To say Indeed has made changes this year would be a gross understatement. Here's a roundup: 1) changes to bid optimizer, 2) changes to their resume reward system and 3) alterations to Geo and Title expansions. And to say some people are unhappy with the changes is also an understatement. That's why we invited Jim Durbin, the man Indeed calls "The Indeed Whisperer" to the podcast to get to the bottom of what's going on at the world's most popular job site.
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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 (21s):
Oh, yeah. What's up everybody? It's your favorite degenerates, aka the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman, joined as always, the Scooby to my Shaggy.
Chad (34s):
Yes.
Joel (34s):
Chad Sowash and today we welcome another old white guy to the show. Jim Durban is the Recruitment Marketing Director at PSG Global and self-proclaimed Indeed Whisperer. And for the old timers out there, Jim was associated with the original recruiting.com, and some may know him as the Social Media Head Hunter. Jim, welcome to the podcast
Chad (59s):
Blogger extraordinaire.
Jim (1m 0s):
Thank you. Thank you.
Joel (1m 2s):
He recently thought about starting a podcast, but he found his brain and decided against that, but he does have a nice shiny mic that he pulled outta the box for this interview. So, Jim, for those that don't know you, give us the Twitter bio and we'll get into your problems. We're gonna do a little, little therapy today, but tell us about you. What makes Jim tick?
Jim (1m 22s):
22 years of staffing, sales, recruiting. I quit about halfway through to start a marketing firm that I couldn't get outta my blood. So I started doing executive head hunting for digital marketers. I then dove into AI and chatbots and all that. And now I end up in RPOs running advertising, hiring hundreds of thousands of people a year. So kind of full cycle, touched everything in the industry, and now I'm back to playing with spreadsheets.
Chad (1m 47s):
Touching it all. That's exactly what we like to hear here on the Chad and Cheese Show.
Jim (1m 52s):
Yeah.
Chad (1m 54s):
Joel's closing his eyes right now. Anyway, so you have an ax to grind with our friends over at Indeed. So we thought, you know, we'd give you a little space. You're doing this on the Daily, this is a, you know, new slash rumor slash you know, the shit that's going on in the industry. And obviously Indeed's a pretty big fucking player in this industry. So let's talk about it. What acts do you have to grind?
Jim (2m 18s):
We've just seen a lot of changes this year. I mean, obviously Indeed's the number one source of all your hiring, for almost everybody. They're cheap, there's lots of volume in 'em. But they've made a series of decisions in the last year that have been poorly communicated. And I don't know who I'm angrier at Indeed for running these out or the TA world for not talking about them. Cuz these are huge, substantial changes in how we market, advertise and spend our budgets. And when no one's talking about it, what it usually means is you weren't paying attention, but we're talking about millions and millions of dollars sometimes for individual clients and they're just not even aware of it.
Chad (2m 54s):
So, recruitment marketing agencies, aren't they like a part of this, you know, piece on the play board as well? I mean, shouldn't they be advocating for their clients? I know they make more money as more obviously budget gets spent.
Joel (3m 8s):
Ding ding, dinging.
Chad (3m 10s):
Right? But at the end of the day, shouldn't they be advocating for the client and making a bunch of noise?
Jim (3m 16s):
They should, shouldn't they?
Chad (3m 18s):
Fiduciaries.
Jim (3m 18s):
Yeah, that's a whole different story. The problem there is that TA just likes to write checks and thinks the problem's solved.
Chad (3m 24s):
Okay.
Jim (3m 25s):
They're not looking at the things they're actually doing. And it's shocking when you guys hear some of the numbers I'll drop on you, you're gonna have to, Oh, better show me that. Cause we're talking about cutting your costs 90% for some of these folks, or a CPA that's $35 that I can deliver you at 50 cents. That's not me being a super genius. That's people doing things so badly and not paying attention and just, oh, just hand it to the vendor to write a check. So it's definitely a problem. And, but that's what's happened this year is these three or four big things. I don't understand why people aren't losing their minds when their costs have gone up so much?
Chad (3m 58s):
All right, number one, let's hit it.
Jim (4m 2s):
In January, Indeed switched off the CPC. So they took off the manual granular view of your campaigns and forced everybody to the bid optimize it, which is basically their version of Indeed hosted jobs. There are lots of reasons why they did it, but they took away that granular piece from us. And so I used that granular piece to drop cost for desktop remote people from $2 and 14 cents down to 50 cents. So when they took that away, I was like, well, now what do we do? Right? In all fairness, the reason they did it is because 99% of their corporate customers just handed off to their customer success manager and they were doing it anyway. So only a few, it's like owning a McDonald's and everybody uses Uber Eats.
