New CEOs at Workday, Snagajob; Indeed's Sneaky New Terms of Service
A new year always brings new promise. For three companies in the employment space, it also means a new CEO. For Indeed, it means a new Terms of Service wrought with unpleasant surprises for those not paying attention. It also means new and interesting ways to quit your job, as Walmart recently found out. With Chad still getting his holiday hangover under control, Cheese is joined by industry veteran Sarah White, CEO at Aspect43, to help make sense of everything going on in the world of recruitment for the first week of 2023.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Joel (2s):
It may not seem like it, but Chad and I work pretty hard to bring you this show on a regular basis, and it's been an unwritten rule since we started the show that we take a few weeks during the holidays to step away from the show, as well as step away from each other so we can come back fresh and be the functioning derelicts, you know and love. Well, Chad spent the holiday polluting much of Europe with his Americanness and needs a few more days to recover. So no Chad means no editing of this show. It's gonna be like your favorite Pearl Jam bootleg tape from 1993, solid content, pretty shitty production value, and anything can happen.
Joel (45s):
Anyway, Chad will be back next week and things should be back to normal. Till then, I've invited a more than capable guest co-host to keep the seat warm for Chad until he gets back. Enjoy and here's to a kick-ass new year.
Chad and Cheese - Intro (1m 2s):
Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts complete with breaking news slash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel (1m 23s):
Oh, yeah, my New Year's resolution, less Chad, and I'm off to a great start. Hi, boys and girls, you're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. This is your co-host Joel "Running for House Speaker" Cheesman.
Sarah White (1m 38s):
And this is Sarah "You're Never Gonna Make It" White.
Joel (1m 42s):
On this week's show, cloudy with a chance of doom and gloom, Indeed's sneaky new terms of service, and a Walmart resignation gone loco. Let's do this. Guys, if you listen to our show, you know, Sovren has been a supporter for a very long time, but you may not know Textkernel who recently acquired Sovren. If you know Sovren, guys, you need to get to know TextKernel. That's Kernel as in corn, which Sarah and I both know a lot about. No one does resume parsing, matching, semantic search, talent sourcing, and more quite like Textkernel.
Joel (2m 22s):
They also have some of the best industry intelligence around all available for free on their blog at text kernel.com. Everyone in the US, you know Sovern, they've been a sponsor of our show for a long time, but it's time to get to know our friends at Textkernel if you haven't already. Do yourself a favor, head on down to www.textkernel, that's T-E-X-T-K-E-R-N-E-L.com and tell them Chad and Cheese sent you. Sarah, welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel (3m 1s):
A lot of our listeners will know who you are, but for those that don't, you are CEO and founder of Blink 182, I mean, Level 42, I mean Area 51. No, no, no. Aspect 43. Happy New Year and welcome to the show.
Sarah White (3m 16s):
Happy New Year. We're not allowed to talk about the Area 51 stuff.
Joel (3m 21s):
We're not? Yeah.
Sarah White (3m 22s):
No.
Joel (3m 22s):
Sarah's in Idaho. I don't know what the fuck is going on in Idaho, dude. Like that whole, that whole desert, big sky. Yeah, that whole location. I hear Boise is nice though. I hear Boise is nice.
Sarah White (3m 35s):
Boise. Boise's about 10 hours away. So I don't know--
Joel (3m 39s):
From you?
Sarah White (3m 40s):
Yeah.
Joel (3m 41s):
You're in the same-- What do you--? God, that's Texas.
Sarah White (3m 43s):
I'm way, way up north.
Joel (3m 45s):
That's Texas land, man.
Sarah White (3m 46s):
I am, oh, gosh, like an hour and a half south of Canada and a couple hours out of Glacier National Park and about three hours out of Seattle.
Joel (3m 55s):
Is it officially a panhandle?
Sarah White (3m 57s):
It is.
Joel (3m 58s):
In Idaho that stick that goes northward, is that?
Sarah White (4m 1s):
Yeah. It is officially called a panhandle.
Joel (4m 3s):
A panhandle. And you live in the panhandle?
Sarah White (4m 5s):
I do. We just call it Northern Idaho.
Joel (4m 7s):
Or Nordiho, Nordaho, Nodaho? I don't know. So Sarah and I have known each other, I thought it was 15 years. She corrected me. It's 17, apparently to the day when I signed her yearbook, "Stay cool dude. See you next year."
Sarah White (4m 22s):
Yeah, middle school. Have a great summer.
Joel (4m 25s):
Yeah, have a great summer, dude. See you at the pool. See you at the pool.
