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Jobs Utopia or Fiasco?

Chad Sowash
3 hours ago
17 min read

Is this a Jobs Utopia or a Fiasco? How does it feel to you?

In this episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, hosts Joel Cheesman and Chad Sowash are joined by Emi to unpack news, startup breakthroughs, and current economic realities across the global hiring landscape.  



PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION


Joel: Too much rizz, aura, and drip for one podcast. Yet here we are. Hey kids, it's the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel. I'm ready for some football cheese.


Chad: Just sending off, not back on the water again. This is Chad. Screw the Irn-Bru. I'm slamming again. So what?


Emi: I'm Emi, "Just call me the Carnival Queen" Beredugo. Thank you.


Joel: And on this episode of HR's Most Dangerous Podcast, the state of labor, the state of jobs, and the state of Holland. Wait a minute, is that a state? I guess we'll figure it out. Let's do this.


Chad: Big enough to be one. Okay, dude. The whole Clippers thing I've been seeing from outside the US and Steve Ballmer, the NBA basketball... I don't know much about what's going on other than they're trying to feed Kawhi Leonard money under the table. But what I was interested in is I was in my Threads...


Joel: The LA Clippers, NBA basketball, just for the international audience. We know Emi brings a lot of internationals when she's on.


Chad: And I saw all this news and this old commercial of Steve Ballmer. Now, Steve Ballmer is the owner and he is banned from the NBA for a year. They got nailed with five first-round draft picks, which they can't have anymore. But I wanted us to have a little nostalgia. So show that video, Cheesman.


Joel: For a year. By the way, I love that your Threads algo is giving you Steve Ballmer videos while mine gets busty Latinas and bug fights. All right, let's watch some Steve Ballmer, everybody.


Chad: That'll tell you something. Ginsu knives.


Joel: Doing his wardrobe.


Chad: That's Microsoft Windows.


Emi: I don't know what I'm watching. My god.


Chad: Tell me Steve. No. No. Eight thousand.


Emi: Three.


Joel: My God. Two eighty-six DOS.


Chad: A few bucks. Except in Nebraska. I fucking love that. Now, kids, if you don't know Steve Ballmer, look him up. He was one of the first 30 employees at Microsoft. He worked his way up and became CEO.


Joel: He was CEO for a long time.


Emi: Hold on a second, he was actually a CEO? I thought he was just a hired actor.


Joel: COO or CEO. He was basically running the show. He was the face of Microsoft for a long time.


Chad: And if you watch any of the old videos of them launching things on stage, it'll be him, Bill Gates, and some of the other executives, the most nerdy motherfuckers known to man, and they're dancing. It is so awkward.


Joel: There's one where he's sweating out of his clothes. He's just a sweaty mess and Gates is there dancing.


Emi: Lord. Can you imagine being interviewed by him?


Chad: I don't think he did interviews.


Joel: There's also a great interview when the iPhone came out and how he talks about how it's gonna be a massive failure for Apple, which has historically been fun for him. Steve Ballmer. Frankly, as a Browns fan, the Deshaun Watson trade is arguably the worst deal in history. This mess up is pretty up there. So I'm glad that he's taken some spotlight. With football season coming and Deshaun being named the starter this year, the Clippers are getting a little heat from the media. Sports, love it. September, October is the best time for me. You get college football back, Premier League, which I'm embracing. I know you're not a baseball guy, but you got the playoffs in October. A little chill in the weather. It's a great time of year.


Chad: Sports baby. It's sports season, I love it. It's US Open time, man. I love me some US Open. Last night, Frances Tiafoe was down two sets, came back. It was four hours and 39 minutes. That's how long the match lasted. And then Ben Shelton, another American, played number two, Carlos Alcaraz. Everybody loves this kid. He's just fucking amazing. He beat him.


Joel: You're the tennis guy. What's going on in tennis?


Chad: Shelton beat Alcaraz in four hours and twenty-eight minutes. It ended at 3:30 AM in New York. I got up this morning, had coffee here in Portugal, and I watched the end of the match. Fucking crazy. It was amazing. I got up, looked at my phone, noticed it was still going live, turned it on, had a coffee, and watched the rest of it.


Emi: My god. Four hours of just playing tennis. How do you keep playing for that long?