Jim (4m 43s):
Nobody goes into the store. So why keep the store open? So they just cut that CPC thing out and nobody said a word because they weren't using the dashboard at all. They were just handing it off to somebody else.
Joel (4m 55s):
So just so I'm clear, Jim, historically you would post a job on, Indeed you would pay, I think initially it was like 25 cents minimum per click and then bids would go up or the cost would go up depending on how competitive the market was. And what you're saying is that's gone now it's just we're gonna do the bidding for you based on the job you're looking to fill, et cetera.
Jim (5m 17s):
Absolutely. Indeed's created, they've simplified their algorithm, but now it's created to identify what they think your ideal spending profile is. That's a dangerous word. Cause it's not your best interest, it's not the best candidate. It's what is your risk tolerance. And that's what the bid optimizer ultimately does. If you're not watching it, it keeps pushing the ceiling up. It'd be like, you know, you go to your store and like, it's $2 for a Coke the next day it's $3. You don't say anything by the time it's eight. You're like, when did Cokes up?
Joel (5m 46s):
Boiling the frog.
Jim (5m 47s):
Because you weren't paying attention because you basically told them algorithmically, I don't have any problem paying for this. And changing that CPC to the bid optimizer absolutely does. And this why you see costs move up in the middle of the year. It's not job postings. It's literally your campaigns are creating a better risk profile based on your past behavior.
Joel (6m 7s):
And is this because companies, they don't really care about ROI in that sense. They care that they get enough candidates and enough hires hopefully to pay for it. In other words, if I'm spending a thousand and I'm still getting the same results, like who cares? But I'm getting fewer candidates and less traffic because of that. And, my Indeed sales rep calls me every month and says, Hey, if we increase that budget, we can get you more candidates. Is that what's happening?
Jim (6m 34s):
But it's what they've been doing for the last 10 years, but it's far more complicated than that. Now there's 30 different triggers that can go on it. There's 30 or 40 different things you can do for your jobs. Whether they're indexed, how are you using your titles? Do they have the right schema for your post? Are you creating something with template, blah blah blah. Lots of tactical stuff no one but me cares about. It's far more complex now they're making it easy because why not make it easy? Nobody cared anyway.
Chad (6m 60s):
Well nobody was paying attention. Yeah. And now they are in a situation where they just have to throw money at a problem. That's all they've got. And it sounds like there is no sound. So looks like Indeed wins again.
Joel (7m 12s):
Yeah.
Jim (7m 12s):
Well that was just the first one in January. So let's go to the second one, see if the changes reminded.
Joel (7m 17s):
Number 2.
Jim (7m 19s):
Okay. As on its own. That's defensible. We're doing it for the job seekers. Yeah, we made a bunch of money, but let's not talk about that. The second one was the change of the sourcing pieces to the getting rid of the rewards. So traditionally they've always complained cuz the dollar wasn't enough for them, but it was a dollar or resume credit and you'd get rewards if you sent it and people responded to you.
Chad (7m 39s):
Right.
Jim (7m 39s):
So I did that at Marriott. We were able to generate perpetual motion machines where we'd have a hundred percent response rates because you get two credits back for sending it. I'd have people sending three or 4,000 emails out on a hundred credit account, which is great for us, right? Yeah. Then they all went free during the pandemic. Now they're like, they went far on the other side. It's, they raised their cost 20%, which isn't that big a deal. Everybody did. But they took away the rewards. And that functionally is a 300% increase in your sourcing budget cuz each contact usually gets about 300 contacts a month.
sfx (8m 13s):
What did you say?
Jim (8m 14s):
Yes, 300. So imagine I go to my CEO and I say, I know that we budgeted $200,000 for Indeed resumes, but it's gonna be 600 this year and 800 next year. And again, nobody said anything.
Joel (8m 26s):
Because they're still cheaper than LinkedIn, right?
Jim (8m 28s):
No. No, not anymore. Not anymore. It's why everybody's moving off that resume. They bought a bunch of contacts. But that's a fundamental change in how and all of our CPHs, it's too expensive to source unless you're a smaller, medium sized business.
