Just when Indeed looks like they've run out of spaghetti to throw at the wall, they did what this week? We're clearly not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy!
This week's topics are confusing at best.
Who's steering the ship at "The World's Largest Job Site."?
and we throw in Kroger drones and military dogs roaming the streets of NYC for good measure.
We're talking end of days shit here people.
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 (20s):
Oh yeah. It's not a blog. It's a social media platform everybody. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast earthlings. I'm your cohost Joel "still banned on Facebook" Cheeseman
Chad (33s):
and I'm Chad "bear down" Sowash
Joel (36s):
And on this week show Indeed perplexes, Facebook workplace flexes and Base Camp more like face plant am I right? Buckle up.
Jobvite PROMO (48s):
You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve.
Jobvite PROMO (1m 28s):
I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. .
Chad (1m 34s):
You still haven't seen Bridgerton?
Joel (1m 36s):
I have not. Have you watched Chad yet?
Chad (1m 38s):
I have not.
Joel (1m 40s):
Well, there you go. You watch Chad and I'll watch an episode of Bridgerton.
Chad (1m 44s):
I'm not watching Bridgeton
Joel (1m 45s):
Right after I watched Downton Abbey, I thought it was Downtown Abbey forever. And I saw a billboard in New York city and I was like, Oh God, Downtown Abbey's hot. My wife goes it's Downton Abbey. But yes, watch Chad dammit. It's funny.
Chad (2m 3s):
Yeah. So I want to start off right out of the gate saying I've, I've always liked the Chicago Bears because of Walter Payton, because of the Fridge. Because I mean, when we grew up right in April.
Joel (2m 15s):
And the Shuffle.
Chad (2m 16s):
Oh yeah. Super bowl shuffle. I mean, all those things, Jim McMahon wearing the sunglasses. I mean,
Joel (2m 21s):
Ditka. SNL skits.
Chad (2m 23s):
Ditka. Yeah, but I have to say that a big shout out right out of the gate to the Chicago Bears during the NFL draft are our boy Justin Fields. I love this kid. He fell down the ranks. He's like the, probably the number one or number two pick athlete wise pick wise throughout the entire draft. He fell to number 11 due to information coming out that he had, he has epilepsy. Now, now this kid has been QB one since high school. I'm talking about nationwide QB one.
Joel (2m 59s):
Well, technically One B after Trevor Lawrence, but okay.
Chad (3m 3s):
In high school, he was one in college, maybe two, one or two, right depending on the team? And he fell down 11 and he's never had problems, quote/unquote "problems" with the epilepsy because he takes his meds and he's stays on his regimen. So, I mean, this is, this is a big thing. The kid has a disability, right? But he is a monster six, three, 225 pounds. Has a rocket for a fucking arm. Good on the Chicago bears. I can't wait.
Joel (3m 34s):
Oh the Bears. And now you have Rogers wanting out of Green Bay. Like this is turning into a football show, but like Roger's in Green Bay. And there's speculation that the Browns are trying to trade for Rogers. Like, I'm very confused by all this.
Chad (3m 49s):
Well, I, as we talk about Cleveland, let's talk about evergreen podcasts who won 4 communicator awards. That's right. Evergreen podcast out of Cleveland, Ctown baby. And guess what? Guess what?
Joel (4m 4s):
What Chad?
Chad (4m 5s):
We the Chad and Cheese show actually won an award of excellence around an individual episode in the business class. And you're going to love this. The episode was CareerBuilder Smokescreen. CareerBuilder is the gift that keeps on fucking giving.
Joel (4m 28s):
Yeah. How apropos that our first real award involves CareerBuilder and ripping them a new one. We have a resi. That's just good fun. But this is, this is like a real shit. This is like an iHeart radio ad. This is like real legitimate industry shit. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. Do we win a cash reward for that or anything? Are we going to get a Rolls Royce, a gift from, from evergreen? Probably not.
Chad (4m 52s):
I'm sure they're going to hook us both up with Maseratis.
Joel (4m 55s):
Probably somebody who is getting something delivered is Jennifer Riley, our new, a whiskey recipient sponsored by Sovren. We sent out a bottle of whiskey. They get a Chad's choice and a Cheese's choice every month. Jennifer has gotten mine. I think yours is on the way. And we've scheduled a tasting with Robert Ruff of Sovren for next week.
Chad (5m 18s):
I messaged. I messaged her yesterday and said, congrats, you know? And she said, wait a minute. I have two bottles coming. Joel sent me one too. And I'm like, that's how we roll.
Joel (5m 28s):
That's how we roll baby two for, two for a shout out to Facebook for banning Trump. That's all I have to say about that. Or continuing the ban on Trump and the best headline of the week was I think it was vice. It said Donald Trump has launched his social media platform in quotes. And it's just a blog, which I thought was really, really funny.
