Job Board Brawl: Cheese vs. The Doctor

We say a lot of things on the podcast that people disagree with. Most people stop short of writing a blog post about how wrong they think one, or both, of us are. However, Jeff Dickey-Chasins, affectionately known as Job Board Doctor, decided to put the virtual pen-to-paper and express how wrong Joel was in his analysis of how job boards are facing a Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the form of Google / LinkedIn, AI, automation and the gig economy. Just when you think the debate will get too nasty to take, Chad swoops in as peacemaker ... or is it instigator? A must listen for every job board employee and customer alike. The Doctor is IN.

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Intro: 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.

[music]

Joel: Oh, yeah. It's your therapist's favorite podcast, AKA, the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, the Jeff Taylor to my Richard Johnson, Chad Sowash is in the house. And today we welcome a longtime fan of the show.

[applause]

Joel: Jeff Dickey-Chasins.

Chad: There he is.

Joel: Owner of Job Board Doctor. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Jeff: Howdy, boys and girls. I'm sorry. Howdy boys.

Joel: Oh, we have girls listening, it's okay.

Jeff: Oh, okay.

[laughter]

Joel: Boys and girls. Yep.

Jeff: Thank you for inviting me on.

Joel: Sure. Now, you are an icon in the industry, but some people don't know who you are. So for those listeners that don't have a clue, give us the Twitter bio, the elevator pitch on Jeff.

Jeff: As an icon, I can say that I started out in the industry back in 1997 with Dice, a little tech job board, and was fortunate enough to sort of see it go public and then exit before everything blew up. I've worked with some other job boards along the way, but in 2009 actually started Job Board Doctor. I'm a business consultant that works with job boards, and no one that I saw out there was really doing that at that point. And I thought, what the hell? And to be quite honest, I've been busy ever since. I've worked with probably 750 job boards around the world.

Chad: Wow.

Jeff: And pretty much any niche and any location that you can imagine, I think it's really fun. I'm a self-described job board geek and quite proud of it.

Joel: Does that work well at the bar when you're picking up chicks?

[laughter]

Jeff: Yeah.

Chad: Not so much. Not so much. How about Wizard behind the job board curtain?

Joel: He's the wiz. Nobody beats him.

[laughter]

Chad: Okay. Okay, listen. Okay. Let's get to business here. So let me set up today's discussion, banter, disagreement, whatever this turns out to be. So in an episode in early November last year entitled, Google Reveals, Indeed Falls, & Labor Wins, Joel waxed poetic on what he called the four horsemen of the job board apocalypse, which mean he believes that these are the four signs that job boards are seeing impending doom. Now then on November 21st, the job Board Doctor, you Jeff, penned an article and entitled, "the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Sorry. No." which refutes Joel's line of thinking. So now, here at the Chad and Cheese podcast, we love snark, banter and different lines of thinking, which is why today we are going to dig into the horsemen one by one. And here are two diversion paths of thoughts. So are you both ready?

Joel: I'm ready.

Jeff: You betcha.

Chad: Here we go. Play horseman number one.

Joel: Number one is Google and LinkedIn. Google for Jobs, no matter what narrative Indeed or anyone else says, is putting a herding on the job board industry. It is a commodity that Google has sort of figured out. And we'll talk about that in our next story. But Google is a juggernaut that job boards haven't quite figured out how to leverage in any scale. And LinkedIn, let's be honest, is the place where you find people, it's where you source people. They've done a great job like it or not of...

Chad: It's like crap.

Joel: Pushing out the competition. Putting a walled garden around their data. And they've done a really good job of doing that. And now they have open AI thanks to Microsoft's deep pockets to now take that to another level. So the first horseman is LinkedIn and Google.

Chad: There we go. That's the first horseman. Jeff, what were your thoughts around that.

Joel: Hold on folks. He's chomping at the bit.

[laughter]

Chad: He just can't wait.

Joel: Lay the smack down. Okay, Jeff, what you got?

