think it's a combination of both. So on the one hand, Google rolled out these E-A-T rules on content quality. So if you start a job board today that doesn't have any content at all, like zero blog posts, no contact, no about us page, you're actually probably not going to get indexed at all. Just forget about the jobs for a second. And that's kind of what made it hard on the one hand. And on the other hand, I mean, Google tracks every click, they know what people like to visit, they know where the high domain rankings are. They're not going to send people to some shady websites.
Alexander Chukovski: I think probably the beginning of 2020, there was this one company that got a very nice site. So they were blasting Appcast jobs into Google jobs from hundreds of sub-domains from these small local radio and TV stations in the US. That worked for a while. They probably made a lot of money. But Google found out about this and they killed it. So today I would say cheating is really, really hard. What I see is that if you try to send a lot of sponsor jobs from Appcast, because they have very short life cycles, they come in for two hours, then they disappear, Google thinks about it as a spam, and then they're just gonna cut you off and you're going to get zero traffic. That's what I see.
Chad Sowash: So from the standpoint of actually getting traffic, and then also let's just talk about SEO at first. Indeed got SEO really, really quickly at really high ranking on the search pages. We find out later the attribution was the amount of content that they... Not just the amount of content, but how quickly they were getting rid of old and pushing in new. Right? So they were like firing off feeds to Google, new jobs to Google very regularly where many other sites would do it like maybe once every 24 hours. Right? So it was very fresh content. And that's what Google saw, which is one of the reasons why Indeed boosted up the rankings. Today with Google for Jobs, is that... Do you think that's a part of the algorithm too? And talk about the traction and type of traffic that your job sites are actually seeing and your client job sites are seeing? Is it worth it?
Alexander Chukovski: I mean, let's put it this way. If you have a good domain ranking and you are not on Google Jobs yet and you have some good content, so let's say stuff like long tail jobs, jobs from direct employers, jobs that don't have a schema that it's kind of hard to find. And if you push this into Google and you play by the rules and you have some good technical SEO, you will get traffic. It's gonna work out. It's gonna be really nice for you. But if you don't have this and you have zero good content on the side, zero blog articles, it's just not gonna work. Google sees this and for them it's just another job site. Why should they give you traffic? Why should they send a job seeker to you and not to Indeed or any of the other guys that are already proven?
Joel Cheesman: So early on, Indeed said no to putting their jobs on Google for Jobs. They've obviously reversed that trend. What are you seeing in terms of your own traffic? Is Indeed funneling a lot of folks from Google to Indeed? And also, we thought when this came out that the corporate site would be sort of the king in terms of where people went to apply to the job. However, that sometimes ends up in a 45-minute painful experience of applying to a job whereas Indeed, LinkedIn who I already have an account, it's a lot easier. What are you seeing in terms of where are people going and your response to Indeed getting into the game?
Alexander Chukovski: There's a lot of inconsistencies, right? So Google introduced this direct apply thing which if you read it carefully, does really not fit into Indeed's apply flow because they ask for your registration in order to send you to jobs.
Chad Sowash: Yeah, mandatory registration. Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. So why do they still rank? But they rank very high because they have very high domain ranking. That's one of the key factors out there. So they're very good on technical SEO and they're kind of riding on this. And that works very well for them. It's not gonna work for other people that are just joining in right now, the party. They are... They're too late for that.
Chad Sowash: To Joel's point, do you think that Google right now is weighting the experience higher than original content? Because to be quite frank, they should be weighting all of the content that's coming from corporate career sites much higher than any job board. 'Cause that's the original content. That's where the job actually originates.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah, but what is the applicant flow on the original application form, right?
Chad Sowash: Well, that's the question is, is it experience? And I know I'm talking to a job board guy and all, [laughter] but it's the experience versus the original content, right? And if I'm just looking at trying to make it easy apply for job seekers to go in and just apply to jobs to a job board versus the original content to the actual brand who's doing the hiring, it seems like Google right now is weighted more toward the experience than original content. And that's not where Google's always been, right? They've always weighted original content much higher. So why is that?