Chad: That's a sport, Emi. That's what you do. Netballers don't have that kind of resilience or ball-handling skills.


Emi: Excuse me? I am an athlete, my dear. We have speed. We don't need endurance.


Joel: This is why penalty kicks should not be a thing. Let them play until somebody scores. Just take a player off.


Emi: I'm with that. It's the shittiest way to win.


Chad: I do like the take the player off scenario. That's pretty cool.


Joel: Take a player off every fifteen minutes till you score a goal. I think penalty kicks I've learned to appreciate as I watch the sport more. I hated it as a strictly American sports fan.


Chad: It keeps you on the edge of your seat though. Anybody could win.


Emi: I still hate them.


Joel: It's very theatrical.


Emi: Anyone can win and it's not always the team that should win. It's just luck and I hate it.


Chad: Which is the team that should win? If you were the team that should win, you shouldn't have been able to go all the way through and not score a fucking goal. Or you allowed this lesser team to score just as many goals as you did. So that's your fault. But I do like the hockey one-on-one. That's pretty fucking cool too.


Emi: Still don't like it.


Joel: I get it. It's dramatic. Sudden death is great. Sudden death historically, some of the best games ever. A team scores and it's over. And these teams are just beating each other up. The Ice Bowl, Green Bay, historically it's just been really good.


Chad: I love it. Sports. Let's do the fantasy football grades now because we're in it. I'm so excited. Even though I don't know what my grade was because I was sleeping while we did this.


Joel: Skipping ahead. We're confusing the regular listeners. We've split up shout-outs. Okay, all right, guys. It's fantasy football time. It's one of my favorite things we do each year. Factory Fix, year three or four that they've sponsored this. Fantasy draft was last night and we get our grades. So 12 people are playing. Chad auto drafts because he's asleep in Europe. Here's your breakdown in the grades. I'm gonna start with the F grades and we're gonna go up. The worst grade, Bosco Vujitovic got an F. Chad Sowash also got an F, everybody. I think you drafted Travis Kelce, which is an instant F.


Chad: Which is good for me. It's only up from here.


Joel: Ben Kuntz got a D minus. Desiree Goldie, another D minus. Molly Sly, D minus. Nick Livingston got a D. Dean Amar, D plus. I got a C, which I thought sucked at first, but then I looked at all the Ds and Fs and thought, I'm doing all right. Scott Clark, C plus. Nicholas Tiziak, C plus. Mackenzie Maitland, the defending champ with a B grade. And the only A in the whole bunch is Jarrett Jildersma. This is never how it ends up, so I'm not sweating the grades too much. But when you looked at who you got, Chad, you auto drafted, did you get most of the players you wanted?


Chad: My quarterbacks are shit. I've got Kittle and Kelce on the tight end side. Running backs are good, wide receivers, but my quarterbacks are just so... And here's the thing. Fantasy football is a marathon, it's not a sprint. Your trades, pickups, waivers throughout the season make the end of the season really hum. When we restructured and shortened our benches, that made it even more fun. It's a chess match, it's not checkers. Give me a D, give me an F. I don't care.


Joel: It's a tough league. Twelve seats full, narrow bench. There's not a lot of room for error. If you get an injury or someone stinks it up, it could be a really long season for you.


Emi: I have no idea what you mean by narrow or short bench. I feel like I need to go away and Google.


Joel: You can choose how many bench players you can have. So the shorter your bench, the fewer reserves you have, which makes it harder to have players that can fill in if there's an injury or a bye week. Less options on your team.


Chad: I'll get to my quarterbacks. Drake Maye was my number one and Baker Mayfield was my second. But I've got Saquon Barkley, Kenneth Walker III, just studs at running back. Tee Higgins, Mike Evans, Chris Godwin. So I've got some good players. I'm good. I'm not sweating it.


Joel: Baker just signed a big contract, like $165 million. You got something to work with. Well, Drake starts tonight, baby. Let's see how that goes. All right, let's get to shout-outs.