Jeff: I was frankly disappointed in Joel to trot those two out. First of all, LinkedIn has been around since 2004. Every job board that's out there has competed against LinkedIn since 2004. And coexisted and grown and done very, very well. And the ones that couldn't are no longer in the market. What's the big deal? Okay. I have a lot of admiration for LinkedIn. I actually think it is probably in my mind, the number one job board in terms of technical capabilities of what they do, far outstrips what Indeed does. But are they gonna kill the job board industry? Hey, they've had 20 years to do it so far. They haven't pulled it off. It's not gonna happen. And with Google, Google For Jobs, it's just keeps cracking me up.

Jeff: Long before the pandemic, I was going to conferences where Google was trotting out saying, we're gonna do this and we're gonna do that. And then they would yank stuff back. They'd put hire out there, all these companies that sign up for it, they'd yank it back, they'd put this out, they'd take it back. And right now, people are saying, oh my God, oh my god. So if it rolls out, big effing deal, right?

[laughter]

Jeff: Because all it is, is a promotional device that anyone can use. And I can be absolutely positive that every job board will be pumping money into it if they want to. Every employer, if they want to, will do it. And sort of the end result of all that is just sort of a resettling with Google putting more money in their pocket. But that's a big if. Is it ever actually gonna come to market? I am pretty skeptical. I may be wrong, I am rarely wrong, but perhaps this time I'll be wrong.

[laughter]

Joel: So on on LinkedIn, yeah, they've been around since 2004, but they didn't have a billion people on the platform in 2004. They don't have the competition now that they had when people were scraping their content when they were regurgitating and using algorithms. They've sort of law suited their way out of that problem, they're now, kicking off all the fake profiles, which to me is kind of the second phase of cleaning up the data. To me, LinkedIn is not a job board, and I don't think most people think of it as like, I'm gonna post my job on LinkedIn. What I think LinkedIn is for is when a recruiter gets, Rec saying, hire a salesperson, whereas 20 years ago, the first inclination would be, okay, I gotta post a job on Monster and Career Builder, and where else do I need to post this job?

Joel: To me, the the inclination today is either I gotta go to LinkedIn and find a salesperson and reach out to them directly, or if they're smart, I'm gonna go into my current ATS and find someone that I can hire that I've already marketed to and gotten into my system. So to me, there's an evolution of less posting and then getting a response and just kicking out the middleman and going right to the people. And I think LinkedIn has done a better job than anyone. I don't think we would argue on that, of building a directory of professionals, world, globally, that no one can really touch. Certainly no job boards database, resume database. And I'm sure some Indeed people would argue with that, but I don't think they could touch it. So for me, instead of posting jobs, you're losing job postings because I don't have to post a job.

Joel: I can go right to the people that are in this directory. In terms of Google. I look at Google as... So first of all, I don't think Google is gonna get out of the job posting business. They're just launching in Germany. They seem pretty serious about this. This doesn't seem like a Google based thing to me. This doesn't seem like a hire where, oh, too much regulation. We don't wanna deal with lawsuits and whatever. Like, we're getting the hell out of it. So I don't think the business is going anywhere because they're growing it. And to me, we've seen this movie before Indeed comes along, it's free traffic, isn't this wonderful? We don't pay anything. People pay us. We get all this free traffic. It's amazing. And then what happened? They turned the spigot and they started charging for it.

Joel: Okay, damn. Okay, well we gotta pay this tax, but it's still less than what our clients are paying us for, flat fee posting, monthly postings or whatever. Well, that price started, the screws starting to tighten the algorithm started pushing out job boards and highlighting more direct employers, money that would've gone to Monster now starts going to Indeed. So my perspective is the same thing is happening. And the fact that Indeed is sort of acquiesced and they're now on Google for Jobs, tells me that Google for Jobs is making an impact on their business.

[laughter]

Joel: As well as other things that I talked about. So for me, it's simply, employers have X amount of dollars. Where do they go? Once they realize and agencies realize we can go right to Google and pay them instead of paying Indeed to then pay Google. Let's take out the middleman, which is Indeed and every other job board, and we'll give money directly to Google. I'm not saying that they're gonna stop paying money to job boards totally, but it's gonna take a piece out of the pie. We don't know how big of a piece that's going to be. And we don't even know, honestly, if Google's going to do a pay-per-click solution, Chad and I think are both on the side of yes, they will eventually start making money off of this service.

