More fun than a press conference at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot, Chad & Cheese bring plenty of red meat this week. We're talkin' big acquisitions, ousted CEOs, empowered women, and ticked-off Mexicans. It's gettin' loco out there, amigos, so take a break from the world and slide away to the sweet sounds of two middle-aged white guys from the American Midwest.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
INTRO (2s):
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):
All right. All right. All right. Coming at, you live from the Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, PA it's the Chad and Cheese podcast AKA HR's most dangerous. I'm your cohost Joel "Podcaster Elect" Cheeseman.
Chad (39s):
And this is Chad "We're Peaking Again" Sowash.
Joel (42s):
And on this week show Smart Recruiters gets a new pal, Hired loses a CEO and Mexican presidents don't fuck around. Time to pay some bills, this beer is not going to by itself people.
Jobvite (58s):
Jobvite the leading end to end talent acquisition suite. Named a leader in ATS, recruitment, marketing, CRM, and onboarding on G2. Kim B says "Jobvite is a user friendly passionate enterprise team that takes care of you. Jolly good." Jeffrey R says, "candidates are constantly telling us we get it right compared to other orgs." Love that! Results driven by AI. Connections built by humans. Jobvite, learn how you can evolve your TA function at jobvite.com.
Chad (1m 28s):
Love that.
SFX (1m 29s):
We'll accept that. Yes.
Joel (1m 32s):
Which brings us to my first SHOUT OUT.
Chad (1m 34s):
Oh, Alex Trebek.
Joel (1m 36s):
Alex Trebek.
Chad (1m 37s):
Yeah. Oh man. My wife is hurting right now. She? Literally, I think she would, she would have left me for Alex Trebeck in a heartbeat or Sean Connery or Sean Connery.
Joel (1m 48s):
Does she prefer the mustachioed Trebek or the sans mustachioed Tribek.
Chad (1m 53s):
Do you like the mustached Trebek or the non mustached? (Chad's wife in background) Mustache? She likes the mustache.
Joel (1m 59s):
She likes the mustache? okay. Okay. I like the cleaner look myself. I like the, the more distinguished clean shorn Tribek and yes, Sean Connery as well. Our second favorite Scott next to Adam Gordon and entries and maybe third next to Mel Gibson are our second favorite scot.
Chad (2m 20s):
He's not a scot. Okay. he did play Braveheart. I get.
Joel (2m 27s):
Gordon gets so mad about us on Australian playing a famous Scot in history. But yes, two men that will be missed. I don't, I don't know of any like celebrity guests hosts. It was always Trebek like the dude was the iron man of game shows.
Chad (2m 44s):
Very impressive. Very impressive. I've got to say I'm I am sad that this week, and I know you are too Joel, that there are no listener questions. So I'd like to definitely make sure that listeners understand that joel loves to answers questions, so get some hard questions in here and we'll we'll ask Joe, he loves the, the diversity and equity questions the most though.
President Trump (3m 6s):
Don't be rude.
Joel (3m 7s):
Yeah. I love those. I love those. We allegedly have a new president here in America. The reign of terror from orange Hitler is over, we're we're hopeful. Anyway. So Biden and Kamala Kamala Harris. Dammit. I always make that mistake. Kamala Harris. Congratulations. Don't fuck it up.
Chad (3m 27s):
Does that mean not Nazi Barbie's not going to be on the TV anymore doing like press confeences?
Joel (3m 33s):
Nazi Barbie. That's nice. She has a nice leather skirt collection. I don't know. That must be a subscription model that she's yeah, the Ava Braun monthly.
Chad (3m 47s):
Oh, big SHOUT OUT to Nick Livingston CEO, founder, over at it's who mailed some bootleg bourbon balls. Did you get those yet?
SFX (3m 58s):
We'll accept that yes.
Joel (3m 59s):
Yes. Yes I did. I, I got to think because Nick is so square. He's so like by the rules that he wasn't going to ship alcohol for risk of like the feds showing up to his, to his house. So he, he went with the balls, the bourbon balls. So thank you. Thank you, Nick.
Chad (4m 15s):
I'll also in the mail Adzooma sent swag. Are you going to, are you going to go ahead and knock on the swag?