Chad (5m 51s):
I think it was funny. He's he's been quoted in saying that press releases are more eloquent than tweets, but they're still full of shit and lies overall. But I mean, I think it's, it's hilarious. He loses this flame thrower being Twitter and Facebook and really social media. And you know, now he's writing shit on blogs.
Joel (6m 14s):
Donald Trump blogger. Love it. Love it. Shout out to our buddy, Matt Baxter at Wedge, they raised another round of funding. 1.6 million. Shout out to them. If you miss their firing squad episode, make sure you check that out.
Chad (6m 30s):
Yup. LinkedIn apparently has high Q in continued legal hell. Our judicial system is so fucked up. Whatever happened to speedy LinkedIn is just pretty much grinding. Hi, Q via time. And I'm sure attorney fees at this point.
Joel (6m 47s):
Chad, we have the best juror judicial system that money can buy. And I don't want to hear another word about it.
Chad (6m 53s):
If you've got the money, you got the best justice. That's exactly right.
Joel (6m 58s):
Just ask OJ.
Chad (6m 59s):
Shout out to listener Michelle Raymond from My G network. Have you heard of this platform?
Joel (7m 5s):
My G-spot what?
Chad (7m 7s):
Yeah, pretty close. Now it's called my G work, which it's it's a LinkedIn network. It's set up just like LinkedIn, but it is for the LGBTQ community and you it's obviously more anonymous, but we're thinking about having her on during pride month to do some educational interviews. We've got a couple of dumb white dudes here, and I think it'd be good to have her on and help us with pronouns and shit like that. Right.
Joel (7m 37s):
We're doing like a pride month series. What what's going on there?
Chad (7m 41s):
Yeah. Why not? I mean, did you just do a series with again, two dudes who really need educated? And I think there are many people that are out there today that have the same questions. It's like, I don't understand the pronouns. I don't get this. What are these acronyms? And et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, you know what, let's go ahead and have the conversations and have those hard conversations out in the open and have people, you know, to answer them and educate us. And hopefully again, some of our listeners will get educated too.
Joel (8m 11s):
Yeah. So by the way, goddammit. So Joe Lockwood shout out and apologies. Speaking of people who should be on our June series, if we're doing that. So sending shit to Europe is always a crap shoot anyway. So I sent Joe a t-shirt and who knows when I sent it? I could probably look at the postmark. It was probably six months ago. And the fucker came back this week. No, it had a rip in it. So he couldn't see the whole address. So I've got to go back to the whole drawing board and send it back to Joe. So Joe apologies if you're listening, but God damn it sending shit to Europe is like sending it to Mars. Like it's a total crap shoot takes forever.
Joel (8m 53s):
Anyway. So shout out to Joe, we'll get that shirt back in the mail ASAP and I'll drop another 30 bucks to send it to you. However much it fucking awesome.
Chad (9m 1s):
Yeah. I think the US postal system after that last fucking idiot that was in charge. I think we're still trying to rebuild it after that.
Joel (9m 10s):
When is Elon Musk's gonna fix the mail? God damn it.
Chad (9m 13s):
That's a good call.
Joel (9m 13s):
Screw this Martian mission shit. Fix the mail.
Chad (9m 16s):
Very good call. We also, also not an award, but we love lists. We're a sucker for lists. We made Fetcher's six must listen to podcasts for recruiters. Not too shabby.
Joel (9m 31s):
You read it. It's pretty spot on because we're, I think we're right above. What's his name? Brett guy. Matt Alder time.
Chad (9m 40s):
Matt Alder.
Joel (9m 41s):
So yeah, so we're above Alder and ours is like, they break shit and piss people off and, and machine gun start-ups and then his is like, it's a great list in over a cup of coffee or tea. And I'm like, wow, they kind of got that right. So way to go Fetcher. Very nice. And I'll get Alder right. Eventually.
Chad (9m 60s):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you will. Not so much free, free, free. I sound like that one commercial. We're talking about free t-shirts from Emissary. Free t-shirts from Emissary. Free beer from AdZuna. And free bourbon, that's two bottles of bourbon, from Sovren. And where do you go, Joel?
Joel (10m 19s):
You got to go to Chadcheese.com/free. Put in your info, for a chance to win all that shit. Folks.
Chad (10m 27s):
Love it. Love it. Topics? Topics!
Joel (10m 34s):
All right. What the fuck is going on in Indeed? You got some scoop.
Chad (10m 39s):
So yeah, I actually received several calls this week. Texts, DMS, all this other fun stuff. And it seems that Indeed's fucking shit up again. Does that surprise anyone? No, no.
Joel (10m 50s):
That's weird.