Joel: You may disagree, but to me it's like, we've seen this move before. Yes, everyone thinks it's great. All the free traffic is amazing. I love it. I'm SEOing this stuff, it's great. But at some point, when you are renting land, eventually the land holder wants to get paid and Google is going to get paid at some point. So those would be my two points on LinkedIn and Google and why they're sort of taking chunks out of the job board business. The ultimate comment on this is job boards just aren't growing.

Chad: So, Google I think is definitely refocused, you talking about all the other products before Jeff. And I think that they're doing what they do, which is search, right? And again, back to what Joel was saying, isn't this how Indeed took out the Monster and CareerBuilder titans of old, right? This is exactly what they did. And I've said on the podcast time and time again, I believe that we need to focus more on strategy as opposed to the short-term cash grabs. And that's exactly what we're seeing from job boards today. They're not thinking about long-term strategy. They're not thinking about tech, and being able to, how am I going to be around five years from now? That's not their focus. It's what's coming in this month? Now on the LinkedIn side of the conversation [chuckle] I believe LinkedIn is drowning in tech debt.

Intro: They don't, have great tech. They've got great data, they've got a shit ton of great data. Nobody has more data on me than LinkedIn, right? But unless Microsoft implodes the platform and rebuilds it, they're not a real threat to job boards. I don't believe. Putting open AI on LinkedIn would be like strapping a jet engine on a Cessna. It's just not gonna work. So I think these two things don't belong together. Google for Jobs and LinkedIn unless, LinkedIn ups their game. That being said, let's go ahead and jump into horseman number two.

Joel: The second horseman is automation. Look, you and I just talked recently about the robots at AWS moving boxes working in the warehouse. Why would you buy stocks that are job postings to hire people when you see images about Amazon replacing everybody with robots that carry boxes, not to mention driverless cars that are eventually going to come. Look, wall Street is a forward-looking indicator and forward-looking. It looks like we're gonna need less people. So why would I invest in these companies?

[laughter]

Chad: Your thoughts?

Jeff: I thought Joel was wrong on the first one. I thought he was dead wrong on that one. That reaction, you could go back hundreds of years over and over again in response to technological innovation. And there will be a Joel standing there saying, when we get this thing and we will not need people in the market anymore. And...

Chad: So you're calling Joel a Luddite? You're calling Joel a Luddite?

[laughter]

Jeff: Joel would be... Yeah, well, I'm not gonna get into what Joel really is, but I think that the...

[laughter]

Joel: Geez.

Jeff: Sort of looking at this... Well, Joel, it's your show I had to come on mean. No, seriously, I think it's crazy to look at any market and say, oh, we're not going to need humans. I think what we're gonna say is that we're gonna need humans in different places. And so let's say that our robotic future is a successful robotic future. The humans will be migrating from putting boxes on shelves to maintaining the robots, to programming the robots, to moving into other positions that don't fit well with robotics or fit well with non-human comprehension. And we are in one of those phases right now, actually, we're always in one of those phases. It had been for the last a hundred years because of the rate of change of technology where there's always a percentage of the labor force that's been thrown out.

Jeff: And they're trying to figure out how to get back in and getting re-skilled, but no labor force, no, not going to happen. No people, it's not gonna happen. It's just going to show up somewhere else. And maybe that was the point you were trying to make that hey, put the money somewhere else. But you know what job boards, their job is to connect the employers and the candidates, and they don't care who the employers are. They simply want to make sure that the employers and the candidates find each other. So that equation doesn't change.

Joel: Okay. Wall Street typically wants to bet on where the puck is going and with some degree of certainty, what we do know is that we're gonna lose jobs to automation. MIT reported a 400,000 job loss in the US alone and you can go Google, whatever studies you want. But there's more of a certainty that automation will take jobs. The uncertainty is will we create more jobs in response to a new technology? Historically, we have. Historically, when a car is made, there are more jobs created. Jobs change and jobs are lost, but they're gained elsewhere. It's uncertain how much automation will create new jobs. You don't know that. I don't know that Chad doesn't know that. The greater certainty is that more automated tools, robots, whatever you wanna call them, will take more jobs. The local McDonald's in my neighborhood used to have four people behind the cash register taking orders.