Joel (4m 25s):
No, you know, I'm a hard guy to fit, you know, I'm a big, I'm a big boy. I'm used to like getting XLs and then I just give it to my wife or my son is now like a large. He'll be the kid at school with like all these brands that no one knows of, which I feel for him. But yeah, it's, it's good stuff. I could always use more water bottles, pens and bottle openers. And who couldn't?
Chad (4m 52s):
Well, I liked it also, thanks to Adzooma for beer drop. And yesterday we had the beer drop tasting party and people, what does that? But we had Jennifer Shanahan, our first winner, she had about 20 beers that landed, dropped, beer drop on her front stoop. And we had an hour beer tasting with Chad and cheese and some of the, some of the dudes over at, at Adzooma. So we had a good time. So she had some one-on-one time with us. I don't know if that's good or bad. You're going to have to ask Jennifer.
Joel (5m 26s):
It was good. It was, that was fun. Like I think, I think I speak for everyone. Who's stuck in sort of a zoom business rut only talking about, you know, sales leads and you know, the bottom line. And, and it was just nice to like, I think four, eventually four of us were on this call, five of us, and it was just nice to hang out and have some beers and talk about everything from sports to weather, to clothing. To obviously we talked a little recruitment, but there's a void in my life. I think of socializing in that way. And if Chad and Cheese can help fix that void, that would be nice. But more on that later, right?
Chad (6m 5s):
That's right beerdropped.net kids. Because if you want to receive, you know, a bunch of beer for free on your front doorstep contactless , and then have a, have a little tasting with Chad and Cheese, a little, little, little one on two on one time, then go, go and register.
Joel (6m 26s):
And I think will be, we'll be selecting November's winter a couple of weeks. So there's definitely time to get into the mix here for November. Give extra Thanksgiving. If you're here in the States and you celebrate Thanksgiving in November, unlike those, those heathens in the North, Canada.
Chad (6m 45s):
And Steven Rothberg also sporting the Chad and Cheese t-shirt look, you're looking good. Boy, Chadcheese.com/free. That's where you can get the free Chad and Cheese emissary.ai powered t-shirts again. We are trying to make sure our listeners are getting beer making COVID a little bit easier getting Chad and Cheese t-shirts making COVID a little bit easier. Are we going to tell them about the new making COVID easier promotion?
Joel (7m 15s):
We sure can, but I do want to say goddammit Rothberg makes it into every show and I'm going to make sure he doesn't get in one of these weeks. Anyway, Stephen, we love you go. Vikings, right? Yes. So we're super pumped at our latest giveaway. So if you're a bourbon drinker, you already know, if you're not, you need to learn one of the most highly sought after bourbons in the world, Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve, this stuff is what, we've got is roughly $2,200 per bottle. And people like per bottle, that's retail. Like you pick up this stuff on the black market, you're going to pay three, four, five times that.
Joel (7m 57s):
All right. So who, who of our sponsors did we first think of to like back, you know, to like bank roll this thing, Robert Ruff. It was Robert, Robert Sovren. We initially wanted to give one away. He's like, yeah. Why not two, and throw in something else? So what we're doing is we're giving away one of two bottles of Pappy's and we're throwing in a Blanton's exclusive Japanese red label bottle. This thing retails for about 500 bucks. Wow. That's third place like bronze metal, my ass, give me some Blanton's Japanese exclusive. So, so if you want this, this is really easy to, to remember it's free Pappy P A P P Y.com go to freepappy.com.
Joel (8m 45s):
Give us your info. We'll put your name in the hat to win one of two, 2000 plus dollar bottles of Pappy's or if you're a loser. Yeah. If you're the loser, you get third place, a bottle of Blanton's that you frankly cannot find in probably any liquor store in the US yeah.
Chad (9m 2s):
I'm drooling over the Blanton's alone, but I got to give Robert big ups. He's always trying to up our bourbon game and it was an automatic it's like, let's talk to Robert about this. He's like, Oh, hell yeah. Pappy's? Let's do it. So once again, Chad and Cheese, given away free, t-shirts mailing to you, your front doorstep, beer front doorstep. Now Pappy Van Winkle. We have first, second and third place. The Pappy Van Winkle is $2,200 a bottle. Jesus. Anyway, we're, we're really excited. Freepappy.com.
Joel (9m 40s):
Have you had Pappy's before actually, Chad?
Chad (9m 42s):
I have not, have you?