Chad (8m 42s):
When is talent acquisition going to fucking smarten up? That's the big question. Because they keep paying for the same goddamn candidates over and over. They're in their database. They don't keep 'em fresh. They allow 'em to, to go into a black hole. I mean, Indeed's prosperity is really off the backs of just laziness or stupidity. Am I wrong?
Jim (9m 1s):
Their tech is better than the other stuff out there because they're a search engine. It's the same reason Google dominated everywhere. You're only as your dumbest competitor. So, while I'm complaining here, right, I have to admit I haven't had these problems. My costs keep dropping. My applications go up. We're doing great. I'm just shocked watching other people, because I sit and talked to a lot of folks in that position and oh God, we spent a hundred thousand dollars Indeed this month. What do I do? The answer is, well six months ago you should have sat down and fixed all these problems and they aren't doing it. So it's happening. I was, CEOs are just saying, yeah, shut Indeed off for the rest of the year. Which is funny cuz that might have the effect of doing more hiring because managers don't have 30 candidates to play with.
Jim (9m 44s):
Right? But it's not healthy for anybody and they can't figure it out. Like how do we fix it? The answer can't just be spend money. We know we have less candidates. We know the entire industry is telling us we are gonna give you less candidates and more cost. Everyone's saying that and we get that and as an industry we have to kind of turn into marketing in 2005, the good thing is we already know the the playbook. We have to focus on conversion because impressions and clicks and analytics don't oppress anybody anymore cuz B2B freaked out now they're all doing content marketing with those stupid cadences because they can't figure out how to get people to, to sign up for a hundred thousand dollars ATS kind of stuff. Right? So we know the roadmap and we've seen it before, but I mean you guys, well Joel, you know, I mean I've been trying for 15 years to tell people, recruiters need to turn into marketers.
Jim (10m 29s):
It doesn't work. We're not the same people.
Joel (10m 31s):
You mentioned Google, but Google doesn't have a lot of competition. Would you argue that Indeed doesn't have any competition either? Cuz I look at the landscape and go, geez, there's a lot of players out there. Are they just not good enough to compete with? Indeed. Like what's going on with the competitive landscape right now?
Jim (10m 47s):
The pay per click model isn't something that anyone's been able to beat. So with programmatic stepping up obviously and a lot of money that comes through programmatic runs through Indeed. But now you took me to my third problem.
Joel (11m 1s):
Let's go.
Chad (11m 1s):
Here we go.
Jim (11m 2s):
So one of the concerns that's coming out of Indeed is job seekers need the same type of jobs. And what programmatics big push is, is geo geo expansion and title expansion. I can put a job all across the country. A warehouse worker is the same as a warehouse worker, associate, a fulfillment specialist, a picker packer, same job, different title. So by doing title expansions because we haven't figured out how to stop people from typing titles into to search engines, right? Until that's done. Those job expansions help us do that when we're doing remote roles are statewide roles. You need those geo expansions if you're gonna do them correctly. And they're now saying we're going to one to one. Now here's the thing, in January that bid optimizer also forced the programmatic advertisers to go to bid optimizer.
Jim (11m 48s):
This one to one seems like it's attempting, and I could be wrong about this cuz certainly the programmatic people aren't admitting this. It seems like they're trying to cut their throats that one to one because it's not a fixable problem on the search engine side without a lot of cash. Making us post one job for one entry doesn't work for everybody. And I, how does programmatic, I don't need programmatic If I can't do geo and title expansions, what are they possibly gonna do for me? So, and again, no one says a word. I'm like, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. And the worst is the whole time that they're doing it, they're telling us it's for the job seekers while they rake in cash. I dunno about you guys. When someone tells me how they're gonna change hiring in the industry, like tell me how to do my job.
Jim (12m 30s):
I start cursing a little bit, you know, and Jim
Joel (12m 33s):
Goes to church every day, so this isn't something he does
Jim (12m 36s):
Regularly. You know, I'll say, gosh darn and nephew, but no, but seriously, don't tell me how to do my, and especially when you're raking money hand over fist, it's so, it's so obvious. It's like in the old days when someone started talking about a social issue, you knew them we're gonna hit their quarterly profits. Now it's the exact opposite. They're raking in money hand over fist. I'm like, oh, we build a hospital. Aren't we good for ourselves? Like I I don't trust people who tell me that they're doing it for my own good n nor should anybody. That's the real question. Are we pivoting away from Indeed?