Sarah White (4m 28s):
I actually had my very first glass of wine the day we met.
Joel (4m 33s):
Oh, I thought you were gonna say you're drinking this morning. Like the holidays are rolling for Sarah White. So, Sarah, a lot of my listeners know you or know of you. You're quite an icon in the industry, but for those that don't know, give us a little Twitter buyer about you and a little bit about the company.
Sarah White (4m 51s):
Yeah, so we actually research work and so I've been in the industry, literally, I fell into it on accident. But we look at market trends, what's going on, try to talk to especially recruiting talent acquisition employees. And then we work with the tech vendors to actually make better products because a lot of them kind of suck. So that's where we spend a lot of our time. And if we could change work for the better, why not?
Joel (5m 21s):
And that is why invited you to the show. Everyone sucks. You have two beautiful children. I gotta mention that.
Sarah White (5m 28s):
I do. I do.
Joel (5m 30s):
You're too humble. You're too humble to admit it. So you're a Californian to Wisconsin via now Idaho. So you've got a nice mix of, I don't know, cheese and cow or something. I don't know.
Sarah White (5m 41s):
Cheese, yeah, I mean, California's a cheese place also.
Joel (5m 45s):
Cheesman. All right, well on the show we do some shoutouts. I'm gonna do one to get you acquainted to how this works. And then you apparently have a shoutout and then we'll get into some other housekeeping. So my first shout out of the year goes to the fans. Our fans, love them, love them. Anyway, every year we sent out a holiday card to our fans that have registered. And this year, if you haven't gotten it or didn't get it, it's Chad and I illustrated. Chad's on a great white shark. I'm on an eagle. We're riding a wave. We got some Christmas trees and candy canes and everything.
Sarah White (6m 18s):
Oh, my gosh.
Joel (6m 19s):
Our fans had some really fun ways of showing that they had put their holiday cards up for Christmas. And one fan in particular that got my attention had a wife that wasn't real happy about our card being among all the family cards and friend cards that they had. So this is my friend Brett Farmiloe, who I've talked about in the show.
Sarah White (6m 38s):
I thought you're gonna say Brett Favre.
Joel (6m 39s):
You know Brett the Farm--
Sarah White (6m 40s):
I thought you were gonna say Brett Favre, yeah.
Joel (6m 42s):
Brett the Farm-- Yeah. My friend Brett Favre, he's a big fan. Anyway, yeah, Brett Farmiloe, my friend at Terkel, Founder and CEO at Terkel, he said, quote, "FYI, my Chad and Cheese holiday card is so front and center at my house that my wife is annoyed with it and comments about it once a week." Quote, "Who is Chad? Who is cheese? Can we take this down?" End quote. That's right. This episode of couple's therapy is brought to you today by the Chad and Cheese Podcast. My shoutout is to everyone who shared our holiday card. You can also send those bills from your shrink and marriage counselor to Chad and not me.
Joel (7m 24s):
Shoutout to the fans.
Sarah White (7m 25s):
Where is the card being placed that's causing--? I mean, is it in the bedroom? Is it on the nightstand?
Joel (7m 30s):
Come one. You probably have a little card thing where either around the fireplace or in the kitchen, you know. You like, you stick them and you sort of present them and virtue signal how many friends you have that are sending you cards. They're putting it with those cards. So amongst the scenes of sweatered families with woodland backgrounds is an animated Chad and Cheese riding a great white shark and an eagle.
Sarah White (7m 58s):
So mixed in with the people from high school you never talked to?
Joel (7m 59s):
It makes sense a few wives might get--
Sarah White (8m 1s):
Okay.
Joel (8m 1s):
Yeah, a few wives might get a little bit distraught over such an image.
Sarah White (8m 6s):
I guess. Okay, we'll go with that.
Joel (8m 8s):
Your shoutout now.
Sarah White (8m 10s):
Okay. My shoutout is to all of the people ops and recruiting pros that have been laid off in the last 24 hours and are handling it with so much freaking grace on LinkedIn. And they're like, "Oh, I really appreciated the opportunity. It was so great to be here. I just got laid off via an email that I woke up to this morning," and we have, you know, three big companies have done layoffs between yesterday and today. And the grace of which these people are handling this after working their asses off for the whole pandemic through great resignation, everything else, is really amazing. So huge shout out to, not just the ones handling it well, but just everyone doing this.
Joel (8m 54s):
So I gotta ask, we talk a lot about Amazon on the show and Amazon just announced 18,000 today I believe, which is more than they had originally expected. Amazon more than most are doing an aggressive job of replacing recruiters. Any thoughts on the automation, the replacement of recruiters? Is that actually gonna be a thing our company's gonna follow Amazon's lead? Is this a failed experiment? What are your thoughts on that?
