With Chad in Europe for the next 3 weeks, Cheese pulls a Lionel Richie and goes solo, talkin' news and opinion on Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. Who are the winner and losers?
Additionally, Facebook and LinkedIn are in the news with new tools aiding recruitment, CareerBuilder keeps bleeding executives and Vermont wants you. Enjoy, and visit the show sponsors: America's Job Exchange, JobAdX and Sovren. I'm on a roll, it's time to go solo ...
Transcript
Hi-de-ho, boys and girls. Welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast, lovingly known as The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman, flying solo with Chad on a three-week bender in Europe. On this week's show, Microsoft just bitch slapped the whole industry again. Facebook isn't taking anything sitting down, and the dominoes keep falling at CareerBuilder. Stay tuned. I'll be right back after this word from JobAdX. How many times has someone said to you, "We're the uber of," or, "It's the PayPal of," maybe, "We're the Facebook of." In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality, or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot-on that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google AdSense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, consistent, and smarter ad unit for job-related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms, real-time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. All this is down with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click, or application. We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We are not set in regrets. For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards higher rev share than other partners through our smarter programmatic platform, in many cases, 30-40% greater, and more for our scalable partner. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com or email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Oh, you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX has just launched in the UK too. Jolly good, JobAdX. Yes, everyone. You heard me right. In the opening, Chad is not on the show this week. That's either- Woo. ... applause or- Boo. ... a big boo, I guess, depending how big of a fan you are of Chad, but yeah, Chad is on a three-week vacation in Europe. Yeah, even Chad takes vacations. That brings us to our shout-outs, and my first one goes out to Chad, who I know is listening over in Europe probably over some beer in Germany or a pint in London or something, probably hoping that I fall flat on my face and realize how much I need him on this show every week to get it right. The good news is that, well, if you don't like Chad, that's the good news, but the good news also is this should be a much abbreviated show because I know how much Chad likes to talk on and on and on about usually nothing, so we'll cut out a lot of the fat in this podcast, hopefully, and cut it down for you guys so you can enjoy your summer a little bit quicker. Also in shout-outs for me, Colin Day, CEO and founder and chairman over at iCIMS. Shout-out to him. We did a great podcast late last month and published it on Wednesday of this week. If you haven't heard that interview, go out to the show archives and listen to that interview. Colin's very honest, very transparent. He's very opinionated as well, so we got some great feedback on that podcast. I encourage you to go listen to that. Another shout-out to Christine Shaw, an Australian listener who heard us for the first time, and we were talking about [inaudible 00:04:32] on the show. She ended up running right into [inaudible 00:04:34], the CEO and founder of the company at some event in Australia, apparently. Shout-out to Christine and our Australian listeners. I love making those connections through the podcast. It's always great. Lastly, on my shout-outs, we haven't been getting a lot of love on the Twitter account #ChadCheese lately, so I encourage you to leave some notes, particularly if you miss Chad, hate me, or maybe you hate Chad, don't want him to ever come back on the show, hashtag on Twitter ChadCheese. Leave a comment. Say hi to Chad. The good [inaudible 00:05:11], I'm sure, will give him a shout-out to make him feel loved. Those are my shout-outs, and with much ado from there, let's get into the news from the week. Well, there was a huge bomb that dropped. If you heard an explosion, that was Microsoft buying GitHub for 7.5 billion, that's with a B. If you're not familiar with GitHub, you're probably not a recruiter. GitHub, for those who don't know, is, I guess, sort of a meeting ground for developers, programmers, tech talent to write code, share code, share ideas, connect, et cetera. It's a hugely popular platform for recruiters to source talent. If you're keeping score at home, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for 26.2 billion last year, 2006, and now they own GitHub. There's not really much argument. They own the two most popular professional networking sites in the world. That's kind of a big deal. We talk quite extensively about Glassdoor going for 1.2 billion to Recruit Holdings, which also owns Indeed. We're talking about $7.5 billion for this deal. This deal kind of laughs in the face of the Indeed-Glassdoor marriage. These are real big companies with real big resources making real big moves in our industry. I got thinking about this move and who exactly were the winners, who were the losers, who were the "We'll see what happens." My short list of winners in this deal, number one, goes to LinkedIn. LinkedIn now adds GitHub as a partner, a platform, potential partner in terms of sourcing. The key here really in terms of recruiting that I see is, a lot of people on GitHub are not on LinkedIn. I hear recruiters all the time talking about "I