Chad (13m 4s):
They've been saying that for 20 years Jim. Or at least close to 20 years. I mean, what the fuck did any of us expect? This has been always we're doing it for the job seeker since Paul Forrester. It's always been, we're doing it for the job seeker while we rake in the cash and it doesn't matter. So you know, this is about the crack job boards got addicted to the crack staffing companies got addicted to the crack. Yeah. Employers got addicted to the crack. Now that you're all addicted to the crack, Indeed start stepping on it and who knows what they're putting in the crack nowadays, but what the fuck are you gonna do? We've been talking about this for
Jim (13m 39s):
Years. I'm worried about what they might do next because I mean I call myself the Indeed whisperer. I've gotten Indeed to start calling me that. And it's kind of funny and I love brands obviously, but what happens when they do something I can't fix? Cause the answer can't just be, Hey six x your budget. You know, it can't be a, hey let's go to who's terrible. Every other job board out there
Joel (14m 3s):
Who's terrible every other job board
Jim (14m 4s):
Out. Well their problem is they're all swapping traffic. They're stuck on the Indeed Crack too. Yes. If you go to, they're buying so much of their traffic from Indeed when I, I diversified our tech stack cuz my goal is to have no more than 50% of candidates come from a de just, just for safety reason. Integration breaks, things go wrong. They get mad at me cuz they say something on a semi-popular podcast by a guy.
4 (14m 34s):
Oh no.
Chad (14m 34s):
Let's go into some of the things that Indeed has been doing to be able to push employers to really do a better job and rethink. I mean again, employers talent acquisition, you, you've been lazy. Let, let's just put it out there. There's no getting around it guys. They are starting to force salary for salary transparency. That's a good thing. Everybody should fucking be doing that anyway. Doesn't matter. Forcing that the application process sucks. So what did Indeed do? They started to paying for the first process of trying to gather more information so that they can do more cost per, you know, whatever. Not to mention interviewing. I mean it's one of those things where they are trying to actually insert themselves into the process more for a couple of reasons because the current process is shit from company to company.
Chad (15m 23s):
I'd say 95% of the companies that are out there. So they see a window and they can say our favorite it's for the job seeker talent acquisition is creating this fucking problem because they're not actually fixing the problems that have been around for 20 years. Most of these problems have been around since the late nineties.
Jim (15m 44s):
Yeah, that's absolutely true. However, except
Chad (15m 46s):
For the programmatic piece. Obviously
Jim (15m 47s):
This is my concern when you go back to Indeed about it, this, they did the salary ranges, which is very bold of them to assume that they understand what's going on. Yeah. By the way, if you make a fight about that on LinkedIn, every compensation analyst in the world has come yell at you. And my only response to that is, well how can you be a compensation analyst? Isn't there still a gender wage gap? So you're bad at your jobs, Right? They don't like to hear that. Yeah, the but that, that's that pitch to salaries. Oh we're doing this. What happened is that they can't track it anymore. So the Indeed Pixel, which never fired correctly because how are they gonna put it into 300 different, you know, all their clients, they wanna know the hiring so they can come back and say, see look how good we do, give us more money now they wanna drive everything internally to their platform.
Jim (16m 32s):
So they're Indeed hiring platforms there. They want you to, they want all of your recruiters to be in Indeed. And I'm like single point of failure first off. And two, why would I trust you and three, why would I give you my data? There's an example for them. Like I see where they're going it, but they're like, give us your data. Like no,
Chad (16m 49s):
Yeah, you can't, you can't trust them.
Jim (16m 52s):
I, I have to manually download reports every day to be able to look at stuff the way I want and that's just Excel and Power bi. Why would I trust them to look at their own dashboards when that ideal spending profile is not based on what I want, it's what on makes most sense to them and good for them for building an algorithm that's as good as the airlines when they change your rates if you go back to IT or Amazon, which charges you differently if you return to much stuff. But just because they want it doesn't mean that it's good for me. And I think that's what people are finally starting to see. We are seeing some companies begin to hire recruitment advertising cuz that that was like, what was that for years it was just job posting and then we had recruitment marketing and all the money goes to employment brand, which is very difficult, very difficult to track cuz creative is, but advertising we're talking about million, 2 million, 5 million budgets that you can cut 10, 20, 30% without even thinking about just basic things.