Sarah White (9m 25s):
I mean, Amazon's clearly had a number of failed experiments related to their tech and primarily because they try to build stuff in-house and have AI bias issues and blah, blah, blah. With that said, we're absolutely gonna see a lot of recruiting jobs go away because of tech. No differently, I mean there's probably one or two other people watching this that are old enough to remember when ATSs were coming in. We brought our ATS in--
Joel (9m 51s):
We have a lot of old people listening to our show.
Sarah White (9m 53s):
Yeah, I'm with my people. You know, when we were bringing in ATS systems 2001, 2002, we were easily replacing 10 to 15 headcounts on our teams by bringing in one system. I had a person whose only job at one of my early TA roles, their only job was to print the resumes, staple, collate, count, and deliver them to me in a mail bin every single morning and after lunch. That was it. Like that was their whole job. And so, you know, there's going to be roles that are going to evolve and change and new ones are gonna pop up.
Sarah White (10m 35s):
So it's not all, you know, all doom and gloom, but things are gonna change, and it's not just in talent acquisition. I think we're gonna see it kind of across the board.
Joel (10m 43s):
Yeah. That person is now a greeter at your local Walmart. So they found somewhere else to go with their high-level skills. Speaking of high-tech, this brings me to my final shoutout. So this goes out to Bing and ChatGPT. Microsoft, in case you hadn't heard, gave ChatGPT in the open AI initiative $1 billion. In return for the check, they agreed that Microsoft could use the tech. So no surprise this week that news came out that Bing will be leveraging ChatGPT's technology to help compete with big G, Google.
Joel (11m 25s):
Meanwhile, Google is apparently freaking out about ChatGPT.
Sarah White (11m 28s):
They should.
Joel (11m 29s):
They're on DEFCON One. Hey, I say competition is good for business. Sarah, GPT Chat, horrible brand. I probably said it wrong. I always do. What are your thoughts? Not so much on the brand, but the technology and how it could impact humanity and/or recruiting.
Sarah White (11m 48s):
Oh, well, I don't know how much on humanity quite yet, but, yeah, it's going to be a biggie. I think on two fronts. I think it's gonna change the type of people we hire because it's gonna change jobs in general. It's gonna reduce the number of people, just like any other technology is. And I know we've been talking about AI, I feel like all 17 years we've known each other. It feels like we've been talking about the same thing and then all of a sudden it's happening and it's here and it's actually working. And so I think I took a lot of time playing around with ChatGPT over the holidays, and by a lot of time, I mean five hours because I got more done in five hours using that than we've had contractors get done in 70.
Sarah White (12m 36s):
So I mean it's changing how our company and roles that we were gonna be hiring for, we don't have to anymore.
Joel (12m 43s):
Really? Chris Russell, a friend of ours that we've known for a long time as well, apparently there's someone coding job boards with no developers whatsoever through some of the technologies that are out there. I assume that we'll be seeing rewrite your job descriptions with AI, rewrite resumes with AI. I mean there'll be a whole new cavalcade of startups that we'll be able to see and enjoy.
Sarah White (13m 8s):
Which means we're gonna see a whole bunch of LinkedIn influencers really pissed off in talking about how bad it sucks and you need that human touch.
Joel (13m 16s):
Which also means I have job security as a podcaster because I have stuff to talk about. Speaking of job security and having something to do, Sarah, if you haven't signed up for free shit from Chad and Cheese, you gotta do yourself a favor. We're talking free t-shirts from our friends at JobGet. We're talking about free beer from our friends at Aspen Tech Labs, Whiskey from TextKernel. If it's your birthday, there's a chance to win rum from our friends at Plum. Just all kinds of goodness. You gotta go to Chad Cheese. We're on brand here, baby. We're on brand next year we're having a liver donation sponsor to the show.
Joel (13m 58s):
But you gotta go chadcheese.com, click the free link, sign up, in order to get all that stuff. And while you're out there, leave us a review on your favorite podcasting platform of choice whether it's good or bad, it is our oxygen and we love to hear from you. And we also love everyone who is celebrating a birthday this month. I mentioned Rum with Plum. One of these lucky people, maybe not this week, but someone in January is gonna win a nice bottle of rum. But this week, celebrating a birthday from our fan club, we've got Muir, Muir McDonald, that's gotta be like an Irish name or something, M-U-I-R.
Joel (14m 38s):
How would you pronounce that?
Sarah White (14m 38s):
Sounds Wisconsin.