Joel: Now there are four kiosks and the food comes out with your number on the thing. And we talk every week almost about new technology with ordering food and making cars. And obviously the Amazon example of robots moving boxes. So if I'm an investor, do I wanna invest in something that I think there'll be more jobs posted, there'll be more activity around putting jobs up. Right now, I'd say if I'm an investor, I'm betting on there's less jobs than there are in the future. So my better bet investing wise would be fewer jobs, which is why I would not put my money into a job board, because job boards grow when the economy grows and we hire more people. So that's where I think automation and, when we talk about minimum wage raising, when we talk about California, New York, that's all great things. And we talked to Kevin Wheeler recently who talked about, look, they're on a five-year parole because they have about five years to make more money than they've ever made. Until all the companies streamline processes, put automation into these jobs, and they're all outta work. His word's not mine. But the risk is there. So I'm not putting my money into something like a job board where they grow when there's more jobs to be filled, because I think more robots are gonna be filling those positions.

Chad: Yeah. I think what Jeff is talking about is a migration of jobs. So let's say for instance, Amazon warehouse jobs, which you talked about, yes. They're gonna go away and thank fucking God. Those are horrible jobs. Nobody wants to be forced to work on a line pissing in goddamn garbage cans. So just because those jobs will fade away does not mean the totality of the workforce equation will be less. Amazon warehouse jobs, good riddance, the migration, which again, job boards will be popping up all over the place for these new jobs. If you take a look at like, anything that is Cyber, when Cyber was big, they just, job boards popped up all over the place. You're going to see a moving migration of need in new job boards that are placed, or new products that are actually created, which we've seen with LinkedIn and Indeed and all the big job boards with regard to Gig and whatnot. Indeed, just talking about their "new tech network" right? So there's a migration and there's a re-centering, let's say, of where the need is. So this is more, I think, migration than it is, people not doing the job.

Joel: And if you could tell me these are the jobs that people are gonna fill that they're losing, then I would buy it. But I don't think we know what those jobs are and...

Chad: That's not the point. That's not the point.

Joel: I don't think you can just take a warehouse's worker and make them into a cybersecurity expert's point.

Chad: That's not the point.

Joel: Not everyone can do that. And we don't know to what degree it will fill. Is it a 100% to 100%? Is it 50% of the jobs that are lost will be filled? We just don't know. So again, if I'm an investor, I want to go where I know there's more certainty, there's more certainty around less jobs, more robots than there are more jobs, more robots.

Chad: Yes. But the point is that there will always be job boards to be able to fill the need of whatever that workforce is. So therefore, it's migration.

Jeff: Part of what I do, I'm at like the front line of the change because the people that are creating the new job boards that are reacting to the changes in the market, come to me and talk to me. And so I just got finished working with a job board that focuses on EV technicians. All the people that deal with EVs and they're at the cutting edge of these things. And that's been happening over and over and over again for the last 14 years. And I can tell you that it keeps moving and sometimes it moves forward and falls back. I mean, look at Dollar General, yank and Walmart yanking all those self-check lines because the loss was so bad. And the humans do a better job of checking people out than the damn machines do. So forward progress through automation is not a straight line. It goes forward, it goes backwards, and sometimes it hits a dead end. And you're right, it's very, very hard to predict. But I can guarantee you that every time there's significant change that gets embedded in the economy, there's gonna be more jobs that surround whatever that change is and will be filling other holes in the economy.

Chad: Go one step forward, two steps back, and that leads us to play horseman number three.

Joel: The third horseman of the apocalypse is AI. Again, if I'm looking at Elon Musk doing an interview with the Prime Minister of Britain saying that we won't even have jobs in the future.

Chad: Universal high income.

Joel: So why would I invest in companies if there's no growth prospects for people or even having jobs in the future, and...

Chad: Jeff, is AI going to take some of those jobs?

Jeff: It's inevitable that AI will take some jobs out there, but I mean, the real issue is what does it do to the job board industry? And one of the things that I've said many times, I think you guys know this is my point of view, is that job boards are sort of the great amoeba of the recruitment industry. Things happen. The job boards approach the thing that happens, they swallow it and they use it, and it's happened over and over and over again. They did it with social media. They've done it with various types of techniques like performance-based marketing, and they're already doing it with AI sort of integrating it into sort of the base functionality of what they're doing, which is bringing candidates and employers together. And is it gonna eliminate job boards? Maybe in some areas, in some places. I mean, certainly some people are placing bets on that. But in terms of really sort of wiping out a $20 billion a year business? No, it's not gonna happen. I actually think it's gonna spur growth. And based on what I've seen so far, I'm pretty positive that we will see a lot of positive changes in job board technology over the next five years or so because of AI.

