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Cha-ching! Just when you thought more money couldn't come into workforce tech, something else knocks your socks off. This week... Phenom People announced a $100M Series D raise Larocque's "Money Shot" index reports biggest quarter EVER and unicorns aplenty Dice puts a new coat of paint on their cardboard box Uber has bigger problems than we expected MLB kicks Georgia where it hurts United Airlines gets big applause and a win for RigZone which means a guilty verdict for David Kent. It's another Jobvite, Sovren, and JobAdx powered podcast. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. 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. Do not violate COVID curfew rules in the Philippines, everybody. What's up boys and girls? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel "my infrastructure needs rebuilding" Cheeseman. Chad (35s): And I'm Chad" I did not eat the hot chicken" Sowash. Joel (39s): On this week show Phenom makes it rain. Uber is in a world of pain and Atlanta's loss is Denver's gain. And the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. Sovren (52s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (1m 51s): And speaking of dinner. Chad (1m 52s): Yes. Joel (1m 53s): Stay away from the extra hot chicken. I tell ya, by the way, I'm going to need to violate some Filipino curfew laws. If I'm going to work off what I ate in Nashville this week. Chad (2m 3s): Shout out to Joel's anus. Joel (2m 6s): And you thought it was hot going in. Yeah, we went to took the kids, just me and the kids. And did Nashville. Did a Johnny Cash museum, the zoo and you and the big kids. Me and the big kids. Yeah, not the little guy. He stayed home with mom and we went to Prince's Nashville Hot Chicken. And Prince's is the OG the original, the story is he pissed off, his wife once and she made super hot chicken. And he's like, this is the best chicken I've ever had. And thus Nashville Hot Chicken was born. Chad (2m 40s): I don't do that. That's not happening. But I did have actually, coincidentally, we didn't plan this. Julie and I, we, I mean, we're pretty much vaccinated up. So we were like, fuck this, we're getting out of the house and took a long weekend, had a condo in Nashville, just a walk away from downtown. To say right downtown and just had a blast, enjoyed ourselves, just being able to get out of the house. I'm so ready to live my vaccinated life. Joel (3m 14s): Yeah. Nash-Vegas is such a great like staycation destination for Hoosiers. It's like a three, four hour drive. You feel like you're in, you know, different, different country there on the South. People are nice. Although the food isn't so nice. We actually funny story. I, we went up to the counter at Prince's and I said, yeah, give me, give me the extra hot. And she goes, have you ever been here before? I said, no, I haven't. And she said, well, our extra hot is everybody else's triple X. You might want to start with medium. And I said, I think I can do hot. So she brought out some hot and I could handle it. I thought I could anyway, I did, I did finish it, but it was rather warm. Joel (3m 55s): But it was, it was a funny encounter. Like, have you ever been here before? Chad (3m 59s): You ain't from around here, are you boy? Yeah. Joel (4m 3s): You sound like a Yankee. Chad (4m 4s): Yes. And I'm not ready for that chicken. Shout out to a old friend. I haven't talked to him in a while. Seth Fight, who was a Group VP of talent over at Charter Communications, not a small organization. Hoping to actually get set on, to talk about Spectrum's new minimum wage, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago, not too much in some of the new Covid business practices and procedures. And those types of things. Joel (4m 32s): Speaking of large organizations, shout out to Amazon and the union vote that is happening as we speak, we should know early next week, whether or not Amazon will be unionizing or not. Chad (4m 43s): Go union. Joel (4m 45s): Where's your money? Where's your money? You're betting on the union? Chad (4m 48s): I am, I am going with my heart and what we should be doing and going with collective, you know, so. Yes, yes. That's what I'm, that's what I'm going for. Joel (4m 57s): I think only half that could vote, actually did vote. So it's going to be hard. Read that what you will. Chad (5m 4s): That's going to be hard, a big shout out to Alexandra Burger or an AMS. Jessica Benjamin from App Cast and friend of the show, a Lynn Bailey from Intel. Thanks for listening and engaging with all of these stupid discussions. Lady, ladies, ladies, we appreciate it. Joel (5m 24s): Nice! Shout out to millennials. Yeah. You'll you'll never hear me say that. Chad (5m 28s): Odd. Joel (5m 29s): So a new new survey by Prudential this week says that one third of millennials intend to seek a new job when the pandemic ends, so say goodbye to a third of your millennials everybody. They're going elsewhere, Chad (5m 42s): But then you barely get that internal mobility plan fucking locked in, that's all I got to say. Joel (5m 47s): How is that retention strategy work in now because the kids are leaving? Chad (5m 52s): You ain't kidding. Okay. So, so some insider baseball here, LinkedIn and Indeed had subtle changes to their apply. Okay? Joel (6m 3s): Okay. Chad (6m 3s): And really what this means is they changed their apply button. LinkedIn's apply, button no longer says easy apply, it just says apply now. So why the change? Well, because of all the garbage content that doesn't allow anyone to easily apply. So instead of LinkedIn making the move for better content and a better experience, what do they do? Let's just go ahead and change the button. Yeah. Let's let's not clean up the garbage heap. Let's just change the button.Fucking idiots. Joel (6m 35s): All right. So let me get this straight. The innovation at LinkedIn is defined as going from easy apply to LinkedIn apply. Chad (6m 42s): No, it's just apply now. Joel (6m 44s): Oh, okay. Chad (6m 45s): Just apply now on. On the other hand, Indeed, jazzed up they're easy to apply button on the two pain posting to read Apply with Indeed. So instead of just saying, Easy Apply, they're continuing to jam the brand into user's mind every step of the way. I, again, I'm not a huge fan of Indeed's experience overall. I mean, from a branding standpoint. Yeah. Slap that, slap that logo on everything you got. Joel (7m 17s): And, and speaking of jamming the brand, my last shout out goes to Indeed as well, who you remember bought Shift out of the UK back in 2019. Well shift is now drum roll, please. Indeed Flex. How sexy is that? Chad (7m 34s): Who didn't see that coming? We didn't see that coming. Yeah. Okay. So nobody's suprised here. Joel (7m 42s): It's a branded house. Chad (7m 44s): Nobody's surprised here kids. So I've got a couple of podcasts recommendations, and then we can just rip off the topics. First and foremost, our friend, you might remember him from My Career Fit, Gordon Collier. You remember him? He has a new podcast called The Riff Radio Show. So he came on Firing Squad at 2019. This show has nothing to do with the industry. It is just like cool. Gen Xer music shit. Joel (8m 11s): Yeah it's good. Yeah, Chad (8m 12s): Exactly. His show is on Spotify. It's totally legit. If you're an X-er it's, it's a must listen. And it's an entirely new way to leverage Spotify's music. So you actually have all of Spotify's music category and the way that he's actually built his podcast pulls in the actual music content, the actual tracks that are on Spotify. It is cool as hell. So check that out again. It's called the Riff Radio Show and the one more new podcast just dropped, coolest podcast out there. I'm telling you other than Chad and Cheese , it's called the Cult Brand Secrets, probably the best brand and marketing podcast out there. Chad (8m 59s): You can check it out at Cult Brand Secrets, wherever you listen to podcast, or just go to cultbrandsecrets.com. Joel (9m 6s): Colt Brand sounds so familiar. Yeah. Chad (9m 11s): Some bald dude named Chris Neeland yeah. He's the host. Joel (9m 15s): Has he left Canada yet? Is that why he's with a podcast? Chad (9m 20s): I think, I think he should though, because they'll get the shot faster. Joel (9m 23s): Yeah. That is, that is true. That is true. Chad (9m 25s): Topics. Joel (9m 28s): Money, money, money. Let's let's rock out with our look, learn, rock out. Our boy, George Larocque produces the money report, I guess, is what I'm going to call it. Chad (9m 43s): The Money Shot Report. Joel (9m 45s): So Q1 of this year was global work tech VC's biggest quarter ever. Of course, they'd all been doing this since 2017, but still it's a big number. It was basically half in one quarter, what all of last year was. Some specifics here, average or equal out about 2.5, 7 billion in VCs across 90 deals happening in 16 countries and across 24 sub categories in work tech, there were seven unicorns, which means companies valued at a billion dollars or more. Those included Better Up, Ginger, Lattice, Modern Health, Next Think, Papaya Global. Joel (10m 28s): That's a new one on me and Persesonio. Q1 was the biggest quarter ever as I said, and interest in investment work, tech reflects a resounding level of interest in the changing future of work and the next wave of innovation that's now upon us as we get out of pandemic hell. Chad (10m 46s): Yes, yes. And notice none of those unicorns. I believe none of those unicorns are actually in the TA space. They're on the human capital management side of the house. It's interesting because if you take a look at the actual deals that have done, you can take a look at the actual money. I think a third TA was a third of the size of that, of HCM, right? So still huge deals going to human capital management side of the house. So that questions, and we'll talk about this with Phenom next, where all the talent acquisition platform types of unicorns. Is this space even ripe for unicorns? Joel (11m 28s): Buy the rumor, sell the news, I guess, in some cases. So you had pandemic fever, every everything was remote. Everything was stay at home. Everything was mental health. Everything was managing employees virtually and you saw the money go in and a huge way. I mean, money just jumped right to that space. We see a huge increase. My prediction. And I think we're getting sowing the seeds of that now is that TA will be the big winner going into the future quarters of this year and probably into next year, because as the world is opening up as money is flooding, the system, people are going to need to hire folks and money is going to flow into TA technology is my prediction. Chad (12m 9s): Whew. Wow. That's an expectation right there, Cheeseman. Yeah, I don't think so. I think the money is going to continue to stay on the backend, because again, we're talking about millennials wanting to leave and companies wanting to be able to have better engagement and better pay systems and all those things. Once you actually have the talent, how do you keep the talent? How do you keep them happy? How do you, how do you actually make it easier for them to join communities within your organization? Those types of things. So I think HCM will still easily outpace talent acquisition throughout the rest of the year. Now here's the question. Chad (12m 49s): Yep. Will anybody even get close to the amount of deals that the United States have? I mean, cumulatively, the rest of the world didn't even come close to the amount that the U S had. We had 52 deals, had 13 and in the UK, Spain had 5. And I think that was kind of like a blip in the radar and a big part of that was the number two size to deal from Job and Talent, who are in our space. Right. Joel (13m 19s): And still have the worst name. I digress. Chad (13m 22s): I think it's fine. I think it's fine. But, but overall, yeah, I think, it's pretty cool, but I still believe that HCM is going to carry the year. Joel (13m 30s): Can we agree with that everybody's getting paid. Chad (13m 33s): Everybody's getting paid. Joel (13m 35s): Bud is getting paid, baby. Chad (13m 36s): And that Phenom isn't getting paid. Joel (13m 38s): Holy shit, Phenom People, I guess they're just Phenom now, I can't keep up with all the names that they go by. So they, they raised a hundred million duckets in Series D this week, to scale globally and continue development on its artificial intelligence driven talent hiring platform. The company last raised 30 million in a Series C in January of 2020, which was led by WestBridge capital. It's now raised $161 million total in venture capital since its founding in 2010, Phenom is used by 25,000 recruiters, talent marketers and hiring managers in 2020 leading to 2 million people being hired on this platform. Joel (14m 21s): Last year, I have a little bit of a soft spot for these guys. So historically that I think the two co-founders, they started by building mobile sites for CareerBuilder. You may or may not remember that they, the contract ran out, I think. And they created, Imomentous, which was the second worst name after Job and Talent. And they were just doing mobile sites that grew into Phenom, changed the name. Now it's all candidate experience marketing or whatever they're calling it and it's paying off, but these guys have grown organically, really happy for them. Great guys, and good on them. Chad (14m 60s): Yeah. I love Philly. And the people at Phenom have got to be dancing on the ceiling after this one. Phenom estimates that COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on the global job market with the prospect of over 100 million workers, switching careers by 2030. Phenom CEO, Mahe Bayireddi believes quote, "the golden age of HR and talent is coming." And I tell you what the guys getting cash. I hate the label. I hate the talent experience management, just because we have way too many fucking labels as it is. Chad (15m 45s): Obviously this has not impeded their progress, but I love they pretty much hinted that they're going to go IPO. The big question is, you know, where does this money go? They've made three acquisitions since September of 2020. And I'm going to predict, I mean, they focus on hyper-growth through sales, marketing, partnership development. The biggest problem I do see is now they have to force their way into partnerships through client acquisition. And I say that because they're becoming such a threat to more of the core platforms. Not to mention what do you, what do you think the possibility of Phenom, turning into a Radiancy or Symphony Talent tech focused agency? Chad (16m 32s): I mean, which would be a huge threat to the recruitment ad agencies, right? Do you think that they might go that way? Just kind of the whole, the whole experience piece. It just, it almost feels like that's where they're going. Joel (16m 43s): If we look at this historically, you know, we were saying in 2003, like what, what great, how great it would be to be the ATS. You own everything. It's so hard to leave. Job boards come and go and we we've continued this whole like plat one platform to rule them all. Who's going to own the company career site. Who's going to own that one-stop shop. And, to me, it's sort of this battle between the established ATSs and the industry, and then you have these up and then you have sort of, the layers of that that came around, you mentioned Radiancy, Phenom, et cetera. And then now you have this up and coming group, which let's agree, everyone thinks, you know, the Seek Outs, the Olivia's of the world are all hoping to be platformed similarly to how ATS are platformed. Joel (17m 33s): So I don't know how the hell this whole thing's going to shake out. I think there'll be multiple winners and just the best companies will win. But for sure, at some point you stop being a friend and you become a frenemy, and then eventually you become an enemy. And I think Phenom is probably in that frenemy zone right now and at risk of becoming an enemy to quite a few players. And we'll see how that shakes out. Chad (18m 0s): Yeah you get that kind of money, you have no other choice than to obviously build. Right. Become bigger, take more market. Joel (18m 8s): They're going to be fine. A third of millennials are leaving. A third of millennials, need jobs, come on under millions of drop in the bucket. Chad (18m 17s): Again. But, again, they're either IPO or they're bought by SAP, you know? So the threat for the core platforms, the applicant tracking systems and all the CRMs that are out there, all obviously CRMs it's going to be a frenemy kind of scenario. Joel (18m 37s): Yeah. And, you know, we talked about iCIMS going public a couple of weeks ago, I think, it's a rumor still, but you got to think that if iCIMS goes and they have a really successful wall street entry that you're going to see more ATSs go public. You're going to see the iCIMS mantises of the world. You're going to see a flood of it. Did I say iMomentous? Holy shit. I hope you got that on tape. I did. Yeah. See, I basically live in 2010. Anyway, if iCIMS falls on its face, it'll be really bad, but I think there'll be fine. Chad (19m 15s): I don't think they're going to have a problem with that, but guess who else lives in 2010? Joel (19m 20s): So please tell me it's Dice. Chad (19m 22s): Art Zeal, CEO of Dice, yes, yes, yes. Quote from Art Zeal and from some article, I can't remember where I found it, but "we are 100% tech focused and have created a platform that allows for end-to-end engagement between recruiters and technologists, ultimately speeding up the vetting process, recruiting time to hire" a blah, blah, blah. He's talking about new profiles, updated this, new lipstick on that pig. I mean, what the fuck is there anything of actual use here that's new and going to help Dice move forward and anything that's even close to innovative? Joel (20m 4s): I mean, I think, you know, like the credit to them is there at least moving a little bit away from, we're just a job board. You look at Upwork, you look at Fiverr, or you look at marketplaces that are, that are booming from a shareholder value perspective. And Dice is trying to move into that position. Like they keep losing money. They're not growing. I mean, it's a hail Mary pass. It's nothing to what, nothing compared to what their competitors are doing. I mean, GitHub is in and of itself, destroying companies like Dice, real good tech people don't hang out on job boards. They don't hang out and message with recruiters. Joel (20m 44s): Like none of this feels fresh. None of it new, it feels like the hail Mary pass, at the end of a game. Chad (20m 52s): None of it solves the problem for the companies who are looking for the types of talent that Dice says they're creating new profiles for. I mean, Woven teams, Codified, Hacker Rank, I mean, helping the talent, get the skills they need to play. Building coding, communities, mentoring, and skilling up the players. Dice is so out of their depth, when it comes to the actual need of the market. It feels like they're sprucing up the house for sale, but nobody wants to buy their painted cardboard box. It just, it just falls so flat. And how much money are they spending on this? Chad (21m 31s): That's the big question. DHI guys, what are you wasting money on? Joel (21m 36s): Yeah. Yeah. Some, so some of the numbers here that you look up, they have, they have 9 million candidate profiles still. They have over 5,000 enterprise subscribers that are using the service. Income of $19.4 million. That's down, that's down 17% from 2019. DHI as a whole reported 33.2 million in revenue, which was down 12% year on year from Q1, I believe in 2021. So the numbers suck. They're not going to get better. And again, hail Mary, we'll see what happens. Their stock has been bouncing over the past few months. So some people on wall street and some shareholders do believe in the plan. Joel (22m 18s): We'll see. Chad (22m 18s): So Art 2010 called, and they want their go to market strategy back buddy. Joel (22m 24s): Art, come on the show, man, convince us that what you're doing is innovative and that you're on the right track. You always are invited on the Chad and Cheese podcast JOB AD X PROMO (22m 34s): As the best ad tool in the industry JobAdX has been providing job board publishers, direct employers, agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms, dynamic job bidding and real time ad delivery through our programmatic job advertising exchange. When we started, we described JobAdX as AdSense for jobs. Now we offer much more with switchboard and live alert, completing our full suite of dynamic programmatic advertising tools. With the best of consumer ad tech switchboard offers our dynamic technologies to all partner, job board, feed management and live alert, eliminates latency and expired job ads via email. For more information about any of our ad solutions, please reach out to us at joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. JOB AD X PROMO (23m 17s): JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Chad (23m 23s): Okay. Before we get into the next topic, I've got to know your thoughts on major league baseball, moving their all-star game from Georgia to Colorado. What do you think about this? It's a political move, right? But it's a business move. Yeah. Joel (23m 39s): Business move. And it's also, you know, you look at a league that is very diverse. I mean, baseball, probably more than any other sport, at least in our country, I mean soccer maybe, but that's not really a sport in our country, but for baseball, I mean, it's probably the most diverse set of employees being the players and to make statements like this, it seems a little late to the game because football has sort of been carrying the baton of equality for quite a while, but it's a great move. Look, I think, you know, you and I debate, you know, is it, is it government, you know, who should be sort of making these moves and to see the market forces, private industry make statements like this, I think is awesome. Joel (24m 23s): I think it's, it's fantastic. And obviously voting rights in light of the 2020 election is going to be a hot topic going into the next presidential, the next interim interim 2022. We see States like Kentucky of all places become the easiest place to vote, in light of Georgia. So baseball made a statement and you're looking at certain States, you know, make statements around, we're making it easier or tougher. Politics is always going to sort of rear its ugly head in most things that we do and in life. So to me, like for sports to make political statements, that's something that's been going on my whole life. And I applaud baseball for doing this and good for Colorado for being able to snag up, you know, that banner from them and host the game, you know, this is a, I think a hundred million dollars that's going to be lost by Atlanta and the state of Georgia because of the decision that they made to make voting tougher. Chad (25m 21s): I hate it for the people because this was six white guys in a room signing the legislation, right, and they're going to take the brunt of it. And to watch Coke and Delta come out after this signing instead of before, you know, I think that rings hollow more than anything because those are huge brands in Georgia. And I hate, I hate that they didn't come out and actually say, what they said afterwards, right? This is this. Now let's hope this has some type of impact on all the other States that they see what's happening. But from an optic standpoint, from a brand standpoint, also from an employment standpoint, this I think is a negative for their brand. Chad (26m 9s): If they came out beforehand and they supported the people and actually trying to broaden up the opportunity to vote, would have been different. Joel (26m 18s): Yeah. It's actually, I mean, it feels like a real, a big step back because you had Stacey Abrams and I mean, Georgia basically delivered two democratic senators on the back. Yeah. So now you see, yeah, this is the reaction and a baseball made a statement and you know, good on them. But I think, I think Georgia is trending in the right way in terms of making voting more this is sort of the last, the last grasp or of the establishment. Maybe, hopefully things will change because certainly it felt that way in the presidential race in 2020. Yeah. Delta, you mentioned also I was impressed, it was a little bit off brand may because you don't really expect Delta to say, Hey, you need to treat people with respect. Joel (27m 7s): You're a big Delta guy, so I won't get too much into that. But I think Delta. Yeah. So Delta I'm in there. You probably got this too. Right. Your sky miles emails. And so they sent out an email about Chad (27m 17s): That was United. Joel (27m 19s): Was it United? Chad (27m 20s): It was United. Joel (27m 21s): Oh fuck. All right. Well, should we even talk about it? Chad (27m 24s): Yes. Yeah. Joel (27m 25s): Okay. So, so sticking with airlines. So United sent me an email. I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but they're really embracing diversity. So in this email that they sent a quote, "we're creating a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace in world. They will train, they're dedicated to training 5,000 new pilots by 2030, at least half of whom will be women and people of color. They're also going to remove some of the financial barriers of entry through partnering with, I believe JP Morgan Chase by providing millions of dollars in scholarship commitments, as well as student loans that ensure applicants will not be turned away solely because they cannot afford to enroll." Joel (28m 6s): So applause, a big applause there for United for being on the right side of diversity. Chad (28m 13s): Yeah. Well, I have to say that it's definitely gonna be hard. I appreciate them putting the stake in the ground, but many commercial pilots actually come from the military. It's like the easy button. They have the experience, flight time, the whole ball of wax, right. But the military leans heavily male and only about 20% of the current active military reserves and national guard are female. So the airlines are already pulling from a male heavy pool of talent. I also went on a pilotinstitute.com and found out that there are only about 7% of females who are categorized currently, as pilot only. Chad (28m 56s): So I think, you know, DEI, as we talk about all the time is the new AI everybody's talking about it, but you United airlines seems to truly be putting, their stake in the ground. Joel (29m 8s): Yeah. And you know, little teaser, we talked to Jackie Clayton over at Seek Out and yeah, she kinda got a laugh out of, you know, like metropolitan areas, that will say companies, there will say, you know, we're going to increase our black hiring by 30% or to 30% of our workforce. And 5% of the whole state, our whole city, is actually African American. So companies make these big, these big bold statements without really sort of thinking through the numbers. And let's be honest, who in 2030 is going to go to United and say, Oh yeah. Did you guys fulfill that commitment to 50 or 5,000 new pilots that are of color or are female? Joel (29m 52s): Probably not. So it's easy to make that claim in 2021. We'll see if anyone holds it to hold them to it in 2030. Chad (29m 59s): Oh, we're going to talk to them in 2030 on the podcast. That's what we're going to do. Joel (30m 4s): We're still doing this in 2030 you have permission to shoot me, anybody, everybody, five years just put me out of my misery. Chad (30m 12s): Well, they're there also opening a pilot training Academy in Arizona, and we talk about this all the time is I don't know why companies don't have their own training? Whether it's working directly with colleges and universities, working together with certification organizations, tech schools, whatever it is, doesn't matter. Working with them to work with the talent, to be ready to hire on day one and, and pay for that training. Right? These guys are actually building manufacturing, pilots talent through this school that will become United pilots. Chad (30m 54s): They'll I'm sure be put on contract. I mean, it's the same kind of thing that you see in the military. This should be what all smart companies are doing. But what they love doing is looking at Uncle Sam and saying, Hey, when are you going to build that a skills gap program that you've been talking about forever? And then they lean on corporate welfare. This is putting your money where your mouth is. So hopefully we do see that more diverse group of pilots coming out. But this is a hell of a step. Joel (31m 26s): And speaking of smart companies, Chad, Uber was in the news this week and I know how much you love them. What were they up to this week? Chad (31m 33s): They're discriminating against blind people who want to ride in Ubers, but they can't. I mean, is there anything worse than discriminating against, I mean, leaving blind people? Joel (31m 46s): This literally the saddest thing I've I read in a long time. Chad (31m 50s): So in 2016, Uber paid $2.6 million because of this problem, actually leaving the blind people, not giving them rides. And they're now paying an additional 1.1 million to a blind woman who says she missed work, missed her birthday celebration, missed Christmas Eve church services. And was left out in the dark in the rain and with other such humiliations, because Uber drivers refuse to carry her and her dog on 14 different occasions. Chad (32m 30s): Oh. Joel (32m 32s): Can we read that again real quick? Okay. She missed work. Her birthday, Christmas Eve church services, she's left out in the dark in the rain and her dog is with her the whole time. It's just so sad. And by the way, the million dollars that she was awarded, guess how much she actually got of that? Chad (32m 53s): Oh, God, how much? Joel (32m 55s): $324,000. Her lawyers got the other $800 plus thousand. Chad (33m 2s): And again, robbing from the blind, Jesus. So the question is it okay? So first off it was reported that drivers from 2016, the 2016 case, they weren't disciplined. So what's the punishment for leaving a blind woman in the rain. Number one, number two is this prop 22 biting Uber in the ass, because if they were actually employees, where there be higher ramifications and punishment for something like this? Joel (33m 33s): There'd be more fear probably. I mean, and so what, so Uber was in a lot of stories this week, but so the other one that we're, that you, you touched on was. Chad (33m 41s): They need people. Joel (33m 42s): When, Uber was afraid. Yeah. They need people too. But when Uber was afraid that that they'd have to count people as employees, they started giving them more freedom to the rates that they charged, who they picked up, et cetera. So some of this shit happens. And then, and then they don't get pinched by the government. So now everyone sort of they're pulling back those freedoms from people. So they're dealing with that headache. And then the story that came out today was gee, no one wants to drive for Uber and Lyft at the moment because they might get sick and there aren't any rides. And they're just like doing laps around, you know, the neighborhood hoping to pick somebody up. So life is not great at Uber this week. Chad (34m 22s): Yeah. Well, and again, this is, to me, seems like prop 22, at least in California, or at least the thought of prop 22 happening throughout the United States, is biting Uber in the ass. They believe that drivers are going to be there. Right. But when they're not, what the fuck are they going to do? Especially if they're those drivers, aren't earning a wage and they can't find people looking for rides, guess what? It's going to dry up. Joel (34m 50s): You can't have your cake and eat it too, if people aren't employees, then they're going to do shit like this. They're going to go rogue and treat people like shit sometimes. Apparently this woman was even yelled at by multiple Uber drivers because of her dog, that is how she sees by the way. Chad (35m 6s): Because she was blind and she needed a seeing eye dog. Jobvite (35m 12s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that jobvite.com/evolve. Jobvite PROMO (35m 52s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Chad (35m 56s): That's a brand that won't leave you out in the rain kids. Jobvite will not leave you out in the rain. Joel (36m 4s): And who's sexier than Jobvite?v Chad (36m 6s): Job. Aman, Aman's pretty sexy. He's a singer. Joel (36m 10s): Oh my God. I was hoping we'd never have to talk about David Kent again, but I guess if we have to talk about him, it's good, it's because he was really found to be an asshole. Chad (36m 21s): This is a throwback, so you've got to give some history on this. Joel (36m 24s): Total throwback. I want to say two years ago when we had, he was at the top of my naughty or nice list from a couple of years ago. So this douchebag, he started Rig Zone, sold it to whoever? Chad (36m 37s): DHI. Joel (36m 37s): The company who then sold it anyway. So he sold his DHI and then he left to start another company that was a competitor called Oil Pro. He took all the data of all the, he took all the resumes, he took all the customers. I think at least one of the engineers that help build a Rig Zone, basically took everything, took their money and then left and took all their intellectual property and then started a competitor. And then also started I think, trying to poach employees from Rig Zone to come to Oil Pro. Well, shockingly, the dude got found out, went to jail and then was sued obviously. Joel (37m 21s): So this week, it came to a head, a federal jury in Houston awarded Rig Zone about 3 million after agreeing its founder, David Kent stole trade secrets to launch oilpro.com. Rig Zone was awarded more than 3 million in damages for misappropriation of trade secrets. The jury also found that Kent violated the racketeer influence and corrupt organizations act. That sounds pretty serious. So yeah, he, you know, he did, he behaved badly and he got pinched for it. The justice system works! Chad (37m 54s): Was he found guilty for being a douche bag as well? Joel (37m 59s): A douchebag and being really, really stupid. Unfortunately that's not a crime in America, but maybe it should be? Chad (38m 5s): In this case, when you jack the candidate database that you just sold somebody, and then you start a competing company? Just for starters. Joel (38m 18s): Just stupid, just it's beyond stupid. Chad (38m 21s): Yeah. Kids don't do that. Joel (38m 24s): And on that note, we out. Chad (38m 27s): We out. OUTRO (38m 28s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (39m 13s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Video interviewing. You've probably heard it's sort of a thing since the pandemic. We're talkin' mass acquisitions here. So here comes Wedge HR with the promise to provide on-demand video interviewing that transforms the hiring process by providing candidates with a seamless, fast, and flexible experience. Oh, really? We'll just see about that as CEO Matt Baxter joins the boys for a rip roaring episode of Firing Squad. This podcast power by The Programmatic Revolution. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. pandoLogic Promo (-1h -1m -0s): Hey HR, have you joined the programmatic revolution? If not, you're about to get schooled on how to take your organization to the next level. Check this out. 95% of CMOs use programmatic advertising, but only 5% of CHRs are using it to advertise their jobs. Where's the disconnect? pandoLogic uses powerful automation to drive higher performing job ads without the bloated budget. It's time to transform the way you think about job advertising and join the revolution. Learn more at pandologic.com/revolution Shark Tank Intro (37s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they got what it takes to make it out alive? Dig a fox hole and duck for cover kids the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel (58s): Oh shit. It's another Monday Firing Squad. So I'm already pissed off. What's up everybody. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by Chad Sowash. Today, we welcome Wedge HR and their CEO, Matt Baxter to the show. Matt. Welcome. Welcome to the Chad and cheese podcast. It's great to have you let's get to some quick personal stuff. And then we'll get to the company. Like what, what should people know about Matt Baxter the person? Chad (1m 28s): Well, first off, first off he's he's having PTSD issues right now from being on the recruitment flex last week. And Shelly just driving his ass into the ground. Joel (1m 40s): Those Canadians can be tough. Can't they? Did they did they say sorry after they ripped you a new one? Of course she did. Chad (1m 47s): Sorry. Matt (1m 48s): Sorry. Love that. So I'm a, I'm coming to you live from grand Rapids, Michigan. I'm a Michigan guy grew up in Ann Arbor. I went to Hope College. Joel (1m 59s): Dope. This show's over. Thanks for coming Matt. Matt (2m 9s): I've got a golden retriever. I run Wedge, which we'll get into. I also have a little side hustle called the Hopper Popper, we dabble in toilets and I've got a podcast myself. Joel (2m 18s): I dabble in toilets too. Okay. Chad, tell him what he's won. Chad (2m 22s): Well, Matt, you have two minutes to pitch Wedge at the end of two minutes, you will hear that bell then Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If you start to get boring, shit starts to ramble. You're going to get the crickets, that means tighten up your game. At the end of Q and A, you will receive either big applause. Wedge will be a big hit, meaning you'll be able to move up to those silk undies where Wedgies are delightful. Joel (2m 50s): You'll be making gold-plated toilet bowls at that point. Chad (2m 53s): Golf clap. It's time to pull that wedgie out of your crack and get focused because you might have something here. Or the firing squad, nothing but cheap cotton skid marks here, Matt, hang it up and focus on Hopper Popper big guy, because this ain't it. Are you ready? Matt (3m 13s): I'm ready. Let's rock and roll. Joel (3m 14s): All right. As much time as you need with a maximum of two minutes, Matt in three, two, ding, ding, ding. Matt (3m 21s): Wedge HR is an asynchronous video interviewing platform. Asynchronous is very sexy or really annoying jargon, depending upon how you look at it for on-demand or one way. We help companies hire more efficiently and effectively by removing some of the headaches of scheduling, calendar invites, or just bad phone screens. And then also from a candidates perspective, we help candidates shine above and beyond just traditional mechanisms like resumes and cover letters. You only get one single sheet of paper to tell who you are and we don't believe that that's enough. And we believe that our platform can help show that for companies as well too. So we work either directly with companies by selling our software solution, or we integrate with an ATS to help scale up as a feature part of their hiring process. So if you would like to learn more about Wedge HR, go to wedgehr.com. Chad (4m 5s): Okay. The first question is when is facial recognition coming to the platform? That's the big question. Matt (4m 12s): Oh gosh. Hopefully never because if, if you're going to convince me otherwise, basically all facial recognition does is tell me, Hey Chad, that's you on the video? Nice. Now people cheating and basically falsifying who they are and in a video interview just does not happen. We were talking about ACTs when there's 200 grand on the line by Tracy, T-score sure you could talk me into it. But I think facial recognition is one of the dumbest things you can possibly do when it comes to a pre-screening video interview. Chad (4m 39s): Take a stand man. So what the hell brought you into HR and recruitment tech or interviewing in the first place? Matt (4m 48s): Natural. Apparently I didn't explain this well enough to Shelly. That's a joke I started. My very first business was the chubby neighbor kid in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I pushed mode a few lawns, probably for some extra beer money or fast food money. By the time I was a senior in high school hired my first employee. By the time I was a sophomore in college, probably had hired 20 to 25, people had a chance to sell the lawn care company. No, it was not a big tech exit, but it was a fun little seed capital to get me started. And what I quickly learned while hiring for my lawn care was I didn't really care if somebody knew how to mow a lawn or weed wack, I cared, can you shake my hand? Can you have a conversation? If you can do those things, I can teach you the rest. So after talking to a bunch of employers in the world and who I previously did, lawn care work, for everybody said, hiring sucks, resumes are terrible and we can't find good people. Matt (5m 34s): So to me, it seemed like there was a major gap in the market to create a more efficient and effective solution for companies, but also a way for candidates to share their story above and beyond just traditional resumes. Joel (5m 43s): So I got an, I got to ask about the name cause I always do. So you were originally Competitive Wedge, correct? That's correct. Okay. So why Wedge and not Edge? And then you went to Wedge HR because no one could spell competitive or like what was the evolution of the name? And you've been around since 2015? Matt (6m 5s): It was an idea in napkin July 1st, 2015. Joel (6m 9s): Just tell me the evolution of the name. Cause I'm always curious. Matt (6m 12s): So one of my buddies sat me down. I think the original name, truth be told, was Stepping Stone, which I was, it was a placeholder and I'm not a very creative when it comes to naming and he sat me down and he said, I think the name should be Wedge because you guys are forming a wedge in the hiring process. And that was ultimately what stuck. And we realized we could actually be the Kleenex of interviewing and basically say, send me your wedge. Or we reviewed a wedge. So yes, when it came to filing wedge.com remarkably expensive to get a start in. And so, you know, wanted to create something that was some form of a tagline. So competitive wedge, you know, spin off of, you know, what you alluded to competitive edge. And then we realized our CTO had to type competitive every time he was writing code. And he said competitive sucks, let's drop it. Matt (6m 53s): When you smack HR on the back end, the end of anything helps the world know that you work in HR. So that's the very sexy, exciting story of WedgieHR. Joel (7m 2s): Well, I love the developer bitch and how that changed the name, nothing else. That's great. And now, and now six years later, you're getting made fun of by a couple of idiots on a podcast. So good for you. Matt (7m 12s): All right, I think I'm in good company. Joel (7m 14s): So yeah. All right. So as, as this is an audible or audio format, walk me through as a job seeker, how I get to the video interviewing uploading stuff. Like, do I look at a job apply and then get an email to do video stuff? Is there a link within the job? Walk me through that. Matt (7m 35s): So I'll give two use cases that would be 95% of who uses Wedge. So use case number one is once a candidate applies for a job, wherever that may be, they would be moved in the next stage a part of the ATS. And then they would be sending an invite by email. We're about to release texts but it's not done yet, but by email and they would be brought and say, Hey, congratulations, you made it past the first round of XYZ. Here's your one-way video interview that you're going to go through. The other way, as you alluded to would be, you can include companies if they choose to, can pop in a link right into their job description that if they want that to be for every candidate applying, they certainly can. So we're probably 70/30. 70% have it be a secondary screen, 30%, have it be the entry part of every hiring process. Chad (8m 17s): So who is your target market from a company standpoint? And what do you see your target type of role filling to date? Matt (8m 26s): Target company to date so far has been companies with a hundred to a thousand employees. We don't have any limitations on scaling up to enterprise, but just from a sales, you know, sales cycle perspective, it's just been easier working with small to mid market companies. We're industry agnostic. Our main users of Wedge would be retail, manufacturing, high turnover positions, sales, account management, any form of role that would be customer facing. We don't typically enter into executive search in any way, shape or form, but I would say mid-market and below, or sorry, mid-management and below would typically be our range. And as I alluded to, it's not really industry related. Matt (9m 6s): Now with Covid, we've had some changes to that, but we can dive into that. Chad (9m 9s): Okay. So are you going straight to market direct to hiring companies with this, or is this actually happening through partnerships with applicant tracking systems, CRMs job boards? How are you going to market with this? Matt (9m 25s): Majority of our revenue partnerships and everything is through, or excuse me, a majority of our revenue growth and companies using Wedge are through partnerships like applicant tracking systems. So what or job boards, the same, same exact thing. And so we continue to scale up by forming new partnerships with organizations that want to leverage video as a feature, a part of their hiring process. And we can fill that void, spin up an integration overnight sort of thing, and off to the races. We'd certainly do have some that are direct, that are great, but for the most part, most organizations want that integration to happen. Joel (9m 58s): Speaking of integrations, talk me through your mindset of this, because usually when we have startups come on and we talk about integrations with ATSs, you know, names like Greenhouse, Smart Recruiters, iCIMS Jobvite et cetera. And your list is a little strange to me. There are three ATSs lists on your website. You have Jazz HR, which is fairly well known, but then you have Applicant Pro hiring optimization. So talk me through why partner with those guys versus some of the names I mentioned. Matt (10m 28s): Yeah. So without disclosing information, that's too early, but some of the names that you listed, those are active partnerships that were either in conversations with or pursuing, so those certainly are there. But you know, Jazz HR, for example, or Applicant Pro are phenomenal SMB applicant tracking systems, and those just happened to be our first ones and they've been great. They've, you know, SMB organizations, you know, a hundred to 500 employees, that want to use video. They want a, cost-effective easy to use solution. Those have been fantastic. There are some ATSs that you can get into that you may be one of 25 different vendors and the only way you get bumped up on the list is if you come and say, Hey, here's 100,000 new clients and yada yada, yada, let me be friends with you guys sort of thing. Matt (11m 9s): And for us, we'd rather partner with the applicant tracking systems that are motivated to push. Our solution assuming we're offering good service and assuming we're helping make them money and assuming we're help making their product more sticky, which is all things that we do and we want to be able to do, but ultimately, you know, we want partners that are not afraid to push our product, or we can form a partnership that's obviously mutually beneficial, just above and beyond a, Hey, here's our list get in line sort of thing. Joel (11m 32s): Gotcha. Well, yeah, one of the benefits when we talked to chat bots is, is ghosting. And I'm really curious from a video perspective, do people like, what are you, what's your bounce rate on videos? How many people that are invited, don't do it. How many bail through the process, or is it like a really high level of completion rates on these? Matt (11m 54s): Yeah, again, a little that's dependent upon where in the process, this lives. Certainly front end portion of the application, you may have higher ghosting versus, you know, once you've already had a few touch points with the candidate. So, from what I know in the industry, the assessment world, it's about a 30% completion rate. When you send out an invitation for somebody to complete an assessment, we're our average or our completion rate is hovering right around 50% between 51 and 52%. Now, obviously, as we scale up that those numbers, we hope to continue as well, but there's certain things that you can do that drastically shoots that up, like text reminders or email reminders or deadlines. And those are all things that we're actively working on, you know, pushing through. Chad (12m 37s): So Zoom, Teams, whereby Slack, Facebook video's everywhere, and instead of buying another platform, why wouldn't hiring companies use what corporate HQ have already purchased them and integrate that into their hiring process. It's what they already know. It's part of their daily routine. So why get into another platform like Wedge instead of just integrating with one of them? Matt (13m 6s): So you can throw other names my way, and I can address these, but the ones that you just listed are all what's called synchronous platforms or live platforms. Wedge is not a live solution. We are an asynchronous video interview solution. So we are a pre-screened. You would set up a series of hiring manager would set up a series of questions. Candidates will respond to those on their own time, comfort of their own home from any device. And then you get to review those results on your own time, comfort of your own home. So we're an asynchronous platform and so different than Zoom, which is synchronous and it requires us to schedule and beyond Zoom at the same time. Now, with that being said, we're not trying to get rid of Zoom, and we're not trying to get rid of resumes, but we're trying to be a pre-screen that allows you to determine who is at least worth bringing on to that time when it requires us to be live. Matt (13m 52s): And so to the other point, you know, about the systems we learned, that was kind of ultimately why we went down. The applicant tracking system approach is that if we're selling our product direct, at some point in time, they got to figure out where it lives in the system or where it lives in their hiring process, where if we integrate with any of our different ATS partners, we can literally set wedge up so that you barely even know we exist. And it's, you know, dropped in simple, right in that, right in your ATS. And there's things like automatic workflows, they're singing like triggered response or batch invites, all of which allows the whole process to be so super seamless and lives right in the ATS, so you don't have to be bopping around different platforms. So two part answer, hopefully I covered both. Chad (14m 28s): Yep. So why is the one way interviewing process better for candidates? And then also, why is it better for hiring managers? Matt (14m 38s): For candidates, I mean, and I know, I know you both may roll your eyes at this, but my sort of tagline, and I actually believe this to be true is that I think everybody has a story and those stories worth telling. And I think right now, when you're applying for a job, you're talking about a single dimension sheet of paper. That's supposed to tell your whole story and why you're worthwhile moving to the process. We're talking about a resume. We're talking about basically however much life experience that you have, or trying to boil that down to one sheet of paper that is supposedly a good determining factor of whether that person has cultural fit or that person would, would work well with the team. And I think that's not enough. And I think that's actually a really bad representation of people. I'm not trying to get rid of resumes entirely, but why Wedge is worthwhile for the candidate is it's a brief opportunity to share a little bit more about yourself so that people have a better understanding of who you are before you walk in the door, supplement that with a resume, great show, your experience, your qualifications, all those different things. Matt (15m 30s): But for the companies that stand up there and say, we love hiring for culture, but get in line if you only have 10 to 12 years experience, we want a PhD too. You're not hiring for culture, you're hiring for qualifications first and then maybe culture. But I think the narrative has shifted. And I think people want to know who they're working next to. And that's why I think asynchronous are one way or a brief one to two minute long video is a phenomenal way to at least leverage that. And then the company side, you know, think about the number of bad phone screens, the number of bad zoom videos, or the number of hundreds of schedulings that you have to deal with and what Wedge is trying to do again, we're not trying to eliminate phone screens or Zoom, but what we're trying to do is say out of your a hundred resumes that you just reviewed, you whittled that down to 50, that you have time to phone screen. Matt (16m 10s): Why don't you have those 50 to a video interview? Why don't you have those three to a video interview and at least determine who's worthwhile to bring into the next stage, that way you can be that much more intentional, that much more focused. And then the other piece in, in my opinion, which I think is kind of game changers, the fact that you can share videos. So a company can now all of a sudden share their video with other people. So Joel, let's say you're the CEO and Chad, you're the CFO, and I'm the hiring manager. You guys may not sit on every single phone screen or every single zoom. But what I can do is I can take my 30 minute or sorry, my three-minute video of 30 different candidates, push them your way and say, Hey, take a brief, look at these before we actually interview every single one. And so it's really, really nice for collaboration as well. Joel (16m 48s): We touched on a competition and there's a ton of, there's a lot of clutter out there. There's a lot of noise. I'm curious, aside from the integrations and some of the partnerships, what are you doing marketing wise to sort of set you apart from all the noise that's out there right now? Matt (17m 2s): Yes. Aside from the ATS integrations, but that's hard not to address. I mean, that's, that's our major, major, major growth strategy and we make our products so very simple and easy. And I know that may not be protective rights, but the fact that you can sign up for Wedge, set a position up, invite candidates in five minutes, this is not a major technical implementation. You could do it today sort of thing. So we really focus heavily on making our products so remarkably simple and easy, and again, so you barely even know we exist. And so, and then on the candidate side, I believe that we're the only platform in the market, that's actually focusing on candidate first. We're about to drop our new candidate experience, where we offer things, you know, just a really, really great experience for the candidates to feel safe in this environment. Matt (17m 47s): Video is new for people. You allow retakes, you allow just to actually good-looking tech versus really, really clunky pieces of crap that suck, but actually be a tech company that offers a wonderful experience. And so I know there's a couple different angles, but we're coming out to the world saying we want to be simple and easy to use for the company. And we want to be a wonderful candidate experience on the candidates. Joel (18m 6s): So in light of sort of that investment that you've made in the course of your existence, you've raised roughly $2 million, correct? Matt (18m 14s): Yeah. So we raised a million so far and we're wrapping up a funding round as we speak. Yep. Joel (18m 18s): And you had some seed rounds before that? It looks like. Matt (18m 21s): Yep. Joel (18m 22s): So what is the money been spent on? It sounds like a lot of development. Am I missing anything in terms of raising more money? Where do you expect that investment to go? Matt (18m 31s): The previous capital that we've raised has been towards obviously building the product, building some early stage partners, obviously beta testing back in the day, and basically setting up our partnership in the foundation so that we can scale up. The current round and what we're scaling up with would be bringing on additional engineers to obviously constantly be improving the product. And then we're going to be also adding new partners as well, too. And then obviously scaling up from a marketing perspective as well. Chad (18m 57s): Okay. So let's talk about the pricing. It's neat. It's simple. How much onboarding does it actually take for an SMB to get up and running? Is that pretty much fairly simple? If a company comes directly to you versus going through like an applicant tracking system partner, like Jazzy HR? Matt (19m 16s): If they, if they come directly to us and they're not using it through an ATS, it's probably maybe a demo and maybe a follow-up demo with other people on the team if multiple people are using it, but that may take, you know, 30 minutes to an hour that we can get them squared away. With an ATS. It's typically one demo and they're ready to rock. Chad (19m 32s): Okay. Matt (19m 33s): So it's, it's pretty simple. Again, some, some HR and love them to death, some HR folks typically like a little bit reassurance. And so we obviously, will happily give that to them. So, Chad (19m 43s): So if I'm a company around 500 employees and I get on an annual plan, this isn't all you can eat plan for, tell me if I'm wrong here, less than $5,000 a year. Is that correct? Matt (19m 59s): That's right. Chad (19m 60s): Why so fucking cheap? Matt (20m 3s): Because HR does not come to you with big budgets. But at the end of the day, I mean, that's, the idea is to scale up like crazy is to say, we can offer a solution. It's a value add for us. It's a value add for you unlimited, you know, limited use. You can scale up during different seasons of your hiring and let's show the value in a hurry. So that's, we found that to be a wonderful pitch and people love it. And that's why we're growing. Joel (20m 24s): Did you have some evolution in the pricing because you adhere to a little smaller business? So I'm sure like to ask for a lot of money is a little bit like pulling teeth. Matt (20m 34s): Oh yeah. We evolved. I mean, there's, there's different things that we've tested and any of my team members, if they happen to listen to this, they're going to crack up because we had some of the most obnoxious pricing conversations through the years, but we, you know, we had like price per seat, volume base or usage base, and it's just complicated. And typically it just, you can close deals way faster, if you just have it be an all you can drink bottle and make it easy. And people seem to like that. So, Joel (20m 59s): So bias DNI is a huge, huge topic these days. And, video formats tend to be under a little bit of scrutiny in terms of, you know, unbiased hiring and anonymity for candidates. Whereas, you know, an automated chat bot, for example, you know, can really claim on bias because they don't, they don't see who they're talking to or who they are, who the video is of. So do you guys have a solution for that? Is it a question that you're looking at solving or we're not really worried about it because our customers aren't sort of asking for it? Matt (21m 35s): Five years ago when I first pitched the idea, I probably had 30 people ask me the same question. So I've learned to love this topic, and it's certainly something that we're constantly concerned and talking about and making sure that we're doing the best we possibly can. At the end of the day, asynchronous video interview is a platform that you can watch rewatch and share with other people. The majority of bias and discrimination issues arise when it's one person reviewing one piece of information. So one-on-one review over resume one-on-one interview, one-on-one phone screen. Whereas leveraging a tool like Wedge or asynchronous video, you can share it to other people that are part of your hiring team. Number one, it is a system of record that you can actually go back to. Number two, you can invite other people to review the video and therefore with more people involved, you can decrease issues like discrimination and bias. Matt (22m 23s): And so we're actively having that conversation. We're actively talking to organizations about how we can better improve that, but at the end of the day, we're, we're capable of actually being an asset, a part of this conversation to say, we can actually help you lower discrimination cases and lower bias cases by having more people review the video. And the problem is in the current hiring solution, it's typically one person phone screening, and then a set of notes that they pass along. But the nice thing is with one way video interview, you can all watch the same exact piece of information, versus one person's interpretation of somebody else's notes. Joel (22m 55s): How global is your product? Any international companies, or is it all North America for the most part? Matt (23m 1s): For the most part in North America, we have a few to say that we're having massive market share international, not fair, but we've been introduced to a couple of partners that are helping that direction happen, so not there yet, but working on it. Joel (23m 14s): Okay. So then my last question is, what do you want to be when you grow up? So you're raising more money. Is this, you know, flip this thing in a couple of years, I know you're an entrepreneur at heart. It sounds like is this, you want this to be a long-term thing? You want to build the tallest skyscraper in Ann Arbor one day? Like what, what's the mission for your company? Matt (23m 34s): It's a great question. And my answer probably slightly changes based upon how stressed I am. At this is the first season in a while that I have never been more bullish and excited about what we're doing. And it's just rather than running the day to day. I'm finally in a chance where I can actually take a step back and say, we actually, I think can revolutionize the way hiring works. Our goal right now is to make asynchronous video a staple part of the hiring process. But then to add that we can begin to revolutionize hiring for a video standpoint and not be one of these clunky platforms and not be one of these bad texts, but actually be a wonderful vendor and scale up accordingly. And so my, what do I want to be when I grow up, I want to build Wedge to be the biggest we possibly can be. Matt (24m 15s): You know, if there's somebody who comes alongside and said, Hey, we can take it to the next level with you, sure we'll entertain that. But right now I think we've got a great team, great folks and great investors. And let's blow the top off. Joel (24m 26s): Roger that, by the way, as a single guy with no kids, you are not allowed to be stressed ever. That's the bell. And you know what that means? Matt you're facing the firing squad. Are you ready? Matt (24m 40s): I'm ready. Joel (24m 41s): All right. Get him Chad. Chad (24m 41s): Dude. So much fucking noise out there. Asynchronous video, synchronous video. So many different platforms to choose from so many platforms to integrate with. One thing that is fairly amazing for your platform is that the market has been validated. StepStone acquires Cameo, Modern Hire acquires Sonru, Outmatch acquires Launch Pad. iCIMS, Easy Recruit, Phenom, Talent. You get the idea, right? This is happening. The validation is there. Scale is necessary. And that's why we're seeing all this validation, because we understand that at least the vendors understand that scale is necessary around interviewing. Chad (25m 28s): A better experience is necessary, around interviewing, but to be quite Frank, this is such a widely used type of platform. You have to separate yourself by business model, strategy, and leadership. And I think to be quite Frank, Matt, this is where you're knocking it out of the park. You are not trying to go after the big iCIMS of the world and try to get into their long list of integrations. You're working with organizations like the Jazz HRS and some of the others who really are hungry, hungry to get into this market, to evolve their platform and perspectively who knows, be part of an acquisition package down the road? Chad (26m 15s): So I think other than your pricing, which is cheap, too fucking cheap, I think this is a big applause. Joel (26m 27s): Wow. Nice job, Matt. Thank you. Matt (26m 30s): I dunno if the Wedgie title or what, but thank you. Definitely. Joel (26m 34s): The hopper popper. Yeah. You, you laid the groundwork for a successful firing squad. Look, I, I don't have much to add to that. You know, I mean, I think I'm always a fan of if you're, you know, if you're an average surfer on a big wave, like you're probably going to be a pretty good surfer. If you're a really good surfer on a shitty wave, it's going to be a bad situation. And you, from my perspective, look like a pretty good surfer on a pretty good fucking wave. Chad (27m 2s): Hang ten, Motherfucker. Joel (27m 5s): You would almost have to fuck this up to not be successful with the way that you're going. I think if you're looking to raise more money, that's obviously going to be more development for you. I think we're going to see more integrations from what you're doing. Video chat, already comment on that. There's money flowing in the streets for stuff that you're doing. So for me, I have not much else to add. A big applause. I say a warm up the Brinks truck. It's boats and hoes for you, my friend, boats and hoes. And since you're single, I can say that without any guilt whatsoever. Matt (27m 44s): HR still working, HR, got to be a little careful. Joel (27m 47s): Not, well, this is the Chad and Cheese podcast. Of course, of course. How do you feel? Matt (27m 52s): I feel great. I will admit I'm a bit shocked, but after I will, I got to give a shout out to Shelly and Serge they prepared me well. So hopefully we did all right, but I feel great. Joel (28m 0s): You're you're going to dis us like that on your final, final note, ruin the whole thing. It just ruined the whole thing. All right, Matt, where can our listeners find out more about you and buy the product? Matt (28m 15s): I'm a occasionally loud and obnoxious on LinkedIn. So you can find me, just at Matt, Matt Baxter on LinkedIn. You also can find our business at wedgehr.com. You can also follow my podcast, which is the Matt Baxter Show. And all three of those are pretty accessible. Joel (28m 34s): All right, well done. Chad, we out. Chad (28m 36s): We out. Outro (28m 49s): This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese Podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com.