Joel (14m 39s):
Muir? Muir?
Sarah White (14m 39s):
M-U-I-R?
Joel (14m 40s):
M-U-I-R. How would you pronounce it?
Sarah White (14m 41s):
Muir like John Muir.
Joel (14m 43s):
Muir. Muir. Okay.
Sarah White (14m 46s):
Like the famous photographer of Yosemite.
Joel (14m 48s):
You know better than I do. Hit us up, Muir, for how you pronounce that name. Mark Fogal, Zachary Larson, Steve Jewel, Rob Barn, Mark Katz, Peter Brooks, Mark Becker, Matt Luca, Shell Ford, Athena Carp, Peter Zalman, and Fish Dogs himself, Craig Fisher, all celebrate another trip around the sun this year.
Sarah White (15m 10s):
Man, what holidays in, what is that, in March? Oh, St. Patty's Day, those are all St. Patty's Day babies.
Joel (15m 20s):
Boom. There you go. That escalated quickly. Yes, St. Patrick's Day Babies. Congratulations to you. Sarah, we got to travel this year again, which is nice.
Sarah White (15m 29s):
We did, yeah. A couple of times.
Joel (15m 30s):
A couple times. So Chad is coming. Chad, the prince of Portugal is coming back to the States. Everyone, alert the authorities. He's gonna be back in States. I think he is actually right now as we speak. He's recovering from his hangover. But anyway, we'll be traveling again this year. Our travel is sponsored by our friends at Shaker Recruitment Marketing and we couldn't be happier. Also, I want to point out that we are now in four different languages aside from English. If your main language is not English, maybe it's French, German, Spanish, or Portuguese, you can listen to the Chad and Cheese Podcast in your native language through the power of technology.
Sarah White (16m 6s):
I'm sure.
Joel (16m 7s):
And that is powered by our friends at Veritone. We wanna say a special--
Sarah White (16m 13s):
That's awesome.
Joel (16m 14s):
--to them. Also, do you play Fantasy Football, Sarah?
Sarah White (16m 16s):
I did not this year, but normally I do.
Joel (16m 19s):
I know you're a football fan.
Sarah White (16m 20s):
Yes.
Joel (16m 20s):
Normally, you do? Okay, well, you didn't sign up to be on our Fantasy Football league. Hopefully, you'll explore that.
Sarah White (16m 25s):
I didn't want to embarrass anybody.
Joel (16m 26s):
Hopefully, you'll explore that next year.
Sarah White (16m 29s):
Next year.
Joel (16m 29s):
Yeah. Aaron Rogers will be off the board quickly if Sarah gets into the league as a Packers fan. But anyway, the tragedy from this week aside and the Damar Hamlin news is being beat to death, so prayers for him obviously, but not to spend too much time on that. It did make a mess of Fantasy. But Yahoo, our league that we used has sort of called it, and Dennis Tupper is our Fantasy winner from this year. But I want to read out the rest of the leaderboard, Sarah, mainly because I came in second place and I wanna like--
Sarah White (17m 4s):
Well, then we have to talk about it.
Joel (17m 8s):
So, again, Dennis, the Gridiron Menace, Tupper is number one. Number two, Joel, Blue, Cheesman. Get it? I'm blue because I lost. But blue cheese is also a thing. So I sort of like wrapped it into a buy one get one on that one.
Sarah White (17m 20s):
I get it. I get cheese references.
Joel (17m 21s):
Yeah. Number three we got Smoke and Joe Wilke followed by Serge, the raging Acadian, Boudreaux. If you know, you know. Chris, middle of the pack, Manion, Chad, prince of Portugal, Sowash right there at number six. Factory Fix his own, Iron Mike Schaffer, Factory Fix is our sponsor for Fantasy Football, by the way. Christie killing it in the name of James Goony GooGoo Gilliam. Matt Fool on the hill. Jason, No Repeat, Putnam. He was last year's champion. He ended in 11th place out of 12 and number 12 the Caboose Dan, no-show, Shoemaker, who came up really short this year on Fantasy Football.
Joel (18m 10s):
So that is Dennis Tupper again is the winner. But let's get into some real news, shall we, Sarah?
Sarah White (18m 16s):
I think that was good news.
Joel (18m 17s):
That was good news but it's not really the news people tune in for.
Sarah White (18m 21s):
Really?
Joel (18m 21s):
We gotta get 20 minutes of bullshit before we actually talk about industry stuff. So, Sarah, you've been around the block a few times as we've already mentioned. What were your takeaways from 2022? It was kind of a nutty year. What did it look like from your perspective out there in panhandle Idaho?
