hireEZ Lemon Squeezy
The world of employment took a break from crowning unicorns this week, and that's just fine with Chad & Cheese, who have gotten a little tired of taking the crazy pills on such a regular basis.
In its place, Hiretual has a new brand and new money in the bank,
Woven took a Series A,
Bullhorn created an investment arm,
the NFL has a race problem (still), Home Depot is hiring too fast or not fast enough? ...and finally.
OnlyFans has another termination (allegedly) to add to its portfolio. This time, a cop. You have the right to remain sexy unless it steps on our Puritan sensibilities.
Take some crazy pills and enjoy!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
INTRO (1s):
Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR’s most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel (21s):
Oh yeah. Tom Brady's retiring, Punxsutawney Phil says six more weeks of winter and thousands of American troops are headed to Europe as Russia stares down Ukraine. Hi kids. It's the Chad and Cheese podcast. The feel good podcast of 2022. This is your co-host Joel "the wrong Ohio team is in the super bowl" Cheeseman
Chad (42s):
And I'm Chad "I'm going commando" Sowash.
Joel (45s):
And on this week, show HireTool is now easy like Sunday morning, Bullhorn has 20 million reasons to be their friend and stop or I'll launch an OnlyFans account. Let's do this.
Chad (1m 2s):
Ah, yeah. So
Joel (1m 3s):
Is it snowing where you are by the way? We're dealing with some snowpocalypse up here in Indiana.
Chad (1m 8s):
Nah, we, yeah, we, I do have ice and the bush, like the, well, the tree that's next to the house. It's kind of like a bush-like tree. It's all iced up and I can hear it just scraping against the side of the house, but yeah, we have like nothing when it comes to snow. Yeah.
Joel (1m 24s):
News alert everybody Chad has an icy bush. News at 11.
Chad (1m 28s):
Gonna warm it up. Can't wait.
Joel (1m 33s):
Oh,
Chad (1m 33s):
How much snow?
Joel (1m 35s):
No, we're probably up here. I mean, it's, it's continuing, coming down pretty hard right now. I'm going to say we'll get like eight to 10 inches. Okay. The good news is we're going to Phoenix soon and there will be no snow there whatsoever.
Chad (1m 47s):
Amen. And also the good news and this is definitely good news for Chris Russell because he wasn't happy with the Washington football team and he got the Commanders. Now he's not incredibly happy about the Commanders. He's certain to warm up to it.
Joel (2m 3s):
Chris, at a minimum should be happy they're not the Washington Guardians.
Chad (2m 6s):
I was hoping they would stay the Washington Football Team.
Joel (2m 10s):
Yeah, that's a tough one from an IP perspective. It's hard to trademark the football team. It is a lot of merchandise that is unlicensed when you're called the football team. Well, let's get to some shout outs. Shall we?
Chad (2m 21s):
Yes.
Joel (2m 21s):
A lot of news to cover this week. Stop me if you've heard this one before Chad, LinkedIn is back in court. So they have filed a federal lawsuit against Singapore-based Mantheos and its founders for the alleged unauthorized scraping of millions of LinkedIn member profiles using a network of hundreds of fake LinkedIn member accounts.
Chad (2m 41s):
Fake accounts!
Joel (2m 42s):
And virtual debit cards under fake names. Mantheos fraudulently obtained, LinkedIn sales navigator subscriptions, they then use these to scrape member profiles allegedly I'm shocked as you are as well. I'm sure.
Chad (2m 57s):
So we talked about fake LinkedIn accounts last week. So it's interesting that this is actually coming into the news and the courts. These are the dark arts of getting into a database and stealing shit. Right? This still goes back to the question of whether LinkedIn is it's their data or is it our data being the users. And I still think that we have a conversation to be had around that, but the way that these guys went after profiles, it's malicious. There's no question.
Joel (3m 27s):
You know, the challenge becomes profiles are commodity, and LinkedIn's going to try really hard to keep people those fake accounts and policing that and it's just, it's a constant whack-a-mole for them. And now it's on a global scale. So have fun with that.
Chad (3m 41s):
We saw companies doing this back in the early two thousands where they would get into Monster's database and they would send spiders iinto the database to go and extract. I mean, this is nothing new, right? So it's interesting. And that being said, leading into the next story, the FBI warns that cyber criminals are using fake job postings to gain access to personal data.
sfx (4m 5s):
Oh hell no!
