LinkedIn We Have A Problem
There’s bad, there’s rotten and then there’s LinkedIn’s job board strategy. It’s like peeling an onion and the boys are almost in tears covering this story, as well as
game-changing news from Zoom,
Buy or Sell with Fetcher, Unicorn Lattice, and Visage,
a 28-year-old earns $300k+ on Fiverr doing what?
Goldman Sachs continues the beatings,
while CitiGroiup optics soar.
... Wait did we mention rumors on iCIMS and Mya the chatbot?
Get comfy and enjoy another Jobvite, JobAdx, and Sovren powered podcast.
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 (24s):
Oh, yeah. Say what you want. But Chad and Cheese have never even been to the Suez canal. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast, boys and girls. I'm your cohost Joel "filibuster" Cheeseman.
Chad (37s):
I'm Chad "chief impact officer" Sowash.
Joel (41s):
Oh, that's going to get Harry on this week. Show LinkedIn we have a problem. Better up gets Harry and better than the sweet 16 it's time for a little buy or sell.
JOBADX (54s):
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Joel (1m 45s):
So I'm finally getting my shot on Friday, which is when people will be first listening to the show. So you and I are well on our way to summer of love, baby.
Chad (1m 55s):
Oh yeah. I've got the second shot. My second shot happening at 11:20 on Friday.
Joel (2m 2s):
And then promptly going on vacation for a week, I think is that, is that the plan?
Chad (2m 6s):
I'm getting the fuck out of town.
Joel (2m 8s):
Just drive. Just drive.
Chad (2m 9s):
Just doing something, doing something.
Joel (2m 11s):
Spin it, spin an arrow and then just go whatever direction it says North, South, East or West.
Chad (2m 16s):
It could be at least, maybe depending on what's open up in Fountain Square, come up there and, and check out the NCAA action. If there's any whatsoever.
Joel (2m 26s):
There you go. So apparently two weeks after your first shot, you're kind of not going to die. Like you, you may be in like, is it that's my understanding is like two weeks to kind of kick in on, the first one. Like, you'll get sick potentially, but not hospitalized and die and shout out to our poor friends in Canada who aren't getting shots apparently.
Chad (2m 47s):
No, but I think that's interesting. Didn't we send them shots? I thought we sent them?
Joel (2m 51s):
Like we sent them the AstraZeneca, which no one else wants. I think that's why.
Chad (2m 56s):
The ones we haven't approved. Yes.
Joel (2m 58s):
Yes.
Chad (3m 1s):
Ah, so NCAA has been shit from a bracket standpoint, not to mention, we've also seen that they don't treat the females quite the same as the males. Have you seen this?
Joel (3m 12s):
Yes. And I'm I'm, I'm so glad that that was a Texas versus Indiana thing. Cause if it was Indiana who looked like, you know, a set of five pound weights on a rack versus Texas, I would have been really hurt. But yeah, it was, it was good to see it was Texas and not us.
Chad (3m 29s):
So first and foremost, the men got the PCR test, the really expensive COVID test and the females got the rapid antigen. Right. It was like, Hey, here's the cheap stuff to go ahead. And it, yeah, you're good. You're good. Then the men got, you know, like a million dollar weight room and yeah,
Joel (3m 47s):
They got, they got the lifetime fitness with the sauna and Whirlpool.
Chad (3m 51s):
And the women got a fucking weight rack. I mean, and again, if Texas can fuck anything else up, just continue. Okay, continue. This is your year, Texas. Continue to fuck. It's just ridiculous.
Joel (4m 5s):
And then it's like next to a fold-out table. Like, is that where they were getting taped up? I don't understand what was going on there.
Chad (4m 12s):
I don't know. I don't know.
Joel (4m 13s):
Here's your bench press.
Chad (4m 15s):
Fucking five and dime down there in Texas. Jesus
Joel (4m 20s):
Don't mess with Texas baby. Let's talk about rumors real quick.
Chad (4m 25s):
OOo rumors.
Joel (4m 26s):
So, so we're not going to report on this, on this show, but this is potentially upcoming hot stuff, hot stuff. So the first rumor that I've got was given to me by two really reliable sources. And it's that iCIMS is soon to be filing their S1, which means IPO time at iCIMS. So be on the lookout for that.