Joel: Swallow is not spits just to be clear, the job boards are swallowing the AI not spitting it out. So AI to me is sort of the flip side of automation. Automation I think is gonna kick the working class in the you know what. And I think AI is going to be a wake up call to the knowledge workers. And we've seen really early iterations around creative writing jobs on gig economy platforms where they're getting paid much less than they were before and there are a lot fewer of them. So a lot of the white collar knowledge based jobs that we know and love many of us will be replaced by a lot of things that AI is doing. And if you need fewer creative writers there'll be fewer jobs posted for creative writing jobs because AI can do it and I think particularly when you see solutions AI salespeople, AI customer service people. And you know Chad and I talked about a company in India that fired 90% of their people and replaced them with AI.

Joel: That's going to happen. If you're a startup and you can buy a solution that will cold call sound like a human being and call through a bunch of numbers. Why would you hire a salesperson to cold call people to generate leads? And companies like Apple and Tesla are already doing this, where they retarget you. If you go to their site and fill out a form, you get a call from, it kind of sounds like a person that's only gonna get better telling you about Tesla or Apple products. And that is gonna replace sales jobs and customer service jobs. And if those jobs are replaced, you need fewer job posting platforms and things to post your job on, which means less revenue for these job sites in the future. I agree with you that they'll plug in AI, they'll be better around, hey, do a job description in seconds that's already being done by the likes of Indeed and Paradox.

Joel: Write a rejection letter automatically, like do these sort of belts and suspenders, things blocking and tackling, if you will, of recruiting. Those jobs will be augmented and improved. And I think the technology around job sites will improve. I just think there are gonna be fewer people doing a lot of these jobs, which means there are fewer job postings, which is inevitably how that money is made. Now, if they wanna start making money on, hey we got this new thing that will write jobs for you, or will write... They can add money on new services to streamline the recruiting process, like that's an opportunity I think that they will do and should do. But I just think at the end of the day when people like Elon Musk say, there's not gonna be any jobs at all. You think I'm crazy? You think I'm crazy? No jobs at all. Okay. So when you hear that and you're an investor, why would you invest in a job board if there are gonna be no fricking jobs in the future? Says Elon Musk, who is smarter than me.

Chad: So, yeah, well, let's talk about that soundbite. Anyone listening to Elon Musk who took a $44 billion company and thus far has lost 25 billion doesn't understand that Elon is good with engineering, rockets and EVs, not with people. And this is an people industry. So looking at Elon and thinking that he knows everything in the fucking universe, come the fuck on. Unlike the Amazon example, tech will take tasks, we've talked about this, not jobs. Jobs are going to be more co-piloted. And then we've also seen where some companies and Joel mentioned the one that's had 90% of their customer service, they also started putting people back into those jobs. Why? Because the AI was fucking up left and right. We've seen hallucinations, we've seen so much happening. Jeff, you just talked about getting rid of self check-in lines, right? There's going to be this step back and forward.

Chad: But for example, the administrivia that recruiters currently have that they have to screw with day by day is going to be taken away with some of those co-pilots. Some of those process methodologies where they will be able to become brand ambassadors and usher in top talent instead of writing job descriptions and pushing electronic paper. Personally, I don't think that many of these jobs, especially short term, I mean, and I'm saying short term in the next 10 years, next decade, are going to be taken by this tech. They're going to be better because of this text. So at the end of the day, I think, I believe that these jobs, unlike Elon Musk, are still gonna be around. They're just gonna be much more fucking tolerable for God's sakes. And that's what I hope for the human race, let's say, that's my two cents.

Joel: I love the optimism.

Chad: Play horseman number four.