Joel (9m 43s):
I have, when I was in Scottsdale, everyone's rich. Everyone's rich, but me, we had some rich friends and he had a bottle of Pappy's and it was quite nice. I can vouch for it's high dollar value.
Chad (9m 55s):
Like to also give a SHOUT OUT to Isabelle Kent, who is trying to turn me to the rye side of whiskey and Isabel, as soon as I can get a COVID shot, it's on. It is on, we're going to do bourbon versus rye. We're going to enjoy it. And it'll be hard to turn me to rye. I'm telling you that right now, but we're going to try this.
Joel (10m 17s):
Little, little boss hog might switch you over to the rye stuff. Little boss, hog, shout out to Vets. Goddammit. Veterans day in the U S was this week on Wednesday. Chad, our resident Vet.
Chad (10m 31s):
Thank you for everybody that did.
Joel (10m 32s):
You get a bunch of people say, thank you for your service. Is that, is that what happened?
Chad (10m 36s):
Yeah, I get, I get a bunch of that. So.
Joel (10m 39s):
Another SHOUT OUT for me, Jordan. Eleven's okay. We've both seen back to the future. One, two, and three, right? Part three. We got the hoverboard. We got the self-lacing Nike's well, they're, they're coming to fruition. Nike today announced the Jordan 11. This is , it laces itself up with an app. You can change the colors, like the primary colors of the shoe. I haven't seen this thing in action. I've only seen a picture, but God damn it. Nike keeps hitting it out of the park and dammit, if they're not making 2020 better, I want a pair of Jordan Eleven's except they're retailing at 500 plus dollars.
Joel (11m 22s):
So maybe not this year, maybe no one will wear these things except, you know, the super, super cool people with $500 to burn. But anyway, they'll eventually come down and be for dads. And there'll be like the Jordan 394 instead of the Eleven's and we'll be able to afford them.
Chad (11m 40s):
That is ridiculous. That is ridiculous. I'm coming back to earth here for a minute. So I'd like to give a SHOUT OUT to CVS health who have announced that Karen Lynch will be elevated to CEO making her the 40th female CEO on the Fortune 500 list, Lynch's currently the EBP of CA CVS health and president of Aetna, the insurance company that CVS bought in 2018. So great to see that seat flip per se, to a female.
Joel (12m 14s):
Very nice. So if you like news, if you like these alerts and things you're talking about on the show, you got to get Chad and Xheese in your pocket. Just text the letters, CC to (833) 799-0321 That's CC to (833) 799-0321 sponsored by our buddies at Emissary who provide text recruiting solutions. Now you can have us a buzzing in your pocket. Whenever a hot news story comes out about recruiting, or maybe if we're just giving away free bourbon, we'll let you know, and you can sign up.
Chad (12m 47s):
That's always a good thing too. One event next week, November 17th at 2:00 PM Eastern time Friendly Disclosure, Round 3, baby. The topic is robots versus humans where my buddy, Jim Stroud pleads his case on why robots, algorithms and automation will never take over recruiting. And I get to play the Andrew Yang card until Jimmy's wrong and why him and everyone else needs to get on board with universal basic income. So watch the socials and register.
Joel (13m 23s):
Do we have a tally? Is there a score card with you and Jim at this point? Like who's winning. Is there any kind of analytics around that?
Chad (13m 31s):
I don't think there's any analytics around opinion. Although if you watch, I mean, it's fairly simple. I win every time.
Joel (13m 40s):
Okay. So events for me, Recruiters Nation Live. This is Jovite's event that they normally have in beautiful San Francisco, California. Thanks to COVID. It is a virtual event. I'll be, doing a little 10 minute presentation with a little bit of five, five minute Q and A. So they understand that the low, you know, the low attention spans that we get online and they're shrinking the time down. So it should be a nice little, little, a little spit and a little education for people at the RNL live online. It's December 10th. I believe you can find out more at jobvite.com.
GuestVoice - sounds like Ryan Reynolds (14m 15s):
We'll accept that. Yes.
Chad (14m 20s):
Yeah.
Joel (14m 20s):
Smart Recruiters gets a new pal. Yes, It's dropped today. So we we're, this is sort of breaking news for a lot of people.