Chad (4m 51s):
Or they've shown enough leg, so that Microsoft looks and goes, huh? Yeah, maybe, I ought to buy that?
Joel (4m 57s):
Yeah. They're going to pull a Glassdoor. They're pulling a Glassdoor. Like here's what we're valued. Here's how much our stock price is rising after our S1 comes on and like, Oh wait a minute, wait a minute. We have a buyer. We have a buyer, everybody psych. Yeah. So be on the, we'll be on the lookout for that. The second rumor Maya, our buddies at the, the chat bot solution there word is that they're, there'll be selling to a staffing firm and that the announcement is coming soon. My source also added that Maya has been trying to sell for quite a long time, but didn't have a whole lot of interest that may have been pandemic influenced or just the fact that the shit wasn't any good.
Joel (5m 41s):
But anyway, Maya and iCIMS should be main stories coming soon if these rumors are true. Yeah.
Chad (5m 49s):
Yeah. I got confirmation on that last one with Maya. Overall, I don't think it's that the tech is shit. I think it's at point you can just kind of wait it out, you know, you can wait it out and get a lower price later. So yeah, that's probably what smart buyers are doing. They're waiting for a little bit more of a clearance rack.
Joel (6m 8s):
Yeah. Fair enough. And let's be honest, Maya raised a shit ton of money, which means the money they had to get in a sale was going to be significant.
Chad (6m 17s):
That was that. Remember AllyO had like $65 and they went for $50. So they didn't even cover their bets. Right?
Joel (6m 24s):
Yeah. What did Maya raise about $70 or 80?
Chad (6m 27s):
$51 million
Joel (6m 28s):
Doubtful. They got the $500 million their investors were hoping for.
Chad (6m 32s):
Yes.
Joel (6m 33s):
We'll see. If they don't announce the number, then we know it was not good
Chad (6m 38s):
Away from tech, but now talking about politics real quick.
Joel (6m 42s):
Okay.
Chad (6m 43s):
The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Dr. Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the very first transgender federal official to be confirmed by the chamber. Now the vote was 52 to 48 and the only two Republicans that actually crossed lines to vote for Dr. Rachel Levine was two females, Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who joined all the rest, the rest of the Democrats and voting for Dr. Levine, as assholes like Rand Paul continue fearing anything that is not a straight white male.
Chad (7m 26s):
Congratulations Dr. Levine, man. That's that's awesome. It's good that we can take that step because I don't believe we're the first.
Joel (7m 34s):
Making progress. And by the way, I don't have the names, but I remember seeing a story about ESPN had their first ever all female play by play on an NBA game. So we're making progress all over the place, baby. Power to the women.
Chad (7m 50s):
One day, this week, one day was Women's Equal Pay Day. So I'm probably going to step in it on this one, but what the actual fuck is this day for?
Joel (8m 3s):
And why is it a day?
Chad (8m 5s):
I mean recognition that females are paid less seriously? I mean, why, why don't we have a concerted effort on this cluster fuck. Instead of a fluffy recognition day, I don't understand days like this. If we focused on shit that actually moved anything because nothing's being moved. Like transparency, forcing companies to demonstrate that they're actually paying equally, there's equity. So these days that just come out of nowhere and everybody's like, today's equal payday. It's like, but you're not getting equal pay. I don't fucking get this.
Joel (8m 43s):
Well, thank God Prince Harry is going to be getting equal pay soon announcement out of Silicon Valley, a unicorn industry startup Better Up, which offers personalized coaching content and care, designed to transform lives and careers has announced Prince Harry as Chief Impact Officer. So no more poor house for Prince Harry. He's going to be making some bank, finally. Thank God for that.
Chad (9m 10s):
I wonder, I mean, the pitch for Prince Harry, because, you know, he had several companies coming after him to have him, you know, like endorse or be a part of.
Joel (9m 20s):
Sure.
Chad (9m 21s):
Gotta wonder what the pitch was here. And obviously with, you know, with Better Up there's this altruistic kind of feel to making money. Right?