can't get tech people on LinkedIn because they hate LinkedIn. All they do is get calls from headhunters." From that perspective, I think that's a huge win for LinkedIn. I think at some point the platforms will bleed into another. Maybe you'll go to your LinkedIn account and be able to source people on GitHub [inaudible 00:07:31]. I think LinkedIn is a big winner here. Facebook as well I think is a winner. This further proves that people are where the value is in these deals. [inaudible 00:07:39] when you see [inaudible 00:07:40] really small numbers compared to what we were seeing out of what people pay for profiles and active users on our website. If you connect the dots there, Facebook has most people on the planet Earth that are online using its site. If Facebook ever decides to get really serious about employment and professional profiles and connecting with those people through searching whatever, which a lot of those pieces are already there, I think they'd become a winner in this trend of connecting with professional talent. I think Dice is an outlier winner of this. Ironically, Dice should've been the headline in the story. Ten years ago, if we would've said who's going to build GitHub, it would've been someone like Dice; however, I do think there's an opportunity for Dice in the fact that a lot of people on GitHub, the open source developers, aren't real big fans of Microsoft. If Dice can build a, provide a GitHub competitor, something similar, I would go out and pay the top 50, a hundred GitHubers that are open-source folks that aren't real happy about this deal and pay them to come over to Dice and build maybe an open-source only product or something similar. I think there's a window here for Dice to take advantage of what just happened with Microsoft coming in and taking that property. I also think that Stack Overflow is a beneficiary of what's going on with this deal, primarily because they're the Pepsi to GitHub's Coke. They have profiles. They have somewhat of the same things going on over there, so $7.5 billion price tag really only means that Stack Overflow should be a much more valuable properly. In terms of the losers of the deal, I mentioned Indeed and Glassdoor. I think they're a big loser in this. I think they continue to add pieces to this Indeed platform. I think they'll add all of Glassdoor. They just bought resume.com, workopolis, the Canadian mega-site. I say that sarcastically. All these pieces they're putting together seem way too little, way too late. The resources, the Microsoft, the Facebooks, and the Googles have are just going to be really, really challenge, so I think they're a big loser in this deal that GitHub joins Microsoft. Another loser in this I think is anyone who provides technology for sourcing candidates where it creates profiles from information on GitHub and LinkedIn, et cetera. A couple ways that that, that this is why I think these guys are losers. Number one is the HiQ case is still out there. For those of you don't know, there's some interviews. An interview we did with a HiQ CEO, we've talked about this case, but basically, LinkedIn is in a lawsuit battle with HiQ over being able to scrape content, profile content from LinkedIn, put that profile data into HiQ's own system, et cetera. There are a lot of sites to do this. The SeekOuts, the HiringSolveds. You guys probably more than even I do if you're a recruiter out there. I mean, there are a lot of sites that make their living on scraping GitHub and LinkedIn data. You can rest assured that if LinkedIn wins the case, then there's a good chance that GitHub and LinkedIn get shut down for anyone trying to access their site as a third party. Even if that case doesn't happen, you're going to have double resources, you're going to have LinkedIn coming in and saying, "Let's create technological ways to keep the scrapers off, let's do things that make it harder to scrape GitHub content and LinkedIn content." I think regardless of what happens, it's going to harder to go in and get GitHub and LinkedIn data following this deal that Microsoft did. I think Google's a loser in this deal. I think that Google would've loved to have had a site like GitHub in its ranks, and I think Google would've been a better acquirer of GitHub because I think most Githubers, if that's what they're called, probably are more amenable to Google as a buyer than they are Microsoft. So for Google to lose this if it was a bidding war, I think is a real negative. I also think that if Google, as part of it's higher product/ ATS, if they want to be able to source the web for profiles and have those profiles accessible to it's users, that just got a lot harder. There's a really good chance that LinkedIn was not going to play ball if Google was trying to build that. There's a very good chance now that GitHub will not open itself up to a Google ATS sourcing search people tool. If that's in the offing. I think we mentioned when Indeed bought resume.com that resume.com resumes would also be closed off to Google in response to this defensive move. So there are three sites right there that probably won't be available to Google if they want to build a sourcing tool in LinkedIn, GitHub and resume.com. So Google is a loser in this. Lastly, sort of fringe, but I think Monster and all job boards continue to be a loser in this game. I picked on Monster a little bit here because they passed on buying LinkedIn a long time ago, over a decade ago. They bought Tickle instead. They shut down Tickle, which could have been all kinds of stuff in terms of networking, professional networking. They had BeKnown when sort of the branch outs of the world were leveraging Face Book to build communities. They tanked that. So they've had multiple times to try to build something social networking wise and they just