Joel: The fourth horseman of the apocalypse is the gig economy. We didn't talk about those stocks. Upwork is over 20% year to date, in its share price. Uber is up almost a 100%, and DoorDash is up 80% year to date. If I'm an investor, I see people have options. I see people can do their own thing. People can gig it as a career. So those four horsemen of the apocalypse, Google and LinkedIn, AI automation and the gig economy spell trouble for ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Glassdoor and others. And I don't see any end to the pain that they are suffering.

Chad: What kind of pain Jeff? What kind of pain are we gonna see?

Joel: His face says, he kind of agrees with me, his face says he might be on board with this one. He might be into it.

Jeff: Dream on. Dream on Joel. Dream on.

Joel: Oh Okay.

Jeff: No. Okay, so this argument once again has been trotted out since the very first cracking of the egg and the little gigs crawling out of the shell and starting the so-called gig economy. We all know that the gig economy has been around forever, right? There's always been people that have done work on a limited basis for payment.

Joel: Never at this scale though.

Jeff: Actually when you look at the percentages of people that are doing that kind of work, and you go back in history, it's not a lot different. I had a grandfather that was a union electrician, worked for a lineman. And then the second half of his life, he worked as a garage mechanic. He was a gig worker, right? There's always been a large percentage of the market that wasn't looked at Wall Street but was there. And now I'm not saying that there's not more opportunity now because of the internet remote work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm just saying that that's always been a large segment of the labor market. Now, to say that everyone can sort of get on a gig and wander off to Nirvana is ridiculous.

Joel: And I don't think I said that.

Jeff: You're implying that the gig economy has the potential to sort of disrupt the job board industry. The disruptions already happened. I mean, Upwork is a job board. Fiverr is a job board. They have taken their places, some of the job boards have actually made modifications to their platform. LinkedIn made a sort of a half-hearted attempt to get involved in this at one point. And Indeed did too. It's a type of work and it's a type of job board. It's doing very, very well right now for a lot of different reasons. But it's not the answer for everyone. Just like AI is not the answer for every industry that's out there. And I guess I look at this stuff holistically and I say, yeah, there's been a change in the market.

Jeff: You look at it from a Wall Street perspective, they're always chasing the latest, shiny, bright thing that they think is gonna make them money. And their horizon is about four weeks. I used to work for a public company. I remember how it changed from, we were looking at three year horizons to suddenly we're looking at quarterly horizons. It totally screws with the way the company works. All I'll say about Elon is I'm hardly on Twitter anymore, and I used to be on Twitter all the time because it sucks. And he did that in the course of 12 months. I don't know how anyone can destroy an ecosystem as quickly as he did, but he did. And he'll never get it back. He's not in authority on that.

Chad: We'll just agree to disagree on that Gigs in the way that they are today have been around forever. I mean, yes, they have, but we're talking about estimates that I see is 35% of Americans, or 59 million, some workers have gigged to some degree. And that was not the case before the internet. I mean, so I don't think it's... I just don't agree that there's always been gigs. And this has been the way it's been forever. I think it's a totally different animal than it was now. I was curious about, 'cause I knew you were gonna bring up Upwork as a job board. And I can't... Look, I say it's not, you say it is. So, I wanted to ask, Chad knows I loved a good LinkedIn poll. So I put out there on LinkedIn, I said is Upwork a job board?

Joel: So 125 people replied, 62% said, no, it's not a job board. 38% said that it was. The flip side of that is that Fiverr is down 24% for the year. So you can look at Upwork, but you can also look at Fiverr one's obviously a much better run business than the other. But I just simply... My simple thesis is that if more people are gigging, they're not going to job boards to look for work. They're doing their own thing. They're going to a platform, they're going to Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, whatever. They're bypassing the whole process altogether. And if they're doing that, that means less jobs on job boards, which again, is how job boards grow and make money. And that's what their purpose is. So pull together, all of these four things take chunks out of the business. I don't think I ever said this is the end, or this one thing is going to replace job boards.

Joel: Job boards will be around forever and they'll be good businesses for people. They're just not growth businesses. They're not spitting out dividends like a established company that has more cash than they know what to do with. They're just kind of there serving their purpose. And I think they're very challenged as we've talked about. But in terms of the gig economy, it's simply fewer people are going to job sites to look for jobs. They're going directly to whatever gig platform that they want, multiple gig platforms, and that's how they're searching for a job. Now, if your argument is Upwork is a job board, then my argument is a bit tougher. So I wanted to put some data on a survey that's non-scientific whatsoever. But there are people in the industry that do follow on LinkedIn and reply to this stuff. So the numbers I do have say that it's not a job board. It's separate from the traditional post and get responses and whatnot.