Chad (14m 28s):
So it is JobPal chat bot solution based out in Germany, Berlin, I believe. And by the way, SHOUT OUT to our boy Bill Bormans. So Bormann, I don't know if you remember from our naughty or nice show in December from, from Dallas, which I guess was outside of Canada. Our last American event, he talked about JobPal is one of his nice companies. So Bill kind of hit this one out of the park. So JobPal who had raised up to $3 million in financing is now a native chat bot provider for Smart Recruiters, who are calling this thing, Smart Pal, real creative, real creative so-so Smart Pal, native technology for, for chat bot, scheduling interviews, et cetera, prescreening, all the good things chat bots do.
Joel (15m 19s):
Obviously from my perspective, this is the battle of the platforms, just like Jobvite is buying up companies and iCIMS is buying up companies, smart recruiters, sort of that third player that Dr. Pepper and the ATS game, trying to be a one platform to rule them all. And chat bot is obviously something everyone is going to have to have. I guess, at a $3 million investment that Job pal was probably snapped up a lot cheaper than some of the state state engineered chatbots. So from all, from all points of view, this is a good, good buyer and probably a good price.
Chad (15m 55s):
I would think so. And I think that any, this is, this is going to be table stakes. For any core platform, you have to have conversational AI/chat bot RPA. This is going to have to be a part of it because you're going to have to provide a much better candidate experience. You're going to have to provide increased candidate conversions, the automated interview scheduling piece. I mean, all those different pieces that conversational AI can provide is going to have to be table stakes for a core platform. And it was smart. I mean, JobPal was integrated or is integrated with Taleo, Workday, SAP, averager cornerstone and obviously Smart Recruiters.
Chad (16m 38s):
So if you take a look at the playbook and the way that we've seen startups get acquired, it's fairly simple. You focus, you, you become very narrowly focused, unlike ALeo, you become narrowly focused and you work on integrations that make sense for you. These are not all of the core platforms that are out there. These are the ones that they were focusing on. And once they had clients who, who were on, I guess the, the biggest question for me though, Joel, is, you know, why JobPal and why not a smaller chat bot here in the US?
Joel (17m 13s):
Well, obviously very little was sort of shared on like price. And we don't, you know, I don't know the inner workings of JobPal and I mean, $3 million is not a huge amount of money. That sounds like almost seed funding for a, an operation like this smart recruiters tends to be a little bit more global focused than some other ATSs. So it doesn't surprise me that they would look into Europe for, for sort of bargains to provide this technology. And again, like you said, I mean, the beauty of being an ATS and having a marketplace is you get to see engagement usage, you get to see all the inner workings of a technology, and then you decide like, Oh, this works pretty well and it integrates with our shit pretty nicely. Let's do a deal. I mean, these global deals I think are gonna, are going to be more and more prevalent.
Joel (17m 55s):
I think, you know, States the state companies buying only companies from the States is going to be less and less of a thing. You're going to see more companies cross-pollinating, you know, from Australia and Europe and South America, more and more. So I think this is a trend that we'll see more of.
Chad (18m 11s):
If you take a look at it, WhatsApp, We Chat, Facebook messenger, or most of the Eurasia conversational AI and RPA companies had to figure out multiple messaging, messaging platforms much faster due to the choices that candidates had for conversations in their normal daily life. So I personally believe conversational AI or chat bots or RPA companies from across the pond have an edge on American startups because right out of the gate, they have to focus on how do we, how do we meet the market? Here in the US we've met the market one way for the most part SMS, being able to be a global player right out of the gate as a conversational AI platform.
Chad (18m 57s):
I think in this siloed area of conversational AI that Europe and Asia, they have an edge on the U S from a programmatic standpoint, I think, you know, or, or some of the other technologies, I think it swings back to the US but in conversational AI. Definitely. I think Eurasia.
Joel (19m 17s):
Yeah. I think one of the advantages of just sort of natively being from somewhere other than the US is you tend to start companies thinking about other languages and cultures and how is this product going to fit into other, other ecosystems? Whereas we, I think we tend to build stuff as English only, and then we sort of plug in, you know, other languages, you know, aside from that. So I do agree that that that is very important and certainly something that people should recognize. I do. I do wonder, you mentioned SMS, where do you think conversational AI leaves, the Techs Recruits, the Emissary's sort of the one-to-one texting platforms. Do you think their Passé, do you think they fit a certain niche, maybe that hard to get, you know, professional, whereas AI or conversational stuff is more high frequency recruiting, where do you think those two co-exist or do they?