Chad: I think we all advise startups. This week I want to give a shout-out to a couple that I advise making pretty big moves. First off, we all know that job seekers are moving toward large language models for job searches. A quick throwback: this is much like when Google started indexing different companies back on the SEO side. You might remember Indeed beat everyone to the punch and owned Google results pages. Many companies lost their brand rankings. For instance, if a job seeker searched "jobs for Marriott," Indeed would own that Google results page. The candidate would apply to Indeed instead of Marriott, and Indeed sold those candidates back to Marriott and their competitors at a premium. Underhanded, but a smart business play. Today, job seekers are starting to use large language models for search. It's an evolution. If hiring companies don't start embracing job search on large language models, Indeed will keep capturing your candidates and selling them back to you for an even larger premium. Sonic Jobs, one of the companies I advise, has created a couple of products. First, there's a jobs plugin that allows companies' jobs to be exposed in a search within ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Secondly, they've created a white-labeled career GPT for corporate career sites. Companies can have their own large language model search instead of using 1990s Boolean search. This is a big move for Sonic Jobs. And Hackajob is rebranding. Why? Because in six months after launching, their recruiting agent, Archer, was responsible for three times their ARR. They received enterprise adoption from companies like Barclays, Comcast, Oracle, Sainsbury, Accenture, and other small companies. Why? Because companies are hungry for getting ROI out of AI. Candidates introduced by Archer are five times more likely to interview. More than 50% of candidates that Archer introduces are first-time interviews. Their discoverability is better. Plus, Archer has blocked over 30,000 fraudulent candidates a month since deployment. When companies ask how to get away from spending money with Indeed and build for the future, my shout-out goes to Archer and Sonic Jobs.


Joel: I love it when a business changes its brand because what they've done is better than what they were doing before, or the new thing is more adept to the future. I think of Paradox and Olivia coming out of Jobing. It's cool when businesses kill their old business in light of new opportunities. On the AI search play, I find this incredibly fascinating where the world of marketing is going. Companies are now developing meta-content for agents because agents and bots on the web have overtaken humans in traffic. As more agents make travel arrangements, search for jobs, and buy stuff, companies are creating marketing just for agents. There's gonna be a whole new industry where companies ensure that when agents come to your site, you're providing content for them to make a decision for the consumer. It's very cool. Almost as cool as free bourbon. Thanks to our friends at Proven Base. Find talent others can't reach. They're providing free bourbon for our listeners. We're sending out two bottles every month. Go to Chadcheese.com/free to get yours. Now for my shout-out. My shout-out goes to Hung Lee. Industry people will know Hung well. He's been a friend of the show for a long time. He occasionally says nice things about us in his popular newsletter. He was recently in Chicago, New York, and LA. It's always good seeing people realize Americans aren't that bad and American cities are okay. Seeing Hung do his walk and talks about how cool Chicago and New York are is very refreshing. We're gonna see him in Nashville in a couple weeks. My shout-out goes to Hung Lee. All right, Emi, follow that one.


Emi: I don't think I can. My shout-out has nothing to do with recruitment because I had an amazing week. It was music-oriented. It started with Notting Hill Carnival. It's a big London celebration of Caribbean culture, dancing in the street. Then I went to the Jay-Z concert. Odyssey, last minute. All the classics were there. One of the best concerts I've been to. I went to Jay-Z about 10 years ago in the Middle East, but it was amazing in London. It was Queen Bey's birthday, so she wasn't performing, but they put a spotlight on her and the crowd sang Happy Birthday. Idris Elba opened the show. DJ Khaled was on stage. And then, the Fugees got on stage. Lauryn Hill. I knew they were in London, but when they popped up on stage to hear her sing "Killing Me Softly" and "Ooh La La La," it was amazing. So thank you, Jay-Z.


Joel: Let's segue into events where I'm sure Emi is gonna tell us where her next vacation is.


Emi: My working vacation is gonna be Thailand. Don't be jealous. I am gonna be taking meetings by the beach with sangria in my hand.


Chad: That is awesome. We're getting ready for travel, sponsored by our friends over at Shaker Recruitment Marketing. 75 years in business. We're going to be at RecFest in Nashville. JT and Mo will be there. September 23rd and 24th. Go to recfest.com to see if they have tickets left. On the first night, we're going to Ole Red's rooftop. Then I'm off to Cabo. Then the Staffing Industry Analysts Collaboration in Dallas from September 29th through October 1st, where I'm judging Shark Tank. Then we're both off to Amsterdam for the e-Recruitment Congress on October 6th, and they're gonna have humanoid robots working the Congress. Only Lieven can make this happen. And lastly, we're going to Workday's frontline hiring event in Vegas on October 12th. Invite only. If you want to go to one of these events, go to Chadcheese.com/events. Register and buy us a drink.