Chad (4m 5s):
So we've always had to warn and protect against this type of activity although scammers are getting more sophisticated. Last week, Mick Griffin, the Chief Growth Officer over at Traffic in Poland said that they are seeing scammers use their 14 day free trial as a way to post free jobs into a system. And then those scam jobs are being distributed to hundreds, sometimes thousands of different job sites. So Mick and his team now are trying to manually validate all companies who requests quests the 14 day free demo. So here you have a guy in a team who's created a great lead gen system that now is turning into a chore to ensure scammers aren't scamming, right?
Chad (4m 52s):
And it's fucked up.
Joel (4m 54s):
It is fucked up and it's a problem as old as the internet and job postings. And when you get, you know, Google for jobs, I know this has been something that they're dealing with as Google's been dealing with spam of all kinds forever. I wouldn't be shocked if the Facebook issue was a lot of these fake things, scams that were going on, that they said, this just isn't worth the trouble, particularly overseas, where we don't have any jurisdiction or sort of legal system to fight it. It's a shame. You know, interestingly Craig's Craigslist revenue was largely built on these scams and saying, well, if we just charge a little bit, yeah, it's going to keep the spammers away because they're not gonna, they're only gonna spend 25 bucks to a hundred bucks to then, you know, not get what they want.
Joel (5m 37s):
So yeah, we have scammers to thank for Craigslist billion dollars that they made at least two years ago, because it was a way to fight all the spam that was going into Craigslist. So
Chad (5m 48s):
Yeah, well, if Google would just pick winners and losers and what I mean by that is actual trusted organizations to take data from, they wouldn't have this issue, but we have this, just this cesspool of job's data that's out there and they feel like they have to take all of it. And so did Facebook. They're fucking themselves. So at the end of the day, you can clean this up. There's no question you could easily clean this up. Now you're not going to have hundreds of billions of jobs or whatever the fuck is out there. Right? But you're gonna have clean data
Joel (6m 18s):
Yeah. And this is a win, it's a win for Indeed and ZipRecruiter and others that have sort of legitimate postings or at least the perception is all the listings are legitimate. Yeah.
Chad (6m 29s):
Unless, unless these different applicant tracking systems that are getting spammed are also pushing jobs into those ecosystems too. Right? So it's a virus, man. It could have infect, a lot just off of one posting.
Joel (6m 41s):
It's a virus with many variants that keep popping up and everyone's trying to find.
Chad (6m 47s):
And the motherfuckers won't get vaccinated. That being said T mobile shout out to T-Mobile. They are requiring their employees to show proof of vaccination by February 21st or face unpaid leave those employees on unpaid leave will then have until April 2nd to get vaccinated or you're gone, bye-bye go away. You're fired.
Joel (7m 10s):
And by the way, T-Mobile just reported some really good earnings. I know we've talked about them in the past with how well they treat their employees. And some of that shit pays off in a lot of different ways. So a congrats to T-Mobile.
Chad (7m 24s):
So I got to say though, continuing to push on this mandatory vaccine piece, this is interesting because we've received vacs mandate research from our friends over at Textkernel which shows that 8.1% of all us job listings have COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment. Some employers and specific industries are still hesitant to roll out these types of mandates since obviously it's already hard enough to find people to fill those positions. And that number would be much higher if the Supreme Court would have supported the mandate. Some of the industries that Textkernel actually reported on in breaking down the data, public administration was the highest with 14.6% of jobs saying, you know, there's mandatory vaccination.
Chad (8m 21s):
And then the lowest surprising yet not surprising, hospitality in food service at 2.6%. The people who are on the front lines, right?
Joel (8m 29s):
Yeah. Yeah. That's the catch 22.
Chad (8m 34s):
YEah, cause you can't fill the position.
Joel (8m 35s):
Wow. Great information for our friends at Textkernel. That's right, I got an air horn baby. All right. A shout out to Miller Light. I don't know if you knew this or not, but there's a big football game coming up Chad. Miller Light is on the bandwagon of the metaverse. So they're partnering with Decentraland. I haven't visited Decentraland, but it's apparently a place where you can buy real estate and hang out. And it's basically Second Life 2.0, for my understanding. Anyway, they're bringing a virtual bar to patrons during Super Bowl 56, which is in a week or two. The digital bar will be the only place where people can view Miller Light's ad. So they're getting around the whole, like, you know, placing an ad at the Super Bowl.