Chad (10m 51s):
During a time when hiring companies cannot get enough candidate traffic to their jobs, Indeed drops another hammer on gig employers. That for most of our listeners who are out there, who don't know, we are at the point where there's more budget out there for performance driven ads than can be spent because candidates are not clicking on the jobs. They're not applying, you know, the cost per application, the cost per click, those types of things. So the budgets are huge and they're not being spent. That's setting the table for on Monday, Indeed kicked gig like job postings from companies like Uber, Lyft, Door Dash, Instacart, and all of the other gig like listings off their general job search and over to gigs.Indeed.com and some hiring companies.
Chad (11m 48s):
Some of these companies actually saw a 90% drop in traffic and remember, they weren't getting the volume they needed in the first place. Demand is high. And you got to question the timing. I mean, making the switch, you got to question, but the timing on this, this is pretty fucked up.
Joel (12m 9s):
Yeah. So, a few things about this. I wanna underscore that you said these folks saw at 90% decrease in traffic, that's gonna really hurt the bottom line for them. The other thing I want to highlight that you said is that there's more budget now than can be spent. There's more budget than can be spent. Those are two serious like points to highlight. And those are maybe they're on podcasts in and of themselves. But when I, so you dropped this on, on us yesterday, I think. And it was sorta cryptic. So I've been trying to like kind of digest what's going on. And either Indeed is smarter than everyone else in the room, or they don't know what the fuck they're doing at all.
Joel (12m 53s):
And I don't know which way I'm leaning, other than they don't know what the hell they're doing because we've seen in the last year plus, they throw a ton of spaghetti at the wall.
Chad (13m 2s):
Yeah.
Joel (13m 2s):
They've shut shit down. They've opened up shit. They've renamed shit. They've done all kinds of crazy shit. And this is the latest of crazy shit that they've done, right? Uber, Lyft, Door Dash, these are some of the few like of the people that are spending tons of money and have money to spend it's these guys and to fuck them over makes no sense to me at all. Other than we can't provide them the click, so let's get them a more, less clicks. So where are they going to go there? Our competition while we've been busy buying up the competition, Google doesn't charge yet for traffic. So that's money that could be spent there that isn't, by the way, Google needs to do Google needs launch a pay-per-click solution, a stat because people have money to spend on them and will do that.
Joel (13m 46s):
So I'm a little confused by the whole thing. The phenomenon of nobody's looking, searching for jobs anymore. No one's clicking on jobs. No one's applying to jobs. And that goes back to what we talked about a few weeks ago and continues to be an issue with like, nobody wants to work. People want to buy Bitcoin and play, play, play X-Box and get government checks and stimis, that's going to run out eventually, but we also have some systemic issues, which we're also going to talk about on the show where warehouse workers and a lack of supply there. And what are we gonna do about that? It's a trillion dollar problem that we're looking down the barrel of. So we've got some real workforce issues in our country and Indeed is just, I guess, one side note with what's going on.
Joel (14m 32s):
But I just, I don't think they know what the hell they're doing over there. They're just throwing shit at the wall, hoping that it sticks.
Chad (14m 38s):
So Indeed is once again, crying user experience as the reason for this change, because they've been flooded with gig jobs. It's amazing. This makes Indeed's tech team look a bunch of fucking idiots, just inept. I mean, seriously, if you think about it, your search tech isn't basic enough to provide users with relevant content. Indeed is basically saying we have a shitty product and our tech team sucks with this whole change. I mean, I don't know how else anyone can see this. We're talking about providing relevant content. You're saying that you have too many jobs from this segment and it's like, what's pretty fucking simple.
Chad (15m 22s):
If you know how to do search, you should be able to filter in and filter out anything that's relevant or not relevant. So yes, the timing is horrible. This whole user experience angle is bullshit and yes, they do have shitty tech. We get that. But what is the play here? Do they see that the gig economy is growing so rapidly and not to mention with prop 22 and all this other crazy shit that they want to split things off to create two different types of sites so that they can try to monetize even more. I don't understand the play other than a long-term play. And this is just really shitty timing.
Joel (16m 2s):
You know, you bring out a really good point in regards to customization and in a world where, you know, Tik TOK knows exactly what I want to watch. And what you watch is totally different than what I watch. The job board classified industry has really dropped the ball on customization of search results. And for the most part, I'm guessing 60 to 70% of Indeed's users are logged in when they're using Indeed because they kind of force you to do it. They encourage you to do it. If you get job alerts, like they push you to become a member. And I'm sure a lot of, at least 50, 60, 70% are.
Joel (16m 43s):
So if you know, someone's logged in, you know, their search behavior, you know what they're clicking on, you know what they're looking at for long periods of time and you ultimately know what kind of jobs that they're looking for that they want. So they shouldn't actually even have to search after a certain period when they go to Indeed, you should know that when John DOE goes to Indeed and he's logged in, or she's logged in that, this is what they want to see. And you show that to them automatically. We are way far away from that in terms of job search and classifieds. But you great, you bring up a great point that if their tech is so good, they should know that this person never looks at Uber jobs. They never apply to Uber jobs. So we're not going to show them Uber jobs.