The world is awakening from its pandemic-induced coma. What does that look like? We’re starting to get an idea, as Will the job market be back by Q4? Google & Amazon say "Your office awaits" Rutgers University make a smart move, employers watch LinkedIn copies Clubhouse Buy or Sell with 1) Celential.ai 2) Crosschq and 3) Datapeople while Ladders thinks rotary dial is innovation. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. 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. oys and girls. Joel (21s): Oh yeah. Celebrating four years together and Chad still hasn't proposed. Hi boys and girls. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel "no more remote work for you" Cheeseman. Chad (37s): And I'm Chad "just watched the Snyder cut twice" Sowash. Joel (41s): On this week show, will you join LinkedIn's Clubhouse? Google and Amazon say, get your ass back to the office, and the Ladders launches a new "innovation." And when I say innovation, I'm using air quotes. Sovren Promo (56s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (1m 55s): Four years together, man. Have we even mentioned that on the show yet? Chad (1m 58s): We have not. Joel (1m 60s): March something. Chad (2m 0s): We have not and glad you did. Yeah. Joel (2m 3s): 2016 or '17. Chad (2m 5s): About a month in, Holy crap. Joel (2m 7s): Remember how much our first show sucked, as if it's all that great now, but anyway. Chad (2m 15s): I totally remember. Joel (2m 16s): We were totally Ricky, Bobby, like not knowing what to do with our hands. We just rambled on for like two hours. Chad (2m 24s): For a first show we thought it was going to take 20 minutes. Yeah. Joel (2m 28s): Oh, so happy, happy April fool's day. You pulling any jokes on anybody today. Chad (2m 34s): Can't get out to pull any jokes for God's sakes. I'd like to, and hopefully will be soon. Joel (2m 40s): Yeah. So last year or the year before I did the old a ultrasound April fool's joke. Chad (2m 47s): Oh man. That's so bad. Joel (2m 49s): Yeah. It's and it's so cliche, but I just, I did it anyway. And then, and then I got a verbal beating from my wife. So I'm steering clear of April Fools 'cause I only get in trouble when I, when I do something. Chad (3m 2s): Yeah. That's a good idea. What you should do is sit down and finally watch the Snyder Cut with Cole on and also Godzilla versus King Kong just came out yesterday. So you have plenty of awesome flicks to sit down and enjoy. Joel (3m 16s): So tell the listeners who aren't nerds like you and me, what the Snyder Cut is. Chad (3m 21s): The, the justice league Snyder Cut, so first off sack Snyder was the, was supposed to finish the justice justice league movie the first time around, but he had some personal issues or something happened and, and Josh Wheden did it and it turned out to be this powder puff. It wasn't horrible, horrible, but it wasn't amazing. So Snyder comes back and everybody's like, we want the Snyder cut. We want the original vision. So on and so forth. So he comes out with this Epic four hour version that is dark, it's rated R and it is just, it's better than Wheden's. It's not as good as anything really in the MCU, but it is incredibly satisfying to watch. Chad (4m 8s): I've watched it twice so far. Joel (4m 12s): That's a big applause from Chad that he's invested eight hours of his life in this film. Chad (4m 18s): It's good. I can't wait for a Godzilla versus King Kong. I'll watch that thing probably about half a dozen times. Joel (4m 24s): Yeah. That one looks weird. Cause King Kong is the good guy and I thought they were both good guys. So it's like Superman versus Batman. I don't understand. I guess not. Chad (4m 35s): You don't know, that's how they get ya. Joel (4m 36s): I got watch. Well, shout out to my son who turned an age old four. He's the same age of this podcast, which either is it's. I don't know. It's it's a bad omen or a sign of good luck. I don't know what it is, but yeah. Jeremy happy birthday buddy. Four years old. Chad (4m 56s): Job Ax four years, four years. Joel (4m 59s): It's all gravy from like 4 to 10. This is the good, the good time. Chad (5m 3s): So thanks to Jennifer Terry Alaina, Jason and the team over at pandoLogic for the bourbon and snacks. They very smartly sent over six airplane bottles of different types of bourbon, pretzels, cheese and caramel corn. And they are perfect for travel, which I am about to do this weekend! Okay. Joel (5m 28s): I was going to say, is there a, is there a ticket, a Hawaii in that package like that's a strange care package. Pretty sweet. It's pretty sweet line airline shots. Awesome. Chad (5m 40s): It goes with the Goldman snacks. Did you see that? Joel (5m 44s): I remember talking about Goldman Sachs recently, but Goldman snacks? Tell me more. Chad (5m 50s): So last week we talked about Goldman Sachs and how their 95 hours per week was just fucking crazy, right? Why? Well, while Citibank mandated, like Zoom Fridays, you couldn't do Zooms on Fridays. So Goldman, after this information came out, they sent their entry level peons, I guess, is what they would call them. Snack boxes, like snack baskets or something like that. While everybody else in the industry gets bonuses or Pelotons. I just thought again, this is like rubbing their face in you're going to work here at Goldman Sachs and it's just going to be shit. Joel (6m 34s): Who's giving away Peloton damn? That's what I'm talking about. That's raining money kind of shit. Chad (6m 41s): Yeah. Yeah. Joel (6m 42s): A shout out real quick, Jessica Jensen, you may not know the name now, but you will. Soon. She is. Indeed's new CMO. She takes over. She takes over for Paul Darcy, who we spoke to off the record. Thanks Indeed for that one. And he was actually SVP of marketing at Global Marketing. So I don't know if they've ever even had a real CMO, but she comes from Facebook, Yahoo, Apple. She was at booking.com, Open Table, like some serious chops. So hopefully next year Superbowl ad will actually be something worth watching. Chad (7m 21s): So it's funny because Chris Neil and our friend over at Colt Collective posted on LinkedIn, here's the post "hamsters have longer lifespans than CMOs. It's very hard to evoke meaningful organizational change and enhance customer engagement strategies when the new egos and different personalities are rotated through CMOs offices approximately every two years." So enjoy those two years, Jen! Joel (7m 50s): Yeah. She's going to get bored real fast, based on her prior experience, working in the job board industry is going to be (zzzz - snore sound effects) Chad (8m 1s): Sucks. Joel (8m 2s): Hope that check clears. Chad (8m 3s): What doesn't suck is a Spotify playlist, kids. Yeah. Yeah. So we have so much content. This is actually episode 653. Good God. We want to give our listeners an easy way to find relevant content. So we started with somewhat of a Netflix approach on Chadcheese.com, creating channels for Firing Squad, Voices, Friday shows and other stuff. But now we've started to create Spotify playlist. The first one is sexy. It's actually called Femm Amp. That's Female being, you know, amplified. Chad (8m 44s): So if you're looking for a great female voices to listen, to just search Femm Amp in Spotify, follow it, and enjoy we'll add interviews of more females to come so that playlist will grow. Joel (9m 0s): Love it. So I'm keeping my shout-outs to a minimum cause we have a lot to talk about today, but we got to mention free shit! Chad (9m 8s): Free stuff! Joel (9m 9s): If you want a t-shirt! You want whiskey? You want beer, you got to go to Chadcheese.com/free register. It costs nothing. You're going to get free shit, probably. The level of the level of awesome will go up and down based on whatever the hell shows up. But you got to get on the list to get the stuff, Chadcheese.com/free backslash free. Chad (9m 34s): Free stuff who doesn't love free stuff? Joel (9m 36s): Special thanks as always to Sovren for the whiskey. Chad (9m 39s): Yes. Emissary for the shirts and AdZuna for the beer. Man. That's just good stuff. Not to mention it's it's interesting because we just saw that Matt Alder just received our Christmas card. So guess who knows, who knows? There might be stuff in the mail right now, right? Joel (10m 1s): Yeah. Well, it was funny too. Lars Schmidt, by the way, that's a nice segue to the interview we did with him this week. If you haven't listened to that, everybody that's gold right there. Yes. So I sent out Christmas cards and Lars either wrong address or I wrote something incorrectly. His came back, I emailed his December 11th and he lives, I think two States away from us. So the mail is definitely fucked up all over the place. Chad (10m 29s): You know what else is fucked up? Equal pay is fucked up. And last week, I didn't understand really what equal pay day was. So one of our listeners, Amy Butchgo over at essay IC. She straightened me out, which I appreciate. So the wage, a white male American makes in a calendar year stopping on obviously December 31st. It takes a white female until March 24th, the following year to earn this same pay nearly three months. And it's obviously much worse for women of color. So thanks for dropping the knowledge, Amy, a couple of dumb white guys are learning every single day. Chad (11m 14s): We appreciate it. Joel (11m 15s): Yes. This podcast is our MBA in case you're wondering. Chad (11m 19s): I'm ready for topics. Joel (11m 22s): All right. So what is the post pandemic world look like Chad? Well, we're starting to get some answers. Chad (11m 29s): Really? Joel (11m 29s): If you think it's talking about, so number one reported this a, this week hiring levels should be at pre pandemic levels by the end of the year. So this is a report by manpower group, who we all know and love, or maybe at least we know nearly one-third of more than 7,500 us employers surveyed said the outlook for 2021 second quarter would return to pre-pandemic hiring levels. This is going to happen as soon as July and an additional 20% said the same could occur by the end of next year. Employers in all of the 12 industries measured by manpower group reported positive hiring outlooks with the strongest projections reported in leisure and hospitality, my two favorite transportation and utilities and wholesale and retail on the state level. Joel (12m 17s): Hiring projections were strongest in Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and then followed up by Michigan, Vermont and Arizona. That's a pretty random list of States. Only 4% of employers in this survey said that they plan to require employees to get vaccinated according to this study. Chad (12m 36s): And that was a pretty legit sample size as well. What was the, what was the percentage of vaccinated? The mandated vaccinations. Joel (12m 46s): Only 4% of employers surveyed, planned to require employees to get vaccinated. I think it was 20% so that they were going to create some sort of incentives to get vaccinated. Chad (12m 59s): Yeah. See that that's where I think the problem lies is the word planned. Has every company laid out what their plan for work from home, hybrid or back to normal is yet? HR needs time to create standard operating procedures in a ton of these different areas. I mean like vaccinations themselves, if you're coming back into the office, how are they not going to be required? What's the risk associated to not requiring it versus the risk associated to it, the quote unquote "legal risk" associated in making it compulsory. Right. So, I mean, overall, I personally don't believe that companies are planning or have planned, let's say for these, for these, different issues just yet, they might be talking about it. Chad (13m 52s): But I don't believe with that 4% number. I think that 4% number is bullshit. The 20% number I think is going to be much higher. Joel (13m 59s): This is a progression, right? Remember when Trump was in office and like 25% said they were actually going to get the vaccine. And now that number is like up to 70. I think don't quote me on that. But things are moving in the direction of let's get vaccinated and maybe companies will progressively move into that same direction as well. I think it's going to take some big companies to require them before other companies say like, yeah, we're going to require it too. I thought was what was interesting from the report was basically it's a, we're opening the country and we're getting the hell out of Dodge and we're all moving to places outside of big cities. So you had obviously hospitality, transportation, people are going to travel. Joel (14m 41s): You have retail. People are going to spend money, spend those stimulus checks. And then you had like States that are near big metropolitan areas. So you have Rhode Island, New York, you have Wisconsin. So everyone's Chicago is going to move to Wisconsin. Everyone in Chicago's gonna move to Wisconsin. You had Michigan there as well. Vermont, everyone from new England is gonna move to Vermont. And then everyone from California is going to move to Arizona. Apparently. So the States that we think are going to be big, this confirmed it. And the industries that we think are going to be big, this, this study help confirm that as well. Chad (15m 14s): I think it's interesting because I've talked to so many people about like live events and, and going back and traveling and so on and so forth. And there are so many people that are, that are so pensive. They're like, nah, I don't think it's going to go back to normal very quick. And then I said, have you watched the news? Have you seen the fucking streets of Miami? Yeah, I understand they're kids, but those are human beings. That's what human beings need. That's exactly what's going to fucking happen. So if we think that things aren't going to just like explode and not, I don't mean go back to normal levels. I mean go back to more than normal levels, right. Going to exceed what we used to see with regard to getting the fuck out and doing stuff. Joel (15m 57s): Yeah. I think the real, the wild card is what our company is going to do. So companies are saving a ton of money by keeping people at home. They're saving tons of money by sales calls and meetings and conferences happening over Zoom and whatever else. I don't know if companies are going to be so willing to send people out on business trips and things like that. I could certainly be wrong. As far as personal stuff. I definitely think, Oh yeah. All these boomers that have been cooped up forever, they're going to like get out. I mean, that's, that's going to be, that's going to be crazy. But according to our next sort of trend in a post pandemic world, we were talking a lot about companies work from home, hybrid, a whole new world. Joel (16m 38s): But then last week we got word from Amazon and Google. Two of the companies you would think of going totally, totally remote, not so much. Amazon on Tuesday released new details about it's postponed emic plans. Quote, "our plan is to return to an office centric culture as our baseline," the company said in the announcement shared with employees globally. Amazon had previously declined to provide details about a potential expansion of remote work for corporate employees beyond June 30th. Employees in the US will start coming into the office through the summer with most back in the office by year by early fall, Google as well is accelerating reopening plans in some parts of the US with a volunteer basis ahead of September one, a September one return, according to the internal documents that CNBC got. Joel (17m 28s): Offices will reopen in a limited capacity in April. This is April 1st based on vaccine availability and a downward trend in COVID-19 cases. But by September 1st, they're looking at a big, big move back into the office. If you want time outside the office. I think this is, this is really interesting. If you look in for more than 14 days per year, you have to formally apply for it. This is in a note that was released, employees can apply for up to 12 months in, in the most exceptional circumstances, but that the company could however, call employees back to their assigned office at any point, for any reason, the note said, so that's a big thing. Joel (18m 8s): Like I have to apply to work from home now at Google. That seems not so progressive. And if Google is doing that, I gotta think most companies are gonna say, get your ass back in the office. Chad (18m 19s): I don't think so. I think anybody who's actually competing against Google, this is, this is a market differentiator for them, right? So I think this is a big control move from two big companies who want to control their people. They obviously haven't learned anything from this pandemic that they can actually have a happier employee, employee base and also get shit done at the same time. They want to revert back to 1950 style, you know, go ahead and punch that clock. So I think, I think that just because these big brands have made this move, I think all the other challenger brands will do the exact the opposite. Joel (19m 5s): Yeah. And we already know from a lot of surveys that workers like being at home better. I mean, certainly some want to get back to the office, but most want Chad (19m 14s): Autonomy. Joel (19m 15s): Yeah. All the things that come with working from home that people like. I think you're also struggle struggling with the challenge as a company of like, Hey, we've spent a lot of money on real estate and leasing space and everything else and Amazon and Google, I can't imagine what they've been spending on that stuff. So they're trying to balance or struggling with, okay, we have all this space. What are we going to do with it? And people they're at home. And so what are we going to do? So I agree. It's going to be a tug of war. Ultimately the company, I guess the market will win because if competitors are getting better people because they can stay at home, then that becomes a competitive advantage, but we'll have to see. Joel (19m 57s): Schools on the other hand, our third post pandemic trend looks like they're going to be requiring students to get vaccinated and get their ass back to school. Rutgers is set to require students to get vaccinated before coming to campus in the fall. This is going to be a trend. I think my wife works in education at the college level. I know students by and large want to get back and experienced the college environment, the college experience. I know from her perspective that professors prefer in person study, in person classes, obviously labs and research have to be in person. Joel (20m 39s): But for a lot of people, Google is here with a certification program that came sort of public or promoted this month. I got an email a few weeks ago from Google that said, quote, "the wait is over new, Google career certificates are now available. Google career certificates are fully online job training designed to help you start a career in project management, data analytics, UX design, and IT support. Alongside these certificates we are also launching a new course to help you prepare for the Associate Android Developer Certification. At under 10 hours of study per week on your own schedule, you can be prepared for a new career within six months. Joel (21m 22s): The program built by Google is designed to give you the foundational skills and knowledge needed to succeed in a growing career field. And if you're in the U S once you complete a Google career certificate, you'll be able to connect directly to over 130 local and national employers to jump start your job search." I think this is a huge development, and I'm really excited to see how the Google certificate program grows. I love the fact that 130 employers are already sort of plugged into it because that's a big question going forward, but it looks like the, you know, the well-to-do and the people that want to go to college can, and the people that don't can still get a hell of an education and get a damn good job and not be in debt at the end of it. Chad (22m 4s): Pretty amazing that universities have the balls to actually say to mandate a vaccination, but employers don't. Then on the certificate side of the house, I mean, this is, if you look at the program, you'll notice that some of the companies involved are staffing companies and they're jumping on this train very, very smartly. Identifying needs in their regional markets, then they find Google cert asserts that align. They sell their employers on the certs, and then they start pipelining talent through their doors. The amount of employers hiring, companies that are involved in this is so small. Chad (22m 48s): I can't believe it. I would have expected to have hundreds of organizations lined up. I would have thought that this would have been, this would have been something that, you know, they could have gravitated toward, but it doesn't look like that's happening. Unfortunately. Joel (23m 5s): Yeah. TA is really bad about being the first at anything, but they're usually not fast followers, but I guess moderate to slow followers. So once a few big companies, I think start doing this and like, it's going to be a process, right? Kids and people who get this certificate have to know that it's going to be legitimized by the workforce or by the employers. And the employers have to be, have a high level of certainty that people are, that are educated in this way are going to be great employees. And if those two things align and come together, I mean, I think this is going to be a big part of how people get an education in the future. Yeah. Chad (23m 40s): No degree necessary. You jump in. And, and I took a look at most of their courses on Coursera except for the Android developer course, which obviously is on the Google platform. Joel (23m 52s): Yeah. I love that you mentioned Coursera who, if their IPO hasn't dropped yet, it's coming pretty soon. So I'm really interested to see publicly how that company's growing and where they're seeing growth and what, like, I think that is a trend that's going to happen. And Coursera, obviously along with Google and others are going to be on the forefront of this movement, but it's exciting. Chad (24m 12s): Yeah. And who else is on the forefront? Is LinkedIn! Joel (24m 15s): LinkedIn, or maybe Clubhouse is a sexy one. I don't know. So LinkedIn, this week revealed that it is developing a Clubhouse-like feature for those of you that don't know Clubhouse or are on Android and can't use Clubhouse. It's sort of a live audio conversation amongst people and listeners. I guess it's sorta like a conference session on your phone, just listening. Anyway, the new service will connect to a user's professional network. It comes as a company, lets users set their profiles to creator mode allowing others to follow their stories, live videos, and more. Joel (24m 56s): I've a few questions about this or comments. Number one for me is, is Clubhouse really the future? Is this really as hot as I guess, Silicon Valley and the media is making it. I know that we did a buy or sell on Clubhouse a few weeks ago and I sold it. I think you did too. And I still would. Like, I have it. And I've been on a few of the conversations. I just don't get it. I guess they tend to be real random. I get alerts saying, Hey, there's so such, such as a Clubhouse cause I follow them. If I jump on halfway, I've totally missed everything that has gone on it. They tend to ramble. There tends to be no sort of structure as there would be with like a presentation or a panel. Joel (25m 40s): So I don't know. I think the jury is still out on it. I think in some ways with LinkedIn, if you can get companies, business pages and have their followers, like come in on clubhouses about the company and what's going on, that could be kind of interesting, but as a random, like, Hey, let's get a bunch of TA people and talk tech TA stuff. Yeah. Chad (26m 0s): I think we're in the, on demand age and that it's not on demand. You know, if they, if they do something that let's say for instance later as a recording and it's on demand, but then again, we're also in our era of quality, right? So when we do podcasts and we listen to podcasts, if it's not great quality and it doesn't sound good and it hasn't been produced, then we might not listen to it. So, you know, again, I think those are, those are two areas that Clubhouse would have to change. It would have to record and ensure really good quality, not just the sound, but also rambling and et cetera, et cetera. Chad (26m 41s): LinkedIn, I mean, they want everybody to believe they can chew gum and walk at the same time, but we can't believe that. I mean, not with a garbage bin of jobs as a primary product and initiatives like asking their clients to clean up their fucking mess. So LinkedIn is throwing all the spaghetti at the wall at this point. And remember they also announced a freelancer platform and a new video cover stories, which is just another great way to thrust bias into the hiring process. So, I mean, these guys are doing so much shit that just doesn't make sense. Chad (27m 22s): LinkedIn can't figure out whether they are a social network or a professional hiring platform and I think they have to choose. Joel (27m 29s): Yeah. And I guess we, I think we can probably think Facebook for this whole like copy everybody. And because we have scale and members and whatever that we can just launch the same thing and be competitive. And so you have not just these, I mean, Facebook is copying Clubhouse. Twitter has already launched a Clubhouse competitor, which for me is actually superior to Clubhouse. At least it is today who knows in the future and then you have LinkedIn and I assume like Snap will do it. And maybe Tik TOK will have some Clubhouse thingy. I mean, it just, it's sort of dizzying how the industry and startups have evolved, used to be able to launch something and have a couple of years to like, you know, figure it out and, you know, grow sort of unfettered, grow organically. Joel (28m 16s): And now it's like, if you're, you know, if you're going to be featured on tech crunch, you know, you're going to have a competitors, you know, by the end of the weekend. And that's a really hard way to, to build a company. Chad (28m 27s): Well, especially when the big brands with all the resources can turn something around very quickly and just copycat your shit right out of the gate, which is exactly what Facebook does. Joel (28m 37s): Yeah. And it hurts because Clubhouse, like, as far as I know, they're not on Android yet, you would know more than me, but they're not an Android yet. They've rolled this thing out sort of Gmail style, which was really great when Gmail came out. But when you roll things out by invitation, well, if you do that, it's kind of slow. And everyone that can copy you will, more quickly than you can add users to the platform, so that kind of fucks up that strategy if you have a good company. But yeah, I think, I think ultimately the Clubhouse thing will fade out or just become, actually Spotify as well, bought a Clubhouse competitor. That's like sports talk. So there might be some fringe, some niche niche offerings for this, but yeah, maybe I'm just too old. Joel (29m 21s): I just, I just don't get it Chad (29m 22s): On demand and quality. That's what everybody wants. And that doesn't seem like that's what Clubhouse is. Joel (29m 29s): By the way, speaking of LinkedIn and, and quality and legacy systems, like it really pisses me off. Like it should be so easy as like a company page to share something and then like boost it to the people who follow you or people that are related to them or some sort of like, do you remember when Facebook had, Hey, boost this post and you like click boost. And it was like $7 to boost the post. Super simple. They took it away. I'm not sure why, but like why LinkedIn, like LinkedIn, if you want to boost a post, you got to start a whole ad campaign. You have to go through all the fucking hoops to do that. Like just make a boost link, put in your credit card and then save it. Joel (30m 10s): And then just like let people boost their posts to their followers anyway, rant over. Let's take a break and we'll do a little buffer yourself speaking of rants. Jobvite PROMO (30m 21s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. Jobvite PROMO (31m 1s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Joel (31m 6s): Buy or Sell baby! You ready? We got three startups. It was three startups this week. We'll go through a brief discussion of each and buy or sell it individually. So number one up, we have Celential. Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. I got hazed by our European listeners for saying Visage and correctly so y'all can fuck off. Chad (31m 29s): Visage! Joel (31m 31s): Gosh. Okay. Founded in 2016, Celential is an AI powered software engineering recruitment platform based out of Sunnyvale, California, a nice place to live. They raised 9.5 million in a Series A funding, a GSR ventures led the round and was joined by investors, including Spider Capital and TSBC. The company also appointed Amer Akhtar, a former Yahoo small business president and ex CEO of ADP China, as the company's new CEO. The biz was founded by founded by former product leads at Salesforce VM-ware and Zynga. The solution is designed to match hiring managers with engineering candidates by essentially simulating human experts. Joel (32m 15s): The startups, AI driven virtual recruiter finds vets and engages passive candidates behind the scenes resulting in what Celential claims is a 70% present to interview ratio. Celestial says it's on track to notch, double digit millions in annual recurring revenues by 22, after growing revenues by seven times in 2021 Chad (32m 38s): wholly! Joel (32m 39s): Buy or Sell? Celential? Chad (32m 41s): I didn't see any pricing on the website, but just from their tech backgrounds, I'd say they're probably leaning toward a SASS pricing model with staffing like a delivery, meaning it's cheaper than staffing and more efficient. It's Uber niche and focus specifically on engineers. And again, if you take a look at the backgrounds of the individuals, the leaders in this organization, you'll see why, I'm going to buy. Joel (33m 9s): I got buy on that one. Yeah. Look I talk all the time about the wave. Are you on the right way for the wrong wave? Look, the software industry will experience a shortage of one point million engineers. Meanwhile, the employment of software developers is projected to grow 21% through 2028. So the world needs engineers. Companies are going to pay a lot of money to software solutions that help them fill that need. For me, this is a big buy for Celential. Next up we have Crosschq it's spelled C R O S S C H Q founded in 2018. Joel (33m 50s): Crosschq is a San Fran based recruiting software company that raised 13 million in Series A funding this week. Tiger Global Management led the round and was joined by investors, including GGV Capital, Bessemer, Venture Partners, Slack Fund, SAP, Intersect Capital and Rocket Ship VC. That sounds fun. Total funding is 23.6 million. Interestingly, if you're a sports fan, unless you're a sports fan or sports fan in Scotland, like our buddy Adam Gordon, you will know some of these names, that are investors. Golden State Warriors, Klay Thompson, Chris Middleton of the Bucks, Aaron Gordon, Isaiah Thomas. I'm not sure if that's the hall of Famer, Isaiah Thomas or the short guard that played for the Celtics for a little while. Joel (34m 38s): PGA pro Cameron champ, MLB player, Nolan Armando, Seattle, Seahawks wide receiver, DK Metcalf. So they got a lot of big names behind this play. It's a diversity play. A quote from the release. "Crosschq provides a SAAS platform featuring a core engine that contains three models to help companies source, screen and onboard talent while providing a fully connected analytics suite that enables on-demand access to quality of hire data. Cloud-based data-driven reference checking and talent analytics platform powered human intelligence hiring is how Crosschq pimps itself. Chad, buy or sell Crosschq? Chad (35m 19s): Pat, I'd like to buy a vowel, please. That's one of the worst fucking names I've seen in a long time. So I quote from the press release "the pioneer of a new software category for the recruiting industry called human intelligence hiring," fuck you starting off with a release, trying to create another label for an industry that doesn't need additional fucking labels totally turned me off, right out of the gate. Then I backed up, I took a breath and then I jumped into the co-founders LinkedIn profiles, you know, just to see what kind of cred they had. And I didn't see any recruitment Tech or industry background at all. Chad (36m 1s): Plus the CPO is a graduate from the team up North, which was not a good thing. The very last straw is what looks like an attempt to enter the ATS space while calling it human intelligence hiring. So shitty name - strike one, human intelligence hiring - strike two, competing with the ATS - strike three. This is a fucking sell for me. Joel (36m 26s): Everything you said. And as a Cavaliers fan, there's no way that I'm going to buy any company that has Clay Thompson associated with it. So for me, sell Crosschq. Okay, this is one you might like. So number three up, we have Data People. Founded in 2016, Data People is a New York based company that sells software designed to make recruiting more equitable. This week, they announced an 8 million raise across two funding events, including a 5 million around that happened in mid 2020. Uncork Capital, Next Few Ventures and First Round Capital led the round its initial product. Joel (37m 8s): What data people cause language analytics, scans, job postings, offering suggested edits to customers to help them attract a more diverse group of applicants and coming shortly data people is rolling out what it calls recruiting analytics, like they made that up, a service that provides a high-level view of companies aggregate recruiting efforts, the recruiting side of it, software service we'll keep tabs on diversity data such as the pace at which a company's job posting attracts women against related jobs own performance. Among other bits of data focused reporting. Buy or sell Data People? Chad (37m 44s): This is definitely a better name. There's no question. Yeah. First and foremost, I love any platform that helps companies optimize their shitty job descriptions. Plus Data People also helps recruiters create better email messages. So, that's pretty good. They lost me on using this new raise for DEI hiring through analytics. Candidates, usually do not self identify when going through the application process. So if you do not have the data corresponding to the analytics, you need to make the decision. How can you provide any worthwhile insights with such a shallow pool of data? Chad (38m 25s): For the most part, we don't have the data. Yes. From a job posting standpoint or a resume standpoint or an email standpoint, we can do the right thing to be able to, to try to, to provide the nuance, whether masculine or feminine. But when we're trying to actually say that we can help hiring, that's an entirely different conversation, which means they're going to be spending a lot of money on something that they can't impact and I'm going to sell. Joel (38m 55s): Yeah. I hate these kind of startups. Like you go to the website and you feel like you need a PhD to figure shit out. I like the startups where it's really focused. You know what they do, you know, whether it's recruit engineers or like whatever, like just be real specific. These guys throw everything at the fucking wall. Look, I think they're on the right wave. I think, you know, diversity inclusion, like every company worth a shit and worth any significant size is going to have to check off the box for diversity and inclusion. I just think like it's such a huge problem. It's such a hugely competitive market. Joel (39m 35s): You know, the first round that they, the 5 million or whatever that they got in 2020, like they didn't even mention the, how much they raised back then they only mention it now because they, they got a total of eight or whatever it is. So like, they're not quite sure what the fuck is going on. I don't know anyone that's running the company. I didn't do my homework like you did on LinkedIn profiles cause I just don't give a shit. So for me, like right lane, but like, this is a fucking jalopy when it needs to be a Ferrari and $8 million, ain't going to get it done. And I don't see any sort of road that's going to put them in the a hundred million plus dollar raise amount. So fuck them, man. I got one buy this week Celential and you too and we're selling to diversity, wannabees, Crosschq. Joel (40m 18s): And I buy a vowel and Data People. And that is another round of buy or sell! A growing popular segment on the Chad and cheese podcast. Chad (40m 27s): It is. Yes it is. Joel (40m 28s): Everyone loves Buy or Sell. So do we want to take a break or do we want to talk about monitoring first? Chad (40m 34s): Let's talk about monitoring real quick. Joel (40m 36s): So a story out this week, a company called Tele-performance. It's a global company. Holy shit. They employ 380,000 people, which is nuts. So they plan to use specialist webcams to watch their staff. Oooo employees will be monitored by webcams. Webcam sounds so fucking 2004, doesn't it? Anyway, webcam's to check whether they are eating, looking at their phones or leaving their desks. I guess they better start painting those bottles, everybody, while working from home! The cameras are also connected to an AI system that will randomly scan for breaches of work rules during a shift. Joel (41m 16s): So no, no Jeffrey Toobin there at work, everybody. If one is detected, a still photo will be sent to a manager and stored for up to 20 days, according to documents sent to staff. Yeah, this is getting creeper and creeper the move triggered warnings from unions and MPS about the normalization of home surveillance by employers as growing numbers of workers, move away from being office based. Holy shit, I'm scared. I'm glad I don't work for a company that puts a webcam in my house. Chad (41m 45s): This story reeks of Bezos. Is this an Amazon subsidiary or something? I mean, this is, this is fucking creepy crazy. And they're framing this as you know, well, we're sending these cameras so that you can participate in team meetings and training. But the AI is also going to be there to make sure that you're doing your job. I mean, this kind of shit, much like we were talking about with Google and Amazon, before, the autonomy to do your job, you have business metrics. You have certain KPIs that you have to meet. If you meet them, you meet them. If you go to their website, you go to Teleperformancecareers.com the first thing you see is best place for people. Chad (42m 36s): Total Bullshit. Joel (42m 38s): Dude, this is the most dystopian. I mean, this is on par with the injecting chips into people like, yeah, this is the most dystopian thing I've heard at least this week. Can you pick your nose? Does it take a picture and send it to my manager? Can I like, you know, scratch my butt. Is that going to be construed? As you know, I'm I'm tubing on the job until the robots take all the jobs we're going to, we're going to do the best we can to make the people into robots because people are going to work their entire day. Looking at this webcam, scared to death, that they're going to be photographed doing something that might be construed as bad. I hate these stories. It's a, it's a shame. It's a shame. Take a break, take a break. JobAdX Promo (43m 18s): As the best ad tool in the industry. JobAdX has been providing job board publishers, direct employers, agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms, dynamic job bidding and real time ad delivery through our programmatic job advertising exchange. When we started, we described JobAdX as AdSense for jobs. Now we offer much more with switchboard and live alert, completing our full suite of dynamic programmatic advertising tools with the best of consumer ad tech. Switchboard offers our dynamic technologies to all partner, job board, feed management and live alert, eliminates latency and expired job ads via email. For more information about any of our ad solutions, please reach out to us at join us at jobadx.com. That's join us at jobadx.com. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Joel (44m 8s): Yeah, Chad it's been a while. Yes, we have not checked in on Ladder's R and D department. Let's get a live look from the Ladder's R and D department real quick. Chad (44m 20s): Snorring crickets sounds .... zzzz. Joel (44m 21s): Yeah. It's about what it was the last time we checked on them. Well, we're actually talking about these chuckleheads this week, they launched a new innovation called apply4me. And that's all one word with the, with the number 4, which is very 2004 of them. So apply4me, the new letters feature relies on humans rather than machine learning or other automation to actually apply to jobs for people. So, as I'm imagining this, and we're looking at the images on the site, but you have to be a premium member to use this service. Everything the Ladders does is to funnel you into paying the money as a job seeker. Anyway, as I'm looking at a job, there's a button that says apply4me. Joel (45m 2s): And I click that and then I have to fill out a basic form. And then from once I do that, then actual people will apply for me, which was kind of hard for me to understand because applying is basically pushing send resume. So they're not interviewing for me. They're just applying for me. But applying is as easy as just pushing a button and sending your resume. So call me cynical. But this seems like a real money grab. And you're utilizing, I guess, the ignorance of the job seeker to think that somehow these people that are applying for you is going to be better than you applying yourself. Joel (45m 42s): I don't get this at all. Aside from the fact that the Ladder is trying to make more money off their job seekers. Chad (45m 49s): Well, that's how the Ladders have always made money. So you think the right? Do you think the same thing, right? Yeah. This is the, this is the most ridiculous. It's like, yes, we're not using AI to do this because it's just, we can't trust AI to be able to make sure that there aren't going to be any errors. Okay. Assholes humans. Make errors. Okay. The reason why you're not using AI is because you don't fucking have it. Number one. Number two, you have no technology. Yeah. This is fucking ridiculous. Joel (46m 21s): So here's, here's how it works based on their website. So they have a three, three step process. So number one is provide Ladders with your job application information, once basically give us your resume. Number two Ladders will fill out all job applications with your information for you. And then three, we'll send you email confirmations while you sit back and relax with a picture of a woman who's drinking coffee in bed. Chad (46m 43s): What are you paying for? If they're filling out the entire, I mean, I guess if it's going to the ATS and that's a 45 minute process on the ATS, I guess that's something I'll pay for. But they're going to ask questions. They're going to ask questions that, that person's not going to know the answer to. Yeah. So I mean, this is the biggest crock and load of shit. Joel (47m 9s): So you have to be a premium member to do this. They're not real forthcoming shocker on the pricing of stuff. So I kind of had to dig around the web to find out what that was. It's roughly about $180 or $200 per year for this premium membership. So again, it's like this facade of we're providing something magical that's going to save you time and you can just stay in bed and Netflix chill while we'll get you that new job, doing all the application for you. Business as usual at the Ladders. And with that, We Out. Chad (47m 44s): We out. OUTRO (48m 6s): I'm Rory from Scotland, the country, which brought you electricity! Thank you for listening to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Nada Niente. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Stick around in this industry long enough and you may see something like a mobile stock trading app called Robinhood acquire a staffing firm. Yeah, that really happened. Hard to top that news, but... Uber finally treating drivers like human beings in the UK, SmartRecruiters getting smarter, Charter kicks wages in the ass LinkedIn suffering an identity crisis WeWork? Nope, I'm gonna WorkChew! Dice innovates... HA! Zoom-inspired Botox comes pretty close. Plus lots more Enjoy this St. Patty’s Day hangover-inspired episode, powered by JobAdx, Sovren, and Jobvite. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. 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 (23s): Oh yeah. Shots in arms and money and pockets America. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast on your cohost. Joel "Irish whiskey made me do it" Cheeseman. Chad (35s): and I'm Chad "Counting Calories" Sowash and on this week, show Robinhood bought what? Uber anarchy in the UK and Botox is booming! We'll be right back. JOBADX PROMO (49s): Job advertising is pretty simple, right? Write a good ad. Find the right channel, run tests, research others translate data, optimize. Okay. Maybe it's not that simple, but there is something that helps bring it all together and put it in autopilot for you. That's programmatic job ads with JobadX. JobAdX gathers hundreds of channels and their job seeker audiences into one place so that your ads reach far and wide without having to create a ton of new accounts, create ad campaigns with no minimum spend or results focused and based on engagements from candidates. Have full control of your job ads using the JobAdX self-serve platform. Welcome to uncomplicated job ads. Find out how you can start attracting and engaging candidates with your ads in three steps at jobadx.com/get-started-today that's JOBadx.com/get-started-today. Joel (1m 39s): Oh, shots are the theme of this week. Me doing whiskey shots and your wife getting shots. Chad (1m 45s): That's right, baby. Yeah. Julie got on a wait list and here in Indiana, this is so freaky. All the States have like their own way of doing this shot thing. And then it almost seems like the counties are doing their own things as well. I mean, it doesn't seem like it was as easy for you to get shots. I was lucky enough, almost like I had a cheat code where I got in the next day. As soon as it hit, you know, hit the age, it was like, boom, I got in the next day, Julie got on a wait list because this state will not waste any, any of the vaccine. So if somebody cancels, they have a list of people to call and they call and say, can you be here in 30 minutes? Chad (2m 28s): She was like, yes. And she was, she ran up the steps. She was glowing and she was off. Joel (2m 36s): So I was, I've been on that same list for months. They haven't called me yet, but I'm scheduled next Friday to get my first shot here locally, which is fine. So it's amusing. When you get added to the wait list, they give you two phone numbers, or at least this was my case. They gave you two numbers to make sure we're in your contact list. Ah, so when they called, Chad (2m 60s): Yes. Joel (3m 1s): You know, whatever showed up or so, so I'm wondering if Julie mentioned putting those in her phone with the name of who was calling and when she saw that call, come in, obviously got excited. Chad (3m 12s): She answered any call. And that was, that was her, that was it. It was like, I don't know where it's going to come from. I don't care. I'm just going to answer any call. And I'm actually getting my second shot next Friday. You'll be heading into the opportunities of getting the fuck out of the house. And I will be in my second phase of fuck yeah! Joel (3m 31s): I know you're taking a week off. Is that part of the vaccine love tour? That's kind of, (music), Chad (3m 38s): Oh dude, we are on Airbnb. We've got all these different trips that are planned, that week is in April where I am actually marrying a couple of my friends in Charleston! Joel (3m 53s): Yeah, I forgot you have that distinction now. You're going to be yeah. Chad (3m 57s): Clergy. Joel (3m 58s): Clergy. That's nice. That's nice. Yeah, we won't mention the name of the company, but both of us got an email today saying, Hey, we're looking at doing an analyst day. We're looking at fall of this year. We're doing a quick survey of whether you'd be up for face to face or you want the virtual thing. And I think both of us answer within two minutes saying like, we're good for face to face. Yeah. We're good for a trip somewhere. Chad (4m 24s): Let's do this. Joel (4m 25s): We'll do that thing. Yeah. We will be vaccinated and ready to go. So St. Patrick's Day was yesterday. Did you do anything special besides counting calories for your summer bod to make an appearance? Chad (4m 37s): Yeah, usually I don't worry about that shit, but during COVID I've been extra indulgent, Joel (4m 43s): Extra drinking, extra drink, Chad (4m 45s): So therefore I've backed off a tad and, we're focused on getting fit and trim so that we can get the fuck outta here and look good. Joel (4m 53s): Boring. Chad (4m 55s): Yeah. I'll take that! Joel (4m 57s): Aside from a good share of my, of my Guinness here in the house. I had a cavalcade, a parade, if you will, of Irish whiskeys that I sampled and I'm a little hung over. I don't know if you can tell, but this, this is a pretty low energy podcast for the weekly for me, but I mean, it's always a great time to think about Ireland. My grandfather, Irish roots. And I just first shout out for me is I want to just name off some names of Irish listeners that are friends and, and love the show. Adam Chambers of course, Neil Dunwoody, Shane Gray, who's probably in Fiji or Bora Bora right now anyway. So who, you know, whatever Patty Doyle, who we've had pizza with, have a pizza with Patti Doyle. Joel (5m 39s): That's the most on Irish or Irish thing ever. Andrea Wade, Johnny Campbell, Dave Ralph, Ivan Stowjanowicz Chad (5m 47s): The Irish recruiter. Joel (5m 48s): And not a very Irish name. Yes. The Irish recruiter with the most non-Irish name ever. Chad (5m 52s): Cause he's from Croatia! That's why. Joel (5m 55s): Put a Mc in front of it. And it's McStojavoniwich or whatever. So yeah, love the Irish. We're all a little Irish on St. Patrick's Day. Shout out to our, our Irish fans. Chad (6m 6s): I've got to give Ivan big props this week. Number one, he has a tool that's called myrobot.works is probably one of the strongest tools that are out there. And if you're a recruiter, I'm not going to go into, into great detail. But if you're a recruiter and you don't know what myrobot.works is, get your ass there now. Then Ivan also was saying, Hey, you guys are looking to travel. Have you looked at Croatia? And then he started sending me stuff and I'm like, Holy fuck. We're just, we're going to go and bounce around Europe. And Croatia is definitely going to be one of the must attend, let's say, on the tour or the Sowash tour. Chad (6m 49s): So at least 30 days in Croatia. So big, big, big props and shout out to Ivan. Joel (6m 54s): Yeah, no doubt and big shout out to a Jobvite, sponsor of the show they announced today before we went on that they were officially moving their HQ to Indianapolis the bread basket and the birthplace of online recruiting, for those that are in the know. So glad to have HQ, a big name in our industry established here in Indianapolis. Now we're trying to get them to open up a little sound studio so we can go in and do live shows, but, but that's sort of on the back burner, they got bigger things to worry about, but we'll see if they can build us a studio down there in downtown. Chad (7m 29s): Stocked with beer! Joel (7m 30s): Live from Jobvite headquarters it's the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad (7m 34s): As we talk about names, Jobvite in Indianapolis, shout out to Vettery, as it seems, they're finally going to get rid of their stupid name and rebrand as hire.com. The thing that kills me about this is they took far too long. They should have made that cosmetic change, at least from the hire.com standpoint, much faster. I mean, seriously, if you're in marketing and you're in sales and you can get away from, you know, a made up name, fucking do it. Joel (8m 6s): Yeah. Shout out to some good looking people sportin' some good looking shirts this week. Christie Moon, super-fan of the show, actually one of the earliest super-fans, she's Mark Fogel. She is OG, sporting some good tea good-looking tees. And if you'd like a Chad&Cheese t-shirt of your own, what do they got to do, Chad? Chad (8m 27s): It's really simple. All you have to do is go to Chadcheese.com, click on free, up in the upper right-hand corner or go to Chadcheese.com/free. And we give away t-shirts powered by emissary.ai. But we also have beer from Adzooma that you could prospectively win. David Bernstein actually had his beer hit his doorstep this week, right? Joel (8m 53s): Yeah. Yeah. He was loving it! He was a stout drinker. Oh yeah. We actually let you kind of pick what kind of beer you want. So as a stout drinker, we had an ample amount of black beer sent to him and we're still trying to get a zoom tasting on the calendar, but David "Steven Seagal" Bernstein, he's a happy man for sure. And it was all free. Thanks to Adzooma. Chad (9m 17s): Thanks Adzooma and then we have whiskey next week with Jill. That's already, that's already scheduled, right? Yeah. Joel (9m 25s): And that's sponsored by Sovren. And we got Robert Ruff on the call! Chad (9m 30s): Sweet! Joel (9m 31s): As well as Michael O'Dell on the call. Both of them are in Nashville. So I don't know if they're going to be a socially distanced and in the same place, or if they're just gonna join the call separately. But yeah. Excited for that. If you want whiskey, beer or a t-shirt at no cost to you, head out to chadcheese.com/free or click that button on the homepage. Chad (9m 53s): Amen. So, Joel, I don't know if you know this or not, but we love lists and we have landed on the AI HRS 65 plus global influencers in HR to follow in 2021 list. Joel (10m 12s): I missed that. Are we on separately or together? Chad (10m 15s): We're on together. They have us at the hip as usual. Joel (10m 19s): Bit scary. Chad (10m 20s): It's a thing. It's a thing. Joel (10m 22s): I wish I could quit you. Chad (10m 26s): You had me at hello. Joel (10m 30s): Oh shit. Well, are you still doing events? Chad (10m 33s): I have an event next weekend. And first off, I'd like to say what a joy it was to have just a back and forth conversation with Madeline Laurano, she is wonderful to talk to. She's much easier than you are, let me tell you. This week, we talked about the state of programmatic with job ads and next week, so we did that podcast this week, check it out the state of programmatic with Madeline Laurano. Now she did research around programmatic and we're actually going to dig deeper into it next week, March 23rd, from one to two Eastern. Chad (11m 14s): If you get to hr.com, navigate your way through their webcasts, you can either watch it live or the recorded version later, either way, she does great work. And I think what you and I both Joel, we are big proponents of programmatic performance driven advertising. Joel (11m 35s): I can't disagree with any of the stuff you just said. Let's get to topic shall we? Chad (11m 41s): TOPICS! Joel (11m 42s): So, this is one of the more fascinating news stories, I think that we've reported on in a while. So Robinhood, you know, the online trading app said on Monday, that it would recruiting firm Binc, which I've never heard of out in San Francisco for an undisclosed sum, adding more than 80 employees to help Robinhood recruit talent. Binc will no longer be available to provide recruiting services. So they're basically shutting down their operation unless your name is Robinhood. A San Francisco based recruiting firm was founded in 2002. And according to Glassdoor has revenue of between $10 million and $25 million. Joel (12m 22s): I just find this very fascinating. When you think about talent recruiting, getting people in the door, startups and tech companies needing folks, why not just go buy a fucking recruiting firm? I mean, it seems sort of brilliant and obvious, and it feels like a trend in the making. What are your thoughts? Chad (12m 38s): Yeah, they could have done that. Or they could have just gone to an RPO. I mean one of the two, I mean, I think this is, this is a weird way of getting this done. Yeah. I'm just going to go buy a staffing firm. Well, why didn't you just go to an RPO and have them as long as you needed them or, I mean, overall, this seems like a very lazy way to say that we need a recruiting function, that's worth a shit. Let's go and just buy it and insert them into our organization. I mean, the problem is they have too much cash obviously. Joel (13m 14s): They do have a lot of cash. I don't know. I mean, look, I can go get eggs at the grocery store, but if I have my own chickens, the eggs are maybe a little better. Maybe they're a little fresher, maybe they're a little more organic. I don't know. I mean, maybe, maybe there's some, some logic there and by the way, Robinhood knows math, right? I mean, they're making money on spreads and all that good stuff and stuff that's way out of my understanding, but you gotta think somebody did the math around, what are we paying, you know, staffing firms or RPOs versus what we could just keep on our own. And maybe the math adds up. It was cheaper to just go buy somebody and keep those fees than to outsource it. Chad (13m 53s): We've seen founders with cash do stupid shit. We've seen that over and over, not just in our industry, in many industries, right? This is, I think one of those situations it's like just, yeah, those guys over there. They, yeah, they look like they could be, let's just buy them. This is probably that we'll just buy them. Then we'll insert them into our organization. Once again, this is interesting because we talk about like tech firms buying like recruitment ad agencies or something like that. You're buying the talent to some extent, right? How long is it going to take for that talent just to walk the fuck out the door? Joel (14m 31s): Yeah. I mean, that's any industry for sure. And I doubt that all the recruiters on the company are under contract for any particular time, so they could certainly walk. But I agree that the Aqua hire option here was interesting. You know, talking to Serge and Brian from Canada a couple of weeks ago, I was guest on their show. We talked recruiting post COVID and would companies just rehire all these recruiters or load up or would they go more automation and both Serge and Brian agreed, I know their both recruiters, so take that for what it's worth. But they think that companies are going to load up on, on human beings. So if you're on, if you're in that, if you're in that camp, buying 80 recruiters was a pretty good move to just as opposed to recruiting 80 recruiters. Chad (15m 17s): I don't agree. Joel (15m 19s): I was surprised that they were shutting down the recruiting business. I was thinking like they could have a scam going where they get the A players and then they send the C players, you know, to the competition. Like they could, they could double dip, while controlling the playing field. Yeah. Chad (15m 37s): It's to me again, just seems lazy. And that's what happens when people have money. I mean, it is a, you can throw money at shit when you have piles of it. The harder part is when you don't have money and you have to figure it out. Joel (15m 51s): Yeah. Well I think it's creative and I think it's a trend. We'll have to wait and see. Twitter announces they've acquired a staffing company. Okay. Well, who doesn't need a staffing company? Actually they do, but Uber is in the news. Holy shit, every week we're talking with them. So we're talking about them again. So they have, they got a big case in the UK. Uber said 70,000 drivers in the UK will now be treated as, in quotes "workers, earning at least the UK is national living wage and other benefits," Uber reported "the worker classification is unique to UK labor law, workers are not employees, but are entitled to the minimum wage holiday pay and a pension," Joel (16m 34s): which is interesting. An Uber rep said, "Uber drivers will receive an earnings guarantee, holiday pay and a pension and will retain the flexibility they currently value" end quote, Uber said an estimated 99% of UK drivers already earn the minimum wage and also noted UK drivers will be paid holiday time based on 12.07, which is really a specific percentage of their earnings paid out every two weeks. Drivers will also be automatically enrolled into a pension plan with contributions from Uber. These contributions will represent approximately 3% of a drivers earnings. Fan or not so much, Chad? Chad (17m 13s): I'm a big fan. I mean, we need to be treating people as if they matter and Uber didn't have to treat these individuals as if they matter. I mean, they're just throwaway, to be quite Frank. So overall they have to work within the actual lines, right? They were coloring outside the lines for a while. Now this isn't just for Uber. This is anybody who is at based gig economy based. So yes, this is great that Uber is actually coming out and saying, okay, yes, we're starting to figure this out. No shit. You spent $200 million with, you know, Lyft and some of the others in California to try to get this thing defeated. Chad (17m 54s): We knew that you could figure it out, but guess what? In the U S here, our votes are bought and paid for, right? Over in the UK, they've showed us how the shit should work. So hopefully we will actually muster the fucking courage, to look down at these organizations and say, no, you can't treat people, like shit. You have to treat them like human beings. So that, and then I also want to transition to giving a shout out to Charter Communications where yeah, this week Charter announced they are raising its minimum wage, starting to $20 an hour for all employees in 2022. Chad (18m 40s): Charter established a $15 an hour, starting wage in 2018, announced in April of 2020, that it would permanently raise its starting wage to $20 an hour. And today it's at $18, they have 3000 positions in 41 different States. So I think this, this is great from an optic standpoint for Charter, but also they have 3000 positions open. There's competition. Right? And they need something like this I think. Joel (19m 12s): Yeah. And I think competition is sort of the key word there. And I think that, you know, Uber's about a 10 year old company give or take, you know, it's about time that there start to be some sort of a compromise, some sort of a government-friendly, worker-friendly, business-friendly solution. And this, whether it's a San Francisco or California or the UK, this thing is sort of morphing into a hybrid of full-time work and contract work. And I think that it's really almost, it's good for Uber in a lot of different ways, but it's good for the sense that they have to start giving incentives for drivers to choose Uber over Lyft or Door Dash or whatever. Joel (19m 51s): So the gig economy now is becoming less about just hours that you work and money that you get paid from a platform or a provider. And you're getting, you know, if I'm getting 3% contribution to, you know, my retirement from Uber and I'm getting zero from Lyft, I'm going to do more Uber driving, for sure. Right? Like I'm going to be more committed to them. So now Lyft is going to have to come forward with something that is friendly in terms of a retention or recruitment tool. And this is just going to like spiral into all the solutions. So I think we're getting to a place where everyone's winning here. I think the workers, the people driving are winning. I think the companies are winning, maybe not as much as profitable as they like to be, but I think they're also pacifying government entities and everyone is sort of, you know, getting a balance into this. Joel (20m 38s): And I think that's really healthy. Whether us adopts it or not, I don't know. But I think you're going to see more of this. Chad (20m 45s): And that's the difference in taking a look at the UK versus the U S the Charter Communications in the U S the company made the decision, right? And that's one organization. How many organizations are there, here in the US so definitely applaud Charter for that. But we, as a nation have to make a standardized decision that we do not want our citizens living in poverty. And that's one of the biggest issues that we had before COVID. During COVID, it's gotten worse and worse. Luckily we have checks going into the bank to help those individuals out, but still that's a bandaid. Chad (21m 29s): We need a long term solution. Joel (21m 31s): Yep. And you know how I know that the big, the big boom is coming Chad, the big, the version 2.0 of the roaring twenties, you know how I know? Chad (21m 38s): How's that? Joel (21m 40s): ZipRecruiter ads. I'm seeing lots and lots and lots of ZipRecruiter ads! And that means the good times are coming. Folks, trust in Zip as the barometer of that. Geez, let's take a break. Sovren Promo (21m 53s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" Sovren Promo (22m 37s): like all the others. No, 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. Chad (22m 53s): All right. So staying on the side of the UK, big question, did you have Cole apply for that Minecraft landscaper position that I sent sent ya? Joel (23m 5s): So, yeah, I love that jobs are being put out for virtual repair. Like we can't even fix our own shit. Now we got to fix the virtual world, but no, I think, I think he's off Minecraft. And I think, I think he's on Fortnite now or Call of Duty. Minecraft is like for kids, I think he's off that. Chad (23m 25s): The company that actually did this, the name of the company is called What Shed. And here here's a taste of the actual job description. "There is no denying the popularity of Minecraft, in 2020, there were 126 million players as X-Box, PlayStation and Nintendo and Switch. Joel (23m 43s): That's huge! Chad (23m 44s): So anyway, we thought we'd take our gardening passions into the virtual world. So really what they're doing here is they're starting to implement their brand into these kids' brains. WhatShed actually has like real, real live sheds, not just virtual sheds, sheds that you put in your backyard, right? So will you be using sheds that are branded WhatSheds to build out your landscape in Minecraft, and then when you are, you know, old enough to actually, I don't know, buy a fucking house, what kind of shed do you think you're going to buy? Joel (24m 25s): I love that we've moved from red bull and like cool shit to pimping sheds on young kids. Chad (24m 32s): Does it not fit seriously? Joel (24m 35s): What are the, what are the child labor laws around virtual work? Like, are there, have we cracked down on that yet or not? Geez. That's and how do they pay it? Are they paid with NFTs or a doge coin? Like how power payments sent to them? Chad (24m 51s): TBD TBD. Joel (24m 52s): So many questions, so many questions. We're just figuring the Uber stuff out. We need to figure out child labor on the internet. So many things to deal with. Well, fortunately, shout out quick to Dice, the innovation machine continues on. So this past week, I don't know if you missed it, but they added self assessment. Helping people find their voice with 12 minutes, you can find yourself on Dice, kids. They've partnered with human intelligence to help your career goals. And also Clarence Jobs who they own launched meetings, this is an integration that allows recruiters to link their calendar with the job boards platform, then invite candidates to set up appointments for a live chat, video, phone, or in-person conversations. Joel (25m 37s): The innovation machine continues to chug along at Dice kids, shout out to them. Chad (25m 43s): Any of those worth a press release? Anyway, I'm moving on to Smart Recruiters, press releases, this is bullshit. Joel (25m 48s): Don't get me on Silk Road. Don't get me on Silk Road. Chad (25m 51s): I didn't even know they were still alive. I thought that company was dead? Joel (25m 55s): That was the press release. They sent out something like, Oh, we've added text messaging. And I think both of you and I said, Silk Road is still around. Holy shit. So yeah. Shout out to them for living. Forget about text messaging. They're still alive. Good job. Chad (26m 10s): All right. Read us into Smart Recruiters. Joel (26m 14s): Smart Recruiters this week announced the launch of Talent Discovery. That's with a capital T and a D. This is an automated matching tool designed to help talent acquisition teams, more effectively source and stock rank existing candidate profiles. Talent Discovery uses NLP and machine learning to surface applicants in a way that goes beyond the traditional resume. Employers can look for applicants with non-traditional backgrounds or experience, including uncommon career paths or uncommon degrees. These are categories that people are stacked into and unearthing uncommon candidates is pretty interesting. For example, a restaurant manager that was laid off might be a really good candidate for a customer service manager. Joel (26m 59s): So you've got some insights scoop from some Smart Recruiters folks what's going on there. Chad (27m 4s): Actually, I think I woke Terny up this morning. Joel (27m 7s): It sound the same nap schedule as I am? Chad (27m 9s): I think so. I think he's counseling. No, but seriously, we've talked about this on several occasions. This type of tech needs to be core and standard in every single core platform that's out there, an applicant tracking system, CRMs, those organizations need to have this type of technology matching type of technology, parsing matching bread. I mean really into the system. My first question to him was this a collaboration with a partner? Or was it in an internal build? Yeah. And it's an internal build. Now that's, again, that's a decision, right? You either build, buy, or partner, and they're looking to build at least thus far, you know, and, and being able to standardize data sets and those types of things. Chad (27m 58s): So you can have the arguments last discussion around whether partner, build, or buy, are the best. I just liked that they're doing it. Why that's it, they have to be going in this direction and they are. We always, we beat this horse till it's dead, and then we continue to beat it. You have to think of, again, the Amazon scenario. And as the press release actually says "this technology Talent Discovery," which we'll get into in a minute "Talent Discovery learns role requirements and hiring success criteria specific to each employer." Okay? So there are so many varieties of Holy shit, just in that short, that short sentence. Chad (28m 44s): Number one, it's learning role requirements and hiring success criteria, which means human behavior. Tech isn't biased, humans are humans make bad or biased decisions. And sometimes they are bad and biased. The hard part is if you have an iteration of this for every single one of your clients, can you imagine, trying to manage that? That's going to be something that the companies are going to have to invest in from an auditing standpoint, from a validation standpoint, those types of things. Joel (29m 20s): Yeah. Look from my perspective, this is an arms race, and you've got Smart Recruiters. You've got Greenhouse, you've got Jobvite and you got iCIMS and then you have the bigger boys above that, but, and they're all jocking to be in that position. And in the one platform to rule them all, this arms race means you better build shit yourself, or you buy somebody to integrate into your stuff. I think partnering is probably not in the cards for most of these companies. They just put up app stores and marketplaces to provide stuff. And then when it becomes popular enough, they just buy it or, or build their own solution. And fortunately, with the tools that are available now around, NLP machine learning, you know, organizing big data provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et cetera. Joel (30m 8s): I don't doubt that Smart Recruiters built this homemade, but they probably had some help somewhere from one of those big companies, and those platforms, sort of being the underlying technology, to a lot of this, means you better build this shit yourself. So I love this. I love that everyone's moving beyond, Hey, upload a resume and we're EOC compliant and they're going to awesome tech. And I think that's going to continue. I think the consolidation is going to continue. So yeah, all the kids are doing it. All the kids are doing, you know, matching in this way and Smart Recruiters just put their own flavor on it. And here we go, the arms race continues. Chad (30m 48s): What they didn't do in their own flavor was name it. Talent Discovery, which is the exact same thing that CareerBuilders product does called Talent Discovery and it's funny because you kind of laugh it off because this, this is almost like one of the bigger players now in the market, looking at CareerBuilder, who was, you know, the biggest, you know, one of the bigger players and saying, you guys are dying. We know it. And we don't give a fuck. We're going to name this what we want to name this. Joel (31m 18s): Yeah. Yeah. It's weird too, because smart sort of lends itself to marketing, right? Like everything they do could be Smart Something, whether it's Smart Discovery, Smart Match, Smart Whatever. So yeah, whatever, I'm sure the marketing team had no awareness of CareerBuilder when they named this product. But yeah, stick it to CareerBuilder is always fun. And we were able to put CareerBuilder into the show, which they weren't originally. So that's always a good thing. Chad (31m 45s): Got to love it. Joel (31m 46s): LinkedIn got your attention, speaking of companies that we have to throw in the show every week, what are, what are they up to those squirrely son of a guns? Chad (31m 55s): This week? I received a screenshot that LinkedIn is asking hiring companies to claim their jobs. So it seems that such a small amount of their overall composition of jobs in the system are direct from companies and nearly all of them are from aggregators that they want the companies because their deduplication sucks so bad. They want the companies to actually come in and through their own task, weed out the real from the fake jobs. So to me, it was like, wow, LinkedIn owned by Microsoft, supposed to be a leader in the market. Chad (32m 35s): And they're going through this manual, do it yourself bullshit. As opposed to being able to identify which jobs are coming from where, which ones are original sources and which ones are not. I mean, it's almost like they got in the game yesterday. This is something that I would see Facebook doing, who really is in the game very late. Right. And doing an amateur job of it. This is fucking amateur hour from LinkedIn. Joel (33m 7s): Yeah. You know, from a historical perspective and you and I are old enough and we'll get to the Botox story in a little bit. But you know, there was a time, I don't know if you remember this where LinkedIn had sort of their own postings, like native postings. And then they partnered with Simply Hired. Chad (33m 24s): Yeah. Joel (33m 25s): To have like additional like, Oh, also from the web! Chad (33m 28s): Backfill. Joel (33m 29s): Like the tab backfill. And I always thought like, why don't they just fucking buy Simply Hired? Like they're in the same neighborhood. They can probably get it for, you know, a good deal. And then they can just be an D and D competitor. And then they can just have like all the jobs and then they can say, Hey, you know, I dunno, sponsor your jobs if you're already on LinkedIn. And then they can like make pay-per-click money from that. And they never did it. And they just, they continue to sort of focus on post your jobs in your account. And then like you got this whole aggregation thing and it's just, I wish 10 years ago, they would've just said, you know what? Let's just take on the aggregators. Let's be one ourselves buy Simply Hired, bring their talent over. Joel (34m 9s): And that's our game. And I feel like they are still trying to figure out, what the fuck they want to be when they grow up in terms of job postings. And this just sort of highlights the cluster, fuck that's going on over at LinkedIn when it comes to job postings. Which is something they should have figured out 10 years ago. Chad (34m 25s): Easily. And this just illustrates their model is shit. When it comes down to this product. And I didn't realize it, but also received more research that many of the aggregators that are out there receive a shit ton of traffic directly from LinkedIn. And that tells me two things. Number one, obviously backfill is smart. And number two, obviously LinkedIn doesn't have shit for real jobs that are posted or taking feeds from direct from hiring companies. So therefore this backfill is really the lion's share of the jobs that are being interacted with from LinkedIn users. Joel (35m 9s): Bingo. Yeah. And I mean, the fact that the fact that I don't go through my LinkedIn feed and see like sponsored jobs, that match, you know, my profile, is a crime against advertising. Yeah. Chad (35m 21s): And that's an entirely different discussion though, too, because they're matching is shit. Joel (35m 25s): Yes. But they could have figured that out if they had Simply Hired! Chad (35m 28s): I know! Joel (35m 28s): yeah. Okay. All right. So we agree, they fucked up. They miss it. They missed the boat. Now it's like, what the hell do we do? Maybe they can get a Work Zoo back into business or Jobs Zoo. I don't know. Anyway. So we're pretty bearish on LinkedIn this week, but we're super bullish in the world of investment that we think is very exciting. Chad (35m 53s): I love this! I'm gonna buy this! Joel (35m 54s): So the company Workchew, and then chew as in what I do at lunch, dinner and breakfast time, minority owned biz, black woman, which is awesome. Cindy Gallop, if you haven't heard our interview with her was a big proponent of minority starting their own businesses. And so that, that off, you know, to start this thing is great, but Workchew Started the turns, hotels and restaurants into on-demand flexible workspaces. Let me say that again, a startup that turns hotels and restaurants into on-demand flexible workspaces, announced this week, that it has raised $2.5 million in an oversubscribed seed round, which I'm not exactly sure what an oversubscribed seed round is. Joel (36m 38s): Maybe you can explain it to me. Harlem Capital led the deal. So with Workchew, company employees can access workspaces wherever they are, whether in an urban corridor or a suburban outside, or a suburb outside of a major city. Workchew is currently in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, and is looking to open soon in New York city, Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle LA, and Denver. Indianapolis is not on the roadmap, unfortunately for us. Workchew offers an alternative to coffee shops, libraries, and places, like We Work. So yeah, basically you can daily or weekly give your workers the ability to go to a restaurant. Joel (37m 21s): They partner with restaurants. So you don't have to sit there, like I got to order food. You're actually like part of the Workchew network. They promise you wifi, they promise you a power source, if you do reserve a table in one of the restaurants. I think this is fucking genius. I feel like, why didn't I think of this? It's beautiful. So good luck to them. I think this is a story that we're going to be looking closely at in the next few years. And I think they're going to, they're going to get some competition, for sure. Chad (37m 50s): Yeah. Yeah. So for $50 a month for an individual, you have unlimited access to workplaces, 10% discount off of food, bottomless coffee or tea, access to Workchew member perks and cancellation at any time. From my standpoint, this allows the remote workforce, which I really believe we're going to expand into after COVID. We will continue to have a large percentage of the workforce composition will be remote. Instead of working in our homes all the damn time, you will be able to bounce out to several locations in the city and actually do work. Now, the cool thing I think is is you have a We Work model and then this Workchew model. Chad (38m 34s): They both drive money into different areas. Number one, being obviously buildings, where we're going to see more than likely companies won't return, so there's going to be empty space. How do you get people in there? How do you get revenue in there? WeWork as a great opportunity. And that is for more of, I think like a group collaboration where Workchew is really just more from an individual standpoint, being able to allow those perks for that individual to go out, get the hell out of their house and go work somewhere. So I really, really dig this. Joel (39m 12s): Yeah, right business, right time. I love it. And I love where it could go. I think it helps restaurants, fill seats. I think it helps people engage that they wouldn't have normally. I'm sure at some point, if a company buys into Workchew all the employees are there and you can see who's at what restaurant, or you can set up little work dates or work meetings in a restaurant. Obviously you're going to buy food, which is great for the restaurant, which has had a pretty tough year this year. I think the commercial real estate market, those guys probably start filling that space with restaurants or interesting workspaces that could plug into, to Workchew's model. So I love this. Joel (39m 52s): I think this is, this is a home run. I would do it for sure. Chad (39m 56s): Oh yeah. Just for the free ice tea and wifi, but yeah. Get out of the house, meet some people. Yeah. I think it's great. Good for them. Good for them. And, if they can start to coordinate with bigger hotel chains, right. And bigger restaurant chains and those types of things, if they can do that, this will spread like fucking wildfire. And the question would be why wouldn't big hotel chains and big restaurants not want to do this because you are virtually just putting bait out there for people to come spend time. Yes. There's bottomless coffee. I get it. And I'm going to have to go over and wait on them. Chad (40m 37s): And they're not really spending a lot of money, but what's the opportunity of somebody actually having breakfast. They're having lunch there. Joel (40m 44s): Yeah. My niece runs, she's a hotel manager and when COVID hit, they turn their rooms into offices where you could go in for the day and you know, they scrubbed it hard and disinfected, but same kind of thing. They have rooms, unfilled, business travel's going to be, you know, tough. And the next, you know, 24 months, probably. This is right. We do that. You could take all this commercial real estate, you could have test kitchens in there where you have interesting restaurants, workspace. Yeah. I mean like the opportunities just right time, right place, right business, are really incredible. Your comment when we were offline was like, I can't wait till they go public I'm buying this shit. Chad (41m 26s): Oh, I'm buying this shit. Yeah. Not so much. And I've already reached out to both founders. I was like, can you come on the show? I mean, I want that connection. Now. Joel (41m 36s): I want that discount at the Cheesecake Factory, baby! Come on, bring it, bring it. Let's take a quick break. And we'll talk about Botox. Jobvite Ad (41m 45s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. Jobvite Ad (42m 25s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Joel (42m 30s): Okay. So it's hilarious that you said Cheesecake Factory, it is probably just a very smart segue. I'm gonna say, but this week I received a text from Rick Carsley. He sent me a TikTok. He sending me TikTok's all the time. It's a job seeker applying to a job at Cheesecake Factory and then getting hit with a Myers Briggs test. The background music is Mad World. And it sends you into this like, you know, kind of like, Oh my God, that person's gotta be on suicide watch, but seriously, Cheesecake Factory giving a person a personality test for what? Joel (43m 13s): I mean, this is fucking ludicrous. Chad (43m 17s): Yeah. This is employers just losing their shit when this shit happens. And speaking of losing our minds. Joel (43m 23s): Yes. Chad (43m 24s): ABC news reports this week on Zoom fatigue, obviously we've all been through hell this past year, some of us more than others. So in the Zoom fatigue era, we're seeing rising interest in plastic surgery. Botox is back baby, in addition to many other things, these Zoom boom, as plastic surgeons refer to it as is a huge increase in people who want Botox. Now, why do they want Botox? Because they're on fucking Zoom all day. And, and the, the fascination that scientists has found out is that when we're on Zoom calls, we look at ourselves. And when we look at ourselves, we think, Oh, wow, I've got wrinkles that I didn't know. Chad (44m 7s): I had, I got bags under my eyes. My lip is a little too, whatever it is, right. I don't think about plastic surgery cause my face is perfect, but I know other people have these issues. So there's a big boom in Botox. And also the study showed up. It was a selfie study. So they found that wearing masks, they did a thousand photographs of selfies with a mask and without a mask. And they've actually found that most people look more approachable and engaging with a mask, over the course of the year. Joel (44m 40s): Before that anyone wearing a mask in the U S was like, what the fuck is that dude up to, that's no good. Now it's like, if their mask, if they're masked one, they're responsible, they care about your safety. They've learned to sort of talk with their eyes, which I think I have as well. Like if I see someone I kind of squint instead of like smile or say hi. So this masks are making people more, more appealing to others. And if they all get Botox and that means their forehead will be nice and smooth and they won't have widow's peaks or, or crow's feet. So I don't know. Good, bad. It's just, it is what it is. Botox is back baby. Buy stock in that. Chad (45m 19s): We've never had to look at ourselves this much ever. Joel (45m 24s): We have a face for podcasting. Chad (45m 26s): That's what it is. It's funny because as soon as Julie got her first shot yesterday, she came back. She was like, I'm so much closer to a manicure, pedicure and getting my Botox done. Joel (45m 37s): I said the same thing. It's crazy. Yeah. Chad (45m 41s): But you're getting other parts of your anatomy, Botoxed. Joel (45m 44s): Eh, we don't have to talk about on this show. We out! Chad (45m 48s): We out! OUTRO (46m 7s): This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast, subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit Chadandcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome.