Joel (9m 18s):
There's going to do it their own little Decentraland location. Yes. Chad, why go to a real bar when you can just hang out in Decentraland? Are you in?
Chad (9m 28s):
This is the stupidest shit I've ever heard. If I want a beer, I want a beer. Right? And I don't, for the most part, I don't want their shitty beer.
sfx (9m 37s):
Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
Chad (9m 37s):
That's how I feel. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! I read this and I was like, this is the stupidest fucking thing in the world. First off, nobody wants a virtual beer. Second. What do you think the odds are? At least the audience will be for this and the viewing of this ad in the metaverse drinking fake beer versus on the fucking Super Bowl?
Joel (9m 59s):
They will get more play out of this from saying, they're going to run an ad in the metaverse than actually people that are there watching the ad in the metaverse. If I had to make a bet, I think the PR that they're getting out of this, the fact that we're talking about it, this is like the new canceled ad or the ads that are too naughty to run. Like those tend to get more play than the actual ads, because they're too scandalous for the Super Bowl and the key masters won't let them into the game. So I think this is just brilliant PR I don't think they're going to get millions and millions of people in their bar watching the game and watching their Super Bowl ad.
Chad (10m 33s):
It's just makes me not want to drink their beer even more.
Joel (10m 37s):
As if you needed any excuse, not to drink Miller Light.
Chad (10m 41s):
Exactly. Exactly.
Joel (10m 42s):
Bougie beer drinker that you are.
Chad (10m 44s):
Thank you. Thank you very much. So big shout out to SHRM. What fucking idiots these guys are. Okay. So listen, it's black history month and SHRM drops a tweet pitching why you should be a member. And it's really wrapped around all of this black history month, right? So they're using this as kind of like a facade for black history month come join SHRM. That's not that that's not the big problem, right? Not one fucking person in this ad was black. It was, it was white women and men. And this tweet is just one of the many reasons why you should not be a member of SHRM.
sfx (11m 29s):
Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
Joel (11m 30s):
Oh, wow. All right. Shout out to Gupy or Gupy. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right.
Chad (11m 34s):
Let's go with Gupy.
Joel (11m 36s):
Anyway, the Brazilian startup, we're going to be talking more about south American companies.
Chad (11m 39s):
<inaudible> Got a Brazilian?
Joel (11m 40s):
That's part of my joke. Hold on.
Chad (11m 42s):
Okay.
Joel (11m 43s):
So a good be set on Monday. It has raised $93 million in a funding round led by our friends at SoftBank out of Japan founded in 2015. Gupy. Are we going with Gupy?
Chad (11m 56s):
I like Gupy.
Joel (11m 56s):
Gupy. Alright. Gupy, with one P sure, uses AI to select, hire and train employees. Brazilian isn't just my favorite form of manscaping Chad it's also a place that pumps out HR tech. See you ruined the joke. You ruined the joke chat. Nice.
Chad (12m 16s):
My bad. Yeah. My bad also a friends of the show. Rocket Matt, or Rocket Match who are, are of the Brazilian as well.
Joel (12m 27s):
This show's going south fast. Shout out to our friend, Jeanette Leeds. She was our beer drop winner from last month. She's doing a zoom tonight with our friends at Pillar and breaking news! Jeanette is now the managing director at Hourly by AMS. So big applause, Jeanette way to go.
Chad (12m 50s):
For all those who don't remember. Jeanette was at Oleo for a number of years. And guess what? Now she's at AMS. So that's a that's pretty big news!
Joel (12m 59s):
Was the interview we did with her on our show or her show?
Chad (13m 2s):
It was our show. And we did it at HR Tech like 2018 I think it was.
Joel (13m 7s):
She's in the archives somewhere.
Chad (13m 8s):
Yes.
Joel (13m 9s):
All right. So if you want to learn, learn Jeanette some more, get to know Jeanette, check out that interview we did with her. And with that.
Chad (13m 18s):
Birthdays?