Alexander Chukovski: I guess we scrape Google, right? We scrape Google Jobs and we see who ranks where for certain search terms, also for my clients, in order to know how they perform. And the truth is that job boards rule right now. It's not the ATS. It's not the career page. It's the job board that rules. And I guess it's just that some job boards offer a better application flow than these career pages. That's kind of my takeaway. Not all of them, right? Workday, [laughter] not really, but Greenhouse, Lever, pretty nice sites, very easy to apply. They do rank very well, but again, Indeed, Zip, they decimate all these results. So they get a lot of traffic.
Joel Cheesman: I mean, tell me if I'm right or wrong on this, is that if I'm a job seeker, I don't know Greenhouse from ICIMS, from Smart Recruiters, from anyone else. So to me, clicking on the corporate site is a box of chocolates. I might get a quick apply, but it also might just be... It might waste my whole afternoon. So if I know LinkedIn, I know Indeed, I know Zip, I've applied through there, I know it takes this amount of time, so to me, it's like, I know what I'm getting with Indeed and LinkedIn. I don't know what I'm getting if I click Salesforce.com or Eli Lilly or a corporate site. Am I right on that or no?
Alexander Chukovski: You're absolutely right on that. I see it the same way. And you already have your data on Indeed. You already have your profile. So you just know it's like one click apply and you're done. Why should you go to this weird page that it's called Workday?
Joel Cheesman: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: What is that? Why would you apply there? So ATSs have lost the battle for sure.
Joel Cheesman: Which is a shame. Can they come back or are they screwed forever?
Chad Sowash: Well, first off, let's clarify this. I don't think the ATSs have lost the battle. I think the HR department and talent acquisition has lost the battle because they took something that was simple, the ATS apply process, and they've created this mon-fucking-strosity of an apply process of saying, "No, we need to have this and we need to have that." This should be a signal to all talent acquisition and recruiting professionals that you guys fucked this up. [laughter] The applicant tracking system did it.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. But I don't have any ATSs as clients or employers that are interested in Google Jobs optimization.
[laughter]
Alexander Chukovski: So let's leave it like that.
Joel Cheesman: Well, what sucks is a few bad apples ruin it for everybody because some of them are doing it right. But if a job seeker doesn't know what they're getting into, they're just not gonna go 'cause it's uncharted waters for them in most cases.
Alexander Chukovski: Although there is this guy, I don't know if you know, Jerry Lee's like an influencer, career coach type of guy on Instagram, does these crazy videos, "Apply 200 jobs in two minutes" and stuff like that. That's kind of his niche. And he's actually doing a lot of advertisement for Lever and Greenhouse and all the nice ATSs, has two million audience. I think he's helping them, he's helping educate people. So I'll bet that in maybe one year, we'll see that Greenhouse, Lever and some of the other nicer ATSs probably outperform job boards for certain niches that they're very strong. Like crypto, for example, is very Lever and Greenhouse-driven.
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: They get a lot of traffic. So we compete with them. I don't compete with Indeed on Google Jobs. Not at all. I compete with Greenhouse and Lever.
Chad Sowash: So a quick commercial, 'cause Alex and I are both advisors for this company. I think CV Wallet will probably be the heir apparent 'cause we really need... And this is something that Taleo tried back in the day, they had the universal resume, right? And because they were so big, they thought they could pull it off. The problem is nobody else wanted to use it because Taleo, much like Indeed is today, was the big bully in the room, right? So you need kind of like an honest third party who's out there to be able to provide this type of service. Do you think this could be something that Google actually thinks is attractive, or do you think they even give a shit?