The Chad & Cheese continue the well-pedigreed conversations, this time with a CEO/cofounder reppin' Harvard, Dartmouth, and MIT. Pymetrics, Frida Polli joins the boys on a quest for a better understanding of personality tests, matching of soft skills to job openings, and the threats that A.I. backlash has on businesses like hers. There even tips for female entrepreneurs. Anything this smart has gotta be powered by Sovren, with AI so human you'll want to take it to dinner, right? PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Frida (0s): I just don't want people to get the impression that again, cause I just don't believe in it that there's such a thing as people that are always going to be top talent. I think that's, that's kind of a myth and it leads us to a lot of unproductive places. And I think in the world of recruiting, INTRO (13s): 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 (33s): Aw. Yeah, we're getting real cerebral on a Friday, kids. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by Chad Sowash and today, holy shit. We were getting big brained, everybody. Okay. We got Frida Polli co-founder of Biometrics and that's just the tip of the iceberg. She's a smarty pants, Harvard MBA, Dartmouth undergrad, PhD from Sofolk. My brain hurts already Frida, welcome to the podcast. Frida (1m 3s): Thanks you guys. Joel (1m 4s): Let me apologize ahead of time for everything that's about to go down. Frida (1m 7s): No, I, this is a great way to spend a Friday morning. Joel (1m 10s): Unwind on a Friday. Frida (1m 12s): Absolutely. Joel (1m 13s): So what should we know about you that I didn't cover? You don't like Irish people. What else? Frida (1m 18s): I mean, and they don't let them go drinking on a a hundred percent. Chad (1m 28s): Not cool Frida, not cool. Frida (1m 30s): I don't know what you want to know about me. I was born in Italy. I'm not from this country, although I sound like it, so I'm not an army brat. I moved around a lot because my dad was in management consulting, but more importantly, I guess for the show, I spent 10 years at Harvard and MIT becoming a smarty pants, cognitive scientists, and that's where a lot of, and that's where a lot of the science that we use at Pymetrics comes from and then, you know, went to the, an MBA program at Harvard. And that's where I saw recruiting firsthand and thought to myself, Ooh, this is, you know, all that science we've been using to, to look at people's soft skills could really be come in handy in this problem of people to job matching. Frida (2m 13s): And that's how Pymetrics was born because you know, really what I saw at HBS was it's not that people were confused about what was on people's resume, it was pretty clear. What they wanted to do was figure out who they were as a person, who they were as a, you know, individual human being. And they were trying to like tea leaf read off a resume, you know, they'd be like, Oh, you know, Chad played sports, Oh, it must be a team player. You know? Or I don't know, Joel had a side job in college, must be hardworking. And I mean, you can actually assess, I don't know if that's true or not, but the point, is you can actually. Joel (2m 44s): I would fail the metrics. Frida (2m 48s): This is what recruiters are doing, trying to figure out who you are as a human being, right from your resume when you can actually measure a lot of those things directly. And that's what we were trying to do is avoid people. Joel (2m 58s): You started this thing in 2013, right? Frida (3m 1s): We started the science part of it in 2013. That's correct. But we didn't have a product in market, until 2016. Joel (3m 7s): Talk about being ahead of the game? Like what, what the hell did you look at in 2013 and say, this, this is the wave of the future that allowed you to create this and how has it evolved in the last eight years? Frida (3m 19s): Yeah, well, again, I mean, I think it was, again, it was my experience at HBS. So, you know, an HBS, tons of companies come and everybody's looking for a job. Right. And so it was watching that process and realizing that people were still relying on coffee chats and resumes and all these like pretty outdated things to understand, Hey, does this person have what it takes to do the job? And then also seeing the flip side of that, which is, you know, some colleagues wanting to go into investment banking when all their friends were like, but you like to sleep 15 hours a day. Is that really a good fit? And then, you know, they'd get the job. And then, and then they, you know, two, two days later, the big, I hate my job. And so just realizing for the matching was not working that well. And a lot of it was because the resume stuff is clear. It's, what's not on the resume that people really, you know, the soft skills that people want to understand. Chad (4m 1s): It is it, is it really something that we should be doing is looking at people's personalities and saying that, that person's perfect for this job versus the skills they have? Because I mean, soft skills versus the hard skills certificate, certifications. Frida (4m 16s): So I would argue that, you know, absolutely, first of all, it's already what people are doing, right. So when they're trying to, so like take the recruiting situation at any college or school, the resumes, honestly, all look the same. They've been formatted the same way everyone's coming from the same school. They've all, you know, it's very hard to distinguish. So they're already looking for, how can I determine, you know, what makes this person unique, soft skills are what make people unique? And they're not about categories like pigeonholing people. It's actually about understanding what really makes them truly unique and enabling them to be that unique person. That's the way that we view soft skills in any, in any case. So it's not about homogenizing people. Frida (4m 57s): It's really about bringing out their diversity. The second piece about soft skills, unlike hard skills, they are far more equally distributed. So I always say you could take the same person with a particular soft skill profile and, you know, have them raised in, you know, an impoverished environment versus, you know, an elite environment. You're going to have very different resumes as we can all imagine, that person is fundamentally the same person, right? So if we want to start talking about equalizing gaps, whether there's socioeconomic gaps or racial gaps or gender gaps, soft skills are the way to do that. You know, there's just, I mean, if you're going to continue to rely on hard skills, hard skills are way more, not evenly distributed because of different advantages that, you know, different groups have in life. Frida (5m 37s): And not only that, I mean that if we rely too much on hard skills, that's when we get into you guys all remember the Amazon resume parser, fisasco, right? well, what was wrong with that resume parser? It was learning that their top folks went to colleges. Like for example, like some of the things they had that were different, you know, women go to Bard well, because they had more male engineers, no male engineer had ever gone to Bard, right? Cause it's a, it's a female college, right? Women play softball, men play baseball. So if you are literally training at off of a resume that has so many proxy variables for gender, race, socioeconomic status, you are almost invariably going to have some pretty big issues in terms of creating algorithms that are not biased or creating processes that are not biased versus soft skills are actually very equally distributed, so they are good equalizing factor. Frida (6m 26s): We have this way that we look at people in terms of, are you sort of more bias to action and impulsive, or are you more, you know, sort of thoughtful and really attentive to detail? Well, I have, since the age of zero always been a little bit on the impulsive side, which makes me bias to action. That's a soft skill, right? Like where you fall on that continuum. It doesn't make one end of the spectrum better or worse, it just means that I'm going to be more predisposed to jobs where I can do stuff. And somebody who falls in the other side of the spectrum is going to be better suited to jobs where they can sort of think, consider and sort of be more deliberate and thoughtful. Does that make sense? Joel (7m 4s): Yeah. And, and as isn't it fair to say, as automation comes more and more into the hard skills that the soft skills are really going to be, what separates the top talent from everyone else? Frida (7m 15s): So it's funny that you use the word top talent. In Primemetrics point of view, in my view, top talent is top talent for that particular job at that particular company. Like I think Frida Polli is, you know, top talent from Biometrics. I don't think Frida Polly's top talent for everything. You know what I mean? And I think we have to, it's all about matching. It's like Netflix, where it's like dating apps, right? We don't, we don't assume that there's like, it's Rotten Tomatoes versus Netflix. Right? Rotten tomatoes assumes are some people that are like some movies are always good and some movies that are always bad. Netflix doesn't assume that it says, Hey, you know, Joel and Chad, you like these kinds of movies, Friaa likes those kinds of movies and we're going to optimize so that, you know, people end up in the right sort of places where they are going to perform better. Frida (7m 55s): So if you're thinking about top talent as like top talent for that job and company a hundred percent. I just don't want people to get the impression that again, because I just don't believe in it that there's such a thing as people that are always going to be top talent. I think that's, that's kind of a myth and it leads us to a lot of unproductive places I think, in the world of recruiting. So, Chad (8m 14s): Amen sister. So let me talk a little bit more about soft skills because whenever I hear a company talk or say soft skills, I'm always thinking to myself, how in the hell are they going to defend that against an OFCCP audit? Frida (8m 30s): Sure. Yeah. Well, when you think about ONAP right. And the knowledge, Chad (8m 32s): No, I don't want to think about own it. Joel (8m 34s): Here we go. That's a mess. Frida (8m 38s): You know, we all don't want to think about ONAP, but unfortunately, you know, ONAP is an important thing in the, in the world of, you know, employment. And so when you think about ONAP, you know, or any way to think about jobs, there's knowledge, skills, and abilities, right? And when we think about knowledge skills and, you know, knowledge is primarily more sort of the hard skill domain, but depending on skills and abilities, they can be things like, you know, attention to detail, for example, you know, and things like that that are not, that are what we're calling soft skills, right? And again, people talk about these things differently, but a lot of the things that we measure are actually, you know, very directly related to the KSAs of particular occupation. Frida (9m 20s): So there are very defensible. And then on top of that, you know, you, we, and one can do job analysis, you know, including, you know, interviews with subject matter experts and all sorts of other ways to do job analysis, to make, to ensure that what you're measuring, you know, is related to the job, right? So you have the ONAP codes, you have a job analysis that you're conducting to confirm, or, you know, tweak the initial idea that you have based ONAP on. And then you're building models that presumably have good concurrent validation. And then last but not least, you're doing some sort of, you know, validity analysis on the backend. So I think there's a lot of ways that you can, you can validate these things and, you know, we have an, you know, we have OFCCP clients that use our products. Frida (10m 5s): So it, it has, I think it's, it has great defensibility. Chad (10m 8s): And you've been up against that and defended against it. That's the big question. Right? And that's, and that's the big, the big stamp, I think for any organization. Frida (10m 17s): I mean, you know, to be completely really honest, I mean, we haven't done that. I, and again, I know that, you know, OFCCP can audit you for a variety of different reasons. I mean, they're typically going to audit you if they see just, you know, signs of disparate impact? Chad (10m 30s): Right. Frida (10m 31s): And so we don't, again, I think I've mentioned this to you, but we don't actually, we have a way of creating our algorithms called fairness optimization, where we don't only optimize for performance, we optimize for performance and lack of disparate impact. So actually our platform won't release an algorithm if it has disparate impact. So the likelihood that we're going to get flagged by an OFCCP audit, looking for disparate impact is extremely low because. Chad (10m 53s): That's the answer right there. Frida (10m 53s): We don't see the answer right there. We don't have any algorithms that we release that have disparate impact. But I think historically, there's been this sort of dichotomy. It's like, Oh, either you can have these very predictive cognitive tests, but while they've got a lot of disparate impact, so like make sure your defensibility evidence is strong, or you can have these personality tests today. You know, they don't predict a whole hell of a lot, but you know, they don't have adverse impacts. So, you know, you're good to go. So it's sort of been like the red steak that tastes good, but it's not good for you. And the vegan burger that's tastes awful, but it's not going to kill you. Right. And, you know, along comes the impossible burger and it's like, Hey, tastes really good. And Oh, by the way, it's vegan. So it's good for you. Right. And I think that, yeah, by the way, Chad, I had been using, I've been using that analogy everywhere, but I think that there, you know, that's what more modern techniques can actually yield is something that is predictive. Frida (11m 41s): We have predictability, but that has, you know, that lacks adverse impact. And I think we have made that the impossible area for so long and, and, you know, come to find out actually, you know, with some more modern approaches to this, it's actually quite possible. Joel (11m 57s): Alright so we, so we agree, this is a trend that's happening. And we also agree that there are, there are pitfalls and minefields and whatnot. And I think that for a lot of our listeners or employers that are looking at integrating this and implementing it, everyone's doing matching now. I mean, everybody. So you have, you know, what I would consider as like the Briggs and Stratton stuff, the Wonderlic stuff, what you guys do. And then we get into, you know, every ATS has matching every job, every job-board has matching. So for someone that says, how do I, how do I make sense of all this? Do I use multiple solutions? Is there one, solution to rule them all? Like, what's the answer for someone that's looking at this landscape? Frida (12m 36s): Yeah. Well look, I mean, everyone's obviously going to come up with their own answer. Right. What I would say is I think that, you know, both your experience, your hard skills and who you are innately as a human being, your soft skills are equally important. Right. And they may be, you know, sort of, you might need to focus more on experience in certain cases and, you know, sort of aptitude and, and other cases. But I think both are critical. And I would say that, you know, generally speaking, when you're looking at most platforms that are doing some kind of matching, whether it's an ATS or, you know, a job board or whatever, they're generally relying on hard skills, right, cause they're using resumes and job and job postings? I think when you start going into the soft skill space, then you are thinking more about what's traditionally thought of as an assessment, right. Frida (13m 18s): So then you are looking at more traditional, you know, like the Wonderlic cognitive testing or SHL or something, or, you know, a Hogan personality test or some sort of personality test. And I would say that, you know, I think there are newer platforms, like Plymetrics that, you know, combine both cognitive, you know, and sort of socio-emotional attributes, but also achieve sort of this Holy grail of lacking disparate impact, but also having, you know, validity. So again, I, I would be biased obviously towards something that can produce, you know, that can be predictive i n that space without having adverse impact. Cause I think it's, it's pretty critical, not just from a defensibility standpoint, but just also it aligns with what employers are looking for. I mean, you know, we all know we're in the epicenter or, you know, the Zeitgeists of the time is we have diversity and equality. Frida (14m 6s): And I think it's a little bit counter to the time, to continue to rely on tools that have a lot of disparate impact. That's my personal view. Chad (14m 15s): Well, let's talk about adoption really quick. It really doesn't feel like corporate America is truly wants to change its biased patterns and processes. I mean, seriously, we put a human on the moon in 1969 for God's sakes and we're still trying to tackle this issue. So why are employers so reticent to adopt tools like Pymetrics that would help make the process less bias and their workforce more diverse? Frida (14m 43s): So I guess I would say, I would say a couple of things, right? I would say that the, we, we work with employers who really are the forefront of diversity. I mean, if you, I mean, I can't name all our employers, but if you were to take a look, you would see employers that, you know, are truly pretty cutting edge when it comes to diversity, including some, some large OFCCP contractors, you know, who are probably the ones, you know, who, who are yeah. I mean really thinking about this the most carefully. So I do believe that there are sections of corporate America that really care. So that's one thing, right? I think the second thing is there's a little bit of like a disconnect between, you know, you have the CEO of the company being like, I want more diversity and then, you know, somewhere down deep in a different part of the organization, you have somebody who's, green-lighting a tool, you know, that has adverse impact. Frida (15m 32s): And those two parts of the organization are not talking to each other. And you know, why is somebody green-lighting a tool that has adverse impact? Well, you know, for a variety of reasons, because, you know, they think cognitive tests are super predictive or they don't know that this tool has adverse impact or whatever. So I think it's a little bit of like, there's just a lot of lack of transparency and sort of understanding of these types of things. I mean, I've personally seen this, right. I've personally seen, you know, debates between the business that's saying, Hey, we should be, you know, adopting this tool. And then, you know, other folks in the, in the business being like, no, no, no, you know, this cognitive test has been validated and defended in court and you know, and you're like, sure, it has been defended in court, but we all know they have really bad, you know, they select three African-Americans and five Latinos for every 10 Caucasians. Frida (16m 22s): I mean, you're not going to get a diverse workforce using pyro testing. Right. And I think it's like 60% of companies still use them. So I think there's a bit of a disconnect between what people are saying they want. And then folks that are used to sort of evaluating hiring procedures, comfort level with, you know, new things when these older tools, to your point have been battle-tested right. Joel (16m 45s): Will small businesses ever use tools like these? I'm guessing that your portfolio of companies are big ass companies. Right? Frida (16m 52s): Yeah. Joel (16m 52s): But do you have any thoughts on, does this go downstream into small companies or maybe even gig platforms? Frida (16m 57s): Ithink it does. I mean, we've focused more on large companies just because, you know, we don't only do recruiting. We also do mobility. We do re-skilling. We do L and D. I mean anywhere where you need to understand somebody who's fit to a role. Right. Joel (17m 10s): They also have money. Frida (17m 10s): So we sort of, there are a variety of different reasons, but I think that, you know, we focused on those companies mostly, because there's just so many things you can do within those companies, not just recruiting, we've been focused almost entirely on recruiting so far, but we do a tremendous amount more. I mean, the mobility and re-skilling space, I would say is completely taken off because again, think about it, right? Like, especially with COVID where, you know, maybe I've had to put a pause on hiring, but now my business has to respond to the environment and a completely different way. And everybody's like, Oh my goodness, I need to re-skill ASAP. Right. And so they're trying to understand, again, you know, soft skills is a really good way of understanding what someone can be re-skilled into, which is not possible with a resume, because a resume just tells you what they've done, not what they could do. Frida (17m 52s): Right. And so we see a lot of, you know, a demand for biometrics, both from the private sector, as well as the public sector in re-skilling opportunities. It's a no brainer and then obviously also a lot of the L and D market. So the point is just simply that we've primarily focused on, you know, sort of Fortune 2000, but I think there is, you know, applicability beyond that Joel (18m 14s): Sort of a self-serve model at some point, maybe. Frida (18m 17s): Definitely, possibly. Joel, Chad (18m 19s): Joel just wants to know if he can go play the, do the test. That's all he wants to do. Frida (18m 23s): You, we, I will be happy to send you happy to send you a link. I mean, at some point I think it'd be really cool to have like a direct to consumer call as well. You know what I mean? Because we get that question all the time. Like, Oh, I want to learn more about myself. This is such a cool application, you know, blah, blah, blah. Joel (18m 38s): You guys do job description. You guys do candidate to job matching as well. Right? For the job seeker Frida (18m 44s): Only in cases, we have some instances, where we do that. Yes, absolutely. So we, so where we would do that, for example, so we're working with the state of Ohio to reskill workers. So in that case, absolutely. We do that. We also like, so for example, like the, the reason I say Pymetrics is an optimization engine is because, Hey, you go through my metrics. Once you're applying to job A, hypothetically, for whatever reason, you don't get job A, we actually can help you and match you to other jobs at that company where you would be a good fit. And so we can do that, right? So that's job to employer employer matching. And then if for whatever reason you get dispositioned out of that company's process, we can actually match you outside of that company, to other jobs at other companies that you're a good fit for. Frida (19m 25s): So the reason I say this is because it's not the first way that a candidate would interact with us probably, but it's oftentimes sort of a secondary, tertiary way that, that somebody would, experience us. Joel (19m 37s): It's commercial time. SOVREN (19m 39s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. Chad (20m 39s): It's show time. Have you seen the, the new documentary on HBO? Max persona. Okay. Okay. So having those, I mean, these, these, this is, this is almost like an hour and a half hour, 45 minute campaign against at least Myers Briggs. Frida (20m 58s): Personality tests. It's against personality tests. Really? I think. Yeah. Yeah. Joel (21m 3s): I hit job. Chad (21m 3s): If you read into it. And, obviously a lot of people have their like little cultish love of, you know, they're there for letters and in the Myers-Briggs. Yeah, yeah. Overall though, you know, it kind of lumps, personality tests all into this one bad group. What did you think while you were watching that? Where you're cringing me entire time or you're like throwing stuff across the room or what? Frida (21m 28s): No, I wasn't actually, I wasn't. So, so they had to, they were really talking about half the movie was about the Myers-Briggs the other half was about Big five. Right. So they're totally different tests. So the whole let's forget about the Myers-Briggs. Their big point with the Myers-Briggs is it was developed by somebody who was racist. I was like, Oh, well, okay. I mean, that's unfortunate for sure, but I don't think they were as focused on bad uses of the Myers-Briggs. I think the bad uses really, really was more focused on, the Big Five. Right. And it was following the story, the story of Kyle Beam, and you, look I've had the pleasure of speaking with his father on numerous occasions. And it's a quite frankly, I mean, look, I mean, this may be an unpopular opinion, but this was sort of what I was saying about, I think traditional testing often puts ranked people on a unitary scale, right? Frida (22m 14s): So IQ says, you know, smart people are always better for jobs than, you know, less smart people. And I think, unfortunately, you know, the Big Five, I mean, there are lots of articles saying, you know, that people that are emotionally stable do better across all jobs and people that are, you know, conscientious, you know, mobile. And that is just not a fundamental way that Pymetrics looks at things. Meaning we don't think of what we measure as a unitary, we think of it as multi-dimensional right. Like for example, let's take the Big Five, right? Nobody's going to be like, yeah, you should take somebody who's neurotic, not conscientious and something else. And that, that's something that's anti Pymetrics in the sense that everything we measure isn't unidirectional either/and it's multipolar. Frida (22m 57s): Right? So either end of the spectrum, like the attentive to detail versus the bias to action, is a perfect example on all of the things that we measure are like that. Right? So I actually don't subscribe to the belief that's sort of held by, you know, sort of traditional practitioners, of the Big Five that, Hey, you know, we should always be pointing in one direction, which, again, I think is, I think that's the issue that, that movie is trying to raise, which is like, you know, you've see these tests have been created so that they always recommend, you know, sort of normal people, right, people that are emotionally stable, people that are not neurotic people that are conscientious people that are agreeable. And, Oh, by the way, like when you look at the opposite, end of that spectrum, you find people that have mood disorders, right. Frida (23m 39s): Because people that have mood disorders, you know, are not particularly agreeable necessarily and because they're depressed. Right. And you know, they may be more because they're depressed. Right. So even though it's not a medical test, per se, I think the broader point that Roland Beam was trying to make is that you're still going to put on the unhireable end of the spectrum people that are more likely to have mood disorders. Does that make sense? And that's very un-Pymetrics in the sense that, again, it's back to what I said before. We don't have either end of the spectrum could be fine. Like everybody has many matches in the Pymetrics system. And we have like, I don't know, 700 algorithms at this models, job laws at this point that we built, so there isn't this sort of like creation of great employees versus not great employees. Frida (24m 22s): It's like, it's, again, it's a matching it's very similar to like the idea that we're Netflix and you know, this other system is more like a Rotten Tomatoes ranking system. Chad (24m 31s): That seems very meaningful to me is you did you reach out to Kyle's dad? I mean, what was that all? Was that before after, do you have a relationship? Joel (24m 40s): Who's Kyle again? Frida (24m 41s): Kyla's his son, so I'll be totally Frank. I have a personal history in my family of someone that I'm very close to who has very severe mental illness. And, you know, I'll be totally honest too. I have in my lifetime suffered from depression, right. When I was in college, you know, and, and it was, you know, it was pretty significant and I had to leave school for awhile and get treatment for it. And so I guess the reason I'm telling you this is I think that, like in thinking about how to build these systems, I sort of came to it with this idea of like, Hey, you know, we want to make sure you know, that these systems, again, we can never be a hundred percent sure, but we want to be as sure as possible that we're not sort of, you know, creating a system where, you know, people with mood disorders or something else, you know, might be excluded. Frida (25m 25s): Right. And so, and I say that because I think that having had that lived experience, does it again, I, you know, I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm sure there's a lot of things we can improve on. But I think the fact that everybody has many matches at Pymetrics means that we're not creating a class of unemployable people. We know that for a fact, nobody that goes through Pymetrics is like rejected from everything. Everyone has fits. Right. And we know that because we've looked at the data, we've looked at all the millions of people that have gone through it. And we know that every one of them has, you know, multiple matches. So versus if you use this more unitary scale, you are creating a system where if everyone's using the same algorithm and it's based on, you know, certain ends of the Big Five spectrum, you will be creating a system where, you know, people will be permanently excluded from things. Chad (26m 9s): Right. Frida (26m 9s): So again, whether it's my lived experience that led me to, to, to build it this way or just, and it's also just like where, you know, cognitive science is just different than traditional personality theory in the sense that it views the brain as very sort of modular and these different things that you can measure. And again, it's this idea that neither end of the spectrum is good or bad. It just makes you sort of well better suited for certain things that others. So it's just a very different philosophy of people that leads to, I think, a different design thinking. Joel (26m 40s): I feel like there's a little bit of a, well, there is a backlash on a lot of this stuff. I mean, the movie sort of represents that, but we're also seeing, you know, facial recognition, you know, get banned and questioned. We're getting, we're seeing DNA tests, like why what's going on with this? Do you ever, maybe not y?our business is doing any of this stuff, but do you ever feel like it's a threat that you're gonna just sort of be thrown in with this group and companies will be afraid to use you? There'll be lawsuits for companies that do use these services or do you not worry much about it? Frida (27m 9s): Yeah. Look so. I mean, no, we absolutely think about it. I think we think about it more than we worry. So we think when we do, rather than worry. So what I would say is that we have, I mean, it's, so first of all, I mean, I don't know if you know this, but we hired two people from the EOC, like years ago to come and help us build the platform. Right. So we really have built Pymetrics with compliance in mind. And to be honest with you, I was very nervous when I did that, because I was like, Oh my God, they're going to find something and we're not going to know. And, you know, then we'll be like blacklisted, but I think we, we really put, you know, complying with federal regulations at the core and just general fairness, right, at the core of our product. And so that doesn't mean that we've solved every problem or anything like that, but it does mean that I think a lot of those things that you've brought up, I think, we thought about ahead of time. Frida (27m 55s): Now, do people have concerns about using artificial intelligence? Yes. People do. For sure. And I think rightly so, because we do see these examples of it being used in ways that are not helpful. But then, you know, you always have to remind yourself that, you know, Hey, these older tools also, you know, have have issues. As we just talked about with, you know, with the movie. So my only view is that no type of technology is always going to be, you know, good versus bad. You really have to investigate each particular technology platform differently and sort of make a decision. Joel (28m 32s): Can we, can we play a little science fiction real quick? You mentioned Netflix versus Rotten Tomatoes. And you've talked about sort of the customization. One of the things that, a story that came out recently on Netflix, I found really interesting and it's not only the recommendations of movies, but also the artwork that they show people. Chad (28m 50s): Oh yes. Joel (28m 51s): So easy example is there's a white guy and a black guy in a movie, right. It's Lethal Weapon. So, if I'm a black male, I might see Danny Glover. If I'm a white male, I get Mel Gibson. Right. So that sort of customization is a little bit scary, but also really powerful. Do you envision a day where job descriptions are custom in that way, or we're seeing, you know, automated videos and deep fakes where you're talking to a person in quotes, but it's actually a machine where the person you talk to is customed to who you are sorta like Netflix shows you, do you envision a future like that or my way off base? Frida (29m 30s): So if we, if we just leave it in the hiring context, I think that would be trickier. Look, so only because it's a regulated space. Right. And I think it was like, was it Facebook that got into trouble, recently because they were only showing job ads to like people between the ages of 20. So I think that because, you know, because of regulation in certain industries, you know, housing, you know, employment, you know, financial, you know, lending, you're going to be more constrained and with good reason, you know what I mean? Otherwise if, yeah, if it was a free for all, you probably would be saying that. Right. But there are regulations that, you know, to the best of my knowledge, sort of prevent that from hap this type, that type of, sort of what I would call maybe more unnecessary personalization happening. Frida (30m 15s): Cause you're talking about personalization there at an individual level. My only point was simply to say that, you know, I think historically we've thought about jobs as being quite unitary and the things people need for jobs as being quite unitary. Right. I mean, just, you know, I mean, go, go Google this, you'll find five articles being like everyone that's smart, hardworking, and conscientious is always good for a job. Right. And we just have this philosophy and it's like, and then all these Talent Wars and there's like talent winners and talent losers. And it's like, it's, to me, it's so 1950s, it's like everybody is, has value. Everybody has potential. Everybody has their right fits, and their wrong fits, you know? And I mean, and again, HBS was a perfect testing ground for that theory, because if the theory that you need to be smart, hardworking, and something else, that means HBS kids would be, you know, hypothetically well-suited for everything. Frida (31m 2s): And they're just not, I mean, it's just, you know, I saw that firsthand. Right. You know, and it's just common sense really. So I think it's about personalizing, not to the extent of like, Hey, I'm going to show you Chad a different picture. It's more just around, you know, not assuming every job is the same and that these three characteristics are going to make you well suited for every job. You know? Chad (31m 22s): So Pymetrics goes to the process, but with gamification. Why did you choose to go through with gamification? Was it to be able to make it more of a pleasurable experience because tests suck? What went into that decision and how much more research did you have to do to get that right? Frida (31m 43s): Yeah. So, people call it gamification because it's a broad category, but all of the Pymetrics tools that are used are actually tools that I used and, you know, the tens of thousands of cognitive scientists across the globe use every day in research. So those are actually research tools, just as an FYI. That's not true of all gamified platforms, but the Pymetrics exercises are actual scientific assays that were taken from, I mean, I used to use these and experiment the 10 years that I spent as a cognitive scientist. Like I used all of these, all of the exercises that we use for talent assessment in research situations. So it wasn't like we had,ew so that's the core premise of Pymetrics was taking new science, cause it's a whole new scientific field. Frida (32m 28s): And we actually wrote a paper, a research brief with MIT on this recently basically explaining how, again, it's like these tools are, you know, like if you take the Big Five, right, it's a personality inventory that sort of has these five constructs. It's very different than what we've done, which is selected individual, you know, exercises that look at particular modular functions within people, whether it's, you know, attention or planning or sequencing or, you know, risk preference or, you know, effort expenditure, things like that. So all I'm trying to say is that when I saw the problem of recruiting firsthand and knew that we had this whole new scientific way of looking at people through their behavior, rather than the true self report or, you know, doing math problems, the light bulb was like, Oh wow, that's such a powerful, new scientific approach to this problem that's historically been challenging. Joel (33m 20s): We like to highlight diversity on the show whenever we can. And particularly on the founder side of things. So for the female out there that that wants to start a business, that's looking to do this. What advice would you give her to, to make that leap and particular, what challenges, challenges did you face as a woman raising money that might be uniqueto that situation, that might be helpful? Frida (33m 45s): Yeah, sure. So I was not only a woman. I was a single mom at the time. So it was, it was kind of an interesting, yeah, time period in my life. Look, I think at the end of the day, like I think you will experience more challenges. I mean, like the data don't lie, you know, women raise less money, you know, and so on and so forth. And that's just true. I mean, you can't ever pin a particular, you know, episode as being like, Oh, that was an example of it, but just in aggregate, you know, that's the case. And so I think you just have to mentally be sort of prepared for that, but I also wouldn't say don't focus on that, right? You don't want to like, sort of have that be the only thing you have going into this process. And, you know, you have to also realize that there are people out there that are very supportive of, you know, women and you have to find, you know, I would say those advocates for those people that are going to be, you know, really supportive and really sort of, you know, help you along your path. Frida (34m 37s): So again, I guess I'm trying to strike a balance. You can't be a Pollyanna and be like, Oh, you know, it doesn't exist. Sexism doesn't exist. Well, you know, unfortunately it does, but at the same time, like I think you can't let that be the reason if you're passionate about something, you just have to, you know, you just have to go ahead and do it. Joel (34m 54s): How important or important was your education? Cause I think something intimidating about you is like, you've got degrees up the wazoo and I assume you're going to say like, you don't need that to be an entrepreneur. Frida (35m 4s): No, I mean, well, so I would absolutely say if I had been starting a shoe company that would have done diddly for me, you know what I mean? Like I think what it is, is like, I think it's domain expertise, right? So I wanted to start a science company. I had a lot of fancy degrees from good scientific institutions. So people were like, Oh, she probably knows what she's talking about. If I wanted to start a shoe company or a toothpaste company, they would've been like, you have no idea what you're doing. We're not gonna fund you. Right. So I don't think you need fancy degrees to be an entrepreneur. I just think you have to domain expertise is just super helpful, no matter what. And I think unfortunately for women, it's more important because there's been research on this too. That, you know, for a guy it's like, Oh, he has so much potential. He's never done it, but I'm sure he can figure it out. Right. Frida (35m 44s): A woman it's like she ever done it like nine times before and was she's successful each of those nine times, okay. Then find, maybe we'll fund her. You know what I mean? So there's definitely, you know, and again, there's research to back that up. So I think domain expertise is more important for women. I don't think that's a bad thing. Right? I mean, I think, I mean, it, I think it should be domain expertise should be relevant for both sexes really. Right. Because I do think it really helps a lot to know kind of the subject that you're diving into. So Joel (36m 7s): Which by the way, you don't need a degree to have a podcast. So. Chad (36m 11s): Thank God. Jesus Christ. Thank you. Frida (36m 14s): You just have to have a face for podcasts, that's all! You know, very small, small, small narrow group of people that have that face for podcasts. 4 (36m 21s): I'm going to have a good voice for you. Frida (36m 23s): We knocked that out of the park. Let me tell ya. It's Frida Polli everyone CEO and Co-founder of Pymetrics, Frida, if all those wonderful talent acquisition people that are out there, who finally want to get in and do this right? If they want to find you or they want to have actually, I don't know, check out Pymetrics where would you send them? I would send them to the website Pymetrics, P Y and then metrics like the metric system, you know, or could always reach out to me at Frida@pymetrics.com Frida Polli's a very unusual, unusual name. So if you Google Frida Polli they're probably, you know, it's one of the plus sides of having a, a strange, not very common name. Frida (37m 4s): So Chad (37m 4s): Frida Polli with an i. Yeah. Thanks so much Frida. Frida (37m 8s): Thank you, Joel and Chad, it was a pleasure Joel (37m 10s): Like the metrics system take your fancy European talk elsewhere. We out. Chad (37m 15s): We out. OUTRO (38m 12s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Jeff Dolan walks in, sits down, and takes his chances by pitching FlashRecruit to The Chad and Cheese Podcast with the possibility of facing disgrace and the Firing Squad. What is FIRING SQUAD? Firing Squad is a raw podcast featuring two grizzled industry veterans who want to showcase recruitment industry startup companies. Their technology, products, and solutions either save them and win massive applause or just #fail and face the FIRING SQUAD. On this episode: We know that email engagement sucks and the response rate is horrible, which is why companies like FlashRecruit exist. FlashRecruit's mission is to "Break down the communication barriers to start the conversation between recruiters and the job seekers looking for their dream job." Can FlashRecruit pull it off or are they in store for a visit from the FIRING SQUAD? You'll have to listen to find out. Then visit sponsors Sovren, Ratedly and America's Job Exchange. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to put to the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: Hey, what's up guys? Joel Cheeseman here, aka Cheese, aka Turkey Killer. On this episode of Firing Squad we have Jeff Dolan of FlashRecruit. Jeff, how you doing? Jeff: Doing well. Appreciate the time. Joel: Are you ready for the pain? Jeff: I'm ready to rock. Chad: Pain Train's coming. Joel: All right. Jeff: I'd try a turkey joke in there, but... Joel: Well before we get to you, let's hear a quick word from our sponsor. Advert: Google, Lever, Entello, Monster, Jibe. What do these companies, and hundreds of others, have in common? They all use Sovren technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit SOVREN.com. S-O-V-R-E-N.com for a free demo. Joel: All right, all right, all right. Chad: Here we go. Joel: Everybody feeling good? Chad: Feeling good, man. Turkey Day's on its way. Joel's going to be tons of turkey-taking naps, which he's used to in the first place. I think the naps part more than anything. Joel: Well the good news for me is because I'm divorced and we had the kids last weekend, I had Thanksgiving dinner last weekend, so I'll get double the dose of turkey which means double the naps, which for me is really, really extreme as you know. Chad: Tryptophan, you'll be in tryptophan heaven. Jeff: Fantastic. Joel: Yes, sir. Chad: Excellent. Let's get to the show. Jeff? Are you ready man? Let me tell you a little bit about what's going to happen. You have two minutes to pitch FlashRecruit, okay? After the pitch, Joel and I are going to hit you with rapid fire Q&A. If you drone on or if you bore us, you're either going to get the bell, or Joel's going to hit his favorite crickets because you bored us. Chad: At the end of Q&A, you're going to receive one of three. You're either going to get the big applause, which means you've exceeded expectations. The golf clap, means you're on your way, but you've got a lot of work to do, or you're going to get hit with the firing squad, which means it's probably time to take your ass back to the drawing board and start over with this whole concept. Chad: So that's Firing Squad. Let's buckle up and let's get this pitch started, Joel. Joel: Sounds good, man. Do we want to meet Jeff a little bit before we go into it or not? Chad: Yeah, why not I guess. Joel: Jeff, you've got a 30 second intro. Go. Jeff: All right perfect. I run all the revenue operations for FlashRecruit. I actually started my career at Careerbuilder.com, and I was there for over ten and a half years primarily in sales roles. Ran a couple different markets and that was actually where the idea where FlashRecruit was born, right. There was a massive opportunity to capture some of the candidates that would be dropping off from the site. Jeff: We'll get to that later. I then joined a early stage company based out of Detroit. Grew that from two to four million in revenue before formally starting FlashRecruit. We've been fully running here for two and a half/three years. Based out of Detroit. That's me. Joel: Awesome so we have some prior experience in the recruitment space, which I think you're the first guest ever. Chad: And a sales guy. Joel: And you built a company, so we expect great things from you, Jeff. Jeff: I'm glad I was able to raise the expectation, therefore the applause will mean more to me than otherwise. Joel: Don't mess it up. At the bell, you've got two minutes to pitch us your company, and after that Chad and I will have our way with you. Jeff: Sounds like a plan. Joel: Here we go. Jeff: All right, cool. FlashRecruit is a recruitment-focused live chat. What we're solving for is the fact that the apply now button is broken. Candidates know how to find employers. They know how to find career sites. They know how to find job postings, but we're losing 90 percent of those folks. The reason for that is that they're not just willing to jump into that formal apply process, right? They have questions. Jeff: On the flip side, recruiters know how to reach out to candidates, right? You go on LinkedIn, you do a search for a title and a location. You've got a big old list of people. The problem is not finding those folks. The problem is connecting with them. Historically, you've got phone calls, emails, in-mails, whatever it may be, all of them are less effective than they once were. Jeff: What we've done is built a live chat to them. Specifically and only for recruitment with the intention of connecting the right candidate to the right recruiter live. Let them interact, answer a couple questions and do one of two things: Get the candidate into the cycle or out of the cycle. Both are good. Jeff: What we've seen is that our customers are telling us it's driving people into the cycle must faster, more efficiently. It also tells us that they're able to get in touch with folks who would have otherwise not applied to the job, and that's a big part of what we do. Jeff: That is FlashRecruit at a very high quick level. Joel: Very good. It sounds like you're adding a layer to complexity to the recruitment process. I know we'll get to automation and things like that later, but you pitch your product as saving time and just on its face it sounds like it's adding a layer of complexity. Convince me that it's not, that it is actually saving time and making things easier. Jeff: It's interesting. A typical industry-accepted ration, you've got ten people who view a job and one of them apply. What we know is that there are qualified people out there who are doing their research. So even if there was a bit of complexity, and it enables you to chat live with a candidate who's highly qualified for your role as a recruiter, what we have seen is that people are very excited about that. Jeff: When it comes to saving time, though, here's a typical candidate experience. They go to a job. They find this apply, they click apply or fill out whatever form that's asked of them. That gets recycled into an ATS, and then somehow it gets onto the recruiter's dashboard. Jeff: The recruiter then has to get in touch with the candidate, so you're going to call them, email them. THey're probably going to miss that. Eight hours goes by. 16 hours go by. Somebody responds. Then they're trying to schedule a phone conversation which takes another day and a half until that actual conversation occurs where they ask a couple of questions and find out that they're not a potential fit. Or they are a potential fit, and then you're scheduling the next step. Jeff: That took days, and so what we're doing is we're enabling our customers to put a live chat on jobs, career sites, wherever it may be that allows an instant interaction. If the recruiter's standing there, I'm notified that Chad the candidate wants to talk to me. I need to know that Chad has seven plus years developing whatever it may be. I'm able to figure that out on the spot as opposed to going through the days of scheduling previous to that answer being found out. Chad: So quick question. I understand there's prescreening questions for any candidate coming through FlashRecruit, and it depends on how the company sets it up. If a candidate answers the correctly, they are automatically funneled to the specific recruiter, and the chat's opened up, right? Jeff: Yes. Chad: Okay cool. What happens if the candidate answers the question incorrectly. What happens then? Jeff: Good question. It's up to the recruiter, or it's up to the company I should say. Most companies if that candidate doesn't answer all the questions correctly, they can still get notified of that chat. There's a ton of use cases we have out there where a candidate chats with a recruiter about a job. They're not a perfect fit there, but there is another opportunity so they can kick that candidate over to another recruiter. Jeff: In other scenarios where it's a more rigorous screening process, we can automate using some of our technology, a customizer-configured message that would go to the candidate saying, "Hey you're not a fit for this specific role. Follow us on LinkedIn," or "Here's a link to our other opportunities." In the second case, that would not notify a recruiter. Again an effort to save time. Chad: Where are all these conversations logged? Jeff: On FlashRecruit, but the key there, and one of our biggest differentiators, is making sure that that is logged wherever the customer wants it logged. We're a Bullhorn Marketplace partners, and in that scenario a candidate chats with a recruiter. Conversation is had. I click complete, and I move on with my day as a recruiter. We create the candidate record in Bullhorn. Obviously the conversation that was had is loaded as a note. It's referenced to the right recruiter. Referenced to the right candidate, and also any answers to screening questions would flow in there as well. Chad: What if I didn't apply for the job? Jeff: You'd be referenced to the job because that's the job that you chatted on. It's not an applicant, right? You'd be a candidate in that case. Joel: Jeff, so you sort of dissed email and voicemail, which is fine. Is this a text-based solution? Is it a web-based solution? I know you have native apps. How do both job seekers and customers typically interface with your solution? Jeff: So the majority of job seekers interface with our solution on a mobile browser. There's a variety of devices, but they're looking from a mobile device and they do that via browser. The majority of our recruiters, actually it's about half and half with the recruiters. Half of our recruiters are using it on a desktop. A day in the life of a typical recruiter would have them at a desktop, so they get a notification on their screen, have the chat from there. Jeff: Another half and half probably are using one of the native apps either on IOS or Android. Typically, the recruiter is working a full desk. They know they're around, or in the scenario that an after-hours chat comes in, they're sitting on their couch, they would typically have that phone from a native app on IOS or Android. Joel: Do you find that they will use it at all hours of the day? Jeff: It varies, but for the most part, yeah. Also the customers are different, right? Take a staffing customer, that is their world. We focused on staffing intentionally for a couple reasons, but one of them is that that placement is their world. They are very dedicated to finding that tough-to-fill role. Finding that candidate [inaudible 00:10:12] and they are more apt to have a conversation early or late. Jeff: In other cases, you can either go so far as to set notifications to snooze out from 5:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m. and so you wouldn't even get a notification that a candidate wants to chat with you fare hours. Joel: So if someone chatted you up on snooze mode, what message would they get? Jeff: It's a configurable message, pretty simple. You can provide another call to action, but the key there is that we do care very deeply about the candidate experience. We have always built with that in mind as well as the recruiter experience. So if you're on snooze you get an away message much quicker. If you tried to chat with me at 1:00 a.m. and I did not hit snooze, then we actually go up into a period of two minutes which is when the data tells us to do this, but we still display a message that says, "Hey I'm not at my desk right now. I'll follow up with you at the email you provided." Jeff: That actually is a segwuay into an important component, because I know this question is coming. What happens if I'm not at my desk. Chad: Right. Jeff: Right? Number one, we basically turn it into that lead for them. We got you that candidate you would have otherwise not received. Jeff: Number two, the recruiter, next time they look at their phone when they wake up probably laying in bed or when they're at their desk, you see that candidate. This X, Y, Z Chad tried to talk to you about this role last night. I was on a call last week actually and a recruiter told me that as long as she got back in touch with those folks within 24 hours of them trying to chat, she's got a 80 percent plus response rate from those candidates. That's impressive. It's less about those scenarios. It's really more about that new channel of candidates that you're opening yourself up to via using a more modern and appropriate communication vehicle which is live chat. Chad: So generally getting an interview on the calendar is pretty basic. You already have the prescreen questions. After you pass those pretty much is, do we want to interview you. At that point you coordinate calendars. Chad: Why does a real person have to be the one chatting to set up an interview? Jeff: Good question. There's a couple parts to that question. One of them is that a lot of our customers use technology to schedule those interviews, right? Very simply, when a chat is happening, if this person makes sense, they'll throw in a calendar link and let it run from there. Jeff: That's a pretty brief, the scheduling piece, is a pretty brief part of that whole interaction there. Jeff: The second piece of it that I think is interesting is the difference between just screening and actually vetting out that candidate. You can have all the AI and all the bots in the world that can basically confirm what's in the job description. Where we see our customers seeing value is that, again, it's enabling these two humans to connect, and the candidate has questions that aren't in the description. AI is not at a place where they can answer some of those questions that cannot be programmatically put in there. That's where the human interaction comes in. When it comes to the scheduling, there are certainly technologies out there as well. Chad: With all the questions that are actually being thrown at human beings today, are you guys logging all those questions and answers to be able to build a Q&A database? Jeff: Yes, that's a little future state from a product standpoint to be totally transparent, but we are absolutely paying attention to what's happening in those conversations. There are tons of implications about what that data can do. I will tell you that the one learning that we have pulled from there that has been very powerful for our customers and for us is that these interactions are not long. One of the initial pushback years ago was, "I don't want my recruiters chatting with candidates for a real long time." What we found is that it's just not the case. You've got these high-quality people. It's a candidate short market. They're not going to jump through your hoops, aka the apply process, but they've got a question. Those questions get answered fairly quickly, and both parties know I'm either in this cycle or I'm out of the cycle. Move on with my day. Joel: Jeff, I want to kind of go back to the messaging component and ask a little bit about the competition in light of that. Joel: If job seekers are engaging with employers via more or less a mobile web application. So their browser, Safari, whatever it might be. If they don't hear quickly from their question, how ... so with text messaging when someone messages you, you get an alert that says, "Hey you've got a text message." How does someone know if it's hours later that they've got a message waiting for them. Jeff: You mean somebody meaning the candidate, correct? Joel: Yes, the candidate. Jeff: Gotcha. So when a candidate chats we've got first name, last name, email. That's the information that we collect. So if a chat did not get picked up again, we tell that candidate after a period of two minutes, "Looks the recruiter is away from their desk. They'll follow up with you." When that recruiter finds that, you can click a button in our system which would then either email or send a text message via SMS if the candidate prefers that, to let them know that Jeff the recruiter is back online. Joel: My competitive question, it sounds like you have some components of SMS, but you're not using like a Twilio or something. Jeff: No. Joel: Is that in the offing, and if not, why not when you see competitors like Text Recruit, who Chad and I know pretty well. You've got Canvas, and of course all the automation tools. Most of them are text-message based. Was there a reason why you didn't, and if maybe you are, just tell us a little bit about that. Jeff: There is a reason that we didn't. There's certainly room for both. If I'm a large employer, and I have a database of 100,000 people that I want to communicate with and I have their cellphone numbers, then by all means, text those candidates. They've opted into that twice actually. That is a very good thing. Jeff: We are further up in the candidate file. I am the guy who is on, I'm doing a little bit of research because I had a bad week at work or whatever that may be, and I am looking at your Facebook page. I'm looking at your career site, I'm looking at jobs, and I end up on X, Y, Z job that could be a potential fit, but I'm curious. You're asking for ten years of experience, I've not seven, but I've got X, Y and Z in addition to that. That is the candidate we're grabbing. You cannot text that candidate because you do not have that candidate's cellphone. Jeff: We are gathering more at the top to bring them into the middle part of the funnel. Jeff: The second part of that answer that I'd love to bring up is that it's a very different thing. One of the reasons why our tool has so much momentum behind it right now is that we're providing a more informal and quick place to start this conversation. If it is via text message, it's a much more personal thing. It's more of we have some semblance of a relationship, whether I can be a candidate in your system. There is a relationship there. We found that candidates are less apt to jump into the texting conversation with no prior context. So we have built and focused very specifically on the top of that funnel enabling more candidates to get into the top, so that relationship is created. Once that relationship is created, then by all means use whatever vehicles make sense for that specific relationship. We have found that live chat works at the top. Chad: So from a website UX standpoint, like from your client's standpoint, I go to websites all the time and they have the little chat box down at the bottom or the bubble that's just kind of bouncing there to let you know that it's available or it starts to engage with you. I went to the FlashRecruit site, and I wasn't prompted to chat at all. I saw it down there, just kind of sitting there nice and quiet. Why? Why wouldn't you want to promote anybody coming in to start the engagement right out of the gate instead of just hope that they want to click on that bubble. Jeff: I think that there's a fine line from UX standpoint that goes from subtlety to annoying. We've got a variety of different versions. Customers can tel us they would like to be more prominent, I'll use that word as opposed to the other word I used. We can make it bounce. We've got tool tips. We've got hovers. It can be larger, it can be colors and it can flash, right? There's some stuff there, and so we can certainly do that. Jeff: On our website it's a little bit different. We are not recruiting for jobs. It's a slightly different scenario. At this point, we remained a little bit more subtle. Jeff: What I will also tel you though, is that from a candidate-experience standpoint, our customers who are fully integrated, it is not a "just a popup". It is not a link in a job. Literally you've got an apply option on a job, and so I'm looking at a developer in Detroit. You've got apply. You've probably got apply with Indeed, whatever it may be. Under there you have a button that says chat now. That is what we do and that is where our customers are seeing massive value. Candidates will click that, and then since we've got the recruiter data from the ATS or the career site provider, that chat notifies very specifically the recruiter or group who is attached to that specific rack. That is our differentiator. That is what we do. Chad: Back to the chat bubble. When I engaged the chat bubble it automatically, and this might obviously work differently on your site versus your client's sites, but it asked me for first name, last name, email address. Out of the gate, from a user standpoint, I'm just not going to give you that stuff, but I have engaged with other chats where they say, "I'm Jeff," or "Hi, I'm Joel, and what's your name?" One of those things, that's really cool engagement, and they get my name, and, "Hey, just in case our chat fails, can I get your email address to make sure that we can stay connected and answer your questions." Do you have the same functionality within your system, and if so, why aren't you using it on your own damn website? Jeff: Good question. Some of that is being built. Some of that exists today. There's a reason we've done it the way we've done it. There are a lot of live chat companies out there in the consumer space. It is a big industry and they all do very clever things like that, but there's a big difference here. If I'm going to look for a car, that dealership does not need to know who I am before they answer those questions. Applying for a job, talking about this job opportunity is a different scenario. We've provided this to all of our customers. We have this conversation a lot. What it comes down to is that the staffing firm or the employer, they want first name, last name, email when somebody wants to engage. Jeff: It's been customer-driven for us to make that decision. What we've also seen though is that the drop off is not that crazy. Although you mentioned you might not fill that out, what we found is that first name, last name, email has become very commonplace within the employment world. It hasn't proved to be much of a problem today. Jeff: That bit is by design, but we do continue to explore what that initial engagement could look like and should look like in the future. It is certainly in the roadmap. Chad: I think one of the worst things that we do, and all of us I think being in sales at one time, we have to listen to the customer. There's no question. When they really don't what the hell they're doing, especially from a UX standpoint. Look at these God damn websites, right? They suck. Then they want to tell us about how we can actually pull the UX together for chat when you guys are the experts in chat. Chad: What you're saying is, what we were just talking about is either in development or is already available, you're just not rolling it out because clients don't like it because they want that intel. Is that what I'm hearing? Jeff: So we pay a lot of attention to what our customers are telling us. What to build, what not to build, and that one is starting to bubble up more closely to the top, but we've got other priorities at this point. It's not on the two-week sprint, but it's certainly within the six month roadmap for sure. [crosstalk 00:21:28] Joel: Let me ask about that horizon a little bit. What does your solution look like 12 months/18 months from now, both as a solution as well as your company. I don't think you mentioned when you launched. Are you going to be looking for venture capital? What's sort of the vision both product wise and company wise for the business. Jeff: The recent version of the product today launched in June of last year. That's how far we've got there. Previous to that we had an 18-month BETA period, and we were very lucky to have that. We got a significant seed round. So previous to June of last year, we spent 18 months. We had a BETA product in hand. We put that in 32 different customers hands. They used it, they broke it, they did all of these different things. We spent a year and a half doing that before a June launch. Jeff: Since then, we've been growing very rapidly. We don't love to focus on fundraising, although it's an important part of growing a business, and we will be raising sometime in Q1, just for total transparency there. The more important part of that question is what it will look like from company standpoint, and so the number one thing, far and away the number one thing we hear from customers when they sign on with FlashRecruit is that they want more chats. The conversations are good. Recruiters enjoy the experience. They know they're getting people they would've otherwise. Then we've got some [inaudible 00:22:52] some pretty significant reporting to be able to return an ROI very specifically on the candidates that are coming through. That's not rocket science. Jeff: The question is, how do we get more chats. Where we are focused is continuing to build out our partnerships. When I told you that scenario in which a chat button lives next to the apply now button, as you would imagine that has a much higher click rate. It's much more powerful. That's great. We've got the career site covered. Jeff: The problem is how many of those candidates are actually hitting the career site. So in some of the big staffing companies, big employers you've got a relatively big number, but what about for the rest of the world. What we're working on today is creating partnerships with the career site providers and partnerships with the job boards to create that same experience because there are more eyeballs there that will convert a higher volume of chat, and that is what our customers are asking for. Jeff: We're very focused on the partnership front and finding ways to drive more appropriate candidates to our customers' chats. So I guess partnership is the short answer but that partnership could mean all sorts of things. Chad: Excellent, so tell us a little bit about pricing. How is it priced out? Jeff: So pricing is really simple. There's a lot of complication when it comes to pricing. We are a pure sass model. There's a very simple $99 a month platform fee. On top of that it's a per user price between $20 and $40. Chad: Per user per month, right? Jeff: Per user, per month. That actually caps off at 50 users. So from there we'd consider that enterprise, and we've got some more creative options at that point, but very, very standard [inaudible 00:24:24]. Chad: The pricing is all transparent on your website though, right? Jeff: Yes. Chad: Other than getting into enterprise level. We've seen from a lot of startups that they like to hold their pricing very close to the vest because in most cases they just don't know how to price it. I like the pricing. I think it's actually fairly cheap. Here's the big question. You know as well as I do the gorilla in this game is Facebook, and they're building out employment and they're going to be focusing on it more. How do you compete with a product that is going to be, because it's all glitz and glamour at this point, but companies want to get into it, and they want to figure out how to use it. How are you going to compete with those guys when everybody uses Facebook messenger? Jeff: That's a good question. Facebook actually has messenger accounts than they do Facebook accounts, which I think is super interesting. I know it sounds cheesy, but I think it's one of the coolest times from an HR tech standpoint. There's a lot of very cool things happening. The answer to your question though is in order to make recruitment chat work, there has to be three things that occur. There is the right candidate, there is the rec, so that job in the middle, and then there is the right recruiter who is attached to that job. That is why we are different. That is why live chat and all the consumer live chats can't do what we do. That's why messaging platforms can't do what we do. We've taken the time and worked through the details on how to say, "Okay, this is X, Y, Z rec. This candidate is looking at X, Y, Z rec. Here is the specific person that is attached to that. That's the person that we should be talking to, and once that conversation completes, get it into the system of record. Chad: I mean don't you see Facebook doing those types of things? They're already starting to take jobs from applicant tracking systems. Jeff: Yeah, which is super interesting. By all means, it could be possible. We spent the last two and half, three years very, very focused on it. Not to say we've got a headstart on a company like Facebook but what we have today is proving to be powerful for our customers, and so we are focused on maintaining that momentum and growth right now. Jeff: Plus there's a nother component there too. If I'm a candidate and I'm going to chat Facebook messenger, that means that I have to be okay with using my Facebook messenger account, right? Chad: Exactly. Right, gotcha. Jeff: That's not cool. I'm not going to do that. There's no way. It's not like there's a whole world of unemployed people out there who are just like, "Oh yeah," hopping around and looking for jobs. I think one of the other pieces of value that we have verse like, why don't I use G chat or what about the LinkedIn messaging capability that keeps growing. All those things, like part of our value. Chad: All right Jeff. Jeff: Ouch. Joel: We're at 28 minutes. You weren't droning on, but we're close in the time and we want to cut it off at 30 minutes, so with two minutes left, Chad and I will go through our commentary on the product, as well as giving you a final rating. Joel: I'm going to go ahead and go first. You're a great salesman. It's pretty clear that you've been doing this for a while, and your answers are really concise and well-formulated and I think that's great. I love mobile. I love messaging and that component of it. To me anything that moves us past email, traditional things like that is a good thing. Joel: I think that the challenges with the business are just like any really job board or solution out there, and it's being squeezed by the big boys. Chad mentioned Facebook. I could easily mention LinkedIn who has a messenger product, with Google I think Google for jobs and how people apply to openings is changing. I feel like there's a real competitive element here that's going to be really tough to overcome. Joel: For me not a dis on the product. I think the environment is going to be incredibly challenging for you and this next step of raising money is going to be really important. For now. We're giving you a cap, but it's kind of - Jeff: It's a golf clap. Joel: - a held back clap. Jeff: Yup, that's fair. Thank you. It's good to talk to you guys. Chad: Okay, so a couple of things. First and foremost, I want to give you kind of sales to sales guy's business advice. I was on the system this morning. Had a great conversation with Henry. Number one, he did great work. He deserves a raise, but one of the things you guys have to do, and you have to do this today, is you've got to devise a way to sell your chat through your chat, and stop this bullshit process of having to schedule a demo. You have somebody interested, and they're there. In some cases they might want to buy, but you're pushing them to next week for a demo. You've got to stop that today. You've got to figure a way to actually use chat to push them to sales people so that you can start a demo through the chat platform. That's number one. Chad: I'm going to go back with what Joel has to say is that competition is the key. It is crazy muddle out there with everybody talking about texting and messaging and Facebook and Google. Facebook is definitely the 800-pound gorilla, and the glitz and the glamour is what always companies find themselves gravitating toward. Chad: I believe you guys, as much as Joel has said, you guys have a big dog in this hunt from a short-term standpoint to be able to make this thing work. Long term is going to be the strategic focus that you guys are going to have to go fare. I think companies should look at you guys very, very diligently today, but long-term, I'm going to have to go with the golf clap as well. Chad: Good show. Jeff: I appreciate it. Joel: It's so anti-climactic. Sorry Jeff. Jeff: That's good. Joel: So you survived, Jeff. Any words? Jeff: No, other than appreciate the opportunity and I appreciate the feedback. It's something that we obviously think about quite often. When it comes to the sales experience when you hit the website. We have gone back and forth with that. There's a couple integration questions we want to make sure that it fits our ideal customer profile before we have that, so that's one of the reasons there, but it's good feedback. We're watching what's happening with the big guys, and that's a part of what our strategic planning looks like very, very often. It's good feedback. It validates what we know to be true. Joel: Right on. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Well Chad, that's another episode of Firing Squad. Everyone thanks for listening. Until next month. Chad: Thanks, Jeff. Joel: This is it. We out. Chad: Later. Jeff: Thanks, guys. Have a great holiday. Outro: This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com. #FiringSquad #TATech #FlashRecruit #Messaging

Ever heard the concepts behind sprint recruiting? Well, we've got the guy who wrote the book on the topic, super-recruiter Trent Cotton. A sneak-peek: Sprint recruiting applies the AGILE methodology to recruiting, enabling recruiting organizations to work smarter and more efficiently. It is built upon four principles to combat the pitfalls of recruiting. And oh, sister, do the boys dig into those principles. Want to learn more? Gotta listen to this Nexxt powered podcast! Joel (0s): Did you say revenue as a recruiter? What? Chad (3s): That is sexy? Any CEO or anybody hears that they're like, Oh yeah, keep talking, keep talking, Trent. INTRO (11s): 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 (31s): Oh yeah. We're recording on St. Patrick's day, which means this is the most sober thing I'll be doing all day. Welcome everybody. This is Joel Cheeseman of the Chad and Cheese podcast as always joined by my cohost and Chief Chad Sowash and today we are honored to welcome Trent Cotton, VP of Talent Acquisition and Retention at Bureau Veritas group. Trent, welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast you've been warned. Chad (1m 1s): Was retention originally a part of the job title, or did you just say, Hey, I need more responsibility through, so throw that retention shit on my shoulders? Joel (1m 9s): That's also what I get after a lot of tacos, a lot of retention. Trent (1m 15s): You know, the whole retention thing. I just, I like to be different. So it's actually, I think a vice president of Talent Acquisition and Talent Strategies. So I probably need to change the LinkedIn thing, but it was just kind of balls to the wall as soon as I started. So it was like update LinkedIn. Let's move on to the rest of the stuff. Chad (1m 35s): Okay. We'll give us a little Twitter bio about you. What did we miss color in the little color, outside the lines, if you want to fuck, this is the Chad and Cheese. Trent (1m 45s): All right. So I am a kind of a business person first. I just fell into the talent space. I always tell people I converted to the dark side in 2004 and spent probably the first six months working with HR professionals who said I would never make it. But the biggest difference for me, I kind of found my voice whenever I realized, Hey, I can talk the language of the client and then I can just bring in the HR stuff. So I didn't, you know, I didn't really stress that. I didn't know HR law. I didn't, well, I did because I spent a hell of a lot of time as a manager in HR for stuff that I was doing, so I knew what not to do. But, you know, I kind of took more of a consultative approach. And that was in 2004, 2005. Trent (2m 26s): I was a Lone Wolf, very outside of your normal HR nomenclature, caricature of what an HR person looks like. And now I'm so excited that it's kind of like 50/50. There's a lot of us that have come from the business side and we're taking a business approach to everything talent. Joel (2m 43s): Found your voice, Lone Wolf, your life sounds like a Hallmark special. Trent (2m 47s): You know, that's kind of the brand that I'm going for. You know, what I like to do is suck them in to the Hallmark and then, you know, kind of drop the rated R version on them. Joel (2m 56s): Then drop the Vice on them. Yeah. I like it. I like it. Trent (2m 59s): That's my price. Chad (3m 0s): Oh shit. So, so TA is really bad about creating their own fucking language. Right. So, so, so let's talk about, you're talking about coming from the business side. So when you step into a C-suite discussion, do you ever push your time to fill cost per hire metrics? Or do you automatically just kind of like spin that into how it either positively or negatively impacts the bottom line? Cause I mean, if we think about it, the C-suite gives a shit about generally one thing and that's the bottom line. Yes. They have other periphery kind of obvious obvious responsibilities, but that's where their eye is set. So how do you as a TA leader focus on that? Trent (3m 43s): Well, my question and believe it or not, in the interview process, one of the, one of the executives I was interviewing with asked me, so what's going to be your TA strategy whenever you come in, if you get the job? I said, what are your profit levers? What needs to be moved for you to be able to meet your goal from a revenue standpoint in 2021? Chad (3m 59s): Big applause. Joel (4m 1s): Yeah. Did you say revenue as a recruiter? What? Chad (4m 5s): That is sexy. any CEO or anybody hears that they're like, Oh yeah. Keep talking, keep talking Trent. Ooh. I want to hear that revenue now. Yeah. Joel (4m 14s): Yeah. Hallmark channel back to the hallmark channel. Trent (4m 17s): But you know, what's funny though, is that whenever I asked them that they said, but no, what's your, what's your TA strategy? I said, I cannot develop a strategy that's going to work unless you can answer that question. And I think it jarred him little bit, I guess, I guess a jarred him, because I had to have other interviews, but you know, whenever I, whenever I came in, you know, I didn't, I don't even know what our time to fill is. I don't care that that doesn't matter to me. What I want to know is are we filling the most critical roles? And you know, we kind of do sprint recruiting, which we can talk about a little bit later. So it changes the dynamics of the metrics. Whenever I'm doing consulting or coaching for other TA professionals. Trent (4m 57s): We'll talk about one as an example, I'll keep it anonymous. But they were just so incredibly proud. They positioned it as, Hey, we want to talk to you about your book. And I was like, okay, cool. If you have questions, let's get on the thing. But it was really, you know, about 20 minutes into and I'm going okay, are you trying to sell me on your version of Sprint and why it's better? Or do you really, I mean, I've got other things I could be doing? But they were touting the fact that they, with their system, they reduced the time to fill from 45 days to 32 days in a month. I said, Oh, that's fantastic. How'd you do it? And they went through their whole little thing. I said, okay, so what's your, what's your quick quit, right? Chad (5m 32s): It's not important. We're not talking about that. That's an entirely different discussion. Trent (5m 36s): Exactly. And they're like, well, we don't handle turnover. That's an HR thing I said, but we are HR. And turnover is a thing, especially if you're looking at the first year. So they said, I don't know. Well, we'll get back to you. Well, next week we hop on, and this is like after hours. And they said, okay, our quick quit rate, you wanted the 90, the 180 and then the 365. I said, yes. And I remember one of them was 42% turnover after the first six months. Chad (6m 2s): Ouch. Trent (6m 3s): And so I said, so you're selling your time to fill, right? To your clients as a win? Chad (6m 8s): Because that's what they got. Trent (6m 11s): I said, let me just break this down. I said, now my minor was statistics and finance. I'm a data nerd. You were telling your client, please give us a round of applause because 48% of the time we find the wrong person who would quit. Audience sound effects. (6m 24s): Boooo. Trent (6m 26s): Well, what do we measure? I said, you need to line them up with the goal. You know, if, if we need to hire in, you know, 16 revenue producers that have an average revenue per FTE of X amount, how often can you get them? And how long can you retain them? And to me, it was just really interesting because MTA it's like, no one wants to talk about turnover. And for me, those two go hand in hand, especially that first year. So if you going back to my weird title, whenever I'm talking to my friends, I tell people, I said, I own a candidate from the time they say hello until we send them a one year happy anniversary card. Joel (7m 2s): You're leading the witness here, Sprint Recruiting, what is it? Why should our audience care? Give us the four Chad (7m 9s): Oh one on, tell us about the book, I mean, it just came out. Trent (7m 13s): It did, ironically, I set a release date just because, you know, I'm a project guy, so I wanted to set a deadline. I set it for January the 25th and got everything done. Got it edited over the holidays and ended up accepting this role. And so it released my first day at Bureau Veritas. And I was like, okay, you know, why in the hell would I want to do one thing at a time? Let's just do everything all at one time. So really excited. It's actually the, the second book that I've written, the first one was the Seven Deadly Sins of HR and what makes it suck. But with, with Sprints, it goes through, yeah. I made a lot of friends with that, but it was about two years ago. I was a TA leader for a very small team supporting the tech function within the firm. Trent (7m 58s): And it was your traditional all the time. You know, hiring managers say, you're not finding this candidate as you're taking too long, you're not filling the roles that we need to. I go to the recruiters that are complaining about the managers. I pull up the metrics, we're hiring people. And actually I was kind of frustrated. I was, I was really looking at, okay, do I need to stay in recruiting? Because I don't know that this can be fixed. And I'm just kind of wish we had just gone through agile training. I spent a week in agile training, a week in Kanban and then a week in design thinking. And then I was listening to the book Scrum by Jeff Sutherland. And it clicked. I said, okay, there are principles here that we can apply. So the more I started thinking about it, there are four traditional pitfalls of recruiting. Trent (8m 39s): The first one is that everything's a priority, which means nothing is a priority. Loss of productivity, loss of efficiency. And it causes a lot of chaos. The second is that, you know, I'm a musician. So I like a rhythm, I like to hear the drum and everybody else falls in line. In most recruiting processes, there's no drum. It's just, kinda like the Lucille bowl hair on fire. Chad (8m 58s): Yeah. Need a good baseline, right? Trent (9m 0s): Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's like, you're, you know, like the Lucille ball thing where you're just kinda like stuffing chocolate everywhere. That that's what they thought behind the scenes with recruiting. Right. And then the other thing is that a lot of times we're out of touch with our clients, you know, we think that we're communicating a lot, but we're not communicating as often. And then the last thing is that the feedback loop is broken. And a lot of times, whenever I talk to TA people, they go, yeah, we have an SLA for feedback. Okay. Is it on the manager too? No, that's not in a FLA. FLAs are mutual accountability. So the four principles of Sprint counteract, those, those four pitfalls. The first one is, Chad (9m 37s): Wait a minute, before we get into the principles. I want to talk, those pitfalls are specifically, and those are business pitfalls because if you're managing a sales team, these are also issues. They are also issues that you've seen in like when you're starting new sales teams and there there's no rhythm that everything's a priority, et cetera, et cetera. So as reading this, it was like, Holy shit. I mean, you're bringing business principles that have been tried and true for many different aspects of the business, into recruiting. Trent (10m 8s): Well, and believe it or not just a quick little sidebar before we get into the principles. My daughter is graduating high school this year and it was right around the time that I was developing this process. Joel (10m 19s): Empty nester alert. Trent (10m 20s): Oh, I know. I know. I'm so excited! Not to get her out, it's just like this stage of her life. It's like seeing her become who she is and it's just, it's like, it's just freaking. Chad (10m 29s): It's amazing. Trent (10m 31s): I love it. Anyway, she was freaking out. She was taking AP classes. She's, you know, she was the drum major she's extracurricular queen and having a total meltdown over one weekend, trying to plan out how her week was going to go. So I, I took her up to Office Max, we got a little foam board, got some post-it notes. I drew the lanes out, kind of put her on a sprint essentially. And I said, okay, I want each subject has got a different sticky note, different color, sticky note, put down everything that you need to do. That's your backlog. And so she goes and puts it down. I said, okay, how many points on the grade? Or what weight is this project or this studying for this task going to be versus this one. Trent (11m 11s): And so she kind of put those down. I said, all right, now let's look at your week. What do you need to get done? She had like, I think 17 little post-it notes on there. And I kid you not in 30 minutes, she had it all charted out and she knew what she needed to get done and where she was in the process. I said, okay, let's set a point value per day. What do you want to accomplish? And she did it in our conversations at night was, Hey dad, I'm 50% above my goal, which means that I have some extra capacity. I'm going to go ahead and get a jump on this one. So that way maybe that Thursday night I'll be able to just chill the hell out. Yeah. I said, well, what if? And it, to me, that's whenever it clicked. I said, if a high school student can get this and make it work, recruiters can do the same. Chad (11m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. Direction and framework. I think that's what every human needs. Trent (11m 52s): Yes. Well, the brain naturally prioritizes information, gold, bronze, silver, you know, one, two, three, all of that kind of stuff. So it's just in the way that the psychology works. And what sprint does is it plays it to our advantage. So the first principle is, is the sprint itself. You're looking at a two week stint. So what I do is every two weeks, when we start to sprint, I go into our applicant tracking system. I do a data dump of all the open positions and so snapshot. So business-wise, it's like a balance sheet. It's a snapshot on that day. These are the jobs that are open. That was the first thing. We go to the line of business and say, here are all the jobs at this point, this is all we want to talk about, unless you have something that's really important that we that's coming down the pike over the next two weeks and we need to add. Trent (12m 37s): So it stops that let me dig myself out of a sand pit. So that the sprint is the first one. The second is that we use points to get the business to prioritize. So here are your 45 positions, Mr. Manager, Mrs. Manager. Over the next two weeks, what is the most critical to your business in terms of prioritization for us to focus on? We're going to focus on all of them, but we're going to front load this sprint, with making sure that you have candidates to be able to meet the needs and get the sprint done in a very successful manner. So give them a hundred points. You know, we try to, we kind of walk them through like a four quadrant type of things to think of the vertical axis as being impact. And that's, I tell the managers, that's what you own impact on the business. Trent (13m 19s): The horizontal is effort from the recruiter. So you have your high impact, high effort. Those are the ones that it's going to take a while for us to search, or we're really going to have to kind of dig in cause this is a niche. That's mission critical. They need 60% of their points to go to those types of positions. You go down to low impact, high effort. Those are, those are the ones that we're still going to have to do a lot of sourcing, but they're not as critical to that business. And that, that sprint, it's a great way for us to get a job. So if we can fill them fantastic, another 20% goes there. Nexxt (13m 52s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt Andy, if a company wants to actually come to next and utilize your database and target texting candidates, I mean, how does that actually work? Right? So we have the software to provided two different ways. If an employer has their own database of opted in text messages, whether it's through their ATS, we can text on their behalf or we have over eight and a half million users that have opted into our text messaging at this point. So we can use our own database. We could dissect it by obviously by geography, by function, any which way some in sometimes we'll even parse the resumes of the opted in people to target certifications. Nexxt (14m 36s): So we really can dive really deep if they want to hone in on, you know, just give me the best hundred candidates that I want to text message with and have a conversation back and forth with versus going and saying, I need 30,000 retail people across the country, and that's more a yes/no text messaging back and apply. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's next with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com. Joel (15m 14s): And how do you wrangle in a team environment? How does that work specifically in your case? Trent (15m 20s): In what aspect, Joel? Joel (15m 21s): How big is your team? How is, how are these projects divided? Is it a big room with everybody or a Zoom call? And we go through each job individually, are recruiters assigned to managers? Yeah. I'm just curious. Chad (15m 34s): And how often is it like every two weeks? Trent (15m 36s): Yeah. So bi-weekly, we have a meeting, we call it the, the retro and Allo call. So we do a retrospective of the previous sprint, what worked, what didn't and I put the fish on the table. So if the managers are not giving us feedback, which is one of the principles, 48 hours, they have to give us feedback or I'll ice their position. And I don't make a lot of friends that way. Chad (15m 56s): Ouch take that power! Trent (15m 60s): But it retrains them. Chad (16m 1s): Yeah. Trent (16m 1s): And then the other aspect of it that we'll cover is, is WIP limits a work in progress. So think about your normal recruiter. This one's really, really important. What are they do? They send 50 candidates over, over the span of two weeks, or the manager asks for 50 candidates only to go back and hire one of the five or so that we sent them three weeks ago. Look at the damn five. These are the top five that we think make a decision, pull the trigger, let us all move on with our lives. This forces it. So our goal, once we have that sprint, once we have our allocations to start looking now at our swim lanes. So recruiter, swim lane, hiring manager, submitted swim lane, and then the hiring manager interview. And we want to put a cap, a maximum amount that the managers can look at. Trent (16m 42s): So the first one is it's five across the board. So five scheduled interviews, maybe five sitting, waiting. Once we hit those WIP limits for that top priority, we move on to the next one. That's where our rhythm comes in because now I'm waiting on that last principle, which is feedback. Once I get the feedback, I can go back to it, move on. So, okay. You like to two of the five, I got another five, let's pick our top three. I get those scheduled. I go right back to the next one that I'm sourcing on in priority. So it gives some accountability and you know, the reporting and stuff that, that built it. It's kind of funny because I love it. The recruiters, whenever I'm training them, you know, especially like in a new organization that go, Oh yeah, heck yeah, this works. And then I go to the hiring manager and they're like, yeah, yeah. Trent (17m 23s): Then I start laying down the gauntlet and going, Hey, you're not playing by the rules. That's what everybody's feelings get hurt. Chad (17m 28s): So how manual is it though? I mean, how much, how much work does the recruiter have to do manual input into the system to be? Is it their normal process that they're used to? Or, I mean, how does, how does this actually change for them other than prioritization? Trent (17m 43s): So I take the Lord of the rings approach. Whenever it comes to reporting, we have one report to rule them all. Chad (17m 49s): Okay. Trent (17m 50s): All right. So the thing at my previous firm, I'm all about simplicity, man, and laziness. Chad (17m 58s): I have a degree in marketing too. So therefore. Trent (18m 2s): Therefore I am. Joel (18m 3s): Find your voice, find your voice, baby. Trent (18m 5s): I'm never going to live that down. Anyway. So at the previous firm we use Google sheets. And you know, the recruiters kind of kept up their little status reports, you know, we've got a status, we got notes and all that other kind of stuff, which is standard. You know, most ATSs, they suck in my opinion, but they are built for me. Yeah. Let's, let's talk. Joel (18m 24s): You use success factors, right? Trent (18m 26s): Yes. Joel (18m 27s): So it's funny that you're using Google sheets, but have success factors. But we talked about them Chad (18m 32s): That was at the other place. Trent (18m 34s): Yeah. That was at the other place. Chad (18m 37s): Now he's got a handyman out on him now. Trent (18m 40s): Yeah. I use Smartsheet now because it's hard in the system, in an ATS to configure it to how Sprint works because you can't put a point value in there. There's gotta be some way that we can track it. Chad (18m 53s): So is that a software? Smartsheets? Trent (18m 55s): Smartsheet is like Excel or Google sheet on steroids. I love it. Because I can put some automation in there. So whenever a recruiter goes in and changes the status on a requisition to say WIP limit, an email goes out to the hiring manager and says, Hey, you are now at your WIP limit, maximum number of candidates and moving on to the next one in priority, you have 48 hours to give me feedback. Joel (19m 15s): So it's like a Trello for recruiting. Trent (19m 17s): It is exactly. And that's the thing that I like about Smartsheet over what we had at the bank. In Smartsheet I can put it in a Kanban. So whenever I'm having my daily standup with the recruiting team, I see where we are in the status. We start with everything that has points. How are we moving them across the board? It's nice and it's visual, which most of us in recruiting, we're visual people. So we can kind of see how are we moving this down the line or moving the ball down the field. And then we say, okay, now that we've talked about sprint, let's talk about the rest of our jobs. And the really awesome thing, cause I'm a, I guess, psychological sadist. I love to kind of put people through planes and watch whenever they start turning the corner and things start hitting, there's always a point whenever I'm doing this consultation with clients that recruiters start realizing, okay, you got 10 days in a sprint. Trent (20m 4s): There's usually by the third sprint of six weeks in, they go, Hey, I'm actually at a point where I can't really do anything on the rest of my sprint roles. Is it okay if I reach out to this executive and see, like, how are they going to prioritize the next sprint? Hell yes. Get a jump on it. Chad (20m 18s): Yeah. Trent (20m 18s): And that capacity standpoint, you know, I call that the capacity mindset shift. It starts at day eight. Usually that's the first, first time that it kind of peaks its head. And then over time I start tracking. When does that? You know, we go from day eight, today, seven today, six. And then as a leader, I can start looking at my team in say, okay, this person has got sprint. They understand the process. They're managing their board. They have extra capacity to let me go in and get them to help out. At an organization level, I know what's important so I can go, and rather than saying this, person's got 68 . I don't care. I don't care if they have 68 . If they have 25 jobs that have points, that's where I'm going to get concerned. Chad (20m 58s): What's the story. Now, when you go to the C-suite, you're setting this up to focus on business prioritization, right? What's that, what's that conversation look like? Trent (21m 8s): Oh, well we sure as hell don't talk about time to fill. We talk about points. We talk about on average, I think we're three sprints in, so I wasn't going to start sprint until like 30 or 45 days into. Chad (21m 20s): You couldn't help yourself. Trent (21m 21s): Oh, dear God. In heaven. I was like, this shit I was having like PTSD from before. I was like, I can't deal with this shit. We're putting these people in sprint. But so now, like whenever I'm meeting with the executives, we do like monthly management reviews. It's a totally different conversation. I said, okay, let's look back at February. We had this many positions come in, we filled this many. So traditional metric, we need to keep an eye on that because I want to see are we trending up and number of jobs? And if so, I want to know why the next part that we go over is I've got them an automatic dashboard, that they just go and click and anybody in the organization, that's a hiring manager can go and look and see where they are. We started talking about week over week sprint. So a hundred points last sprint, or the first sprint is February. Trent (22m 3s): We hit 60%. The last sprint of the month, we hit 25. Part of that was because, you know, half the team sits in Houston. They were iced over for, you know, close to a week. But I can also go in and look because we tracked number of points obtained against the budget. But then for all of those roles that we closed that do not have points, we get extra credit. So I'm able to track two trend lines. One of the conversations I had, I think last week with one of the executives, they're like, you're not filling the right roles. I said, well, look at the sprint. Look at this number. You've got 38 extra jobs that were filled outside of the 10 that you allocated points. So either the recruiter and I'll find this out, either the recruiter is taking the easy way out or you are diverting our prioritization and we need to, we kind of need to go and say, what is prioritization? Trent (22m 48s): Let's go back to kindergarten. Let's define it for you and the client because you're screwing with my productivity. Joel (22m 53s): Nice. Well, speaking of productivity, let's talk about recruitment tech for a second. You mentioned you, you endorse one product, which is nice for the company. You do quite a bit of stuff. And this is actually my most important question. Is it pronounced hire tool? Or hired Tool? Trent (23m 15s): Hired tool. Chad (23m 17s): They just can't smell that shit right. Joel (23m 19s): I'm guessing by the number of YouTube videos you've done for them. You liked their products. How did? They got Seek Out, Hiring Solved, their competitors? I guess what, what are some tools technology-wise that you can't live without and that you, you love and use almost daily? Trent (23m 35s): Yeah. You've already named my first one. The thing I love about, about Hire Tool is it's kind of like an all-in-one. So I've got this incredible AI sourcing machine learning, sourcing platform that goes across 45 different platforms. So I'm not just LinkedIn or CareerBuilder as if they are still relevant. Indeed. Joel (23m 52s): Hold on. LinkedIn is not relevant? Did I hear that right? How about CareerBuilder? Trent (23m 57s): Yeah. LinkedIn's not too far behind them. Joel (24m 1s): All right. Keep, keep going, keep going, Trent. Trent (24m 5s): So we've got, you know, access to 45 different platforms. So it's an incredible sourcing tool and it's also got market insights. So once I I've kind of got my search, I'm looking at the sample candidates and I go, yeah, I'm on the right track. I can go and generate market insights that tells me everything from top schools, top locations. What's the average salary based off of, you know, I think they use salary.com, Indeed, GlassDoor, but don't hold me to it. But anyway, it's like real life stuff. I don't have to wait 18 months for a damn survey that tells me what to pay someone now. So I can build a recruiting strategy. And what I do is, is whenever I'm sitting with executives, I pull up my screen and I show them and they helped me build out the search. Trent (24m 45s): And then we look at, you know, who are our competitors? I can do competitive analysis, you know, go and pick ABC company, DEF and XYZ company. And look at project managers. What are they paying their people? Where are these people located? How competitive are we? So it's got that, that talent strategy. And then you've got the CRM built right in. And to me, it's just kind of an all-in-one suite. It's probably one of my, that was the first thing that I lived with. And whenever I joined the company, actually, before I joined the company, I accepted the offer on a Tuesday. I emailed my rep at Hired Tool, Jonathan, huge shout out to Jonathan, but I emailed him and copied my new boss, her partner, and said, I need y'all to find time. I start on a Monday. I need a meeting on either Wednesday or Thursday of that week. Trent (25m 27s): Maggie and you know, team. I want you to demo the product. Joel (25m 30s): Hired Tool is the one, one solution to rule them all for the most part, for you? Trent (25m 35s): Yes, sir. For me. Joel (25m 36s): How about real quick communication wise? Right. We talk a lot about chat` bots, automation, text recruiting, picking up the phone and talking like, what is sort of been the best way to communicate with candidates in your world today? Trent (25m 49s): In the world today I'm still learning. So I come from banking and now I'm in everything testing, inspection and certification. So it's a totally different job market. We've got a huge group that they don't email. They don't, it's kind of like the, I felt like I was about to do the car to be sold. They don't email, they don't cook, but they, you just have to try to like pick up the phone and call them. And even then it's, it's, you know, calling and texting, but then we've got another group that is still on LinkedIn and all that. One of the products that I am enamored by is a Wade and Wendy. They, you know, it's kinda, kinda got that, that front end going out, helping you source, evaluating the candidate, that real time aspect. Trent (26m 31s): And I liked the interface. It's a lot more human centric, even though, you know, whenever it introduces itself, Wendy the I'm an AI recruiter. I was talking with the company not too long ago and they were sharing some antidotes about how candidates like hitting on them or, you know, wanting to take the AI out to dinner whenever they started and everything to me, that from a candidate experience, that means, Hey, you're on to something. But then the Wade aspect of it, so someone doesn't qualify, Wendy turns it over to Wade, wait, goes and does some career pathing. So as a retention strategy, to me, that's a fantastic way to unleash that on the internal population and give them the opportunity to kind of drive their career. And it's all going to be based off of data. Joel (27m 13s): So that that's kind of like, that's a flavor of the AI that I'm looking at for this next stage. Analytics are huge to me. I have worked with Busier in the past. It's probably one of my favorite analytic tools. I can, I can look at turnover. I can look at it, broken down by diversity. I can look at trends, anything that I want to equity, all that stuff, it's right at the tip of my fingers. And it puts it in fantastic graphics that are easy to understand. I'm a data nerd. Vizard is a fantastic way of just kind of putting it in a way that both HR people and the business understand it. And it puts them speaking the same language. Those are, those are kind of like my three favorites right now. Chad (27m 53s): So candidate engagement, and obviously the experience is huge. And on page 92 of the Sprint recruiting manual, there's this awesome bar chart. It says the worst thing to hear from recruiters, small bar says, sorry, you didn't get the job. Big bar, nothing. Right? So what, what are you guys doing to ensure that all of those candidates, they're receiving some type of interaction there. They're getting some type of feedback. You talk about Wade and Wendy, but what overall do you think is the best to kind of like pop down for that one communication tech that's out there today in recruiting? Trent (28m 34s): You know, honestly, this is, this is where I struggle because there is part of me that would love to find a way to automate that. But then there's another part of me that that's a human thing. If I pick up the phone and I hear your voice and I talk to you and I try to get you interested in role, or I'm evaluating you for a role and we decided not to go, it takes me two minutes to pick up the phone and call you. You're going to have a much better taste in your mouth from that kind of an experience than me talking to you, getting you all hyped up. And then suddenly I just sent you an email like 45 days later, Hey, we decided to go with another candidate. That's just kind of my corporate role. So as far as tech goes, I don't know that there's a tech platform out there that I would trust without that? That's a human thing, but what I'll do look at it from a strategy standpoint, what can I automate to take away some of the other crap? Trent (29m 20s): So that way the recruiting team can go and focus on those human elements that I want them to own. So that that's kind of my strategy or my thought process behind it. Chad (29m 29s): Gotcha. Joel (29m 30s): Finding his voice on the Chad and Cheese podcast, everybody. Trent Cotton thanks for coming on the show buddy. Trent (29m 35s): I enjoyed it. Joel (29m 36s): For those who want to know who want to know more about you or want to get a copy of Sprint Recruiting, which let me add, does not involve actual physical sprinting. Chad (29m 45s): Thank God for Cheeseman. Joel (29m 46s): Where do they get the book? Where do they, where do they connect with you? Trent (29m 50s): Definitely on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter @trentcotton. You can follow my blog. I go into some case studies and some other little topics on sprintrecruiting.com. And of course you can go to Amazon and type in Sprint Recruiting: Innovate, Iterate, Accelerate Your Recruiting. And please leave a review if you do read the book because I read them all and I try to respond. Joel (30m 12s): Happy St. Patrick's Day, everybody. Trent, Chad, let the Guinness start flowing. We out. Chad (30m 17s): We out. Trent (30m 18s): We're out. OUTRO (31m 11s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