Joel (17m 24s):
We're gonna stop showing them Uber jobs and show them the jobs that they do want and that they do click on and apply to. And they haven't done that. And if anyone should be doing and it's Indeed.
Chad (17m 32s):
Yep. Now we've talked about how shitty their product has been from a search standpoint, in a delivery of content, right. In just emails, right? You subscribe to emails and you get a bunch of shit in your email, right.
Joel (17m 47s):
Glassdoor's just as bad. Glassdoor's worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drop the ball
Chad (17m 51s):
On one company who seems to have this down. And I don't know, maybe it's a privacy thing or not, is Facebook.
Joel (17m 59s):
Yeah. So, so Facebook workplace, God bless them. They just keep chugging on organically. So Facebook's enterprise platform Workplace, this is their Slack competitor, their teams competitor, claims 7 million paying subscribers. That's quite a bit of paying subscribers. This is up from 5 million in may of last year. It comes to the company, announces new features, including integrations with Microsoft 365 and Google calendar. By way of comparison and this is a little bit sobering, but Microsoft claims more than 145 million daily active users for teams and Slack past 12 million daily active users in September of 2019, which has been awhile but it's also the last time they reported that statistic.
Chad (18m 44s):
A representative told CNBC quote, you could take my mom and put her on Workplace and she would understand how to use it immediately, which is how they're sort of saying that they're different from the rest of the guys. Other new features include a new live Q and A experience and a number of new diversity features, including different skin tones for emoji and a feature that allows users to show their colleagues the correct way to pronounce their name, which I think is kind of cool. Your thoughts? I don't know how Enterprise businesses can trust Facebook.
Joel (19m 18s):
This is a, this is an SMB play for sure.
Chad (19m 20s):
No they call it Enterprise.
Joel (19m 22s):
Yeah, that's true
Chad (19m 23s):
They call it Enterprise. So I see this as an amazing SMB play. No question I agree with that, but they are pressing this Enterprise piece hard. So I see small businesses using the platform to gain local awareness and business, which I think Facebook has done really well on the locals side of the house. But I don't see how you use this as an Enterprise edition for big companies and they talk about Spotify and they do have some fairly big logos with some high employee count. From my standpoint, I want to do my social on Facebook, but if my businesses on Facebook too, can I ever really get away from it?
Joel (20m 5s):
Yeah, I'm shocked that they have 7 million paying subscribers, if they had had 7 million users that were using a free version of, I could believe that, but 7 million paying customers when you have Microsoft and you have Slack now on by Salesforce, you have two really competent players. So yeah, to me, this is simply small, small business play. How much of a slice they're going to get out of Enterprise? I don't know, but you know, that if Facebook continues to iterate and improve this product so they must believe in it. Or at least the overall vision. It is less than 1% of their revenue as a company.
Joel (20m 46s):
So it's not really moving the needle in any significant way. So I don't know if it's a bigger piece of where they're going. You know, if they're going to become more of a enterprise software competitor, are they going to have spreadsheets on Facebook and did PowerPoint on Facebook? I don't know, but it seems like it must be something, part of a bigger vision because they keep iterating and it's not a huge part and they have significant competition. That's fun to watch.
Chad (21m 13s):
And I think if they did stick with SMB, they could get a pretty big swath of those businesses. I mean, because again, you know, if mom can use it right, the owner who also has a Facebook account can use, you know, workplace. So I think there's a good transition there from an SMB standpoint, but as an enterprise and working for enterprise organizations before, there's no way in hell, I would think about trusting Facebook with any of my information at all. No fucking way.
Joel (21m 46s):
Yeah, I'd agree. But if you're a small business, you can post your jobs on Facebook. You can market on Facebook. Oh, you got your workforce chat going on on Facebook. That makes a lot of sense. But yeah, Enterprise, there must be a bigger picture. Zuckerberg you mad genius.
Chad (22m 2s):
Or they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall like Indeed.
Joel (22m 8s):
That could be the case. Let's take a break.
SOVREN PARSER PROMO (22m 10s):
You already know that Sovren makes the world's best resume CV parser, but did you know that Sovren also makes the world's best AI matching engine? Only Sovren's AI matching engine goes beyond the buzzwords. With Sovren you control how the engine thinks with every match the Sovren engine tells you what matched and exactly how each matching document was scored. And if you don't agree with the way it's scored the matches, you can simply move some sliders to tell it, to score the matches your way. No other engine on earth gives you that combination of insight and control. With Sovren, matching isn't some frustrating "black box, trust us, it's magic, one shot deal"
SOVREN PARSER PROMO (22m 54s):
like all the others. No, with Sovren, matching is completely understandable, completely controllable, and actually kind of fun. Sovren ~ software so human you'll want to take it to dinner.