Alexander Chukovski: I don't think they really care about it. I think that's a great use case. It's the only use case for blockchain in recruiting. There are no other ones. Whoever tells you this, anything else then just shoot them or run away. But I mean, Google can actually verify people, 'cause most people have a Gmail address. Do you remember the login with Gmail thing?
Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: That's a verification. That's a profile verification. So that's kind of a competitor to what we do in this other company that you just advertised.
Chad Sowash: The challenge is which Gmail account you wanna use when you verify your identification.
[laughter]
Alexander Chukovski: BustyLatina69 is mine.
[laughter]
Joel Cheesman: BBL71. Yeah.
Chad Sowash: BigBootyLatina69.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Alexander, you're an SEO and it's pretty clear from this interview in the green room that you pay a lot of attention to rankings and what that means to your traffic. Do you have any sense for, if you look for a job on Google for Jobs, you have like maybe three or four job boards that you can choose from, do you have any sense for what that number one position is for traffic versus number two, three, and four? 'Cause I know in SEO for regular results, they know that 97% click that first ranking or that first result, and then it goes down significantly from there. Do you see the same thing with Google for Jobs or is it too early to tell?
Alexander Chukovski: It really depends on the country and on the niche. Right? So if we stick with the US, 'cause you don't care about Europe anyway, I would say the first place is really like a hardcore between Zip and Indeed.
Joel Cheesman: But do you know what percentage of the clicks go to the first result versus second, what's beside that? Do you have any sense for that right now?
Alexander Chukovski: Oh yeah. It's about 80% on the first click.
Joel Cheesman: Okay.
Alexander Chukovski: 'Cause that's what we always optimize for. We always say that we wanna get clients on the first click and everything else is not important.
Joel Cheesman: That's great information. And what do you need to do to get to that first position? Is it an SEO game? Is it like, I need people to click that over everything else? Or both?
Alexander Chukovski: It's mostly like an SEO game because it's part of your optimization. It's everything. It's like page speed, it's your current technical SEO, it's your domain ranking, it's your job ads page, how is it structured, anything that...
Joel Cheesman: Page of the domain, all kinds.
Alexander Chukovski: Page of domain. Yeah. When was the job updated?
Joel Cheesman: Yeah.
Chad Sowash: So give me an idea. What kind of traffic, from one of your sites or one of your clients' sites, what kind of traffic are they seeing from Google as a percentage from overall traffic? And then also, what kind of boost does a company, if they do this right, what kind of boost could they see from Google for Jobs?
Alexander Chukovski: Well, I can give you like direct figures from one of my job sites. So with inventory of about a thousand jobs, only 500 of them are relevant for Google because of location and stuff like that.
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: We get about, what is it, 10,000 clicks every three months, organic clicks.
Chad Sowash: Okay.
Alexander Chukovski: So it's 3,300 clicks per month.
Chad Sowash: On 500 jobs.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah, yeah.
Chad Sowash: Yeah. 'Cause that's a very small sample size. Right?
Alexander Chukovski: A very small sample size.
Chad Sowash: Yeah. So that's a lot of clicks on a very small sample size.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Not too shabby.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. Then I have another European customer as a comparison. I would say 16,000 jobs in inventory, Northern Europe, probably get about, I would say close to 60,000 clicks a month. So...
Chad Sowash: Okay.
Alexander Chukovski: Pretty good. But I have a very strong local authority. And then there are these clients that I start working with, they have 200,000 jobs and they get 30 clicks per month.
[laughter]
Chad Sowash: So, those companies are probably gonna wanna get into Google for Jobs ads. So can you give us kinda like a basic intro into the Google for Jobs ads, the ad product that they came out with?
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. I mean, isn't this a secret? I don't know. Am I allowed to talk? Is Google listening? They're gonna blow up my laptop.
Joel Cheesman: They are listening.
Chad Sowash: They're always listening.