If you've been in employment for any period of time, you know Lars Schmidt, author of the Bestselling Book, "Redefining HR," podcast host, founder at Amplify, and Fast Company contributor. If you don't know Lars, well, let us introduce you. Hot off the presses of his latest book, the boys dig into everything swimming around in Lars' head at the moment. And trust us, it's a deep, deep dive. Enjoy, the water's warm. Knowledge building goodness powered by Sovren AI so human you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Sovren (0s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. ou'll want to take it to dinner. INTRO (1m 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 (1m 25s): Oh yeah. What's up everybody? This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host in chief. Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my cohost Chad Sowash Chad (1m 37s): Chief, my ass. Joel (1m 38s): We are, we are super jazzed today. It only took four years for us to get Lars Schmidt on the show. Lars. Welcome. Lars (1m 46s): Hey guys, it's good to be here. Has it been four years? Has it been that long? Joel (1m 50s): Well, podcasting for four years, last time we saw you was drunk on a stage in London. Thanks for breakfast. Or at least according to Chad, only one of us was drunk. We won't mention who. Lars (1m 59s): On our way too. How about that? We we're on the road. Joel (2m 3s): Yeah. I feel like you, a lot of people know you, but some don't, so let's get the introductions out of the way. You have a lot of shit going on on LinkedIn, but you want to funnel it for the audience as founder of Amplify HR and the author of How Millennials Are Redefining HR, how millennials are doing it is my own, a little title for the book, but we can get into that in a little bit. Anything else that we missed there that the listeners should know? Lars (2m 31s): That's good. Joel (2m 32s): Okay. All right. I did my job. Chad, it's your ball now. Chad (2m 35s): So give us some background, some story around a book. You write a book and this is not, I mean, coloring book for God's sakes. I mean, this is total research, big names, big wigs, and an enormous amount of focus in discipline to put out a book like you just put out. Joel (2m 55s): Did you say this was an ego project and Lars wasn't hugged enough as a kid. Lars (3m 1s): Parents were pretty generous of hugs to be honest. Joel (3m 3s): So what was the Genesis of the book? Lars (3m 5s): The book really came from a lot of things that I had been working on before I actually signed the deal to write the book. You know, so the, you know, from, from the work in HR open source through, you know, the, my first book on Employer Branding For Dummies, through writing for fast company and Forbes and whoever else and the podcast, it was like, I had all these different things, these different channels, if you will, that were giving me insight into how the field of HR was evolving and what companies were doing that was different and unique. And so I had, you know, I'd been building all of these disparate connections, research writings, et cetera, before I kind of said, okay, you know what I need to, I want to package all of this in a way that tells more of a cohesive, you know, full story, rather than just focusing on a practice or an event or a person. Lars (4m 0s): And so in that sense, like a lot of the work I've been doing over the last five years was, you know, kind of foundational to the book. So when I, you know, set about to actually start writing the book, I, you know, the idea is a lot of the research, a lot of the connections and people that I knew I wanted the interview to go deeper. We're already in place. I wasn't starting from scratch, which was probably the only reason that the book got written during a pandemic. If I had to do that all from scratch, that would have been a little rough. Chad (4m 27s): So you're talking about key shifts from legacy HR to modern HR. What are some of those key shifts that you think are priority for HR and why the hell has it taken so long for us to do it in the first place? Lars (4m 40s): Yeah, I mean, so that last sentence assumes that everybody's done it and they haven't, you know, I think HR as a whole right now is kind of a spectrum. You know, you have some operators at the leading edge that are doing a lot of the practices that I spotlight in the book. You've got, you know, the other side of that spectrum and, you know, still old school personnel, transactional, yada yada. And then you're the bulk of the field is somewhere in the middle. And so, you know, for me, it was really about trying to shine a light on what, you know, interesting and progressive and modern HR looks like and do it in a really tangible way. So the book is full of case studies and practitioner spotlights and stories of people actually doing the work. Cause that's not me, kind of bringing that to life, really with the hope that that middle kind of tier of the industry can see some of those practices and be like, you know what, I can do that. Lars (5m 27s): Or I can do a version of that. And hopefully, you know, kind of move more people towards that more progressive approach to the field. Joel (5m 35s): And in writing a lot of books, talk about who you're writing this book for, and who's reading it. I, I feel like you're very central to sort of North America and your own experiences and contacts, but it has a very global vibe to me. Are you seeing a lot of buyers globally? And in what parts of the globe do you see action, and how does that stack up versus some of the other books that you've written? Lars (5m 57s): Yeah, I mean, so certainly the, there it's found a pretty large audience in the Media and part of that is, you know, I was able to spotlight different practitioners work there. You know, my publisher Kogan page is based out of London. I'm sure that helps, but I've also built a pretty sizable network in Europe and specifically in the UK. So when it came to launching the book, I kind of had that pre-built audience that was already, you know, interested in, you know, the story is, and kind of what would be covered North America would be next, you know, not as much in Latin America, you know, some in APAC, certainly the, the audience has been much broader than the employer branding book that I wrote a couple of years ago. Lars (6m 39s): You know, obviously that's a niche topic. I think it holds up and seasoned people, but it is a niche. Whereas this book, I think, applies to a much broader audience Chad (6m 47s): Dig into the employer brand space a little bit deeper just for a minute. Why does HR care now after not giving a shit for decades about employer brand? I mean, what is the major factor in why employers are caring more about brand today than they did two decades ago? Lars (7m 4s): Yeah, I mean, cause hiring is hard when you're, when you're competing for the same types of talent that everybody else is competing for. And you've gotta be able to find ways to differentiate yourselves and kind of the employee experience and what somebody is going to get out of working for your company, you know, beyond just being a recognizable brand. And I think that that shift probably happened right around 2011, you know, with the, you know, kind of ubiquity of social media and people leveraging, you know, Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook in different ways. And so, you know, employer branding has been around for awhile, but that was that kind of digital iteration and shift in employer brand is when companies started getting much more deliberate and thoughtful and specific. Lars (7m 47s): I mean, back then, it was like you threw the hashtag jobs on a tweet and you'd make hires off that. Like, I, you know, Twitter was our number four source of hire at NPR in 2011. I mean, it was crazy. So, but you know, now that would never happen because there's so much noise and everybody's doing it. Like we were, had a first mover advantage, then, you couldn't do that now, but it's, but yeah, I I'd think probably right around 2011 is when that shift happened. Chad (8m 13s): Isn't there also a layer of covering your own ass as well, because before Twitter, before Facebook, before LinkedIn, somebody had a bad experience with your organization, they told three people. Now they're telling 30,000. So I think there might be more of a reaction to that then, because they're trying to look for good people. Yeah. Lars (8m 35s): Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on how they look at it, right? Like, I mean, even back in the day, like pre 2010, you had fucked company. And that was, you know, that was a great site. You know, it didn't allow for individual reviews, but it, it certainly covered some of the, you know, shady aspects of companies and how they hire. I think if, if you look now, you know, companies, there's an offensive approach to social media and there's a defensive approach, right? Offensive, meaning actively using those channels to kind of convey what it's like to work at your organization and own the reality of it, right? Like the highs and the lows, like you, you know, good employer, branding shares both. And then there's defensive, which is like, how do we clean up last store? Like, how do we clean up Indeed or comparable, or some of the other sites out there where people are leaving negative reviews. Lars (9m 19s): Right. And that's, it's kind of backwards thinking, it's like, well, why don't you address the thing that led the person to write that review, rather than trying to clean up the reviews? So, so yeah, there's, there's, you can kind of look at it almost as an offense and defensive play. Joel (9m 33s): You talk in the book, the sort of the evolution of employer branding. And I'm curious your thoughts on how COVID is going to reframe employer branding from our perspective, it seemed like as soon as the virus and the pandemic hit, some of the first people were to go or be laid off for employer branding managers. So what is the future of employment branding look like as we come out of the pandemic? Lars (9m 57s): Yeah. I mean, look, I think it's what I hope it is and what I think it will be as somewhat of a resetting, you know, we employer branding, it became kind of an arms race as more and more companies were investing in employer brand managers and resources and budgets. And so, you know, we kind of defaulted to hyperbole and like looking at all the cool shit we've got and look at our, you know, we still sold ping pong tables. Now we sold three flavors of kombucha and you know, all these amazing office amenity is unlike no one really cared about that, but we didn't, you know, we still sold it thinking they might, but that never really truly was a differentiator for the majority of candidates. And so now we're at a place where obviously offices are irrelevant today, that will change. Lars (10m 39s): You know, people will be back in offices at some point, to some extent, it won't be the same, but you know what, we'll have physical spaces to go to for those of us that go into offices. But I think that we are the language I would like to see, start to shift, right. It's not about like, we're the best, we're the greatest. And like, let's find all the hype buzzwords and try to insert as many of them we can into our copy. It's, let's kind of recalibrate a bit, to like, what is the employee experience like here? What's differentiated and what will be interesting? And I think this will put more stress on employer brand is, as more companies that have employees, that have the ability to work remotely, choose to have either fully remote or hybrid structures, you know, and people can really work anywhere from anywhere. Lars (11m 25s): Work itself kind of becomes a bit of a commodity, right? People can easily move from one thing to the next. And so, you know, from a recruiting perspective, it's going to become even more important that you can convey and articulate a clear value prop about why somebody would want to do what they do at your company. When they, you know, have dozens of choices of top tier companies, they could do that same work from their same home without having to relocate. Right. Like, that's a huge difference than world we were in a year ago. Chad (11m 54s): So moving from ping pong tables to actually something that's meaningful. Lars (11m 59s): Yeah. How refreshing, right? Chad (12m 2s): Yeah. Yeah. So talking about the opportunity to scale, right. Because one of the things that we have to get ready for in recruiting in HR overall is scalability. So explain what you mean in the book by building for scale? Is that mainly predicated on internal mobility and tech, where does that go for you? Lars (12m 24s): Yeah, for me, the kind of lens through which I looked at that in the book was more about really building foundational elements of the kind of talent HR people strategy, however you want to frame it in the early days, so that as you scale and grow, you're building on processes that are designed to scale and grow. And, you know, historically we've been terrible at that, right? And it's not, it's not HR has fault. There's a variety of factors, but you know, companies that were in hyper-growth mode, it was like, okay, we just need to, you know, 80% of our HR and people, operations, budget resources are focused on recruiting. Like we're just trying to get people in the door. Lars (13m 5s): We need more people, people, people, and, you know, you're, you're growing and you're scaling off Excel sheets and, you know, all of these like random, you know, tools and systems that are taped together. And then you hit, you know, 200, 300, 400 people and you're, it's breaking. And then, and then you have to kind of go back retroactively and rip out all of that stuff, put in new systems, new tech, new approaches, new leadership in many cases. And so, you know, having to do that, once you've hit a critical size is massively disruptive to the business. And so the approach is more of like, okay, we know that we're going to be going through this growth trajectory. Yeah. We probably need to hire a head of people or a CPO earlier than we would have. Lars (13m 49s): We probably need to invest in a tech infrastructure built for a company that's 500 to a thousand people rather than 100 earlier. So that when we are at that stage, you know, we can still be building on that tech that's in place. So that that's really the kind of, you know, theme of the chapter. Chad (14m 6s): Isn't that kind of HRS fault though, because I mean, it's our job to be able to bring the business case. And one of the things that we're really bad at in HR and TA is to be able to demonstrate how scalability and what we're doing in our tech affects the actual bottom line either positively or negatively. So you say it's not HR's fault, but really shouldn't, we take responsibility and start taking accountability for these types of numbers so that we can have the bigger conversations with the C-suite. Lars (14m 36s): So I I'd say yes, but I'd put an asterisk by that. Cause I think if you look at a lot of startups, you know, thwey have an office manager who moves into an HR manager and the HR business partner who is now asked to run the whole team, like they're in those scenarios that I mentioning there, they had junior talent that they're scaling with. And so, you know, yes, you could say like, shouldn't, that person have said like, Hey, this is, but like, they don't know they haven't done that before. So I think, I think that is why you're starting to see a shift in particularly in startups hiring that more seasoned HR leader earlier on, because they do know those things and they can push back and they can say, Hey, look, I've done this two, three, four times over. Lars (15m 17s): Here's what we need and when we need it. Right. So that I think, you know, yes, that is HRS responsibility, but all too often, they have a junior person in that role, that's just not equipped to, you know, they don't, they don't have that context, they don't have that direct experience to be able to steer the leadership team in that direction. Joel (15m 35s): A couple of things in the book, sort of going up a little bit back to employment, employer, branding that you talk about in the book that I want you to, to expand upon. One of them is sort of the ongoing performance reviews in the book. I think you talk about, they should be daily to some degree. And I think a lot of us agree that the yearly performance review is pretty broken. And the second thing I think that piggybacks off of that is managing burnout, which you talk about, which I think the work from home environment has sort of reframed what that looks like. So talk about the importance of those two things. Maybe some companies that are, that are doing it pretty uniquely. Lars (16m 9s): Yeah. I mean, I think in performance, you know, daily is probably a bit much, but I think, you know, whether it's quarterly or monthly or whatever the framing is, it's gotta be a cadence more than any like annual reviews or that's just a Relic of the past. It doesn't fit how we work. It doesn't fit how people want to be developed and coached and have expectations. Like, am I hitting the mark? Am I missing the mark? Like, what am I, what do I need to do better to, you know, to be excelling in my manager's eyes? And so that, you know, that I think is pretty clear. You know, one of the case studies I go into in the book is from Survey Monkey, which, you know, they, Becky Cantieri, Chief People Officer walked through like how they shifted from their annual review process to a quarterly review process. Lars (16m 50s): And it was received really well. And what was cool about them is they actually then gave away like all the templates they used in that shift. They open-sourced sourced all of that. So, that was one example. And I think, you know, burnout, especially kind of, you know, coming out of 2020 and like we're still in a pandemic, right? We're not over this yet. I think that every, every employee has been hit hard, but in different ways, by all the circumstances of the past year, right? Whether it's Covid, whether it's working from home, whether it's kids at home, whether it's, you know, the, the conversations around social inequity and black lives matter, like everybody has been impacted in multiple angles and multiple ways. And they're carrying that with them every day for a CPO specifically, or CHRO or whatever the title might be, if you've got a really unique burden of all of that, because they're going through that as an individual, they're going through that within the context of, you know, leading their executive team and helping guide all the decisions that they're having to make as an executive team for the direction of the business. Lars (17m 48s): And they're going that for, you know, their own HR team who is on the front lines in many cases of a lot of these very emotional situations that these employees are experiencing and all of their employees, and they can't talk to their peers like within the organization, they can't talk to their colleagues about what they're experiencing. So, you know, I've seen a lot of really robust CSRO peer networks kind of flourish of last year because people needed a place to go and like talk to people who actually understood what they were going through and could, you know, commiserate and console in some cases. But I think too often they were addressing their own needs last. And that really, I think, caused a spike in burnout that we're still carrying today. Chad (18m 30s): Yeah. And Joel, he loves, you know, having more empathetic managers and HR, those types of things, going back to. Joel (18m 38s): I've been burned out on Chad since 2007 so I'm trying to get some guidance on that. Lars (18m 44s): We have support networks to help you get through that, Buddy. Chad (18m 46s): But yeah, no kidding. So you talked about, you know, a little bit about black lives matter and I mean, there's, there's definitely a culture shift and not to mention there's a different, I guess you could say conversation about things you can talk about at work. Right. And things you can't talk about at work. I mean, things have changed over the past year plus in really moved the needle in so many different areas. So as you talk about culture, can you talk about what culture might look like or should look like in 2021, 2022 to try to get away from the past and how rigid and how sterile it has been. Lars (19m 22s): Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the shifts that I kind of described in the book specifically around the CSRO role or CPO role, but I think it applies much more broadly than that. It is this move from being infallible, right? This like buttoned up polished archetype, that would say the right things and, you know, always kind of, you know, just a super, highly polished. Chad (19m 45s): Right. Lars (19m 45s): And like, right. Not real, too vulnerable, you know, to people that are able to be more real and share some of their own struggles and just be more human. Right. I think that there's a couple of cases in the book of CHRs from, you know, talking about things from their own struggles, with infertility to mental health and thoughts of suicide to, you know, coming out and the office is as gay for the first time and, you know, and sharing those experiences with their employees and that those kinds of conversations barely ever happened, you know, even a couple of years ago. And now I think we're seeing more of it. And I think this whole notion of work and life and separation, like we've all been in each other's homes through Zoom. Lars (20m 29s): We all know more about our colleagues now than we probably ever did. Just kind of going through these circumstances together. And so I think culture is going to be, you know, much more real and open and honest then I think before it was very, it could be very manufactured in some companies, you know, and it could be very aspirational, right? Like this is who we want to be like, that's cool, but that's not at all who you are. I think people need to like, be more comfortable with who they are, maybe talk about who they aspire to be, but like have that rooted in their reality with more of a direction of where they hope to be. Chad (21m 6s): Now, do you think that we are feeling more comfortable with being uncomfortable since we've been so fucking uncomfortable over the last year and maybe that's, what's pushed a lot of this EMP empathy is that it's just being human and living and it's uncomfortable, but we're becoming more comfortable with providing that in and actually having this conversation. Lars (21m 27s): Yeah. I mean, I think we're having conversations now that we never had before. Right. Like, I can't meet this deadline. Like my three kids are home from school and I'm at my wit's end trying to teach them. And our wifi is cutting out and like, I'm sorry, I just, I can't do this. Like, you know, when did we in the construct of work, did we have people say like, Hey, I just, I can't meet this deadline for personal reasons. And like, have that be acceptable and not to say that's acceptable across the board. Like some managers are probably still dicks about that, but like that, you know, that those kinds of conversations like taking a mental health day, like a wellness day, like saying like I'm just the stress of everything is getting me. I just need to take today off, like before it was like, we'd have to hide her out in a sick day. Lars (22m 9s): Like, Oh, I've to go to the doctor. We'd have to make up some excuse. I think, that is certainly starting to change. And part of it is just going through this like massive, you know, humanity level event that we've all experienced that has kind of knocked down some of those veneers and walls we put up around us and has given them permission to do so in the context of kind of how companies and employers are looking at their employees. Joel (22m 36s): I think some of the support that people are turning to, you've mentioned a few times in this interview is open source and opening sort of the doors. One of the stories you give in the book is of a Coinbase. And for those playing Chad and Cheese, bingo, that's our crypto reference for the show, they used open source for their COVID response, basically allowing other companies to come in and see that. So a lot of our listeners probably aren't even aware of what open source is. So talk about that and maybe some other examples of how companies are leveraging that strategy. Lars (23m 10s): Yeah. I mean, so open-source broadly, it's a, it was a concept, you know, started in the software. The idea being, if you write a line of code that does X thing, why not give that away and upload that to a common repository that other people can then just use to do that X thing. And over time, other people will take that code. They'll make it faster or they'll make it more efficient. They'll make it better. And so you have, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of engineers, all optimizing lines of code that's available for anyone. And so it's, you know, it became the fundamental backbone, much of the modern web that we use. And so taking that kind of open practice approach and bringing it into HR, which, you know, historically we sucked at that. Lars (23m 50s): We were all about silos and hoarding our data. We wouldn't share anything. And so that started to shift around five years ago with the launch of HR Open Source and Google Rework and other platforms. And so I think if you look at it now, I mean, the Coinbase situations, a great example, like back in late February, they, they publish their internal kind of pandemic response plan. And you know, that event at that time at that scale was something that no HR practitioner alive had experienced. Right. It's just, we, you know, we haven't had anything like that in years, and so lots of people were looking, you know, CHROs and HR leaders. They're they're CEOs, executives are looking at them for guidance. Lars (24m 32s): Like, Hey, what do we do? How do we approach this? And doing that, there was no precedent. And there was no playbook having that Coinbase example. The way that it played out was exactly like open source software. So they publish theirs. I then created an open source doc that included that. And I began curating other resources and news and updates from companies and how they were responding. And then I encouraged other companies to say, Hey, look, if you're basing your own pandemic response on Coinbase's doc, then please consider uploading your version of that doc to this common document so that other practitioners could read it. And, you know, within a week or two, we had about a dozen or more companies that had all open-sourced their pandemic response plans. Chad (25m 16s): That's awesome. Lars (25m 16s): And I think that was really instrumental at that early stage when like we were, you know, the pressure on HR teams was massive. Nobody knew, you know, nobody knew for sure, like, Hey, this is the right way, this is how you handle X. Like we're all figuring it out. And so being able to see like, okay, Coinbase is doing it this way, like Sneak is doing it this way. Dashlane is doing it this way. I'm not going to do any of those things, exactly. But I'm going to build what I'm going to do off of all of those other things. It was invaluable. So to me, like, you know, the use case for Open Source was firmly established in my view, long before that, but that was kind of the moment where, you know, globally people all around the world were borrowing from that doc and then adding their own. And I think it was just a master case study in how open-source can work in HR. Chad (26m 0s): That is amazing. Well, the, the book is Redefining HR. That's Redefining HR, Transforming People, Teams to Drive Business Performance. That's from your buddy, Lars, Lars. We got to have you back. We didn't even get a chance to talk about DEI, AI and a bunch of other acronyms. But until then, until then. Joel (26m 22s): Yeah. Chad (26m 24s): You know me and then. Lars (26m 25s): Chad Huxtable. Chad (26m 27s): Where can people actually find this book? Where can people buy this book? Lars (26m 31s): Yeah. So just going to redefininghr.com. I make it easy. The links to the book, podcast, any other content and projects and whatever they come out of the Redefining HR umbrella. It's all there. Chad (26m 43s): If you're not listening to the podcast, definitely listen to the podcast. Lars, once again, man. Want to have you back soon? Lars (26m 49s): Yeah. Thanks guys. Thanks for having me on and I'll see you in four years! Joel (26m 52s): Alright Buddy. Chad (26m 52s): You got it Dude. Joel (26m 54s): Another one in the books. We out. Chad (26m 56s): We out. OUTRO (27m 51s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Just when you thought you had that whole employer brand game figured out, along comes a pandemic and tosses that EB playbook right out the window. Expert Neil Harrison joins the boys to discuss brand strategy in the age of COVID. Needless to say, it's a masterclass in how to resuscitate your employment brand and give it a much-needed vaccine shot right in the arm. Questions: Will making vaccines mandatory kill a brand? How do employers recreate a sense of community? Will your talent/employer brand be more important than ever before? Can the vaccine be seen as a civic duty or is it too late? Powered by NEXXT! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. 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 (19s): Oh yeah. Dooby, dooby, dooby. What's up everybody. It's not Neil Patrick Harris is on the show, right? Chad (28s): No, it's not Neil Patrick Harris. It's Neil Harrison. Joel (32s): I've been told a handful of lies today. Welcome everybody. I am Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my cohost, Chad Sowash. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad, tell him what he's won today. Chad (46s): Well, Neil Harrison, what you've won is the opportunity to talk about stupid shit on the Chad and Cheese podcast and/or really cool shit as well. Today we have not Neil Patrick Harris. We have Neil Harrison, who is the lead consultant for NH237. This reminds me of remember Oaktown three, five, seven. They had like a couple of like juicy was one of their songs back in the nineties. Joel (1m 15s): I thought it was an area code for New Hampshire. Is that not NH237? Chad (1m 20s): It could be, but, but anyway, Neil has a very long list of pretty much areas that he's worked. He was in TMP worldwide. Now the new, what Radancy? Is it Radancy now? Or is it I can't remember. Anyway, he's head of employer, brand and insight there for like 12, some years. Neil, tell us more about you. What are we missing? Give us that long walk on the beach kind of Twitter bio. Neil (1m 51s): So you don't want to hear about how I met your mother. Joel (1m 55s): Oh, that's not bad. A little British dry wit to start the show. That's nice. Neil (2m 3s): I thought I'd start with, for me to go on. So hi guys, it's really nice to be here. So I've been working in the field of employer branding for a good chunk of time, actually. The last 15 or so years, as I said, as you suggested working as head of employer, branding and insite at TMP, not the ones who've been rebounded Radancy, Radiancy, whatever you want to call it? Chad (2m 25s): Oh really? Joel (2m 25s): No raid and C? The Capitol. The Capitol writers were saying that. Neil (2m 34s): And I guess my work involves a number of facets in terms of really focusing on EVP. So an organizations, why. At normal event, normal times that non COVID times, we're dealing with a lot of very competitive employment marketplaces. So organizations have to be objective standard aside and understand what is it that good candidates respond to? What is it about this organization that they have to join? And I do a lot of that work in terms of speaking to senior stakeholders, to talking to the key employee audiences and trying to understand what's different, what's unique about the employment experience they're bringing to life. Neil (3m 19s): And I've been doing that for a number of years, left TMP about three or four years ago, and set up a NHS, NH237 consulting. It's fairly obvious what the, the word stands for. So I won't spend too much time focusing on that. Chad (3m 33s): Are you 37 years old? I mean, what's the 237 for? It's not that obvious, Neil. Neil (3m 39s): Well, let's highlight it's for Neil Harrison because our listeners aren't that bright. They might not. Chad (3m 44s): I can accept that. Okay. Neil (3m 46s): Is it the number of the number of women you've had in your life? Like what is the 237? Neil Patrick Harris, as you well know, doesn't have that many women in his life and I'm a little bit disappointed. So no, 237 is it's a very complicated algorithm that relates to talent acquisition. You probably know, you guys, I wouldn't insult my audience by going over that again. So, yeah. NH237, I worked with organizations domestically in the UK and more internationally, again, trying to understand what is it about the essence of an organization, how it's ties in with organizations, vision and its missions, its values, and trying to bring a why and employment, why to different audiences. Neil (4m 34s): It's a fascinating field for my . I really, really enjoy it. And it's good to come here and talk to you guys, Joel (4m 40s): Neil, I'm sorry. I'm going to play stupid. I don't know the algorithm of 237 and how it plays into employment branding. Chad (4m 46s): It's on the employment brand periodic table. Joel. Joel (4m 54s): All right. Let's just put this in the show notes. We'll talk about after the show, let's go into the state of the world. COVID has obviously turned employment branding on its head. It's sort of reformed what companies need to talk about and what they need to offer folks. We've certainly talked about on the show, how companies like Chipolte are offering, you know, mental health benefits that weren't there, but so what are companies doing? What are the questions they're asking you and what are some of the answers that you're giving them? Neil (5m 21s): Yeah, there's very little positive come out of COVID and the lockdowns and what have you. But in, in an odd way, there's a simplicity and a clarity that COVID is delivered to employer branding. So the way an organization, any organization is treated is its people, its employee base, since this onset of COVID effectively is their talent brand for the next several years. For me, it's really hard to come back reputationally if an organization's treated it's people in an unsupportive uncommunicative manner. I think for a lot of organizations, there will be a slight temptation to see the current marketplaces as a buyer's market and maybe disregard the employment experience they provide. Neil (6m 3s): I think that will rebound on them significantly. And certainly in the UK marketplace, we've seen a real kind of polar divide. So some organizations have been exemplary. The example you gave is fantastic. And what we've seen organizations reaching out, being supportive, listening, really caring for the employee wellbeing, that whole mental process. And just as a slight tangent, I've got a horrible feeling there's going to be a, a mental scarring that attaches itself to an awful lot of us, as a result of what's happened, in COVID and the lockdowns. Neil (6m 43s): And that'll be fascinating to see how the better employers support their people. Whether it's that supporting them at home or supporting them in a new office environment that. Joel (6m 54s): Say a little more about the mental scarring is that loneliness, depression. What are we talking about? Neil (6m 60s): Yeah, it's all the good stuff. So it's going to depend entirely on how people react to potentially being alone or indeed potentially being in a house, a flat with a partner. You don't want to be, with a whole bunch of small children making an awful lot of noise. It depends entirely upon your environment. But I think for the better employers, there's an ability to reach out from screen to screen, my daughter, for example, she's an engineer she's battled home living with us. Her employer couldn't have been better, an international organization, Canadian owned, and they've been supportive. Neil (7m 42s): They've nurtured, they've listened to people. They've sent little packages home. They've been fantastic. And you know, as a father looking at how my daughter's doing, you know, couldn't have been, I can't be more positive in terms of endorsing what they'd been about. And there'd been other organizations who've just done the opposite who've frankly, or they put their people on furlough and make them redundant and treated them really abysmally. And that's the essence of, for me of their employer brand for the next two or three years. So in the stories that an organization's people tell over the next six to 12 months, that that's the definition of their employer brand, and it's going to be really hard for certain organizations to come back from that. Neil (8m 29s): And they have to be openly, have to be honest about maybe some of their favorite failings. And again, it's about how they tell those stories. Chad (8m 38s): We've done a shitty job of telling stories thus far, though. That's the biggest issue. And I'm not just talking about companies, you're talking about countries, right? The United States in itself has done a very bad job in selling that this is a health that has impacted the economy, not the other way around, right? So that's number one. Number two. Now we have in, in Ohio a state that's just next door to us here in Indiana, 60%, 60% of medical staff and nursing homes have declined to take the vaccination, the employers, and the States, and the federal government need to have a brand around this to ensure the only way we're getting back to work Neil is to be able to get the goddamn shot if you're an essential worker, but some of these essential workers are turning it down. Chad (9m 38s): What can employers do to be able to help? Because they're going to have to mandate that these shots are taken, if you're coming back into the office. Right? What can they do? Neil (9m 48s): Yeah, I think it's a massive issue. I know you talk about mandating and make it and making it obligatory certainly in the UK that's, that's not, that's a non-starter. I think it's about education as much as anything else. I think too, I think there's a war being won, certainly looking at our media, I'll be fascinated to see the balance of how they're playing the virus and up until the beginning of this year. So come March and April last year, there was lots of focused on hospitals, people on ventilators, lots of doom and gloom kind of scaring people. If you like, then as big kind of lockdowns. Neil (10m 29s): And then the whole thing eased up. And for me, there was too much easing up of that in the media. So all the health issues weren't really being played front and center, that's changed since the beginning of this year. So we're back to seeing a whole lot of people struggling in hospitals and actually those people who are patients and obviously really, really struggling. They're actually, on-camera talking about that kind of battles with breathing. And I think that sense of education and seeing very ordinary people who neither 80 plus not overweight normal people do normal jobs having caught that through no fault of their own in that situation. Neil (11m 11s): I think that there's a sense that Pete, that the tide has been turning down. And certainly as far as the UK is concerned, those kinds of stats that you're talking about probably don't necessarily exist. And you know, we've probably 10% of people have already got that, that first jab. And we'll see how that the rest of that goes. But you can't mandate people. You can't force people because if you force people to try and do something that a lot of them are just going to do the opposite. Chad (11m 41s): The problem is if you don't mandate it, then how are you going to get them back into a scenario where there's huge risk that could be associated with them coming back to the office? We're talking about people dying. We're not talking about somebody perspectively getting a fucking paper cut for God's sakes, right. And on LinkedIn, they actually did a poll that had about 80,000 respondents. And the question was, should employees be required to take a COVID-19 vaccination before turning to a returning to the office? Only 36% said, yes. I mean, that to me is a corporate branding issue as well as a country branding issue. Chad (12m 26s): And this is going to be different as I, as I think you, you just, we're talking about from Europe to the United States and if you're a multi national type of an organization, you need, it sounds like you have to get a Covid brand ASAP. Joel (12m 43s): We Americans don't do well with mandates. Neil. I didn't know if you knew this about us. Neil (12m 48s): I'm kind of assuming. No. Yeah. And I, the UK, are we any different? Well, probably slightly more inclined to, to say that to stand in line, but I think it's the way it's like any story, it's that it's the way it's told. And you have to talk to audiences about how to play that. And what's acceptable. What's not, do you scare the ass off people or are you much more conciliatory? Do you have a lot softer notion, a lot softer Tony gas people, but I mean, 80,000 is a massive kind of study. I'll tell you a little piece of research I did three or four months ago. So I researched a bunch of people who were in candid audiences, but we're currently working. Neil (13m 34s): So they weren't desperate for a new job. So ask them to ask a bunch of questions. And one of which was you've got a choice. Okay. So your next job, would you prefer to move to an organization that had treated these people well during COVID, but which had some kind of challenges or would you like, what do you next job be with an organization that's doing really, really well, but haven't treated its people well during COVID? The response to that was fascinating. So 93% of people would rather go to an organization that supported, was there for its people, even if it might have some challenges ahead, rather than the other way, round, just 7% of people wanted to work with an organization that might've been doing really well, but we treated these people really, really poorly. Nexxt PROMO (14m 22s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of NEXXT. Andy, if a company wants to actually come to Nexxt and utilize your database and target texting candidates, I mean, how does that actually work? Right?So we have the software to provide it two different ways. If an employer has their own database of opted in text messages, whether it's through their ATS, we can text on their behalf or we have over eight and a half million users that have opted into our text messaging at this point. So we can use our own database. We could dissect it by obviously by geography, by function, any which way some in sometimes we'll even parse the resumes of the opted in people to target certifications. Nexxt PROMO (15m 6s): So we really can dive really deep if they want to hone in on, you know, just give me the best hundred candidates that I want to text message with and have a conversation back and forth with versus going and saying, I need 30,000 retail people across the country. And that's more of a, you know, yes, no text messaging back and apply. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's next with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com. Joel (15m 43s): Let's talk about carrots and sticks for a second. Where are you on incentives, incentives or punishments in turn? Like, are you for giving cash bonuses? If you get a shot before coming in, or there's some sort of a punishment, if you don't get a shot in some way, or where are you, where do you fall on that? Neil (16m 5s): Fascinating question? I mean, a lot of it is going t be market driven I suspect. And if you're a situation where the market, the labor market is really tough, which is on both sides of the Atlantic, then effectively the power. Power is maybe the wrong word, but employers have the whip hand that. So they have the effectively that the power, whether that's unspoken or spoken power to exert that kind of thing, I think they've really, really struggled in so many marketplaces. And you talk about the Dutch and those guys are out rampaging on the streets because they don't want to be locked down anymore. I suspected if you, if you introduce that kind of thing, there'd be even more rioting. Neil (16m 48s): I don't think people can use the stick in terms of getting people back in the office. I think it's about presenting the office as safe. And for me, there's a whole different subject there about how do employers recreate that sense of community back in the workplace. So how so for a lot of organizations, isn't it, you've got empty offices. There's, community's completely broken down there. So how do you recreate that? And there's lots of different facets to that in terms of physical, the physical office space, the health and safety, they have to have a sociological that kind of giving people the confidence to go back into the workplace. Neil (17m 28s): How do you manage workflow? But also just literally making it very clear that this is a safe place to return to. Now, where do you do that in terms of saying, look, to come back into our office, thou shalt have this injection, whether you like it or not. I think it'll be interesting to see for some organizations have direct customer contact, because if I'm a customer, do I want to go to a workplace that has that I'm going to come into contact with people that haven't had the vaccination? Probably not. Could you see some litigation down the line? So if I catCovid and you guys got, I've been in touch with you guys, I may be getting a hamburger from you guys are buying a shirt from you guys and you haven't mandated that you guys have a vaccination. Neil (18m 21s): All of a sudden, am I going to be suing you as a result? Joel (18m 23s): It's pronounced cheeseburger, Neil not hamburger. So I want you to put the carrots and stick away for a second. I want you to bring out your crystal ball. Let's go three to five years in the future. Do we go back to the office? Do we stay at home? Certainly we've talked about on the show of companies are never going back. It's too expensive to have commercial real estate. They're saving so much money at home. Is it like the young people go to an office for awhile? And the old people show up sometime? What, what does this thing look like three to five years from now? Neil (18m 58s): I think there's been a natural reaction to say it's the end of the office, it's the end of the workplace. Who needs it? You know, we're doing okay. We've made the best of a bad situation, absolutely Dorsey point about age. And again, going back to my poor daughter. So she's 25. What does she want to do? She wants to meet people in offices. She wants to go out for beers with people. She wants a whole sense of fun and collaboration. And that whole vibe there. Does a considerably able to father want to do that necessarily to a far lesser degree. But having said that just from an ideas perspective, just in terms of generating thought processes, there's nothing like interacting, even in scenarios like this, there's nothing like contact with other people to just spark thoughts, to come up with different concepts and ideas. Neil (19m 48s): And that sense of collaboration. I think a whole bunch of people have missed. Not to go back to the office. I don't, I don't think that it's not binary. People talking about. I presented working solution whereby in, it might go back two days a week, you might go by three days a week. You might work one week and off the next week. I think organizations will find their own way through this. Again, it often goes back to your own personal situations. If you're living in a nice house with a nice garden, you've got a nice personal relationship there. You might want to spend more time at home. If those things aren't in place, you're not possibly living in the nicest of home environments from all sorts of different perspectives. Neil (20m 31s): Do you really want to spend additional time there? I'm guessing, probably not. So it will depend on so many different facets there. Let me see. Well, what we were started in the UK about, what's why we started no at all, but pollution levels drop like a stone as soon as no one was going to the office. So no one's getting in cars and buses and trucks. And what have you, it's all of a sudden the sky is a clear, the air is nice to breathe and what do we want to do? We want to go straight back to that and all of a sudden, but actually because public, nobody really fancy public transport bought for office reasons. People then realized that actually, if they got in their cars, then they wouldn't be sat next to someone they didn't really fancy sitting next to, they didn't have a mask on. Neil (21m 19s): And, and so all of a sudden we're back using our cars again. So do you know what? It's really not clear, but people, people like people, people want the company that sense of company and for a whole generation to miss out on that, I just don't think it's gonna have to happen at all. Chad (21m 38s): Isn't it important that companies start engineering that whole idea now on what they're going to do? The actual street strategy on getting people either back in the office, either in a hybrid scenario or what have you so that they can build a brand and a talent acquisition strategy around that? Because if talent acquisition doesn't know in next year, let's say 2022, whether they're going to be a back in the office type of organization, an at-home home organization or a blended organization, it is hard to be able to sell what you don't know. Neil (22m 16s): No, exactly. And I think that applies to so many different things. I think people as much as possible want clarity, want a sense of what the next six to 12 months are going to look like. Now for a lot of organizations, absolute clarity in that, in that circumstance is, is impossible. But people want a sense of what it's all about and what ultimately they're working on, what they're contributing to that sense of direction. So just to say, we're just going to play it by ear for the next six months we hope to go, right, but who knows? It isn't really the clarity and reassurance that people are looking for. They want to have a broad idea of what the future is look like and where they're going now, whether that's then an organization pivoting and changing, what it's businesses like or how it goes about its business, or once you're suggesting where it goes about that business that's one thing, but organizations that just leave that, leave that open, I think are going to, are going to be at disadvantage. Neil (23m 12s): And that's, I wrote a blog just this week, actually about ripples and, and how organizations, whether it's a global organization, those ripples reaching effectively around the world, or actually just those ripples reaching people's individual houses and flats is another thing. And the importance of internal communications and delivering the people run the talent brand, whatever you want to call it locally, or indeed globally is more important frankly than it's ever been before. And just to neglect that and assume people are okay or assume that because unemployment figures are going up, then actually, do we really need to engage with our people? Neil (23m 57s): Do we really need to look out for them? Certainly organizations, some organizations are taking that option is absolutely wrong. And again, going back to the start of this? People's employer brand people's talent brand is being forged as we speak by the decisions they're making in terms of support, nurturing community and communication. So if you're not getting those ripples as magic ripples of communication out to your folk, whether it's in individual laptops or it's to whole countries, then you're going to be at a disadvantage. And whether it's about the office environment, whether it's about vaccination, whether it's about engagement levels, whether it's about really making sure that people are being listened to and their voice is heard, all of those things apply in equal ownership. Joel (24m 47s): No, you said most people like people are people like people and, and I actually hate most people, that's a separate podcast. Chad (24m 56s): Join the club. ` Joel (24m 57s): Yeah. So, and, and I hate, I hate people more ever since I've been only talking to Chad for a year, but I want to talk about some of the technologies that have come out and as Chad and I talk about companies and startups that have been funded over the last year, they are very focused on the work from home phenomenon, right. And whether it's video recruiting or, you know, chat bots or job fairs online, they're all trying to solve this problem of, we're not going to get back together again for a while, if at all. So I'm curious your take on technology, you know, companies that want to, you know, build engagement at a work from home environment companies that are, you know, whether it's video. Joel (25m 40s): One thing that, a story that I, that came to my mind was that culturally or like women feel like they aren't heard as well on Zoom calls because they're less likely to interrupt people to get their voice heard. So I'm curious, are these technologies going to be longstanding or are they going to fail in building engagement and actual nuances of human engagement going into the future? Neil (26m 7s): I think as going back to that original question about, you know, blended working, we're working at home, we work or we're working in the office, it's going to be a combination thereof. And I think some of the, some of the innovation and that's one of the really, really positive things again about what's happened is, the guy who owns Microsoft. You know, he's talking about, there's been two to three years worth of technological development in two to three months. He said that, last year, when they were into the COVID period there, and for better or worse, it's accelerated so much, you know, take the vaccines for example, that the progress has been made in terms of vaccines, which would have taken what 12, 14 years normally it's happened over the course of a year, it's absolutely staggering because there's been a will and there's been money invested in it. Neil (26m 56s): And I think that the same thing for a lot of technology that necessity to drive, whether it's video interviewing, whether it's video conferencing, whether it's going to virtual events, I think there will be a sense of blending. I think there will be a natural reaction as, and when people feel it's safe to go to physical events. I think there will be a real desire to go about meeting people and laughing at people and laughing at people's funny names and shaking hands because we've missed all that. So, yes, I think those technologies are here to stay and what's happened to take soon, for example, this isn't a so you've obviously, but I've, I've had several Zoom calls today, as I'm sure most people listening to this that have done that and have probably had pre COVID have had probably as many as I have in a week normally now. Neil (27m 50s): So we've embraced, there's been a sense of embracing technology. I think we're quite discerning about it. And I think we were, you know, there've been some video conference facilities, for example, which were around pre-Zoom, which all of a sudden we didn't really like they weren't, they were a bit clunkier and unintuitive. So yes, it's great that people are harnessing new technologies, that those technologies have been accelerated as a necessity of COVID. I think we're more discerning as users in terms of thinking, do you know what to great idea, but it's bit clunky and actually, do you know what I'd really like to go and meet people in person again, because we can do that. And you know, six, nine months down the line, who knows, but will those things be dropped entirely? Neil (28m 32s): No, they weren't because they're massive labor savers. Do we want to be jumping on planes? Like we did to the, to a certain extent, no, we won't be doing that. Like everything. I think the solution is probably somewhere in the middle Joel (28m 43s): I love that you said laughing at people, instead of laughing with people. Neil (28m 48s): Yeah. My mistake. Joel (28m 49s): I want to party with you. Chad (28m 52s): Exactly what he was thinking. So I'm glad he said it. I'd like to, I'd like to just say to all the listeners out there and, and it, that we have done this before. If you remember, in the 1950s, the polio vaccine. We provided, I know in the US we actually built a brand, it had a mascot, it was a civic duty, right. And companies got behind that and everybody's got their vaccination. So we can do this. We don't have to use the word mandate, but God damn it. These things have to happen. But we overall companies, the employees, we have to get a better idea of how we get there. And Neil, we appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about this. Chad (29m 36s): If listeners want to find out more about you, where would you send them? Neil (29m 42s): You would go to employerbrandingadvantage.com, a bit of a mouthful, I do apologize. Plenty of information on there. Plenty of blogs, which you might want to listen to about subjects like this, right across some acquisition, EVP space, come along and have a look at their website. Joel (29m 59s): Love it. Chad (30m 0s): Excellent. Really appreciate it, Neil. Neil (30m 3s): Thank you guys. Really good talking to you. Chad (30m 5s): Another one in the can, Joel. We out. Joel (30m 7s): Well, we out, all right now, best band from Liverpool, not named the Beatles? Neil (30m 12s): Echo and the Bunnymen. Joel (30m 14s): Fair enough. OUTRO (30m 38s): Thank you for listening 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.

There’s bad, there’s rotten and then there’s LinkedIn’s job board strategy. It’s like peeling an onion and the boys are almost in tears covering this story, as well as game-changing news from Zoom, Buy or Sell with Fetcher, Unicorn Lattice, and Visage, a 28-year-old earns $300k+ on Fiverr doing what? Goldman Sachs continues the beatings, while CitiGroiup optics soar. ... Wait did we mention rumors on iCIMS and Mya the chatbot? Get comfy and enjoy another Jobvite, JobAdx, and Sovren powered podcast. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. INTRO (1s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR’s most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (24s): Oh, yeah. Say what you want. But Chad and Cheese have never even been to the Suez canal. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast, boys and girls. I'm your cohost Joel "filibuster" Cheeseman. Chad (37s): I'm Chad "chief impact officer" Sowash. Joel (41s): Oh, that's going to get Harry on this week. Show LinkedIn we have a problem. Better up gets Harry and better than the sweet 16 it's time for a little buy or sell. JOBADX (54s): Job advertising is pretty simple, right? Write a good ad. Find the right channel, run tests, research others translate data, optimize. Okay. Maybe it's not that simple, but there is something that helps bring it all together and put it in autopilot for you. That's programmatic job ads with JobAdX. JobAdX gathers hundreds of channels and their job seeker audiences into one place so that your ads reach far and wide without having to create a ton of new accounts, create ad campaigns with no minimum spend or results focused and based on engagements from candidates. Have full control of your job ads using the JobAdX self-serve platform. Welcome to uncomplicated job ads. Find out how you can start attracting and engaging candidates with your ads in three steps at jobadx.com get-started-today, that's JOBadx.com/get-started-today. Joel (1m 45s): So I'm finally getting my shot on Friday, which is when people will be first listening to the show. So you and I are well on our way to summer of love, baby. Chad (1m 55s): Oh yeah. I've got the second shot. My second shot happening at 11:20 on Friday. Joel (2m 2s): And then promptly going on vacation for a week, I think is that, is that the plan? Chad (2m 6s): I'm getting the fuck out of town. Joel (2m 8s): Just drive. Just drive. Chad (2m 9s): Just doing something, doing something. Joel (2m 11s): Spin it, spin an arrow and then just go whatever direction it says North, South, East or West. Chad (2m 16s): It could be at least, maybe depending on what's open up in Fountain Square, come up there and, and check out the NCAA action. If there's any whatsoever. Joel (2m 26s): There you go. So apparently two weeks after your first shot, you're kind of not going to die. Like you, you may be in like, is it that's my understanding is like two weeks to kind of kick in on, the first one. Like, you'll get sick potentially, but not hospitalized and die and shout out to our poor friends in Canada who aren't getting shots apparently. Chad (2m 47s): No, but I think that's interesting. Didn't we send them shots? I thought we sent them? Joel (2m 51s): Like we sent them the AstraZeneca, which no one else wants. I think that's why. Chad (2m 56s): The ones we haven't approved. Yes. Joel (2m 58s): Yes. Chad (3m 1s): Ah, so NCAA has been shit from a bracket standpoint, not to mention, we've also seen that they don't treat the females quite the same as the males. Have you seen this? Joel (3m 12s): Yes. And I'm I'm, I'm so glad that that was a Texas versus Indiana thing. Cause if it was Indiana who looked like, you know, a set of five pound weights on a rack versus Texas, I would have been really hurt. But yeah, it was, it was good to see it was Texas and not us. Chad (3m 29s): So first and foremost, the men got the PCR test, the really expensive COVID test and the females got the rapid antigen. Right. It was like, Hey, here's the cheap stuff to go ahead. And it, yeah, you're good. You're good. Then the men got, you know, like a million dollar weight room and yeah, Joel (3m 47s): They got, they got the lifetime fitness with the sauna and Whirlpool. Chad (3m 51s): And the women got a fucking weight rack. I mean, and again, if Texas can fuck anything else up, just continue. Okay, continue. This is your year, Texas. Continue to fuck. It's just ridiculous. Joel (4m 5s): And then it's like next to a fold-out table. Like, is that where they were getting taped up? I don't understand what was going on there. Chad (4m 12s): I don't know. I don't know. Joel (4m 13s): Here's your bench press. Chad (4m 15s): Fucking five and dime down there in Texas. Jesus Joel (4m 20s): Don't mess with Texas baby. Let's talk about rumors real quick. Chad (4m 25s): OOo rumors. Joel (4m 26s): So, so we're not going to report on this, on this show, but this is potentially upcoming hot stuff, hot stuff. So the first rumor that I've got was given to me by two really reliable sources. And it's that iCIMS is soon to be filing their S1, which means IPO time at iCIMS. So be on the lookout for that. Chad (4m 51s): Or they've shown enough leg, so that Microsoft looks and goes, huh? Yeah, maybe, I ought to buy that? Joel (4m 57s): Yeah. They're going to pull a Glassdoor. They're pulling a Glassdoor. Like here's what we're valued. Here's how much our stock price is rising after our S1 comes on and like, Oh wait a minute, wait a minute. We have a buyer. We have a buyer, everybody psych. Yeah. So be on the, we'll be on the lookout for that. The second rumor Maya, our buddies at the, the chat bot solution there word is that they're, there'll be selling to a staffing firm and that the announcement is coming soon. My source also added that Maya has been trying to sell for quite a long time, but didn't have a whole lot of interest that may have been pandemic influenced or just the fact that the shit wasn't any good. Joel (5m 41s): But anyway, Maya and iCIMS should be main stories coming soon if these rumors are true. Yeah. Chad (5m 49s): Yeah. I got confirmation on that last one with Maya. Overall, I don't think it's that the tech is shit. I think it's at point you can just kind of wait it out, you know, you can wait it out and get a lower price later. So yeah, that's probably what smart buyers are doing. They're waiting for a little bit more of a clearance rack. Joel (6m 8s): Yeah. Fair enough. And let's be honest, Maya raised a shit ton of money, which means the money they had to get in a sale was going to be significant. Chad (6m 17s): That was that. Remember AllyO had like $65 and they went for $50. So they didn't even cover their bets. Right? Joel (6m 24s): Yeah. What did Maya raise about $70 or 80? Chad (6m 27s): $51 million Joel (6m 28s): Doubtful. They got the $500 million their investors were hoping for. Chad (6m 32s): Yes. Joel (6m 33s): We'll see. If they don't announce the number, then we know it was not good Chad (6m 38s): Away from tech, but now talking about politics real quick. Joel (6m 42s): Okay. Chad (6m 43s): The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Dr. Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the very first transgender federal official to be confirmed by the chamber. Now the vote was 52 to 48 and the only two Republicans that actually crossed lines to vote for Dr. Rachel Levine was two females, Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who joined all the rest, the rest of the Democrats and voting for Dr. Levine, as assholes like Rand Paul continue fearing anything that is not a straight white male. Chad (7m 26s): Congratulations Dr. Levine, man. That's that's awesome. It's good that we can take that step because I don't believe we're the first. Joel (7m 34s): Making progress. And by the way, I don't have the names, but I remember seeing a story about ESPN had their first ever all female play by play on an NBA game. So we're making progress all over the place, baby. Power to the women. Chad (7m 50s): One day, this week, one day was Women's Equal Pay Day. So I'm probably going to step in it on this one, but what the actual fuck is this day for? Joel (8m 3s): And why is it a day? Chad (8m 5s): I mean recognition that females are paid less seriously? I mean, why, why don't we have a concerted effort on this cluster fuck. Instead of a fluffy recognition day, I don't understand days like this. If we focused on shit that actually moved anything because nothing's being moved. Like transparency, forcing companies to demonstrate that they're actually paying equally, there's equity. So these days that just come out of nowhere and everybody's like, today's equal payday. It's like, but you're not getting equal pay. I don't fucking get this. Joel (8m 43s): Well, thank God Prince Harry is going to be getting equal pay soon announcement out of Silicon Valley, a unicorn industry startup Better Up, which offers personalized coaching content and care, designed to transform lives and careers has announced Prince Harry as Chief Impact Officer. So no more poor house for Prince Harry. He's going to be making some bank, finally. Thank God for that. Chad (9m 10s): I wonder, I mean, the pitch for Prince Harry, because, you know, he had several companies coming after him to have him, you know, like endorse or be a part of. Joel (9m 20s): Sure. Chad (9m 21s): Gotta wonder what the pitch was here. And obviously with, you know, with Better Up there's this altruistic kind of feel to making money. Right? Joel (9m 30s): Yep. Chad (9m 31s): Maybe that was it. Joel (9m 31s): I feel like the attending, the SHERM conferences was probably the thing that sold Prince Harry on our industry. I mean, can you imagine finally, sales calls will be answered if Prince Harry is making, making the sales calls at Better Up, that'll be a nice change. Chad (9m 48s): They'll send out a send out a, just like these robotic Prince Harry voice mails. Yeah, Joel (9m 53s): Yeah. Harry's to everybody Lisa, Prince Harry's on the phone. No shit? The whole HR departments gathered around for the sales call. Chad (10m 1s): Prince Harry's on Zoom. That's what it is. So this week I had a great time with Madeline Laurano talking more in depth about the research she did and programmatic it's called State of Programmatic job advertising covered a couple, you know, areas. 40% of job advertising spend is wasted due to obviously the old way of doing job postings versus programmatic, which actually has a 90% customer retention rate, which I thought was fucking ridiculous. I mean, that's awesome. Anyway, we went pretty deep into the, the programmatic research can find it at aptituderesearch.com to download the entire report. Chad (10m 45s): That was a good time. And to think that all of pretty much talent acquisition, they still can't spell programmatic. Let alone know what the fuck it is. Joel (10m 54s): He said really deep. Let's just talk about free shit for a second. If you haven't signed up for free t-shirts, free bourbon, free beer. What the hell is your problem? Head out to Chadcheese.com/free it's towards the end of the month, we'll be announcing announcing new winners very soon. Make sure that you're on that list to win good free shit. chadcheese.com/free. Chad (11m 17s): Amen. And one last shout out to Torrin and Julie at Crazy in the King. Julie's on the road this week, she had a road trip with Tristen. So I filled in as guest host on the show. So this week it was appropriately renamed Whitey and the King. So go check it out. You're going to love it. Joel (11m 39s): Would Cracker in the King, be too inappropriate? Chad (11m 41s): I can call myself whatever I want. Right? Joel (11m 42s): Okay. We have officially, both stepped in it and we're 12 minutes into the show. So that's good. That's it. Let's get into topics. Chad (11m 49s): I can call myself whitey. Topics! Joel (11m 53s): LinkedIn we have a problem. So our friends at Jobiak, or as you like to mispronounce it, Jobiak apparently, and, their job search engine, all jobs, they did a little research or a little recon after our topic about LinkedIn aggregating jobs. And they found some pretty interesting information. Chad (12m 14s): Yeah. So last week we talked about the LinkedIn jobs Joel (12m 20s): Product or problem? Products. Chad (12m 22s): Okay. Both. Yeah. It's a both in this case, their product and or problem, relying on employers to claim their jobs so that they can clean up this shit pile of a job mess that LinkedIn has. So pretty much they're saying, Hey employers, we've got shit over here that needs cleaned up. Can you come do it for us? So Vencat was like, this sounds interesting. Let's jump into it and he found some data. The findings are based on the analysis of 52,000 companies, jobs on LinkedIn. Joel (12m 55s): So not a small universe. They did some real deep data diving in this one. Chad (13m 0s): Not at all. So approximately 60% of LinkedIn jobs were coming from job boards. Over 50% of jobs did not have direct links to employer career pages. Jobs are being associated with the wrong company. Come on man. As an example, Jobiak found six jobs linked to its name none of them were correct. Coinbase, a company that has a total of 200 jobs on their career page had 2000 jobs on LinkedIn. So I mean, Joel (13m 36s): Sorry about that extra zero. Sorry about that extra zero. Chad (13m 39s): What the Fuck man? I mean, this is just ridiculous. Joel (13m 44s): So to remedy this is my favorite part. LinkedIn is relying on employers to claim their jobs, which as Jobiak highlighted is unrealistic and a cause for major concern. LinkedIn, come on, man. Chad (13m 60s): Yeah. So Alexander Jakawski on LinkedIn. He's been scraping jobs probably for about 10 years, if not more, he posted this and the Coinbase example of actually 200 jobs and 2000 on LinkedIn and what are the product managers or something said responded and then said, you know, it's not as easy as it looks. Joel (14m 20s): Well, no shit. Chad (14m 21s): I'm paraphrasing, but it really to be quite Frank, it is if you know the source and you don't take jobs from everyone, that's the problem. They're opening up to everyone. And the question is, are they doing this from the arbitrage standpoint? Or are they doing this so that they do create a mess? So that employers feel like they have to come back, clean up that mess. And then re-engage with those employers, that's a shitty way to drive leads. I don't see that somebody actually threw that out to me, LinkedIn. I was like, that's fucking stupid. But overall it is easier when you white list companies. And if you're taking jobs directly from applicant tracking systems and you're not taking them from job boards, you have to look at the source. Chad (15m 6s): We started doing this at Direct Employers before we were Direct Employers in like 2002, right? And Indeed took our feed, Simply Hired, took our feed. You know why? Because they knew it was a trusted feed of only corporate career sites. Right? So this can be done in a very easy way. I quote unquote "easy". There's a lot of maintenance to be done. The biggest key, if you're a LinkedIn, you go to the applicant tracking systems. LinkedIn has a big enough name to be able to interface with the applicant tracking systems and actually make something like this happen. Joel (15m 42s): I think a lot of it was early hubris. I think, early on they thought every recruiter uses us. Every employer uses us. So of course they're going to post all their jobs on our site, right? And then the world sort of went away from this manually posting jobs world and went into sort of a XML file, scraping whatever. And LinkedIn wasn't built for that. They were built for like, Hey, your link, your job is connected to a profile or a company and everything's native and you're putting it in it within the walled garden of LinkedIn and programmatic throws this whole other variable into the job search and job promotion world, and companies just want jobs to show up. Joel (16m 25s): They don't want to post them manually. And they've just what they wanted it to be isn't what it is. And now they're trying to like backtrack and figure out how do we fix this? How do we get all these jobs to be native jobs? And that's not working. So they have a real fucked up situation over at LinkedIn. Chad (16m 41s): They're showing just how ancient their technology is right now. Joel (16m 45s): It seems like they should have some brain power in the house to help them with this problem. Maybe not. Chad (16m 51s): If they wanted to figure this out, it could be figured out fairly quickly, but they don't have, they don't have the expertise. Joel (16m 56s): Just, just write a check to Vencat dammit, just write a check and be done with it. Chad (17m 2s): I love Vencat to death, but looking at his stuff, I don't think he's got to figured it out either. Joel (17m 7s): And we'll talk about that on next week's show, stay tuned, kids. Chad (17m 12s): Now it's time for some buy or sell. Joel (17m 14s): Well, I love me some buy or sell. All right we have three startups. They all have one thing in common, of course, which is, I guess the pandemic. We'll start out with Visage, hopefully I'm saying that correctly, San Francisco based Visage as a hiring platform, using the power of the crowd. Think of it as like 4,000 sourcing nerds in one place to find you the right candidate. So they raised 7 million in series A funding. First analysis led the round and was joined by investors, including Urban Innovation Fund. You can find out more and I love this. I'm just going to throw this in there. URL is visage.jobs, which is the only vendor that I can think of that uses a .jobs domain. So good on them. Joel (17m 55s): This sourcing technology blends 4,000 sourcers and AI to find diverse talent within hours. Buy or sell? Chad (18m 4s): Yeah. Unlike Fetcher, I like that Visage, isn't trying to bullshit the market yet, they're using humans as a part of the model. What I would not like as a perspective buyer is the valuation of a tech company instead of a service company. Right. So if it's valued as a tech company, it's overpriced, I'm selling. If it's valued as a service company I'm buying. So the platform could turn into the Uber of RPOs, I think, but overall there are way too many cogs that could, human cogs, that could fall out of the machine to make it its valuation good for tech. Joel (18m 48s): Yeah, so if this had been a company launched 15 years ago, it would have been hailed as revolutionary as fuck. But as most of our listeners have heard us talk about over the years, you know, sourcing is becoming more and more automated. The idea of thinking like, let's post a wreck and have 4,000 human beings weed through it and place people, seems really antiquated and it seems prime to be totally disrupted by, I don't know, automation and automated sourcing, which a lot of companies are doing now. So unless they're looking at a big pivot to get off the human beings, I'm going to have to sell this thing. Joel (19m 28s): I mean, I like the idea of these sourcers having something to do because companies are letting them go at at record paces. So that's nice. And I guess they can milk this for a while, but you know, I think sourcing is going the way of the Polaroid camera, maybe at some point. Chad (19m 43s): Well, it seems like it could be almost like a niche Fiverr for sourcing. Joel (19m 48s): That's basically what it is. I mean, crowdsourcing was big again, back in 2010, if this company was, you know, 10 years. Chad (19m 56s): Oh, Fiverrs big. Yeah. It's crowdsourcing not to mention also this is kind of like an Uber app. Think about it. Uber's crowdsourcing vehicles and people. Right. Joel (20m 5s): You can crowdsource it, but can it be automated? I think is the question. And I think most of what Visage does can be automated. Chad (20m 13s): Gotcha. Joel (20m 13s): All right. Let's go to number two. Fetcher. You gave a tease on that, you're not a huge fan or maybe you are the New York-based recruiting automation platform focused on diversity raised 6.5 million in Series A funding late last week. G20 Ventures led the round and was joined by investors, including K fund, Accomplice and Slow Ventures, Fetcher automates your repetitive top of funnel tasks. So you can focus more on candidate engagement and team collaboration, buy or sell? Fetcher? Chad (20m 44s): Yeah. So is anybody not pimping diversity these days? Joel (20m 49s): It's like AI was a year and a half, two years. Chad (20m 52s): Diversity's the new AI. Yeah, that's it. Okay. So now you, you know how much I love me some matching technology, right? That's my favorite, but I'm not a fan of said matching. If it's founded in outsourced humans, performing the matches. I understand Fetcher is more than matching, but that is the biggest and most valuable lift and technical asset for me and it's vaporware. So I am selling. Joel (21m 22s): Yeah. Just on the promotional copy that I've read. I mean, I liked the idea of automating repetitive top of funnel tasks. Obviously we talk a lot about that. So I'm going to go ahead and sell this one as well. I do however, love the fact that they actually engage with us when we post. I posted a shred on this and I got followed by like 28 Fetcher employees and people that were like, thanks for talking about us, which is also not a great sign that their employees have all the time to like follow, follow me and thank me for that. But anyway, all right, we got two Sells. Let's see if we have a buy in our third competitor, Lattice: a San Francisco based HR management platform raised 60 million this week valuing it at $1 billion, unicorn alert! Joel (22m 10s): Tiger Global led the round. The new series of the investment brings Lattices total funding to $158 million, since its founding in 2013, so not quite as startup. Lattice has grown its teamed over 225 employees and serves more than 2,500 businesses, including Slack, Asauna and over the course of 2020, the company has doubled in size due to the increased focus on people-centric thinking in businesses. Lattice is the people management platform that enables people leaders to develop engaged high-performing teams. Lattice, buy or sell? Chad (22m 47s): Pandemic, say what? Yeah, we're going to stay remote and or hybrid, right? So we have to have technology in to be able to manage that much better than we have over the years. So Lattice in their investors understand now is the time to build and grab market share quickly. Organic growth is great, but when the weather is right and you have access to funds, you launch that rocket ship baby, because I'm buying! Joel (23m 14s): Right. Yeah. I agree. Like we, I talk all the time when we do these about catching the right wave, right? There's no doubt that the pandemic and work from home and hybrid office and et cetera, is going to mint a lot of companies that focus on this problem. Is Lattice, the company that strikes at big or one of the companies that makes it big? I don't know, but they're riding the right wave. So for me, this is a big buy Lattice, even though it makes me think of lettuce, which I don't like so much, let's Take a quick break and get into some more. Chad (23m 49s): Hot topics. Sovren (23m 51s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (24m 51s): Nationwide is on your, Oh no, wait. That's not the right nation. Chad (24m 55s): I don't think it's that one. I don't think it's that one. Yeah. So this next story is pretty amazing. Just from the standpoint of, we've been talking about hybrid? Retracting the footprint, right? And Nationwide tells 13,000 employees to work anywhere. We're putting our employees in control of where they work from, inviting them to quote, locate for their day, depending on where they need to achieve. So apparently they can work in a branch office. They can work at home, they have this kind of like ability to move around and just get work done. Joel (25m 29s): Yup. Yup. So under the plan Nationwide is closing three offices in Swindon, wherever that is in the UK with 3000 staff, either moving to the nearby HQ, working from home or mixing the two. Other UK staff may be able to work from their local high street branch if they prefer rather than travel to offices. A survey of employees, 57% said they wanted to work from home full time, that's a lot of people who never want to go back to the office again. Chad (25m 55s): Fuck Yeah! Joel (25m 56s): More than a third 36% said they prefer a mix of home and office based work. A move toward flexible working will see a change to the configuration of offices. I don't know if that means there'll be casinos or what, but they claim that there'll be more collaboration spaces and fewer meeting rooms, as well as introducing quiet areas, oo that sounds nice, and designated walking and cycling routes. Quote from the higher ups, "Our offices will become hubs where teams can meet for creativity, social connection, and collaboration." That sounds sexy. Good for you Nationwide. Chad (26m 33s): Yeah. Quiet areas to you means nap areas. Joel (26m 37s): That means my bed. It means my couch that's what that means. Chad (26m 40s): So also a Santander, I guess is how you say it. They're going to be closing 111 branches. So another company also retracting their footprints. Again. I just think this fiscally, is a very smart move. Yeah. Joel (26m 59s): Yeah. And they talked about like, you know, climate footprint and all the good things that come around because of this. And this sort of started in a big way with Salesforce who announced a few weeks ago that, Hey, this is the model it's like, you can work from home, you can do half and half, or you can come to the office, you know, all the time. Workchew, which we talked about last week, a startup that basically partners with restaurants and hotels to let people yeah, to let people sort of by passes and then go and have unlimited, you know, coffee, tea, chips and salsa or whatever. This is the way the world is going. And to me, the thing that caught my attention was we're going see con a reconfiguration of offices because these companies still have this real estate. Joel (27m 44s): They still have to make these payments. So they have to do something with these spaces. So what does collaboration space mean? I don't know. It's going to be every company figuring out what the new office looks like. I got to think this is a bad thing, if you make cubicles for a living and probably really good if you're like a furniture store, because there's going to be some really rethinking about what an office is. And to me, that's going to be pretty interesting. Chad (28m 10s): Yeah. Being able to figure out what's going to sell in the home office versus the cubicle office. Joel (28m 16s): And being really creative around urban areas. And how do you work in a, you know, a one bedroom studio apartment or whatever. Like those will be challenges. Chad (28m 29s): Food trucks. That's the game right there. Right. Food trucks. That's what I want to see. I want to see more Food Trucks. Joel (28m 36s): And companies reserving entire food trucks to come to their office certain days a week. Chad (28m 41s): YES! Joel (28m 41s): And then that day, you know, taco Tuesday is when everybody comes to the office because well, Tacos. Chad (28m 47s): Well, if you're smart though, and you're like a small downtown, like Columbus, Indiana here, or maybe even a larger downtown, like Indianapolis, you have like Food Truck days. So you're pulling people downtown into communal areas, those types of things out of their homes and offices. So I think, you know, there's opportunity for different behavior, but a better behavior that's more work-life balance. Joel (29m 12s): Yeah. Test kitchens, ghost kitchens. There's going to be some real rubbing together and getting sticky with the food industry and the corporations of the new post pandemic era. Speaking of pandemic companies, Zoom everything this week. So announced by one of our favorite video solutions. Zoom now has an SDK for putting Zoom into other things, Oh God, did we predict this? Or what? Chad (29m 43s): Yeah. Joel (29m 43s): I think we did. Zoom has released a new SDK meaning software development kit. For those who don't know to help developers build Zoom into their software. According to the company, you can build your own video based applications and websites. Did I hear video recruiting solution? On top of Zooms platform and can more easily incorporate Zoom's video and audio features directly into your apps? The company envisions developers, utilizing Zoom's chat functions, and a number of different settings from social media and gaming platforms to virtual retail apps. Quote from the company "Using our video, SDK developers can drive customer engagement and provide new opportunities for revenue without being tied to the Zoom meetings user face." Joel (30m 31s): And every video recruiting company now is shaking in their boots. Right? Chad (30m 37s): I wouldn't go that far. Although I would say that companies like Talk Push and Paradox saw early on, that instead of building their own quote/unquote "video platform," integrating Zoom, Teams, Google Meet was really the way to go because those were the quote unquote "preferred platforms" of said companies, right? Said clients, so if your client uses Zoom or they use Meet or they use, you know, Teams, whatever they use, you want to be able to have some form of SDK to plug into it and integrate that into your platform itself. So it makes it easier for not just recruiters, but also hiring managers. Chad (31m 22s): You know, they don't, they're not in it every single day. So being able to provide them with a video solution that they're already used to, and they're already hooked up to, and they don't have to go through, you know, single sign-ons and all that other bullshit. But zoom will have to start doing more of this to get aggressive as Google meet and Microsoft teams continue to gain acceptance by users. So this is a move, but they have to get more aggressive. Sure. Joel (31m 49s): So I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take our listeners back in time a little bit. We need some like music. So, in 2003, four, five, six, YouTube was becoming a thing. And you had a ton of video competitors. I think Vimeo is the only one that's still around, but you had a ton of like Josh T, Justin TV or something. You had like Zoom Cam and, or XY cam, whatever. You had a bunch of stuff. Right. And inevitably our industry said like, we're going to make our own video player too. So the one that sticks out in my mind and partly, just probably because they bought my company a few years later is Jobbing Video. Joel (32m 30s): Do you remember Jobbing Video? Chad (32m 32s): No, no. Joel (32m 32s): Nobody remembers. But Jobbing Video literally had a staff of videographers personality. They would go into companies, do video, really progressive stuff. And they had their own video player. So they stored the video. They played it. Well over the course of a few years, YouTube, wasn't just this weird sort of quirky video upload thing. They started adding things like, Oh, I don't know, HD. They started adding things like, you know, no buffering and closed captioned and all these things that there was no way that employment sort of solution was going to keep up with the innovation that was happening at YouTube. So they dumped Jobbing Video and started just putting in YouTube videos, embeds into, into the solution. Joel (33m 19s): So my prediction is I think that you're going to start seeing startups and going to be implementing Zoom. And because Zoom is going to have all this shit, one is people will have an account, they'll hit critical mass. They'll have like background custom backgrounds that people can use for whatever. I mean, they're going to use all the cool technology that Zoom has and claim it as their own using the SDK. And by the way, because they're not like hosting, powering, producing, all that good stuff, taking the content or transcribing stuff like Zoom will probably have that available as well. At some point, like they're going to be companies recruiting, video companies powered by Zoom, and they're going to be cheaper, they're going to be better. Joel (34m 2s): And they're going to push the other companies to really rethink how are we doing video? Chad (34m 6s): So you just said pretty much HireVue is dead. Joel (34m 9s): Note to self, it may take 10 years and we'll be retired from this podcast, but, but that's my prediction unless they take that AllyO acquisition and really make it awesome. Chad (34m 22s): Right, okay. So last one in this segment, we're going to talk about Goldman Sachs versus a City Group. This is interesting because Goldman Sachs, it seems that they had an employee survey that got out and the BBC published it. So the BBC understands that the survey was conducted by a self-selected group of US based first year investment banking analysts among themselves. But here's the information that they got that was actually available by Goldman Sachs slides. On average, you're going to love this, first year analyst work over 95 hours a week and sleep five hours a night. Joel (35m 7s): My days are reversed by the way, I work five hours and sleep the rest of the night. Yeah, Chad (35m 12s): They get to sleep around 3:00 AM. A hundred percent have seen the job negatively impact, their relationships, family, family, and friends, duh go figure. 77% feel victim to workplace abuse. 75% sought counseling slash therapy, a hundred percent feel like they have a unrealistic deadlines and 83% experience micro management. These are all first year investment banking analysts, who we know just historically, are treated like dogs, right? But apparently through the pandemic, it's gotten worse. Joel (35m 51s): I have a lot of questions about this survey. So according to the news, this was a survey among 13 employees, which is not a lot of employees, Goldman Sachs employees, a lot of people. Now, I'm not saying that life isn't hard for first year, Goldman Sachs employees. In fact, I would say like, if you go into Goldman Sachs thinking, you're not going to work like a dog for a few years until you prove yourself and move on to something else, like you're probably in the wrong business anyway. So part of it is I think this is real, but I also think that part of it is maybe whining by a small group of people. And the media has grabbed hold of this and really, really run with it. My company Poach, which we don't talk a lot about a lot, but we basically can look at data and then create sentiment scores and whatnot around this. Joel (36m 38s): So I conveniently put in Goldman Sachs into our little AI machine to see what would, what it would spit out and overwhelmingly sentiment is very positive at Goldman Sachs. And if you look at, if you go to Glassdoor, which most people would say is sort of the, you know, the gold standard for, for happiness at a company, they're four out of five stars. The CEO who I know got a lot of Slack on, I think, New York Post or wherever saying, let them meet Saturdays, which I thought was great. He has an 89% approval rating. So to me, this is an outlier. I agree, it makes great headlines and great press. And I think additionally, what City Group did and we'll talk about that in a second, it was a really good chess move in light of the news to make themselves look better and look like a much better employer. Joel (37m 27s): So for me, I know it sounds bad, but the data and the bigger picture doesn't show a company, that' you know, I don't know, a sweat shop and a horrible, horrible place to work because a lot of people apparently do like working there. Chad (37m 42s): Yeah. I think it's funny by now. You don't think that those algorithms can't be gamed because a company like Goldman Sachs with the kind of cash that they have, you know, that shit's being gamed. Joel (37m 52s): It's a big company with a lot of employees. Chad (37m 55s): This is how Goldman Sachs does business. And if that's how Goldman Sachs does business. Okay, great. If you don't want to work 95 hours a week, you don't go to Goldman Sachs. Joel (38m 7s): No Chad (38m 8s): DJ Soul, and the investors are greedy white dudes who give zero fucks. That's what it is, right. Joel (38m 14s): You're not going to Goldman to save the world, and you're not going to Goldman to like, you know, have a work-life balance and have kids, like you're going there to make money or have a springboard to a better, you know, better opportunity because you put the time in, at Goldman Sachs. I mean, it's boot camp at the Marines for Ivy leaguers. Chad (38m 33s): Wouldn't quite got that far, but yeah, it should be expected right? Now, I think you're a hundred percent correct when we're talking about chess moves. Citi Group CEO is probably 180 degrees different from good old DJ Saul. Yeah. Citi Group CEO, Jane Fraser told staff that she is banning, banning internal video calls on Fridays, encouraging workers to set boundaries for a healthier work-life balance and instituting a firm-wide holiday called Citi reset day, which is actually May 28th. Joel (39m 12s): That's clever. Chad (39m 13s): As a COVID pandemic fatigue takes a toll on employees. They have about 210,000 employees. I think once again, it starts to set up really the expectations for not every company is the same. I don't agree with brutalizing 95 hours a week, work, but overall that you know what you're getting into compared to Citi Group. Yeah. And look, Jane Frazier basically said, Hey, Goldman Sachs employees who hate working at Goldman Sachs, take a look at Citi Group, because we might be a much better place for you to find a career. Chad (39m 53s): So for me, like either it was really a just coincidental timing or one hell of a chess move to say, look, they're in the news as being a real shitty place to work, we're going to come out and say, Zoom free Fridays and work-life balance and mental health days and Citi reset, and like really clever marketing. Joel (40m 14s): And I'm sure a lot of people that at Goldman that said, Hey, we have, we do it does suck here. Like, what else is out there? So from a marketing standpoint, I mean, she looks like a much better CEO, a much better place to work. And it was a great recruiting move to get people from other places in her industry to, to come work for them. I mean, oddly enough, both of them in terms of like poach data, they're both very positive Glassdoor. I think Citi's like three and a half out of five stars and, and her and their CEO is like a 91 or so percent approval rating. So oddly enough, both of these companies show really high sentiment scores as well as really popular CEOs. Joel (40m 58s): But sometimes there's an opportunity and you can spin the marketing wheel and have two very opposing stories, which may be, we have here. Chad (41m 7s): Yeah. You better check your algorithm. Joel (41m 12s): That's what she said. Chad (41m 15s): Oh, we'll be right back. Jobvite (41m 17s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Joel (42m 2s): We talked about Fiverr and you dissing on Visage with their five or like type of crowd source. Chad (42m 10s): It was a disage on Visage is what I did. Joel (42m 13s): Oh, that's very good. That's nice. Chad (42m 15s): That's our new title for the show. Joel (42m 18s): Yeah. Visage is not big enough for a title. Yeah, I know. So at 28 year old making $378,000 on Fiverr, how the fuck does she do that? She works really fucking hard is how she does it. So Alex Fasulo, she's in Brooklyn, she's a freelance writer and she looked around in the pandemic and saw everyone losing their jobs, new companies, going out of business, et cetera, and said, I need to find a new gig. And she went on the Fiverr platform. Joel (42m 59s): She's on the higher end version. The Fiverr pro you have to sort of earn your way into that. But once you get into there, you're a really trusted vendor. She primarily ghost writes white papers and books and eBooks and whatnot. She charges clients a thousand dollars for around the 10,000 word ebook. She says in any given week, she writes up to three e-books for clients. That's a lot of fucking books. She also said while so many people were losing their jobs. And so many businesses were going out of business. So many people were coming online to start selling products and services because it was the only way that they were going to make contact with other human beings. Joel (43m 39s): It wasn't make money, it was connect with other human beings, which I thought was interesting. This isn't easy money, by the way. She's obviously good at it because you got to get rated. You got to get reviewed. So she's obviously good at it. She's defined a need in her marketplace. So she's actually selling something that people want to buy. And according if my, and if my math is correct, she's turning out like 10,000 words every day, seven days a week. Yeah. So she's working hard for that $378,000. Chad (44m 11s): Yeah. So in May of 2020, she earned over $36,000. That was her highest earning month. So that if just the math, that's nine eBooks a week, that's 90,000 words a week. So she's got to have this down some, some way. Yeah. She's got to have system set up where she's kicking ass, taking names. She might have a staff. She might have a staff. I've heard of that before. Yeah. I've heard of writers that have, you know, sub writers and nobody knows about them. So yeah, she may have a system. Yeah,e she may have a system. I mean, she's according to the article, she's put around in a nice new Jeep and enjoying life. Joel (44m 51s): So it's hard for me to imagine she's burning the midnight oil, just writing thousands and thousands of words every day. Chad (44m 60s): And she moved to Florida because you can do that shit anywhere. Joel (45m 5s): And there's no sales tax. So it's all bright skies, baby, but you still got to live in Florida, for that. We out. Chad (45m 16s): We out. OUTRO (46m 9s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out..