Joel (23m 10s):
Make up your mind, corporate America. Open or closed, which is it?
Chad (23m 14s):
Employees just want to know what the fuck is going on.
Joel (23m 18s):
That's right. That's right. So while tech firms such as Microsoft and Twitter have announced plans to allow employees to work from home permanently, Google has resisted going fully remote and employees said there's an increasing sense of frustration among a fraction of the work force. Some threatening to quit. As a result, Google is relaxing its remote work rules for it's roughly 140,000 employees. And also probably the strongest union in the world. Expanding options around how, where, and whether staff return to the office. CEO, Sundar Pichai outlined the new plans and a note to staff this week saying that from September, he expects about 6% of Google staff will work in the office a few days a week while 20 plus 20% will be able to relocate to other company sites in other cities.
Joel (24m 6s):
And the remaining 20% can apply to permanently work from home. Google's previous plan required all staff to come into the office three days a week, Google workers will be allowed to work for four weeks per year from a location other than their assigned office. Is this a fair compromise, or is Google going to have to give up a little more power?
Chad (24m 27s):
I think it's interesting that we know how productive our teams can be remote. Right? We know that.
Joel (24m 35s):
Yeah. By the way, Google's crushing it.
Chad (24m 39s):
And yet we're having problems with this. Right. And I just, you know, I said it, I said it already, employees want to know what the fuck is going on. The anxiety of working from home right out of the gate during COVID was hard, but then they got into a productive routine. And now that is being overshadowed by the anxiety of what work is going to look like within the next month or two months or three months, because these employers, they can't get their shit together. And I think it's just amazing that we demonstrate it. When I say we employees demonstrate just how much autonomy we can take and stay productive. Not everybody can, and it's not for everybody.
Chad (25m 20s):
I get it. But to be able to allow the autonomy in some cases, I think is incredibly smart. So Google is dancing and then we have Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. They're sticking to a hard and fast rule. We want everybody back in the office. Now, I'm not a big fan of that, although that cuts down on anxiety a lot. And if I don't like that idea as being employed by them, I know now I can start looking for another job.
Joel (25m 50s):
Yeah. And I think, kind of competition for talent is driving this. And when you look at Google employees, gee, they're kind of smart and they're kind of marketable. And they're also able to get a new job tomorrow if they want. So this 140,000 strong group of employees they have a lot of pull with what the company does. And so this sort of compromise that Sindar is forced to make, I think is, is driven by the power of the employees. Which is in contrast to what we're seeing with Amazon. But knowledge workers I think are on a road to being at home whenever they want, working however they wish otherwise they're gonna vote with their feet and go work for somebody else and companies are gonna have to deal with that.
Joel (26m 34s):
It's also, you know, tech companies were the first ones to have casual Friday. Remember when that was like a real progressive power move. So, so culturally they're sort of, they're sort of used to this progressive stance. Big banks, as you mentioned and I think other companies and industries are struggling with it. So Goldman Sachs has laid the groundwork for its return to the office. CEO, David Solomon, informed employees in the U S and the UK that they should be in a position to return to the office by June 14th and June 21st, respectively, this was reported by CNN. The move is the first for a major US bank. Meanwhile, Vanguard is planning a hybrid model for its staff and Citadel aims to have most of its us staff in offices by June 1st, JP Morgan Chase also recently announced plans to have half of its employees back in the office, by July.
Joel (27m 26s):
CEO, Jamie Diamond, your buddy, told the Wall Street Journal CEO council that he's quote done with zoom. So different cultures, you're going to have different results.
Chad (27m 38s):
Yeah. And I think that, I think the key word there is culture and that's what many companies are actually going to be citing to get control.
Joel (27m 49s):
Yeah. And they should, that's really the main argument they have to do it, culture.
Chad (27m 54s):
Well it's culture. But I think that is just really a hidden reason. It's more around control. Now, if you're looking at main, you know, mainly entry-level and they do need to learn the ropes and you need managers to be able to do that. You know, obviously there are some hybrids that you could work into, or it's a hundred percent at, you know, at the office that is going to be a culture scenario. But when you're talking about individuals who have been experienced in a productive role for even before COVID right, and they were able to push through that in Covid, I don't see the reasoning behind it by saying culture because you're taking choice away from the employee.
Chad (28m 37s):
Right. So overall, overall, I think it's going to be interesting to watch. And also for everybody who's out there who didn't listen to the interview with Seth Feit, who is a Global VP of Talent over at Charter Communications, not a small company, look for the Vaccinations, Wages and Hybrid Work Podcasts that we put out this week. That was, that was a great discussion.
Joel (28m 60s):
Yeah. Yeah. The answer to all of your questions, Chad is money. So culture is a culture. Sounds really great, but it's all about Holy shit, we spent how much on leases? Let's get people back to work.