continue to drop the ball on that. I also think that Job Boards in particular continue to lose footing in this battle of resources and big dollars. So job boards in addition, I think are a loser here. On the I'm not sure yet list, is going to be consumers. Consumers particularly being employers. On one hand, you have the fact that by being purchased by Microsoft, GitHub is going to have a lot more in terms of resources, money, new features, things that will go on. In that case it's good. I think if you're an employer and you love Linked In, I think eventually those two properties will bleed into the other. Will you be able to use LinkedIn and then also advertise on GitHub as well, or source talent in GitHub while you're in the LinkedIn platform? I think that's probably good from a user's perspective. You're not bouncing back and forth and a lot of those tools don't exist now on GitHub. For example, posting jobs in mass on GitHub. It hasn't been real easy. I suspect that to change. You could probably post a job on LinkedIn, you can upgrade that listing to go onto GitHub if it's a tech position. So that will be easier and probably more user friendly. However, I think on the other side of it, it will cost more money to use LinkedIn and GitHub services. So they'll be pulling more and more money away from what you're already using to recruit. If you can't add more dollars, if you can't add more dollars, God bless you. Most people aren't in that position. So, money is going to flow out of the traditional players that we look at now because you're going to be spending more money with LinkedIn via GitHub and that whole platform. I also think that a loser in this might be Innovation. As business as we know it sort of condenses or consolidates into three, four, five major players, a lot of the start ups out there are going to have a tough go at it because companies use one or two platforms to recruit. So I think in that aspect, it does kill Innovation a little bit, which does obviously impact the consumer long term. So, that's a negative as well, but the jury is still out on how bad this will be or how good this will be for consumers. Moving along here and I'm a little slow with the sound board because it's just me and I can't look at it while Chad's talking. But our second story here I wanted to talk about, speed kills. In the news this week, both LinkedIn and Cornerstone on Demand released new features, products to basically make it easier, quicker to apply to jobs, sort of the one click apply notion. Now historically, one click apply hasn't been hugely popular with employers, they like to pre-screen. They like to add steps that keep out the undesirables or the most aggressive job seekers, make their job a little easier. The Amazon'ing of things won't let that last for very long. People want to quickly apply to jobs, they want to get to that application, move on with their life and I think that moreover, this is more of the Google for jobs effect. In other words, if you go search for a job for Google today, you will see apply to this job through usually ATS, or the company page and you'll see a variety of job boards. So you'll see Linked In, which may or may not be a job board, but job sites. So Zip Recruiter, Monster, multiple sites. I think that, ultimately, Google will algorithmically start showing only the ones that people like to use, continue to click, don't click and then come back and use another service. Google will eventually learn where users want to go and they will slowly filter out the sites that, frankly, aren't very user friendly. So if I click on a site and the application stinks and I've got to put a bunch of stuff in and I don't have an account already, I might go back and say, "All right. I noticed LinkedIn was on that list. I have a LinkedIn account. I'm just going to go to LinkedIn and apply that way. Ultimately, the sites that have the easiest, frictionless ways to apply are going to win in a world where Google for job sort of owns the space. So, for vendors out there, if you're not making it super easy to apply to jobs, you're going to be losing out in this battle and you're going to slowly fade away from the landscape of Google. So I encourage you to do that. Also, if you have an ATS, how quickly and easy is it to apply to your jobs? If it's slow and it stinks, you may start losing out, ironically, to job sites that are easy and quick to apply. I think LinkedIn, by far, has the pole position on this, the advantage. Most people that are searching for a job, or a lot of people already have a LinkedIn profile. So if LinkedIn is making it easy to apply, it's real easy to just go to LinkedIn, apply one click, go back and search for more jobs and apply that way. So I suspect that LinkedIn will continually be a winner in this move to create a one click apply. It really helps them out in that space. Without further ado, let's hear a quick message from America's Job Exchange. Then I'll talk a little bit about some moves by Face Book and some departures by CareerBuilder. America's Job Exchange is celebrating our 10th year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment, designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women and minorities and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community based organizations. Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284, or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. So I've talked a lot about Facebook on the podcast today and sure enough, they are in the news this week. Facebook announced early in the week that they were opening basically their job component, job postings employment in three countries, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Germany certainly being a very impactful country, a big economy, lot of jobs. So that was a big move for them. Facebook has stayed primarily in the Americas until now, so branching out into Europe is obviously a show of strength and a show of the fact that jobs must be working for them. Users must be going to job postings. Engagement must be pretty high. This is something that Facebook is not sleeping on. I think that ... I wrote a post on ERE recently about not falling asleep on Facebook. We talked about it on the podcast as well, but 800 million users per month on their marketplace products. Those are people that are not only selling used bikes and furniture, but they're also posting jobs, looking for jobs and whatnot. So that's a lot of people. If only 10% of the people that go to marketplace search for jobs casually, that makes them one of the biggest job sites in the world actually. If you're not paying attention to Facebook, particularly if you're a smaller business, which is where I think Facebook is really targeting their employment efforts, you should definitely keep your eye on and start playing around with Facebook. Start putting some budget toward it because it is an important platform and will continue to be. If the news of growth and how many people are on Facebook jobs platform isn't enough, the news that they are now allowing users to boost or advertise their marketplace postings, should definitely get you interested in viewing and looking at what's going on at Facebook. So the news that came out recently is that if you ... they're starting to beta test I think in US and Canada, the ability for users to, let's say, "Hey, I have an old bike for sale." I post it on Facebook. Hey, there's an option now where, for a minimal cost, I can boost my listing, my classified basically. And by boosting it, not only I assume it's boosted in the marketplace, but we do know from the news reports out there that the item will be promoted on the newsfeed of Facebook users and I assume as well the Instagram users which Facebook owns, Messenger which you're starting to see more and more ads show up on Messenger. Also the stories, putting stories on Instagram and Facebook, now we're starting to see ads there. You will start seeing, more than likely, more and more used furniture and bikes and things like that advertised on Facebook. They do have the advantage of knowing where you are based on your mobile phone. So you'll get stuff that's near to you, maybe stuff that your friends have clicked or shown an interest in, we're not quite sure what the algorithm will have, will filter these things, but it is a foregone conclusion that Facebook not only will allow you to promote that treadmill that's for sale, but also allow you to boost job postings as well. So I definitely expect that to be something in the near future. I think that in their partnerships with Zip Recruiter and Job Score and some others that they'll probably go to them first and say, "Hey, let's do a bulk deal and let's promote a certain percentage of your jobs, or all your jobs," and then we'll have those employment opportunities promoted within Facebook's news feeds. So expect to see postings in your news feed that are sponsored here in the near future based on Facebook's new advertising option. That should be fairly powerful if they do it right. Also in the news this week, recently I guess, a couple CareerBuilder departures to note. CareerBuilder as you know, if you listen to the show has been going through some challenging times to say the least, it looks like Apollo, their private equity firm that came in and bought them has made some tremendous changes. I encourage you to listen to past podcasts that we've talked about this item. But, a couple of veterans apparently have left, as well as some of the handful of those, the Richard Castellini's, the guys that have been there since the head hunter days in 2000. Rosemary Hefner, who was head of HR at CareerBuilder has definitely left. She has a new LinkedIn profile and a new company. She was at CareerBuilder for 14 years. The story that I heard, again this is alleged, but allegedly, this was in the tech department, that a manger or someone high up had done something that HR didn't really like. So Rosemary came down on them fairly hard. I think called him out on his bullshit was the quote that I got. I just put an expletive writing on the show, sorry about that. Called him out for his bullshit and the next day, she was let go from the company. So, not sure if that's true or not. If you know anything, feel free to head on to chadcheese.com, send us a note, or you can reach out to me directly. But Rosemary, after 14 years at CareerBuilder, is gone. Another resignation that we heard about, Kyle Brown, who was President of the staffing and recruiting group there at CareerBuilder. His LinkedIn profile is still CareerBuilder, but we've heard that he has resigned from the company. More on that later, but allegedly, Kyle Brown, President of the staffing and recruiting group is gone. The soap opera at CareerBuilder continues. Let's take a quick break, hear from Sovren and then we'll talk about HR blogging and potentially moving to New Hampshire. Sovren AI Matching is the most sophisticated matching engine on the market because it acts just like a human. You decide exactly how our AI matching engine thinks about each individual transaction. It will find, rank and sort the best matches according to your criteria. Not only does it deliver the best matches, it tells you how and why it produced them and offers tips to improve the results. Our engine thinks like you so you don't have to learn to think like the engine. To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit sovereign.com. That's S_O_V_R-E_N.com. So I said moving to New Hampshire. It's actually Vermont. We'll get to that story at the end, but I get those two states mixed