Jim (17m 46s):
Well what do you do? This is my problem. I can't walk into a company and say you're overspending by 90% because then everybody gets fired, right? I made that mistake years ago. I walked into a very large beer company and I told them I will give me $200,000 and that $15 million a quarter you spend on banner ads, you can drop 5 million of it. Cause I'm gonna triple your page views. Guy threw me out of his office, told me I was an idiot not to talk to anybody on the way out because I was telling a 60 million guy this young 30 year old was telling this 60 million guy that he's really a 40 million, $200,000 guy. Which was not what you did back in those days. Marketing. But that's the question is how do we make small fixes so we can put our money towards hiring people, training up, getting recruiters are gonna actually ask what the salary is without offending the person or immediately low balling 'em cuz their last company paid.
Jim (18m 38s):
Well I mean those are all things we should be putting money towards, but instead we're just feeding it into the mall of of vendors.
Joel (18m 44s):
I want, I want to zoom out for a second, Jim, Why is Indeed doing this? Are they just a greedy corporation looking to milk this thing for all it's worth Capitalism baby? Or are there macro events that are making them, I don't know, I don't know if panic is the right word, but maybe get, you know, get it while the gittens good cuz they realize that the writing is on the wall. The two things that I think of, and maybe less so than I did five years ago, Google for jobs taking over sort of the search space on job searches. But I think more and more the programmatic landscape is really impacting Indeed's profits from a macro perspective. Why do you think Indeed is doing these things so quickly and so quietly?
Jim (19m 27s):
I think there is that fear of careerbuilder, monster for a lot of people actually. So, so long ago they don't realize Monster was number one and then Career Builders started giving CEOs sports tickets and they became number one. Yes. And then, and then they started taking those remote work from home jobs before it was real and they got mad cuz there were so many scams. And so career builder really just fell off I think. And then the job search came along, you know, Indeed was just a scraper and they ended up being number one. So I think there was that fear. Perhaps I, I don't have insight into the heads of the senior executives, but that company's grown a lot. It was a billion then it was two last I heard it was six. It's probably bigger now. They have tried staffing, they have tried a higher.com thing.
Jim (20m 10s):
All these things they keep adding that. They try that don't really come to it.
Joel (20m 16s):
Don't forget Job Scout, the Android app that set the world on fire. Sorry, go ahead. Go
Jim (20m 20s):
Ahead. Right. No, huh. The whole app stuff and you know, that's the whole other thing of what they're, how good their app is. Here's one for you. If, if I apply to Indeed with the fake address, I'll get 24 emails in the next 22 days. Ah, tell me what other jobs pay more than the one I just applied for. Like what? Because I think what it is is they're so big at this point that you have the management which you is owned by, was it Crude Inc. And Employee Recruit. Yep. Recruit Holdings. Yeah. So there, there is a big aspect of that. There's a hedge against it. It's different, it's a Japanese company owning stuff here that growing they didn't have to do, but they did hire those 2,500 salespeople to grow to that size and chase the small business market. And they did that cuz they were afraid of Google for jobs.
Jim (21m 0s):
And there was no question. That's why we've gotta lock down the small business market before Google for jobs launches, something that works now I think they're big and they don't know what to do next. So now it's what do you do when you have all the money in the world? I'm gonna change things. You know, they're, they probably watch Bill Gates and go, Oh he's making a lot of good in the world. We should, we should be like him. That's, I'm guessing I'm making this up, but I think that's part of it. They don't know what to do. But the same time they still sales targets, they still sales, sales managers, it's still a growth oriented company below the executive leadership. I think that is a, that's a different set of if anything splits up, that's what's gonna cause it. Well that and eventually ta waking up and saying one person can't have this much power or one company can't have this much control over us.
Chad (21m 45s):
TA will never do that. I, I hope, I hope we do. And I hope we get to the point where,
Jim (21m 51s):
You know, we're
Chad (21m 51s):
Mature, we understand what's actually going on around us. We start paying attention first and foremost for those who haven't paid attention, obviously, you know, this is a smack in the face and it should be. But yeah, it's, it's one of those things, again, when you give a monolithic organization like Indeed Recruit holdings, Indeed reasons to come after you and charge more money, they're gonna do it. They're just gonna do it. And all those things that we pointed out earlier were because either talent acquisition or recruitment marketing didn't pay attention or they just allowed shitty processes to happen.
Chad (22m 35s):
Indeed saw that job seekers won't, weren't getting a great experience. We all knew that and they just started saying, Hey, it's for the job seeker, we're gonna charge you more and we're gonna change X, Y, and z.