Chad (29m 11s):
Yeah. But that's short term. I don't believe that at all, that sort of term.
Joel (29m 15s):
And you can renegotiate that. And I mean, some of these companies have bought real estate and so that's okay.
Chad (29m 20s):
Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, I mean what they spend on real estate? That's a fucking drop in the bucket for God's sakes and that they can, they can hardcore court, fucking press, full court press any real estate organization.
Joel (29m 34s):
Yeah. I think if you're moving up, if you're starting your career, you're looking to advance. There's really no replacement being there and having face time with your boss and the people who are going to promote you. So I'm just curious longterm, how this will play out in terms of the demographics of who goes in and who's at the office versus who isn't. Because my expectation is that people have kind of become comfortable, are going to be the ones that are at home and the ones that want to like work their way up are going to be the ones on the ground doing the work in the office. But time will tell.
Chad (30m 10s):
Yeah, I think, I think employers have to remember one thing is that you're dealing with humans and we have only one of these things. One only one of these lives on this blue earth. And if the US continues to play this, you know, live to work, instead of work to live scenario, they're going to be, they're going to be in the same issue that some of these companies are going to be faced with, with organizations like Base Camp people ejecting, because they can't talk about what they want to talk about, you know, in the office.
Joel (30m 48s):
Yeah. It's a great time to go poaching on Base Camp, right about now. So more than more than one third of base camps, 57 employees resigned after CEO Jason Freed announced that quote, "societal and political discussions" end quote would no longer be allowed on the company's internal chat forums. Behind the scenes Freed had been dealing with an employee reckoning over a longstanding company practice of maintaining a list of funny customer names some of which were Asian and African and origin. The internal discussion over that list had been oriented primarily around making Base Camp feel more inclusive to its employees and customers. But Freed and his co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson.
Joel (31m 30s):
Gee is that the whitest name you've ever heard? had been taken back by an employee post, which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially motivated violence and closed the thread. They also disbanded an internal committee of employees who had volunteered to work on issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion. So should political speech be allowed in the workplace or should employees just shut up and dribble?
Chad (31m 57s):
It's a pretty weak move by a tech company who, you know, if you're in and around Silicon Valley, everything's open. We want to hear what you have to say. You know, it's one of those things until we don't. And that's the thing is that you've had individuals over the years who are, or who are you know, of the LGBTQ of color or what have you, they've had to put up with this shit for years, for hundreds of years, right? And now you get a couple of white guys who are uncomfortable and they want to shut it down. My response to that is fuck you. The uncomfortableness of life is what we deal with everywhere.
Chad (32m 38s):
And if you cannot manage and lead these types of discussions and use those DEI, ERG, or what have you to be able to do the right thing through your employees and through your leadership, you shouldn't be in fucking control.
Joel (32m 54s):
Yeah. I think two things on this one is, you know, that there was a time in the world where, you know, you punched a clock and from nine to five, you were at work. And, the mentality of like, when you're at work, you work and when you go home, you do whatever the hell you want. Right. But when you're at work, you're working, you're not doing anything other than working. Well over the last 10, 15, 20 years work follows us everywhere and work based on, you know, technology or whatever it is, like work follows us everywhere. So to think that these issues aren't going to start bleeding into the workplace is just stupid because it's going to happen.
Joel (33m 36s):
So to me, it's like the world has changed. This is a dynamic that is going to be real for companies, whether big or small, and this is a small company, this is 60 people. This is something that you're going to have to grapple with. The other take on this is that you can't have it both ways. And you made a great point in terms of like, look, people, you know, diverse people have been taking it for a long time and just biting their tongue or not saying anything. And apparently, you know, the founders of this company, or at least one of the founders was really active with some really far right sharing of like Breitbart articles on these forums and talking about really conservative issues. So you can't, as a founder, you know, put out conservative ideas and opinions and not expect your workers to express opinions that are diverse to yours, that counter yours to come out.
Joel (34m 29s):
And it's actually a pretty healthy thing, but you can't have it both ways. You can't tell you can't tell workers, we're not talking about this. You can't shut off the commentary on their forums when you're actually doing that as well. So yeah. Times have changed and you can't have it both ways. And then your points are well taken as, as well.
Chad (34m 50s):
Agreed, agreed. And as we talk about punching the clock, we're having issues with factory workers in this country, which you, I would never think that we would be saying because we outsourced and all of these factories shut down. And now, and now we have a need for factory workers and factories are struggling to find skilled workers for specialized roles such as welders, machinists. I mean, the list goes on. So, you know, what the fuck's going on here. Yeah.