The guest so nice, we had to have him on twice. Listeners will remember a red-hot interview Chad & Cheese did in 2020 with IKEA's Rick Carsley, and luckily for everyone, he's back on the podcast. Now with Freedom Mortgage, Rick heads up TA and, as usual, he doesn't pull any punches on recruiting tech he likes and doesn't like. It's a must-listen for anyone shopping around for the latest industry tools. All Rick Rollin' and Candidate Matching powered by Sovren AI. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Sovren (0s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" Sovren (44s): like all the others. No, 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. INTRO (1m 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 (1m 20s): Oh yeah. What's up everybody? This is your favorite podcast. I am Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my co-host Chad Sowash. Chad (1m 29s): What's up? Joel (1m 29s): And Holy crap, you guys, we have Rick Astley on the show today. Can you fucking believe it? Rick Astley! Chad (1m 36s): No Rick Astley turned us down. We actually got Rick. Rick Carsley. Yeah. Remember Rick from Ikea. Joel (1m 45s): Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The meatballs, Hey Rick! Chad (1m 50s): No, Ma the meatloaf Rick, Rick actually is now Talent Acquisition at Freedom Mortgage. Rick dude. Welcome to the show. Give us a little intro. We were just at Ikea. When did you make this move? W Joel (2m 5s): What's been going on in the last year that we, that we spoke? Did anything happen in the world? What's going on? Chad (2m 10s): How's Philly? That's what I want to know. Is Philly still there? Joel (2m 14s): We're so here, we're definitely still here. We got hit with Midwest style snow over the last three days. I was talking to my mom just about shoveling four or five times. And she's like, you're too old for that. You need to get a snowblower. I'm like I'm 40. I think 40 is still shoveling age? Chad (2m 35s): Yes, I agree. Joel (2m 37s): But yeah, I left Ikea in June for various reasons. Some of the stuff I talked to y'all about last time, you know, visitation in retail had always kind of been an issue in March when the government cracked down on what was essential versus non-essential business. Rick (2m 57s): I think if you looked in the dictionary for non-essential, like Ikea's emblem, it is right there. You know? So initially like they furloughed essentially everybody, almost everyone that worked at the store is outside of management. And that occurred like April. And so we went from being a recruiting organization to essentially like a furlough organization. Because when you think about that process, you're creating letters, you're, you know, setting up agreements and then we started to call all those people back. Joel (3m 27s): That sounds fun. Rick (3m 28s): Oh, it was a blast. Chad (3m 29s): That sounds like just fucking horrible. But my question is how, how are those meatballs not essential? I mean, I don't get it. Can I get those delivered to my door for God's sakes? Can Ikea do that? Did Ikea actually use Task Rabbit to start delivery services? Joel (3m 46s): Pretty sure they shut, they shut down all the cafeterias didn't they? Jesus. No more food at Ikea dude. Rick (3m 53s): Yeah. I don't know if they have opened those back up just yet. I assume, I assume they have not. One of the benefits to working at Ikea when, you guys all visited, it was $2 to eat lunch. That lunch was basically featured a whole lot of sodium again, weight gain. But I think that is the one thing we don't talk enough about quarantine is the quality of my lunches has just increased by about a hundred percent. Chad (4m 21s): As in quantity. Are you talking about, what do you mean actual quality? Joel (4m 26s): Are you dissin' the Ikea food? Chad (4m 28s): What are you getting the Wiz on the, on the Philly cheese steak now? I mean, I don't understand. Tell me, Rick (4m 33s): I just mean like cooking from home, firing up the grill, throwing some chicken kebabs on for lunch rather than like eating taco bell in your car. You know? Chad (4m 46s): Joel's eating salads nowadays. Joel (4m 48s): What's wrong with Taco Bell? Jesus. Rick (4m 52s): I think everything is wrong with Taco Bell. I think it's consumerism at its worst. Chad (4m 57s): Oh, so now you're at Freedom Mortgage, which I would assume is an entirely different set of obstacles. Even when Ikea was up and running and they were hiring, this has gotta be in an incredibly difficult. Joel (5m 9s): There's a lot of refinancing going on. I'm guessing the mortgage business is pretty busy these days. Rick (5m 14s): It's absolutely insane. You know, I grew up in the mortgage industry. That's how I learned like what recruiting was, which was just completely random. I don't know if I ever told this story right after undergrad, I was a loan officer, like dial for dollars call center. And there was a flyer, it was bright orange and it said $500 referral for any loan officers that we hire. And so I went out, I joined my alumni association. I would go to like happy hours around Chicago and brag about how much money I made as a loan officer. Cause you're clueless at that age. And like in 45 days I hired about 18 loan officers. Rick (5m 57s): And that caught the eye of another company who hired me to run their like huge, huge branch that they were building. And the way I got into this show that we call recruiting was the owner was like, Hey, you don't just how your loan officers here, you have to hire all the other jobs. And my only question was I'm like, so those jobs have base salaries, right? He's like, well, yeah. And I'm like, well that's easy. Yeah. I can do that. Chad (6m 24s): No, that's like cheating. Right. You're starting with a leg up already. Rick (6m 30s): Yeah. So then like 16 years later, this is, this is how I pay my mortgage now. But the industry just, you know, blew up. Financial services and essential retail have been like the two things and warehouses that have kept, you know, the, the economy moving kind of since March. And when you have record low interest rates, when you have rising home prices and Freedom kind of based on our size, we had to hire and how you're quickly. We hired like 6,300 - 6,500 coworkers last year and the kind of skilled positions in the mortgage industry underwriting kind of, kind of being a huge one, the overall salary of a job like that, you know, a year ago, underwriter was say, two years of experience was on the market for say 70 to $75,000. Rick (7m 24s): That same job. Now that base salary is around a hundred and you have quarterly bonuses. You know, that you're all in number like a virtual now, is that a remote job? Oh yeah. Freedom had always really been remote. So that was kind of our leg up previously. But now that everybody is remote, there's like 10 to like 12 to 15, really big players in our industry. And it is a constant battle of us kind of outbidding each other, a candidate for underwriting. If they throw the flag up on LinkedIn that they're looking or tossed to their resume on, Indeed, they're gonna get hit up by like 10 companies in a matter of days. Rick (8m 8s): And then your staffing partners, which is huge in financial services, there there's no industry that gets dominated by staffing like financial services does just because of the volume and the constant ebb and flow. They just drive the price up further and further. Joel (8m 23s): Sounds like you guys were sort of familiar with interviewing through technology, whether that be video or some other means, would that be correct? And if you're doing that in some companies that are sort of new to doing that, what are some tools that you find sort of invaluable? What may be changed for you with video and I guess longterm wise, it's going to stay that way for you? Rick (8m 45s): I mean, last time I talked to y'all, I was just singing the praises of HireVue, which seems to be a reoccurring theme since I stole that idea from the Hilton back in 2011. And it's funny, the person that runs Ikea now is from the same lineage, but it's completely different. You know, like when you think about just where candidates come from, Ikea could spend $1 on any pay-per-click site and they're going to get 2 million impressions and thousands of thousands of applications a month and that's brand, yeah. That's not the same in financial services, regardless of who you work for. And in our business, the bigger you are, the worst reputation you have, like no one wants to go work for Quicken. Rick (9m 31s): So, you know, in my old world of Ikea, you had so many applicants. It was like, well, how do we not take the recruiter's time? And that was just, I'm going to send you that, HireVue, you're going to do it yourself and I'm going to gauge your participation in our process. And then from there, I'm going to make you take a video game assessment. So I can tell the business why I'm making the hiring decision based on math versus you. That just doesn't work in our business. But you know, the financial services industry, there's times where it's beset with the same amount of fraud that you have in your normal C to C game, if you're hiring like international for .net developers or whatever, and IT. So you're doing Zoom video interviews for recruiting, you're still taking them through an assessment, but that assessment is very skills specific for that exact job. Rick (10m 20s): So, you know, I really don't have a video based solution outside of Zoom right now. I've been playing with LinkedIn's new ad-on. Did you all see that, with the two behavioral based interview questions that you can add in there? Like when you post the advert directly on their site, have you guys played with that at all? Chad (10m 43s): Haven't played with it, how was it working? So, Rick (10m 45s): So, you know, the problem with LinkedIn, I don't, that would take like four hours for me to answer my own statement right there. But so, you know, you post your advert and maybe one to 2% of those applications are anywhere near relevant, your job. So what you can do is as part of your application, you can set up two video based questions, but you only have like 25 to 30 questions to actually choose from. So what it's been good for is kind of lower level positions where you're able, like my whole big thing was always evaluate people and not paper because especially coming from retail, those people aren't resume writers. Rick (11m 28s): Like resumes continue to get worse and worse and worse. So it's like let's give candidates the ability to push themselves up from the pack and show that they are willing to do the gig and that they want to do the gig. And if you're remote and remote, full-time, you're going to have to interact on video with your manager, with your peers, with your customers. And it was free as part LinkedIn. And now that I no longer have the Ikea budget, free is very good. So it's still, you know, like it's that same old adage, you know, a hundred people apply. If you reach out to all a hundred, you know, knock out 35% that aren't gonna respond because we've made applying so easy. Rick (12m 12s): And then just keep going down that funnel. So participation for the pilot, you know, I probably get maybe 18 to 20% of the people actually fill out the video part of it. You know what I've seen both LinkedIn do. And Indeed recently for the first time in forever is one improve their interface and two give away things for free all the years I've been doing this. Like if LinkedIn even thinks of a new project, you see it on the invoice before you've ever even opened up the site? Chad (12m 46s): Don't you think that's based around competition now though. And not to mention if LinkedIn doesn't go to video before your applicant tracking system automatically integrates acquires and then integrates interviewing and video. I mean, they're fucked. So I mean, they have to beat them to the punch don't they? Rick (13m 1s): They do. It's a cool idea, you know, and I really like it. The one thing is, and I don't know if it was really that hard to program, but only giving me like 30 questions that I can actually ask. Chad (13m 15s): That's lame. Rick (13m 16s): You know, like, you know, it might as well be like, Hey, tell me about your biggest hero or do you know all these fluff questions? You know, there's stuff where like, you know, where do you want to be in five years? Joel (13m 28s): And three people you'd like to have dinner with dead or alive? Rick (13m 32s): It's so similar to that. But what, where we've been using it is just to one, when you have a market that you're just not going to find good people in. And when I say good, I just mean have done the, a very similar job before at a competitor. So when you're going to go off of people that don't fit the script from A to B, then you need something to get in front of the hiring manager. The one cool thing is when you have a big LinkedIn contract, you know, the old hiring manager seats that were just never used. And it was really just like, Oh, I'm sharing profiles, but you'd always have your executive recruiters do that nonsense. Like, Oh, I shared twenty-five profiles with a hiring manager. Rick (14m 14s): He wants to talk to three. You're like, cool. Does he know that that website has a one participant, 1% participation rate outside of recruitment. And we're never going to talk to those people anyway, but I hope he looked at those profiles. So with this, at least you can create a project. You can make the hiring manager part of that project and they can actually view the video, so it added a little bit onto that. Thinking of LinkedIn too. Did you guys see the new resume builder function, that's like plugged into Microsoft word? Yeah, I thought that was just kind of a cool add on it sets up for a world of plagiarism in regards resumes that already existed. And now we just made it one click away. Rick (14m 57s): But you know, there's a lot of neat stuff that like the two big guys did during the throes of the pandemic or the beginning of it. Anyway. Chad (15m 7s): It's a good way to push the rest under some dirt, right? So I mean, video interviewing in itself, I think every core system should have that integrated and why they, they haven't acquired and or develop their own has makes no sense to me whatsoever, especially during this last year? But you mentioned Candidate ID and obviously, you know, we know Adam and the crew over there pretty well. What are you guys doing with them? And what actually leads you into a discussion? What was the problem? Rick (15m 40s): For years the old two big players in a recruiting CB and Monster. You paid to build these talent networks and they were never touched and depending on your ATS, and we just have some, some issues with our ATS because it's a legacy system supported by a data warehouse. Joel (15m 58s): Wait you have issues with your ATS? That's weird. Rick (16m 1s): I know. Right? But so, you know, I've always loved Adam's system because I dug the fact that he didn't call it a CRM. He gave the CRM away for free and what they can do in combination with their sourcing product and their talent pipeline software is just super, super cool. So like, if you were going to just buy licensed database style lists, whether it's looking for like loan officers or whether you're looking for underwriters, that stuff comes with like 35 to 40% of actual, you know, relevant information, like real email addresses, real phone numbers. And just cause I've known Adam for awhile, I was able to get through a lot of that fluff. Rick (16m 45s): And so it's like, Hey, I need 10,000 - 12,000 names of people that do this job. And I want to put them in your system. I want to text them. I want to email them. And I just want to see, can we find candidates before they hit that market that I was telling you about earlier, that is going to be at a price point that we're just not going to live in. It's not like we can't afford to pay underwriters at top of market or any of these jobs at top of market, the ebb and flow of a business like ours, doesn't have a good history for people that get comped at the top of market. So, you know, Adam has assembled a nice little team, you know, and it's been a product that I feel like, you know, there's really only one kind of solution like Candidate ID that's priced that how Candidate ID is that you can run five to 10 campaigns and just keep them going. Rick (17m 41s): Because there's companies that do stuff very similar, like RCI, for instance, but they're going to charge you three to four grand for every 30 days of just sourcing you names. And that's just not worth it,. Where you can get Candidate ID to do, you know, five to 10 of those jobs for around the same price point. Now, granted, it's not going to be as granular and it's not going to be as hands-on, but it's the whole point, like go through my database, see what's real and what's not, let's clear out what's not. Joel (18m 10s): So we obviously love when we get people you know, able to do the job on the, on a regular basis. What are some other tools that are sort of invaluable to you? And I'm interested what tools may be were effective at Ikea and are totally useless at Freedom Mortgage. You mentioned HireVue. Rick (18m 28s): I used for texting at Ikea just because it was hard to get approval for texting and that's just a lot with the way that Ikea looks at data. We used Call-Em-All, which is really just one of those that they used to use it in the store to tell people that it was snowing. And I moved that over to texting here at Freedom. I use Canvas for my texting and where that's neat is it's an annual contract that doesn't really like every other texting provider. It's like, okay, 2 cents a message, 3 cents a message, 5 cents a message. That's like a rolling invoice that every month you got to sing for your supper, you know, be like, Oh, I'm sorry I text so much. Rick (19m 8s): When you have just like the overall suite that's a lot better over here I was using Intello for a little while. That's kinda, I feel like an in-between from like a buy list. You know, CareerBuilder's Talent Discovery product is very similar where you're like, Hey, can you find me relevant contact information for people that are trying not to be found? But again, that's a product where it's neat in concept, like our friends at ZipRecruiter, but then when you go to use it, if it never really works, you're like, well, why am I paying y'all? You know, I did a demo with Hinterview. Have you guys been hit up with that nonstop campaign of, we'll give you a free month of video. Chad (19m 50s): I've seen interview, but I've, haven't been hit up by their campaigns now. Rick (19m 55s): Yeah. I think she's going to kill me just like when the ZipRecruiter guy called me multiple times about why I got him in trouble last time, you know, it's, it's just another kind of video software, but, you know, yeah. It's neat to have a free month of any product, but when it's a product that works best when it's integrated with your entire other world, like this is just an obstacle. Joel (20m 21s): Is, are using canvas and coordination with Jobvite or is it an integrated into a difference? Rick (20m 27s): So I don't utilize Jobvite we had solely a Canvas contract now, like I just got a cut off a call yesterday to figure out like, who is our rep? You know? Cause our contract goes up in a couple of months, I'm gonna integrate Canvas just with Candidate ID. Okay. At Ikea, we never suffered from resumes. Here you need experience for 70 to 80% of our jobs. So we really need to work on how do we get your information and pluck you cause you're not looking for work. Whereas Ikea, if you can walk into the store, you are technically qualified to work the job. Joel (21m 7s): So I'm curious, we talk a lot about on the show in terms of engagement and you know, keeping employees engaged in the company. And it sounds like as retention is a huge challenge for you, how do you balance engagement in a work from home environment to keep these employees, you know, feeling like they belong in the company and or is it just a money question with mortgages? How are you guys handling that issue of retention? Rick (21m 35s): That's that's tough. It really is. And we've really seen a lot of our managers kind of step up to try to really get, you know, more time with their teams, just on a random social aspect. You know, Zoom fatigue is real. And you know, the amount of times that I spend six to seven hours myself on Zoom calls every single day. So it's really hard to then work after that. You know, like it's just like, that's not, that's not really my job just to have conversations. I actually, sadly that is exactly my job. What Freedom does, that's neat as a company is, you know, like we'll have you know, our monthly meeting or quarterly meetings and they'll send you like GrubHub cards, you know, where it's like, Hey, we're having a lunch and learn buy yourself lunch. Rick (22m 28s): Every time there's a holiday, you get kind of a little gift just, just to kind of get that, you know, something additional like something you normally would have seen if you were at one of our offices. And then like with my own team, you know, I have multiple 30 minute touch bases. I hate that word. I was trying to think of something else to say, but you'll have like your meetings. And a lot of times, like you don't even really want to discuss work, like it sneaks in because that's what you guys all have in common. But you're like, I just want you to have some sort of social outlet because the isolation to all of this is real. Rick (23m 8s): Like your people that, you know, don't have a family that live alone. Like I can only imagine, you know, the kind of pain that they have to go through just to wake up every day. And as a wife who is a recruiter, all herself, like I swear the Microsoft sound should say something much different because every time you hear that little dah, dah, dah, you, you're not feeling positive about that situation. Chad (23m 34s): Yeah. You have the Pavlov's dog of fact where it just scares the shit out of you instead of making you more hungry. Rick (23m 42s): Well, it's like I was in the kitchen and like, you hear that noise and my first thought, cause my phone's in my pocket. I'm like, please be her computer and not mine, please be her computer and not mine. The other thing that we've really done a good job with at Freedom is we promoted almost 2000 coworkers last year. Chad (24m 1s): You guys are focusing on internal mobility, which we don't see a lot happening in our industry and that's sad. So, but you guys are, is that what I'm hearing? Rick (24m 11s): Definitely. Just because you know, with as quickly as we grew, you know, you kind of threw away rules where like, Oh no, you have to be in your job for two years before you can be up for promotion or posts out. But when you're growing as quickly as we are, that's not possible. So if you hire a cohort of 20 processors and they come in and you have those two or three, just, you know, high performers, after six months, we'll we now need a processing lead. So you two have been the best performing, go ahead. And then you keep bringing people in. And then the people that are doing the right things that are doing the work, good quality, those people are rewarded. Rick (24m 51s): So we've done a really, really good job at doing that. And employee referrals are massively important here. Our CEO back when all of this started and you know, you know, so many people, you know, sadly lost, their job. He started to different friends and family, you know, events. Where it was not, we're going to lower back some of our requirements and we are going to get your friends and family back to work. And then we had enough opportunities that were, I don't want to call them entry level, but very close to it. Or if you had some skills that were similar, we could put you through a proper two to four week training to get you going, get your remote. Rick (25m 32s): We were able to bring a whole lot, you know, of our coworkers, friends, and family back, you know, supporting the economy. Joel (25m 38s): Are you using any technology for referrals? Rick (25m 41s): We are not, we are not. Much to my chagrin we had to put on a virtual friends and family event late fall. And like I used Chromeifi for the scheduling because the guy who created was given a car free for a little while, did you know, like just awesome evergreen recs and our ATS, and then did a lot of manual work to kind of just keep the process going. That was another thing that really blew up, every job fair provider bought the executive suite to Zoom and became a virtual career host. Chad (26m 19s): Yeah. Rick (26m 20s): And some of those joints wanted seven to like ten grand to run a virtual event. Those prices just went nuts. And I think you've seen a ton of kind of your university recruiting models, which has been a waste of time since like forever. Now try to get you to go to their virtual events. Chad (26m 44s): Now, do you think that this has all happened, that these in-person career fairs are going to finally fucking die? The box sandwich, you know, box the launch career fairs that are being put on when they can be done so much more effectively and efficiently online? Do you think they're going to die or do you think they're going to be revived? Rick (27m 6s): I pray that they die. I've worked a lot of these fairs back in the day. And I think back to like my time in like Jersey, you know, when you get into like that Newark area or that Patterson area, and you're hosted up at a Ramada Inn/ you know, the people that walked in there and had like written resumes, you know, the only reason why I'd want some of a certain aspect of that to keep going is to level the playing field a little bit. To make sure that if someone doesn't have a good wifi connection in their house, they have the ability to go out and seek work. That is the only part of that, that I really kind of believed in. Rick (27m 46s): But, you know, I'm a massive germaphobe, so not shaking anyone's hand for the rest of my life is really the biggest positive of the pandemic for me. And it's funny, you know, when all of this started and people are like, Oh, I bet you're freaking out because of this. And I'm like, no, now you just know what it's like to live like me. I've been keeping hand sanitizer in my pocket since I was 14. You know, this is, this is normal. I hope everyone's still has to wear face masks. I feel more comfortable being in the grocery store than I ever have. Chad (28m 18s): When we finally get back into the office. And I know you guys are probably going to be staying, staying pretty heavily remote, but you do have offices. I think you even have one here North of Indianapolis, will you be mandating shots? Rick (28m 32s): I can't even comment on that. I don't have that answer. I've seen a couple of companies kind of make those kind of announcements, but those companies are on huge, huge scales. Didn't Amazon say that they're giving people 50 bucks or something really nominal, if they agree to get the vaccination? You know, maybe they give him a bathroom break or something? I don't, I don't see, you know, like if our CEO decides to make that decision, you know, but I'm not really sure about that. Chad (29m 9s): I mean, on the HR side, and I know not talent acquisition separate from HR, but on the HR side, it's a lot of it has to do with risk mitigation. And this is a huge risk, obviously. So being able to, there's a lot of education that needs to happen, but overall, if you want to come in to work, you know, you want to provide a safe environment. So this is, I mean, this is a discussion that it's really interesting to me, that talent acquisition and HR is not pushing to the C-suite to make decisions now because it's going to be happening soon. Rick (29m 44s): I think the vaccination overall is really going to be a very interesting study into, you know, societal norms. If you just talk about it and have a random conversation with your neighbor and they give like a very strong opinion, one way or another, whether they're going to, or going to not get it, it's something as off putting now is if you talk about your political affiliation and it shouldn't be something that's political, it should be something that follows, you know, science. How do you guys feel when as soon as you can get the shot in the arm, are you, are you apt to take it? Chad (30m 19s): Oh, hell yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Joel (30m 21s): I'm on the waitlist! Chad (30m 23s): I haven't been on a plane in a fucking year. I want to get on a plane and I want anybody who's sitting next to me, perspectively on that plane, I want to know that they've had the fucking shot too. Rick (30m 36s): I'm the exact same way. And it's funny, like, were you guys, did you guys use to get flu shots? Chad (30m 43s): I was in the Army forever? You didn't have a choice. So you got that shit stuck in your arm. Rick (30m 49s): Yeah. My, my old man, he was a Chicago cop and he was in the Navy. And so he gets his vaccination on Saturday through the VA. So I'm actually signed up March 11th to get mine cause I kind of qualify. So it's, it's just one of those things that you, you know, you can't help my seven year old daughter's right next to me. Do you want to talk on the pod for a bit? Chad (31m 17s): It's a family show guys. Rick (31m 18s): That's the future of recruiting right there. You know, it's hard to not, you know, do the math in your head for, you know what, we're getting 1.2, 1.3 people, 1.2 or 1.3 million people a day, are getting the shot. Yeah. So like when you do the math, there's what 340 million people in the United States knock out the people that are under 16. So like you're probably like 280, 290,000,000. So we haven't gotten, at least it really hasn't been highly kind of reported is that group of probably 30% of the US that's just going to refuse the shot. Like when you start getting into rural America. I know we've seen little reports about, you know, nurses that didn't want to take it or first responders that didn't want to take it. Rick (32m 4s): So this next, you know, three to four months is going to be really interesting. And like every time you think you're out of the woodworks or something, then you'll read like, Oh no, six, the next six to 14 weeks are truly going to be the darkest time. Joel (32m 17s): All right, Rick, I'm going to let you out on this one. You mentioned earlier, I think off the show offline that branding is sort of a big issue with, with your business. And you can, you can choose to name the company that you talked about or not, but it sounds like employment branding is somewhat important and companies have brands in the mortgage industry. And I'm curious, we'll talk about that. And then also talk about how has it changed in COVID? Will it change for the future? Talk about employment branding and your business. Rick (32m 50s): I mean, it's, I think the last time we chatted, I was talking about how difficult it is to create a kind of humanistic brand inside of financial services, because it's easier in retail cause people think of Ikea and it's like unique or cool into like, Oh, I bet that would be a cool company worked for, just like the same way you think of any large company. And if you've ever worked for them, it tends not to be the case. You know? So Brandon Lynn is a guy who I knew from before Freedom Mortgage, he's my VP of employee branding over here. And so what we've been trying to do is kind of figure out the voice that you really want to show that the outward market and you know, something that, you know, actually is going to either attract customers or attract candidates. Rick (33m 40s): The thing about a mortgage company is it's hard as a consumer to not think that they're a dime a dozen, just because every time you get a piece of mail, anytime you accidentally click on something that says interest rates are low, you're just completely slammed by all of these companies. And it, the mortgage industry is like the, you know, biggest small industry in the States just because it's everybody knows everybody. So if you hire one person from or you're underwriting someone, chances are your manager works for you now, or like, it just kind of never ends. So where we've been able to get really creative is Freedom has this program called first flyer, which takes undergrads. Rick (34m 25s): They have to be a year out of school and then puts them into kind of a historically, really hard to fill position for us. We just had one for IT. We had one for marketing, one for underwriting. And so that is the group that you really get to be the most creative with. Because you're not thinking about like, Oh, how does my LinkedIn post get impressions and likes because your kids graduate from college, don't care about that. You're like, how do I make my posts inventive? How do I make it cool? How do I make, is it like the Costco video that I texted you a couple of weeks back, Chad. Like, you know, give me an honest interpretation of what it's like to work at that company. Rick (35m 10s): And I don't know if you got to see that Joel, but you know that guy, you know, and I guarantee you corporate didn't approve that at all cause no corporation would. In like fifty seconds that guy gave seven reasons to come work at Costco. It was the pay rate. It's when you would get overtime, when you would get time and a half. He even brought up like the same $150 that everyone gets to go to the eye doctor, which everybody knows that that's, you know, you're going to get money to get glasses or contacts every year. But when you have someone that actually works at a company, say it, it actually just comes across as even more genuine. Because it's like, that's their client base. Rick (35m 52s): So I'd love to see more like that. And I was super angry that I didn't think of that idea because that was really cool. Chad (35m 59s): Doesn't mean you can't do it though. It doesn't mean you can't. He's laid out a great format. Now you just sit there with a beer and a Philly cheese steak in start your TikTok. Rick (36m 10s): When you have that huge population that retailers do and Target is, you know, a brand that walks on water in retail, they do this crazy thing where they pay people fairly. You know, there's so much opportunity when your job really is relevant to anyone. When anybody that probably doesn't have a felony can come work for you. You can really like appeal to mass audiences. What you're going to see us do this year is really try to flirt with creating better video content to share. My social aggregator is Everyone Social and so that hooks up into your Twitter, that hooks up into your Facebook and also your LinkedIn. Rick (36m 54s): But I am tired of seeing static job posts. Like that is like the absolute worst content that you see on those feeds. Like there's this job that you may know someone who did this once, but you probably forgot that it was your career. Like it please. Chad (37m 10s): You heard it first here, kids Tik TOK is the way to go. Rick. I got to say, man, I appreciate you taking the time today to actually plug in those, those headphones first and foremost. Joel (37m 22s): Thanks Rick! Chad (37m 23s): And then getting Rick rolled there. It is any tough dudes. This just makes me smile whenever I can hear it. But man, thanks for coming on. And if somebody wants to find out more about you, maybe connect with you or I don't know, maybe come work for you? Joel (37m 40s): Want a job at Freedom Mortgage? Chad (37m 42s): Where would they find you? Rick (37m 43s): Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter? @RickCarsley26. Yeah, but LinkedIn is obviously the, the easiest way to, to get ahold of me. Chad (37m 53s): Bastard. Joel (37m 53s): Dig it. We out. Chad (37m 54s): We out. OUTRO (38m 23s): I'm Rory from Scotland, the country, which brought you electricity! Thank you for listening to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Nada Niente. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

COVID has made online video incredibly popular in the workplace, but it's also made human connections harder to come by. And engaging with new people at work is almost impossible. That's why startups like Spontea Coffee are so interesting, they bring together online video with spontaneous human connection. But do they have the chops to survive the Firing Squad? Being recent winners of the HR Hackathon says they do, but Chad & Cheese will have the Final Word. This podcast power by The Programmatic Revolution. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Pandologic (0s): Hey HR, have you joined the programmatic revolution? If not, you're about to get schooled on how to take your organization to the next level. Check this out. 95% of CMOs use programmatic advertising, but only 5% of CHRs are using it to advertise their jobs. Where's the disconnect? PandoLogic uses powerful automation to drive higher performing job ads without the bloated budget. It's time to transform the way you think about job advertising and join the revolution. Learn more at pandologic.com/revolution Firing Squad Intro (36s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they got what it takes to make it out alive? Dig a fox hole and duck for cover kids the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel (58s): Ah, yeah, what's up everybody. It's another firing squad. This is your co-host Joel Cheesman joined as always by Chad Esquire Sowash. Chad (1m 8s): Well, Hello. Joel (1m 10s): And today we welcome co-founder of Spontea. We'll get into the name in a second. Viktoria Sheyko, Viktoria is also a consultant at KPMG, Viktoria . Welcome to firing squad. How are you? Viktoria (1m 24s): Hi! I'm good thanks! Joel (1m 26s): So who is Viktoria? Give us a little bio tweet on you and then we'll get into the show. Viktoria (1m 31s): Sure. I will be glad to. So yeah, I'm Viktoria. I used to be an auditor in KPMG, there for six years now and yeah. Switched to being a finance consultant, doing all these things, now I'm communication. And at the same time, I'm very passionate about improving the world a little bit, especially focusing in an improving workplace, I'm doing like a lot of diversity stuff and yeah, and now I was participating in that HR hackathon, too. Joel (2m 1s): Chad, tell her what she's won today. Chad (2m 4s): Well, that, that being said, everybody needs to know this is a special edition of firing squad because Spontea Coffee, the Spontea Coffee team actually won the HR hackathon, which landed them a spot on today's show kids. That's right. So for clarity sake, there were two categories of winners. Category number one was a ground up build concept tech team, everything. And that's exactly what Viktoria's team did. They built the entire thing from the ground up, the team, the concept and the tech. And it took two days. The second winner was actually existing tech and they will be on a future firing squad. Chad (2m 48s): So congratulations on that, Viktoria. Viktoria (2m 52s): Yeah. Chad (2m 53s): Now let me tell you what you've won you, lucky thing you. Well, you have won, two minutes to pitch the Spontea Coffee app. At the end, you will hear that bell then Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start rambling or we get bored, Joel's going to hit you with the crickets. At the end of Q and A, you're going to receive either a big applause. That means you'll be swimming in caffeine, water-cooler talk and cash. Joel (3m 27s): Drinking gold plated, orange juice. Chad (3m 32s): A golf clap. Now you should probably brew another pot of coffee, you're going to need the energy because a, this slug needs to get moving or last but not least the firing squad. Sorry, we don't see coffee in your future. Just another HR hackathon and try again. Any questions? Viktoria (3m 54s): No. Chad (3m 54s): Okay. Let's do this. Joel (3m 56s): Let's have at it two minutes starting in three, two. Viktoria (3m 60s): Yeah! Hey everyone. So you heard it. I was participating in this big HR hackathon of two days and was teaming up with literally two strangers. And we were from different countries, different backgrounds skills. And yeah, the ideation process was really, really intense. But at the same time, we were concerned about this one thing we wanted to embrace remote work and why. So the new way of working, it proved to all of us that we are getting more and more disconnected from our colleagues, from the company. And the same time we are realizing that conscious breaks are so important for productivity at work. In the same time we used to have the breaks for networking because there we built relationships and this basically shapes work culture. Viktoria (4m 46s): So how does Spontea Coffee resolve the issues of being disconnected? Right? It gives us the opportunity to really connect and engage with each other in little short breaks, really five minutes with the option to extend and without having to consciously make appointments, right? The tool itself reminds us to take the spontaneous break. And yeah, you can decide in advance whether you want to meet new people or just chat with your teammates. So that way you keep in touch with your teammates constantly. And at the same time, you have the option to broaden your horizons. You realize how diverse your company is and then how much it has to offer. And this, at the same time, we really want to use intelligent matching tools. Viktoria (5m 27s): We're thinking about that also. So you're getting matched based on common interests or hobbies based on data from LinkedIn profiles, for example, or acquirees and especially exciting is our collaborative feature here. That's possible to hop in conversations like an in-house clubhouse feature in a way. So you see two team colleagues and you're like, Oh my God, I didn't talk to them for ages. So you hop in and you get the ultimate kitchen top feeling back. Yeah. So this tool is really for connecting with each other again, get the team spirit back. Yeah. We would be glad to see you on SponteaCoffee.com. Thank you. Joel (6m 3s): Good. Very good. All right. I'm going to give you the softball first. Let's talk about the name. So Spontea, how'd you come up with the name? And will there be an American version called Sponfee? Because we drink coffee over here. Viktoria (6m 17s): Actually, it was a really fun conversation. Very intense because yeah, we were out like one German girl, one German guy who's living in Denmark and Australian girl living in London. And we were really discussing it because it had to be spontaneous in it and the same time, Spontea Coffee and tea. And she's like from London. So yeah, it must be something with tea at the same time. And the thing is, I was thinking in German, I was like, do you mean spontaneous Spontea Coffee? Because I literally read it. And I was like, no, no, I don't like it. I don't like it. And until we really talked about that yeah, it was really, it was SponCoffee, CoffeeSpontea, it was everything. Viktoria (6m 59s): So yeah, the same at the end when we talked and she said Sponttea! And like, yeah, I like it. I like it. It's smooth. It's quickly. And it has everything it is in there. So as spontaneous tea or Spontea Coffee. Joel (7m 12s): So the full name is Spontea Coffee. Viktoria (7m 14s): Yeah, exactly. Chad (7m 16s): And the SponteaCoffee.com domain was obviously available. Is that what I'm hearing too? Viktoria (7m 22s): Yes! Chad (7m 23s): Excellent. Okay. So tell me a little bit about the team, you had. Was it two other team members? How big was the team? What are their backgrounds? Viktoria (7m 31s): So it was also an interesting thing. So I was applying like submitting my idea and yeah, the, the only, the other girl was helping in my chat. And we were like having this really hot discussion about everything. What kind of features can we have, like virtual rooms and all this stuff, like really, really hard discussion. And yeah, all of a sudden Tom joined us. He has like a more kind of hackathon background. He did a lot of them. And so he and her, they're both developers and I'm the only one having this business consultant background. So I was mainly responsible for making the concept more, like writing it down, doing the video and stuff like that. Viktoria (8m 14s): So it was, and for like developing the prototype, they were more responsible and was a lot of fun, like having this energies, especially where like really different people. I'm like, okay, so I'm a consultant. So I love talking to people and I'm like, Oh, I would love to share this information or this information. Then I have, like, we talked to Tom and he was like, I don't want to talk to like strangers or something. And we were like, Oh, what do you want? Like you really want to. So I was like really a lot of fun conversations about like sharing data also because we were like, okay, intelligent matching what kind of things we would share. And actually, I was also like, I'm from Germany. So data privacy is really a hot topic here. And for example, him, he lives in Denmark and he says like, we share everything. Viktoria (8m 55s): So it was really interesting to get all these ideas together. And only in two days. Chad (8m 60s): You're right out of the gate, there, there really isn't any intelligent matching. You were looking for individuals to tell you what their interests are so that you can actually just do that regular type of matching and then hopefully match them up for calls down the road. Viktoria (9m 16s): Yeah. So it was one option to say, okay, rather we want like more data, like more information about the people. If this is like, you're compliant with the data privacy things. And then you can like matching them more intelligent, intelligent, because you're then like, okay, you love tennis. So you get like matched with someone who loves tennis or something. But at the same time, we were like, okay, you can just get matched randomly, completely, randomly. And also using, for example, icebreaker questions who are like coming up from a bot, for example, like, I don't know, I was making all this questions like, yeah. What was the best thing you did today or something, or like, did you have a hard day or something like that? Viktoria (10m 2s): And then you can start just from scratch. Chad (10m 4s): So is this only a mobile app or is there also a desktop Viktoria (10m 8s): Right now? It's not a mobile, it's only the web version. Joel (10m 12s): Okay. So what do you want to, what do you want to be when you grow up? So you win this hackathon thing and this weekend, you know, development sprint, are you going to raise money? Do you have plans to evolve the product, go to market it as is and see what happens? Like what, what are the next steps? Viktoria (10m 30s): So actually I was talking to some people from HR because I really wanted to get to know their opinion about the tool itself. And really, I didn't even expect that much positive feedback about that because really people from HR looking into that, and there are like many big companies. For example, I was talking to someone from Microsoft, but they're developing kind of their own tools, but who knows, maybe they're coming up to us as well. Who knows? So we really see the need at one point. And yeah, we definitely would need to raise money to develop it further because it's really an early stage development prototype. Joel (11m 11s): Well, so let's get into sort of my, I guess two hurdles, I'll go over the first one. To me like these sort of, I don't know, chat, chat-roulette, you know, spontaneously meet folks that you work with through video almost feels like the ping pong tables of the nineties. You know, like companies thought it was cool and Hey, people are going to have these, these moments where they meet for ping pong or foosball or something, and really connect and engage. And I think what mostly has happened is that people don't use those because they think, well, if I'm using them, then I look like I'm slacking off. Or I'm sort of connecting with people that I may or may not like, talk to me about the human element. Joel (11m 53s): Do you feel like people want to spontaneously talk to coworkers in this way? Do you have any data to promote or support the business model or do you just have anecdotal conversation with HR people, who let's be Frank usually will tell you something is good now, whether or not they'll buy it as a whole different discussion, but help me and help me con convince me that people will do this. Viktoria (12m 18s): Okay. So I can actually talk also from my own experience, I told you, like, I'm very engaged in diversity thing. So I was building up with some other colleagues, huge female network within the company of 800 people. So when Corona came up, like everyone was like, Oh my God, we are just sitting at home and how to engage with each other. And actually we were one of the first ones saying, okay, we just do coffee dates with the people. So you get still this feeling of connection with each other and of this 800 people, like within a few days, more than 100 were like engaging, just filling up XO spreadsheets, like saying, okay, I will have an appointment with this people because we didn't have any other tools. Viktoria (13m 1s): Right. They just wanted to get connected. And especially new joiners, I had so many new journals talking to me. It was like really just 15 minute talks, but they were so important. And the same time you get a connection with a person who's there in the company for six years. And I was like, okay, just hit me up whenever you have any question and you need like some information about how getting things done or something, you know? So I think this is a very, very special tool, especially because I have the same feeling about this making appointments. Like I don't want to use that because I keep rescheduling stuff. I keep rescheduling stuff because I have so much to do during the day. And especially I forget about my breaks, right? So this was the main idea about that. Viktoria (13m 42s): They were saying, okay, the tool itself tells me to make a break, especially when it sees, I have like some, like I have no appointments in between. And then I can still say no, but like in this moment, you, you might feel happy about that because I barely talked to my teammates nowadays, because we have our tasks and we don't need to talk to each other, but it would be nice. I'm always happy if someone calls. Chad (14m 8s): So what happens when Covid goes away and we're not relegated to staying home anymore? I mean, do you believe this issue is going to be de prioritized? Yeah, Viktoria (14m 17s): Sure about that. Because I was also reading some studies, at least for Germany, for the German market. So almost half of the people like the employers, they don't want to go back to the office. And the only reason people want to go back to the office is to meet the people, to talk to them again, to network. This is the number one reason. There are some other reasons for sure, but this is the number one reason. So it will be kind of a part-time thing. Maybe we will go back, but probably it will be always a half-time thing, going back. So we need tools to stay connected. It's really like, I believe there's a so important because companies will have a huge issue because of this disconnection. Viktoria (15m 3s): Because at one point, like, you will say what I do this for this company, because you don't feel this bonding anymore. You're too far away from like being engaged in there. Chad (15m 14s): No zoom fatigue is real. So, you know, does anyone really want to go on another video call? No matter what, you know, you feel like you're on video calls all day. Do you really feel like you want to jump on another one, even though it's only for five minutes and maybe you're not talking about work, how do you get past the zoom fatigue rule? Yeah. Viktoria (15m 35s): This is actually like the only issue I see for sure, because we like need time, like a screen off time. But at the same time, I feel like for example, so in the tool itself, we definitely one, like we made a setting where you say, how often can you get called and which times you prefer, for example also. So you have definitely control over that. So you don't get pinged all the time. This is really important because it gets, it can get like annoying too. But for example, at the end of the day before the weekend, for example, you're just saying, okay, let's have a beer together. It's almost the end of the day. Viktoria (16m 15s): Right. And you feel great just talking to someone randomly or some of your team colleagues, even feeling this connection right now, having this beer and just be happy about like going into the weekend. Chad (16m 28s): I do like beer. Viktoria (16m 29s): Love it. Yeah. Chad (16m 30s): I do. Like you sold me on that one. Joel (16m 33s): Okay, Viktoria, let's, let's talk about competition for a second because a lot of this business to me feels very commodity and nature, like very easy to do. So in researching for this call, I went to the Slack app store and there's a handful of companies that already kind of do this where, you know, via, via Slack, you can sort of randomly talk to people that you work with. They can set you up on calls with people that are sort of like-minded. So it seems to me like there's a, there's a good amount of competition in this space already. And it also seems like the ability to build a moat or a defensible position around it seems very hard to do. Joel (17m 17s): So I guess, tell me why your app is going to succeed on a field that's already has a lot of competitors. And what, what features are you going to build that will help defend it against other competition? What's going to make it unique. Viktoria (17m 33s): First thing I was looking into the other options. And as I said before, for example, like the big companies they are all working for in-house functions. So you're kind of like always limited to one program. For example, like we were not allowed to use Zoom at work or some others not Slack, some others, not Microsoft, maybe even. So you're always limited to this one program and with our tool, like, we really want to make it able to everyone using it, right. Like everywhere and everyone. Another thing, what I think is unique is like that it's very spontaneous. Viktoria (18m 13s): It's really like, we want to focus on the spontaneity again, this kitchen talk, feeling like no appointments. And especially, for you, no effort. I think this is so important because I don't even want to fill in my name in a fucking, sorry, spreadsheet. Joel (18m 30s): It's okay. You're on the right show. Viktoria (18m 34s): So it's like, even this is too much effort. I'm the most lazy person, the most lazy customer is. I'm always saying to all my friends and colleagues and I don't want them to have any effort with any tool. And this is what we are focusing on, that you don't have the effort, but you get the most out of that. And what I was mentioning in the elevator pitch, I really love the collaborative feature that you can hop in conversations really with teammates that you didn't talk to before. And you feel like, Oh, I have two minutes in there talking, maybe I can join. Especially if you have like kind of a red or green flag saying like, yeah, I'm always open to any other people talking to me. Joel (19m 14s): Let's talk about sort of a little bit of your growth strategy. And I know you're still developing the product, but are there plans to integrate with other platforms such as Slack to sort of get traction? What is the growth strategy of the company? Viktoria (19m 29s): It will be definitely an option to integrate it in other platforms. Joel (19m 32s): So haven't crossed that bridge yet in terms of, in terms of growth and how we market this thing. Viktoria (19m 37s): No, not that far, no. Okay. Chad (19m 39s): What department in the company actually owns this? Who are you selling to? Do you believe it's HR or is it somebody else? Viktoria (19m 48s): It could be all kinds of departments. We're really interested in team building. Like, like, I know for example, some departments who are very much focused on team building measures, so everyone who wants that they can use that. For example, only for their little teams, it doesn't need to be always HR and using it for the whole company. It can be really, yeah. Just be applied on some certain little departments. Depends always on the boss. Chad (20m 19s): Okay. Okay. Yeah. No, makes sense. Flexible. Can this work outside the virtual office? I mean, can I integrate friends and family from Facebook? Can I have kind of like spontaneous tea and coffee with whoever I want to? Viktoria (20m 34s): We discussed this feature as well. It's always like about data issues, but at this point on this two day hackathon, we were like, okay, let's just discuss everything, if everything is possible. And we really like this idea of, for example, like when you have this connection to LinkedIn profiles, just saying, okay, we can integrate this profiles and having this matching things with interesting people from business, for example, also. Yeah. So we definitely had this conversation as well. Joel (21m 4s): Well, Viktoria, that is the bell, which means your question and answering is now complete. Are you ready to face the firing squad? Viktoria (21m 12s): Yes. Joel (21m 14s): Okay. I'm going to go ahead and go first. I have, again, I have two sort of major hurdles in this business that I was, I was hoping that you'd, you'd be able to help me clear after the call. The first one was, do humans really want to do this? And Chad mentioned, you know, fatigue on being on video and sort of being on all the time with your employer, fellow, employer, coworkers, and employees at a company. And I just feel like it's just easier to have those friends that you want to talk to and have those side conversations, whether it be on FaceTime or Facebook and have those conversations that you would normally have at happy hour take place outside of any kind of work work environment. Joel (22m 1s): Because I think there's also an element of sort of being spied on by your company. And when you're chatting on a company device, you feel like, well, I have to act a certain way. I have to talk about certain things. So I think that's all gonna come into play as a hurdle for the business. The bigger hurdle for me is the competition. Like I mentioned, you know, a handful that are on Slack, developing that have already developed similar technologies. You know, they have their pricing, you know, down, they have their marketing down. They are integrated with obviously very popular messaging device. For me, I mean, maybe it's, you guys are just so early in the process, maybe I'm doing you a favor by nipping some of this in the bud, but for me, I think human nature and the commodity of video online and just making that, you know, spontaneity or spontaneous, just isn't enough for me to sign off on this startup. Joel (23m 1s): So for me, this is a shoot down situation. It's a shoot down situation. Let's hear what Chad has to say. Chad (23m 10s): Whew. Okay. Okay. I'm coming down. Joel (23m 14s): Nothing personal. Chad (23m 15s): I'm coming down off of that one. So a couple of questions that Joel asked, number one was, is there a need? And then number two, he asked about competition and says, it's high. Well, competition, wouldn't be high if there wasn't market validation. So therefore, Viktoria, there is a need. You have passed the needs test. For me, human connections plus beer equals great mental health, right? This doesn't have to be obviously a sit down and have beers with your colleagues or anything like that, but the mental health aspect of what we're doing today. And I agree with you a hundred percent. What we're going to be dealing with from now on, in this new hybridization of work is, is real. Chad (24m 1s): And there's no question we're connected 24 seven. The problem is we're losing the human connection. So this concept, this product, this, this app provides an easy opportunity to reestablish that human connection many of us have a lost. And a, I mean, yes, the Zoom fatigue is real, which is one of the reasons why, you know, I like the idea of this app specifically, and I know it's not, but I do like the idea of it specifically being a mobile app that drags me off my laptop and allows me to get up and stroll and chat and get away from just really the thought of even being at work overall. Chad (24m 46s): So it gives me the possibility of stepping out of my workplace. Are there obstacles? No question is developing directly to Slack in advantage. No, it's not at all because you're automatically pinned into Slack. What you're doing. And what I believe you're doing correctly is you're developing outside of Slack and or any of the other platforms that you can integrate into later. So you're not painting yourself into a corner, which is incredibly smart, which is overall, I understand there's a lot, you have to work on, but overall, this is something the market needs. This is something that humans need. You get a big applause. Joel (25m 29s): Love it. That's why we have a podcast. Opposing viewpoints. So how do you feel, Viktoria? Viktoria (25m 36s): Good, good. And you gave me a lot to think of and really good ideas and yeah, for good ideas to improve and yeah and work on that further. Chad (25m 47s): Thanks for coming on and congrats on winning the HR hackathon. Joel (25m 52s): Congrats for sure. And good luck. I hope you prove me wrong because it's not personal. It's all about the love. And with that, another firing squad is in the books. We out. Chad (26m 7s): We out. Joel (26m 8s): Thank you goodbye! Firing Squad OUTRO (26m 21s): This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the chadandcheesepodcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today that's www.chadcheese.com.

Performance-based ads have become a highly-adopted and powerful tool for Marketing departments throughout the world, and yet it hasn't in Recruitment Marketing. So, what is the state of programmatic job advertising in the recruitment world? Madeline Laurano, Founder of Aptitude Research shares information from newly published research entitled The State of Programmatic Job Advertising. - Are performance-driven ads the answer to more effective recruitment advertising? - What happens when employers embrace performance-based programmatic? - Why aren't employers jumping on the bandwagon? - What is the key differentiator for programmatic? - Can anyone do programmatic? - or should Marketing be involved? DOWNLOAD THE RESEARCH Great research coupled with Madeline's HOT TAKES on news from last week in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by those crazy programmatic kids over at Pandologic. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Pandologic (0s): pandoIQs, Programmatic recruitment advertising platform helps employers source talent faster and more efficiently than ever thanks to predictive algorithms, machine learning and AI. Buzzword, overdose alert. Yeah. Pando was on the cutting edge of Programmatic, while being deeply rooted in the recruitment industry. pandoIQ provides an end to end Programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any waste spending to maximize the ROI on your recruitment spend. And their AI enabled algorithms use over 48 job attributes and more than 200 billion historical job performance data points to predict the optimal job advertising campaign. The machine does all that shit. That shit sounds expensive! Think again Cheesman pandoIQ provides an end to end job advertising solution that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any wasteful spending. Sold! INTRO (1m 21s): 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 . Chad (1m 44s): Here we go welcome back kids. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese HR's most dangerous podcast. I am Chad Sowash and today we have a special guest researcher, analyst and intelligence elevation artist, that's what she's going to be doing today, Madeline Laurano, founder of Aptitude Research. Give a Big applause. Big applause. Madeline (2m 8s): Thanks Chad. Chad (2m 9s): Madeline, I didn't do justice. Okay. I need, we need to know more about Madeline. Give us a little Twitter bio about you. Madeline (2m 16s): Well, thanks for having me on Chad, I'm thrilled to be here. And I think the intelligence elevator is the greatest compliment I've ever had, so I don't know if I can say anything else after that, but I do research, like you said, on HCM technology, talent acquisitions, a big focus for me. And I know for you too, so I'm excited to be here and share some of the new research. Chad (2m 36s): Enough of the T's on the research. We're going to be talking about programmatic, but before we get into the research, let's talk a little bit about what programmatic is in the first place. We know what dumbed down distribution is and all that is very simply, and it is programmatic to an extent, right? If you're posting a job and it's being thrown out there to the world, that is a programmatic distribution, but we're talking about something much different than just spray and pray types of technology. What is the programmatic that we're going to be focusing on with this research? Madeline (3m 11s): Yeah, it's exactly right. I think most people think it's just job distribution or just real-time bidding. And it's so much more, it's really automating all the buying and selling of advertising. It's used so often in marketing and it's removing in many cases, humans from negotiating that, which is time-consuming, there's so much error with that and it's streamlining all your advertising and it's doing that all through a performance driven system. So ultimately if it's working, you're saving all of this wasted spend, you're saving money and you're streamlining your advertising and ideally getting the right candidates, which is what it's designed to do. Chad (3m 46s): Yeah, but the problem is in talent acquisition, adoption. We haven't seen mass adoption. So your research actually jumps into some of those different points. And again, we're just going to tease the research because we want people to be able to, to read into it, not to mention you and I have a webinar with hr.com to talk more about this in March, right? Madeline (4m 12s): Yes, exactly. We're going to talk about all of these misperceptions around what it is and what's happening in the market. And I think that's exactly right, Chad though. It's, if you look at marketing and how we've adopted programmatic, it's like it's 80%. Something crazy! And that's small companies, big companies and in talent acquisition, it's under 10%. And that's what we found in our research too. It's just not being adopted. It's not being talked about enough. I mean, people don't understand what it is, who the players are, what it can do. So we're, I know we're going to do that on the webinars, you know, shine some light in the space and we tried to do it in the research too. Chad (4m 47s): Well. Let's talk about some of the players real quick, because if talent acquisition leader is not familiar, we've got the pandologics, we've got the Joveos, we've got the Appcast, we've got hat is, what is Radancy's, I think it's just Randancy's programmatic, Symphony Talent, programmatic. Who else, who else? Madeline (5m 12s): Yeah. And then Recruitics with KRT and they've got programmatic. And, you know, I think that that's really where a lot of the strength is in these standalone providers or the Symphony's that have, you know, really made a commitment to building it out. I think the confusion is when, and I know we've talked about this before, when the ATS providers start to say, we've got programmatic and they don't, and then it just becomes confusion about what's job distribution. What's truly programmatic. And, and we've seen that, we've been at conferences together where we've seen ATS providers going to market with programmatic. Chad (5m 47s): Yeah, and really what it is what I like to call. And I'm not trying to downplay how hard it is for like a Broad Bean to push jobs out. That's that's not easy. They have analytics, they have all, but it's not programmatic. Right. They actually, I think they've partnered with Joveo and probably some other programmatic players to provide programmatic to their customers. So the big question is why has marketing had such a high adoption rate in talent acquisition has not. Madeline (6m 19s): Yeah, it's a great question. And we dove into that and the research, and I can tell you some of the themes that came up and the differences that came up the first is it's not an integrated part of our TA strategy where it is in marketing, like the marketing strategy and the brand strategy for companies includes programmatic. That's a core component, and we don't do that in talent acquisition. It's the separate side item. You know, it's a different market, different providers that we don't typically talk about and it's not integrated. And I think the other piece is marketing does a really good job of showing the value and showing that this isn't something that requires you to build this new budget and think about cost, it's a cost savings solution. Madeline (6m 60s): And we don't talk about it the same way in talent acquisition. So I think when it's not integrated, and when you're talking about it as an expense versus a cost savings solution, there's a disconnect. Chad (7m 10s): And that being said, what has your research actually found with regard to companies going programmatic? Are you seeing them sticking with it? Are they actually, you know, increasing budget? What's the story there? Because those are the ones, for all those talent acquisition professionals out there who are not yet in the land of programmatic, they can look at their peers and say, okay, what have they done? Madeline (7m 34s): Exactly. And I think that was the biggest aha to me in this research is that companies start using it. Don't go back. They don't go back to traditional advertising. 57% of companies they use programmatic are continuing to increase their investment. And that's huge to say, that's an, and it's an easy replacement. It's not like a CRM. Like if you, if you don't want to use your CRM anymore, you've come through so much implementation. It's so much money. You got to stick with it. But with programmatic, you could go back, you could go back to traditional, but companies aren't, they're spending more. And you know, I think that really speaks to the value and you know, the streamlining, this advertising, which is a huge time commitment if you're not doing it through automation. Chad (8m 13s): Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So what's the next point? The next point is another, I think excuse more than it is anything else. Madeline (8m 20s): Yeah. I think the next point is about this loss of control, right? It's that companies think if they're going to go to programmatic, we're going to lose control in how we're doing our advertising. This isn't what you want to manage. We want to use one aggregator. We want to use Indeed. And that's what we're comfortable with. And programmatic means we don't have control of that anymore. We're removed from the negotiation. But to me, it's like traditional advertising. It's a complete out of control model. That's a model that is out of control. You have no visibility, you have no idea what's working. And when it doesn't work, you have to spend more to be able to get more of an online presence. So it's not working, you're not getting the right candidates, give us more money, so we can increase your online presence, you still will have no visibility and that's out of control. Madeline (9m 5s): So it's interesting. Chad (9m 7s): So you're trading one control piece, for you control maniacs, et cetera, out there, I know, cause I'm one. You're trading the control of knowing exactly where my job is being posted, for the control over your wallet. Because right now the control on your wallet is gone. You are screwed. Madeline (9m 27s): Yeah, exactly, exactly. Exactly. So to be able to see some visibility and performance driven advertising, which just isn't happening right now. Chad (9m 37s): So, and that is all through this third point, which I am going to just sit here and just bask in, because we've been talking about AI for so long and everybody makes fun of it and everybody's like, yeah. Machine learning and AI, but you found that AI is actually the key differentiator, which is why people stay and why it's so effective. Madeline (10m 0s): Yeah. Because you're actually using historical data. You're using these job attributes and you're able to predict what's going to work. So the advertising that you're doing is based on a model for your company, that's going to work for you and bring you the right candidates. And that's very different than just real-time bidding. That's very different than just job distribution. AI, to me, what's the differentiator. And that's when you look at all these different providers we talked about in the beginning, that's where you're going to start to see some providers stand out more than others. Chad (10m 28s): Right. Right. And some of these providers, I mean, they've been around for 10 to 20 years in gathering data. I mean, we're talking about models that before programmatic, these organizations were gathering data because they were pretty much the dumbed down distribution models and then they evolved. So this isn't, it's not like you're dealing with organizations who just popped up out of nowhere. You're dealing with individuals who've been in this space for a very long time. In some cases, probably longer than you, talent acquisition leader. Madeline (11m 4s): It's such a good point. Nobody talks about that. It's these CEOs and these founders of these companies have been in the space forever and most of them have started other companies too. They've gone through this. They've seen what works, what doesn't work. And they've landed here in this programmatic world because they see the value and that's, you know, it's not somebody that's kind of worked in finance and said, Oh, talent acquisition is getting a lot of money, let's move over there and, and build something cool. We get it. You know, they get it. Chad (11m 30s): Yeah. Because that is exactly not how this industry works. So, and then we talk about, you know, that's your fourth point that programmatic requires expertise. Madeline (11m 40s): Yeah, exactly. And I think when you kind of go back to that, who are the players? What are the categories? We're starting to see some, you know, different providers and whether it's ATS land or CRM land, starting to talk about it, but it really does require that expertise and that commitment to doing this because it's a lot of work. And I think anyone that's been responsible for traditional advertising, you know that, you know how much work it is, you know how much time you put in, you know how much error can be involved with that. So if a provider's not dedicated to that, they're going to have the same issue. Chad (12m 11s): Yeah. Well, I'm going to definitely call out a bunch of those applicant tracking systems that are out there. And I remember you and I were at the same conference and I was talking to Colin Day about this. This to me, for your clients, is not an option any more, whether you're iCIMS, whether you're Smart Recruiters, whether you're Jobvite, none of this is an option. This is a part of core business. Madeline (12m 38s): And if you're not going to build it, partner with some of these providers in a really strategic way. And I think that's what a lot of ATSs are doing, which is very smart. Chad (12m 47s): Yeah. So you were 5th and final, as we tease a little bit more into this, is programmatic impacts, both marketing and talent acquisition metrics. Talk a little bit about that. And does this mean that we're going to have to bring the CMO into the discussion? Madeline (13m 5s): Yeah. You know, I think it's not a bad idea to bring the CMO into the discussion mostly because I think talent acquisition can benefit from seeing how marketing has done this. Chad (13m 15s): Yes! Madeline (13m 15s): And use that as a role model and a use case. If we can see how marketing's adopted this, how they're, you know, not even building a business case anymore. It's just part of what they do. We could probably learn something from that. So I think it's a great idea to do that. And what we found and I think people always love to see kind of the impact of different technology on the business. We found a big increase in things like job views, traffic to the site, thinking about, you know, where some of these sources are coming from. All these kinds of traditional marketing, advertising metrics that companies look at, a huge impact on them, when companies use programmatic and then kind of your traditional TV metrics, like time to fill, quality of hire, and diversity, you know, hiring too, we saw a big improvement. Madeline (14m 2s): So anyone that's interested in the report, I can share all of that with you. But that to me is always the most interesting thing to see, okay, wow, this really does work. Yeah. Chad (14m 12s): Yeah. Well, it obviously does because when, when companies get into it, they don't leave. Madeline (14m 17s): They don't. Chad (14m 19s): So, okay. So really quick, how can people find the research and where should they also go to listen to our fabulous webinar that we're doing? Madeline (14m 30s): I know we're gonna be talking about much more of this discussion on the webinar. And we have a couple of key studies we're going to be talking about. So if you're interested in that, go to hr.com and you can go to their events. It's March 23rd at 1:00 PM, and we'll be there with some slides. We'll have some slides. So that's always, that's always exciting. And then our research will be published next week at aptituderesearch.com. Chad (14m 53s): Excellent. Excellent. Well, I can't let you out of here yet because we've had a couple of big things happen this week or actually today. And I want some Madelyn hot takes on this. So you want to play the game? Madeline (15m 8s): Yeah, let's do it. Chad (15m 9s): Okay. Okay. Okay. So today, drum roll, please, Seek Out, received $65 million in series B funding prior to this, they only had $8.2 million. So what are your thoughts on Seek Out? And this is a big raise. Madeline (15m 28s): Huge, I mean, this is huge. I, you know, I thought I was just going to have a great day. We were going to record this. I was going to get some work done, do some, it's going to be a writing day, a low key day. And now, then this happens. I mean, this is a huge, huge, huge announcement. And we've been doing a little bit on AI matching and I, to me, this is where Seek Out is going to go, right. They're awesome with search, they're kind of solving that problem for organizations. When they're looking to, you know, find the right candidates, they can kind of search all these public profiles, like Get Hub and Stack Overflow and all these kinds of experts sites, and find candidates. And that's such such value for companies and sourcing. Madeline (16m 9s): But then if you look at what like Eightfold is doing and Hired Score is doing and all the attention they're getting, just, it's amazing. I mean, those are two amazing companies and we could talk about that for an hour, but, you know, I think this is Seek Out's opportunity is to say, well, not only can we kind of solve this search and think about, you know, diversity hiring and thinking about efficiency, but can we kind of play in this AI matching space a little bit more competitively as well? Chad (16m 36s): Yeah, I think, I think that's an interesting thought. My favorite tech in the space today is matching, that that's my favorite. It is the biggest lift out of anything else that's happening in technology today. And it also leverages the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars that companies have spent in creating their own candidate databases, that they just allow to atrophy and die and so on and so forth. So I think that is a very interesting angle. Although, you know, my question is to the Eeightfold side of the house, Eight fold to be quite Frank, they are promising way too much right out of the gate. Chad (17m 18s): And I love to see a company who knows how to focus and they are disciplined. Anoop, I can see where this could be a pretty easy where we're searching databases. Now we're reaching back and we're just, we're continuing to search databases. It's just your database. It'll be interesting how they sell that as an out-reach and an in-reach kind of kind of scenario. So I like that take that. That's pretty hot. Madeline (17m 47s): Yeah. And I think the other piece too, like I think they're going to have to tighten up their messaging around AI and ethical AI, because that's what Hired Score has done so well, I know that's what Eightfold has been focused on and that's a very different approach than I think what some of the other AI providers are kind of putting out there in the market. It's real consent. It's real ethical AI. Chad (18m 10s): Yeah. And that is a podcast within itself. We're going to take you down a rabbit hole. Okay. Before I go there, we've got to get to the, the next piece of news, Tengai gets legs. What do you think about that? Madeline (18m 25s): I thought this was, I was excited by this. I was not expecting it. And I saw your post actually this morning and it got me interested. And I think it, I think it makes a lot of sense. You know, I think we got a lot of attention with the talking head for anyone that doesn't know, Tengai, they have the talking head that does interviews that reduces bias. And it's basically giving everyone the same opportunity with this sort of robot or real robot head that does the interview. And a lot of companies invested in this and they bring this in and everybody kind of goes through this process and there's mixed reviews, right? We've heard mixed reviews. It's people like the head, people don't, they think it's creepy. They, you know, have different opinions on it. But I think the value to give everyone a fair opportunity and increase inclusivity is a huge advantage. Madeline (19m 10s): And to be able to now, do what they're doing and kind of broaden it a little bit is I think just strengthening that inclusivity message. Chad (19m 19s): Yeah. Yeah. I think if you take a look at all the acquisitions around interviewing, and video interviewing, there's obviously a huge need for something like this. And to pat Joel and myself on the back, we were in, it was 2019, when we actually had an opportunity to go to Sweden and meet with the team. This is one of the things that we said they have to do. I mean, there's there, they have to be able to provide portability, not to mention, can you imagine trying to scale a bunch of those talking heads versus an app. So now they have this awesome physical interviewing capability, along with something that is much more scalable and fits right in your hands. Chad (20m 7s): So I think this is an awesome job. The work that goes into something like this is pretty amazing. And for them to turn it around that quickly and still have the updates going for the, the physical Tengai, I've got just a big applause for those guys. Madeline (20m 26s): Yeah. And especially in like the remote recruiting world that we're all in now too, to be able to pivot like that and say, this is what a lot of companies need and we can work on that. They did a good job getting that out quickly. Chad (20m 38s): I love it. I love it. Well, Madeline, thank you for taking a little bit of your time and teasing out what we're going to be talking about with programmatic on, you know, the hr.com webinar and the research itself. One more time where can they go to find the actual research. Madeline (20m 56s): Yes, you can to aptituderesearch.com next week. And I can share that link with you when it's up and published and ready to go. But I'm excited. I'm thrilled that we're talking about it together and I'm excited for the webinar too cause I know we have a lot more to say on all of this. Chad (21m 11s): Good times, now that I got you Madeline, we're doing more of this. I appreciate it, again, thanks for coming on. Madeline (21m 17s): Thanks for having me. Chad (21m 18s): And we out. Madeline (21m 20s): Bye. OUTRO (21m 43s): Thank you for listening 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.

For the most part, Corporate America sucks at Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Wait, you don't believe me? Look at the numbers for this nearly 60 year-old practice. In most organizations today money is thrown at training, messaging, and an inability to match one's brand articulation with reality. Enter John Graham, a diversity leader with a recruitment marketing and branding background, not to mention practical experience with logos like Amgen and Merck. But wait there's more... Shaker Recruitment Marketing, a nearly 70 year-old agency, barges in the room and plants its DEI stake in the ground by hiring John as their VP of Employment Brand, Diversity, and Culture. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. 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. Chad (34s): I am Chad Sowash. Today we have a guest host. Give it up for John Graham. Everyone. Let me hear it. John (43s): Hey, Hey! Chad (45s): We're lactose free today, John. John (47s): Yes, indeed. Indeed. Dairy-free for sure. Chad (51s): Let's just jump into this real quick. Why don't we have John on the show? That's a good question. First and foremost, we needed to up the show's IQ. That was number one. Yeah, many requests from, from the peanut gallery saying that we need to up up the IQ of the show, but John is a brand strategy stud with logos, like Merck Amgen under his belt, attended Lincoln University went to this little school called Yale. I mean, John, do me a favor. Give the listeners a little Twitter bio about you. John (1m 26s): Yeah. I would label myself as a dot connector between history and modern day reality. Oh. As I attended the first degree granting HBCU in the country, the Lincoln University, I was an African studies major/ history minor, originally comp science, funny enough, but that's a whole other story. That's an easy parallel, you can see how somebody would veer off to African studies. But, but yeah, and then I did my master's in education and decided I'd never set foot in a classroom, but ultimately what I've come to understand is I'm one who can articulate the brand at the tip of a company's tongue, right? Like they're on the verge of understanding who they are. And I helped him get all the way there, but even more so I help improve the daily lived experiences of the marginalized. John (2m 13s): And I feel like that's where, you know, sort of the marketing and the branding and the storytelling converge into this shabang called employer brand and culture marketing. Chad (2m 22s): So today you are Senior Manager, Global Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketing at Amgen. Is that, is that, is that what's happening? John (2m 32s): Well, not exactly Chad. Chad (2m 35s): No, wait a minute! Your LinkedIn says you're an Amgen. So therefore. John (2m 40s): Well, you know, you can't believe everything you see on the internet, Chad. Chad (2m 43s): Well, what the hell's going on here. Tell me what's going on? John (2m 45s): Well, I had a great run at Amgen. We built an amazing EBP and employer brand and it's, you know, globalizing and localizing as we speak, but I have taken a new path, a completely venture, some might be shocked and some might be like, yeah, that makes sense. But I have gotten into now the consulting side of the game and stepping outside the sort of expand the impact. Chad (3m 12s): Smart. John (3m 13s): And so I there's this the small, but mighty shop how'd that some know who have courted me and we've seen eye-to-eye on where the future of employer brand can go and believe that DEI and employer brand are going to merge. And so now we're on this new venture and I'm happy to say that I have joined the good folks over at Shaker Recruitment Marketing. 2 (3m 36s): Oh, Joe Shaker. You gotta be kidding me. That's awesome. Yeah, the little shop that's been around 50 plus years for goodness sakes. John (3m 45s): Indeed. Chad (3m 46s): So what made you jump ship from a big logo to go into recruitment marketing as a service and really what are you going to be doing there? John (3m 59s): That's a great question. So I think what, you know, after conversations about the disconnect between the roses and the champagne of employer brand that is today versus the realities of cultures within organizations and seeing that gap, I saw very clearly that DEI, you know, with great internal initiatives, lack of external face. And I also saw that employer brand's job is to package and articulate a company's culture to make it attractive to talent. And I'm like, well, you can't talk about the culture without incorporating DEI because that is the culture, right? Chad (4m 37s): Oh, you hope it is right. John (4m 39s): One would hope, one would hope, one would think. And so for me it was like, okay, I'm in a, you know, a big pond, you know, Amgen twenty-three thousand global employees, Merck was, you know, 180,000 global employees. And I'm like, okay, you can do so much, Chad (4m 59s): Damn! John (4m 60s): .... within one company. What would it look like if you could expand this and really bringing new pathway to exploring an employer brand and an EBP from a means that that helped the company's marketing match their reality. And that's where I said, you know, you can't do that from one company. You know, you can do it from many, but that's where it made sense to take a whole new approach. Chad (5m 23s): Well, is that how you feel like you can really make a much larger impact is like, you can only do so much under one logo, but if you are at a shop like Shaker, you have many different logos that you can perspectively impact around brand articulation and DEI. John (5m 43s): Yeah. That's the 100% correct. In my mind, I think I had always done the speaking engagements and the conference circuit, you know, talking about these things and I loved it. Right. I would see after, you know, you get off stage and you're when we could be in person with people. And you're having the conversations with your peers who are doing this great work at other companies. And you're seeing just like, man, you're you're you're so right. Like it's, we need to do a better job of incorporating diversity, equity and inclusion into the employer brand story. But how, and for me, you know, I realized that this is not, this is a new capability in, in the space of, you know, recruitment, marketing, employer, brand, and EVP developments for companies. John (6m 28s): So, you know, what we're building is Shaker. It's going to be a first of its kind. It's going to push companies past performance, which is, I think a very important thing, not only for myself, but Joe was a hundred percent behind that in the sense that he didn't want to get into this work, right. It's, it's a, it's a 57 year old practice, DNI consulting, $8 billion industry. And you see a lot of companies now throwing a ton of money at it. So, you know, outside looking in, it looks like a great business move, but, you know, Joe was very clear and we agreed from the start. It's like this isn't about making money. This is about making change, like doing really good work that actually moves needles and, okay if there's money on as a result of that. Cool. But, but let's, let's do good work and have fun while doing it. John (7m 10s): Change, change the landscape and have that really help the marketing match reality. Chad (7m 13s): Making change, and you've got to feed the family at the same time. I mean, let's get through that real quick. Yes. Here's the thing. So brand articulation to me over the years with recruitment marketing, especially around DEI has been fluff. So tell me about what yourself and Shaker will be doing to drive real outcomes. We're talking about companies who, as we can see the tip of the iceberg have 8% female representation in the CEO position alone. Right? Because that's just what we can see. You know, the rest of that iceberg is even worst when it comes to workforce composition, equity and inclusion. What are you guys going to do? Chad (7m 53s): Not just to talk about the fluffy shit and articulation, but actually drive outcomes? John (7m 60s): Yeah, that's that, that is the $8 billion question ultimately is right. Not what a consultant's going to do, but what are, what are companies going to do? What is the CEO suite going to do to actually change narratives and daily lived work experiences for the most marginalized? What I think we have a real opportunity to do out of, out of the Shaker house is to ask questions that haven't been asked, right? For fear of offense or fear of causing uncomfortable or discomfort in the conversation and really help to look at things in a different way. So for instance, most DEI approaches start by working backward from the most privileged people in the organization, right. Chad (8m 40s): The top, right? John (8m 41s): Then there's this expectation, okay, you resource it, you fund it, you put, you know, roles, responsibilities, measurements, all that stuff in place. And somehow the, it gets solved in this trickle down theory kicks in and the most marginalized people feel the sprinkling of commitment and concern come down from the top. Well, we know that that doesn't work right, and it hasn't worked. So what I wanted to do, and Joe was a hundred percent aligned. I said, look, let's work backward from the voice of the most marginalized and understand what their daily lived experiences that's causing, you know, high attrition rates, that's causing a significant health, emotional mental concerns, right? In these demographics. And let's be honest right today, the black professional in corporate space is still the most marginalized out of any demographic. John (9m 28s): And that's statistically, it's not just me saying that as a black man, right? We're talking about pay equity, we're talking about micro-aggressions. We're talking about being dismissed to humanize in certain cases, yet black women being the most educated in the country and all the multiple degrees, credentials and so forth, but still not advancing up the ladder. So that at some point we need to ask the question, what is the, the C-suite willing to do to put structural and behavioral together to make lasting change. Right? We've seen a lot of emphasis on the behavioral, and we're just seeing some surface scratching on the structural changes, accountability, measurements, and enforcement, right? But it's still an uphill battle. So, so what we're looking to do is to take some really unique approaches that was a long long-winded answer to tell you where we're looking to take some unique approaches that will, that will not only help you look at your representation, but also looking at the ability to be authentic in your organization. John (10m 20s): We have some other cool things that we're doing there and then looking at development. Right. And so I can unveil a little bit, you know, when we talk about authenticity and being your authentic self, right. We've heard that statement about, you know, bringing your whole self to work. Chad (10m 35s): Right. John (10m 35s): And for a large population within corporate spaces at best you can bring your whole half. Chad (10m 40s): Yeah. John (10m 40s): And so what are the impacts of that? Well, how many executives actually know what that means? And there's a, there's a term called code switching, which let's say a lot of black professionals have to do. We're bilingual too. There's the way we speak and act and project ourselves in corporate spaces versus how we do outside. And don't get me wrong. Everybody code switches, to an extent it may be class-based, it might be ethnicity based, but right. But what would it look like if an executive team could see and hear the stories of their marginalized employees in their daily lived experiences in a way like, even in a documentary style way. And storytelling that connects the historical context, or like archival footage and PhD, analyses of the impacts of these experiences on there, on the employee base like that, you know, in addition to some measurements and some instruments that we're working on that are going to highlight that daily lived experience. John (11m 33s): So there's some really cool stuff. I mean, we're getting into like natural language processing and performance reviews to locate biases in particular demographics, performance reviews, and help to really lock in on where advancement is stalling out. Chad (11m 46s): Yeah. John (11m 46s): So there's a lot of work that we can do in here, but I think it's the approach that we're taking that's going to make it unique and differentiated. Chad (11m 52s): It's interesting because the easy answer years has been, do more training. And that's why we have billions of dollars spent on DEI training. And we're not seeing any outcomes. Do you know that there's really an appetite out there to go past the performative? To go past just spending money on training, to tick the box and say, look at what we did and focus on outcomes and focus on the internal mobility and retention and definitely promotions. John (12m 22s): Yeah. So is there an appetite absolutely, from those who are not seeing the change, right. If we're talking about the heads of company, the Titans of industries, here's what, here's what we know there is, you know, in a post George Floyd era, there have been commitment statements made, right? There've been pledges, there's been commitments met, right. Chad (12m 45s): Many. John (12m 46s): Many right? You give that about six to eight months and now what you've seen as a return to business as usual. That is seen, that is felt by the marginalized or underrepresented employee base at your organizations. At some point and we're starting to see this now that feeling and that sentiment, or that I almost say the sense of betrayal is spilling out online. Chad (13m 8s): Yeah. John (13m 8s): So now your brand is going to start taking a hit from the inside out. So at some point as an organization, you have to figure out how do you not only get ahead of this, forget the PR side of it. Right. But how do you stop the bleeding from, you know, and close that gap between your commitment and then the reality of change. And we all know that this is a 450 year old problem in certain instances, that's not going to be solved by Q3 of next year. Chad (13m 31s): Right. John (13m 32s): But in the meantime, the people who, who are most aggrieved should feel like something's moving in a direction that doesn't just feel like lip service. So, you know, is there an appetite, you know, it's a question of how, how much change do companies really want and how willing are they, right. It's not a capability question. It's a willingness question. How willing are they to disrupt the status quo to really get a different outcome? And we believe that there are companies out there who are ready to, to try something different or to add on to what they've already been doing to start to make sure that those results hit the intended beneficiaries. Chad (14m 13s): I think talking about, you know, really the ability for transparency out in the social networks of the world through brand articulation, or let's say false brand articulation, which we've seen again, the fluff that's been blown. We'd love to start to see organizations and hopefully this is something that Shaker can not just foster and build within your own group, but also be able to press out to your clients is transparency and demonstrating that, you know, workforce composition, pay, equity, all of that. And this is, this is not a small move obviously is incredibly important to demonstrate to everybody that brand that you are articulating is real. John (14m 58s): That's right. And look, the biggest, I think barometer of whether that's working is, is getting a very good sense of where your baseline is. What is your marginalized population saying, right now? What is th`eir experience? How is that being viewed and expressed internally? What are the channels for outlets and so forth. And then you start to make some, some tweaks and you start to look at structural change, and then you start to look at, you know, meaningful change that's implemented. And then you go back and you test again, you say, look, did this change for you? Do you see an improvement? Are your managers less micro-aggressive? Do you feel like you're heard, are your ideas still being stolen and being passed to somebody else, right? Or, you know, are you seeing a difference in your performance review language or your pay scale? John (15m 42s): Like these are the conversations that you have over time so that the people who feel like they haven't had a voice at least know you're listening, and then they can see what measures companies are taking to actually implement and make good on the commitments that they're making, internally and externally. Chad (15m 59s): What's the title. What's the expectation, many organizations they only know one thing and that's to throw money at the problem and that hasn't worked. They need something that works. So what are you going to do? And what are the expectations you guys are setting at Shaker? John (16m 14s): From a title perspective. I mean, if those are even relevant anymore, I'll be the VP of Employer Brand Diversity and Culture. The mandate is to oversee the existing employer brand division, while also building the DEI culture transformation. We're adding these new capabilities and offerings for our clients existing and future to really work backwards from the lens, through the lens of employer brand and say, okay, look, we understand you want a diverse, equitable and inclusive employer brand, but is your culture diverse, equitable, and inclusive? And if not, why not? If who are your marginalized, you know, that's going to be meted out by your data, you tell us, but as we do the EVP culture analysis, we're now intermingling different instruments to get at other sides of the culture. John (17m 1s): So we're not going to look at just what the broadest population thinks about the culture and who they are and their experience and so forth. But we're actually going to zero in on the marginalized. And we're, you know, like I said, we have some instruments in development that will speak directly to that. So historically you've had the inclusion surveys or your pulse surveys, right? That gives you this broad swath of how your company culture is operating. But we know that the voice of the majority can drown out the marginalized in those surveys. And I think the way that some of these questions are asked, don't really speak to these other experiences. So we'll do those still, but then we're also going to introduce some other ones that can give you a really good contrast of the experience of those who, you know, who we obviously know don't have the loudest voices. John (17m 44s): And so with that, then we're able to sort of bridge the gap and still create an EVP that's honest, that's accurate. That speaks to the culture of aspirational elements of your culture, you know, where you want to be and lean into those places where you're not yet, you know, arrived. Right. And be honest about that. And it's, you know, I'm a huge fan of, of Brian Adams and Charlotte Marshals to get him to get approach to employer brand and not just selling champagne and roses. Right. But also leaning into harsh realities. And that takes a very bold, honest self realized company to do that. And I think that we can, we can make that work good. So, yeah, it's, it's, again, it's not DEI standalone on its own. John (18m 25s): It's DEI through the lens of your employer brand, making sure that the marketing matches reality. And if not helping you close those gaps, some really strong offerings and partnership opportunities there. Chad (18m 36s): Well, excellent. John, I have to say that this is a big move. There's no question for an organization like Shaker to commit to DEI initiatives and to be able to make it more holistic. One thing I am going to say is you have to come back on the show and we're going to be as critical as we possibly can be because we want to see the ball move. Right? and you know, as well as I do, we haven't seen enough of that. So we want to hear about it. We want to see it. And we definitely want to invite you back on the show to talk more about what you guys are going to be doing at Shaker. So in the meantime, as you're getting settled, I'm sure over at Shaker Recruitment Marketing, where can individuals find you to start having these discussions? John (19m 25s): Yeah. Great question. I'm all over LinkedIn. You can simply search John Graham creative and you'll find me Twitter. I'm Instagram 1906 and that's G R A H A M. And yeah, I'm, I'm always happy to connect. I loved hearing, you know, what my other fellow employer brand and talent marketing colleagues are doing, but also how we can start to interweave this other element and super important element of culture into our work. Chad (19m 52s): And I'm also expecting a copy of the book that you're going to be putting out as well. So again, once again, thanks so much John Graham for joining us and we out. John (20m 5s): Hey, I appreciate it. Thank you. OUTRO (20m 55s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Cha-ching! Seekout, Jobsandtalent open the damned vault! Let's just cut to the chase. This episode has everything our listeners crave: - Mad investment dollars going into Seekout and JobandTalent - International intrigue, - Recruiting robots in your pocket, - Indeed, CareerBuilder, Monster and Amazon bashing, - Women worshipping, and yes, even Burger King. So throw that into your iPod Classic and smoke it! Special thanks to Sovren, JobAdx, and Jobvite for powering this monstrosity. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. INTRO (0s): 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 (28s): Oh Yeah. The only thing hotter than non fungible tokens and herd immunity. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel "stimulus-bill" Cheeseman. Chad (41s): And I'm Chad "got my first shot" Sowash. Joel (43s): And on this week's show, Seek Out more like Cash In, am I right? Tim Guy in your pocket and BK says, get back in the kitchen. Have you tried this chicken sandwich yet? Chad (55s): No. JobAdX (56s): Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the US and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Chad (1m 45s): Damn dude. So how was virtually podcasting in the great white North? Joel (1m 51s): Oh, it was lovely. I dressed extra warm with my Toque. That was a gift from the boys at Rec Text back in Christmas. And I may have had a sip of alcohol to keep warm as well. And also, you know, I'm just a better podcaster when I'm drunk. Yes, we had a good time. Hopefully, if you haven't heard that one, go check it out on whatever that podcast name is. I don't even remember. Chad (2m 16s): The Recruitment Flex. Joel (2m 17s): The Recruitment Flex. That's right. And no one knows flexing like me, so I should remember that. Chad (2m 23s): Yeah. I mean, Shelly actually coming in and guest hosting, she was delightful, knowledgeable and easy to listen to. Everything you're not. Joel (2m 31s): Yeah, I was gonna say so is nothing like our regular show. People must love that. Chad (2m 34s): Entirely. It was a great departure. Let me say. Joel (2m 40s): Thoughtfulness, intelligence, class. Chad (2m 44s): Nothing like our listeners are used to, which is why they probably liked it so much. She does love the sexy, careless, whisper saxophone. That's for sure. Joel (2m 54s): And who doesn't, which is by the way, why we're announcing that I'm leaving the show as of today. And Shelly is now moving, moving into my place. Chad (3m 2s): Don't say that. Cause you will, you will get her Joel (3m 4s): I need therapy. Dammit. This is my weekly therapy session and we didn't do it last week. So I'm destined to cry on this show. I may, I may release gas. I don't know, but I need some, I need some Chad time. Chad (3m 19s): Well, first and foremost, I need a big thank you because you would not be on the vaccination list right now. If it weren't for Chad looking out for you. Joel (3m 26s): Yeah, I appreciate that. So you actually got a shot. We'll get to that in a second, but yeah, you, I guess you got alerted that you're on some wait lists and then told me like, Hey dude, you're almost you're, we're both almost 50. It was like, Hey, if it's four months, four months before it or into it you're you can get it. And I was like, I don't know. And I went to the wrong link and you shared the right link and I was able to get on. So, you know, : I scheduled the earliest time of day, which was April 23rd at 12:20, I think here locally. So by our birthday, the 28th and 27th, I should be ready for the summer of love. Chad (4m 3s): Amen, brother. That's what I'm talking. Joel (4m 5s): Amen. Indeed. Chad (4m 6s): Yeah. I was lucky enough to have somebody actually looking out for me. They saw that there was a cancellation and they had just changed the age restrictions. So I literally got in the day before and I got the shot the next day. And that's when I contacted you and said, Hey, are you on the list yet? And you're like, no, we're not 50. And I'm like, that's what I thought too. But there's obviously a trick to this fucking thing. You have to be, you know, 50 in July or some shit, which makes no sense. But anyway. Joel (4m 40s): J and J or did you get a Pfizer? Moderna? Chad (4m 43s): I got Pfizer. Joel (4m 44s): Okay. So you still got to get the other one. I'm getting Mederna. I think I thought it was Modelo at first and I was going to get a beer. By the way, what the fuck is up with Texas? My 81 year old father who survived two bouts of cancer, isn't vaccinated yet. They've released masks. Like the mandate is out. So whatever's going on in Texas. It ain't good. Chad (5m 8s): If he was closer to any of those white, rich senators or representatives or some shit like that, or if he was like a huge donor, he'd probably they would have come to his house and are already given. Yeah. Joel (5m 21s): The Ted Cruz vaccination tour is what he needs to get on and Cancun, Cabo or Cancun. Which do you prefer? Chad (5m 30s): Cancun. Because in Cabo, you can't get in the ocean. The riptides will rip you under! Joel (5m 36s): Yes. Do not swim in Cabo. Kids just stay on the mainland, getting drunk. Chad (5m 42s): Yes. Joel (5m 42s): Unlimited buffets and drinking. Anyway, man, let's get to, let's get to some shout outs. Anything stand out to you from the last couple of weeks? Chad (5m 50s): Well, first and foremost, we've had, we've been hearing a lot about royalty lately. Joel (5m 56s): Harry and Meghan, right? The Megxit, the big Megxit. People in Britain are going nuts. Chad (5m 59s): No, I'm talking about coming to America two, is Zumunda was talking about the royalty of Zumunda and Coming to America 2 just dropped on Amazon. And I think it's like a 30 year anniversary or something like that, but it was, it was fun. It was a very fun watch. And after watching it, seeing like comments on people saying, well, it wasn't as good as the first one. And it's just like, give me a fucking break, people. Allow your brain to shut down and just laugh at stupid Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall. Joel (6m 36s): I have not seen it yet. I'm waiting for my 14 year old son to be here to enjoy it. Chad (6m 42s): Perfect. Joel (6m 43s): Does let your Soul Glow come back. I like are jerry curls. Do they have the McDowell's? Did they make an appearance or are they totally out of the new one? Chad (6m 51s): Well, Soul Glow was like in the background of a couple of the barber, the barber shot shot shots. McDowell's was definitely there. As a matter of fact, they opened as a Mundo look as a Mondo location. So yeah. I mean, it's, it's like they do a lot of throwback shit and it's just fucking funny because it's just fucking stupid. Fuck you. Fuck you too. There's there's a little bit of that. Joel (7m 22s): Face to face. Chad (7m 25s): You've got to have Disney plus right? You to have a little fun. Joel (7m 28s): Disney plus got Amazon prime video, whatever Netflix, Hulu. Chad (7m 33s): Have you watched Wanda vision at all? Joel (7m 35s): Haven't. I haven't. We're on a big Stanley Tucci in it in Italy kick right now. And we're catching up on Shameless episodes. Chad (7m 45s): Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. We're catching up on Fringe episodes. We're on season two, but Wanda vision is like a must. It was incredibly well done. Marvel just knows how to do their shit. So a Winter Soldier and I think Falcon and Winter, Winter Soldiers, the next one up, hopefully that one will also meet the bar. Joel (8m 7s): Yeah. Heard really good things. I'll try to, I haven't finished season two of the Mandalorian, so, Oh, I'm way behind. Oh, that's good. So I know we joke, but did, did you see any of the Harry and Megan, do you care? Chad (8m 19s): I do care, just from the standpoint of, she was at the point mentally where she was contemplating suicide and that is never right, in, and I don't give a fuck if you're in the Royal family or where you're at. Right? So yeah, this is, this is an issue. And then having idiots like Piers Morgan, trying to, trying to slash and burn her reputation even more. Luckily he's off that fucking Good Morning, America, Britain or Good Morning Britain. Joel (8m 51s): I stand forever confused by the appeal of the Royal family, call me an American, but I just, I just don't get it. Chad (8m 58s): How much money goes into that? Joel (9m 1s): I have no idea. It's ridiculous. It's I dunno. It's it's like, I guess the equivalent of fame being famous for just being famous Kardashians style here in the States, but we tend to rotate every few years. They've been on the same people for a thousand years. So what are you going to do? But I will shout out to Oprah. She is still a gangster man. She is still like equal parts, velvet glove and iron fist when she does an interview. So I was glad to see her back and her glasses must cost $8,000. Man. I think those things are made out of like whalebone and I dunno, Martian glass, they look so. I'm just jealous. Chad (9m 41s): You can, you can never go wrong with a little Oprah. Joel (9m 44s): Speaking of awesome. Have you seen Todd Burns in a Chad and Cheese? T-shirt Chad (9m 49s): Holy shit. I have not. But anybody wearing a Chad and Cheese t-shirt generally looks much better than prior. Joel (9m 57s): Oh yeah. There is a sexification that happens when you put on that silky smooth cotton. Combed cotton to be exact. Chad and Cheese t-shirt. Chad (10m 7s): Listeners, listeners will remember. We reported a few months ago that CareerBuilder was leaning heavy on auto-renewal contracts. Well, kids, I guess that's over because it went over like a lead balloon and customers pretty much said they weren't going to have it. So CareerBuilder then sent a response message saying, yeah, we're not going to do that anymore. Joel (10m 30s): Can we take credit for that one? I think we ripped into him pretty hard for him. Chad (10m 34s): Well, I, and again, it's one of those indicators, right? That their organization they've been going down to the bone from a structure standpoint. They've always been incredibly good on the sales side of the house, but this just demonstrates that leadership doesn't understand how CareerBuilder was built. You know, it was built through connections and relationships and this kind of shit just blows it all to fucking pieces. Joel (11m 2s): Speaking of, you mentioned that a source tells me that unconfirmed Indeed is now charging sales tax taxable purchases, where they weren't before apparently they were eating that 5 to 8% expense. So if true, that's a nice way to add 5 to 8% to your bottom line. Just start charging sales tax where you weren't before. Chad (11m 24s): Yeah. Well, companies have been paying the Indeed dumb tax for a very long time. So, you know, what's another five to whatever fucking percent, right? Joel (11m 34s): The dumb tax that's like listening to our show, the ultimate dumb tax. What are you doing listening to us? Let's get to topics, shall we? Chad (11m 43s): Topics! Joel (11m 44s): And Job and Talent. I sold this one on buyer sell a few weeks ago. If I remember merely on the fact that name sucks and it still does, but so this, this Spain based startup, they call themselves a "work as a service" platform. They announced a series D round of $119 million that they're getting from SoftBank as well as a $99 million debt and funding from BlackRock, bringing the total raised this round to $218 million. They last raised $108 million in January of this year, which brings the total amounts ... Chad (12m 22s): 2 months ago! Joel (12m 24s): ... to $507.6 million. If you think they're worth it, they reported revenue growth from $6 million in 2016 to, are you ready for this $596 million in 2020? There was no word on the actual valuation at this point, but I got to think next, you know, next turn unicorn status for them? They streamline the job application admin and payroll into a one-stop shop suggest its marketplace workforce as a service model can provide temps with continuous employment. They are preparing to enter the US market in the next year. And did I mention, I still hate the name. We're pretty excited by these numbers if nothing else. Joel (13m 6s): Jesus. Chad (13m 7s): Yeah. I'd like to say 1998 called and they want their marketing strategy back Cheeseman. So 850 companies use Job and Talent to match temporary roles and do the hard work like payroll, time sheets, legal compliance, all that kind of shit. Unlike Indeed Flex and job.com who I've been pretty hard on Job and Talent, works with staffing companies instead of competing with them. This means the platform could become the staffing segments new operating system, could help them scale and drive revenues through higher margins or better margins. Chad (13m 48s): So I think overall what Fndeed Flex and jobs.com they're missing is where the money is being made. And that's not competing with staffing, but actually working with staffing, becoming their operating system. To me, this is it. This is lightning in a fucking bottle. Joel (14m 7s): Yeah, this is pretty cool, for them. So, two questions I have. One is, they really bill this thing as a like continuous employment or permanent employee, so you're basically staying employed by just picking up contracts. So if one expires you get another one. So, so I kinda like the genius of, of spinning a temp working site as a permanent, by just hopscotching to different opportunities. Agree or disagree? And also can they make this thing work in the US? Chad (14m 37s): I love that because you know, when the contract ends, so you can have them ready for the next contract, not to mention, I guarantee you that employers can request working with individuals that they've had before, right? So you have a bench that is set up yourself of individuals that you want to take that position. So I think there are many different ways you can actually work the technology from the employee or contractor standpoint. And then from the employer standpoint. And I sure as hell believe that if staffing companies in the United States, aren't looking at this, if they're not looking at trying to create an operating system that allows them to scale faster and to be able to look forward into the future with regard to where are they going to go next, as opposed to yeah. Chad (15m 22s): Sit on the bench for a couple of weeks while we wait and try to find you something they will lose because platforms like this will win. Indeed, if they are smart enough to actually drop the competition, if job.com is smart enough to actually drop the competition and become that operating system, I think they have a chance, but if they don't, I think somebody is going to come in right up underneath it, scoop them up and fuck both those platforms. Joel (15m 48s): Yeah. And by the way, the timing of this is perfect. As the world opens up, restaurants, open up all these sort of jobs that are going to just blow up as we come into the summer of love, as I call it, as we vaccinate the world, couldn't be, be better timing. Did I mention, I hate the name? Spend some of that money on that and get something new. Anyway, whatever, more money flowing. And Oh my God, do we have a great track record on death match? Or what? Like, let me tell you if anybody wonders, if we know what the fuck we're talking about. Like if nothing else we've got Canvas, Opening, Seek Out app all, all home runs at this point that are death match winners. So anyway, Seek Out in the news, by the way, speaking of names Seek Out, got the.com. Joel (16m 33s): At some point, I remember when they launched, they were seekout.io. I did a little research there, seekout.com now. So good for them. They kind of did that, right? So anyway, they announced a new round of funding this time to the tune of $65 million in series B led by tiger global management with participation from existing investors, Madrona Venture Group, and Mayfield. This raise brings the Redmond, Washington based startup to a total funding since it launched in 2017 to $73 whopping million dollars, putting a valuation on the company, close to half a billion dollars, not shabby for people search engine. Chad (17m 12s): Yes. Joel (17m 12s): Seek Out will invest in sales, marketing, and customer success to reach new customers. They put a big diversity spin on the PR. I think all three of the quotes in the story talked about diversity. So that's obviously a huge, huge thing. Any thoughts on the news? Good for them. Chad (17m 29s): Bringing Jackie Clayton on board doesn't hurt when you're talking about diversity and being able to, to really understand technology. And I mean there, and obviously wrap the DEI marketing around a tool, look for practical applications and those types of things. But as we said, and I think when we in Austin in 2019 and we were judging these guys, one of the biggest reasons that pushed me over the edge was Seek Out was Anoop Gupta was the right hand, man for Bill Gates. Now it's not, not only because it makes him a really fucking smart dude, but he is a really fucking connected. So I believe personally, I believe these platforms are becoming a dime a dozen, great tech, powerful matching, and yet not all of these companies have a great go to market strategy in tandem with disciplined leadership. Chad (18m 22s): That's where I believe Seek Out is one of the top echelon types of platforms in this segment. Yes. Everybody is going to have amazing tech. The thing that we have to look at now as analysts in the space, who are the leaders who are going to be disciplined and who really have their shit together? Joel (18m 42s): Yeah. You, typically bet on the jockey and not the horse and Anoop Gupta obviously has the chops to make this, make this thing something special. I got to admit, I kinda got this space wrong. I kind of felt like at one point that profiles and online, you know, finding people online was sort of a commodity. And I'd say a couple of years ago it looked like it might be. Right? Anyway, it used to be like anybody that can make a Chrome extension can go search, you know, 200 million profiles. And it seems like I've lost a little bit of I guess, nuance that comes into play with this stuff. So I guess making sense of all this data has really become important. Joel (19m 24s): So no shock that some data scientists are actually figuring out how to make 2 cents out of a dollar with some of these profiles. And I also think it's a little bit of an anti LinkedIn bet. I think that there's a lot of distaste for LinkedIn, the money that they charge and what they provide for that. And people are looking for an alternative to LinkedIn. And if you can come into the market, like Seek Out has with 500, 600 million, a hundred million profiles, which they have, and you can provide nuance and a better search. And by the way, they're adding, they're starting to add automated messaging and some tools that are, you know, AI related and automated tools, which we talk about all the time on the show. Joel (20m 4s): I mean, they're really evolving this thing nicely and I couldn't be happier, happier for them. And I'm glad you mentioned Jackie, because in hiring her, they also hired the whitest guy on the planet, Jeremy Robert. Yes. There is some equilibrium there, in those two hires, but yeah, really happy for them and keep an eye on that. They they've gotta be on acquisition alert at this point. Chad (20m 27s): No question. I think again, you take a look at this type of tech and they were smart to go to market with a brand that is focused on really, it was LinkedIn at first LinkedIn and Get hub. How can we help recruiters get to those, those individuals who are most qualified types of skills, et cetera, et cetera, how do we get to them faster? Well, the search on LinkedIn sucks, the search on an applicant tracking system sucks. The search everywhere sucks. How do you create that power search? Then it became matching because of all the data that they were actually compiling. So this is, what it's doing is, it's morphing nicely as it grows much like I'd like to say a little robot we know. Joel (21m 12s): A robot Tengai some news out of them. So everyone knows that listened to the show what Tengai is, but if you've missed it, it's the recruiting robot. Chad (21m 22s): A real robot! Joel (21m 23s): We've talked for a while and that they should evolve into a software as well. So jeez surprise. The Swedish based Tengai has launched their product on mobile devices, adding software to its offering. Apparently you tested this thing, is that correct? Chad (21m 38s): I am on the schedule tomorrow to have my interview with Tengai, but I do want to say, remember back in 2019, when we were floating in the Kattegatt Sea in Sweden, and then we had a chance to actually take like a full day with the Tengai team. And we talked to them about good on market strategy and where their gaps were. And my main concern was scale. How do you quickly and easily scale something that is a physical robot? It can be done, but it's not easy. And it is very costly to go into mass production. On the other hand, an app software can scale much more quickly as AWS can spin up instances. Chad (22m 21s): So, you know, I'm not going to credit us for being the reason because I just think that this was the smart way to go in the first place. But I do know that we did have a hard nudge on several occasions in talking to these guys. I love the physical robot, don't get me wrong, but I think overall, this is the winner. Joel (22m 40s): The robot has some logistical challenges, to say the least. So to me, their promotional email kind of says it all. So they said to meet the increased market demand for conversational AI and remote interviews, we're launching automated, two-way interactive digital video interviews with the new release recruiters around the world can sit back and relax while candidates perform the interviews, hiring managers can then access the unbiased interview data and its result, blah, blah, blah. So this is basically like video chat with the robot. I will report back. I promise. So, so my question is this better than chatting text with deep fake becoming sort of more and more advanced? Joel (23m 24s): Couldn't you just have the robot be, I don't know, Penelope Cruz or just a random woman or man? So I kind of questioned like why it had to be the Tengai robot. I understand that the hard and the soft together, but I got to think at some point, if this becomes a thing, you'll talk to a real person instead of a robot. Chad (23m 45s): The CEO or the, you know, the natural HR manager or what have you. Yeah. If you remember the actual physical robot, you can easily take the face off and replace it. And they had a Barack Obama version. So it was something that physically they could change. I guarantee you, this is something that they either have baked in or will have baked in soon. Joel (24m 9s): It'll be like a choose your adventure book. Like who would you like to be interviewed by? Scary cyborg or Tom Cruise? Chad (24m 17s): That in itself would be incredibly cool. Morgan Freeman or Joel (24m 21s): Dave Chappelle. I want Dave Chappelle to interview me for my next job. Oh, I'm curious as well. So when COVID happened, we were like, awesome, the robot can like go and go in an interview room. It's germ-free yeah, you can wipe it down. Chad (24m 36s): That still works. Joel (24m 37s): But over the course of the year, I'm kind of thinking that interviews will primarily be video or at home or chat, like the fact that to go into a store or retailer and get interviewed face to face. Is that going to come back? Chad (24m 51s): Wait, it's not, will it come back? It's going to have to stay there because if you go into, let's say for instance, an Ikea and you say, I want to apply, well, you can just go into this room over here and interview with Tengai right? So there are practical applications, right? Those are more of the forest location scenarios. What are you going to do when that happens? Are you going to have to try to pull somebody off the floor? Do you have to do this? Do you have to schedule it? No, fuck that. Throw them in the room and have them talk to Tengai. Or if they're coming online to be able to go through the process, then you can schedule them and Tengai, you know, shoots them a link. Joel (25m 28s): Yep. So anyone who thinks this is just sort of a publicity stunt, I guess it's not, they are actually iterating and evolving this product. So best of luck to them. So let me keep score here. We're taking credit for the CareerBuilder announcement. We're taking credit for Seek Out for winning death match because everything took off for them once that happened and we're taking credit for the Tengai news. So we're doing pretty well. Let's take a break to pat ourselves on the back and we'll talk some acquisitions. And your favorite topic, Amazon. Jobvite PROMO (25m 59s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. Jobvite PROMO (26m 39s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Chad (26m 44s): Alright. Coming out of this one, I've got to let this one out. Cause I'm pretty stoked that a podcast I've been working on for months is going to drop on April 2nd. Joel (26m 55s): Nice. Chad (26m 55s): So I'm breathing and breathing a little heavy. It's called Cult Brand Secrets, hosted by Chris Nealon and it is what you and I have actually experienced. It is pretty much the individuals that are speaking from Spotify, from the LA Lakers, from Beats by Dre, Yeti, Northface, Marvel Studios, Skittles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all these huge brands and brand leaders, CMOs business leaders are actually speaking on stage. And we've turned that into a podcast. I mean, it's truly a masterclass for CMOs and brand leaders who want to stay sharp and not to mention everybody who someday wants to become a CMO and SVP of Marketing or brand or something like that. Chad (27m 40s): So I'm really stoked that's gonna drop soon! Joel (27m 42s): So Chris is leading the discussion. Chad (27m 45s): Chris is going to come in with learnings, like points of learning introductions, and then points of learning. So what you should be looking for, listen for during this podcast, then you have the podcast then after he goes over those learnings again. So this is truly one of those masterclass types of podcasts. Joel (28m 3s): Well, speaking of master class, Chad, I got to give a shout out to my youth, which is, I think quickly leaving my body. And it's not because 50 is right around the corner, but I got to tell you some of the things that have been dropped and in the past few weeks, just have my mind swimming. So let's go through Roadblocks. Have you heard of that? Chad (28m 21s): No. Joel (28m 22s): No. Okay. So it's went public this week. It's huge company, video games, blah, blah, blah. You've probably heard NFTs thrown out in the last couple of weeks. Chad (28m 31s): Yeah. Joel (28m 32s): Yeah. Totally clueless why Jack Dorsey's original first tweet just sold for $6 million or some shit like what in the world is going on? And then this whole, I'm still confused by this whole stocks, Game Stop thing. That's going on power to the people and how they're manipulating stocks. I just feel like, like my dad, like, I don't know what the fuck is going on? I'm glad that March madness is around the corner so I can like at least watch something I know. And I'm familiar with, cause I'm feeling really old lately. I don't know about you. Chad (29m 3s): Most people don't understand what the fuck a non fungible token is. I I'm going to have to go out there. I'm not going to say at your age or anything like that. I'm going to say that most of this, when you talk about blockchain, I mean seriously, right? I mean, this is all these different cryptocurrency, non fungible. I mean just all these things, Joel (29m 24s): You know, it's coming to employment, you know, it's coming. So someone's going to launch some fucking NFT jobs, something recruiting NFT, and you'll get a token, if you interview some, I mean, something is coming, man. I'm telling you, just wait for it. Chad (29m 39s): I hope not. Joel (29m 41s): We've been long enough to know that something is going to drop in the employment space around NFTs. Chad (29m 47s): That's your cue. Arran Stewart. Joel (29m 48s): The first resume, online resume will sell for $80 million or some stupid shit. Some bulletin board resume from 1982 is going to go on sale and get an NFT. Chad (30m 4s): We have an acquisition. Let's talk about this. Nobody. Yeah, nobody gets that shit. Joel (30m 8s): Criteria acquires Alchemy, which I think I dated her in high school. Yeah. Alchemy . Shout out to her. Chad (30m 16s): Good one. Joel (30m 17s): No L.A.-based Criteria, an employee assessment provider announced this week that is acquired Australian-based Alchemy Interactive an on-demand video interviewing platform founded in 2014. Stop me if you've heard this before. Quote from the Presley's "Alchemy is a unique technology that drives an outstanding customer and candidate user experience, advanced functionality around diversity and inclusion." There's a diversity word again. "And the ability to cater for both prerecorded and live structured video interviews", I'm really upset that an Australian video interviewing company was bought and it wasn't Verbo. That really upset me. I gotta, I gotta kick as I was researching this and Australian headline about this news was titled, "local video interviewing specialist falls into overseas hands." Joel (31m 5s): So there's some imperialism going on with a snagging up these, these technologies around the world. What are your thoughts on this? Chad (31m 14s): Here's a comment from Stan over at Smart Recruiters that he posted this, I think on LinkedIn, Facebook all over the place. So here's the quote "StepStone acquires Cameo, Modern Hire acquires SonRu, Outmatch acquires Launchpad, iCIMS acquires Easy Recruit, Phenom acquires Talent Cube, Criteria acquires Alchemy." Joel (31m 37s): Hm. Seek acquires Verbo. Oh, sorry. That was my crystal ball sitting here. Chad (31m 43s): But you would almost think that having native video in assessment and TA platforms these days are a must. I mean, this is, this is one of the hottest pieces of tech today that I think every organization, especially if you are a core platform, like an applicant tracking system, or if you're a CRM, I mean, you can start to at least have that on the backend, right? Joel (32m 6s): Yeah. At least throw a fucking robot on a video screen. Chad (32m 10s): It's a screening company. This is a screening company that bought this. Joel (32m 14s): Yeah. And don't forget Paradox launched video as well, pretty recently, virtual job fairs are popping up all over the place. I want to know what the fuck is wrong with Monster? They were believe it or not, they were a bit of a trailblazer with this video thing, even though, you know, they outsourced the technology, but at least they embraced video. And now they're not even coming to market with any kind of cool video interviewing tool. Chad (32m 37s): Yeah. There's nothing there. Joel (32m 39s): Last one out at Monster, turn the lights off. Okay. Well speaking of turning out the lights. Chad (32m 46s): Yes. Joel (32m 47s): You're going to love this story. So capitalism wins again, Chad, Amazon, obviously you're aware, is upping minimum wages in certain markets that they operate. And it's having a nice little impact on businesses around those local local markets. So the New York times this past week create a story. So Amazon's wage increase in 2018 was, was found to not only help workers at the company. Help workers at the company, Chad, they're helping workers, remember that, but also lift wages for workers at companies in the regions where Amazon operates. This is a new study cited by the New York Times, the paper found that the online retailers influence in the areas it operates is so powerful that workers at other businesses were able to command higher wages from their employers just by being close to Amazon. Joel (33m 39s): And also found that a $15 minimum wage was not as detrimental to the economy as some critics claim. Now you're probably torn over this, right? Chad (33m 50s): No, I think this is fairly simple. I mean, they're doing it from the standpoint of competition. So this was Amazon Walmart and Target. And even in more rural areas, it increased wages in those areas, not just, not just big cities or tier two cities. So that, that was pretty important from the standpoint of wow! Jobs weren't lost? Holy shit. Maybe we should have a $15 minimum wage number one. Okay. Joel (34m 17s): Local economies prospered. What? Chad (34m 19s): Yeah. What? The hardest part of this conversation right now is still CEOs are making about 300 to 400 times more than the people who are actually doing the hard work in developing products and delivering services. We're pretty much in a feudal system right now. And to be happy about $15 an hour jobs to me is I think more of a diversion than anything else. It's $30,000 a year before taxes. That's still not enough for many of these families. So yes. Does it dismiss the lie that a higher minimum wage will cost jobs? Yeah, it does. Chad (34m 59s): It totally dismisses that. It's total bullshit, but we are still in starvation wage territory and CEO's like the motherfucker from Kroger who's making, you know, shit 350, 400 times that of his people that he's not giving that $4 an hour minimum wage to, that additional to the essential workers. Give me a fucking break, man. I, it feels good to be in a, Oh look. Yes, we're finally, there. We're finally getting there, dude. We're just catching up. We're not where we should be. Joel (35m 37s): Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, to me, this is a, this is a, a dance that Amazon is putting on and we already know that, you know, Teamsters union, cue the Jimmy Hoffa music, is now working to organize drivers at Amazon delivery. Chad (35m 51s): Get 'em. Joel (35m 52s): They provide a concern over the impact of transportation on the entire industry, as well as the subcontracters. So, so you have this dance of like, we don't want government to give us, like to tell us what our wages is, but we don't want our workers to unionize. So what is the dollar amount that we can give that keeps workers un-unionized and keeps the government from actually, you know, dictating what minimum wage is and that increasing over time. So to me like, yeah, Oh, for the good of humanity, Amazon's doing this. No, but in addition to like communities around it and you get capital, you know, market, the invisible hand of the market, that's increasing salaries. Joel (36m 33s): We're getting is great, but Amazon is playing a much longer game in my opinion. And I think Kroger, even as well saying, look, if we give into to this California community, we're going to have to give in to every community and them taking a stand as a bet on them not having to do that. And you see this whole dance that corporations are doing in hopes of staving off government, staving off unions. And we'll see if they can pull it off? For now, they kind of are, for those listening outside of the US, minimum wage failed to pass recently, and unions still are pretty weak by most accounts. So it is working. Chad (37m 9s): From business insider data as well. The median necessary living wage across the United States is $67,690. The state with the lowest annual living wages, Mississippi, go figure with a $58,321. The state with the highest living wage is Hawaii, $136,000 plus. We have to understand this is not a living wage. $15 an hour is what we call a starvation wage. And we are just trying to get to a starvation wage. Joel (37m 47s): On my show with the Canadians. Chad (37m 50s): Yes. Joel (37m 50s): They have a lot of confusion around why America is so fucked up. And I tried to explain it in the best way possible. I probably failed miserably, but you know, when, when you and I were doing entry-level work and this kind of stuff, it was never meant to be a life, right? It's never, it was never meant to be. We're going to do this for a long time. And with the death of manufacturing automation, like these jobs are now essential jobs that are livelihoods for people. And we have to stop thinking about them as, Oh, it's a 17 year old that works over the summer until they go to school again, right? These are like people's livelihoods. And until we kind of think of it in that way, we're going to keep having this conversation and this dance. Chad (38m 34s): Agreed. And, and again, these are lies that have been told for decades that we are still buying into. Again, people, if you raise wages, the wages, don't just go into their pockets and stay there. Those individuals spend that fucking money, which means it drives, it juices, the economy, instead of going to some fucking rich white dude that goes into a trust fund. Joel (38m 59s): Should we take a break? Chad (39m 0s): Ooh, talk to me about some Burger King. Joel (39m 2s): Do we really want to talk about Burger King before lunch? Yeah. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, we do. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (39m 7s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" SOVREN PARSER PROMO (39m 51s): like all the others. No, 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. Chad (40m 8s): Oh my God. This next story stepped in it, dude. Well, okay, so here's the thing. Here's the, I'm a, I'm a white dude, right? And I saw that Burger King did this tweet that started out with. Joel (40m 25s): Women belong in the kitchen. Chad (40m 27s): No, but women belong in the kitchen. Yes. But then, then it goes down and it starts talking about if they want to. And only 20% I believe of chefs are females and they're starting an actual program to be able to help get more females into it. So I, again, didn't say a fucking thing. I'm looking at this on social media. And because again, I'm a white dude and my opinion carries little to no weight with most people on this type of topic. So the first thing I did was I went straight to Julie. I showed her the tweet and guess what she said. Joel (41m 3s): I have no idea what Julie said, and I'm not going, I'm not going to make any guesses as to what she said. Cause I'll be in the shit house for sure. Chad (41m 13s): She said literally, Oh wow, that's cool. I then told her BK is catching flack for the tweet. And her response was, and I'm paraphrasing here. People are looking for reasons to bitch. This is a program to support females who want to become chefs. People need to get the fuck over themselves. So that's coming from my wife who is very progressive left. Okay. She's not a centrist at all. And she's saying that, so again, not coming out of my mouth cause I'm a dumb white male. This is at least what the estrogen is saying in my house. Joel (41m 48s): Yeah. You know, when I read that on, I knew you and I, okay. We talk about BK a lot on this show or a recruitment employment related show. We talk a lot about BK. We've interviewed Ellie Doty, who's their Chief Marketing Officer. I think we both enjoy their food. You choose from a different side of the menu than I do, but we do enjoy the food and we talk all the time about their crazy ass marketing. So how people wouldn't read "women belong in the kitchen" and go, Oh, BKs, being BK again, they must have some funny shit going on and then read into it. What they're actually saying. It was a surprise to me. So clearly people read the headline of the tweet or the main gist of the tweet. Joel (42m 30s): Didn't read the story. Didn't dig into like, Oh, what crazy shit is BK doing now? Which they should have done. And BK paid the price for it. I guess. I mean, they deleted the tweet. They said, we're sorry, but I knew when I read it, it was just a, it was a quirky way to get your attention. But the message was obviously something more. And I guess the mother of all shout outs for this week show is that Monday was International Women's Day. You and I have obviously many strong women in our life, that we appreciate. You mentioned Julie's you have at many, many points in time. I wanted to give my wife a shout out as well at this story, my wife is so ridiculously more intelligent than me. And she was awarded this week, the Indiana university, bicentennial medal. Chad (43m 14s): Nice. Joel (43m 14s): Wasn't the only one, but there's just like an awesome based on her research work that she's doing and she's doing shit like, like you'll hear stories around or see documentaries about people eating bugs around the world and how that's like kind of a thing. She's at the forefront of all of that. So she's a super strong woman. That's an inspiration in my life. I wanted to mention her during this story, but I also am glad that this was, this was from the, this was from the UK. This was from Burger King in the UK. So I'm glad to know, at least UK and USA still have that bond of stupidity because that's a special bond that I hope is, is never broken. Chad (43m 52s): Cheers mate. Yes. And thanks for making us look less dumb. We out. Joel (44m 2s): We out. OUTRO (44m 56s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

How do you turn a company with 13% female engineers to one with 27%? Straight outta Oaktown, the boys invite head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Airtable, Albrey Brown, on the show and chat diversity recruiting, what a typical day in the life of a DE&I director looks like and even find time for MC Hammer jokes. U can't touch this, but you should sure as hell listen to this pod powered by NEXXT. Nexxt, connects you to a whole world of talent and the tactics you need to reach them.. Transcription sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies find talent in the largest minority community in the world – people with disabilities. Chad (1s): Hide your kids lock the doors. You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman 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. Joel (25s): Oh yeah. You know what time it is everybody. This is Joel Cheeseman of the Chad and Cheese podcast joined as always by my cohost Chad Sowash and today. Chad (37s): Yes! I'm excited. Joel (38s): You're blessed to have Albrey Brown, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Air Table. Albery how's it going, man? Albrey (48s): It's going well. It's a sunny day here in Oakland, California. Yeah. Chad (53s): Oaktown, three, five, seven, baby. Joel (55s): Does everyone know MC hammer in Oakland or is that a myth? Albrey (58s): No, everyone knows MC Hammer Joel (60s): Yes! I knew it. Albrey (1m 1s): And when you move to Oakland as a gentrifier, you have to meet with him for 45 min. They watch you do the hammer time dance. And if you can't do it, you're done. You can't buy a house. Chad (1m 13s): You're kicked out! Joel (1m 14s): Do you have to wear the pants when you meet with them? Or does that, is that optional? Nice. Chad (1m 18s): Yes! Of course you do! Albrey (1m 19s): You got to wear the pants. You got to wear the shades. Chad (1m 22s): The suspenders? Albrey (1m 26s): Can't touch this. Chad (1m 27s): Yeah, Albury. So a lot of our listeners obviously don't know who you are. So give them the Twitter, Twitter intro, and maybe a little bit about Air Table for those who don't know. Albrey (1m 36s): Yeah. So I want to first say that everyone knows me. So I'm sorry to tell you why, but my name is Albrey. I lead Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Air Table. I've been leading D&I at several companies for about seven years now. And Air Table is a cloud correct collaboration company, really in the what's called the no-code, low-code space. So what we specialize in is we have a product that makes it really easy for folks who've never programmed before to build their own applications and workflows. So what we say is that we are democratizing software creation by allowing anyone to build what they want. Albrey (2m 16s): And we truly believe that, which is why diversity, equity and inclusion is at the core of our mission. So that's what we do. Any other questions? Chad (2m 24s): Would you count Twilio as a competitor? Albrey (2m 26s): I'd say Twilio, not so much a competitor because they focus more on how you like do outreach to folks. So like SendGrid and text messages, messaging, et cetera, et cetera. But we do like integrate with platforms like Twilio. So for example, if you want to, if you two had a form request, when people wanted to like apply to be on the show, there, we have a database system that when people apply through an Air Table form, it hits the database and you can create an, that automatically uses Twilio to text them to say, Hey, we got your, got your application to be on the show. Albrey (3m 7s): We'll get back to you within 48 hours. So we're kind of like the layer between actions and like human actions and triggering other tools to do the things that you all want to do. Chad (3m 21s): So we had Madison Butler on the show and like all break came out of the woodwork on Twitter. It was like, it was like Lee and I noticed his Twitter handle. Right. And it says angry black man. I'm like, okay, that's a dude. I want to talk to! Albrey (3m 37s): Yup! Joel (3m 37s): His LinkedIn about is I'm rooting for everybody black. So you make, no, you don't camouflage it at all. Albrey (3m 44s): 100%. Chad (3m 45s): I dig it. So what kind of flack do you get from that shit? I mean, seriously, because it's, it's interesting. We've talked to Torin Ellis before and he's like, nobody calls you angry white dudes and you are what the fuck. Right. So from your standpoint, I mean, you gotta catch flack from that shit? Albrey (4m 1s): Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the reason why I made it, my handle is because one, it's a little bit ironic and I'm an ironic dude. I feel like, you know, there's the angry black man trope, you know, that, you know, black folks are angry at the way the society has treated them and just continuously kind of reproduce that anger and their actions, which let's all just say that's totally warranted. I mean, I can't go past, if you gave me a time machine, I wouldn't go back to pass like the 1980s, because life wouldn't be all that easy for me, before then. But you know, the reason that first and foremost to your question, I actually don't catch any flack. Albrey (4m 44s): I think that the, the reason why I put those things first and foremost on my LinkedIn and my Twitter is because it's kind of like the Eminem Effect, you know, Eminem and eight mile the, in the last rap battle, he's trying to figure out how to beat this guy who just way more gangster than him. And he just decides I'm going to lay it out all on the table, so that you know, my brand. And then what are you going to say? So it actually ends up being the opposite effect because I've, I've owned it and I've already kind of put that on the table. It's somewhat disarming and it's worked out in my favor. Joel (5m 16s): Was there any conversation with your employer about this or was it just sort of like we know we're getting and we're going to roll with it. Albrey (5m 22s): There was a conversation at the beginning when I was interviewing at Air Table about who I am and about what they are buying when they decide to provide my salary every two weeks. And I think part of the luxury that D&I people don't talk about is that I'm actually paid partially to be black in the workplace. Like my job as a diversity leader, is to be black so that I can then translate what it's like to bring your full self to work, to both executives and to individual contributors. Yeah. So I think if I was a salesperson, it might be a different conversation. If I was an engineer, it definitely would be a different conversation because the culture is a little bit different, but the privilege of being in diversity, equity and inclusion is that you're put on this platform to be in my case, black as fuck. Joel (6m 15s): But wait a minute, because CTOs have been a ceremonial position over the years, although over the last year, 18 months or so I'm feeling like that's finally, they finally found their groove, right? So I get what you're saying about, Hey, it's my job to be black in the workplace. And to be able to live who I am, it's almost like CTOs for a very long time really had no resources. There was no outcomes associated to them. They literally were just there as a figurehead. Albrey (6m 49s): Yeah. 100%. And liketo your point, there is kind of like a tokenization of the CTO, right? Like let's, let's hire someone in the C suite or like right under the C-suite to show that we have representation, but let's not give them the operate operative budget to actually change the way that we do things. And I think that's a really keen observation, Chad, that over the last 18 months, maybe, you know, I'd say 18 months is about right. I think what companies are recognizing is that, especially gen Z gives a fuck about this stuff. They care about diversity. I don't know if you two are on TikTok Chad (7m 28s): Yes! Albrey (7m 28s): But I learned more from the 25 and under crowd on TikTok. Talk about oppression and racism and sexism then about anyone else. Joel (7m 38s): Sorry, I'm taking notes. How do you spell that? T I C K is that? Is that? Chad (7m 44s): This dude, this dude is on Tik TOK more than, probably than you and me combined. I'll bet. Albrey (7m 51s): Oh, well, so Joel, you gotta get the Ben Roethlisberger Tik TOK handle. Joel (7m 59s): Is he on TikTok? I find that very hard to believe that. Chad (8m 2s): If he's not on TikTok, you should own it. Joel (8m 4s): Yeah, I should own that. I should on that. So, so you're, you're obviously not a figurehead you're doing work. What is a day in the life of Albrey look like? Albrey (8m 13s): Great question. I think diversity and inclusion work is first and foremost, very entrepreneurial in the sense that, you know, you're really selling a vision of what the company can be like in the future. Well, from a cultural perspective, you know, no company is getting any diversity, equity and inclusion right at the moment. And it's going to take, you know, 50 to a hundred years to get to a point where things are equal for everyone in whatever way, that's meaningful to, you know, an organization. So as an entrepreneur and a person who's building my function from the ground up, you know, my, the day in the life looks first and foremost, like talking of being the first one, the lighthouse for talking about things that are going on within the world and relating that back to the organization. Albrey (8m 58s): So for example, one thing that we just did last week at Air Table was acknowledged all of the anti-Asian racism that's happening across the nation. There's been an 1900% increase in hate crimes against Asian folks since coronavirus. And it was something that our Asian employees were having a lot of just personal strife with just a lot of, you know, I talked to one of our employees about the fact that like, she's really worried about her parents when they walk around San Francisco and what might happen to them. I talked to another teammate of mine who he's not Asian, but his wife is Asian and his is he's taking his kid to daycare. And he's just very worried for the first time about racism. Albrey (9m 40s): So I was the person who first listened to the employees who were being affected by this. Prompted our leadership team like that this is something that we need to support as a company, and then coordinated both a statement and a donation campaign and we're bringing in an expert who can educate other Air Tablets and allies about what needs to be done and how they can be allies outside of the organization. So that's just an example of like, I am kind of the tip of the spear when it comes to acknowledging the societal things that are happening outside of Air Table and attaching them to both our like employee culture. Albrey (10m 20s): So that's one day. Joel (10m 21s): So it's more than just job descriptions. Is that what you're saying? Albrey (10m 24s): Way more than just jobs descriptions. I think this is the trouble that companies are having right now who are just new to this game. They believe that it is not a truly quantifiable role and the sense that, you know, culture is not something that you can just put down to like the most simple atomic unit, right? Or the most simple, you know, objective and key results. It's truly a really fluid day-to-day that I have. The things that are consistent are, you know, reporting on our company representation and say, you know, what do we look like from a bunch of different dimensions: race, ethnicity, gender disability status, veteran-ship. Albrey (11m 9s): And then trying to understand whether we're actually providing equal opportunity to what folks outside of our organization. So that really looks like comparing what we look like as a company, to the total, total available market of talent. So if we have, you know, we recently realized that only 13% of our engineering team were women that was last year, but the total addressable market available market of talent is 30%. So we said, we should at least get to that total available market of talent. If the, if the market is telling us that 30% of engineers identify as women, 13% is not enough. So we just spent the last year getting up to 27% Chad (11m 48s): Dude, 13 to 27%. I mean, so. Joel (11m 53s): Solid. Chad (11m 53s): So that in itself, that itself outcomes, right? I mean, that's part of what we've been asking for for decades for God's sakes is stop this mamby pamby fucking fluff that we're hearing about. Joel (12m 9s): Mamby pamby. What are you? 65 manby pamby, good Lord? Chad (12m 14s): For our 65 and over crowd. I have to say, that's true. Albrey (12m 19s): Well, age discrimination is huge in Texas. Joel (12m 23s): We're on the we're on the back nine of that, my friend don't you. Chad (12m 27s): Shut up. Cheeseman. So overall dude, I mean, that is, that is huge! and I want to talk about outcomes are going to get to outcomes. There's no question, but from my standpoint, and I'm sure from yours as well, being in the position, DEI feels like it's bigger than HR, right? So, you know, does DEI actually belong, reside in HR? Or is that just one of the departments that you're a part of and who do you currently report to? Yeah, Albrey (13m 1s): I currently report to one of our HR leads right now. We are looking for a head of HR, or head of people. So if you know, anyone, please let me know at Air Table is a great place to work. And we could definitely, as we scale, you use someone who could make sure that we scale in a thoughtful way. So just putting that out there and to your question, I mean, we've had several conversations about this at Air Table, about who D&I should be reporting to. And honestly, it's the CEO to your point, Chad diversity touches every single part of the organization. And first it definitely starts with like taking care of your people. I think of it as like spheres of influence. Albrey (13m 43s): So your first sphere of influence are the people who are working for you. And those are the people who are the most important because they're actually pushing the product forward. So whatever they care about from the diversity perspective, you should work very, very hard to make sure that you're meeting those needs. The second piece is the talent that you're going to have in the future. So applicants, folks who you want to source, recruits. So making sure that your company and your talent brand really speaks to them, which means having a company that's representative of what the market says is available. And then the third is customers. So what are your customers want to see? And I can tell you that, especially in tech and really for any product, they want to see themselves represented in the marketing. They want to see themselves as sold ads that are, that have people that look like them because we live in a world now where identity is very much attached to your dollars. Albrey (14m 32s): And then the second piece is they want a product that is accessible to them. And accessibility, I think, is going to be the number two. I think probably the number two biggest topic, go over the next 10 to 20 years, it's going to be sustainability. It's going to be cultural diversity. And then the third piece is going to be how accessible are your products and your technology so that anyone and everyone can use them. And I think that's where diversity is really going to see a huge boost and moving from HR to the C-suite. Nexxt PROMO (15m 11s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. Andy, if a company wants to actually come to Nexxt and utilize your database and target texting candidates, I mean, how does that actually work? Right? So we have the software to provide it two different ways. If an employer has their own database of opted in text messages, whether it's through their ATS, we can text on their behalf, or we have over eight and a half million users that have opted into our text messaging at this point. So we can use our own database. We could dissect it by obviously by geography, by function, any which way some in sometimes we'll even parse the resumes of the opted in people to target certifications. Nexxt PROMO (15m 55s): So we really can dive really deep if they want to hone in on, you know, just give me the best hundred candidates that I want to text message with and have a conversation back and forth with versus going and saying, I need 30,000 retail people across the country. And that's more of a, you know, yes, no text messaging back and apply. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's next with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com. Chad (16m 32s): So diversity meaning in this case, talk about accessibility is disability, which to be quite Frank, that group, which is a very large group, really gets pushed to the side in most cases. And we don't have that discussion. What are you guys doing? Or are you doing anything to be able to also embrace the disability side of the house? Albrey (16m 56s): And to be totally honest, we suck at it. We're not a very accessible product, but we know we suck at it. When we talk about disabilities from the software perspective, it's folks who are, first and foremost, just like impaired, vision impaired. So using bright colors is also is a really bad thing to do for folks who are color blind. Using different tool tips when folks are clicking around an application really makes it hard for folks who are visually impaired to navigate your tool and kind of use it. And secondly, or thirdly, from like a compliance point of view, there are tons of companies, especially schools or organizations, especially at schools that can't use any piece of software unless it's ADA compliant. Albrey (17m 42s): So policy is moving in the direction of now centering folks who are, who have disabilities because as the world becomes more reliant on software, like, you know that what we're using to record this, you have to make sure that anyone and everyone can use it. And you know, to your point, Chad, there are 1.5 billion folks who have some sort of disability and missing out on that market is not only bad for, you know, diversity. You know, if we're just going to talk about it is like the right thing to do. It's also bad for business, like it's bad for dollars. If you just built a business to serve the needs of folks who have disabilities, you could make a lot of cash. Albrey (18m 23s): So I think we'll, we'll see that conversation get centered sooner rather than later. And the reason why it's not is because it's so much easier to focus on what people look like and perceived identity. It's so much easier to focus on women, people of color, because you can see that and you can see that represent, you can see more representation as it happens. But I do think that that we'll see all of these things kind of put on the same plane sooner rather than later. Chad (18m 54s): I'm sorry, Aubrey, I'm going to have to back up the bus a little bit. Did you say 13 to 37%? Albrey (19m 2s): 13 to, Oh, I said 13 to 27%, sorry. Chad (19m 6s): 27%. Okay. So big. Obviously our listeners are like, how the fuck did they do that? Because you have the added curve ball of COVID, which we know has been an incredible source of pain for women, particularly mothers in the workforce. So if listeners are like, how the hell did they do that? How did you do that? Albrey (19m 27s): That was a great question. So I think it was a confluence of, I'll say four factors. The first we started measuring it. So something that we do that I think a lot of companies really shy away from is we visually ID every single person that applies to our company. If we are looking at your application, we are also looking at your LinkedIn and seeing what do you, what is your perceived identity? What do you identify as, what do you express your identity as? And we, our recruiters are trained to tag folks by demographic and a private field that hiring managers can't see. Albrey (20m 9s): And then every two weeks I pull that information and we look at it in aggregate and that makes it really wow. We know that we probably get things wrong. Sometimes let's say at a 10% clip, we also know that having the data is way more important than having no data at all. So we're pretty open about that. We're pretty honest about the fact that we do that. We hope that folks self identify so that we don't have to go through the pain staking of actually, you know, misrepresenting them. But what that allows us to do is have really clear conversations with our hiring managers and say, Hey, like you haven't, you have only interviewed one woman and the last three months. Albrey (20m 48s): So Chad (20m 49s): Do you really hold them to task like that? Albrey (20m 52s): Yes. Chad (20m 52s): Awesome. Joel (20m 53s): Wow! That is awesome. Albrey (20m 55s): I meet, I meet with our leaders. I meet with our engineering leaders every two weeks. We go over the pipeline stacks. We go over what representation looks like, just like we would, you know, in a sales culture, looking at the numbers and we say, Hey, this is where we're weak. This is where we're strong. I'm going to go work with the managers that are weak and you keep motivating the managers that are strong and we just kind of kind of tag team. But I think that the core piece is like, when you have the data, what did Jay Z say? He said, men lie, women lie, numbers don't and it makes those conversations a whole lot easier so that you can take folks to task. I'm sorry. Joel (21m 34s): I'm still taking notes. Is that J-a-y? Chad (21m 37s): And Jay-Z said that cause he was fucking around. Albrey (21m 45s): I still don't believe that. By the way, I feel like I think Lemonade was a stunt, but we can talk about that at a different point. Joel (21m 53s): Say bruh, Beyonce, how do you cheat on that? And anything else? Yeah. What else? Albrey (21m 58s): Data colllection. I think we just have a willing team. You know, we are a younger company and I think our managers, I have to give them a lot of credit that they understand that this is not only something that's the right thing to do, but necessary. If you look at the numbers of computer science graduates, like 43% of them are women that used to be 35%, five years ago, that used to be 20%, 10 years ago. So I think that they're seeing that the market is telling them what they need to do in order to continue to hire very quickly, whether it'd be the right thing to do or not. So our hiring managers really do put in the work to make it happen as does our recruiting team. I will tell you, our recruiting team is the locus team that I've ever worked with in my life. Albrey (22m 41s): I do. In fact, they make me work harder than I should be working, in the sense that they are coming with ideas, bringing up partnerships, getting telling us which job boards to get on. So I have a really super amazing team. Now, if I'll say for the folks in the audience, if you don't have that type of team, then the data really makes it easy for you. As recruiters have been tagging folks, not only has it been an exercise and you know, gathering the data, but they learn a lot, they learn a lot about their own biases because they have to go in and perceives people's idntity. Joel (23m 14s): So it sounds like you're manually going through this process, is that what I'm hearing? Albrey (23m 18s): Yep. Manually going through it. Joel (23m 20s): So we talk a lot about the show on the show about AI and artificial intelligence and sort of the automated tools that take out, you know, bias from recruiting. Is that something you guys have explored? Is it something that you've closed the door to? Or what, where, where do you stand on sort of AI tools to take away the bias and recruiting? Albrey (23m 40s): Yeah. I think that's a great question. I think that the is still emerging and it's hard for me to invest in an emerging technology on such an important topic. When you're talking about, you know, AI that really looks at surface level things like, for example, most tools that tell you whether someone is like, what someone's gender is or what someone's ethnicity is or looking at solely at first and last name. Now that sounds all hunky Dory until you realize that there are a ton of androgynous names, first names, and that also sounds all hunky Dory for the last names, until you realize that this generation has the most interracial couples ever. Albrey (24m 24s): So it becomes very, a kind of a tough game to trust a piece of AI, to be able to tell you what someone's identity is now, that's also the same as like a recruiter, right? Like I can't trust a recruiter to be able to look at someone's, you know, joint last name. That's maybe like, that looks, you know, Hispanic or Latino, but, you know, they are kind of white passing. So who knows, but I put rather put that in the hands of a recruiter, knowing that the benefit is not just going to be that we've taken that data point, but like, let's say, they're looking at, you know, on LinkedIn, you can look up people's interests, right? Let's say they look at the photo it's, there's this, you know, go back to the example of a white passing person with a Hispanic last name. Albrey (25m 9s): And they look at the person's interest and it says, they're part of the Latin X and Hispanic design group, right? That's an indicator and that also then tells us that we should be a part of that Latin X and design group. So it expands our aperture, where we're recruiting from. So there's this in an AI, wouldn't be able to do that in AI. Wouldn't be able to, you know, help us with this two-pronged approach of both taking down the data or taking the data and learning about new ways to recruit. Chad (25m 38s): So let's spin this to employees real quick. So how can employee resource groups help? It seems for the most part, most of these groups are way under utilized and not truly connected to the business itself. How do we get these groups who have volunteered, some of them being paid, how do we get them more engaged in the business? Albrey (26m 4s): Thank you for bringing that up, this has been the crusade that I've been on over the last year and recently wrote that Fast Company and post about it. And I think that you answered the question so perfectly, it's they're underutilized. I think that companies need to stop seeing ERG is, is something that they're giving to employees and more of an investment in the fact that it scales up efficiently, scales up your diversity and inclusion strategy. So if you can't afford an entire DE&I team pay diversity into a paid ERG leaders, because at the end of the day, they're going to help you, they're there are three things that they can provide. First, just a fast feedback loop for if you're doing something racist or sexist. Albrey (26m 47s): Like if I am coming up with a marketing campaign, wouldn't it be great, if I could go to my black employee research group and say, Hey, can you take a look at this to make sure I'm not tokenizing anyone? And that's way cheaper than going to a consulting firm. That's way cheaper than just kind of guessing and kind of getting dinged on the back end when Twitter rose too, because you put on something and put up something that was insensitive. I think Amazon just got roasted because their latest logo looked like a Hitler mustache, and they got roasted two days ago and changed their logo immediately. So like, I wonder if they had shot that out to their employee resource groups, if someone who identified as Jewish, might have said, Hey, I just want to let you know that this looks kind of Hitlerly. Chad (27m 35s): Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Not cool. Joel (27m 38s): In the green room, we talked a little bit of football, a little bit of Steelers, and that reminded me of the Rooney Rule, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And Chad and I talked about on our weekly show, a couple of weeks ago, Activision a fine California company out there where you are originally had a little, a little tif with the AFL CIO who had requested to them to implement the Rooney Rule in their hiring procedures and at which Activism gave them the middle finger, in so many words, I'm curious what your take is on the Rooney Rule. Is it a good practice? Is it unrealistic? Where do you stand on that? Albrey (28m 17s): It's nuance? I think there's a spectrum. I think that the Rooney Rule is necessary, unfortunately. I don't think it's good by any means in the sense that, you know, forcing it feels like tokenization when you force people to go and talk to their one black friend for a role, without them actually genuinely wanting to look for a person, for someone in that role or that person to take on the role, it leads to bad outcomes. That said there's tons of research that it works. So for example, in California, three, four years ago, they said that, you know, every public company needs to have a woman on the board. Albrey (29m 0s): Now a hundred percent of companies have a woman on the board and they just passed another law this year that says, now you have to have a person of color on the board and I can assure you that in two years, every one of those companies will have a person of color on the board. So I think it's necessary in terms of forcing folks to take that next step, because what I see as the biggest threat to diversity and inclusion is that people truly like to work with people that they like and that they're connected to. And unfortunately, the past history has forced us to only hang out with people that look like us and only provide opportunities to people that look like us. I mean, what segregation was 60 years ago, 70 years ago. Albrey (29m 42s): And if you don't believe that we are still a very much a segregated society, then I think that's a naive take and the Rooney Rule forces more integration in that way. I do hope that in a decade, the Rooney Rule, we won't need the Rooney Rule. Given how I've seen roles filled, based off of nepotism and the relevant, past relationships, I do think that it's 100% necessary to create the diversity we want to see. Now, the last thing that I'll say, because I know I've been on that we've been on this topic for awhile is, I think that, what people don't understand about the Rooney Rule, that there is a benefit to it that if you see it just as forcing yourself to look at the full pool of talent, I can bet you that we'll find in five to 10 years, that people will look back and say, I'm really glad I did that because the first person that I thought of for this role, that I would have gave it to is probably a shitty pig. Albrey (30m 45s): And if you're not ready to put someone that you know, up against the field, then they're probably not as good as you think, because at the end of the day, you're just hiring them because of the feeling that you have. And you need to be able to see five, six, seven people before you can actually truly say that they're the best for the job. And I think that's what the Rooney Rule forces outside of race, gender, et cetera, et cetera. It forces you to put people up against the field. And I think that will lead to better hiring outcomes. Chad (31m 15s): So Albrey, I think you, my friend are a fringe player. You're the guy who is making shit happen. And I don't think there are enough of you out in the world. And here's why I'm saying that because Google just got hit with a measly $3.8 million back-pay fee, right from the U S government. So the U S government is asking Google for couch cushion change, after getting caught red-handed, to ensure that they are doing what they should be doing in the first place. So taking a look at companies like Air Table, who understand what their workforce composition is right out of the gate, and they want to be able to change it because they understand why they need to change it and then providing the how they need to change it. Chad (32m 8s): But overall, don't, we need some form of regulation to ensure that all these other organizations who don't have an Albrey get their shit tight. Albrey (32m 20s): Yeah. And I think, I think it's coming. I think that you're predicting the future man, like with the Biden administration. I think we'll see the opposite of what we've seen in the past administration. And the past administration took steps to dismantle a lot of diversity work. And I think it was because there was an anticipation that the law is going to, like legally, we're going to see mandates that are much more complex and much more hard hitting than affirmative action. This year, they just passed a law that said any federal contractor has to have a goal of hiring, making 7% of their workforce folks with disabilities. I think they're giving folks about five to 10 years to actually hit that goal. Albrey (33m 4s): But I think that's an indicator of what's to come. It's not about identity politics anymore, it's about identity policy. And I think it's, this is the very we're at the very beginning of this and this is that's why diversity is being invested in so much. There are societal pushes, right? But once policy comes into play, that's when the real investment starts to pour in. Because at the end of the day, once the government says, you have to do this stuff, companies will follow suit. Joel (33m 36s): Albrey, I mean, Albrey Brown, everybody. Chad (33m 39s): Yes! Joel (33m 40s): Thanks for being on the show, man, for our listeners who want to learn more about you or your company, where would you send them? Albrey (33m 45s): You can hit me angryblackman@gmail.com. No, I'm joking. At @AlbreyBrown on Twitter, LinkedIn Albrey Brown. That's A L B R E Y. And if you want to learn about Air Table, go to airtable.com. We have a beautiful website, you can sign up for free. And I'm looking forward to hearing from y'all. Joel (34m 5s): Can't touch this. We out. Chad (34m 8s): We out. OUTRO (35m 9s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

It's a lactose-free episode of The Chad & Cheese podcast with special guest, Canadian podcast superstar, Shelley Billinghurst of The Recruitment Flex. This week we ask... - Why is Facebook invading my notifications and feed with jobs? - Will COVID kill the job board star? - Is Work From Home just a phase? - Will Iceland wins the wage gap wars? - Will spinning the vinyl help Goldman Sachs CEO remote-free strategy? ...and will Canada align with the UK on gig? You've got questions and we've got Molson and Yukon Jack fueled hypotheses. Big thanks to our friends at Jobvite, JobAdX, and Sovren for supporting The Chad & Cheese - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. 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. Chad (32s): Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I and Chad, "Hey, the damn people" Sowash and today I am joined by Shelly (38s): Shelley "stay in your own damn country," Billinghurst. Chad (44s): And all today's a lactose-free episode apparently Facebook is really serious about this job's thing, will Covid kill the job board star? Is work from home, just a phase, and will Canada aligned with UK on gig? Stay tuned there's more to come. JOB AD X (1m 3s): Your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JOB AD X (1m 43s): JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you inJobAdX.com the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Chad (2m 6s): All right, everybody put your hands together and welcome guest host, Shelley Billinghurst to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Everybody. How you feeling, Shelley? Shelly (2m 16s): I'm pretty happy to be here. Tell you I'm living the dream. Thank you for having me on the show Chad. Chad (2m 22s): So do you have butterflies, could you sleep last night? Shelly (2m 25s): I did have stress dreams. I have to admit, I kept thinking I was going to be late. I'm going to forget to say something. Like, you know, that dream where you have to get to the airport and all these things prevent you from doing?Yeah, that was me last night. So yeah, it's a big day here in the great white North. It's a big day. So thank you for having me. Chad (2m 46s): I obviously traded up this week for Shelley while Cheeseman takes her slot on Canada's hit podcast, the Recruitment Flex, and I believe correct me if I'm wrong, Shelley, all 200 people in Canada actually listened to the Recruitment Flex, right? Shelly (3m 1s): Yes. Yes. And it's, it's just, it's caught on fire. OUTs. Oh you tease. Chad (3m 9s): Geez. Seriously. Give our listeners a quick Twitter bio about you. Who is Shelley? Shelley (3m 15s): I am Shelley Billinghurst. I live in the great white North. I'm in the Western part of Canada, very low density population, but we are just a stone's throw from the beautiful Rocky Mountains and the lovely city of Banff. I come to you with let's look, we're just going to go with 20 plus years in recruitment and I'm the president and founder of Hire Value, Inc. We are recruitment marketing advertising. Chad (3m 43s): Very nice. Thank you. We are happy to have you. How, how did we actually get you over Serge? Because I think we actually got the, the better part of the deal on this one. Shelley (3m 53s): Well, thank you. Thank you. Do you know, I think I just kind of elbowed my way and said, Oh no, like this, this needs to be Shelley and Chad, of course. And, and I think there's some sort of Canadian connection with Mr. Cheeseman, right? He's married to a Canadian. Yeah. Chad (4m 11s): We can't even get into Canada right now. What kind of irony is this? We're talking about building a wall on the Southern border, but we can't even get through the Northern. Shelley (4m 21s): Okay. So let me clear that up just a little bit. You can come in, but we're going to quarantine you at a government approved hotel at your own expense. And that's even with tested negative for COVID. We're actually going to put you in Canada, hotel jail. You can still come. I mean, like if that's not the biggest, you're not welcome. I don't know what it is. Chad (4m 44s): And you're going to charge Waldorf Historia rates. I'm sure. Shelley (4m 47s): Do you know, the government is very secretive about what hotels they've chosen. I have no idea if it's like the seediest little hotel somewhere near the airport or the Waldorf, but I do have an idea as to why this is such an extreme reaction. Over the Christmas season there were numerous, very senior government officials who decided that the COVID 'don't travel rule' just didn't apply to them and they were off in the sun taking their families on vacation and coming back after the Christmas break. Chad (5m 20s): Typical. Shelley (5m 21s): I know, right. It doesn't apply to them. They just make the laws. They don't have to follow them. There was huge fallout. There were resignations both at the, you know, kind of the state slash provincial level, as well as at the federal level, there was a lot of shame on you. So I think this is like typical overreaction, now, you know, we're gonna make it tough for anybody to leave the country and even tougher, if you need to come up here, my heart goes out to people who have no family here and they need to come and attend, you know, sad events, like funerals and that sort of thing. Chad (5m 54s): Right. Let's just make it clear here in the United States we're not embarrassed about anything, obviously because our politicians do whatever the hell they want. The only thing that I think happened where Ted 'dumb ass; Cruz went to Cancun and then found his way back. But for the most part, for the most part, yeah. Our politicians do whatever the hell they want, while they tell you to do something entirely different. So that's normal here in the US you guys are, are much nicer in Canada. Shelley (6m 25s): Oh, okay. Chad (6m 26s): So I got a little bit of news from the Indeed camp. You want to hear it? Shelley (6m 32s): Yeah. Bring it! Chad (6m 33s): So a very strong rumors are coming out of the Indeed camp. Indeed's virtual interviewing platform. It's been free to employers and users, and guess what kids, go figure, Indeed's going to start charging you sometime very soon. Now, I personally have not used this platform. Have you, Shelley is, do you think it would be worth the squeeze? Shelley (6m 55s): Yes and no. The yes side of this is, well, you know, where are you going to get the candidate traffic? And so when you look at low who the big players are, which we all know, because there are other virtual interviewing platforms, right. That you can subscribe to, but then you've got to pay to get the traffic, right? Like how are you going to advertise it? So I think that's the plus. The downside is, you know, again, you're kind of putting all your eggs in one basket. You've got, I don't know if you could use other platforms to drive traffic or your own organic traffic, that I don't know. What I do know though, is yes, I have actually test driven cause usually in Canada we will see once it's been tested out, they'll roll it out to Canada, as far as features and upgrades. Shelley (7m 39s): And I've actually used the tool and found it to be well, considering it was free, super! Well, it did cost you the whatever it costs to advertise. Right? Chad (7m 49s): Right. Shelley (7m 49s): I was impressed. You have to wonder what the evil empire actually has to do behind this? This is another platform I see them bringing to bear. Will it actually integrate with applicant tracking systems? Will it be a system that works outside of the Indeed ecosystem? I doubt it. Yeah. I have not deep dived into how it connects with all the major applicant tracking systems. But I do believe, I mean, it would make sense that you could feed, like whoever you hired just directly into your HRS, it does work outside your applicant tracking system. So good point. Chad (8m 23s): Stay tuned for more evil empire shit. Shelley (8m 26s): I'm just so not popular. Chad (8m 29s): Shout outs. You get, you get the, you get the first shout out. Who do you want to give a shout out to? Shelley (8m 34s): Oh my gosh. Okay. Big drum roll. There's there is one real cool kid. One of the coolest kids here in Canada is Will van Middendorf. Will is a guy, he runs three companies and he's also a father of two little kids, but in his spare time, he runs the Canadian recruiters network and is just so awesome to give back the recruiting community here in Canada. So big shout out. Hey, Will, thanks for all you do. Chad (9m 1s): Very nice. Very nice. I'm going to give a shout out to Costco who ups their minimum waves to $16 an hour now! Two years ago, they moved their minimum wage to $15 an hour and they're just going to one up, all the bullshit that's happening in Congress right now. So overall, if you do work at Costco, their employees receive up to two bonuses each year, which can be around $4,000 combined. The, the average hourly wage, which include those bonuses are around $24 an hour. Now that's what I call actual wages. Depending on where you live. Right? But overall, $15. Chad (9m 41s): Come on guys. That's literally $30,000 a year before taxes. We at least need to go there for a minimum wage. Shelley (9m 49s): Nice. Shout out. Can I do another one? Chad (9m 51s): Yes. Shelley (9m 52s): So I do want to shout out my buddy, Derek Christiansen, formerly of ZipRecruiter. He's just moved over to Virtual Event Platform. Hmm. What are we just talking about? That it's called Brazen. And so I do understand from Derek that he actually was in an airport and saw you and Joel and went up to you and said, Hey, love the podcast. And you guys were like, meah, whatever stars, fans, do you want me to sign something? I don't know, but he's pretty sure you guys don't remember him, but he was like, I met those guys. Chad (10m 26s): That's that's total fake news, number one, but I remember meeting him in, I believe it was Minneapolis airport and we sat down and we actually chatted with him for a little while. So that's fake news. I remember it! Brain like a fricking elephant over here. So yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Awesome. But we love our fans. Shout out to friend of the show, Isabel Kent who sent me some old Overholt and 11 year old rye whiskey. She's trying to broaden my whiskey talent. So thanks Isabelle. It was delicious not to mention. Isabelle also is now the newly appointed executive director of Philly Startup Leaders. Chad (11m 7s): If you're one of our many listeners in Philly, you should definitely check them out. They're at phillystartupleaders.org. Congratulations, Isabelle! Happy Birthday to Adam Chambers. The dude is 24 years old living the life. I'm telling you the kid travels. Well, pre COVID put it this way. Kid travels everywhere. He's a founder of his own organization, his own tech called Applichat. And you never know where you're going to find him. He could be in Mexico. He could be in Spain. He's all over the place. He's living and lovin' life. So happy 24th! God, I can't believe 24 years old. Adam Chambers, good job, man. Now on to free stuff. This is where we love our listeners, Shelley. Chad (11m 52s): This is going to move the, how much you love your listeners? Watch this. If you want free stuff, you go to Chadcheese.com/free and you register. And here's some of the stuff that you can actually win. T-shirts by emissary.ai. Shelley. I'm sure you're a fan of text recruiting, right? Shelley (12m 11s): Mm I am. I am. It's what all the cool kids do, right? Chad (12m 19s): It is definitely what all the cool kids do. Go to emissary.ai. Katrina Collier actually sent a picture to us. Gorgeous in her blue, Chad and Cheese t-shirt. Kyle Hagar shared a new pic with his new Chad and Cheese tee. Kyle buddy, you're starting to look like shaggy from Scooby. You need to get rid of that Covid hair dude. Beer by AdZuna that's right. Not just t-shirts beer. We had a late night drink, zoom beer tasting with Dennis Tupper from CVS. He was our latest winner and it's always fun to just sit back and enjoy a drink or two with our listeners and this month's winner drum roll, please ... Chad (13m 6s): iS David Bernstein from Job Sync. That's right, David. Shelley (13m 13s): I know him! Chad (13m 14s): Bernstein from JobSync. You might remember him. He is the Steven Seagal of recruiting. Shelley (13m 21s): That's right. He's a great guy. He really is. And he's got just the nicest little pony tail going on. He's a great guy. Chad (13m 28s): Exactly. Shelley (13m 29s): Lucky guy! Chad (13m 29s): Exactly what he wants to hear, nicest ponytail supposed to be a dangerous ponytail. It's supposed to be dangerous. Whiskey by Sovren that's right, kids Sovren has AI so human you'll want to get drunk with it. Are you a big fan of AI? Shelley? Do they have AI in Canada? Shelley (13m 48s): You are just something else. Of course, we even made our own! Chad (13m 53s): Made your own? Shelley (13m 56s): We have technology in Canada. Believe it or not, Chad, we do. And we actually have tech startups here in Canada. We actually have a tech community. Can you believe that? I know. I know it shocking. Chad (14m 6s): No I love it. I love to hear these things. Reports from the great white North stay tuned because next week we're actually going to announce the winner of the whiskey giveaway from Sovren this week. And in, remember you get two bottles of whiskey, one from Chad and one from Cheese. So yeah, what you guys should do, you and Serge, Shelley should actually have like a Yukon Jack Canadian whiskey giveaway or something like that. That sounds like fun. Shelley (14m 38s): Oh yeah. I'm on it. Like we'll work it into the budget because you know, we're not making any money right? Chad (14m 45s): Yet. Shelley (14m 46s): We do this for free. Yes. Chad (14m 47s): Do you do it for the love? Shelley (14m 49s): Yes, we do. And so that's on agenda. Thank you. Nope. Chad (14m 53s): You're welcome. Made time for topics. Okay. So over the last couple of weeks, we've either talked about or mentioned in passing how Facebook is getting aggressive in scraping jobs. Some job sites are seeing activity that seemed like Facebook was just testing, you know, like intermittent scraping once a week, you know, amateur kind of stuff. Well, this week I had jobs in my Facebook notifications and feed itself. So it looks like they're actually looking to roll out a more aggressive user side of the house. So the user experience, you should start seeing more jobs. Chad (15m 34s): The thing that I'm trying to figure out, am I just a test subject? Are you seeing this kind of stuff? Shelley, are you on Facebook that much? Shelley (15m 41s): We are like for both the company and me personally. And so I think you must be part of a test group or as I think what I say see most of the time, is that they'll test it out in the U S and then we'll see it in Canada sometime, maybe 18 months down the road, sometimes not at all, but, you know, I wonder, so what you're seeing, is it relevant? Like, is it actually anywhere close? Like yeah. Chad (16m 8s): No, not even close. Yeah. Okay. So it's interesting because first and foremost, Facebook doesn't have enough of my information. I don't have my resume. I don't have like job history, like LinkedIn does. So the matching is total shit in itself, but it looks like they're at least trying, you see them trying, but it feels like amateur hour. Shelley (16m 33s): I agree. I agree. And do you know, I think they tried this before and it kind of fell flat, but, but I think maybe in some markets, I've heard that in some markets it's super popular and it's doing really well. I think in some markets, maybe it's like, Oh cool, man, like a golf director job. Ooh. Yeah, never thought of that. Chad (16m 56s): Exactly. I got, I got a golf director job in my feed, anything that said director, because I think I had like titles of what I've done, but I didn't have really any context provided to the titles. And obviously they have no type of ontology with regard to actual job titles as well. So I think they're really going to have to do a much better job because from what I'm hearing is, they're just scraping once per week. And that's horrible. You're going to get a lot of dead links. What does this mean for Indeed? I mean, everybody other than you, Shelley hates Indeed. So they're going to look for exit strategies. Chad (17m 36s): This is, this is going to be one of them. Shelley (17m 38s): That's not true! Chad (17m 39s): This is going to be one of those. Shelley (17m 41s): Well, so all you're doing is you're just trading one hater, for another, like, honestly, because if it were Google and Google for Jobs and I mean, they own everything. Chad (17m 51s): Yup. Shelley (17m 51s): I mean come on. Like if they get into the, if they really go hard at and they then become kind of the next tidal wave, well then you're just going to hate Google. So, you know, it's we just decide who we're going to hate this month. So let me, let me lay some Canadian level on ya. Chad (18m 6s): Yeah. Shelley (18m 7s): Just chill man. Like, honestly, you're so salty! Chad (18m 11s): But Indeed is not a lifestyle platform. Right? Facebook and Google are both lifestyle platforms. These are things that we use on a daily basis when we're not looking for jobs. So these are a part of our daily routine. When Google starts feeding relevant jobs, when Facebook starts feeding relevant jobs, that's going to impact Indeed and all the other job boards in a very, very negative way. Don't you think? Shelley (18m 41s): Of course everyone's, you know, but I've heard it before. You know, I don't know if I mentioned I've been in the recruiting game for 20 plus years and I've seen it before. I just don't know. I mean, I don't have like you, I don't have a lot of confidence that they're going to do something so incredibly innovative and fun and easy that candidates go, I'm going to go look over here for work. Chad (19m 6s): Yeah. But I think what we're seeing is if you are a part of this platform and you use it every single day, it's going to be fed to you no matter what I mean, it's going to be more force fed than anything else and it'll get better. They'll get more data. They'll do those things better. I guess the big question is they seem to be going very aggressive at this now Facebook does. And we're also hearing, at least last week, we talked to Arran Stewart for the CVO of jobs.com. And he said that his Google for Jobs, traffic is actually better than the Google organic traffic. So it seems like there's more aggressive steps being taken by both organizations. Chad (19m 48s): The big question I'm hearing, and I agree a hundred percent. I actually worked with the Google-based team back in the day if you talk about dating yourself, we've seen these big companies fail before, because this is not their wheelhouse. The big question is what kind of debts, whether they're an expert or not, what kind of debt they will actually make. Shelley (20m 7s): It's an interesting idea, but it's not their core business. Yeah. Chad (20m 11s): Yeah. Well, that being said, Facebook and Google are getting into the jobs game. That that's one thing, but how does the rise in remote and work from home impact job boards? Shelley (20m 23s): Can I chime in on this? Chad (20m 24s): Oh yeah. Shelley (20m 25s): Oh, okay. So love the job board business it's but it's been around a long time too, right? Like it's I would have thought by now we would have invented something better, but other than type in job title and location, right? Like really? We're really looking, I guess we're looking to you Americans to invent something better. Yeah. It was interesting to consider what this is going to mean for employees. I know certainly here in candidates, it's starting to get safer to go back to work or bring people back to the office, but do they want to correct me if I'm wrong here Chad, but if you're unmarried and under the age of 30, you're probably pretty lonely. Shelley (21m 6s): And going back to the office is a good way to meet people. Shall we say? Or I don't know hookup, right? Chad (21m 14s): Yeah. Shelley (21m 14s): But I think it's the older workers who are like, you know, I'm okay. Let me just kind of judge up my house and I'm good. Like I don't miss the commute. I don't miss the dropping my kids off at six o'clock in the morning at daycare to drive for an hour and a half to get to the office. Chad (21m 35s): I see two issues right out of the gate. Number one, no matter what happens, they're going to be a contingent that go back to work. They're going to be a contingent that have a hybrid scenario. It doesn't matter what happens. Remote jobs are still going to explode in the coming months. How will job seekers manage that large influx of jobs that they will see from all over the country? Right? It's going to be information overload because most of the job boards will just do one thing. They're going to add a remote as location, which is what they've already done. And that doesn't fix the problem. What we're doing at that point is we are tagging everything that we have with remote. Chad (22m 17s): And then we were sending all of these jobs to job seekers who were perspectively qualified for those jobs, but might be across the country. Now, number two, this is a harder question for employers because now employers who are putting the remote tag on those jobs are going to receive a huge influx of job seekers from all over the country. So I have one answer when we're talking about technology and we're talking about job boards, and I think this is kind of like the first step. First off, this is a great opportunity for job boards to use the information already available to them. And then ask for more. This means top of the line parsing and matching tech is not a nice to have. Chad (23m 1s): It is a must have, because what will happen at that point is I can feed you jobs that are more relevant to you, instead of just sending you everything that is a quote unquote "sales job" that is remote and in my database and just totally overloading the job seeker. And then on the other side, overloading the employer. And I go back to, I'm going to hate on Indeed a little bit more seriously, Indeed spent millions of dollars on a Superbowl ad and their matching tech or how they've implemented their matching tech, sucks. What we need to do is we need to focus on relevance and experience and job boards from the standpoint of job seekers and employers, we have neglected that for decades. Chad (23m 50s): We've got to take this shit serious, or it's going to bite us in the ass. That's my thought. Shelley (23m 54s): You brought up some great points. You know, I love the notion parsing. The whole idea of parsing is, is also kind of like so 2001. Chad (24m 6s): Yeah. Shelley (24m 6s): Like honestly, I remember the sales reps rolling through town saying, you know, they've got the magic sauce for parsing and you know, most of the shit doesn't work. Yeah. You know, I've always had an eye on, on parsing tech, but I love the idea of parsing it out to the job seeker as well. Like, because that's the biggest complaint is like, don't send me job ads for golf director, like please. Right. And let's layer on the fact that the type of work I can do, I can do from anywhere. So it's really going to, I think, turn the job boards on their heads, to figure out a way to help people get the right jobs in front of them. Shelley (24m 47s): And you're right for the employers as well. Chad (24m 49s): I know there are some top level parsing companies that are out there. I'm wearing a vest from Sovren. They are probably the best in the industry and that's on both sides, parsing resumes, being able to parse jobs, but also going the next step for all of you employers that are listening out there if you aren't putting the right processes, whether they're it's RPA, conversational AI in place, to be able to help your process and also divert those individuals who are not qualified to jobs that could perspectively be qualified to, you're going to take a huge hit on your brand. And that obviously is not going to be a good thing. Chad (25m 30s): So I tell you what, let's take a quick break in on the other side, we're talking Iceland, Canada, the UK, and the possible impact all over the world. We'll be right back. SOVREN PARSER (25m 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. Chad (26m 45s): All right, Shelley, how does Canada's gender pay gap look? It's gotta be better than the U S right? Shelley (26m 52s): Actually, no, I don't think we're any better. Chad (26m 57s): What? Shelley (26m 57s): No, I'm I'm serious. I really don't think we are again. I think we've got the same sort of, if anything, I, I would say it's even worse. Chad (27m 6s): Wow. Shelley (27m 6s): In Canada, because Canadians are really, no, we're really weird when it comes to talking about money. It's considered impolite. Yeah. So you can magnify that when it's women and you know, whether it's my generation or the generations before me or after me, we've never really had any good coaching on how to ask or talk about money. I would say, you know, we're no further ahead. We really aren't. Chad (27m 33s): Let me tell you who is! In 2018, Iceland introduced the first policy in the world that requires companies and institutions with more than 25 employees to prove they pay men and women equally for a job and of equal value. The policy is implemented through a job evaluation tool called the equal wage management standard, or simply the system. If companies show, they pay equally for the same positions, they receive certification. Beginning in 2020 certification became a requirement and companies without certification incur a daily fine. Chad (28m 15s): That to me, Shelley is the answer past what you were just talking about with Canada. You are a polite, I think that obviously impacts a female's wages and widens the wage gap. Iceland is stepping in. What do you think about government actually stepping in to ensure fairness and equal pay? Shelley (28m 35s): Wow! That's a loaded question. I would be in favor of it because, well, no, because I understand our cultural uniqueness and as a country and I'm not trying to stereotype us, but I do know that even from childhood, we, aren't doing much to open up those communication or teach people about economics. So love, love what Iceland is doing because you know, it's one thing to say, you know, we want to get there, it's another thing to actually put a, not really a stick, but I guess a baseball bat. Cause if, if they're being fined per day, it's a little more than just a, Oh, you know, you really need to get on board. Shelley (29m 21s): Right. And they gave them two years to get on board. Chad (29m 23s): Yeah. Yes. Shelley (29m 24s): From what you're saying here and you know, they wanted, so without it, I don't know what the alternative is because why would you opt into it if there's no motivation to opt into it from a corporate perspective. Right. It's just more red tape. So I guess politically it may not be super popular, but what I love about what they've done is they really do understand that they're doing this with a view for the future, right? Chad (29m 52s): Yeah. Shelley (29m 52s): Yes. You got to start somewhere, but the more you do this, the more you are really ensuring that you're getting people into the workforce, they're being paid equally and it just has this ripple effect on the economy. Chad (30m 6s): Yes, it does. And there are three main factors and why Iceland system has succeeded. Number one, the shift of the burden of proof to the employer, instead of to the employee either. So we've always here in the US have waited for the employee to bitch and whine about not getting paid enough. Now it's upon the employer to prove that they are doing the right thing. Number two, demand, evaluation and compliance, which means equal pay certification is only effective when strongly enforced. And then three create a transparent system. Chad (30m 47s): I personally think this should be number one. I think this should be every government's first step. Drive transparency, make it mandatory and then everybody knows who is getting fucked. And at that point, as a company has to change what they're doing and overall, you know, the government should be there to provide protections for the people, not focus on protections over the people for the corporations. And I think Iceland's got this right. What do you think? Shelley (31m 23s): Wow. Okay. Part of that, like it really kinda zinged me there! Chad (31m 28s): What part? Shelley (31m 29s): As far as, you know, pulling people's pants down and saying, Oh, you've been exposed. You're like I had this visual in my head of everybody knows who's getting fucked. I mean, okay. I don't know, is it I guess, compliance by humiliation as well, right. I guess I wonder what's the flip side of having this pay transparency. I know some workers would, might say that, you know, it's a little bit of a, you know, when you're publishing people's pay, because I know that the Alberta government did something similar a few years ago and it really had a bit of a backlash as far as people feeling like, do I really want to work somewhere where they publicly publish my wages? Shelley (32m 13s): I don't know. Maybe again, it's a Canadian thing, right? Like it feels like a little bit of, I don't know, enforcement by humiliation. Chad (32m 23s): But so here's the question though, if we don't do this from these, from this type of standpoint, maybe from a transparency standpoint, all we know are really leading indicators. And most of those leading indicators are that we can see the C-suite and we can see what the composition of the C-suite is. And we know, we know that the fortune 500 companies that 8% of fortune 500 companies have a female CEO only 8%. And by composition, half of the population is female. So therefore we're off 42 percentage points, right out of the gate. Chad (33m 5s): Right? So if we understand not just the composition of an organization, but also the Pay composition or the pay equity in an organization, that's the only way we can fix it. So yes. Is it going to shame some organizations? I totally agree, it would. Do they deserve to be shamed? You're God damn right, they do. If they are paying, I have two daughters. If my daughters are getting paid and working their asses off, doing the same job that a male is doing, I want my daughters to get just as much. Shelley (33m 37s): You get no argument from me there, no argument, at all. But I think, where you've really got, cause I have I've got a daughter as well. And I know that equal pay certainly for equal work. Absolutely. But I think you've raised another issue. And I hear you talk about it often, so, wow. I can't believe this is really happening. I get to talk to you about this Chad, because the, the percentage of representation of female executives, you know, there's a larger systemic issue, I think. And the pay gap between executives and their workforce is another thing, I hear you talk about a lot, even if we go back in history and we look at the Lords of the land that took taxes off the back of the people. Shelley (34m 25s): I think it's throughout human history has always been the case. It's just, now we're able to see it more easily because companies are public. But you know, if we want more representation, I think the solution is also to start investing in education and start because if there's no, we've got to move the talent up the chain so that when there comes open and opportunity, there are women who want the job. There are women who are ready for the job, and yes, we're 42 points away, when we're talking CEOs. But what have we done to ensure that women and all diverse groups are ready when that job comes open, right? Shelley (35m 12s): It's about, you know, as much owning your career path and doing everything you can to prepare yourself so that when that executive position comes open, you've at least got a shot. Chad (35m 23s): I agree in that, will roll right into talking about an entirely different type of worker being a gig worker. This comes from freightwaves.com. The battle for gig worker rights has come to Canada. That's right. Shelley, where the Canadian Union of Postal Workers has launched the Gig Workers United campaign. It is the latest in the global movement to increase wages and improve working conditions for gig workers who rely on app based companies for employment. So do you believe this is a response to the UK ruling a couple of weeks ago? They thought, Hey, there's some momentum here we can jump on this? Shelley (36m 8s): Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, looking back in history as well, what's happened in the past here in Canada as well, where our labor laws are very much in favor of the worker very much in favor. So this does not surprise me at all and is, you know, quite aptly timed. It, I think they also are, everyone's watching what's happened in California. Yes. As far as gig workers. And do they have any rights? Who's protecting them, right? Like if they have no rights. So what happens also as a society, we have to think about, you know, if they get sick, they've got no protection and we all retire someday. Shelley (36m 51s): Yes. So this did not surprise me at all. I think this is really something to watch. Chad (36m 58s): Yeah. I believe this is just another situation where the government has to be able to step in, to do what's right for the people. And I keep saying this and I'm going to continue to say it, people. We only get one of these people, we only get one life. We've got to ensure that our neighbors have a good life as well. We do and if you have a great life, why shouldn't your neighbor? Right. So overall, whether they're driving, you know, an Uber or doing Door Dash, or they're an executive at a, you know, a fortune 500 company, they deserve good lives. They deserve more than starvation wages. Chad (37m 39s): So overall, yeah. I think this along with the last topic is really focused on government reigning in what we've seen since the eighties, is just an unleashing of no more rules for corporate America. They're just running crazy and you not. That's, I think, going to change. So, okay. Shelley, you're wearing me out over here, we're going to take another quick break. And when we come back, we'll discuss whether work from home is just a blip on the radar or if it's here to stay? See you on the other side. Jobvite (38m 14s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Chad (39m 1s): Hey Shelley, how long have you worked from home? I've worked from home since 2012. Is this kind of a normal thing for you? Or did you have to shift back to home? Because of the pandemic? Shelley (39m 14s): I have been working from home since 2014 and I love it. I absolutely love it. The pandemic and the lockdowns really not much changed for me. I actually saved money. Nice. Because I had like a, one of those drop-in offices. Chad (39m 34s): Nice. So Goldman Sachs calls work from home an aberration. This is from CNBC Goldman Sachs CEO. David Solomon said that working from home was not a new normal for the investment banking giant calling it an aberration. So the question is, are all old rich guys going fucking crazy or does this in fact make sense for a company like Goldman Sachs? Shelley (40m 3s): Oh my God. So yes, like let's, let's call a spade a spade because Goldman Sachs CEO, David Soloman. I don't know if you knew this, but he's actually got a side hustle. Chad (40m 16s): No. Shelley (40m 16s): Did you know that? Chad (40m 18s): Imagine that. Shelley (40m 19s): He has a stage name, DJ Diesel, and he performs in nightclubs and music festivals around New York. So not only is he old, but he's, I guess he's trying to be hip! Chad (40m 30s): No fucking way! Shelley (40m 32s): Yes! I'm dead serious. I'm dead serious. So, so I don't know if he's trying to relate to us or trying to relate to his younger workers, but it just absolutely galls me that you could deny that of all types of companies whose best for remote work would be the financial business. Like, I don't know what he was referring to when he says that they're innovative and collaborative apprenticeship culture. Like, you know, there's a, you know, there's this thing called Zoom. Yeah. Right. Like our or Slack, like have you heard of Slack buddy? Shelley (41m 14s): Yes. So yeah. DJ Soul CEO. I think the impact Chad (41m 19s): Apprenticeship culture is really what he's, he's getting at. And when you have younger individuals who you're paying starvation wages to, if you're paying them at all, when you get them in, you want to control them very tight. Right. And not to mention, I mean, this organization is really engineered behind 1950s mentality and I'm more of a boiler room type of culture, for the most part. So it almost feels like, again, some organizations that you feel are built for work from home will drag individuals back into the office and make them chain themselves back to the desk because they want that command and control. Chad (42m 4s): That 1950s command and control. I guess the big question is how long do you think that'll last? Do you think it'll just take DJ Soul to die off and then the next one in line is like, screw this shit, we're going to work from home. Or do you think this is a long-term situation for some of these organizations? Shelley (42m 22s): I believe it is longterm and, and people will speak with their feet. You know, if you believe as Goldman Sachs. Yeah. They got a huge brand and I'm absolutely, I know you're right, that this is very much about command and control and don't, and it is about control and don't change anything because we know this works, especially when you're taking new grads or their apprenticeship program. It just means that we are going to brainwash you into thinking that this is the way it works. Well, I think it's really short-sighted because we already know that, you know, staying with the same company, your whole professional life is just, it's not going to continue the way it did in the fifties. Shelley (43m 10s): Right? So I believe workers, especially great talent. They're going to vote with their feet. They may take advantage. I mean, it's good to have Goldman Sachs on your resume because a launch you into what you really want to do. Chad (43m 23s): But one thing that they will have Shelley, they will have DJ Soul spinning the tune, spinning the records, spinning the vinyl out of the lunch area, probably you know, every, every Friday or something like that. So good for Goldman Sachs. So Shelley, thank you so much for coming on the show and in giving me a break from Cheeseman, how do you feel? Shelley (43m 47s): Oh man, I honestly, my cheeks hurt from smiling. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. I am so appreciative to be part of the show and this was just a blast and I am looking forward to more of the Chad and Cheese show. And please don't stop with the careless whisper. I'm going to put that in there, so sweet. Chad (44m 16s): And everybody you can tell Shelley is Canadian because she is sweet. She is kind. And she says, thank you all the time. Thanks again, Shelley, for coming on and we out! That's when you give me a way out. Shelley (44m 33s): Sorry. And we out. OUTRO (45m 20s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Aside from being a summary of one of our podcasts, it's also a #1 Amazon Best Seller and one of nine books Entrepreneur Magazine says you have to read this year. Authors Tracey Lovejoy and Shannon Lucas join the boys to talk about catalysts, and what they mean to an organization and how they can thrive. Just another podcast where someone smarter than the hosts come and chat. Enjoy this Sovren powered podcast. Sovren, software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Sovren: 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. 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 (20s): Oh yeah. Chad (21s): It's time to move fast and break, shake kids. Joel (25s): Number one Amazon bestseller in the house. Chad (29s): I didn't know you wrote a book. Joel (32s): Not me, my friends. Chad (34s): That's right. That's right kids. We have Shannon Lucas and Tracey Lovejoy in the house, here to talk about the book Move Fast. Break Shit. Burn Out. I can't, I can't wait. First and foremost, Shannon has been an EVP at Ericsson, a Senior Innovation Architect at Cisco, that's a hell of a title right there and a Director of Innovation at Vodafone. Okay. Shannon on the spot right now. What's your most proud moment, your most innovative moment at Vodafone. I mean, you were the Director of Innovation, so what's, what's the thing that you hold up high? Shannon (1m 13s): I would have to say that it would be the work that we did in Africa using basic technology to sort of transform the medical industry and how we tracked drugs from supply chain to the end users in the rural communities. Chad (1m 27s): Holy shit. Oh, that's a lot better than I thought. Shannon (1m 34s): Ask and you receive. Chad (1m 37s): I was thinking like, you know, I had this headset idea. It was really cool. It was cushiony and it was awesome. Okay. Okay. Well then we have Tracey, who is an anthropologist, believe that shit and yeah. Joel (1m 51s): Lovejoy. Chad (1m 51s): And the research engine for catalyst constellations, she spent 12 years at Microsoft leading teams of change-makers and co-founded the Ethnographic Practice in Industry Conference, now, is that really the name of the conference? Tracey (2m 7s): E.P.I.C. for short. Chad (2m 8s): Oh, okay. But yeah, but you had to throw Ethnographic in there so that idiots like us would never go to that conference. That's right. Okay. You've both authored this book calleds, right out of the gate softball question, how do you guys define catalyst? Tracey (2m 30s): To us catalysts are people who are natural change-makers, right? We played with the word change agent to figure out if that was the right path. But when you look at the literature around change agents, a lot of it is like how to become a change agent. We're talking about the people out there that either from birth or, you know, young age, have this intuitive way of being in the world, where they're taking in information, seeing lots of opportunities and possibilities, and can't stop themselves from moving to action to actually make that true. That's what a catalyst is to us. Joel (3m 4s): Entrepreneur magazine gave you the distinction of one of the nine top books to read in 2021. Tracey (3m 10s): How awesome was that? Yeah! Right? Joel (3m 13s): Why do you think you're one of the nine books that I should read and it takes a lot to get me to read, folks. Chad (3m 19s): Yeah, cause he can't. Shannon (3m 22s): I'll jump in here. I would say, because one of the other distinctions about how we think about catalysts is they are the people who help, you know, sort of are, are born future ready if you will. There's a term called VUCA, which is stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous, which came out of the military in the 1980s to describe sort of the post cold war situation. And that VUCA, you know, reality has only sort of accelerated in the past decade since they came up with that term. And while organizations and entrepreneurs themselves have sort of been denying that new reality, 2020, it was definitely the year where we saw what that looked like firsthand globally. Shannon (4m 3s): And so I think it's really important for people to understand what it means to sort of arrive in the world, VUCA- ready, ready to take on all of these challenges and find new and better opportunities out of them. Tracey (4m 14s): And I'll add if you're an entrepreneur, that's an innovator. You're too important to where we are today to get taken offline and catalysts have cycles of burnout that really do, just last flat out. And so if you don't have your operating manual of how you can sustain your energy, this is it, that's what we wrote. So to me, that's fundamentally why we think everybody who operates this way absolutely should check it out. Joel (4m 36s): Curious guys, writing a book is never like an easy decision. What was the Genesis to put pen to paper and get this thing done? Tracey (4m 45s): For me, it was, as soon as I started doing research with Catalyst and it happened by accident, there was, I knew that I was going to have to make the information available. I didn't know necessarily if it was going to be book writing or blog posts, but it was something that almost felt like it came through me, from the earliest time of doing interviews. I would watch these people have a space to talk about what the reality has been like and the challenges that they've experienced and given my sense of purpose, personal purpose. It just, it was going to happen in one way or another. So I don't have a better answer than that. Joel (5m 18s): Was it 50/50 or did, is one writing more than the other? How does, like, I can't imagine, like I do a podcast with someone else writing a book, I think would be a nightmare. How did that work? Shannon (5m 28s): It was, it was actually fun. It was a fun creative process because we actually deepened our thinking and continued to do research the entire time that we were writing the book. So we did, you know, multiple rounds of additional interviews with the people that we, you know, highlighted in the book. So, you know, it's not an easy process. And we also just came, we, you know, we decided early on that done was better than perfect. And so, you know, we set a time goal for ourselves and it was just important to us that it got out there. And I would just add to the why that Tracey said it became clear early on after the first couple of years of us launching the company that we needed to create a shared language and a shared context in order for us to be able to fulfill our mission, which is really to help identify and support catalysts around the world. Chad (6m 16s): Who does this book help? Is it the individual? Is it the leader, the manager? Who does this book help to be able to focus on understanding what a catalyst is and how they work in or outside of an organization? Joel (6m 33s): Millennials must love this thing. Shannon (6m 34s): The title helps the, the original idea that we had was actually almost like a two-sided book, one for the individual catalyst and then one for the organizations or leaders or managers of catalysts. We tend to dream big and audacious, and we decided to dial that back for this first book. But there's definitely another book that we would like to put out there, which would talk to the organizations of the leaders about how to support them. So this first book is really to get the name out there and for the individual catalyst, but we have a lot of people who might not be catalysts who are reading it, but as they read it, they're like, I know who these people are in my life, now. And I understand, you know, how I can more effectively support them. Chad (7m 13s): Joel and I are both gen X-ers and that's probably the only label other than podcaster, that we actually fit ourselves into. But I can just see all of the LinkedIn ninjas, and the wizards. Now we're going to have to deal with all these people, titling themselves as sales catalyst, marketing catalyst, Door-Dash catalyst. I mean, are we just creating labels to create labels here? Or what problem does this solve really? Joel (7m 45s): That was good, Sowash. Tracey (7m 46s): Did we make your lives more difficult? Chad (7m 48s): IDK what it does for me, help me here. Tracey (7m 55s): Well do you identify as a catalyst? Chad (7m 57s): That's a great question because I'm sure we all know tons of people with great ideas. They can talk about innovation all day, but they move like sloths and they couldn't execute if their lives depended on it. So the question is, what is the major factor of a catalyst I would like to say, "Oh yeah, I'm a catalyst," but shit what does that even mean? Tracey (8m 20s): Well, those are two really important and different questions that you've posed. The first being, you know, how is this helpful? And unposed question of, you know, is it potentially not helpful or you didn't say, and then, and then the next part of, you know, what does it mean? So the, what does it mean? Because this is the book for catalysts and this also answers the why is it helpful? Is if this has been your way of being most of the folks that find us have had an experience where it has ended up feeling really painful and lonely. And so having this named for them has been really, really important because they start to question, am I wrong? Am I broken? And so to have someone say, like, we actually see a subset of folks and they have been written about in other places, but what's interesting in the writing is they're like, Oh, there's, you know, 4% or 10% of the population are like this, but nobody has the done the work to understand what really binds them and what's different? Tracey (9m 13s): And yet there's this kind of common wisdom that they are the starters for us, societaly right. If you look at, you know, the diffusion right of innovation, and it talks about these folks are you look at leadership agility. It talks about these folks and all of them end up talking to the masses about how you can be more like them, but it doesn't help the folks who are already like that and we have really unique challenges that we face, and there are ways that we can be better. So for me, right, helping to write a book that actually optimizes the change making of our best Changemakers, I think that's an amazing opportunity, for us, especially given the number of problems we have to solve today. Tracey (9m 55s): Back to what Shannon was talking about, if the VUCA-ready folks like let's amplify them, right. Let's empower them and help everybody get better, as they're helping lead the charge. That's what it means to me. Chad (10m 8s): So in most cases, when you feel like you are moving at light speed, you see a lot of shit that's happening all around you, you see the dots and you're connecting the dots, but most of the people that you're actually talking with and dealing with on a daily basis, they can't even see the dots, let alone connect them. Right? So, so what we're saying is, those individuals, and I've had that feeling my entire life. Those individuals really can burn out fast, but they also have issues because it's hard to work within a team when they can't even understand what you're talking about a lot of times, cause it's hard to articulate what's going on in your brain. Chad (10m 56s): How as a leader, how do you identify that? And how do you help that individual? Because the last thing you want to do is lose is an individual like that, even though they're not fitting in, what do you do? How does that work? Shannon (11m 7s): I mean, the identification, as I mentioned earlier, when people are reading the book, as people start to understand, you know, the highlight of what it means to be a catalyst, their brain sort of naturally goes to those people in their life because they do stand out, they show up differently. We often get called, you know, get, get named monikers like troublemaker or disruptor and not always in a positive sense, especially if we're not self-aware to Tracey's point. You know, part of the point of the book is to give the catalyst themselves the skills to be less disruptive, which doesn't mean stopping change. It just means doing it in a way that brings other people along more effectively. So it's not hard to identify them. Shannon (11m 48s): We work with organizations like we can have surveys and self-identification tools, et cetera. One thing that Tracey and I talked a lot about early on when we started this work is, do we want to be the labelers of catalysts or do we let catalysts sort of lean in and name themselves? And we came pretty heavily down on that second one. Like if the word catalyst, even if you all the attributes fit you, if being a catalyst doesn't resonate with you, then, then that's fine. And then I think there's a great question there about, you know, as a leader, how do we support them? Obviously myself as a leader, I was a catalyst and so I had to surround myself with people who could translate, you know, that had catalytic capabilities, but could also help me bring the rest of the organization along. Shannon (12m 29s): And so intentionality is a word that we use a lot in all of this work is like, how can the catalyst be more intentional about the work that they're doing, but also how can the leaders intentionally support them? Making sure that they're not spread thin chasing all of the new shiny projects or opportunities, but helping them to prioritize, giving them the surroundings and removing some of the barriers that might, you know, get in their way. And I think one of the key things from that perspective is psychological safety. Once catalog, you know, once organizations recognize that they have these VUCA-ready people, they will send them on these heroes missions. Okay, go out into the world and figure out what we need to do next. And by definition, that's usually some kind of divergent thinking from the way the organization currently operates. Shannon (13m 14s): So they go out, they do their vision quest and they come back, hopefully they can now clearly articulate their vision, but it could cause such cognitive dissonance for how the organization operates that either the idea gets attacked or the catalyst themselves gets attacked. So it's really then incumbent on the leader to help create a space of psychological safety, to have healthy conversations about which pieces of that they're going to move forward with or not. Chad (13m 38s): If they're truly catalysts, then if their idea gets attacked, they're being attacked. Shannon (13m 44s): That's it feels like a hundred percent, it's almost a physical connection to that idea, that's right. But it's interesting because catalysts generally not, not universally, but generally don't go in with an agenda. You know, when they get brought into the organization or the team, or if they're entrepreneurs, they're really just sensing, like, what's the next thing that needs to unfold here? As the dots are connecting, as they're doing the sense-making, it's not like it's their horse in the race until they're convinced and have the data, you know, that that is the right thing to do. And we can be arrogant about that. Let's let's own that we can be arrogant, that we can see the absolute right path to go down. Chad (14m 17s): Right. Shannon (14m 17s): But I think it's important for people to remember that, you know, we're usually just in service of whatever positive change we think needs to come next. Chad (14m 25s): So frustrating when nobody wants to come along for the ride. Shannon (14m 28s): It was frustrating. Tracey (14m 30s): So very frustrating, painful. Joel (14m 32s): The book talks about whether a catalysts are born or made. Talk about that. Tracey (14m 38s): We don't know, we just simply haven't done the research. So I can tell you that in initial research where I was doing in depth interviews, qualitative, a lot of the stories talked about this having been a way of being, since childhood, that they can remember, I didn't dig into was that born, were there events that happened? And I haven't yet met people who tell me like it came later in life, but I don't rule that out as a possibility that they had some experience that kind of forced them into that. In fact, in the Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks about that in terms of community change and habit that there are community leaders who've had that. I don't know if those leaders would say I became a catalyst. It just, honestly, hasn't been the question that I've been that interested in answering because there's so many different things that I keep going back to learn more about from our population. Tracey (15m 24s): So I don't know. Shannon (15m 25s): We do have a gentleman that we highlight in the book, Michael, who he really pinpoints in his life, what his catalytic moment was. And it's when he was, you know, young and in a car and a friend in the car died, not his fault, but it really precipitated great change in him. So there is a hypothesis that there might be some of those life altering moments, but to Tracey's point, we don't have the data yet. Chad (15m 47s): Yeah, I think mine came in when I actually went into the military because the military in itself really teaches and, focuses on troubleshooting and looking for the dots so that you can so that you can connect the dots. And I'm not sure that everybody kind of like absorbs that same learning, but I know then that's when mine hit. So really it's almost like there's a point where you finally get algebra. Shannon (16m 14s): Yeah. Tracey (16m 15s): Ah, yeah. That's fascinating because one of the things that I've played with, especially thinking about it from a research and teaching angle, Chad is the one key attribute that I wonder that we can teach is the ability to take in lots of information so that you're really connecting the dots. And so I've had a hypothesis untested of like, maybe that's the thing that people have naturally or not. But what you're telling me is that even that part can be taught, which is really compelling to me. So thank you. Chad (16m 43s): I think it was almost how to pull the dots together. I was never a great student and I never understood why. Right. But when I got into more of a structured scenario and they taught me how to take all of those inputs and then focus on execution, that was big for me. Joel (17m 3s): But don't you think the catalyst was always in there? It just had to be sort of programmed or pulled out. I don't think you learned it, I think it was always there. Yes? Chad (17m 11s): It would have been triggered, maybe on to take in the information process, the information and work. I mean, cause obviously my brain is all jacked up to be able to work it right? You know what I mean? Joel (17m 22s): Yeah. It's easy on the Red Bulls, there killer, easy on the Red Bulls. Chad (17m 25s): Chill out. Joel (17m 26s): Guys, I want to pivot a pivot a little bit. When I read the name of the book, Move Fast and Break Shit, in particular reminded me of Facebook. And I want to say that this was either, sort of a programming mantra at Facebook early on where just move fast, build stuff, break shit, move on and keep going. And I think that was initially sort of a badge of honor for Facebook and you know, a years hence. We found out that, well, if you're not thoughtful about this stuff, you know, Russians get involved, elections go awry. Tracey (17m 59s): Small things like that. Joel (18m 0s): That aren't necessarily positive. So I assume that both of you have a positive take on the Move Fast, Break Shit or am I wrong on that? Shannon (18m 8s): Title definitely has a nod to Facebook for sure. And you know, I'm coming from sort of the background of having been in Silicon Valley for the last 20 years. But the book is also about what happens when catalysts are unintentional. So I think a lot of people get hung up on, especially the catalyst they're like, yeah, I want to move fast. Yeah. I want to break shit, but no, I don't want to burn out. And so they get confused like, are you advocating for burnout? We're like, no, in fact, we're not necessarily advocating for moving fast and breaking shit per se, you know, unto itself. What the contention is is that if we are not intentional about what we are doing, we will do that mindlessly. We will move too fast. We will move too fast. We'll leave people behind. Shannon (18m 49s): We'll break shit without understanding what data or like sort of intentionally picking the processes or the things in the organization that actually need to bend or break. And then that all of that will cause resistance, which will then accelerate and sort of amplify burnout. And so the whole rest of the book and that's the subtitle, is let's get the tools so that you can actually, in some ways, move faster by intentionally slowing down through some steps, you can break shit, but with intentionality so that it's actually in service of your vision and moving things forward instead of leaving people behind and having them get pissed off and frustrated, that goes back to the disruptor and troublemaker monikers that we get. And our contention is that we probably can't stop you entirely from burning out. Shannon (19m 31s): We just move fast and shine bright. And that's our way of being. But we do know that there are ways that we can reduce the amplification and the frequency of the burnout because the contention is, you know, a burnt-out catalyst creates no change at all. Tracey (19m 46s): An interesting points to that is it's often only when we point out how burnout gets in the way of creating change, that catalysts, including myself, will actually start to embrace some of the methods for reducing the friction and burnout. We won't do it for ourselves and in terms of a sense of self care or self worth, but we'll do it in a sense of service of the thing that we're trying to create. Chad (20m 8s): Talk about that because when it comes down to managing this, it is incredibly frustrating, as I had said before. And as you know that when other individuals can't see the dots that can't connect the dots and you can't really articulate the process in itself, what do you do? You know that the end point for you as a catalyst really is execution. If you can't do that front part, you can't get to the end. Right? And that's where the major frustration comes. If you're at a point of leadership, obviously you could be a failed leader, even though you see it all. And if you're a part of a team, you can't be jelled in a team because they don't understand really the end of the means right on how you can get there and the frustration just grows. Chad (20m 55s): So how do you, how do you manage that? Tracey (20m 58s): Shannon was alluding to this of that, we struggle to, you know, self care. I feel like, I'm at war with the term, self-care it just, we, we real, never do it, if that's how we think about it, the paradigm is self care is, you know, it's selfish. It is, you know, the last thing on my list, I can do it once a quarter. So the big switches, when you see the ability to make change, that you are an actor within that system and that it doesn't happen without you participating, then you'll begin to make the switch. Right? And so there's a super easy metaphor that people can use. And once you get it, you're like, how did I not see it before? It's thinking of yourself as a gas tank and taking the time to actually figure out what are the activities that take gas out of my tank? Tracey (21m 46s): Like, Oh my gosh, when I meet with Joanne, every Tuesday, I am exhausted and I've never noticed that before. Chad (21m 52s): Got I hate her. Joel (21m 55s): After I talk to Chad Tracey (21m 59s): When I have that team meeting, I'm always really energized. So it's bigger than just the activities we do outside of work hours. It's really getting clear on what is it that fills us and depletes us, and seeing ourselves as part of that vision that we're moving toward and making sure that your time integrates activities that give you energy and take energy away. It sounds simple, but there's so much awareness you have to put into it, that it does take time and intentionality. Chad (22m 24s): And don't, you have to also identify when a culture and an environment isn't good for you? And you just got to get the fuck out. Tracey (22m 35s): Yup. Shannon (22m 36s): Totally. Tracey (22m 36s): A hundred percent. Shannon (22m 36s): Yeah, we talk to people all the time. Our vision is to have, instead of like the top 100 places to work like the top 50 or a hundred catalysts friendly companies. It'll be an amazing, you know, magnet for attracting high potential people, because there's a high, there's a high correlation between catalysts and high potentials. And the amount of change they'll be able to create is it will be sort of unstoppable. I also, just to going back to the other point that you were making, you know, the bringing people along. So how do you reduce the resistance, which ultimately leads to the burnout that Tracey was sort of solving for? And there's an interesting thing here about emotional labor is really the word that comes up because we need catalysts because the impetus is on them. Shannon (23m 20s): They're the ones that see the change to help actually the organization go through the different stages of relationships through the change process, which is much like going through the grief process. And one of the most frustrating parts for catalysts about this is that we have to do a lot of the emotional labor for the organization. We have to do the hand-holding, not just to get people, to see the vision, but to be comfortable moving through all of the steps to actually achieve that vision. And that's where a lot of the frustration comes it's. So that's where that frustration is. It's like, why don't they see it? And why don't they get it? But the impetus is not on the other people necessarily to do that emotional work. Joel (23m 57s): How does the pandemic change the calculus? I'm guessing this wasn't something you thought of when you started the book, but it obviously probably came into effect as you were writing it. So we have more people working from home. We have more solopreneurs, we have more contract workers to navigate. There are a lot of things that are a little bit different in our world and will continue to be a difference. And how does that, how does that impact sort of your structure and your thesis on catalysts? Tracey (24m 25s): I don't know that it changed the calculus changes or thesis changes. Certainly one of the things that Shannon and I are doing are collecting case studies because the catalysts have been on fire during the pandemic, right? If there was ever a time that people needed to be out there helping solve problems, my goodness, this is it. And it's amazing to watch those that have, have become part of the community, have that opportunity to do that. What has changed that you're pointing to, that's not about our calculus is the burnout rate globally is so intense, right? Mental health is so challenged, never shut off. And we are disconnected. As I talked about those activities that fill us, we're disconnected from a lot of those activities, including human connection, which is like the heart of how we thrive most of us as human beings, even as introverts. Tracey (25m 15s): And so that's not, catalysts, aren't separate there. And so when we, you know, are in community with folks, we have an online community. That's something that we address a lot. It's a tough time for all of us Joel (25m 26s): That I thought about when I asked the question, as well as you guys talk a lot about delegation in the book and the importance of, you know, passing on work to relieve stress on you, to, you know, counteract burnout. How do you think work from home and being virtual impacts, delegation? I, my, I personally feel like it's harder to delegate when you're not in a face-to-face situation. Shannon (25m 50s): I would say, that could certainly be true. One of the tools that, I mean, we can even talk about how we run our company. One of the tools that we talk about is once you have your vision, getting really clear on what the strategic priorities are, and then actually like making a priority list and tracking your time against that and having a not right now list as well. And so we try and sort of walk the talk as we're doing that. And when we get, the crisper that we get on the actual activities that are supporting us achieving the vision, the more bound they are, actually, the more capable we are of delegating those. And Tracey and I personally, I mean, Tracey has two kids at home. We have a bunch of kids at home, so we've been living this experience along with everyone else. Shannon (26m 34s): And we've just gotten every quarter, honestly, clearer and clearer on when our tanks are getting low and we need to delegate things. So I think it's a very relevant conversation. I don't know for myself if harder, I think it's more necessary now because of all of the demands that are put on us. Tracey, what do you think? Tracey (26m 50s): Yeah. I love the question, Joel. It's really making me reflect and I'm diving into, yeah, lesson two research and more into coaching conversations. Cause that's where I spend a lot of my hours each week and I don't delegation is definitely a thing, but because catalysts really, you know, think about solving a problem. I do see a lot of intentionality in the time of now. And we're working from home. I'm thinking about the structure of how work's getting done. And so I see less of a problem for leaders in delegating cause they'll get there as they figure out like what's this new system what's today versus what's going to be sustained for a few weeks. How do I solve for the reality of it? How do I, you know, not help my people burn out, but you brought to mind a place that is different for catalysts. Tracey (27m 32s): And that's actually the opposite of leaders. It's when we're in physical spaces and we're not included in the meeting we know we need to be in, to be able to help affect change. We can kind of get the room right, and show up. But in the age of zoom, if you don't have the link, this is actually much harder. So I'm seeing where it's sideways, you know, influence or moving outside of my organizational influence where catalysts are struggling a bit more than the delegation and going straight down. Joel (28m 2s): I'll let you in on this and I kind of want to piggyback on the delegation topic, Chad and I talk a ton on the podcast about automation, about how, you know, really repetitious recruiting tasks will be automated, searching for candidates interviewing, you know, prescreening, how all that will be automated in your world or where you're coming from is automation sort of, it seems like that would be extra gas for a capitalist, right? If I can, if I can move off some of this minutia of my every day and focus on kicking ass and breaking shit, like that's a good thing. Am I thinking about that correctly or not? Shannon (28m 40s): 100%. And actually we just, there's a, there's a compendium book that I think everyone else should read, which is the Adaptation Advantage by Chris Shipley and Heather McGowan. And this is exactly what they're talking about. They're talking about the impact that automation is going to have on the future of work and their contention rightly is the more human the job is, the more human skills that are required, the more valuable it's going to be. And what's interesting is in, in years, past catalysts have had a real challenge explaining what their superpowers have been or are. And that's why we lean into VUCA so heavily is because it's a co it's a context that people can start to get their heads around, that has all of those soft skills, which are like the creative thinking, the signal through the noise, the dot, connecting the, you know, we ignite cultures. Shannon (29m 28s): We become the evangelist for things and get people on board. Like all of those discreetly, the emotional, the empathy that we bring to the table, the emotional intelligence, all of those things that it will, it might happen some tape, but it'll take a long time for the, you know, the automation to catch up with that. So a percent we like from a personal experience, the more that I can automate or, you know, sort of outsource some of those more repetitious jobs, the more engaged I am in the creative thinking and problem solving work. Chad (29m 59s): Excellent. Well, Shannon Lucas and Tracey Lovejoy Move Fast. Break Shit. Burn Out.: The Catalyst’s Guide to Working Well, I would assume I can just go straight to Amazon right now by the book. Did you guys also do the audible on this? Have you done the audible yet? Tell me you voiced the audible. Tracey (30m 16s): We have not released the audible yet on the horizon. Shannon (30m 22s): Yes, I know. I know. Chad (30m 24s): I expect you both to be on the audible version, but until then, if people want to find out more about you find out about the organization, the book, where would you send them? Tracey (30m 35s): To find out more about the book, absolutely hit Amazon. It's up there, grab it and to learn more about us and what we do go to catalystconstellations.com, and you can learn all about the ways that we support catalysts from having online community. We have courses that are bringing folks together, offer coaching and mentoring, lots of ways to come together and explore your catalytic-ness in the world. Joel (31m 2s): And don't forget MoveFastBreakShit.com. I love that. Tracey (31m 6s): Nice. Joel (31m 7s): Now we out. Chad (31m 9s): We out. Joel (31m 10s): Thanks guys. OUTRO (32m 3s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Job.com founder Arran Stewart has been busy making acquisitions - or at least promising acquisitions - since his company appeared on Death Match in Austin a few years ago. Needless to say, Chad & Cheese have some questions, focused on the recent acquisitions of HireVergence and Talenting, as well as hoping to get to the bottom of the whole blockchain in employment issue. Is Job.com destined to default to job board status, or can they fill the innovation shoes its founder keeps promising? Maybe somewhere in the middle? Another power-packed episode brought to you by the NEXXT generation of hiring. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Chad (0s): So we can talk about traffic. What, what are you seeing in the differences between Google For Jobs traffic versus organic? Arran (8s): Yeah. So Google for Jobs traffic is much higher than organic. INTRO (11s): 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 (31s): Aw. Yeah, let's get to the bottom of this crypto questions. Shall we welcome everybody? I am Joel Cheeseman. Co-host of your favorite podcasts joined as always by my cohost Chad Sowash. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. And today we welcome, (applause) Arran Stewartt, founder and CVO of job.com. CVO means Chief Victory Officer? Chief Visionary Officer? Chad (1m 0s): They take the pandemic serious. This is the Chief Viral Officer of job.com. Arran (1m 7s): Correct. It's a newly, newly invented role. That's what it is. Chad (1m 11s): Visionary. Right? Arran (1m 13s): Visionary, Chief Visionary Officer. Yes. Joel (1m 15s): That's sexy. Chief Visionary Officer. Very nice. Nice. Welcome back, Aaron. You agreed to come on the show, even as Texas fades into the sunset you're you're out of power. You have no water, like you're at a hotel room? Arran (1m 32s): Correct. Joel (1m 33s): What's the state of Texas, right now? Arran (1m 35s): Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a pretty, sorry, a fair. And obviously, you know, all jokes aside, there are a lot of people, vulnerable people that are actually kind of in some trouble right now, which is kind of worrying, but yeah, so we should, we should acknowledge that. But fortunately my wife and my children and I are now in a hotel, but yeah, we've been without power and without water for well water a week, power on and off throughout the week. And yeah, it's and we're still in the hotel because the tenancies aren't back up running. Joel (2m 2s): How many kids, you have Aaron? Arran (2m 3s): 4.2 billion children by the feel of things. I'd have thought. I have five kids, everybody, and they're age from 11, right through to one years old. So as you can imagine, not being able to have any water, bathrooms, washing bottles this year, it's been a, it's been a pretty brutal week, that's for sure. Chad (2m 23s): You, you came obviously from across the pond and, and tell us and tell our listeners what you told us. Arran (2m 31s): My naive assumption was that being kind of the richest state, in the richest country, in the world, that six inches worth of snow, wouldn't be enough to throw it over. But obviously it is more than more than enough to throw over for an entire week. And obviously being British, I'm used to terrible weather about 99.9% of the time. And yeah, I was not pleasantly surprised to see everything kind of fall apart so much. And I think in all honesty, listening to the governor, I think it's a little bit embarrassing for Texas, in some respects because, you know, Joel (3m 5s): Blaming it on renewable energy was probably a bad decision. Chad (3m 9s): What a douche bag. Joel (3m 11s): As was Ted Cruz going to Cabo or Cancun or whatever. Arran (3m 15s): Ted Cruz? I mean, what are you doing, man? You know, I know what I'll do in the middle of a crisis we'll just go to Cancun. Joel (3m 22s): That's what Churchill did in World War I. Wasn't it? He went to Cabo or Bora Bora or where was it? Yeah, I'm getting the fuck out of here. Forget these air raids. Arran (3m 31s): Yeah. Yeah. But one thing's for sure. I would not have missed the Chad and Cheese show. Joel (3m 38s): Aw, what a suck up. Very nice Chad (3m 41s): Smart. Joel (3m 42s): Well we got questions. Arran (3m 43s): I'm sure you do. Chad (3m 47s): Questions, sucker Joel, go ahead and roll that beautiful bean footage. Let's get right into it. Joel (3m 54s): All right. Well let's so let's set up this sound bite. This was from death match two years ago? Chad (4m 0s): Yeah, 2019. Joel (4m 1s): In Austin, Texas. Yeah. And, and you had sort of painted a picture of a lot of acquisitions and agencies and what not. So let's go to this and then we'll sort of dig into the sound bite Arran (4m 14s): Based on some numbers that we projected, like we're enrolling up companies at the moment, so I'm buying out staffing agencies as we speak. We bought three staffing agencies this month. Chad (4m 23s): Ouch! Arran (4m 24s): No, no, I'm glad, I'm glad that you've done this because it's the perfect opportunity to explain. Chad (4m 29s): That's why you come on. Arran (4m 31s): Yeah, no, it's true. And this is a fancy gents. Thank you for calling it out, cause I know that there are other people that would have been in the show that may have also have heard that and be like, well, what's going on? To be honest. I mean, so throughout my career, I have actually bought many staffing companies and recruitment tech businesses. And it's the first time in my career that I've ever got to the point where you have an agreed letter of intent. So now Y with an agreed valuation on the business multiples, preliminary due diligence that has all been agreed and signed. And then you go through, what's called a deeper dive to diligence to close the deal up and all three of those LOIs and actually others all fell over in 2020. And the reason for that, as you can imagine, all COVID related and every single one of those businesses that we were buying were being valued on what's called trading 12 for trading 12 months od EBITDA. Arran (5m 21s): The first quarter of last year through, you know, a lot of the businesses that we were buying is trading 12. Some of them went to no profitability from their trading 12 because they made such major losses in first quarter. Others just were reduced so greatly that they didn't want to sell any more, they'd rather wait, ride the storm out. And yeah, it was, it was a learning lesson for me as a leader and a person that's bought many businesses that actually even at the point of an agreed LOI, they can still fall over because I've never seen that in my career, but then I've never seen COVID-19 in my career either. But sadly that was the reason, so we had those businesses acquired up, ready to go funds in place deals agreed, going through deep due diligence. Arran (6m 6s): The last quarter of 2019 was slow completing them on a couple of bits and then hit enter 2020 and the deals fell over. And we were very more devastated for the entrepreneurs. These are small business owners that in their mind had psychologically sold their business, had now gone from not just selling their business, but we're in, trying to make it survive. And yeah. And you know, I'm sure there'll be listening to this. And hopefully guys, if you trade in twelves back up, please come back to us. So, so yeah, that's what happened. Joel (6m 36s): Okay. So as you know, we're on top of this, on the show. So we're counting two acquisitions recently. We got HireVergence and most recently Talenting. Are there any that we've missed? Arran (6m 49s): No, there's, there's none that you've missed, but I can say at the moment, fingers crossed, we do have three, three staffing agencies that have all finished, that we're all agreed there, otherwise nap it last September. And they're all in the very, very final stages of their deep dive to diligence and should be closing end of Q1. So end of March. So there'll be three more acquisitions being publicly announced. They're all staffing companies, all Bates based in health care, one's an RPO and one's based in light industrial and sales marketing recruitment. Joel (7m 20s): So for those that don't remember briefly described the HireVergence acquisition and why that was necessary. And then we'll, I think we have some questions about Talenting. Arran (7m 30s): So just say, HireVergence is a cybersecurity based contract, staffing agency. Those guys, the owners there, the original owners did an exceptional job of riding through the COVID-19 pandemic. And as you can imagine, cybersecurity was one of those industries on the perm side, direct hire was effected, but on the contract side, pretty much remained, you know, unpunished. So they were actually a deal that we've concluded as an LOI at the beginning of 2020. So we closed them up. It was our first completion of a true staff acquisition from money handed, overnights are our company, and we're delighted to have them. They've been an amazing acquisition and have grown very well actually since our acquisition of them working with us and, you know, specialists niche. Arran (8m 16s): But at the same time, they have some really, really great clients that also have further expanded IT recruitment needs. Chad (8m 26s): Aaron, when we talked about obviously the, just the business model of job.com, the, one of the main reasons for buying up these staffing organizations is to get the actual technology up under them. But we haven't seen that with HireVergence ,yet. It doesn't even look like they're running job.com tech on their website. And when I dig, when I dug deep into the jobs on HireVergence, they weren't even on job.com. So when is going to happen and how long does it actually take to get a small staffing firm up and running on job.com? Arran (9m 2s): Yeah, that's, I'm really, that's a great question. So our strategy for acquisition is the first 90 days of taking a business over is do no harm. So you do the first 90 days do no harm. So you don't do anything to their company. You just get working within it. The mechanics of it, you win the hearts and minds of the existing recruiters and the consultants there. Because one of the biggest impacts when you acquire a company is called change management. And change management can see your best talent walk straight out the door, and there goes your asset. But we actually took a bit long with HireVergence, and the reason for that was a couple of things. The pandemic has presented a more complex landscape and also their technical infrastructure. Arran (9m 46s): And the way that HireVergence works is a lot more particular than let's say, a more standard generic staffing agency, so HireVergence attracts most of its placements through network. It's not out there necessarily like sourcing or syndicating or advertising on various different platforms there, they are very much a network based solution. But what I can say is that we're kind of in the final stages now of their first preliminary technical integration with us, we did take longer with it. There's no doubt about it, gents, mainly because as well, it's our first acquisition here in the US as a staffing company. And I, and I will tell you that by the beginning of Q2, you will begin to see a pretty major impact on HireVergence, visually, and also within their operation. Arran (10m 35s): I'd love to give credit to them as a team. They've been amazing joining us. And obviously our president of staff in Steve O'Brien RN, who is a recruitment and technical wizards, is doing a fantastic job with them as a company, especially considering, you know, instead of fairly difficult time in the recruitment industry with the current climate. So navigating a much more complex storm than we first anticipated. So, yeah, we've just taken a little bit longer with this one, playing it safe. Chad (11m 2s): Let's talk about job.com real quick before we jump into Talenting it seems, you know, you guys have turned into more of an aggregator, taking app cast feeds. I mean, just, just really standard aggregator type of technology. And again, back to the business model, you guys are looking to try to build a job seeker, really talent community within itself. That's going to be hard driving people off the site. Joel (11m 32s): Is the credit card gone? Arran (11m 33s): No, no, it's not actually, you know, so, so we, we took it away. So Joel, I've got some interesting stats for you though, which I think you might find quite fascinating. So, so yeah, it's a great question. So we structured the site last year to focus heavily on SEO. So, you know, we're set on job.com as I'm sure you can imagine that URL has been in the public domain for a very long time. We do a lot of press and PR. So we have a very, very strong domain authority as a platform. And as we started to analyze, and this was a bit of a pivot last year in relation to COVID-19 was, you know, we really need to be taken advantage of just the vast quantities of candidates that are out there looking for work. Arran (12m 16s): And also we need to be conscious that if we're only focusing on our internal staffing jobs, that's not enough of a job experience for someone to sign up to the site, get matches, get some level of experience with us. So as a kind of quick user experience, what you'll see is, we've created a top of funnel strategy, which is yet we aggregate job content from at-cost and all the other usual suspects in the market that we all know, we optimize that content for the purposes of SEO. We also use, we also match those jobs, to all of our job seekers. And we actually use every time someone clicks on a job, they get matched to, we use that as a machine learning opportunity. Arran (12m 56s): So that's constantly feed the ML of what they select out of our matches is constantly feeding back into our AI and ultimately, you know, we just, we make revenue selling, sending CPC out of that by giving job seekers an experience where if they can't find a staffing role through job.com or one of the portfolio companies that we own or will own, then we at least give them something, a breadcrumb of service or use case within the platform that gives them opportunity. Right? And at the same time allows us to kind of cast a wide net out into Google and generate candidates towards the site. Give you an example. Arran (13m 36s): Our organic SEO grew by 130% in December, and then 130% again in January compounded because just as an example, because job.com has just such a legacy URL. So, so really does have a great impact in Google. It allows us to attract job seekers for free. It also allows us to look at where the job seeking market is as we try and determine which staffing assets, which staffing agencies, we may go and acquire because, you know, building up pockets of talent communities and base in there that can be used for placements is also another strategy. We still do have the card, Gents, we still do offer the rewards. It's now a feature rather than just the headline, but I will tell you, we got more people sign up to job.com and register when we had the card on the front than we do with the job seeker experience, I'm not going to swear, but I'm not joking. Arran (14m 33s): But what I will say is that's that stat is yes, we did get more sales, but we do get more physical revenue generating activity out of job seekers utilizing kind of the job board functionality. Joel (14m 48s): Do you have any idea how much of your traffic is direct people just typing in job.com? Arran (14m 52s): Oh Yeah. This there's actually, yeah, it's quite a bit actually. And I will say the words job as I'm sure you can all appreciate is a university, you know, translatable word. So it's understood in many countries in many languages. So we do get a lot of international white noise, you know, where people like job and we just, you know, they instantly find job.com or they just type in job into their browser and job.com comes up. Which, you know it's cool, we welcome everyone to the site. We're delighted to have people come to job.com, but, but at the same time, sometimes, you know, transparency that can impact the quality of the traffic that's coming through to us. Arran (15m 33s): It can be, you know, it's kind of difficult sending traffic away that maybe has no visa to work in the United States, for example. And we welcome them as a visit, but we can't really do anything with them, sadly. Nexxt PROMO (15m 51s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. For clients that are sort of married to email, what would you tell them in terms of the metrics versus text messaging? It really depends on the audience you're trying to reach. I'm not going to even tell you text messaging is the right tool for every type of audience. You know, you're not going to reach, you know, a VP or senior level person necessarily through text. You're going to reach more of those hourly workers, more of the gig economy, more of anybody that's on their feet all day long. So again, you know, you gotta break out email and texts into different categories. And sometimes depending on the audience, the best thing to do is hit them with both of them. Nexxt PROMO (16m 33s): And it reinforces the message, the brand that's coming across, they'll know who the company is, and it's like any other commercial or podcasts, you know, you might have to listen to it a few times before it resonates and it sinks in. I believe it's the same thing with text versus email versus any other form of communication For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's next with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com. Chad (17m 5s): So we can talk about traffic. What are you seeing in the differences between Google for Jobs traffic versus organic? Arran (17m 13s): Yeah. So Google for Jobs traffic is much higher than organic. So, you know, just, just transparent. I mean, we feed straight into Google for Jobs. We also do, you know, Google console site map, the usual, you know, as many landing pages as we can physically get to be indexed into Google. But one thing's very clear is Google strategy of navigating people through their own job search solution. It reminds me of Indeed all over again, right? They're gonna go from free to freemium, right? They're going to sucker everyone's jobs in gain all the usability off of it. And then suddenly go, Hey, you pay us or die, you know, and, and I guarantee that's going to happen, right? I don't doubt for a second, which is so I find being brutally honest Gents as a small business, we are shoe-horning our way through various strategies, the kind of guides, job.com forwards, but with the ultimate goal of just becoming an ultimately focused data-driven digital staffing company. Arran (18m 8s): But at the moment, you know, we're utilizing the assets that we have, which is job.com is great at capturing stuff for SEO. It has a good rapport with Google and Google for Jobs. So we'll capture users there and we're just leveraging what we can while we can. Joel (18m 22s): Shoe Horning is a good word and I think Indeed is busy doing that with a lot of other things. We refer to it as throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. So let's talk to, let's talk about Talenting, why the move, how the deal go down. And then I want to dig into blockchain a little bit, but, but set the table with why you guys acquired this company and why it was smart for your strategy. Arran (18m 45s): Yeah, sure. So we have two proprietary pieces of technology that job.com focuses on. So one is, is AI. You know, we are very focused on artificial intelligence and have been for, you know, eight years now, before it was job.com when it was My Job Matter in the UK. And the other part is the utilization of blockchain technology within our tech stack and process. So the guys at Talenting a CEO there, Bill Allen, and I have been friends for a number of years and him and I have been the kind of keynote speakers at SIA for Blockchain for a number of years as well. We've done various panels together. And, you know, they went a route where they were looking to utilize blockchain for compliance and also to create an ecosystem where people could validate their credentials to which I'm very pro the whole validation of credentials piece. Arran (19m 33s): But the utilization of blockchain truly for us, is about trying to help with two things, one diversity into compliance. So I'll explain the diversity piece. We'd like to say that we're a diversity, you know, tech, diversity-tech driven business, and have been for some time, it's not just jumping on the bandwagon from everything that went on last year. We've been publishing articles out about this, which I'm happy to share with anyone listening. For a number of years, I come from Luton town, North London, which is a highly diverse area and I'm passionate about it. We utilize blockchain to allow us to anonymize data going through the hiring process. So there was a research report done in 2016. Arran (20m 14s): There's a page on job.com that talks all about it, that showed an African-American resume and a Caucasian, white resume, identical resume going into the job market and the Caucasian white resume name that, that resume got 150% more phone calls back from recruiters in 2016. So I'm under no illusion that that unconscious bias within the hiring managers potentially, or recruiters is still existing five years later. So we utilize blockchain to allow us to anonymize the sociodemographic data out of a resume, but allow, the hirer to know that this person is validated, they are who they say they are, they have done what they say to have. You just don't need to know their sex. You don't need to know their name. Arran (20m 55s): You don't need to know the,ir race that, you know, you don't need to know that stuff when it comes to the hiring side. And so that's what we're utilizing blockchain for is one component. Chad (21m 2s): Do you need blockchain for all that? Joel (21m 4s): Yeah. This exists without blockchain, right? Yeah. Arran (21m 7s): Can you tell me, you can do that without blockchain, but I think sometimes people think blockchain is maybe more than it is. a private Hyperledger fabric, blockchain on Amazon web services, you could set up in an afternoon, it's as easy as pie. I mean, people, I think sometimes people get so wrapped up thinking blockchains, this mysterious complex voodoo. It really isn't, it's just a server infrastructure for security. And, we just choose to use it. Talenting has two paintings. They've got one paint and granted, which, or should I say now job.com does, which is for storing a career record in association with biometrics. Okay. So we utilize face, fingerprint, Pat password and pin and store that record, your career record with that association. Arran (21m 48s): So it's Joel, it's got your face and this is your resume and it's on a private Hyperledger fabric. So now we definitely proven it's you. And now, you know, so we have a, we have a painting around that. And then the second painting, which is still pending, which we acquired to, is career scoring, which is where you can provide a level of scoring behind did this person really work at this company. And did they really do this job? And did they really get this reference? And we've been working on an ecosystem to create kind of, you know, that referencing piece built within job.com for a little while now, it's still not finished. Won't be finished until 2022, but it's all part of the data-driven digital staffing piece. So, so yeah, we just choose to use blockchain for the application. Joel (22m 32s): Help me understand as a job seeker, the default is typically to advertise as much as possible. I'm looking for a job, so I'm going to market myself accordingly. My profile is going to be available on LinkedIn. My resume is going to be everywhere. And then blockchain comes in. And I think I understand it as a layman, why that's important for money maybe for, you know, sensitive data like health care or my social security number, things that, that I don't want to get out, but my personal data for my resume, I want it to be public. So blockchain ends up to me sounding very, just sort of soup de jour kind of thing to help me to like, be a shiny object of, Oh, this is good, but I have a hard time as a regular job seeker, understanding why I should care whether a job site is blockchain or not. Joel (23m 28s): Can you help make that clear to me and all of our listeners who are like, why is blockchain relevant to job search? Arran (23m 35s): Yeah, no, I know and I think it's a fabulous observation. And I think it's one that's shared commonly amongst a lot of professionals in the space. A.s A job seeker, you will probably never that you're running through a blockchain on job.com and we don't advertise it or sell it to our job seekers. Akin to half the technology that's probably going on when you do a Google search, you have no idea as an average user the sort of criteria they're going through to give you that listing. But, but for whatever reason, in this particular application, it works. Blockchain doesn't hide their resume at all. All it does is it just hides some sensitive material about them that could be related to bias. Arran (24m 15s): It could be related to shortlisting someone before their credential, their true credentials that matter, which is their experience, their education and their track record are truly looked at. And as job.com, we've made a conscious decision to utilize the technology, to try and help increase the diversity funnel. I would love to be proven wrong and shown that you don't need to do that to help increase diversity because you know, the ultimate goal is not about proving that we're right with blockchain. It's about proving that we can get a more diverse workforce into the labor market. But, you know, we made a strategic decision at job.com to pursue the blockchain side, but their resume remains public. Arran (24m 56s): You could search their resume for job.com. Our recruiters will find their resume. They just won't know whether you're African-American or Hispanic or Asian or you know, that you're living in the middle of South central LA you'll live at, you could be living anywhere. Joel (25m 11s): Is the background check piece something that you guys are pursuing. Cause I do see some relevancy to having sort of a blockchain background check that, you know, this Joe Smith is different than that Joe Smith. Arran (25m 21s): Correct? Yeah. And we certainly, we certainly are Joel, and that's again, a slightly later strategic piece actually with someone that you, you guys know quite well, actually, but I can't say yet, so, and I'm not going to say either because I'll shoot myself in the foot or you did that death match, so I'm not saying anything, so Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but you know them guys, so and so, yeah, so, so we sat in the army. One thing to remember, guys, we acquired a job.com three years ago. We did a blockchain ICO, if you, Gents, probably cast your mind back, which was sadly a failure for job.com, but we're a fairly new business, you know, and we are going out there trying to, you know, be fairly radical with our approach in some respects, fairly, you know, innovative. Arran (26m 15s): There are some things in the decisions we've made that have not been the right decision. There have been some that have been absolutely the right decision and we're a learn-it-all organization, not a know-it-all organization. And I quote our CLO Bill Clem with that. I won't take claim to that saying, he says, it's everyone in the business we're learn-it-all not know-it-all. And, but we definitely see the practical benefits of blockchain. There's also one other bit, which I'm sure you guys are more than familiar with, especially Chad with your background, Randstad EEOC records, right? So, you know, we have to have a comprehensive security based EOC record as a co-employer. And we choose as our decision is we like to use blockchain in order to do that and create a public blockchain that employers that we've come employed with can access to. Arran (27m 2s): So that let's say heaven forbid job.com wasn't here anymore, then they're not in breach of their compliance because how many staffing companies in America have been keeping EOC records on behalf of their clients who are maybe now no longer here and their clients have to keep a record for that for seven years. And if they don't have a record of it, because they were relying on their staffing company, that's no longer, no longer here, they're actually have a compliance issue. Chad (27m 25s): My last question Aaran, like Indeed flex, why is job.com competing with the staffing industry instead of becoming the platform for the entire staffing agency? I mean, you can, you can see the opportunity, right? Instead of buying up, and again, there's a lot of resources that go goes into buying up staffing organizations and then rolling them up underneath your tech, why not just be the operating system for all agencies instead of competing with them? Arran (27m 58s): It's a fabulous question and it is actually one that we have had internally at the moment. Our strategy is certainly, and, you know, we've made a decision to be a competitor and to go out to the market as a competitor. And we have, you know, we've got 474 shareholders in job.com. And so, you know, we collectively, as a collective shelter team said, where do we, where do we see our position in the market? Where do we see what we want to hit? And, you know, let's be transparent, my passion is to help people feed their families and pay their bills. But at the same time, I have a shareholder obligation to make an ROI. Arran (28m 38s): And we have a very intricate, detailed map showing acquisition, marrying technology, uplifted acquisition with technology. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, and taking, let's say three or $400 million worth of revenue out of the market per se. And, you know, with our talks of obviously doing a public listing and achieving the ROI that our shareholders invested into, you know, so, so that's, so, so there is definitely a compelling argument to say, why not just licensed this to every recruitment company in the U S and, and follow that strategy? Arran (29m 18s): I think it's, I think what it is, is that there's quite a crowded room of very sophisticated service providers to the staffing industry. Some very, very great technology out there. I feel that we do a great job at job.com. I think it's more within our control and wheelhouse strategically to go and buy staffing agencies and create a nice, good data-driven digital staffing company powered with AI and blockchain that is right for either, an IPO or an acquisition, rather than maybe trying to go directly out into the market and maybe find myself up against someone like a Bull Horn, right through to other different platforms that are out there that would, you know, would definitely give jobs.com a good run for its money. Arran (30m 2s): Let's be brutally honest. Joel (30m 3s): The IPO or kids, Arran Stewart, everybody always a pleasure. Arran for our listeners to want to learn more about you or job.com, where would you send them? Arran (30m 17s): I will, I would send them to job.com or alternatively, I love talking to everybody. Feel free to just hit me up on LinkedIn. You know, I've got a rather peculiar spelling of Arran. So you, you can't miss me or Twitter. Yeah. Joel (30m 31s): That's A double RR-A-N. Arran. Thanks, dude. Thanks so much. Good luck. Good luck with your busted pipes. Arran (30m 40s): You going to come and help fix them Gents? Joel (30m 42s): No we are not! Chad (30m 46s): We pay our taxes and have maintenance already. Joel (30m 50s): We out! Chad (30m 52s): We out! OUTRO (31m 51s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

This one's a real rush of blood to the head! Recruitics and Phenom are continuing the acquisition boom in our industry LinkedIn is looking to take on Fiverr and Upwork. And that's just the Chad & Cheese appetizer, as the boys then dig into billion dollar companies that poo-poo HR departments, professors who do hardcore drugs to achieve work-life balance and even a good ol' fashioned dust-up with industry vet Bill Boorman. It's a good time after a week that came with a hefty dose of salt and vinegar. As always, C&C are powered by Jobvite, Sovren, and JobAdx. 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 (20s): Aw. Yeah. Dancing on the line of cancellation since 2017, welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, everybody. I'm your cohost Joel "cheese is good for you" Cheeseman. Chad (34s): And I'm Chad, "the stranger" Sowash. Joel (37s): And on this week show the shopping spree continues in TA tech, LinkedIn wants a piece of the gig economy pie and heroin supports a sound work-life balance. Who knew? Chad (48s): What?! Sovren (49s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (1m 48s): The sun is shining in the Midwest. Chad (1m 50s): Feels good. This is, this is going to be our feel-good episode. Okay, the last ones we were cranky. We were all pissed off, but I am determined to make this "a feel good episode", that being said. Joel (2m 4s): Yeah. Chad (2m 4s): Sometimes I would say, throughout the day, I just have happy songs pop into my head. Does that ever happen to you? Joel (2m 11s): That sounds a little psychotic, but yeah, sometimes songs pop into my head. When there's room for the voices, stop talking to me. Yeah. The music Chad (2m 20s): One popped into my head today. It's Stevie Wonder's, Sir. Duke. That is one that pops into my head frequently. And I think it's because it was played on the radio so much when we were little kids, it was probably drowned into my head, but I just love that song. What song? Just kind of like, it's a happy song that kind of like pops into your head out of nowhere. Joel (2m 44s): So as both of us are young children of the seventies, I have a, you know, a favor for the seventies disco. So for me, it's a little Sister Sledge, Good Times. The actual show Good Times was great. There's also Wang Chung Tonight. I guess if you're rolling into the eighties. Yeah. You know, Everybody Wang Chung for a good time, but yeah. Songs are great. And the older you get, the more, the bigger the library gets and it's all good. Chad (3m 19s): And dude, Spotify is my, my best friend right now, podcasts, music. I mean, I spend probably half an hour on Spotify looking through like albums and shit liking things and just that whole signal liquidity that Spotify has on me. Joel (3m 37s): So you are, you're a subscriber then to Spotify. Okay. Are you a Joe Rogan listener? Occasionally? Chad (3m 43s): I can't. I can't listen to Joe Rogan. They're like three hour podcasts. Number one. I would have to split it up. Number two. He's just a Fucking whack job. Joel (3m 55s): He's a different cat for sure. He's a rich different cat. Chad (3m 59s): He is, good for him. Joel (4m 1s): Yeah. Well we got to have some feel good shout outs, I guess, to start the show. Chad (4m 5s): Yeah. So I want to start out with the feel good of, I just saw this morning and did a little research of over a hundred migrant children are being united with their families, and this is only the first month of Biden being in office. I think people across the globe, let alone us here in America, watching that happen in our country that made me feel good this morning. Joel (4m 34s): Definitely feel good. So we've talked a lot about corporations and vaccine and should they require it? What should they do? So, so Publix, your new favorite grocery store since Kroger rubbed you the wrong way, let's put it that way. They're offering a $125 gift card to employees that get the vaccine and gift card sounds a little cheesy, but hell they're probably spend the money at Publix anyway, with their employee discount. So public's way to go, man, incentivize that vaccine because we all need the shot. Chad (5m 6s): Yes. Incentive is smart. People living on incentives, essential worker wages, need food, go figure and pub Publix probably doesn't want their employees spending just some old gift card at Piggly Wiggly. So, you know. Joel (5m 24s): Does Piggly Wiggly still exist? Chad (5m 27s): I have no fucking clue. One of my favorite brands. Joel (5m 31s): It's actually a really interesting short sell story, from like the thirties or forties. So in lieu of the GameStop drama that we just lived through, if you want a historical perspective on short selling a Google Piggly wiggly, short sell, and you'll get a good story. Chad (5m 48s): Well, and this answers your question, which was will employers pay employees to get vaccinated? Target is providing hours of pay and free ride share rides for workers to get vaccinated. Grocery store chains. LIDL? Lidl? I guess, I don't know. Fuckin' never heard of it. And Aldi are also giving them employees paid time off to get the coronavirus vaccine. Instacart's gonna give their quote unquote staff, $25 stipend. So it is happening and this is a great way to just get these people to get the goddamn shot, because we all need it. Chad (6m 30s): And, and I'll take it if you wont. Joel (6m 32s): Yeah. And the time off is a big one, because they're going to be in line for three, four hours to get this fucking thing in some places, by the way, census Bureau survey that just came out almost one quarter of Americans said they don't plan to get vaccinated. What the fuck, America? Chad (6m 48s): After that $125 Piggly Wiggly card, I bet they do. Joel (6m 56s): Oh, what else? In shout outs, who else besides Kroger rubbed you the wrong way, Chad (7m 2s): Thrown under the bus, which was really interesting. Joel (7m 5s): The double-decker bus specifically, and Chad (7m 8s): We're actually called out on Facebook, Bill Borman. Joel (7m 10s): There's a new podcast, right? Yeah. They promoted it with basically a Mount Rushmore old Willie Nelson album cover design with, let's be honest four middle-aged white dudes as sort of the future set in some, I think it was a Maren Hogan and some other women called them out like, Oh, you know, more white dudes on a podcast. Fantastic. And they projected, or they deflected that on us. Chad (7m 34s): Do you and I, Joel, we talk about this in getting interviews. We talk about who we should schedule, why we should schedule who we think are fun topics, that kind of thing. And I've talked, I've talked to Matt Older about this, who was also one of the individuals who was run over by the Borman bus. So we are, we are constantly looking at trying to find individuals, especially females, because females, they don't come to us. I have, we have probably hundreds of males who come to us on, you know, month after month after month, trying to pitch why they should be on the podcast, whether it's their brand, their product, whatever it might be. Chad (8m 16s): Female on the other hand, they don't, they, they generally not coming to us. So I guess they're, they're looking for us to find them, whether it's on a list or something like that. So, you know, message to all you females out there. We'd love to be able to have you pitch us on why you want to be on the show. And if you don't want to be on the show, that's cool too. That means you don't have to pitch us. But overall, if you want to get your voice amplified, your brand amplified, all these things, it's really easy to get a guy on because they're all over the fucking place selling themselves. And I'm not saying that you have to be crazy about selling yourself, but at least have some type of pitch and push it out to podcasts. Chad (8m 60s): And we're not saying that we're just automatically going to have you on because you're a female. It has to be good content. I'd love to be able to talk to you because I'm spending time, hours a week, looking for individuals to make our podcast more equitable. And this year, so far, we have nine interviews, five of which are female. So, you know, we're trying to, we're trying to keep that balance and trying to be smart about it. Joel (9m 26s): Yeah. So three things on this one is it's, it's much like my teen years, women ignore me. So I'm sort of used to it. Secondly, although the professional quality of this podcast is above, you know, you know, the average podcast, we have no production team. We have no staff. It's just us. And we have other things going on. Like we don't have a team getting guests for the show. And then lastly, it would be much different if a female came at us about female representation, the fact that it's the white British dude doesn't really keep me up at night. So that's three things and Bill love him to death, super charitable guy. We just, we thought we'd have some fun with his calling us out on this, on this issue, because I think we're pretty proud actually, of the representation that we give to a broad spectrum of folks across the board, on our show. Joel (10m 16s): Yeah. Chad (10m 16s): Yeah. And can we do better? Always? There's no question. Joel (10m 19s): Help us help you. Chad (10m 20s): Yeah. Help us help you. But overall, one of the things that we did create was a channel called Fem Amp to be able to highlight and amplify all of the females who have participated in interviews on Chad and Cheese. But again, if you want on the show, that's awesome. Let us know, and then pitch us on what you'd like to talk about, but we'd love it. Joel (10m 41s): And then get ready for fun on the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad (10m 44s): Or a no, because it might suck, because if it sucks, you just say, I'm sorry. Joel (10m 51s): Trust me. I usually don't want to be on this show, so I forgive you if you don't want to be on this show either. You know what I'm saying? Chad (10m 57s): Events! Joel (10m 58s): Events! Chad (10m 59s): Okay. Oh, a good segue. We're going into a TNG and ADA digital's Unbiased Day on March 18th. Yeah. So you can go to TNG.se, just scroll down to the painted lady, register. It's free. Some of your favorite people are going to be there from TNG and ADA Digital. I might be talking a little bit about robots, but for the most part, I'm going to be talking about bias and technology, here in the United States. And I think that's pretty much going to translate abroad as well, but Julie is going to be speaking. And so is Bas, not even going to try your last name, buddy, cause you always say, I say it wrong, but so many great speakers, Asa, Sarah, Elan, and a whole host of crew, go to TNG.se and registered today. Joel (11m 53s): That was a great segue. And you didn't even plan on that. I don't think we didn't. We didn't talk about it. If only we had a better segue into the first news story. Chad (12m 0s): Topics! Joel (12m 1s): Which, we don't, but let's get into some acquisition news. Our buddies at RecruitEx acquired Reverse Delta. Chad (12m 10s): Yes. Joel (12m 10s): I didn't know who Reversed Delta was. They're London-based company that specializes in integrated recruitment websites, think jobs to web, I guess, and digital marketing and is best known for its award-winning career site platform, FX Recruiter. It's so famous that we've never heard of it. Anyway, there they tout themselves as a "high performance mobile first empowered recruitment website, producer built for exact fit with your business." This one's a little confusing to us. What are your thoughts? Chad (12m 42s): So I love the name right out of the gate, Reverse Delta because in business many, use the word Delta as a meaning for gap, whether it's a gap in sales, a gap in production, whatever, thus making Reverse Delta a closed gap, get it, get it anyway? So yeah, I, dude, this is interesting from a recruiting standpoint, I believe that in the candidate experience, many hiring companies have failed to provide a truly responsive and great experience, but I don't totally understand where this fits into RecruitEx bag of tricks. Are they harkening to an SEO for jobs or jobs to web? Are our systems not yet evolved enough to already provide this type of functionality. Chad (13m 29s): But then again, I remembered Mona and Ryan and the whole creative KRT crew is over there. They're alive and well and kicking. So I'm wondering if they're not trying to go down the road of a Radancy and see like Talent Brew or a Symphony, like SmashFly X? They've got the programmatic piece, right? Sodas, Radancy? Soda's Symphony? Now they're, backloading it with possibly the website piece, our CRMs next? I mean that, that's the question. Are they really trying to compete in that segment? Joel (14m 5s): Yeah. So I've been reading press releases for a long time. Now I've written my own set of them as well. And there, there are sort of three telltale signs of a press release that should tell you how important the news is to the companies that are putting out the release. Number one is the length of the release. The longer the release, the more important whoever is doing the acquisition thinks of the acquisition, right? Chad (14m 28s): It's like a Twitter feed. Joel (14m 29s): Yeah. Okay. This is like a three paragraph. Okay. We bought this company, here's a quote from recruiting CEO and we're done. Okay. So the length is important if they don't disclose the terms, it wasn't enough money to talk about it. So that's usually a little bit of a telltale sign. And then lastly, the transition information and what's happening to the people that are being acquired. We had a good laugh about job.com's, recent acquisition, and that the quote of the co-founders didn't even have their name. It just said the co-founders said this release doesn't even have a quote from the CEO of the acquired company. There's nothing about anyone joining the board. There's nothing about, they'll be our new product, our new product chief or anything like that. Joel (15m 13s): So I don't know how important or big a deal this thing is. Reverse Delta was started in 2002, according to the website. That's a long time to be in business, It may just be a situation of we're just tired. Competing is hard. This thing is getting to be a bitch. Like let's find someone to put us out of our misery and just buy our clients and then put them on your platform. So I don't, I that's kinda my take on this. There, there was no big splash on this news. It probably doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot, other than Reverse Delta's clients will now be giving money to RecruitEx instead of Reverse Delta. Chad (15m 53s): Do we know another brand in our space that holds their cards as close to the vest as RecruitEx does? Joel (16m 2s): Paradox. Chad (16m 3s): Yeah. Good point. Good point. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. So, but most don't, I mean, that's the thing is that I think RecruitEx and their team, just from a culture standpoint, they reserve the right to tell you anything. And they generally don't tell you a goddamn thing. So the press release. Yes, it was very Twitter. Like it was a tweet and there wasn't much there. And that to me felt on purpose. Joel (16m 28s): So if I had done my homework better, and again, we have other things going on other than the show, but I would probably go back and look at other press releases that RecruitEx has dropped. The KRT one comes to mind. Chad (16m 41s): That's a different level, different level. Joel (16m 44s): So there would be some trend of importance equals exactly . But anyway, I think it's much ado about nothing keeping with our London theme and prove me wrong. RecruitEx tell us what's going on. Chad (16m 56s): Like to hear it. Oh, I love the Intel. Joel (16m 59s): Another Acquisition, good God, the money is flowing. Chad (17m 3s): Phenom is spending cash. Joel (17m 5s): Phenom, Philly based Phenom. We love the Philly-based companies, acquires Talent Cube a little bit on that Talent Cube, which I haven't heard of before, I don't know if you have either, is an "experienced, driven video technology company" based in Germany, Munich. I've never been to Munich. Have you? Chad (17m 23s): Oh yeah. Were you stationed there? I was not. I actually went there with the family a couple of years ago. Joel (17m 29s): Okay. This is Phenom's, third acquisition in five months. So they're a bit on a bit of a tear. The addition of Talent Cube's technology advances Phenoms ability to provide seamless video functionality. Where we heard that before at every stage of the talent journey. The Phenom CEO Mahe Bayireddi said, quote, "Talent Cubes, video platform, inspires mutual trust throughout the talent life cycle. Organizations can convey their mission through their employees own voices, while job seekers can narrate their journey in a context that relates to recruiters and hiring managers. Stories resonate more deeply when we tell them face to face, in real time or through automated video prompts. Our acquisition of Talent Cube will cultivate a stronger understanding between company and candidate." Joel (18m 13s): Again, stop me if you've heard this one before. Chad (18m 15s): Phenom is on a tear. They've bought My Ally in Q3 of last year, EnDouble in Q4 of last year. Now Talent Cube. This acquisition is easy to understand, nlike the RecruitEx acquisition. Joel (18m 30s): Yes. Chad (18m 30s): Market validation. iCIMS planted their video flag in the ground with two separate acquisitions of Easy Recru and Altru. Yup. Video is a part of the future of experience and engagement. No doubt. So this to me is a great acquisition from a capabilities and global standpoint. Obviously this is their second global acquisition. So the big question for me is when will Phenom raise again. And if they don't raise, who's targeting Phenom for acquisition. Joel (19m 5s): Ooh, I don't see them going public? Chad (19m 8s): No. Joel (19m 8s): So they got to sell to somebody. Hmm. Chad (19m 11s): And have about $57 million in funding thus far. So I could see them raising, although I think right now with these, these acquisitions, they would be ripe for acquisition themselves because they haven't taken that much money. Joel (19m 27s): Yeah. It's gotta be a decent fish though. Yeah. Mm Hmm. That'll be interesting. Yeah. I'd say get more money and buy some more companies like people are on clearance right now. Chad (19m 37s): Applicant tracking Systems all over the world need to be looking at companies like Phenom. Joel (19m 42s): What's your own ATM go by Lever. I hear they're hurting. They need a buyer from what I understand. Call Lever for certain. Yeah. They replaced their CEO a few months ago. That that was very quiet. No, no press releases are usually more revealing than press releases. This makes total sense to me. Video's hot, work from home is hot. We talked about Paradox recently, putting video into their chat bot or conversational AI. We talked about HireVue buying, you know AllyO so this is clearly a trend and Phenom pimps themselves as the CRX, right? So it's all about the user experience and video is obviously a component of that. The work from home, remote recruiting trend is not going to go away. Joel (20m 26s): So this makes perfect sense to me and Talent Cube has kind of a funny, quirky culture on their website and under the, About Us under their Values, one of them is make your mama proud, which I thought that was kind of funny. Make your mama proud. That's one of their values, one of their core values. So yeah, this makes total sense to me. Chad (20m 45s): Sounds like a German core value that can expand throughout the universe, to be quite Frank. Joel (20m 53s): And always a chance to bring up Snatch and Zeee Germans and his quote is always fun. Chad (20m 58s): Is it a Tommy. Joel (20m 59s): Yeah. Tommy? What's this, you got to be some protection? Protection from who? is the Germans. Anyway, it's kind of a British show. It's a feel-good British show today. Let's get away from that and go to Canada and get a quick word from JobAdX. And we'll talk about LinkedIn. JOBADX (21m 14s): You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Joel (21m 59s): I just realized this is an Indeed-free show. You're welcome. You're welcome listeners. If you're sick of Indeed. Chad (22m 19s): Being said, shout out to the stranger, Joel (22m 23s): A great album about from the seventies, Billy Joel, by the way. Chad (22m 27s): An Austin family took in Chelsea Timmins, a delivery driver whose car nearly crashed into their home during a delivery run due to the weather, the family welcomed her to stay in, it ended up being five days. Timmins who lives three hours away in Houston, said she makes weekly trips to Austin because the delivery market in there pays more. Chelsea picked up one last delivery on Sunday as the snow picked up thinking she would have time to make it home. She didn't. And she found herself with a nice Austin family who took her in, for five whole days. Joel (23m 10s): Nice. Speaking of strangers. Oh, Matt Charney, buddy of the show. Chad (23m 15s): He knows The Stranger. Joel (23m 17s): He's familiar. He joined Smart Recruiters. One of our faves as the Director of Industry and Product Marketing, Matt, congratulations buddy. 6 (23m 29s): Who, who came up with that title? Jesus that's right. Joel (23m 31s): Probably memorable. Probably Matt. I'm only coming on. If I'm the director of, I want to be the SVP of industry and no, you can be a director. Fine. And, and also speaking of lack of blood flow, LinkedIn went down this week on Tuesday. I don't know. I don't know what recruiters were doing for that few hours that LinkedIn was down. But I think, I think recruiting still happened even with LinkedIn not working, but they're back, they're back up. The blood is flowing now. Chad (24m 2s): On the heels of Fiverr acquiring, Working, Not Working, from last week's show a somewhat bigger deal as is happening at LinkedIn. Joel (24m 11s): Mr. Segue, you are, good God. So LinkedIn is eyeing the gig economy and who wouldn't. This is the biggest news since LinkedIn launched an ATS. Haha. The information, I'll let that sink in for a second. All right. This was news out of the information. They said, quote, "LinkedIn is developing a new service called marketplaces." Stop me if you've heard that one before "to let it 740 million users find and book freelancers pitting it against publicly traded firms, such as Upwork and Fiverr." According to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, marketplaces is slated to launch. Joel (24m 52s): As soon as this September Upwork and Fiverr last year together generated about $550 million in revenue. So it's no shock that LinkedIn would eye this market Facebook, as we also know, cause we've talked about on the show is looking at this, but more of a fix your plumbing perspective, then go find a designer for your website. What do we think about LinkedIn getting into the gig economy? Chad (25m 21s): Interesting. LinkedIn generating 8.8 billion in revenues in 2020 from subscriptions and selling jobs, freelancers? They want freelancers to spend more time on LinkedIn and trying to think this through. Yeah. LinkedIn would broaden their user base. It's current, somewhat developed tech to gobble up that $550 million and drive more. But I don't know from, from my standpoint, why wouldn't they just acquire some one? Joel (25m 53s): That's interesting. The valuation of those two companies has gone through the roof. I mean this, so the marketplace will sort of replace what they have now. It's called ProFinder. So ProFinder has been around for a long time. It lets users post proposals, proposals for jobs and then people can hire freelancers. ProFinder also lets people contact freelancers directly, blah blah, blah. But there's no sort of fiverr-ish experience. There's no, stars, reviews. Chad (26m 24s): I don't like it. Joel (26m 25s): Yeah. So to me it makes sense,what I think the hidden. Okay. So there are a few things here. I think that are, that are cards on cards in LinkedIn's deck that can make it really formidable to Upwork and Fiverr. Number one is their acquisition of GitHub. If they can figure out a way to blend marketplaces with the GitHub community, then you've got a pool of like technical people that is probably unmatched by Fiverr or Upwork. The other thing that would be interesting is if they went into, you know, Microsoft's treasure trove and either gave more money or more of a percentage, or took less of a percentage for buyers, could they roll in, you know, benefits to some degree, maybe even health care on some level, depending on the country. Joel (27m 17s): I mean, I think that with Microsoft's, you know, bag of money, there's some interesting things they could do to draw people away from Upwork and Fiverr. And I think that GitHub universe, community is really sort of an untapped monster in terms of something like a gig economy, marketplace. Chad (27m 35s): Yeah. If you're Microsoft and you have that kind of money, go find doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be Upwork, doesn't have to be Fiverr, there are up and coming gig platforms that are out there that are gaining traction. Like our buddies, you know, at Camino, obviously we just saw Working, Not Working was acquired by Fiverr they're out there. So go find something and buy it. They've been at this since October of 2019. I know that doesn't seem long, but overall, this is not your expertise. Right? I do know that they bought some attorney, platform that was a gig platform years ago. Chad (28m 16s): And they have that CEO driving this train. I think that's the wrong thing to do. You buy that shit when you're Microsoft? Joel (28m 25s): Yeah. Or you're so damn big you think we can just do it ourselves, sorta like, you know, Facebook and their marketplace. Anyway, the next story really interesting, we enjoy this one. We don't need no stinkin' HR out of, out of London. Again, more England, actually, this is Manchester. I wonder if they know our buddies at Caroo, they probably did. Chad (28m 47s): Caroo. Joel (28m 47s): Caroo, the BBC reports, Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, some of you in the UK might be using the Octopus to power your house. No one in Texas, no one in Texas is you can start at more than $2 billion selling green energy. Despite now having more than 1200 employees, Greg says he has no interest in traditional things like human resources or information technology departments. He says there is a tendency for large companies to infantilize their employees and drown, creative people in process and bureaucracy. They want to stay away from that. Joel (29m 28s): No HR, I, I like the sound of that. Your thoughts? Chad (29m 32s): This CEO, he has actually run very small companies before, right? So that's, he's used to, that's what he's comfortable with, right? So what he's doing is he's taking what he's comfortable with and trying to apply it to something much larger and overall, it won't work. It won't. I mean, when you're talking about a company that he says, Hey, look, we don't need HR to fix, you know, these squabbles and things. That's what the managers are for. Right? Well, for the most part, the managers are part of the fucking squabbles, right? Chad (30m 14s): You need to have somebody in there to be able to help you figure these things out. So not to mention, think about all the crazy paperwork HR has to do. What about, you know, hiring? I mean, there's so many things that HR talent acquisition, those types of things have to do. Are you going to try to outsource all of that is the first question? The second question is once again, do you really believe that your managers can handle all of that shit? Because humans generally can't, which is why you need an intermediary some somewhere. Right? So I just think it's a guy who is a CEO of an organization who should have left or should leave now and just enjoy being, you know, chairman of the board. Joel (31m 5s): Yeah. I don't think he's going anywhere. He's clearly a pretty eccentric dude. If you go to his LinkedIn profile, his headline reads "due to volume of spam LinkedIn is not a good place to reach me", so he's sort of all over the place. He thinks, according to the article, this approach allows companies to scale faster, as well as making employees more self-reliant. He tells a story about one of his first jobs out of school. He told a 40 something woman sort of what to do and she put him in, put him in his place saying I've been here longer than, you know, you've been alive. Chad (31m 38s): He was mansplaining. Joel (31m 39s): Yeah, and from that experience, he believes that's going to paint his entire profession for every company. I think coffee shop was one of these businesses that he had a little coffee shop. Yeah. This dude is a lawsuit away from having an HR department. Trust me, like the bigger he gets, the more risk he puts his company at. I mean, if he has shareholders or anybody, that's an adult in charge. Like, I can't believe this, this hasn't happened yet. But yes, he is a law lawsuit away from, from having an HR department. So it's just a matter of time. It sounds good on paper and the BBC will report it, but long-term, it's a pretty bad decision. Chad (32m 21s): Risk mitigation. That's all I got to say. Joel (32m 24s): But talking about good decisions, let's hear from JobVite and then we'll talk about heroin and work-life balance. Jobvite (32m 30s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Joel (33m 15s): I just love it when British people say Chad and Cheese, it's always fun. By the way, shout out to Adam Gordon who put you and me in kilts as his Facebook profile pic. Chad (33m 27s): I'm just mad that he didn't do it a while ago and kept it there. I mean, that's a sexy photo. Joel (33m 32s): Dudes married with two kids and he puts us on his profile picture. Like he, if he didn't get an earful from his wife for that, he definitely deserves it. Adam, we love you, man. We love you. We love you long time. Chad (33m 45s): So segue into this last story, I've got a question for you. Joel (33m 49s): Okay. Chad (33m 49s): What's the hardest drug you've contemplated actually taking. I'm not saying that you've actually taken it, but you've contemplated it, which one? Joel (33m 58s): Okay. So there's one of my favorite shows is Shameless. Chad (34m 2s): Okay. Joel (34m 3s): And there's an episode where if you've ever seen the show, you'll appreciate this. But, so there's an episode on the show where he meets a terminally ill with cancer patient, convinces her to do a bunch of bad drugs, because she's going to die anyway, and why not have a good time going out? So they do all the worst drugs. And I'm thinking like, okay, if I were terminally ill, would I do any of these as sort of a final F-you to the world? And heroin, I would say it would be at the top of my list in terms of what you're asking. Now, there are forms of that shit, like meth and ice and I mean, there's some really bad shit. Chad (34m 38s): No. Joel (34m 38s): But, I hate needles to begin with. So the thought of putting a really bad drug in my body with a needle doesn't really appeal to me whatsoever. Was that a longer answer than you wanted? Chad (34m 47s): No, that, that, that, that, that works. That works. That I can cut that out and down. Joel (34m 55s): You're an evil genius. You and your editing. Chad (34m 57s): Ah, yeah. I have to say that. I have thought about a Psilocybin. Joel (35m 4s): No clue what that is. Chad (35m 5s): Kind of a LSD, more of, they call it obviously a mind expanding type of drug. Joel (35m 12s): Is that Molly? Okay. Chad (35m 14s): Molly? IDK, if it's Molly, but yeah, so that's, that's really the only one. I've never thought about taking heroin, cocaine, any of that shit? I haven't, but I have thought about Psilocybin. Joel (35m 27s): And it's a psycho psychedelic drug? Chad (35m 29s): Yeah. Joel (35m 30s): Okay. Did you ever do like a little Ecstasy back in the day? That was really, that was big when we were teenagers Chad (35m 36s): Now, now, no, I was, I was too much of a straight arrow shit. I didn't start drinking until I was in my mid to late twenties. Joel (35m 43s): Mid to late twenties. Chad (35m 45s): Yep. Okay. Joel (35m 46s): Okay. You are a straight guy. Yeah. I didn't drink until college. And then it was like Katy bar, the door I made up for any lost time. Anyway, we digress. We digress. There's a story out of Columbia University. Our buddy Suresh might know this guy. More than likely, Carl Hart. He's a professor of psychology and neuroscience. He chairs the psych department. He seems like a well adjusted man. He's 54. He's married in the father of three. And he says, quote, in a story from the New York post. There aren't many things in life that I enjoy more than a few lines by the fireplace, that's lines of heroin, by the way, kids by the fireplace at the end of the day, like vacation, sex and the arts heroin is one of the tools that I use to maintain my work-life balance. Joel (36m 37s): We've been doing it wrong, everybody. It's not about technology and some sort of an engagement app for employees. Just give them lines of heroin. That's the work-life balance. Chad (36m 47s): So this made me think of the TV show Fringe. Have, have you ever seen that? No, it sounds good though. Okay. So, so, so you and I actually were in the Austin airport when I pointed out a dude who was behind us in security and said, that guy is the professor on Fringe. His name is John Noble. You remember, you remember going through? Joel (37m 12s): I remember, I remember that moment. Yes. And I was like, I've never seen Fringe and I've still never seen it since she told me. Chad (37m 17s): John Noble actually plays a fringe scientist on that show. And he's always doing some type of hard drug. And I automatically thought, yeah, that's, that's fucking professor Bishop right there. Too easy guy just wants to expand his brain and live the life the one life that he's got the way he wants to. Joel (37m 38s): Yeah. Yeah. He also does Molly and meth, which is additionally interesting. The heart sites, America's founding documents and their promise of life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, his reasons for having the choice to snort lines, smoke weed and expand his mind. Oddly enough, Columbia did not return any requests for comments on professor Hart's statements. This is why tenure is a great thing, without tenure people can't say crazy shit like this in politics. Exactly. Right. Thank God. We can't be fired. Good times everybody. Chad (38m 17s): Yes. Now it's time to get to one of those more accessible drugs, alcohol, and to start to produce this fucking podcast. Joel (38m 25s): Yeah. It's five o'clock somewhere, baby. Chad (38m 28s): We out. Joel (38m 28s): We out. OUTRO (39m 23s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