Chad: Do you post a job on Upwork or Fiverr?

Joel: You can post it, you can post a job, but the...

Chad: You can post a job.

Joel: Yes, you can.

Chad: Okay. But yeah. But here's the question on monster, traditional monster back in the day and even today. Could you go and look for people in the resume database?

Joel: Yep.

Chad: Answer's yes. Could you post a job? Answer is yes, it's the same goddamn thing.

Joel: So is monster a gig platform?

Chad: If they were posting gigs, yes.

Joel: We can agree to disagree. My numbers from LinkedIn support the fact that 60...

Chad: Here's not bullshit numbers. Gallup gig economy research suggests that 29% of US workers have an alternative work arrangement as a primary job, 29%. That to me, is big. Now, whether you believe that gigs have always been that big or not, we weren't able to record that over history like we can today. 'cause there were so many people that were paid under the table for doing gigs, right? Today we have a couple of mechanisms. I do agree with Joel that we'll be able to scale gigs much faster, right? Much faster. The rise of the gig economy is necessary because the lower third of the US population is not making a living wage.

Chad: So the gig economy only exists because people are doing everything they can to either get out of a dead end job or just making enough money to survive. I guess the question I'm asking you both because this affects the gig industry, but also the job board industry is will the US be forced to start focusing on people in living wages over profits? Because if they do, the gig economy will shrink. If people need to do less gigs because they're actually making a living wage, the gig economy will shrink substantially. So do you think that we will actually start focusing on pushing a living wage versus not because of that? And do you agree with me that gigs will shrink because of wages?

Joel: I think your argument is that if I can make more money as an employee, I won't do gigs. I think that a lot of people do gigs for freedom to do whatever they want on their own time. So, I can't blanket say yes or no. I think it's a person to person situation. Some people love jobs.

Chad: Do you think the amount of gigs in the market will shrink?

Joel: The ultimate pain in America is health benefits. And until the gig economy fixes that, or we've as a country fix that. But I think it's a case by case basis on whether or not someone wants to gig or wants a full-time job with benefits and healthcare and all that good stuff. And certainly minimum wage increases, will pull more people out of the gig economy. They do want that.

Chad: Okay. There's the answer. Okay, Jeff?

Jeff: Well, I think you were asking the question, what will the country do? What would happen? And sadly, I think it'll do the bare minimum because there's a lot of corporate pushback at all levels. Companies like Uber and companies that are not Uber, that don't necessarily want to see universal healthcare, for example, because universal healthcare would really change the labor market. And if we had universal healthcare in the US even though there's plenty of job boards in countries that have that, the market is different because there's not the penalty that you pay as you move from job to job to job. And I think that that's probably not gonna happen anytime soon. But I do think that depending on what happens in November there could be progress made toward higher wages, and there could be certain segments of the market that get pumped up, that aren't getting pumped up at this point in time.

Jeff: So I mean, I don't see a big change. I see gradual change. And Joel, this is just sort of a side thing that maybe you don't realize because you're not sitting where I sit, but a lot of my job board clients that are reasonably sized they are 20, 30, 40$ million are getting a lot of money from gig companies to post their jobs. A lot of those jobs roll through the job board economy. And that's been true from the very beginning. And why is that the case? Because those gig companies still need to acquire scarce labor. In your wonderful world, there's gonna be more people than jobs. Right now that's not the case. And given our birth rate and the way things are going, I don't think it's gonna be the case anytime between before any of us die. I think there's gonna be scarce labor for the jobs that are out there.

Chad: Well, Jeff, thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Joel: The doctor is in the house.

Chad: Great discussion. Great arguments, great disagreements, that's what this is all about. I really appreciate you bringing those on the show, Joel, thanks for being a good host all the way around. Thanks a lot guys. Really appreciate it. And until next time, we out.

Joel: I need a beer. We out.

[laughter]

Jeff: Thanks.

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 chuggle heads 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.