Joel (35m 21s):
Yeah. So let me set the table here. And I think we both have some, some interesting insights. So demand for goods is skyrocketing in the U S as the US economy reopens from the pandemic. But we have a big problem. Like you mentioned, American factories can't find enough people to do the work. US manufacturing to a 37 year high in March, but the industry has more than a half million job openings. Factories are struggling to find skilled workers for specialized roles, such as welders and machinists. Manufacturers are even having trouble hiring entry-level positions that do not even require any skills. As many as 2.1 million manufacturing jobs will be unfilled through 2030 according to a study published Tuesday by Deloitte and the manufacturing Institute.
Joel (36m 6s):
The report warns that worker shortage will hurt everyone or revenue. Production end could ultimately cost the US economy up to 1 trillion by 2030. Interestingly, a manufacturing executives say part of the problem is that many young Americans just don't want to work in factories in part, because of fears about robots taking over and jobs getting shipped overseas. A couple takes I have on this, you know, and age is a nice thing, in some ways, because we can look retrospectively on this, but you and I, being kids in the seventies, like manufacturing used to be a proud position. I mean, I can remember whether it be advertisements, the build America by America slogans that sort of brought pride.
Joel (36m 49s):
And like you said, things got off-shored over the years and that, hurt the image, I think of an honest, day's work, honest days pay. I think that immigration and not having immigrants or closing the border immigrants has been a huge mistake, strategically and economically. And immigration, we're talking about like 1% of the country, we're making such a big deal out of that, like 3 million or 4 million people that immigrate here legally every year. I think that the perspective of, I don't want to, I don't want to get a job in a factory or an industry because a robot's just going to take it in a few years is fascinating to me. And I also think that just the phenomenon of, if you're a blue collar worker, you're a loser.
Joel (37m 34s):
I'm not exactly sure when that happened, but it did. And I think that we have to dig ourselves out of that brand. I think we need to lift up trade schools and community college. I know, you know, pitching community college as free or paid for by the government is kind of interesting when you look at this issue and it, like, we need to teach people that it's okay, that you don't have to be a webmaster or a Tik TOK star to be accepted in this world. And that's a big challenge to overcome.
Chad (38m 3s):
Agreed and again, looking back when we were in school, we had vocational options in high school. My cousin went through, he was, he was an electrician, right? He was ready to be an electrician pop right out after high school, we had welders, construction and all of that, you could go the college prep route, which is what I did, or you can go the other route. And that was not something that you looked down on and the companies locally pipelined those workers right into their organizations. Right out of the gate, right? They were even pretty much like interning doing half days with many of those companies, they had a job before they even had a were out of high school.
Chad (38m 48s):
And so I think what we did in this country is we started forcing kids into thinking that college was the only way to go. And we're forcing them into debt and creating the academic industrial complex that we know today. But college isn't for everyone. I think overall, the factories themselves, they know where the problems lie and they need to fix them. They need to start working with local high schools, building programs here in Columbus, Indiana. We have a vocational high school still that connects because Cummins engine company. So we need to have those vocational programs, those tech schools, et cetera, et cetera.
Chad (39m 32s):
And we should be also modeling. And I say this a lot after the U S military. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, when you were in high school, remember when they would set up in the cafeteria and they were coming in and they were recruiting and they were letting, you know, what they had to offer. These are the same things that they should be doing, these companies should be doing. They should be working directly with the schools here, tech and also with the local community colleges.
Joel (40m 2s):
Yeah. And I think, you know, you mentioned pipelining both by the military and companies as well, but there, there was a day where pipelining happened within families and, you know, grandpa worked at the factory and dad worked at the factory and now I'm going to be funneled into the factory. And we had a situation in our country where, Oh, shit, I saw dad get laid off, or I saw grandpa, you know, lose his pension. And there's a whole generation of folks that are like, I'm not touching that profession with a 10 foot pole. And that still lives with us today. And it's unfortunate.
Chad (40m 33s):
And the union busting and all that shit that happened, bad memories.
Joel (40m 38s):
We'll be right back.
JOB AD X PROMO (40m 39s):
As the best ad tool in the industry JobAdX has been providing job board publishers, direct employers, agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms, dynamic job bidding and real time ad delivery through our programmatic job advertising exchange. When we started, we described JobAdX as AdSense for jobs. Now we offer much more with switchboard and live alert, completing our full suite of dynamic programmatic advertising tools. With the best of consumer ad tech switchboard offers our dynamic technologies to all partner, job board, feed management and live alert, eliminates latency and expired job ads via email. For more information about any of our ad solutions, please reach out to us at joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com.
JOB AD X PROMO (41m 22s):
JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs.