Joel (9m 30s):
Yep.
Chad (9m 31s):
Maybe that was it.
Joel (9m 31s):
I feel like the attending, the SHERM conferences was probably the thing that sold Prince Harry on our industry. I mean, can you imagine finally, sales calls will be answered if Prince Harry is making, making the sales calls at Better Up, that'll be a nice change.
Chad (9m 48s):
They'll send out a send out a, just like these robotic Prince Harry voice mails. Yeah,
Joel (9m 53s):
Yeah. Harry's to everybody Lisa, Prince Harry's on the phone. No shit? The whole HR departments gathered around for the sales call.
Chad (10m 1s):
Prince Harry's on Zoom. That's what it is. So this week I had a great time with Madeline Laurano talking more in depth about the research she did and programmatic it's called State of Programmatic job advertising covered a couple, you know, areas. 40% of job advertising spend is wasted due to obviously the old way of doing job postings versus programmatic, which actually has a 90% customer retention rate, which I thought was fucking ridiculous. I mean, that's awesome. Anyway, we went pretty deep into the, the programmatic research can find it at aptituderesearch.com to download the entire report.
Chad (10m 45s):
That was a good time. And to think that all of pretty much talent acquisition, they still can't spell programmatic. Let alone know what the fuck it is.
Joel (10m 54s):
He said really deep. Let's just talk about free shit for a second. If you haven't signed up for free t-shirts, free bourbon, free beer. What the hell is your problem? Head out to Chadcheese.com/free it's towards the end of the month, we'll be announcing announcing new winners very soon. Make sure that you're on that list to win good free shit. chadcheese.com/free.
Chad (11m 17s):
Amen. And one last shout out to Torrin and Julie at Crazy in the King. Julie's on the road this week, she had a road trip with Tristen. So I filled in as guest host on the show. So this week it was appropriately renamed Whitey and the King. So go check it out. You're going to love it.
Joel (11m 39s):
Would Cracker in the King, be too inappropriate?
Chad (11m 41s):
I can call myself whatever I want. Right?
Joel (11m 42s):
Okay. We have officially, both stepped in it and we're 12 minutes into the show. So that's good. That's it. Let's get into topics.
Chad (11m 49s):
I can call myself whitey. Topics!
Joel (11m 53s):
LinkedIn we have a problem. So our friends at Jobiak, or as you like to mispronounce it, Jobiak apparently, and, their job search engine, all jobs, they did a little research or a little recon after our topic about LinkedIn aggregating jobs. And they found some pretty interesting information.
Chad (12m 14s):
Yeah. So last week we talked about the LinkedIn jobs
Joel (12m 20s):
Product or problem? Products.
Chad (12m 22s):
Okay. Both. Yeah. It's a both in this case, their product and or problem, relying on employers to claim their jobs so that they can clean up this shit pile of a job mess that LinkedIn has. So pretty much they're saying, Hey employers, we've got shit over here that needs cleaned up. Can you come do it for us? So Vencat was like, this sounds interesting. Let's jump into it and he found some data. The findings are based on the analysis of 52,000 companies, jobs on LinkedIn.
Joel (12m 55s):
So not a small universe. They did some real deep data diving in this one.
Chad (13m 0s):
Not at all. So approximately 60% of LinkedIn jobs were coming from job boards. Over 50% of jobs did not have direct links to employer career pages. Jobs are being associated with the wrong company. Come on man. As an example, Jobiak found six jobs linked to its name none of them were correct. Coinbase, a company that has a total of 200 jobs on their career page had 2000 jobs on LinkedIn. So I mean,
Joel (13m 36s):
Sorry about that extra zero. Sorry about that extra zero.
Chad (13m 39s):
What the Fuck man? I mean, this is just ridiculous.
Joel (13m 44s):
So to remedy this is my favorite part. LinkedIn is relying on employers to claim their jobs, which as Jobiak highlighted is unrealistic and a cause for major concern. LinkedIn, come on, man.
Chad (13m 60s):
Yeah. So Alexander Jakawski on LinkedIn. He's been scraping jobs probably for about 10 years, if not more, he posted this and the Coinbase example of actually 200 jobs and 2000 on LinkedIn and what are the product managers or something said responded and then said, you know, it's not as easy as it looks.