Jim (22m 45s):
What if they're right?
Chad (22m 46s):
I'm not saying they're wrong, that that's the thing. I think they are right. I'd
Jim (22m 50s):
Like better communication about the changes they're making, but I can't say that they're distrustful. But I mean, the truth is we do do a bad job. You know, I think our average to talk to people is three to 14 days after they applied. Actually I don't think that I know that cuz it's one of our sales decks. It's three to 14 days. Imagine calling a waiter and you're, I can't get anyone to come work for me 14 days later you call. Oh it's, it's horrific.
Chad (23m 15s):
Well imagine spending $2 million on marketing. Let's say a CMO spends 2 million on leads that send in a database and nothing happens to 'em. They are gone because they paid for those leads and they sat there and they atrophy. What do we do? We put job seekers into a shitty experience then into a black hole and then we stop using the actual database. We've been spending millions of dollars to build. Oh, as a matter of fact, we, we collect that, that individual, that one job seeker 4, 5, 6, 10 different times because we're spending all this money on outbound advertising to try to suck in hell. We've had 'em for years.
Jim (23m 50s):
Think, think how bad this is. I can go on my phone right now and get $30,000 in cash because I have a w2. Takes about 15 minutes to go to a lending club or whatever and have and money deposited my cash in three days. They verify they know who I am. It's easy to do. They call KU money like that. I can buy a car in 15 minutes on, on Auto Navigator and have it delivered to my house. It takes me 45 minutes to fill out something in an ATS system
Chad (24m 17s):
That
Jim (24m 17s):
We can't search is badly done. I mean we're, we are choosing, and this is why when you look at the quote better ATSs, it's just ones with better code base. I think that's a big part of it. So it's, they're just, they're just new and there's so much nonsense in the back end. Here's one for you because if you, you can be integrated and your jobs go directly into your ATS or you can post jobs and drive them to your careers website. What percentage is good for a corporation that's driving traffic to its website? What conversion of those? That traffic is considered good.
Chad (24m 51s):
Yeah, well that's the big question is if everybody looks at traffic as good, look at the actual, the hires that you get out of said traffic, but
Jim (25m 0s):
No applicants alone though 20%, you're losing 80% of your applicants at your career website. That's horrific. And,
Chad (25m 8s):
And well AKA's latest data is it's 92%. So it's only 8% that are, that are
Jim (25m 14s):
Completing down
Chad (25m 15s):
The application process. No, no. Right. So there's that,
Jim (25m 18s):
There's no excuse for it. I mean there it's just, it's hard to figure out what's going on because what's funny is, is like we joke around people Oh no Indeed and all this stuff. When I show my marketing friends what I do for a living, they laugh at me. They're like, I I've got a 19 year old that's doing that just as effectively as you are. I'm like, but I'm making more. Right? So it literally is a refusal to, it's this stuff isn't hard, it's not new. I'm not doing anything that someone working for group M's gonna go, Wow, that's something I really learned today. No, nothing like that at all. Basic stuff.
Chad (25m 52s):
You've gotta remember complexity costs more too, right? So you, you take a look at consultants, nothing that you talk to a consultant about is easy. Everything is complex. Whether it really is or not because it's gonna cost more. That's
Jim (26m 4s):
True.
Joel (26m 5s):
Hey Jim, what did you read into Indeed killing their api?
Jim (26m 8s):
Anything? I think it was the same thing that LinkedIn was going through. They didn't want people building stuff off of it cuz they can't control what happens and their singular focus for their pro. So it's like factions of the government, right? It's not Indeed it's, Are you talking about product marketing? You talking about client success? Are you talking about small business and Indeed flex, whatever it is, they all have different things they're trying to accomplish. Their RPO system is different than their client system. Not system, but the way they get paid and who they add and stuff like that. So the API takes away control and they want everything going to their dashboard so they can read what's going on. Anything anything outside of that becomes lost.