Sarah White (18m 42s):
Oh, man. Well, oh, I guess I was here a full year. I've only been here a little bit, but I'll tell you what I think the word of the year for 2022 is delusional. Like everybody wanted to believe what they wanted to believe without looking at the facts of actually what was happening. I think that was my biggest takeaway. We were continuing to talk about like, "Oh, these jobs are growing so quickly. Oh, no, there's not actually going to be layoffs. Oh, everything is fine." We wanted to have such blinders on and kind of ignore stuff in part because of what was coming out from media and government and all of this type of stuff. But it was tracking things that were happening in an unprecedented way.
Sarah White (19m 23s):
And so we were making assumptions based off of kind of the wrong data. And so I think that was my biggest takeaway is that some of the standard ways that we were judging and looking and making decisions around growth and layoffs and investments and everything else probably needs to be reevaluated for a much more modern society and how things are going to work in the 2020s versus in the 1900s.
Joel (19m 53s):
So I'm assuming that you have investments in some sort of stocks somewhere. So it was a real shitty year for Wall Street.
Sarah White (20m 2s):
Yeah.
Joel (20m 2s):
But labor for the most part has remained strong. So delusional.
Sarah White (20m 8s):
But has it--
Joel (20m 9s):
There were layoffs in Silicon Valley, pretty high-profile ones, but the labor market, at least in 2022, seemed to hold. Is that just a lagging indicator? Like we'll get to 2023 and I don't want to skip ahead, but like if labor is a lagging indicator, I assume that you think it's gonna catch up to the stock market and we're gonna see sort of labor catch up with the, I don't know, the cliff dive that we saw on Wall Street. But you will agree that people had a hard time firing people in 2022 even though they probably knew the writingis on the wall.
Sarah White (20m 46s):
Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. I think they were trying to get through and just be like, "No, no, no, we can do okay this year." You know, some of it, I don't know how much was tied back to like PPP rules or other, you know, there were multiple different types of funding coming in for keeping and you had to retain employees past a certain date. But it sure seems that as all of those rules fell off, we started seeing the layoffs and everything, start to kind of moving a little bit more aggressively. I do think that there's some lagging indicator here though because if somebody is underemployed, so let's say they, you know, get their hours cut back or get something else, if they even take a job so they go to work at Walmart as a greeter, for instance, right?
Sarah White (21m 27s):
They're removed from all of the lists that something's wrong with their labor and so it still looks like they're fully employed. But when you start looking into more detail around like number of hours people are working, how much they're earning, all of these other factors, those are kind of red flags that we look at to look at kind of what the 12- to 18-month numbers are gonna be.
Joel (21m 50s):
Yep. Are we undervaluing the effect of the gig economy on the world? You mentioned greeter but I'm sure a lot of those people are driving Ubers and delivering food on DoorDash and Bing.
Sarah White (22m 6s):
Yeah. And I think a lot of the people that are doing that are doing that as a supplement to other things or as a stopgap. But the second they start doing that, they also come off of all of those numbers. So if they are just not taking unemployment and they are making slightly more driving an Uber, DoorDash or anything, they show as they're fully employed, even though they don't have a job. I mean, I'll use a very small example. We're a small firm. We definitely don't pay high, you know, tech industry rates. We posted a job in October. I had to turn the job off within six hours because we had almost a thousand applicants, all highly qualified.
Sarah White (22m 50s):
I had posted the salary on there, the salary was, you know, maybe a couple years out of school, three to five years out of school, and not tech three years out of school, like normal-world three years out of school, and probably 70 percent of the applicants we got have been out of work since July, August, September. They've been on long-term.
Joel (23m 11s):
Are they all working for FTX or any other crypto exchanges?
Sarah White (23m 14s):
Most of them were not in tech at all. And I think that's where we're really, you know, the media talks a lot about the tech stuff because that's splashy and all of that. But we know of layoffs that were affecting all industries kind of across the board last year or small downsizings.
Joel (23m 34s):
Yeah. Yeah. Right-sizing.
Sarah White (23m 35s):
Right-sizing.
Joel (23m 36s):
I'll ask you this before we get to 2023.
Sarah White (23m 39s):
Yeah.
Joel (23m 40s):
We saw crazy money go to our space in '21. I mean, stupid money, right?
Sarah White (23m 45s):
Oh, gosh. Stupid money.
Joel (23m 47s):
I remember fielding questions about predictions for '22 about are we gonna continue to see money, you know, go into our space and more unicorns being created. I predicted no, which I ended up being right. But what's your sense on the money that came into the space? What's happening to those companies or what's