Joel (13m 18s):
We're done with the shout outs. So podcasts from last week, make sure you guys check out Cult Brand Revolution with our friend, Chris Kneeland also our interview with one of the Wolf of Wall Street guys from this past week. All right, let's get to birthdays. Celebrating a birthday this coming week. Nick Fishman.
Chad (13m 37s):
Hello?
Joel (13m 37s):
He's my old boss. He's a background check icon. A lot of people don't know him, but Nick celebrates a birthday. Bad-ass Jess <inaudible> celebrates a birthday. Yes. Jason <inaudible> Dave Ralph, one of my favorite Irish Irishman. Dave Mendoza, old timer. Jennifer <inaudible>.
Chad (14m 1s):
Yes.
Joel (14m 2s):
One of your favorites. Elizabeth <inaudible>, Jacob Elizabeth Dunlap Martin. Don't call him Rodney Dangerfield, all celebrate birthdays in the coming week. Thanks for listening guys.
Chad (14m 13s):
And while you're at it, thinking about these birthdays, you might as well. If you haven't go and register for free shit at Chadcheese.com/free, you could win free beer delivered to your doorstep by Pillar.HR, you can win free whiskey. That's two bottles of whiskey. One from Joel. One from me. That is sponsored by our friends at Sovern/Textkernel. And last but not least, you could get a t-shirt good-looking threads, baby sponsored by Emissary.ai. Go to Chadcheese.com/free register. Win some stuff.
Joel (14m 53s):
Chad it's a combed cotton t-shirt it doesn't get any more comfortable than that. You know what I'm saying?
Chad (14m 57s):
Topics!
sfx (14m 57s):
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Joel (14m 59s):
All right. Our friends at <inaudible> or in the news, is
Chad (15m 3s):
It <inaudible>? I thought it was hired.
Joel (15m 4s):
We'll get to that. We'll get to that. All right. They announced the closing of 26 million in funding, bringing the total raise to about $45 million. With the new funding, the company plans to invest further in product innovation, expand operations and scale the team globally. But wait, Chad.
Chad (15m 27s):
What? There's more?
Joel (15m 28s):
That's not all the company is also rebranding as Hire Easy.
sfx (15m 32s):
That was easy.
Joel (15m 35s):
Which the company says reflects its mission to make outbound recruiting well, easy.
sfx (15m 38s):
Easy peasy, lemon, squeezy.
Joel (15m 40s):
New money, new name, Chad, what are your thoughts?
Chad (15m 43s):
First off you weren't impressed with the $26 million. Why?
Joel (15m 47s):
It wasn't an impressed thing. It was like, well, in the shadow of Seek Out raising $115 million and being a unicorn, it seems sort of anticlimactic. However, talking to the company, the money was there to be had. It was a matter of sort of doing it strategically. And I think how these companies are evolving, sort of reflects that. So I backed down a little bit on it, not being impressive. I think it's a little bit more strategic.
Chad (16m 12s):
I think it's important for us to be able to take a look at, you know, the numbers and the tech and understand that, you know, there's more than one path and Seek Out, obviously going into unicorn land with all that fucking cash, they've also gone through a shit ton of dilution, right? Not to mention when you get that money, that much money, you do lose some control, especially over roadmap, go to market, a lot of things, right? So you're pushing a lot of different directions. So I think personally, it was smart not to take a lot of cash. And this also, I believe cements that they're going to be more focused on being a point solution rather than trying to be, you know, that one platform that suits them all.
Chad (16m 57s):
So I, I like their focus and the idea of not taking a shit load of cash, because obviously there aren't many organizations that can afford to buy, Seek Out after this, but Hire Easy. They're still in the target range. Right? So new name, I think it was necessary because I didn't know what their fucking name was in the first place. Some people said high hired tool. Some people said Hire Tool. Yeah. And, and I understand it was kind of like this play on words of hiring and being virtual and whatnot, but it just never worked for me. So this rebrand, even though some people are like Hire Easy, I don't get it. It's like it.
Joel (17m 33s):
Hurries.
Chad (17m 34s):
Yeah. Hurries. It made sense. And if you take a look at the logo, it's easy to understand it's Hire and then it's got the big, easy. So I think they're doing a good job there.
Joel (17m 46s):
Yeah. Yeah. You're cool with it.
sfx (17m 47s):
Easy peasy, lemon, squeezy.