Chad (20m 11s):
Yeah, they do co-exist. I think that when you're talking about having a market in the US there's a lot of money and there are a lot of use cases, right? And SMS is one hell of a use case for here in the United States. That's an entirely different discussion in Europe, right. Where there could be charging in some countries charging per, per text. Right? So that's why they use WhatsApp instead. So it, and I agree, I remember being at Monster and Monster creating a model and then trying to slam that exact same model into every country. They went into and saying, no, it'll work, no it'll work. They weren't looking at culture. They weren't looking at lifestyles.
Chad (20m 51s):
They weren't looking at how business was more were actually done in those countries. They just tried to slam the US version into it. And I think from a JobPal's standpoint, in this case in many European companies, they have to automatically, as you said, out of the box, think of all these different countries, lifestyle, so on and so forth. So they do have an advantage in some cases.
Joel (21m 15s):
Yep. Getting to people the way that they communicate and not email or InMail anymore so much is obviously important. And these platforms need to have that as a tool in the toolbox.
Chad (21m 25s):
Yes. And there was another acquisition.
Joel (21m 29s):
Yes. Another big one. Speaking of tools in the toolbox, we had one in the podcast world that you got pretty excited about.
Chad (21m 36s):
Yeah. Spotify acquires Megaphone. And this is a major acquisition as we talk about content. I mean, if you're in this industry, you're in any industry you're talking about content, and then you talk about obviously the different players in that content and how does it, how does it actually fit in? Well, in this case, when Spotify acquired Anchor, anchor.fm up another podcasting platform, everyone took notice because Spotify was obviously cementing themselves in podcast content. Then, they upped the ante with the acquisition of Gimlet Media, with podcasts like Homecoming, which turned into an Amazon original Sandra, Crimetown and a ton of others.
Chad (22m 19s):
But guests who Gimlet uses to host their podcasts?
Joel (22m 24s):
Is it Megaphone?
Chad (22m 25s):
It could be Megaphone. This content acquisition play is bigger than the other two can combined. First off Megaphone is a network podcasting platform, meaning unlike Anchor, who allows anyone on their platform, you have to be a legit podcaster in a legit podcast network, which is weird because I'm not sure we fit that, but Megaphone has Wall Street Journal podcast, Slate podcasts, Disney podcast, Gimlet. We just talked about Marvel podcast, Viacom, CBS interactive, and one of my favorite podcasts of all time, Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History.
Chad (23m 7s):
And that's just scraping the surface. So as we think about how we do our jobs here in the employment space and how we actually press content out there, how we become more genuine, man, if you're not thinking about podcasting or at least aligning yourself with a podcast, you are way behind the fucking eight ball.
Joel (23m 29s):
Yeah. So this was a $235 million deal. So as excited as we were about Joe Rogan for a hundred million dollars, this, this sort of door that, you know, to me, I think in addition to the content sort of the ad marketplace that Megaphone brought the table was incredibly appealing to Spotify. And you and I are old enough to remember when blogs were born, right? When blogs became a thing. And, and I speak from experience. The first ads on blogs were sort of these one 25 by one 25 banner ads in the sidebar of your blog, or you'd have like a leaderboard or a skyscraper. And you'd go to a company and say, Hey, do you want to sponsor my blog?
Joel (24m 11s):
And they'd give you a banner creative and you tell them click throughs. And ultimately that became what was Google's ad sets. So all these bloggers who didn't want to actually sell stuff, just put a piece of code in their blog from Google, and then Google started serving those ads and then paying them based on clicks and impressions eventually. And similarly podcasting is sort of going through a similar evolution. So, whereas, you know, now it's a lot of going to sponsors directly. A lot of podcasters don't want to do that shit, right? They just want to record their shit. And then if they can make some money. Great. So Megaphone has a really cool sort of marketplace where as an advertiser, you know, you upload your, your commercial, you pick channels and things that you want to make sure that your ad is placed on.
Joel (24m 57s):
So for Spotify to sort of create an automated podcasting ad sense, if you will, where podcasts can get paid more efficiently, and companies can advertise in a more streamlined fashion, I think makes a whole lot of sense and probably will make both Spotify and podcasters a lot of money. And don't forget, a lot of advertisers that used to spend money on things like conferences are going to be looking to new alternatives like podcasting. And if they can do that easily through the Spotify platform or Megaphone or however they build it, then that's a big win for, for everybody.