Joel (26m 47s):
Yeah, I got tired of dealing with fraud, crappy traffic, bad candidates and just said fuck it, we already got the seo, you know, rankings. Which is really what the api, one of the powerful things was is that every, every job board had a link that said jobs by Indeed with a hot link that went from jobs to
Jim (27m 5s):
Indeed. And you think Google might have had something to do with that
Joel (27m 8s):
Too? Yeah, Google might have, They still have great rankings though. They're all, they're paying Google a shit ton now also. But another question, what's your state of LinkedIn right now and why they have such a hard time taking it to Indeed? Well,
Jim (27m 20s):
My pitch for, I think LinkedIn was bought to be the new data.com for Microsoft Dynamics for dynamic crm. And I think the pandemic created a big issue with that. I'm surprised they haven't walled gardened that off already because they're just, their revenue stream means nothing to Microsoft. So when they bought it, and it's funny is like, I wrote about this recruiting daily. I didn't make it up, I just went to the Microsoft announcements on their, and they basically, they this big universe and this tiny little dot, it's like showing the earth in the micro, in the Milky way. It's this tiny little dot that's linked in. I don't think they're thinking about it at all. I don't, I don't think it matters. There's just not enough money unless they can tie that into performance. And you can't because the back end, the sales and marketing is never tied into your accounting.
Jim (28m 2s):
You gotta remember a lot of these ATS decisions are made by accounting and the growth of TA. We came from CFOs looking at CMOs swallowing the world and going, Well you can't have recruiting too. Let's create an department call it talent acquisition. That was like 2005 and 2006. You track your Google trends, I get an unwritten white paper. I just can't seem to finish talking about it. But watch what happens. We we're from the CFO side of the business, why can't we understand how to cut cost?
Joel (28m 30s):
Another quick one. I'll let you get outta here. What happens to Glassdoor from now? Are they around any year? Like what, what the hell's going on with glass? I
Jim (28m 38s):
Think they sit around. Well, they're swallow. They owned by Indeed. Right? And they're technically separate. They're not all the original people left from it. They're, they're like simply hired.
Joel (28m 48s):
Really?
Jim (28m 48s):
They're sticking around cause it gives them something, but there's, there's no reason for
Joel (28m 52s):
Them. You think they're, that they're that low in the totem pole
Jim (28m 55s):
That far, but they're not
Joel (28m 57s):
Yet. Wow.
Jim (28m 57s):
Yeah, they're, they're just, there's not nearly enough money in that. For some reason, we're better at Glassdoor than we are at Yelp and determining who's bad and who's good. Like we get glass doors mainly made up, but for some reason for Yelp, you know, we still go to restaurants. I I just don't think it's important to them. They, they were bought just to make sure they weren't a competitor.
Joel (29m 15s):
Yeah. Then they buy zip next once the stock hits $10.
Jim (29m 21s):
Oh God. Geez. Come on man. Don't do
Joel (29m 23s):
It. Don't do it.
Jim (29m 24s):
Don't put that out into the universe. Oh God.
Joel (29m 27s):
Our prediction shows coming up.
Jim (29m 29s):
That's a Oh, that's terrifying.
Joel (29m 30s):
All right, last one Are is Indeed still number one 10 years from now?
Jim (29m 33s):
I'm gonna say yes, but they're gonna be down to 30% I think. I think the growth of AI and real tech coming into HR and HR or ta ta becoming closer to a marketing function. I think in 10 years we don't, we're not relying on all this stuff we were doing before and our assessments and projections are a lot
Chad (29m 52s):
Better. Yeah, well I think as soon as marketing finds out that there's an opportunity here, because we're fucking up a huge experience for a but millions, hundreds of millions of people that are actually interacting with their brand, they're gonna be a little pissed off
Jim (30m 9s):
Just a little bit. Well, they, they do, they get mad at us right now. But marketing's so full of themselves. You can't have marketing come help you. You have to hire marketers into your TA organization, which is a very slow process. Yeah. But once you get there,
Joel (30m 23s):
I'm calling it now the return of Jason Goldberg and Job.
Chad (30m 31s):
My God, Jim Durbin everybody.
Jim (30m 32s):
Thank you guys.
Joel (30m 33s):
Jim, for those that want to connect with you or learn more, where would you send them?
Jim (30m 37s):
Go to LinkedIn. They're LinkedIn and look me up. Jim Durbin,
Chad (30m 41s):
The Indeed Whisperer.
Joel (30m 42s):
The last thing, he's a man of few words. The Indeed Whisper everybody. Chad, it's in the can we out? We
5 (30m 50s):
Out. Thank you for listening to, what's it called Podcast, The Chad the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one chatter. Blue Nacho Pepper Jack Swiss, the song, Many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any who. Be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
5 (31m 32s):
That way you won't mess an episode. And while you're added, visit www.jetcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grill cheese is so weird. We out.