Joel (17m 48s):
The people, find your business as quickly becoming a commodity. And it's kind of precious that the Joe Rogan story that we talked about, I think last week kind of comes into this play. So music is a commodity as well. Right? You sign the right licenses. Everyone can have this music. So in Spotify case, the pivot was let's get into podcasting. Let's get some of these personalities on board. It's apparently pissing off some hippies from the seventies. But ultimately I think that choice was something that they did to differentiate themselves. And our space is not much different. Everyone has these profiles. They're clearing houses where you can get access to them, their <inaudible>, where you can have access. Obviously some is fresher than others.
Joel (18m 29s):
And when you talk to recruiters, there is some difference there. But as we look at what I would say would be like the OGs of the sourcing technology business, Hiring Solved, Seek Out and now Hire Easy. They're all pivoting into different areas. So with Hiring Solved, the pivot was more like we're going to do internal search for you better than anybody else. And for Seek Out, it's like rule the world, cradle to grave platform, kind of kind of strategy. And with Hire Easy. From my perspective, it's sort of like a HubSpot for recruiting. Like we want to be the outbound marketing arm slash recruiting arm for a business. So which Pivot's going to work. Maybe all of them may be none of them, but I think that they're all forced to look at their businesses and say, we can't just survive on people search and people finder.
Joel (19m 14s):
We have to do more than that. And we're going to take our current crop of customers and our market share and try to grow that into new and interesting ways. So I think it's exciting that they're all sort of doing this or not stuck in their business as is. And obviously the investors believe in the vision. We'll have fun talking about it on the podcast, for sure. Yeah.
Chad (19m 39s):
So I think the, this new launch of brand and story and focus is good. There's no question. It helps. They're going to have to evolve the tech though. For example, making it easier for recruiters to email spam is nice, but it's not new it's table stakes today, right? It doesn't move the bar. Now, if the system could help a company nurture candidates versus spam, right? That's awesome. That's moving. And when you're talking about candidate enrichment, which they do talk about, I'd like to know how, because this is really what employers need to leverage. Better. Employers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on tech and recruitment marketing over the years to attract candidates into their system, then allow them to wither a way.
Chad (20m 29s):
So how can tech like Hire Easy help teams stop committing HR malpractice? I also believe that they are going to have to pick a side of the street to work. Currently Hire Easy has pricing for single recruiters. So a transactional model along with an enterprise model. And if I were an investor and to be clear, I am not, I would push hard for them to choose a side of the street. These types of models lend themselves to a big corporation, buying a cheap seat for a single recruiter as a test. And then for a myriad of reasons, the system doesn't get used like it should. And it's called a failed test, meaning you just lost an opportunity for an enterprise client. So I think they have to pick a side of the street.
Chad (21m 9s):
They can't have both.
Joel (21m 11s):
The side note left-field from that, they've done a really good job of the warm and fuzzies.
Chad (21m 14s):
Yeah.
Joel (21m 14s):
They were originally sort of a, you know, a tech heavy sort of cold organization.
Chad (21m 20s):
I blamed Shannon for that.
Joel (21m 23s):
Yeah. I mean, so, so Shannon Patrick York, a few of the other folks that they brought on, they've done a really good job at reaching out to the community. You've probably saw posts if you're connected to recruiters in this space about sharing pictures and videos and stories from the recent rebrand announcement and that's all Shannon and that team that they brought in. So one, if you're a company doing a rebrand, it's a really good idea to get the thought leaders out there. You and I were invited, but had other things we had to do, but it's a really good idea to bring the community into that process. Obviously it's good PR, but also they can speak intelligently about it.
Joel (22m 5s):
They've done a good job of that in addition to the money in the rebrand. So, yep. Keep on keeping on.
sfx (22m 13s):
Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
Joel (22m 15s):
All right. Let's talk about Woven.
Chad (22m 17s):
Yes.
Joel (22m 18s):
Indianapolis based and Firing Squad survivor who uses a combination of human and machine powered evaluators to uncover tech talent has secured $8 million in series A funding on the heels of its recently launched WovenMatch, which pairs hiring managers with experienced developers based on their Woven assessment results. Woven has more than doubled its revenue and head count over the past eight months. Woven plans to use the investment to expand Woven Match. C