Chad (25m 33s):
Yeah. Yeah. And Megaphone is the third platform we've actually been on. And luckily we're with Evergreen. So we can actually get on this platform and it is fucking legit dynamic insertion of ads and those types of things. So I'm really excited to see where this goes and how the Spotify brand Actually takes us further.
Joel (25m 55s):
Right on. Right on.
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Joel (27m 16s):
Tale of two CEO's this week.
Chad (27m 20s):
Yeah.
Joel (27m 21s):
So, so you got tipped off about Hired's CEO. We did a, we did a shred on this. So founded in 2012, these guys have raised 133 million or so dollars. Mehul Patel who's who was the former CEO came in in 2015 and he replaced the then CEO and co-founder Matt Mickiewicz I believe is how you say his name. This to me is, so of the two that we have, this one to me is the runway was shortening.
Chad (27m 51s):
Yes.
Joel (27m 51s):
When you, when you, when you get founded in 2012, you've got a six to eight 10. If you're lucky time, period, to have it liquidation event, either go public or get sold and Hired clearly is not on pace to do that. bviously COVID was a nice hiccup and all that. But to me, this was simply the guy in there wasn't getting it done. They needed to make a move. They have not named a replacement. As far as I know, if you go to their about us page, it's still Patel that's the CEO. So if you're looking for a CEO job call up Hired, they might, they might give you an interview. Okay.
Chad (28m 27s):
Yeah. They're probably trying to save that salary to be quite Frank. Yeah. It, they received the series D in June of 2018. I think it was like around 30 million or something like that. And it looks like they've been on a steady downward trend of losing employees. There are around 130 now. So I, I would predict that's going to continue. And you see companies like this, that they look really polished and they should, they've got a lot of fucking money.
Joel (29m 3s):
Yeah. These guys started primarily as sort of a way to find tech folks.
Chad (29m 8s):
Right.
Joel (29m 8s):
And in 2012, it was really hard to find tech people. You know, since that time we have the evolution of GetHub. We have the evolution of, of sourcing and finding pretty much anybody you want to find online. So in terms of trying to pivot and be some sort of an everything to everybody, I don't think they've ever really fit in. I mean, they should be a platform. They should have been eventually evolving into a place where they were a central technology to provide the ability to connect with all kinds of people, around the world. And they have never really gotten out of, I think, where they started. I don't think, you know, either one of us would claim to be an expert on Hired and the road that they've been on.
Joel (29m 51s):
But I think that their initial model has definitely faded in importance because of technology and being able to find people online. So, so good luck to them going forward.
Chad (30m 1s):
This should have been a tech staffing play.
Joel (30m 3s):
Totally. It should be stack overflow. It should have been something more competitive than what they're doing doing now.
Chad (30m 9s):
This should have been a play to automate for staffing to be able to increase margins.
Joel (30m 13s):
Yeah. Yeah. They're founder as well, I don't have his info in front of me, but he had been in some pretty high profile companies there in Silicon Valley. So a little bit, a little bit of it, might've been, you know, someone without a core competency and employment, just coming along and saying, Hey, I can raise a lot of money. I can help find tech people because we did it at my companies that I founded before. And we know that that usually doesn't end well, uncommon for a lot of people that come into our industry. Now, the second CEO that that has has left is a little bit near and dear to our hearts. So, so HiQ the, the hiQ labs versus LinkedIn drama continues. I actually just got an email back from, from one of their, their exact saying that everything is good, which I don't necessarily believe.
Joel (31m 1s):
They're still in court over LinkedIn, whether or not the Supreme court takes or not. I know they lost a recent battle in terms of antitrust. They tried to get LinkedIn to tie to antitrust cases, which I think the judge throughout we've sorta lost, lost track of this because of, I don't know, just various reasons, but their CEO who we've actually interviewed. So if you want to go back into the, the archives, Mark Wydick has left as CEO. Now he is full time now at a company called simple legal. I don't know if this is a case of just getting really tired from finding an 800 pound gorilla called Microsoft LinkedIn. It doesn't look good at the moment for hiQ labs.