Joel (14m 20s):
Well, no shit.
Chad (14m 21s):
I'm paraphrasing, but it really to be quite Frank, it is if you know the source and you don't take jobs from everyone, that's the problem. They're opening up to everyone. And the question is, are they doing this from the arbitrage standpoint? Or are they doing this so that they do create a mess? So that employers feel like they have to come back, clean up that mess. And then re-engage with those employers, that's a shitty way to drive leads. I don't see that somebody actually threw that out to me, LinkedIn. I was like, that's fucking stupid. But overall it is easier when you white list companies. And if you're taking jobs directly from applicant tracking systems and you're not taking them from job boards, you have to look at the source.
Chad (15m 6s):
We started doing this at Direct Employers before we were Direct Employers in like 2002, right? And Indeed took our feed, Simply Hired, took our feed. You know why? Because they knew it was a trusted feed of only corporate career sites. Right? So this can be done in a very easy way. I quote unquote "easy". There's a lot of maintenance to be done. The biggest key, if you're a LinkedIn, you go to the applicant tracking systems. LinkedIn has a big enough name to be able to interface with the applicant tracking systems and actually make something like this happen.
Joel (15m 42s):
I think a lot of it was early hubris. I think, early on they thought every recruiter uses us. Every employer uses us. So of course they're going to post all their jobs on our site, right? And then the world sort of went away from this manually posting jobs world and went into sort of a XML file, scraping whatever. And LinkedIn wasn't built for that. They were built for like, Hey, your link, your job is connected to a profile or a company and everything's native and you're putting it in it within the walled garden of LinkedIn and programmatic throws this whole other variable into the job search and job promotion world, and companies just want jobs to show up.
Joel (16m 25s):
They don't want to post them manually. And they've just what they wanted it to be isn't what it is. And now they're trying to like backtrack and figure out how do we fix this? How do we get all these jobs to be native jobs? And that's not working. So they have a real fucked up situation over at LinkedIn.
Chad (16m 41s):
They're showing just how ancient their technology is right now.
Joel (16m 45s):
It seems like they should have some brain power in the house to help them with this problem. Maybe not.
Chad (16m 51s):
If they wanted to figure this out, it could be figured out fairly quickly, but they don't have, they don't have the expertise.
Joel (16m 56s):
Just, just write a check to Vencat dammit, just write a check and be done with it.
Chad (17m 2s):
I love Vencat to death, but looking at his stuff, I don't think he's got to figured it out either.
Joel (17m 7s):
And we'll talk about that on next week's show, stay tuned, kids.
Chad (17m 12s):
Now it's time for some buy or sell.
Joel (17m 14s):
Well, I love me some buy or sell. All right we have three startups. They all have one thing in common, of course, which is, I guess the pandemic. We'll start out with Visage, hopefully I'm saying that correctly, San Francisco based Visage as a hiring platform, using the power of the crowd. Think of it as like 4,000 sourcing nerds in one place to find you the right candidate. So they raised 7 million in series A funding. First analysis led the round and was joined by investors, including Urban Innovation Fund. You can find out more and I love this. I'm just going to throw this in there. URL is visage.jobs, which is the only vendor that I can think of that uses a .jobs domain. So good on them.
Joel (17m 55s):
This sourcing technology blends 4,000 sourcers and AI to find diverse talent within hours. Buy or sell?
Chad (18m 4s):
Yeah. Unlike Fetcher, I like that Visage, isn't trying to bullshit the market yet, they're using humans as a part of the model. What I would not like as a perspective buyer is the valuation of a tech company instead of a service company. Right. So if it's valued as a tech company, it's overpriced, I'm selling. If it's valued as a service company I'm buying. So the platform could turn into the Uber of RPOs, I think, but overall there are way too many cogs that could, human cogs, that could fall out of the machine to make it its valuation good for tech.