Joel: And you failed to mention that Stephen McGrath will be in Amsterdam with us. Looking forward to seeing him. By the way, I finally got tickets to the Anne Frank House. That thing is always sold out and I got enough lead time. I'm pretty excited about that. All right, let's talk about labor. We celebrated Labor Day this week. US unions enjoy a 71% approval rating, yet membership is only 10%. The UK is roughly double that, and Europe fluctuates from 90% membership in Iceland to 6% in Estonia. Many developed economies struggle with immigration, deglobalization, and safety nets. We haven't raised the minimum wage in the US since the Obama administration, and humanoid robots are coming. AI is taking a bite out of low-cost labor jobs. Chad, what's your take on the state of labor?


Chad: One thing you didn't hit on was H-1B visas. I dug into some economic research from George Mason's Mercatus Center, which showed that the restriction of H-1B visas led to more offshoring of high-skilled jobs to foreign subsidiaries in countries like India, China, and Canada. There's a massive loss of innovation because 41% of patents granted to US-headquartered companies involve at least one foreign-born inventor. They only make up 16% of the US inventor workforce. That's a huge brain drain. High-skilled tech workers act as growth drivers inside companies because their ideas create products. Without them, we will see a reduction in secondary hiring for support and non-technical staff to build, sell, and support those products. Overall, the US became less competitive. Americans' strength has always been our diversity. It makes it so much easier for countries like Canada and France to poach scientists, developers, and great talent from the US.


Joel: If I look at immigration as an issue, I can understand people saying immigrants are taking jobs for less money. The H-1B stuff is hard to understand. Why have we said, "Hey, if you're smart and a company wants to bring you over, we're not welcoming you anymore"? It seems counterintuitive. Big tech has a lot of control and maybe doesn't want others to have those workers. Who has $100K to bring people over? It's big tech. I read a Bloomberg story about a Texas town built on H-1B visas. South Asians coming over created a huge boom in housing, services, and healthcare. These folks create jobs and growth for everyone. It baffles me how America has become a place of walls. The labor union thing has been a theme on our show. During COVID, it seemed like a renaissance with Starbucks and Google unionizing. But labor has taken a hit for decades. Laws were passed because labor got politicians into office. As media and the internet became a thing, the ability to put a message in front of voters became efficient. Media and money go hand in hand. The power of unions to get votes started to subside. Pensions were cut out for 401(k)s in the 70s. Automation came in. The power of the worker continues to get hit. The system sucks if you don't have assets.


Emi: It's a depressing read to see people struggling. The US is expensive. I read somewhere a burrito is $20. Who's paying $20 for a burrito? If a burrito is that expensive, what about everything else? People are losing their jobs. Press reports say unemployment rates are stable, but that's not real-time data. Even if they are in a job, wage increases aren't keeping up with inflation. Year on year, you're making less money. It's not a great world out there. I hope the youngsters will get pissed off enough to vote and say they can't afford to live in this economy.


Chad: How would you feel if you lived in your mom's basement right now? You hear people saying they're lazy, but it's because they can't find a job that pays enough. It is so irritating.


Joel: I don't hear either major party talking about raising the minimum wage or helping workers much. Are we bullish or bearish on labor?


Chad: Bearish. With Citizens United, you're gonna be bearish. Until we get rid of it, money's gonna win.


Joel: America's latest jobs report surprised to the upside. August payrolls rose 162,000 and unemployment held at 4.1%. Participation ticked up to 61.6%. Hourly pay was $37.75, up 3.1% year over year. Hospitality and local education added jobs. Information lost jobs. The market looks stable. Sunny days ahead, Chad?


Chad: We beat expectations, but we just talked about the H-1B debacle leading to more offshoring. The jobs being created are ones Americans won't fill, previously filled by immigrants who were deported or left. If Americans are performing those jobs, it's because the jobs they're qualified to fill don't exist anymore due to downsizing or offshoring. Over half of those 162,000 jobs came from hospitality and construction, where immigrants play a huge role. We're creating jobs nobody wants. On the tariff front, Volkswagen faces costs from US tariffs on imports from $4.7 billion to $5.8 billion this year, passed on to American buyers who can't afford a new car anyway. VW builds 200,000 cars in the US, but imports 240,000 from Europe and 280,000 from Mexico. The US sets the rules for trade, like the USMCA agreement. Companies worked within those rules, and then things turned on a dime. Now they expect VW to move operations to the US. Why would they do that? Tariffs are killing jobs.