Chad (31m 44s):
The hard part about any of these David and Goliath scenarios here in the United States is that the one with the most money usually wins. And that's the hard part. And as we try to talk about innovation, we try to talk about entrepreneurship. It's all really smoke and mirrors, if a big company wants to come and drink your milkshake, it's just all there is to it. So as we, you know, like to talk about David and Goliath scenarios, for the most part, if you have more money, you are going to win, much like we saw with prop 22. So I'm hoping because the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the US), the SCOTUS decision was supposed to happen around October, sometime, obviously that didn't happen as this continues to get pushed off.
Chad (32m 33s):
Obviously it's much harder for a smaller organization to continue to operate. So, you know, I, again, really, we're in there for hiQ a hoping that SCOTUS can actually get a decision on this. And we can at least try to understand whether a person's information is their own or if Facebook and LinkedIn and all those other platforms actually own your shit.
Joel (32m 58s):
Yeah. Look, these, these big companies have armies of lawyers and their life. Their role in life is to crush anyone who doesn't have the resources to fight you. And the LinkedIn knew, even if LinkedIn isn't right, or when this court battle, they knew that if they just drag this shit out for years and years, that hiQ or any other startup wouldn't have the resources to fight them in a lengthy war and inevitably hiQ, they're going to go out of business and LinkedIn will win by default because there just won't be any case left to fight. And it's also really, it's unfortunate that there's a lot of fear in these kinds of situations.
Joel (33m 40s):
So anyone who's looking, anyone who gets a cease and desist from LinkedIn is really gonna think twice around, do we fight this or do we just shut the doors and go home or try to pivot somewhere else? The unfortunate truth is 99.9% are going to just close the doors or try to pivot. I applaud hiQ as I think you do as well for even fighting the fight. We'll see how it ends up. It's a real David and Goliath story, but in the real world, Goliath, 99 out of a hundred times, 999 out of a thousand times, wins this battle. And most of that time is just because of attrition.
Chad (34m 15s):
It's money, it's money.
Joel (34m 17s):
That's America.
Chad (34m 18s):
Well, hopefully we see something that's not running out of gas and that's women competing in the workplace. So Goldman Sachs study actually shows companies with more women in management have outperformed their male led peers. This is from Business Insider. So in a basket of 600 European stocks companies with more female leadership saw their share price outperform on average, by 2.5% a year, compared with companies with less women leaders. Having a greater proportion of women in senior senior leadership positions is not just a diversity score to target, but is associated with lower cost of equity, stronger share price performance, and lower volatility of shares.
Chad (35m 13s):
The hard part about this is then as we talk about CVS seating, number 40 of female CEOs, that's 8% of the fortune 500 CEO positions when just here in the US females comprise 51% of the population. And there's also another story that shows female led startups have been disproportionately low over the years and actual funding. The number of unicorn private companies valued in excess of 1 billion, headed by women have grown over five fold.
Chad (35m 57s):
So even though these females are getting a lot less money and there are fewer of them, they are kicking ass and taking names on the startup front as well. So the big question is why, why is there such such disparity?
Joel (36m 13s):
I tend not to focus on the disparity as I do the trend and everything is going on the right side of history with this. So if you look at, you know, I think it's 70, some percent of valedictorians in high school are females. I think 56% of college graduates now are females. We look at role models, whether it's the current vice president, you know, the world is trending towards women and that's going to happen regardless. I don't know if COVID, is increasing the pace at which this is happening. I guess time will tell on that. But I just, I think there are entrenched cultural behaviors that are hard to crack, but eventually they do crack and crumble and females getting into the business world in a big way and having influence in a big way.
Joel (37m 6s):
I think it's indicative that that Europe is such, I guess, a beacon for what's going on, whether it be in government or in corporate corporate life, that women are taking such a forceful role and an important role in terms of how companies and governments are being shaped, good old America tends to be behind trends like that. And this is no different, but I think eventually, you know, that that wall will crumble. The glass will break. I think we're seeing it happen maybe too slow for most people, but it is happening.
Chad (37m 39s):
The world economic forum projects is going to take 257 years at our current rate to close the gender pay gap. So should females wait another 257 years to actually close the hiring gap? I mean, I appreciate adding three seats, I think three or four seats just this year, but that at that rate, that is not something that we can applaud or get behind it. This has to happen at a faster rate and to be quite frank when we have 40 females that are a top fortune 500 companies, not one of them, zero are black females.