Joel (18m 48s):
Yeah, so if this had been a company launched 15 years ago, it would have been hailed as revolutionary as fuck. But as most of our listeners have heard us talk about over the years, you know, sourcing is becoming more and more automated. The idea of thinking like, let's post a wreck and have 4,000 human beings weed through it and place people, seems really antiquated and it seems prime to be totally disrupted by, I don't know, automation and automated sourcing, which a lot of companies are doing now. So unless they're looking at a big pivot to get off the human beings, I'm going to have to sell this thing.
Joel (19m 28s):
I mean, I like the idea of these sourcers having something to do because companies are letting them go at at record paces. So that's nice. And I guess they can milk this for a while, but you know, I think sourcing is going the way of the Polaroid camera, maybe at some point.
Chad (19m 43s):
Well, it seems like it could be almost like a niche Fiverr for sourcing.
Joel (19m 48s):
That's basically what it is. I mean, crowdsourcing was big again, back in 2010, if this company was, you know, 10 years.
Chad (19m 56s):
Oh, Fiverrs big. Yeah. It's crowdsourcing not to mention also this is kind of like an Uber app. Think about it. Uber's crowdsourcing vehicles and people. Right.
Joel (20m 5s):
You can crowdsource it, but can it be automated? I think is the question. And I think most of what Visage does can be automated.
Chad (20m 13s):
Gotcha.
Joel (20m 13s):
All right. Let's go to number two. Fetcher. You gave a tease on that, you're not a huge fan or maybe you are the New York-based recruiting automation platform focused on diversity raised 6.5 million in Series A funding late last week. G20 Ventures led the round and was joined by investors, including K fund, Accomplice and Slow Ventures, Fetcher automates your repetitive top of funnel tasks. So you can focus more on candidate engagement and team collaboration, buy or sell? Fetcher?
Chad (20m 44s):
Yeah. So is anybody not pimping diversity these days?
Joel (20m 49s):
It's like AI was a year and a half, two years.
Chad (20m 52s):
Diversity's the new AI. Yeah, that's it. Okay. So now you, you know how much I love me some matching technology, right? That's my favorite, but I'm not a fan of said matching. If it's founded in outsourced humans, performing the matches. I understand Fetcher is more than matching, but that is the biggest and most valuable lift and technical asset for me and it's vaporware. So I am selling.
Joel (21m 22s):
Yeah. Just on the promotional copy that I've read. I mean, I liked the idea of automating repetitive top of funnel tasks. Obviously we talk a lot about that. So I'm going to go ahead and sell this one as well. I do however, love the fact that they actually engage with us when we post. I posted a shred on this and I got followed by like 28 Fetcher employees and people that were like, thanks for talking about us, which is also not a great sign that their employees have all the time to like follow, follow me and thank me for that. But anyway, all right, we got two Sells. Let's see if we have a buy in our third competitor, Lattice: a San Francisco based HR management platform raised 60 million this week valuing it at $1 billion, unicorn alert!
Joel (22m 10s):
Tiger Global led the round. The new series of the investment brings Lattices total funding to $158 million, since its founding in 2013, so not quite as startup. Lattice has grown its teamed over 225 employees and serves more than 2,500 businesses, including Slack, Asauna and <inaudible> over the course of 2020, the company has doubled in size due to the increased focus on people-centric thinking in businesses. Lattice is the people management platform that enables people leaders to develop engaged high-performing teams. Lattice, buy or sell?
Chad (22m 47s):
Pandemic, say what? Yeah, we're going to stay remote and or hybrid, right? So we have to have technology in to be able to manage that much better than we have over the years. So Lattice in their investors understand now is the time to build and grab market share quickly. Organic growth is great, but when the weather is right and you have access to funds, you launch that rocket ship baby, because I'm buying!
Joel (23m 14s):
Right. Yeah. I agree. Like we, I talk all the time when we do these about catching the right wave, right? There's no doubt that the pandemic and work from home and hybrid office and et cetera, is going to mint a lot of companies that focus on this problem. Is Lattice, the company that strikes at big or one of the companies that makes it big? I don't know, but they're riding the right wave. So for me, this is a big buy Lattice, even though it makes me think of lettuce, which I don't like so much, let's Take a quick break and get into some more.
Chad (23m 49s):
Hot topics.
Sovren (23m 51s):
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