Joel Cheesman: And a lot of people already have signed agreements not to disclose stuff.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. I mean, I haven't signed anything, so I can just talk. Well, we've been waiting for this since 2016. Probably it's gonna come out in the US around the end of this year. And what we know is that it's just going to be another class of ads, right? It's going to be shown on top of the sponsored job ads, so on top of the sponsored links. So, you have sponsored Google Job ads, then you have sponsored display links, then you have Google Jobs, and then you have organic search. So, very important product. It's going to give you a lot of visibility. It's going to be a direct click out, so no intermediary page. So you can think about that in terms of performance.
Chad Sowash: Oh, nice.
Alexander Chukovski: And I think it's just going to send ripples through our industry. It's gonna have a huge impact.
Joel Cheesman: Have you seen screenshots or things in the wild that would tip you off to that sort of visual? Or is that just your best guess?
Alexander Chukovski: Well, we all saw the screenshot from Tom from Appcast. [laughter]
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: But if you now browse Google, occasionally there are days where they would alpha test this and beta test this. I think it's now in a beta test stage because I have been able to see a few of them. What's really interesting, in Europe we have this one small fragment on top of the Google jobs results, which says "See similar... Find jobs here and there," and it has the small levels of job boards where you can find jobs. You don't have this in the US, but in the beta of Google job Job ads, you have this in the US. So that's gonna be a major change I think when it comes to capturing the whole search page as a brand. So if you're Indeed, not bad for you.
Joel Cheesman: So just to be clear, it'll be at the top of the job search results, there'll be direct links to that job. So it won't be, "Here are the results," and then that first spot, that first link, I assume that would be like paid and it would say ad. That's not what we're looking at. You're not buying the first link in a job posting. You're buying display ads basically, or ads at the top of the search results.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. You're buying display ads on the top of search results. It's gonna be three or four, like a carousel type of thing. And that probably's gonna be connected to your bidding and what you're willing to bid. It's gonna be the first thing that people see on mobile.
Chad Sowash: So if, you know Google Shopping, if you've ever gone through that experience, then they have tried to assimilate that user experience from what I've been told and the screenshots that I've seen. So if you haven't tried Google Shopping, go try it out and then you'll get kind of like a flavor for that. So you have actually said Alex, that you believe that this Google for Jobs ad component is going to be a supreme, supreme product. Why do you think that? Why do you think it's gonna be better than Indeed or any of the other major sites that are out there?
Alexander Chukovski: Well, it's probably five reasons, but let's focus on the two main ones. So user intent recognition. If you think about Google Jobs, the way it understands that you're searching for jobs and it knows what kind of jobs you're searching for, this is based on the technology that Google built for job-matching. There was this product in 2017 called Google Cloud Talent-something, I don't anymore. They changed the name so many times. It was a supreme job-matching product, right? So it had a very extensive in-house developed taxonomy, 250,000 occupations, three different layers, 50,000 skills relationships between them. Very good products. No idea why it never actually managed to work out. But...
Chad Sowash: Money.
Alexander Chukovski: That's what they use on Google Jobs, yeah, to understand what the search intent of users is and to show them corresponding jobs. And that's gonna be the same technology that's going to power Google Job ads.
Chad Sowash: My conspiracy theory was they were using that in their large language model. As you started to get all that information from all of those areas and they were pushing in, they were using it in a large language model to be able to actually hone their own algorithm.
Joel Cheesman: Conspiracy theory.
[laughter]
Alexander Chukovski: There's this other theory that they just assume that they can translate the whole thing with natural language...
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: And the language models, but it didn't work out. 'Cause labor markets are complex. You cannot just translate them.
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Do you anticipate it'll be a penny a click to start and the market will drive prices up from there, similar to how pay-per-click came out in 2002 or '03?
Alexander Chukovski: I think that there will be some, let's say, arbitrage opportunities in the markets until everyone really jumps on the opportunity. So definitely money to be made.
Joel Cheesman: But do you think Google will charge as little as a penny, or do you think they'll have a higher threshold coming out the gate?