Chad (38m 20s):
So what this tells, what is this telling our kids? What is this telling the rest of the world, about us in America? Again, beating our chest saying we're so damn good at everything, but we can't even get equity done right?
Joel (38m 33s):
You know, vote with your wallet, buy from companies, that champion, this movement and how we do that. Exactly. The, I don't know. I mean, obviously the, the pay gap that you, that you referenced is real and it's huge, and it's unfortunate. What's going to speed that up. I'm not an expert on that topic or how that, that does. We've interviewed people that think they know, but just giving money to a certain, a certain segment of the population and saying, start businesses is harder to do than say, so it's a complex problem. And I'm not sure either one of us are gonna figure it out on an hour long podcast.
Chad (39m 10s):
Transparency's key. As soon as we can see the workforce composition, and we can start to see the actual angles of those individuals who are getting promoted and also those wages, then everything becomes a hell of a lot more simple. It's complex because we don't have the information.
Joel (39m 28s):
We don't have the data. As soon as we have that, everybody, everything becomes crystal fucking clear. Amen. Well, speaking of data, yes, let's hear from Sovren. And we'll talk about Mexico.
Sovren (39m 42s):
You already know that Sovren makes the world's best resume CV parser, but did you know that Sovren also makes the world's best AI matching engine? Only Sovren's AI matching engine goes beyond the buzzwords. With Sovren you control how the engine thinks with every match. The sovereign engine tells you what matched and exactly how each matching document was scored. And if you don't agree with the way it's scored the matches, you can simply move some sliders to tell it to score the matches your way. No other engine on earth gives you that combination of insight and control. With Sovren matching isn't some frustrating black box, "trust us, it's magic,"
Sovren (40m 25s):
one shot deal. Like all the others now with Sovren matching is completely understandable, completely controllable, and actually kind of fun. Sovren software so human you'll want to take it to dinner.
Joel (40m 40s):
And hopefully that dinner has Mexican food on the menu cause that's my personal favorite.
Chad (40m 45s):
And Pappy!
Joel (40m 46s):
And Pappy, yeah. Good luck, finding a restaurant outside of Kentucky with Pappy in the bar. So it's good to know that the US is not the only country that's having issues with contract workers. We talked about prop 22 last week with Uber and Lyft and others. Mexico has certain issues with, they call it outsourcing, which is essentially contract workers. And the it's so bad. The Mexican president is threatening to ban the whole thing. Like no contract workers whatsoever. Now companies are apparently really abusing the shit in terms of giving benefits and, and, you know, annual pay, pay commissions, and benefits one company that is really scrutinized at the moment, apparently off everybody that was a contract worker in November, and then hired them all back in February.
Joel (41m 40s):
And the reason they did that was because they, they didn't want to pay them their annual sort of commission. So that's sort of what they're dealing with there, obviously some serious pay issues in Mexico, the minimum wage, there is $5.50 cents per day, which is yes, if you're doing the math well under a dollar per hour. So anything that's cruise the workers is a big, bad thing. And the Mexican president is hoping to change that around obviously, companies aren't too happy about it. We'll see how that plays out.
Chad (42m 15s):
Yeah. So the Mexico's Employers Federation, a business group said, quote, this would have a great impact on the already seriously deteriorated economic situation and would mean the loss of considerable number of legitimate and properly paid jobs. So we see this exact kind of shit here in the US where companies, engineer excuses to pay people an incredibly low wage while their profit margins grow. So overall, the wage gap turns into a wage chasm and we relegate more humans to poverty. And the thing that I don't get is that, you know, we, we only get one life, right?
Chad (43m 0s):
I mean, all of us, unless you believe in reincarnation, but we only get one life and thinking about a family living in poverty in Mexico or United States, while others are buying yachts and multiple homes, I mean, again, I think we really have to focus on our humanity overall and making sure that we are not leaving people behind, but yet we're giving them an opportunity to lift themselves up and not paying them substandard wages. And you can see that's exactly what's happening in Mexico as well.
Joel (43m 34s):
Workers of the world unite, I believe in reincarnation because I want to come back as my dog because he lives large. Chad, we out.
Chad (43m 44s):
We out.
OUTRO (44m 7s):
Thank you for listen to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.