Joel: The jobs are coming in healthcare, construction, and education. Boomers are getting older and sicker, which means we need more healthcare workers. Boomers also have money and are spending it. Empty nesters go out to eat and travel. Teachers are retiring, so we need to fill those jobs. State and local government is growing because boomers want more services. If you have assets, life is good. If you're young, not so much. Fast food and services for younger people are struggling. It's funny because a few years ago these reports were between 200,000 and 300,000 jobs, and now we're excited over 162,000. Anecdotally, everything's at a standstill. Do we believe the numbers? Not anymore.


Emi: We don't believe the numbers. It's easy for HR professionals to look at the headline and think it's positive. They rely on people not peeling back and doing the research. Podcasts like yours that research and tell people what's going on are important. HR professionals need to wise up and understand what's actually going on beyond the headlines. Unemployment rates look steady because mass immigration means fewer people looking for jobs. My biggest takeaway is don't be fooled by a headline.


Joel: Let's take it over to Europe. A Dutch privacy regulator has fined Uber 825 million euros for automatically blocking drivers over suspected fraud or low ratings with little or no human review. GDPR bars high-stakes automated decisions. The algorithms are coming for your job. Will your government do something about it?


Chad: Europe is definitely gonna do something about it. I guarantee this is happening in the US and nobody's checking it out. It reminds me of when Amazon had its system fire women out on maternity leave. Stupid things like this will continue as long as leaders allow these systems to work without human supervision. Uber will be lucky if they only pay 825 million euros. The new EU AI Act is going to hit hard.


Joel: I'm convinced companies just have accountants crunch the numbers to see the maximum fine and compare it to how much they'll save. If it's worth it, they do it. Running over the law is part of business risk analysis. Also, AI is going to monitor everything you do at work. Efficiency improvements come from people thinking they're being watched all the time. America won't make laws around this. Get used to algorithms watching, ranking, and grading you.


Emi: I don't like that idea. I'm a massive fan of AI, but I don't want it to be totally automated. We're in a people-driven industry. I hope we don't get to a stage where performance reviews and interviews are totally done by AI. In Europe, we have legislation like GDPR and the EU AI Act. The fines will get stricter. When organizations buy HR tech, they can't just implement it blindly. They need to show evidence of meaningful human review. If you have no proof, you'll be hit by a fine, and that could tank a smaller business.


Chad: 4% of revenue is a lot. They can come back and hit them again.


Joel: Is the driverless market in Europe big? Are there Waymos driving around?


Emi: I've never seen it in London. I wouldn't even get in it.


Joel: The Guardian announced it is closing its long-running recruitment platform, Guardian Jobs, after more than 20 years online. The Guardian is a major British daily newspaper. Emi, is this a big deal?


Emi: It is a big deal. When I graduated, we looked for jobs in newspapers like The Guardian. When I worked in the charity sector, it was a great place to capture professionals. It's sad it's going away because now niche platforms are disappearing and candidates will go to Indeed and LinkedIn, which will monopolize the market and charge whatever they want. It's a wake-up call for organizations to pivot and build a stronger employer brand or internal sourcing model.


Chad: Newspapers aren't great businesses today. They didn't understand that classifieds were what kept them going. They didn't evolve their job sites or increase their total addressable market. They stayed standard and stagnant for years. You have to innovate and move toward targeting qualified candidates. The Guardian did nothing, and when you do that, you die.


Joel: I would venture they're still on a duration-based advertising system where you pay a flat fee for 30 days. The world is moving towards a results-based system. The reason they gave for shutting down was that vacancies reached a five-year low. Vacancies were low because no one was posting jobs on a system not made for recruiting today. It's not the strongest that survive, but the one most able to adapt. Unlike dad jokes, which will never die. Why did the banana go to the doctor? He wasn't peeling very well.


Chad: That's a good one.


Joel: I always get ya. Guys, it's been fun. We out.


Chad: We're out.

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