Joel (41m 31s):
Oh yeah. Yeah. So one for the kids out there, if you haven't seen Gung-Ho a Ron Howard movie starring Michael Keaton, do yourself a favor based on our last topic and watch that, it's funny as well as sort of insightful in terms of where we've come with factory exact employment. So yeah. Chad's favorite grocery chain Kroger is testing drone delivery. Testing will begin this week near its Kroger marketplace store in Centerville, Ohio, between Cincinnati and Dayton. The flights will be managed by licensed pilots with Kroger's partner, Drone Express. Customer deliveries are scheduled to begin later this spring. And a second pilot is scheduled to launch this summer at a store in California where Kroger operates its Ralph's subsidiary.
Joel (42m 16s):
The testing comes after Kroger's e-commerce sales hit $10 billion last year, and the company begins ramping up its home delivery service aimed at doubling that figure by the end of 2023. So Chad, are you ready for drone delivered barbecue sauce to go with your autonomous Roadster pizza deliveries?
Chad (42m 37s):
Yeah. This is going to be interesting. I am not sure how the FAA actually works into this or what have you. We have an airport, a local airport here. So I think, I think it will be interesting on how it actually rolls out. If you take a look at, and we'll actually have this article on the website, you'll be able to read it. And you'll also be able to see a video of how Kroger currently has an Amazon. Like, you know, how their warehouse has a bunch of robots doing fulfillment. Kroger has that exact same thing, doing fulfillment for groceries. It is incredibly cool and weird at the same time. And they get all the groceries ready for actual truck delivery.
Chad (43m 20s):
So a human gets in the truck and they actually deliver, deliver the goods. But now they're talking about the actual, the actual drones, brilliant. At the end of the day, what we're looking at here is what we already see in Kroger's and Targets and retail all over the place, is the death of cashiers. With checking your own shit out, right? This is just going to start to take a lot of those positions now, you know, does that mean they, these individuals could perspectively move up into more technical positions? I don't know, but I guarantee you one thing that, sorry, motherfucker. The CEO of Kroger who earns $14 million a year is going to give himself a fucking pay bump.
Joel (44m 5s):
Yeah. It doesn't hurt that it e-commerce sales hit 10 billion last year. Speaking of talent crunch, I was really intrigued by this story because they're managed by licensed pilots?
Chad (44m 18s):
Drone pilots.
Joel (44m 19s):
So these aren't like pilot pilots.
Chad (44m 21s):
No.
Joel (44m 22s):
These drone pilots are different, so, okay. So there's going to be a whole profession guess coming up of people, piloting drones and that'll be a high-paid profession. So maybe all cashiers can just get licensed in drone flying and make a mint there? But yeah, I'm ready for my barbecue sauce to show up on my deck with a drone. I'm ready for that.
Chad (44m 41s):
Yeah. Julie does Instacart all the time, so I mean, we have groceries land at the front door, right? It's an actual human being doing it, but I mean, it's the same kind of scenario. It's just cutting the human out of the supply chain.
Joel (44m 54s):
Yeah. So we've got drones in the sky, delivering food and we have little Roadsters delivering a pizza from Domino's and other places. So you know what won't be in the streets? Security, the NYP have ended their contract worth $94,000 with robot, dog creator and our favorite tech company, Boston dynamics, after a fierce backlash over its use in New York City. A government spokesperson told ABC New York quote "it's creepy alienating and sends the wrong message to New Yorkers" end quotes.
Chad (45m 30s):
I see it as the militarization of robots. I mean, it's like the steady step. As we see our local police officers actually receive, like they have armored personnel carriers and shit like that. There's this militarization of our local police and something like this robo dog, it does nothing but press more of that sentiment. So I hope there are other applications for this dog cause I think it's the coolest fucking thing in the world. But yeah, I think it's a good idea to get rid of it.
Joel (46m 3s):
Yeah. So after you watch, Gung-ho watch Robocop in your eighties movie, movie-a-thon, but yeah, one of the, one of the takes on this, which I think we, we don't appreciate as, as white dudes is that for people of diverse, particularly black Americans, you know, the dog represents oppression and violence against, you know, their neighborhoods. So in the sixties you had German shepherds obviously at the hip with police controlling crowds. So that is a perspective that I don't think a lot of people thought of, when they said let's put robo dogs in the street next to policeman, but also think that this is, this is going to eventually be a thing.
Joel (46m 45s):
Now, whether it looks like a dog or it looks like four Wheeler, or it looks like whatever?
Chad (46m 50s):
A drone.
Joel (46m 51s):
Yeah. I mean, yeah. I don't know. But look, I just don't think it's going to be in the form of a dog. It'll be in the form of a poodle. Maybe, maybe that's less threatening? I don't know.
Chad (47m 1s):
If they did it as a Chihuahua, nothing, this wouldn't be an issue. This would not be an issue.
Joel (47m 7s):
Instead of one big dog it's like 10 little chihuahuas.
Chad and Joel (47m 11s):
We out
OUTRO (47m 12s):
Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of Shout Outs of people, you don't even know and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode.
OUTRO (47m 57s):
And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.