Alexander Chukovski: I think it will be higher out of the gate.
Joel Cheesman: Okay.
Alexander Chukovski: And I mean, they'll do the bidding for you automatically, so yeah.
Joel Cheesman: Some people don't know this, but Bing does get a lot of traffic, and they've basically copied the format of what Google's doing. They used to do only LinkedIn 'cause they own them, but now it's a competitive product. Are you getting your jobs onto Bing? Do you have any data on that or experience? Or is there a reason why you're not on it?
Alexander Chukovski: Well, I mean, Bing had a nice jump in performance during the whole generative AI phase. That was great.
Joel Cheesman: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: It wore off. So right now it's at the same level as it was before. You can get a couple of clicks. They do have a sponsored job product. But in order to get in, you need cooperation with Microsoft. And no one in Microsoft knows how to actually get in. I've asked so many times. So right now it's probably mostly reserved for LinkedIn.
[laughter]
Chad Sowash: Imagine that. Imagine that. So let's talk a little bit about impact globally. You talked about before some of the pressures that are actually happening in the global market against Google and they've been fined dramatically, which is... I mean, it's good. It's good for the bully to get smacked around a little bit every now and again. Do you think that this is going to be rolled out carte blanche and then it's gonna be global? Or do you think they're gonna be pretty much dead zones in the globe, like the UK or something like that, where they're just... They really just don't wanna play in that sandbox.
Alexander Chukovski: Yeah. I mean, they're probably not going to roll out in France, right? [laughter] No, I mean, joke aside, so US by the end of the year, for sure. UK, I don't see an issue there 'cause UK is not part of the EU anymore. So...
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: Who cares? It can go wrong. And then about Europe, I think we'll see a subsequent launch on a country by country way, the same way they did it with Google Jobs.
Chad Sowash: Sure.
Alexander Chukovski: There was a new lawsuit announced in Denmark against Google, again, because of Google Jobs and some competitiveness and copyright infringement and that kind of stuff. So I think that's probably going to hold them off a little bit 'cause there is a potential lawsuit there. I mean, it's going to be such a great product. If you think about a country like Germany, where people pay €1,600 for a job posting to StepStone and suddenly they have this alternative where for 50 bucks, they can get, I don't know, five amazing job applicants, that's gonna be problematic for some of the job boards. And I'm sure they'll try out something against Google.
Joel Cheesman: Speaking of lawsuits, let's talk about Elon Musk real quick. A little bit off-topic, but you listen to our show, you know that X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, is rolling out job postings. Companies that are sort of verified companies can post jobs. I assume those jobs will eventually make it over to Google for Jobs. Have you seen any evidence of that? Just overall thoughts on Twitter/X getting into this game.
Alexander Chukovski: Well, obviously, Elon Musk needs money. I mean, that's kind of clear. So he wants to dive into recruitment marketing. I haven't seen anything on Google Jobs. And I think Twitter is becoming a more closed platform now. So the whole tweet indexing anyway is a hard stuff. So imagine getting jobs indexed. That's gonna be even harder. But I don't know. I just don't see it as a big game changer in our industry. All the problems that I can think of with regards to your brand to advertise on Twitter, why would you do that? That's like suicide.
Chad Sowash: Yeah.
Alexander Chukovski: God, I hope he's not gonna sue me. [laughter]
Joel Cheesman: The guy from Crypto Careers says putting your shit on Twitter is a bad move, everybody.
[laughter]
Chad Sowash: Well, Alex, we could talk to you all day, my friend, but we're gonna cut it off here. We're gonna have you back when this is all real, it's live, it's not alpha, beta, any of that stuff. But until then, if listeners wanna connect with you, where would you send them?
Alexander Chukovski: Just go on LinkedIn, type in Alexander Chukovski and connect with me.
Joel Cheesman: Alexander, stay out of my search history. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out.
Chad Sowash: We out.
Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.