up. Politically, they're super different, but geographically, they look the same. So I apologize to anyone for offending that. I wanted to talk about, sort of get off the news feed for a second. There was a post by Mark Vogul at Fistful of Talent. If you're not familiar with Fistful of Talent, the blog, I encourage you to go visit. It's basically a group of bloggers, recruiters, thought leaders that occasionally blog about certain topics. Anyway, Mark wrote recently a piece called Did HR Blogging Jump the Shark? If you're not familiar, number one with jump the shark, you don't remember Happy Days and Fonzie more than likely. That was an episode where Fonzie, in a leather jacket, water skis over a shark and by most calculations, that was the end of the popularity of Happy Days. So when anything is sort of dying or dead, we call it jumping the shark. Most of you probably knew that, but those who didn't, I wanted to just bring that up. Anyway, Mark writes that in the early days of HR blogging, it was sort of risky, it was sexy, it was like that new band throwing TV's out the window of hotel rooms. It was really sort of a cool thing to do. I speak from a position of uniqueness in this for the fact that I started blogging in 2005. I continue to blog today for ere.net. I encourage you to read some of my stuff if you haven't. And I also podcast, so I have a pretty good understanding of what Mark is talking about in regards to blogging had a heyday, social media came out, podcasting now is sort of the hot new thing. I assume at some point video will become as big or just as big as podcasting, although I think podcasting has a unique place in sort of the lives of people. If I'm working out, I go for a walk, I'm hanging out laying in bed or whatever, like audio books. Audio has a uniqueness about it that's really cool. But the gist of the story is blogging was cool. It's not cool anymore. Companies are blogging. The corporations are blogging. It's not cool anymore and you see people like Chad and myself, he mentions Laurie [inaudible 00:30:12] in the story, are gravitating towards podcasting. Vogul said, "Some of the outliers who introduced us to blogging and social media in the HR and talent space have gone heavy with audio. Can you say Chad and Cheese or Laurie [inaudible 00:30:28]? These folks led the charge in HR social media a decade ago and have switched gears in their content delivery. Podcasts, which have been around for years are finally starting to be adopted in the HR and Talent space. And HR blogging, which was once a place for those that were innovative and on the edge of HR has now gone mainstream. HR tech company blogs and [inaudible 00:30:51] bloggers are now at all the major conferences. Like music that goes from edgy to popular, the rough surface and the creativity gets watered down as consumption goes up." I agree with most of that. I will also add that podcasting is way easier than blogging. I write roughly three stories a week for ERE. I do an hour to two hour show during the week. We do firing squad. We do monthly podcasts, but I'd say by and large, the time that I spend blogging is probably three to four times longer an investment than I take in podcasting. I can say that podcasting, from a financial rewards standpoint, is equal to what I do writing. From that perspective period, would I rather ... it's much easier to podcast than it is to write stuff down. Blogging can be really frustrating because you could spend a lot of time writing a well thought out article and nothing happens. You can also put something on LinkedIn or Twitter that's really ridiculous and silly, or meme, and get tens of thousands of engagements. So, blogging is just ... I think there's just so much more competing with it that fewer people are doing it. Corporations and publicists do it just because that's what they do. But blogging really well is hard. Podcasting and speaking into a microphone for an hour or two, not that difficult. So that's where I see a lot of the trend in terms of blogging versus podcasting. Anyway, I wanted to throw that in there. It's something Chad would not probably care to talk about, so I wanted to throw that in there. Lastly on the show, Vermont is in the news, going back to them. Vermont is offering to pay people who move to the state up to $10,000 to move there. This is quite an interesting move to get talent into your state and it would be certainly interesting if a lot of other states started offering bounties for people to move to their states and increase their tax rates and everything else. There are some caveats here. To be eligible, workers must be full time employees for an out of state business. So right there that becomes challenging. I'm assuming that if you're a gig'er, if you're a freelancer, you're out of luck. You actually have to work for a legitimate business full time and move away from where they are in order to get this deal. You must work primarily from home or a co-working space within Vermont and you must become a full time resident on or after January 1, 2019. Based on the budget that they have for this program, it looks like they can accept roughly 100 people per year. I think this stretches out until 2022, this program. So anyway, if you fill those eligibility standards and you want to see really beautiful foliage in Fall and go do some skiing and you're a major Liberal, maybe Vermont is the place for you and you heard it here first maybe. That's all I got. Listen, this was a lot of fun. It's a little more challenging to be on your own, but it does allow some freedom to talk about some other things. Chad, I know you're listening. I hope you're having a great time in Europe. I'd like to say I miss you, but I don't really. But, three weeks from now, maybe I will miss you. Regardless of that, have fun and I'm out.