"Indeed gives zero fucks about employers!!! - Yes, that's a quote from an employer... and No you're not surprised. What do you get when you cross Indeed desperation with Facebook hubris and throw in a dash of Google humility? This week's podcast, of course. What's more? Entelo's ongoing meltdown, The grownups taking over at VONQ Spotify steps up!. Recruitee and Sympa plat Wonder Twins Working Not Working classes up Fiverr As always, your favorite podcast is made possible by Jobvite, JobAdX, and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. 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. The least you're not in Texas, unless you are in Texas. In which case? Ouch. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Everybody. I'm your cohost, Joel "blame it on the windmills" Cheeseman Chad (37s): and I'm Chad "rolling blackout" Sowash. Joel (41s): And on this week, show Australia tells Google that's not a knife, that's a knife. Chad gets a chubby listening to Spotify and indeed proves once again that it quote "gives zero fucks about employers" end quote, we'll be right back after I finished shoveling my God damn driveway. Sovren (1m 3s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (2m 2s): Good times. Chad (2m 7s): Welcome to America kids. The land of a rolling blackouts. What the fuck is going on, dude? Joel (2m 13s): Well, dude, I was sipping margaritas and hunting Marlin in the keys this early this week. So I got to leave that and come home to like a foot of snow. So I'm a little bit salty and not from the margaritas I had. Chad (2m 27s): Yeah, I think people in Texas are probably a little bit more pissed than you are right now. Joel (2m 34s): It's funny. You mentioned that because my father lives in Texas and he's still in route to get back to Texas. He lives in Austin. He has to go to Houston, which I guess apparently is thawing out quicker than the rest of the state. And then he has to go home. I'm not sure when he'll get to go home, how the roads are and whatnot. And then he gets to find out if his pipes burst or not, he's still a cold weather guy at heart, but he may or may not have electricity and keep in mind. He's 81. So yeah, life is going to be real fun for him this weekend. Chad (3m 3s): I'd be fucking pissed if I were a Texan, because we're talking about a state that is number eight in the GDP, worldwide. Prides themselves in being the quote/unquote "Energy state" and all forms of Texas Energy failed. I mean, I, I don't know where they fuck where'd they buy those windmills that they buy them from fucking Mattel. I mean, I don't get it here in good old Hicksville of Indiana. We have fields of windmills and those motherfuckers are cranking out megawatts. They've been doing it for years. I just can't get it. And again, being a Texan and obviously they don't pay taxes. Chad (3m 47s): They, obviously want, they want to have low energy costs. And I think overall it's like, guys, you gotta pay for something somehow. Fuck. Joel (4m 1s): And I know that we talk football on the show quite a bit. And football season is over. And our international listeners hate when we talk football, football fans will remember when the Superbowl was in Dallas a few years ago and they had this same shit happen. So not only do they say, you know, fuck it. They don't apparently learn from the past and try to fix shit. But there's another winter front coming this weekend. It's not going to get much easier anytime sooner for Texas. Shout out Texas. We love you man. No matter what, dude, are you ready for this? Chad (4m 32s): What? Joel (4m 32s): Okay. We love Torchy's speaking of Texas. I mean love Torchy's right. So I'm talking about, we're talking about Torchy's with my sister who lives in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Sorry to get so Metta everybody, but okay. So we talked Torchy's and my sister goes, Oh, I think there's a, Torchy's moving into Jeffersonville, which is a small town of about 50,000 people. It's near Louisville, Kentucky, which is not a big city either. And it's a long way from Texas. And I'm like, get the fuck outta here. This is not, it's a different Torchy's or it's tortures or you're, you're getting it wrong. So I go to Torchy's website, I go to locations and I search Indiana. And Holy fuck. Joel (5m 13s): There's a Torchy's Tacos moving to Jeffersonville. So I, my friend will be tracking down to Jeff at least three or four, six, 10 times a year just to get some Torchy's Tacos. And I'm fingers crossed that they're coming to Indianapolis soon. Chad (5m 30s): There's just something about sitting in Austin and having a Torchy's Tacos. I think it's going to be entirely different being in Jeff, having a Torchy's Tacos. Joel (5m 42s): It's just a different kind of trashy. It's a different kind of trashy when you get the extra sauce on that taco. Chad (5m 48s): Yeah. Okay. I will take that. Joel (5m 50s): It's way better than the Taco Bell on taste. I'm telling you that, right? Chad (5m 54s): God, I fucking hope so. Shout out to Daniel Fellows from get optimal. Who sent me some French gin. Joel (6m 2s): And sent me nothing by the way. Thanks Dan. . Chad (6m 5s): You don't deserve anything. Joel (6m 7s): I'm not worthy. Chad (6m 8s): Here's the thing though. I got sent the gin. Julie confiscated the gin. All I have now is I can taste her gin when she's having cocktails, because it's obviously fucking good. So yeah. Thanks. Thanks Daniel. If you could send another package, that'd be great. Thank you. Joel (6m 25s): Are you a gin guy now? I'm a little confused. Or do they sell, do not sell whiskey in his part of England? Chad (6m 32s): Daniel is a different kind of guy. He doesn't just want to give you what you want. He wants to give you something that is outside of your comfort zone. And no, I'm not a gin guy. And he's like, you will love this gin and Daniel, I bet I would love that gin, if my wife didn't steal it. Joel (6m 50s): Speaking of women who like liquor, shout out to my sister who got remarried on Valentine's Day. How romantic is that? She did tie the knot. I know I mentioned I was going, but it, it did. She closed the deal. It was done. And she is soon to be Holly Bricker. Chad (7m 8s): Very nice. Joel (7m 9s): On her ID in case you are looking for her on, I don't know, Snapchat or something. Yeah. Chad (7m 15s): Nothing, nothing like sending, sending people out to troll your, your sister. That's awesome. Joel (7m 20s): Yeah. She's not on Snapchat or anything else, I think. Chad (7m 23s): In case you missed it, we interviewed Torin Ellis on the pod this week, check it out. It's called exercising our demons. And there's more Torin to come. We did like an hour or something with them. So I cut it up into, into short bite sized clips and I've already had people saying, Hey, that was too short. So don't worry. There's more coming. Joel (7m 46s): Yes. Oh man. I enjoy being in the punching bag on those podcasts. So thanks everybody for asking for more Torin. That's great. That's great. I appreciate it. Well, speaking of saltiness, you're mad at Kroger again, aren't you? Chad (7m 59s): Kroger, again is shutting down two locations this time in Seattle, the last one was in Southern California, because they are being forced. That's right. Kids forced to pay their essential workers, $4 more an hour. And again, I would like to remind everyone we're talking about people who, if you don't have them working, hence essential workers, the shit doesn't get done. They're the people who look you in the eye and say, thank you for shopping here every day. Right. But yet, but yet the fucking CEO makes $14 million. Chad (8m 40s): And we're talking about revenues, Kroger revenues overall corporate wide. It was like $121 billion. So when somebody says to me, Oh yeah, but grocery profit margins are really thin. Fuck you. Okay. $14 million then fuck you. Anyway. Joel (8m 60s): So that means the Sowash boycott is still on Kroger and well, I've got a new boycott of my own. I think speaking of mad. Word out this week, BK, Burger King is changing the chicken sandwich and I'm tired of this movement of Popeye's, Chick-fil-A, the original chicken sandwich at Burger King was one of the reasons I fell in love with Burger King and they're changing the damn chicken sandwich. I got a problem with that Chad, but I'm going to taste it first before I give a final verdict. Chad (9m 32s): I actually reached out to Ellie Doty, who is the CMO of Burger King. And I asked her if we could do like a taste test because they also, I think a Popeye's as a sister. Yeah. Sister franchise, if we could do a taste test. And I think that you would definitely be in for that. So hopefully, you know, we can get that done. Joel (9m 51s): A little date with you for some chicken sandwiches at BK. That sounds good. Sounds good. Bring on the coupons. Bring on the coupons, Ellie. Chad (10m 1s): I'm ready. Excellent. Real quick. We have in a event, that's a TNG an ADA digital that's right, those crazy kids from Sweden. They're having a Digital Unbiased Day on a March 18th. Just go to TNG.SE, scroll down to the wonderful looking painted lady and register. So some of your favorite people from TNG and ADA digital will be speaking ASA, Sarah, Elan, plus my lovely wife, Julie, Bass van de Haterd and I'll be speaking as well. So get in there, register, and we'll see you soon! Joel (10m 43s): Nice by the way. Speaking of Sweden. And I've got a quick, a Netflix movie recommendation. It's called Red Dot. Yes. It would be like if a Quentin Tarantino redirected Deliverance in Sweden. Oh, that's all I'm going to say. Okay. Well, I'm going to say if that sounds appealing to you, Red Dot on Netflix and you're welcome. Chad (11m 3s): It's on my watch list. Joel (11m 5s): There you go. Chad (11m 5s): Don't forget if you want free beer. That AdZuna is propping up kids. Free t-shirts that Emissary is a place where you go to do text recruiting, is propping up free t-shirts or free whiskey. That's right. We're giving away free shit left and right, because Sovren, Sovren loves you go to Chadcheese.com, click on free, or just go Chadcheese.com/free and register. And we give shit away, because our listeners deserve free shit. Joel (11m 38s): Yeah. Sovereign loves you, but they hate your liver apparently. Let's get to some topics shall we? Chad (11m 45s): Topics! Joel (11m 46s): Let's pile on Indeed to start the show. What better way to feel the love? What better way to feel the love? So you got some, some, some, some mad users, but you got some UX issues with what Indeed's doing right now. Chad (12m 1s): So remember when Indeed changed their entire user interface and model a few years ago, they used to be like Google, not Google for Jobs, but Google, when you would click on the job link, it would take you to the corporate career site where you, I mean, just directly. Joel (12m 19s): Like a search engine. Chad (12m 20s): Yeah. Like search engine. Joel (12m 22s): Yeah. I remember those days. Chad (12m 24s): Then they changed their user interface entirely, where you click on the job title, then it opens the job description on Indeed. So you can view it there. Then you click apply. Then you go to the corporate career center. So that just, that takes you to two clicks. What they just did is they created an inter-digital page that says, no, Hey, before you leave, make sure you've registered with Indeed. So this interstitial creates a three click obstacle for a candidate to apply on the corporate career site. Number one, view the job on Indeed. Number two, click apply on Indeed version of the job description. Chad (13m 7s): And then number three, you have to click. No, thanks on that fucking interstitial. You finally made it kids and Indeed are the one. Remember Indeed was, Oh, they're always talking about like traffic quality and content and Joel (13m 21s): We're not NASCAR. Chad (13m 24s): We don't do that because we're clean. We're easy. We're simple. We're the best user experience for a job seeker. Well, that's all gone to shit kids. Joel (13m 34s): Is Indeed double-dipping? That's what it sounds like. They're getting paid the click and then they're getting the user. They're getting their double dipping and those motherfuckers. I tell you why I got a problem. I'm going to pile on their super bowl ad God dammit, cause it's been a week. So the verdict's out, this ad sucks. It was in the middle of the pack in terms of scoring. I haven't seen the fricking ad since the super bowl and granted we're not in the biggest market in the world. So if you are seeing this ad a lot, please hashtag has Chadcheese. So I can, I can see what's going on. But if, if YouTube is any guide of the success of this ad or this video they've had roughly 250,000 views, which kind of is sucky anyway. Joel (14m 16s): But to put that in, in comparison, Fiverr, whose ad was nothing to write home about either has had 7 million views on YouTube. So Indeed hasn't even cracked a million and, or has seven million. That means your ad sucks. No one wants to watch it. No one wants to share it. No one wants to talk about it. Just throw it in the trash, chalk it up as a Mulligan and move on Indeed. Chad (14m 38s): And then I've got one more as we pile on, we actually had an employer send us Indeed hate mail. And let me, let me open it up. I'm going to go ahead and read it for you. Okay. Here it is. Joel (14m 51s): I like the sound effect. That's good. Like you really have a letter. Chad (14m 55s): I'm opening my email right now. Joel (14m 57s): Are you David Letterman right now? Your mail. Chad (15m 1s): Indeed gives zero fucks about employers, three exclamation marks. They do no product management and when you do provide feedback, it goes nowhere. I look forward to watching them tank for that reason" end quote. Joel (15m 19s): So it was a, it was a love letter is what you're saying. It was a love letter that you just opened. Chad (15m 24s): Again, this is the sentiment that is out there. It is been out there and it's just getting worse. And if recruitment ad agencies who control a huge amount of spend, if they don't do something about who the fuck is? Joel (15m 40s): You know, who else gives zero fucks about employers? Let's talk about Facebook for a second. Shall we? So this is a mean show. Okay. So we got word it's sort of official. We've talked about it. It's been speculated on, but Facebook are scraping apparently sites that have not given permission, which doesn't surprise anybody that's been going on for a long time. But we had a quote come in. This is being tracked now people in their Google analytics or analytics program are seeing basically referral traffic from Facebook. Now this is a reader said, quote, "Facebook are scraping our site and company pages, indexing it to Facebook jobs. They are using the same schema as Google and they are going hard. Joel (16m 22s): We have no relationship with Facebook at all. They are doing it all themselves. So the bot doesn't declare itself, but it's been going at it for over a month." This sounds like a porno. Okay. And then on Friday night we started getting large amounts of traffic from Facebook. Okay, well that's nice. The spike perfectly matched this unknown scraper we were tracking. So Facebook is going in without telling people what's going on, but then people are getting great traffic. Good thing, bad thing, indifferent? Chad (16m 51s): None of this makes sense to me to be quite frank. I mean, seriously. If Facebook wants to go all in on jobs, then great. Do a pilot with companies with big brands, then release information and data and Harold, how awesome it is. I mean, it's like their PR team has no idea how to work optics. And, we're not just talking about jobs. You're talking about anything fucking Facebook does. The optics for Facebook right now is for shit. Joel (17m 28s): Yeah. Facebook has bigger issues to deal about a deal with which we'll get to in a second. But marketplace has been a strong suit for them for quite a while. They've dabbled in this jobs thing, the Slack competitor thing. Clearly there they're getting feedback from data, that marketplace is spiking. I assume with COVID that people trying to sell stuff on marketplace buying stuff because it's cheaper. So you're getting a lot more eyeballs to marketplace in some genius there said, Hey, if we just like have more jobs, we're going to get a lot more views, which means a lot more advertising, which means a lot more money. So this makes total sense from a Facebook, like let's just get more eyeballs standpoint. I'm guessing that most people that are getting scraped, don't give a shit as long as they're still getting traffic, they're not paying for it. Joel (18m 12s): Now at some point, Facebook might charge or upgrade jobs or boost them as part of the scraping service. But for me, it's just a par for the course, Facebook is going to do what Facebook is going to do, and it's going to take your jobs and it's going to make money from them. Chad (18m 26s): As we just finished talking about the, the serious, fucked up goodness of Indeed. If Facebook starts to do that, I mean, companies are looking for alternatives. That's all there is to it. They don't want to use Indeed. It feels like they have to at this point, so they're looking for alternatives. If Google does go, pay-per-click on Google for Jobs. If Facebook does ramp this up and then start the ability for targeting with jobs. I mean, those are two aspects of get me the fuck away from Indeed that companies I guarantee you will gravitate toward because they hate Facebook and Google less. Joel (19m 8s): Yeah. And don't think that these moves aren't like on Indeed's windshield when they're figuring out what the fuck do we do. And by the way, dropping 10, 15, whatever million on a Superbowl ad is part of that panic. And this is the stuff that we're seeing with Google and Facebook, because this stuff is coming and Indeed sees it. And part of this grab of, of candidates is part of like, well, fuck it. We're getting the traffic. We're going to try to get as many of those people into our database as possible so that we can milk them for as long as we possibly can. t Chad (19m 37s): As we talk about Google, we talk about Facebook. We're also talking about Australia. Joel (19m 42s): Oh, we love Australia. Chad (19m 43s): And Australia, Australia has stiffen their spine and said, no, you're not taking our shit, Google, Facebook, fuck you. You're going to pay for the content. And it seems like Google folded. Joel (20m 0s): Yeah. When you live in the country, that has 90% of the world's venomous like animals, you really don't give a shit when Google threatens you with shutting down. By the way, never compare Australia to California because that really is an insult, apparently, I pissed off a lot of Australians when I made that comparison. But yeah, so Google kind of played chicken with the government of Australia. Google has about 95% of the market share of search in Australia, roughly 25 million users of the service, again about size of California. But anyway, Google blinked, they said, okay, we understand this is what's going to happen. They understand data that people use their site for new search, that they want to get information that's, news-related, that's solid, you know, journalistic content. Joel (20m 48s): And they said, we were going to lose this fight. And we just have to come to terms with the fact that the hundreds of millions, if not billions, and maybe even bigger than that over the last couple of decades that we've been fleecing, newspapers and newspaper content is finally coming to a head and we're going to have to pay the Piper. This is what happens. I love the fact that Rupert Murdoch is kind of behind this. And I'm sure that he's been wanting to stick it to Google for a long time, but he's going to start getting checks from them, which I don't think he's gotten since Google was my was Google was MySpace is search engine and pay them a lot of money to do that back in the day. So this is sort of the reality that Google faces they're either going to pay or they're going to be out of business. Joel (21m 32s): And if they don't play companies like Bing and search engines like Yandex and Baidu are eventually going to move in and try and chip away at Google's dominance. So what I think is interesting is look, every country on the planet is going to do this. Like as soon as Google folded, like Canada started, you know, getting all chesty. Europe is going to get super in line to get money from Google, whether or not the US does it, I don't know. Maybe eventually I think they have more lobbyists than most States in Washington. Google does. So they'll hold that off as long as possible. And now Facebook is in the crosshairs. Joel (22m 13s): Facebook for the most part has said, suck it. And they have very different business models. I don't think as many people go to Facebook for news as they do pictures of family and other stuff. And I don't know how this works, where if I want to share something from news site a does Google or does Facebook say, sorry, you can't share that. Can you not share any news? Obviously that's a little bit frustrating. Facebook probably will pay in the end somehow. Yeah. Chad (22m 41s): Well, Google understands that if they step away, there's going to be a vacuum and they don't want that. And so they're playing the long game and they're playing smart, not to mention, they have mountains of fucking money for God sakes and they negotiated and I guarantee you, they negotiated a good deal. Facebook is painting themselves into a corner, unless they follow suit. So overall great job Australia! Way to stiffen the spine everybody's watching you. And hopefully everybody else will follow suit because content has worth. Joel (23m 14s): Yeah, for sure. Look, journalists have been taking it in the, you know what, for two, for 20 some years, thanks to the decline in classified revenue and the cheapening and commoditization of journalism. So the world will probably be better off by newspapers, making more money and being able to pay better journalists. My question is newspapers used to rule the world in regards to classified advertising does this inflow of money and better journalism, increase subscriptions, increase eyeballs and thus bring back more companies and employers to online newspapers. I got to think it does, right? Chad (23m 52s): Yeah. I'm with you. Joel (23m 55s): All right, man. Let's take a quick break and we'll get to acquisitions and all kinds of good stuff. We'll get a little less salty I think. JobAdX (24m 2s): Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for long-term full time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. JobAdX (24m 44s): Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Chad (25m 2s): Out of the break I have, I've got breaking news. I just received a message from Recruit X. It seems like Recruit X has acquired Reverse Delta, including their FX Recruiter career site platform. I have no clue who these people are, but it sounds like a match. Joel (25m 22s): Sounds like a match. Chad (25m 24s): Yeah. So we're going to have to check this out, but yes, it RecruitX acquires Reverse Delta. Interesting. Very interesting. Joel (25m 33s): And we just had drinks with James Deneen. How could he not give us the scoop on that? That's some bullshit. Thanks James. Thanks James. Well, don't call it an acquisition, apparently. Chad (25m 44s): It's a matchup. Joel (25m 45s): Recruitee yeah. Acquired. This is kind of a weird, a weird deal Chad (25m 50s): From the Netherlands. Of course, it's weird. Joel (25m 54s): Obviously it's the Nordics! Amsterdam based Recruitee is combining with Helsinki based provider of core HR software in the Nordics to quote, "create a premium digital HR solutions offering the combined group will have over 4,000 customers across Europe and the U S and a team of over 250 employees, PSG leading growth equity firm, partnering with B2B software companies will back the business as the majority shareholder following its investment in Sympa in July of 2020," the CEO clarifies that this is neither a merger nor an acquisition. They just want to keep, they want to keep both companies separate here because they actually serve different regions and different customers. Joel (26m 37s): The combined group aims to achieve unicorn status. We'll see about that in the next to six years and become quote, "one of the biggest global HR tech companies around" high aspirations in the Nordics. Chad (26m 52s): Oh yeah. I mean, they've got, I mean, it sounds like they've got some really good growth going on. Private equity is they're buying shit up, kids and PSG obviously saw that this startup kind of up, up and coming ATS Recruitee they're obviously gaining traction, looking at just some of the functionality of the platform. It looks, looks pretty slick. Sympa is pretty much more of a backend system. So PSG bought Sympa last year, and now they're gonna combine forces, not merger, not acquire, but this, to an extent it's an acquisition for God's sakes. People come on. Joel (27m 32s): It's a wonder twins, activate. Chad (27m 34s): Yeah. Joel (27m 35s): Acquisition. I guess something like that. Look, these European countries can only grow like locally so much. And then they have to expand. And these kinds of "partnerships" I'm using air quotes can help them do that. So good luck to them. 4,000 customers across Europe, US. Yeah. It could be a match made in heaven. It could be a, it could be a true love affair in the Nordics, everybody. Chad (27m 59s): Yeah. And if they're going to want, if they're going to want more brands in the US they've got to grow and obviously, you know, private equity sees that, which is why they put the money in Joel (28m 10s): Justin Gignac. Chad (28m 12s): It's Gignac. Joel (28m 14s): Damit. Chad (28m 16s): It's Gignac. He's got the coolest name. How can you forget Gignac? Joel (28m 19s): Yeah, it's been awhile and I was, I was drunk on Canadian whiskey, I think at the time. But yeah, Fiverr, Fiverr acquires our buddies at Working, Not Working. If you guys haven't heard and a lot of you probably have an earliest forgotten. It's been a couple of years. We interviewed Justin about his company and couldn't be happier for him. What a great guy. What a great story. Chad (28m 40s): Yeah. It's interesting because there's a quote from Fiverr or CEO, Micah Kaufman. This acquisition expands our penetration into high quality creatives and freelancers. Yeah. I mean, this is a weird kind of a mix because Fiverr is somewhat of a race to the bottom from the stamp, from the standpoint of, I want creative cheap, right? That's where you go to Fiverr. That's what you do at Fiverr. Working, Not Working entirely different. You're going for a race to the top. You want high quality shit who, from individuals who have worked with big brands and they have an incredible portfolio. Chad (29m 20s): So they are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. I think this is smart for Fiverr, but I don't know that they're going to operate these two organizations separately. How does that actually work? I think Working, Not Working their pricing kind of their subscription model has to change or to fucking cheap. And I think Fiverr has cash to be able to boost them. I think it's awesome for Justin. Joel (29m 45s): Yeah. It's awesome. And I think, you know, keeping the brand separate to some degree, I think is going to be important. I mean, let's agree that creative folks, aren't flocking to Fiverr for like the best deal or the most money in their pocket. Justin quoted in the article that I read with Fiverr's technology and powerful insight into building a global platform, Working, Not Working our community can be at the center of that future and no matter how the creative industry shifts talent will always be a constant. So obviously Fiverr's resources are much greater than what Working, Not Working had. And the global footprint that Fiverr can deliver is going to be much greater. The release also says Working Not Working will help Fiverr in its efforts to build new products that appeal to the advertising and marketing communities. Joel (30m 32s): The acquisition is said to expand fibers penetration into high quality creatives and freelancers and gives them the opportunity to tap into its own technology. So yeah, I think keeping creatives happy, getting a footprint and creatives and hopefully at some level learning about how to get the most money for your people on your platform, right? Because Fiverr are still competes with Upwork. They're competing with more and more people Uber. So if they can figure out how to be the place where you're going to get the best money, then that's a huge win for them. So I'm really excited to see where this goes and really, really happy for Justin. Just a solid dude. Chad (31m 12s): Solid dude, solid creative, overall Joel (31m 15s): solid as... Chad (31m 16s): I wouldn't go that far peaches and herb, thing like this happen. But again, when we talk to Justin about this, we talked to Gignac about this. He was like, you know, Fiverr's a race to the bottom and he's right. How can they perspectively stop that and make Fiverr in itself a better product as well, so that those individuals don't get fucked every time they have to take a, cheap ass project. Joel (31m 44s): Do you think our friends at Comuno are on the line with a Upwork right. About now to see what to see, what kind of deal they can make. Chad (31m 51s): So I think overall Communo, I mean, we know those guys pretty well. I think Communo itself has a better model from a revenue standpoint, I would assume just because they are catering to ad agencies that they're doing a hell of a lot better than what Working, Not Working was doing. Right. So it's just, again, it's models in it's a go to market strategy. And I think they were entirely different. They were on two ends of the spectrum. Joel (32m 21s): And Communo if nothing else is going to watch to see what Fiverr does with Working, Not Working. Even if they fuck it up, they're going to be there to try to clean up people that are wanting to leave Working, Not Working and come to Communo. Chad (32m 33s): Yup. And as we talk about the new distributed workforce, right, we talk about giggers, we talk about now just where you work. Spotify says work from anywhere, kids. And guess what? We're going to set a base of salary. And that salary is going to be out of San Francisco. And it doesn't matter where you live. That's how you're going to get paid. You know why? Because your time, no matter where the fuck you set, your butt is worth the same. It doesn't matter. Joel (33m 5s): You love this. You're being very restrained. I know you want to tell me off and in lieu of this story, so feel free to tell me I was wrong and that you're going to be right about this. And Chad (33m 18s): I don't know that that's the case. I just know that big brands like this need to stand up for the people, right? Facebook is looking to fuck their people over, not to mention there's a big difference in doing business back in the old days, the reason why everybody had to be in those big cities was because that's where HQ was. And everybody had to go into an office, manufacturing, plants, those types of things. They had to do that. It was all something that it was standard. That's not how we work today in 2021. Costs were high in cities because the population density now that we can distribute more, you can take that money into areas that need economic boost. Chad (34m 8s): So I think, I think this is good for our country, only if employers don't try to fuck people over more, like Facebook. Yeah. Joel (34m 18s): I live in St. Louis and get paid, like you're in Stockholm. Sounds like a pretty good deal, but yeah, it's, you know, I look at this as a major differentiator in recruiting talent. You know, if, if I knew that I could get paid as if I live in London and you know, live in London, Kentucky, that's a pretty sweet deal, man. I'm living pretty high on the hog being able to do that. And if, if every high-tech company kind of has to follow suit and pay people, you know, what a PHP developer gets and whatever major market it is, they're going to get paid that in Seymour, Indiana, or wherever they are like, that's pretty interesting. And it expands your talent pool significantly. Joel (35m 3s): It's also really nice when times are good that you're paying people really high wages. If streaming music ever becomes a challenge business, if it ever becomes Blockbuster, at some point, they're going to start cutting costs. And if you're paying people really well, those people are going to get cut. So it, it works really well when times are rocking more power to them. If they're going to roll the dice on this and force, everyone's hand to pay more money or not pay on, you know, a basis of where they live. That's a really powerful recruiting strategy. Chad (35m 33s): Yeah. Well, because of capitalism and increasing margins, which is a part of it, when it's a no guardrails, we start to hear organizations using terms like cost of living to engineer, reasons to pay people less. And personally that's bullshit. Again, I definitely behind Spotify. Base Camp is doing this as well. I stand behind that. It doesn't matter where you live. If you give 40 hours to do the same project that somebody else is doing across the United States, you deserve the same pay. Joel (36m 14s): We'll see how the grand experiment works. And let's take a break and we'll talk about some, some major moves in the C-suite. Hold on kids. Jobvite (36m 23s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. Jobvite (37m 3s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Joel (37m 8s): Still need to watch that Bridgerton. Dammit. I'm not going to watch. Have you watched this thing? Chad (37m 15s): No. Joel (37m 15s): Are you going to watch it? Chad (37m 16s): No. Joel (37m 17s): Okay. I tried to give Downton Abbey about two episodes and I couldn't do it. So no, no way am I doing this. Chad (37m 24s): No. We have movement kids. We have movements. Joel (37m 32s): That shit I got back in college. No way. That's a different, different log Chad (37m 36s): For that. Right? VONQ . One of the leading European recruitment technology companies announced today, the appointment of Arno Schaefer as CEO earlier this week, VONQ is stepping back. Although he will remain involved as a shareholder. If you remember kids, there was an acquisition slash majority shareholder swap with the private equity firm, capital D in October of 2019, VONQ acquired IGB last year. And it's obviously time to move capital D people into place. Chad (38m 19s): Not to mention, to be quite Frank. I think too many co-founders and CEOs of startups stick around way too long. Really good startup startup phase is so much different than running the business, when you're out of startup phase and you're in regular business mode. And I think this is probably a very smart move by a co-founder. Yeah. Joel (38m 44s): Yeah. I mean, these VONQ has been around since 2006, so they've had a little bit of time for this co-founder to get things right. He got a little bit of money last year or two years ago. Interestingly, it was an undisclosed Series A in 2014 that they got around the money. So basically the clock has ticked down on his regime and they bring in Arno Schaffer who looks like one of the bad guys from the original Diehard. That's always fun, but he's in there. He's apparently sold a company, a successful exit. Joel (39m 24s): The grownups are in town. Now, kids at VONQ , and they're gonna tighten this ship and they're hell or high water. They're gonna liquidate this thing in some form or fashion, or they're going to go, I don't know, on the public markets. Chad (39m 36s): Take that money. You still have stock in the company, relax, enjoy your kids, take a breath. And then who knows what's next? Joel (39m 46s): And who knows what's going to happen to Intello? Chad, they're a hot mess, aren't they? Chad (39m 50s): We received an anonymous message that said, quote, "the downward spiral is still on. Mark Landwer CRO just left to go to a competitor Phenom from my standpoint, if, and I don't think he was, I don't think Landwehr was actually there that long, was he? Joel (40m 9s): Six long months, Chad, a real investment in the hire real investment. Chad (40m 15s): Yeah. I mean, if you, if you get into, if you get into a position as C R O, and then leave to go to another startup as a VP there's obviously some C-suite issues. And we know that the CEO just changed over not even what a year ago? Joel (40m 35s): Yeah. That was a new CEO Robert Sao, if I'm pronouncing that rightly correctly, he won't come on the show to tell us how to pronounce his name, but he's always welcome if he wants to explain what's going on at Intello. So he's been there since May, 2020. So if my math is right about four months into it, he hired Mark. Mark had been at CareerBuilder for 13 years. I think he was at a staffing company before that. So definitely a veteran knew the industry knew what he was getting into by no means is a lightweight. And in six short months, he figured out this dumpster fire isn't for me, I was at CareerBuilder for 13 years. I don't need any more time doing that shit. Joel (41m 16s): I'm going to go jump over to Phenom. Chad (41m 18s): This is very telling, I mean, you don't leave this type of, of a position in six months. There there's obviously pressure from investors again and not to mention Danielle left late last year, as well, I mean the chief product officer. So, you know, they they've had some, some great talent leave. It sounds like it's winding down rather quickly. Joel (41m 44s): Which is really challenging for their social media department, because most of their social media is celebrating people's anniversaries. And eventually there won't be anybody to celebrate for their anniversary, so they've got to get a new social media strategy over at Intello pretty soon. Chad (41m 58s): Well, my, my strategy to celebrate is that this podcast is over and I can have a fucking beer. We out. Joel (42m 5s): We out. Chad (42m 6s): We out. OUTRO (42m 6s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (42m 51s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

It's part 2 of our interview with Torin Ellis, DEI consultant, risk mitigator, and truth teller! We continue to exorcise our demons while having some moped money laughs at the expense of Google, Kroger, and a very lame and lazy U.S. Department of Labor. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion force is strong in this one. LISTEN TO PART 1 Also, are you adding text recruiting in to your DEI engagement strategy? Maybe you should check out NEXXT while your listening to another great interview. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Chad (0s): We're back with the second half of our interview with Torin Ellis, the man, the myth, the legend. If you missed part one, it's called Exercising Our Demons. You can find it on Chadcheese.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's get into the show. Torin (17s): I think it costs them about $3 million to do that. That's the same moped gas money that Google just paid to settle that suit that they had. INTRO (29s): 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. Chad (59s): Have you seen since George Floyd, since you know, Ahmaud Arbery, Brianna Taylor, have you seen more white people starting to understand that sitting back on the bench, isn't not being a quote/unquote "racist" isn't enough. You have to be anti-racist you have to go after this and you have to voice this and actually focus on action. Torin (1m 21s): Yeah, absolutely. And again, I don't put it only on white men, you know, I absolutely feel like we need to put our voices out. You know, Superbowl Sunday was a couple of weeks ago and I put up a tweet, fuck the super bowl. And below that, I said, you know, I want to see justice for Brianna Taylor's family. I want to see Daniel Cameron, the AG removed from office. And I want to see a black coach hired in the NFL. I believe they hired one after that, but they had seven openings, seven! They had seven openings this past year. And you have to offensive coordinators that are black and neither one of them had had a conversation about being a head coach. But yet you would go hire a college coach. Torin (2m 4s): So I mean, the point to me is there are so many ways that we can make this thing better. It requires that all of us show up and I'm not, you know, critical of people who watch the Superbowl and enjoyed it. Fine, that's your thing. I'm not watching football. I'm not supportive of it, but that's just one of the actions that I take. Conversely, Chad, you mentioned being at a black lives matter rally. I've never been at a rally, so it's not that I'm better than, or any of that. It's not a comparison. This is not a competition. It's really about all of us being included in the conversation. And I don't care what microphone I hit. I'm never going to say that I don't want white men in the conversation. Torin (2m 48s): I'll certainly say every once in a while white men can just listen, it'll be good for you to listen and take in what's happening. But I'll never say that we should be doing this work excluding anybody's voice because that absolutely is counter to the inclusion and the representation that I talk about. The last thing that I'll say is I had a client reach out, well, a company reach out, wanted me to have a conversation for black history month. Cool. So I told them what we were going to talk about. I sent him to talk about the 1619 project. I'm going to talk about the book, The Color of Law. And I'm going to talk about how you can be a better, more inclusive individual in your organization. Those were the three points that I gave them. Torin (3m 29s): And then they sat on it for, I guess a week. Didn't know what the 1619 project was, so they went and did some research, came back to me and said, well, we prefer that you not talk about the 1619 project. We'd actually prefer that you don't bring up the book, the Color of Law, but you can talk about, you know, being a better and more inclusive employee. I said, well, I'd prefer if you not try to tell me what the fuck to talk about. Chad (3m 57s): You won't me to train, pretty much your training. Absolutely. And what they want and what they want to chat. All this was was let's be safe in conversation. Listen, people are hurting or people have been safe for too long. So all I'm saying to you is you got to trust me, if you are reaching out to me, you're reaching out because I know what I'm doing. You're reaching out off of the strength of a referral from somebody else who's already brought me in. So it's not as if this was just some random Google search. But, but the point is even if it was a random search, I'm not the dude that you're going to tell how to come into an organization and do the work that I've been doing for the better part of the last 20 years. Torin (4m 37s): There's absolutely no way you are going to put a silencer on the vocal authority that I have. You're not going to put a silencer on the experiences that I get to bring to the equation and share. You're not going to put a silencer on me, tapping into your audience, your employee base, share your experiences with me so that I can amplify them with other people, share those experiences with me. It may clash with my experience, but it'll be a beautiful piece of art. If we can have this conversation in front of everyone. So I'm not trying to necessarily plan it safe. I'm going to always show up professional. I'm going to always show up and be respectful, but I'm going to show up and be transparent, which is part of the reason why whenever I'm asked to speak, I don't send them slides. Torin (5m 23s): You know, I'm like, and when you get the slides, it's probably got like five words on it. Everything is up in the devil. And because I already know these folks are going to try to put all they can to clamp down, you know, how to kid, you know, releases and I'm not having it. Joel (5m 35s): You mentioned Torin. And this, this is a genuine question. You said that the rate on the Capitol was racist. Did I hear that correctly? Torin (5m 44s): You did. Joel (5m 44s): Okay. Help me understand in your, from your viewpoint, why it was racist? I mean, there was nothing in the words that they were talking about that was racist or racial and manner, it was, you know, it was "Stop the steal," it was, you know, "hang Mike Pence" or like me as a middle-aged white guy got no sort of, maybe there were undertones of racism just because of the whole Trump movement. But what about that rally was racist to you? Torin (6m 13s): Yeah, so actually that's a good call out on your part. And I wish that I had not described it in that particular way. It would have been one of the descriptors, because as you said, it was a portion of what we saw. I think the bigger portion, the bigger portion of what we saw was privilege. And that privilege will manifest if in fact for real, these individuals are not charged. So that really is what we saw. Joel (6m 38s): Okay. Torin (6m 39s): I think the racist piece for me is, you know, certainly the language that we heard, if you caught some of the video that had been circulating around the internet, I've always felt like the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism. I mean, absolutely, absolutely feel like it's a symbol of racism and you're not going to tell me anything different. So to see that flag hung up and or fly in from the rafters, from the Portico, from the balcony or the steps, if you will, that's a piece of racism. So my characterization in the beginning of it being racist? No, it being more of an act of privilege. Yes. 3 (7m 17s): Okay. Cause I, I certainly agree there were racist in the crowd and there was a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment as well. So I think that that was, that was on play as well. But I just, I wanted to understand your viewpoint on that and on why it was racist. So thank you for, thank you for clarifying that. Torin (7m 32s): Yeah, absolutely. 3 (7m 33s): You mentioned Rooney rule and the Superbowl and Chad and I talked about a story about Activision, I think last week and the AFL CIO is sort of pushing the Rooney rule on corporate America. I assume that you have thoughts on that. Whether it's a good thing to do, whether it will be effective or not. I think you'll probably agree that it's been mostly a failure in football. And if it's been a failure in football, then won't it most likely be a failure in corporate America. Torin (8m 2s): Yeah. I categorize the Rooney Rule, Murphy's Law and unconscious bias training all in the same sandbox as performative. Murphy's Law is a version of Rooney rule for the legal profession and of course, unconscious bias training is what it is. And I feel like all of those things are mere curtains of complacency and mediocrity. We just check the box, let's put, you know, whatever. And in the lineup, if you will just, just because we'll shut them up, we'll make them feel good. We'll appease them and we'll keep on moving. So I absolutely think that is a waste of time. I want to get to the point Joel, where individuals are simply saying to themselves, wow, we don't have individuals that have a disability on our staff and they could be doing this work right here. Torin (8m 49s): Or we don't have a person that we know of that is out on the spectrum of LGBTQ and they are absolutely qualified to be in our executive ranks. The person with that disability is qualified to be in our executive ranks. I want it to be to the point where folks are comfortable saying, we're missing something so let's be more intentional and about either how we are grooming them, how we are, including them in our succession, planning, how we are initially sourcing for them, how we are inspiring and developing them. What are we doing intentionally, period, just look around and see what's missing and let's put action in place to just simply be human. Torin (9m 32s): That that's all I'm asking. I don't, I don't want a job to be given to a black person or a black woman or a Muslim individual, I don't want the job to just simply be given to them, but I do want them to be fairly considered. I don't want it to be performative. Chad (9m 49s): So workforce composition in itself and pay transparency. I mean, we see the NFL's workforce composition. I mean, it's small. You can see it. It's fairly simple, much like CEOs, right? We finally have a, is it one or two black female CEOs? I think it's one, in the fortune 500 over 500, 1 in 500. And, and overall it's less than 10, I believe females. Torin (10m 14s): Yes. I think, I think black CEO's right now is under five. Chad (10m 18s): Yeah. So overall we see the tip of the iceberg, the NFL, they don't have any type of quote, unquote "compliance" or regulations that are actually holding them to anything that's entirely different than talent acquisition. The problem is that we can't actually see below the tip of the iceberg. The tip of the iceberg, we can already see as wrong as it is, whether it's CEOs, boards, et cetera, et cetera. Why aren't we focusing and really pressing the pedal to the metal on workforce composition transparency. So to everybody so that we know exactly what is underneath the tip of that iceberg. Torin (10m 56s): Chad, most organizations, you know, when they're not disclosing it it's because the penalty isn't high enough. Chad (11m 2s): Yeah. Torin (11m 2s): I don't mind paying the penalty. I'd rather pay the penalty than tell the true story of our workforce. They just did a study over in Europe of the financial services market. And it was mostly banks with a headquarter here in North America. And you know, it was amazing at the beginning of the article, it said many of them couldn't find the data, please. Like they know the data, they absolutely have access to the data, they don't want to release that information. I'd rather pay a penalty than to release that information, which is why I said in part a moment ago, succession plan is extremely important. If you want to see more underrepresented individuals as CEOs of fortune 500, Fortune 1000, Fortune 1500 organizations, you have to start placing them in where they have responsibility, pNL, responsibility, large, large sector, moving responsibility. Torin (12m 1s): You got to give them those challenges. And I find it fascinating, fascinating that we have some of the most incredible white men leading organizations, but yet they don't trust their own ability to develop other people because that's what it comes down to for me. Joel (12m 16s): Yeah. We talked about last week, Google had a lawsuit in terms of sexism in their interviewing process. And I think it was paying equity right, for women, and I think correct me if I'm wrong, Chad, the, the fine was I think $8 million, which for Google is, you know, couch cushion, you know, change. Torin (12m 33s): And I got to think it was $3.8 million. Joel (12m 36s): Okay, there you go. So 8 million, 3 million, you know, to Google's nothing. Like what do you think when you see stuff like that? Cause to me, I agree that the company would just rather pay a few lawyers and a fine than deal with the transparency of what's going on? Chad (12m 51s): First off, that was not a fine line. Let's clarify that real quick. That was back. That was a back-pay for those individuals who were, who weren't getting paid equitably, right? Number one. And number two, it was also a little bit of money for those individuals who didn't get hired into those positions. There was no fine. So therefore Google got off pretty much what happened. They committed a crime red handed and they had no fine. All they had to do was try to level the field back out and there was no fine put on top of it. I think that is where the biggest issue is. And Torin, you said there are rules, I totally appreciate that. Chad (13m 31s): But they, if they're not enforced and to exactly what Joel is pointing out, if they're not enforced and there aren't huge ramifications, fuck it I'm gonna do what I want. Torin (13m 41s): Yeah. That's all it comes down to. I mean, honestly. And so I think that, you know, just as we started the conversation around the events of January six, you have to hold people accountable in a way that makes them feel it. So we talked about the perp walk there, you don't Google and other organizations you should be paying. I mean, sizable fines where you like, look for real, I'm not going down that road. I'm not trying to deal with that right there. Let's go through and look at pay equity inside of our organization. Do what Salesforce did three years ago. They went through, I think it was 2018, it could have been 2019, they went through the organization, not once, not twice, three times. And I'm not suggesting or propping Salesforce up as a model organization for diversity and inclusion. Torin (14m 26s): But I am suggesting that they did it. They did a phenomenal job of saying, we need to forensically look at our compensation data across the entire organization. And they did it three times to make sure that women were on par with their male colleagues. I think it costs them about $3 million to do that. That's the same moped gas money that Google just paid to settle that suit, that they had. Joel (14m 53s): Mopeds. Torin (14m 54s): That's it, that's the little moped money, you know, like that's a small, small tank, $3.8 million. That's a best a baby tank. So, you know, I just feel like we can absolutely do what needs to be done. It just comes down to leadership saying enough is enough. Like my bonus doesn't need to be whatever my bonus is or has been in the past. My board of directors should be saying, you know, if that means that we need to pull back on some of this money that we get for coming to sit on the board or to sit on zoom calls, we'll leave some of that in th kitty. I mean, the point is it requires everybody and what I've seen, let me tell you what the second thing that pissed me off in February, more emphasis on GameStop and Robinhood, then racial inequality. Torin (15m 40s): And I said on Twitter, if we saw from the media, I'm only speaking from the media standpoint, not corporate America, but if I saw from the media as many posts around racism, around pay and equity, as I saw in a four or five day span around GameStop, where would we be in terms of progress in that regard? So it's all a matter of what people deem to be important and worthy. And for me, humanity is absolutely important and worthy. And does it sound, you know, Pollyannish and you know, does it make me sound soft and all that other stuff? I don't care, maybe it does, but I care about people. And if I, if it means that I have to sacrifice a little bit so that somebody else can have something or have access to it, then damn it I'm willing to make that sacrifice. Torin (16m 29s): Why am I fighting to park money offshore when I can be using that money to give my frontline workers more? So that I didn't last year, they were giving them a bit of a bonus because they were frontline, but took the shit away from them in June. Why? Joel (16m 45s): It's commercial time. Nexxt PROMO (16m 52s): We'll gt back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt Andy, if a company wants to actually come to Nexxt and utilize your database and target texting candidates, I mean, how does that actually work? Right? So, we have the software to provide it two different ways. If an employer has their own database of opted in text messages, whether it's through their ATS, we can text on their behalf or we have over eight and a half million users that have opted into our text messaging at this point. So we can use our own database. We could dissect it by obviously by geography, by function, any which way some in sometimes we'll even parse the resumes of the opted in people to target certifications. Nexxt PROMO (17m 36s): So we really can dive really deep if they want to hone in on, you know, just give me the best hundred candidates that I want to text message with and have a conversation back and forth with, versus going and saying, I need 30,000 retail people across the country. And that's more of you know, yes/no text messaging back and apply. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com. Chad (18m 13s): It's Showtime. Dude. And we only get one of these. I think we should, we should really focus on that statement. We only get one of these, one of these lives, the person to the left, the person to the right, it doesn't matter. And to that exact point, Kroger's CEO, we're talking about revenues of, I think it's like $122 billion in 2019. The CEO salary is $14 million plus I believe, and they shut down two locations in California because they were being forced to pay that additional hero pay of $4 per hour. Chad (18m 54s): Two locations. Torin (18m 55s): It reminds me of my man Dan Price. I can't remember his company out, in Seattle. Chad (19m 1s): Yup. Torin (19m 2s): The payroll company where he cut his salary and all of that stuff. Like he is savage on Twitter. You got to follow Dan Price. Chad (19m 9s): Everybody makes $70,000. That's right. Torin (19m 13s): Period, period. And they said that he would go out of business and all of that other stuff. He still thriving. He still thriving. He still has an enviable Instagram trail, as far as I'm concerned, skiing and you know, all going all cut down. So he, he ain't struggling. He's not struggling. Chad (19m 32s): Name of the company is Gravity Payments. Torin (19m 34s): Gravity Payments, Thank you. Thank you. Joel (19m 37s): Who, do you think should be the ones like, you know, who should be calling out Google and in that situation who should be calling out Kroger? Is it the media that's failing? Is it, I just, I think about the Lincoln Project and Trump and, you know, the Lincoln Project, their whole existence was to fuck with Trump and piss Trump off and be a thorn in his side and educate everyone on what was going on. And it feels like there should be a Lincoln Project for equality. Who should be the one calling out these companies and these individuals that are doing these things. Torin (20m 13s): PolicyLink does a great job of going through and evaluating organizations. And from time to time, they'll put out, you know, economic related data related reporting, whether it be around workplace culture, whether it be around compensation, it could be around GDP. So I think when we talk about who should call them out activist organizations, nonprofit community-based organizations that have the bandwidth and that acumen, that business acumen, they know how to grab the information they need. They can scrub it, put it in the way that's guide decimal and presentable to us, the audience. So I feel like are doing a good job. I think the people that are failing in this are shareholders of the respective companies and I think the media. Torin (20m 57s): Those are the two audiences that I think are probably more culpable in the disparity that we are looking at, like shareholders. They want the return, I get it, but I don't get it. So call that out. Like, you know, when you go to the shareholder meeting and say, look for real, we could do a better job. Think about what NASDAQ did back in December. NASDAQ said, we're going to, and they put this up in front of the FCC. I don't know if you all talked about it, but they are trying to make it a requirement that all 3000 of the companies listed on NASDAQ, do a better job around inclusion and representation. And they're giving them like a two to four year period. I believe it is to kind of get up to speed. We won't go into the detail. Torin (21m 37s): The point is, as a body, NASDAQ is saying, we want different from organizations that are going to be listed. That's the kind of call out that I want. So now we know these organizations, if this gets approved, they'll act and show a little bit differently. So I would need shareholders to say, you know what enough is enough? Capitalism is not bigger than humanity and you are absolutely right, Joel, when you say, is it the media? Yes, indeed, it's the media, but it's around bandwidth. You know, when you probably look in newsrooms all across the country, there are, I dunno, handful of business related reporters, you know, more people covering sports and entertainment, you know, not enough covering business. Torin (22m 17s): So I just think that we need more people to shift their focus around what's important. Chad (22m 21s): You want Kroger to change their ways have people stopped shopping at Kroger. Torin (22m 25s): Well, that's one thing, but I think you forgot one entity Torin the Department of Labor, the government. That's what the government is here for to protect the people. So overall I think the Department of Labor, when they are sending these messages to Google with $3.8 million, that's just saying, here's a slap on the wrist, continue doing what you're doing. The Department of Labor overall, if they provided huge fines, not just the level playing field, but actual fines, huge fines, then these organizations would change the behavior, but they won't. I agree. I agree. No, that's a good call out. I agree. And again, that, that just goes back to, you know, how some of these regulatory agencies have shown up and operate it and it questions it, and it supports the question that some, you know, from a political standpoint, when they take the position of government is useless or we don't need more government. Torin (23m 24s): I can understand those arguments, which is in part why once again, I tend to not have the conversations around politics because I see the fault on both sides. I understand it's hard work. It's challenging. It's nuanced. I get it. But you know, some things are really kind of cut and dry and the Department of Labor could absolutely do a better job of holding these organizations accountable. Joel (23m 46s): We talked about corporations and government. And I'm curious about your perspective on the two in each one's role. From my perspective, it seems like corporate America is doing more than government. I know that we just trashed a couple of companies, but a few examples I can think of off the top of my head are, you know, the CEO of Netflix giving I think $120 million to historically black owned colleges. Myriad of companies giving you no money to black entrepreneurs. Google for one I know recently, and I know we just trashed them, but they have in their shopping search, now they indicate whether someone is a black owned business or not. What are your thoughts on corporate America's role in equality and is what they're doing, working or not? Torin (24m 31s): I think it's too early to say what they're doing is working, because they really, for the most part just stepped up in 2020. So I don't want to put a verdict out, but I do appreciate that. I'm not begrudging the start because we need the start. I love Apple. Apple's most recent decoration, they allocated a hundred million dollars to social impact initiatives. And in that announcement, they use the word enduring and they said that their pledge would be enduring until, and I can't remember the rest of it. It was phrased in a beautiful way, but it simply simply said we're committed. So when I think about, and slight correction, Netflix gave a hundred million dollars to black banks. Torin (25m 13s): They deposited money in black banks and community-based banks. And so I love these very large shows of support, but I also appreciate the smaller shows of support, like leadership, being willing to have uncomfortable conversations in their organization, like leadership, being able to say, we're going to hold you all accountable for some degree of responsibility around, you know, diverse interview slates and promoting black and brown employees and people with disabilities and other. I believe in small steps, like saying on a performance evaluation, everyone has something to do with diversity and inclusion. Like even if you are in the mail room, if you are a delivery driver, there's a question on your performance evaluation. Torin (25m 57s): What have you contributed to what we said is important as an organization? If you contributed something awesome. We want to capture that if you didn't, that's cool. We want to be able to capture that as well. And I'm not suggesting that it impedes you from being able to move, but it shows every employee in the organization, five employees, 500 employees, 50,000 employees or larger, DNI is important and everyone's being measured on such. So that's what I want to see. I love the big amounts of money. I love the grand statements, but so much of this work should be happening behind the curtain. And we should never even know about it. Chad (26m 35s): That note Torin. Thanks. Thanks for joining, for again, having the challenging conversations that we like to have, whether we're discussing bantering, fighting, it's always fun, no matter what, but we appreciate you taking the time. If somebody wants to find out more about you, or maybe wants to have you come in and do little work for them, where would they find you? Torin (26m 58s): Across the web @TorinEllis. That being social media, as well as my website, Torinellis.com. And again, I just appreciate the both of you for making space for Black History Month, bringing voices on that perhaps your audience may not be familiar with, and I encourage each and every one of you to also subscribe to CrazyAndTheKing.com and listen to the conversations that Julie and I have as we try to make diversity and inclusion digestible and give you a bit of proximity to what's happening in the lives of others from week to week. Chad (27m 34s): Amen. Joel (27m 34s): Our pleasure. Chad (27m 35s): Excellent Joel. Well, there's another one in the books. Joel (27m 39s): I was still so tired after Torin, I need a nap. Chad (27m 43s): We out. Joel (27m 44s): We out. OUTRO (28m 40s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Maintaining a platform with decades of unused features, or multiple features providing the same end to a means, or a pile of feature dropdowns leading to a totally unusable system is leading indicators you possibly reside in "Feature Hell". A well-designed, user-friendly ATS is a little like trying to find Sasquatch. It apparently exists, but really hard to find. Well, lucky for you, Chad & Cheese have nabbed Bigfoot, metaphorically that is. Meet Lital Sherman, Head of Experience Design at PageUp, who agreed to sit down with the boys for a few and chat applicant tracking design dos and don'ts. Dig into testing, mobile, and feature hell with us, won't you? Matching candidates to jobs shouldn't be Hell either, which is why you need Sovren as your parsing and matching partner. Visit Sovren.com, tell them Chad & Cheese sent you and to send us more bourbon. We're almost out! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. 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 (19s): Oh yeah. Good day, mate. We have another Australian on the line because, well, God damn it, that's happy hour in the U S and Chad and I are fully drunk. Welcome everybody to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my companion partner. Handmade, homemade Chad Sowash. Chad (41s): Hello! Joel (42s): Today is Lital Sherman Head of Experience Design at PageUp a popular applicant tracking system because they're well-known for their design out there and Australia. Let's all welcome to the show. Good to have you. Chad (56s): Now that, that is one heck of a title, head of experience design I wouldn't even know who the hell you report to at that point. Are you floating out there? Who do you report to? Lital (1m 9s): That is really a good question. So I report to the CIO and hello by the way guys. And basically our department called the product, right? So the CIO is not the Chief Product Officer. He is the CIO, so he managed product, design, and engineering. So all of us were work together. And the good thing about it is that I think traditionally design is they reported into marketing or into product. So head of PR, head of design or design managers were reporting into the head of product, but at Page Up, Head of Product, Head of Design and Head of Technology are all kind of equal. Lital (1m 52s): So we have equal voice. And, you know, we argue a lot every day, which is awesome. Joel (1m 57s): Lovely, lovely. Lital (1m 59s): And as an Israeli, I always win. Chad (2m 2s): Take it by force. Always taking it by force. Lital (2m 9s): Just joking. Chad (2m 10s): And that is interesting because it sounds like you have to be in a, more of a collaborative model in that kind of a setup. Lital (2m 16s): Exactly. Yes. Yes. So we actually done kind of is our restructure transformation about a year and a half ago. And what we've done, there is really kind of to change the way our product development teams are working, the way they're working, the way they solve problem to customers and also the structure of those teams. So every team is being led by what we call the three amigo or the trio is probably a more known term, which is, Chad (2m 47s): I love it! Lital (2m 48s): No I'm serious, which is a Senior Product Manager, a Senior UX Designer and a Senior Tech Lead. So they are leading the teams one of them obviously have their own responsibilities, but together they basically make all this strategic decisions for the team then to operate on those things. Chad (3m 8s): Have you seen that movie though, the Three Amigos, do you know what the reference was? Lital (3m 15s): I don't know. I'm not sure. Joel (3m 18s): She's much younger than you are by the way Chad. Lital (3m 22s): I'm not sure. Joel (3m 23s): So Lital, your background is not, you know, rooted in HR. You've worked in consumer sites and sort of traditional sexier design projects. I got to know what was your first impression? I can't think of anything less sexy than an applicant tracking system. Like what was your first impression? What was the hook that got you into this industry? Like talk about that. Cause I'm mesmerized. Lital (3m 51s): Yes. Well, I have to say, I haven't seen ATS that is sexy or good looking or has a delightful experience. So yes, that is not, but for me, honestly, I will choose a role because of the culture of the company, way more because of the product itself. And I love going into, you know, challenging roles when you see that something is actually not so great. And I really have a really great impact that I can, you know, support the company. Joel (4m 25s): Yeah. Were there a few, Oh my God. Moments, like in terms of design when you looked at these ATS and said, I cannot believe that you're doing this, this and this. Absolutely. Is there a one or two that stand out? Lital (4m 37s): Because, you know, as a job seeker in the past, probably the apply. So the application system for candidates is just horrific with every ATS that I've seen, ever. And I applied for a lot of jobs in the past when I was looking for jobs, but also I applied for jobs just to see how competitors are operating. And they're all pretty crappy, you know, and that's really tactical with the candidate experience. How can we make it better? Why do we need all this information, that we ask for candidates? How can we make it just easier for people to use and apply quickly to a job? When, you know, usually when someone is looking for a job, they will apply to 20, 30, a hundred jobs sometime, how can we just make it a little bit better? Lital (5m 22s): But for me, I really, it was a really good opportunity to join a company that is working on something completely new. I like my challenges and I like moving around the industries. I don't like to stay in one industry and say, Oh, I know everything here, learning new stuff. And B2B was also new to me. So, you know, working with businesses, it is the way more challenging than working with consumers, but I love it. It's interesting. It is honestly interesting. Chad (5m 50s): Basic expectations and HR, are just HR, talent acquisition, the actual recruiting process. There they are met because it's not quick. It always asks me to create an account when there's no reason I need to create a goddamned account, it doesn't ask me for the same info or it does. It continues to ask me for the same info over and over and over. It takes 10 to 20 minutes and it sends me into a black hole. So the, the whole experience like defies the gravity of just basic expectations. So I can see why this would be kind of like an allure to you because there are so much that you could fix. Chad (6m 34s): There are so many challenges, but the question is, why is it that way in the first place? Lital (6m 39s): Well, I can tell you what, just from what I know. So traditionally, you know, those businesses exist for many, many years and businesses. Like most businesses are being, you know, developed and managed by engineers and sorry, I love engineers, but to be honest, they don't really care about experiences or they don't have the knowledge to design a good experience. Most, most companies, you know, they start especially B2B, adding more and more and more and more and more features because clients are requesting those features. So they have a backlog and a list of all the features that all those, you know, let's say 20 customers at the beginning are requesting and I get what they do that right? Chad (7m 21s): To make money? Lital (7m 22s): Yeah, exactly. And they want to sell it because you know, it's okay, they'll pay for it. Also, let's just add another feature and another feature and another feature and another feature. And sometime you will have, you know, three ways to do the same task. It's just confusing. And then a user will see the system and like, okay, I don't know what I need to do now, do I need to use this feature or this feature, you know, to complete the same test. So this is a lot to know what we call a feature hell or experience rot. When you basically have no idea, what is the next step that you need to do, which is crazy. Now PageUp, like, you know, other ATSs exists for the company exist for 22 years, the ATS exists for something like 17 years. Lital (8m 6s): So, you know, of course we have a lot of kind of tech death and legacy systems that, you know, people added more and more features over time. My job with my team is really to fix it. So to find those opportunities of where we see the most value for customers or for the users, what can we change or remove or add, you know, whatever feature or we just completely redesigned the experience to give them a much better experience, because it's really all about the experience, right? If people are not using the system because they want to use the system, okay. Chad (8m 42s): Some companies that are pliable and they'll allow that, but this accumulation of all of these, these features or these questions are just this big ball of a massive years of condensing features into a which creates just a horrible experience overall. It's like going into a room where you just go ahead and just throw everything instead of organizing it or getting rid of stuff. Right? So we become feature hoarders. The question is, do you talk to companies, company by company to try to help them with their actual design? Or is this more of a strategic effort from the top down to create a better experience for all organizations? Chad (9m 28s): And then how do you manage that from a client standpoint? Lital (9m 32s): Yeah. So what do I do? I work more with a team on the strategy. So, you know, we identify those opportunities and sit, and then we say, okay, we'll really need to fix it to all of our customers. Like we have about 400 plus customers. We can't work with each one of them individually and design their own experience because, you know, it's not sustainable. It's not going to work. So for us, for the product design team is really about identifying those opportunities and obviously giving some flexibility to the clients so they can, you know, bring their own templates, create their own workflow, whatever they want to do within the boundaries that we are giving them. Lital (10m 15s): Now, of course not every customer will be happy when you change a feature. That's just to given people don't like changes, so we need to work with them on that. And this is where we work with our customer success managers, our account executive, our support team and so on. So they can support those, those clients and take them through the journey of this is what we change, this is the reason why we changed it, give it a go, give us your feedback. So we work a lot with customers in my team, but it's more about interviewing them, really understanding, you know, their needs, their expectations. We adopted what we call jobs to be done. I didn't know if you ever heard about that, but this is a way to discover and really understand, you know, the core job that the customers are trying to get done when they're using a product or assist them or a service. Lital (11m 8s): And they'll just say yes to every feature request. And obviously in our industry, customers will request features all the time because this is what they think they need. And, but sometimes the feature that they're asking for is not really the best solution for the problem. So we are there to identify where the problem is and to identify the top problems for the majority of our clients, and then to solve it in the best way possible. Joel (11m 37s): You talk about feedback from clients, and that's obviously an important piece of it. I'm curious about the testing side of things, because I think most companies or ATSs in general in terms of testing, you know, maybe they give it to a couple of people in the office or the engineers kind of QA. But I think the best way to do it is to actually have people that are really, you know, 30,000 feet away from the product and bring them in and say, okay, how do you do this and do this and give them instruction, talk about how you test new features and new designs before you roll them out to the public. Lital (12m 12s): Yes. So we do what we call usability testing. So usability testing is really bringing people and, you know, the users that we expect to use a system and share the prototype. So it's all about prototype. It's not coded yet, the solution is not coded cause once it's coded, it's really hard to change it and you basically give them a task. You don't tell them what to do, you just tell them, okay, well, you know, change the status of five candidates from this to this, go ahead, show me how you do that. You also tell them, obviously that everything that they do is absolutely a great, and we're not testing them, we're testing our solution and please explain to us what you do. Lital (12m 53s): So really want to understand their thinking and they're habits of how they complete tasks. So this is one thing, and also we have that, you know, what we call alpha release and beta release when we put solutions in front of a subset of users and we basically tell them, okay, go ahead, have a play with that and tell us what you think. So we have there, kind of a window for them to give us their feedback. And this is really helpful because sometimes what we think and what we, you know, working at PageUp. So it doesn't matter who you are and to your point before when we test it internally and for us, it's absolutely amazing and awesome. It really doesn't mean that the user will like it or will understand what we're trying to do. Joel (13m 35s): You triggered something and I didn't even think about like, so you're testing for both the customer side as well as the job seeker side, correct? Yes. What percentage is which, which is more important, is it equally distributed on the customer side? Like, do you randomly select customers to test? Talk about that process. Lital (13m 53s): You know, we have different what we call archetypes also of customers. So it's not just about the industry, but also those people themselves, what are their roles and what are their jobs to be done? So we have the recruiter, we have the hiring manager, we have the supervisor, we have the buyer as well. We are doing discovery with all of them, and it depends on what we're trying to achieve. So with a buyer, obviously we want to see if someone will buy our new product. For example, we have some features or some solutions that are just for hiring managers, for example. So I don't want to get the feedback from the super user on what they think their hiring managers need. Lital (14m 33s): I want to get the perspective of the actual hiring manager and they rarely use the system. So for them to use a new feature or an existing feature is much harder than someone that is in the system on a day-to-day basis. And their expectation will be completely different. They want something super quick. They just want to complete the task as soon as they can, they don't want to go somewhere and start thinking, okay, okay, why do I need to do here? So that will be different as well. So with the percentage and everything, it totally depends on the feature that we, or the product or, you know, what the problems that we're trying to solve if it's around the hiring managers. So we will recruit hiring managers to, you know, for interview and usability test. Lital (15m 16s): And if it's for recorders, we'll do it for the recorders. If it's for candidates, we'll do it for candidates and so on. Sovren (15m 22s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. Chad (16m 24s): It's show time. So when you're talking about getting into feature hell, which is the years and years of piling features on top of features, and you have recruiters like a handful of recruiters who say they like certain features, and then obviously the sales people have these anecdotal instances in which, Hey, you can't take that feature away because my client or our clients will leave us. And that scares the shit out of everybody because that's that's revenue. Do you guys do any type of internal, I guess I would say analytics on the usage of all of these features to be able to demonstrate internally and externally why you're making certain changes? Chad (17m 6s): Not just because you wanted to, but from a usability standpoint, it just made sense. Lital (17m 12s): Yes, yes, absolutely. So we use data in pretty much everything. We will use the kind of product usage data, the customer satisfaction on different experiences and also the qualitative data that is more about the interviews that we do. And we do interviews all the time with customers. We do what we call ongoing or continuous discovery. So we always want to reach out to customers and to have one-on-one interview with them. And this will be my team doing that. So the, the designers or our UX research in the team will do that. And it's really more about understanding why. All right. So it's all about the why, why are you trying to do something? Lital (17m 52s): Why are you trying to, you know, change Chad (17m 55s): To understand the problem is really the key, right? Lital (17m 58s): Exactly. Yeah. And, and you know what I said before that, if, for example, you have three different features that are doing the same thing. You want to look at the data and understand which one of those features is being mostly used. And also why, why, why the other features are not being used. And if they're not being used, maybe because, you know, one customer requested in the past, but then, you know, you have two customers using it. So we don't want to keep it there. Why? Because you need to maintain the future. And also it create, you know, the future hell. So how can we remove this feature? And if you have someone, you know, scream and say, no, we can't do that. So, you know, we just need to have a conversation and we work really well in collaboration and say, okay, let's reach out to the customer and see if we can change their behavior and move them from this feature to another feature? Lital (18m 49s): Yeah. And it happens a lot, like, you know, changing experiences is not easy, but, but it can be done. Joel (18m 54s): Well, we see a ton of fluff in branding, you know? So does it, does a system really need to be cosmetically appealing to be more delightful or to provide a much better experience? Lital (19m 9s): It will be nice for it to be, you know, pretty, but I don't think that's the most important thing. It should be functional. It should be easy. It should be, it should make sense. I need to go slower and say, okay, this is exactly what I need to do here. Whatever amount of steps that I need to take, but I know exactly, you know, what are the steps that I need to take and what is the experience? And I need to say that when I completed a task, I want to get something from this system, right? Like a confirmation, a success match message or something yet, your task has been completed. Great, awesome. That's what I need. Joel (19m 44s): So what's more important to be intuitive or to be beautiful? Lital (19m 48s): Oh, intuitive, by far. Beauty is a delight, you know, add to experience this, but it's really all about the usability of, you know, of the experience, of the feature. Joel (20m 3s): And lucky for me, I'm both. Alright Lital, you mentioned data, and I'm curious about sort of the variety of platforms that are being used to search for jobs. And we talk to a lot of people that, that highlight mobile as a way that a lot of job seekers, and I assume customers as well are interacting with the site. So talk about design for mobile. What sort of focuses do you have? Are you looking at watch design and wearables? And most importantly, when is the PageUp virtual reality product coming to market? Chad (20m 40s): Never. Lital (20m 41s): To your last question, you know, so-and-so in any day now. But with wearable, no, we're not doing that yet. You know, that's kind of a gimmick, but I don't know if it's really relevant to watch. We do. However, with mobile, yes. We design mobile first with every, you know, new feature, new products that we're designing now, it always has to be responsive, mobile, friendly, accessible, usable. We have a design system, we have guidelines. We have all, we have all of that. So we don't need to think about any new feature, you know, to re-design it from scratch. We already have all those components in a library. Lital (21m 23s): So basically a designer or a developer can just grab those components from the design system and just create something that will be just, you know, great. Joel (21m 34s): What kind of traffic numbers are we seeing on mobile versus desktop? And I know you have a variety of customers. You have a lot of colleges, I know that you work with here in the States. So that's certainly a, a unique audience, I assume much younger in terms of searching for jobs in many cases. So data-wise, what are you seeing in terms of mobile versus others? And as far as I can see, you don't have a native mobile presence. So there's no iOS app, no Android app was at a decision based on data, or is that something that'll be coming for the customer side of things? Lital (22m 8s): We have two apps for the learning and performance models that we have, but we don't have for the recruitment, I would say with the admins, so recruiters. And so, and that the vast majority are doing it on a desktop. So, you know, it's kind of a complicated system. It will be very difficult to, you know, to do what they need to do on their mobile. And also I would expect that most HR people will have a computer so they can, that they can work with. It will be more for the candidates, but that's a tricky question for you, the numbers. Lital (22m 48s): And honestly, I have to say that I'm not sure, but it is increasing that, you know, more and more candidates obviously are applying via the mobile and looking at offers, accepting offers, reviewing them and so on a buttons. Chad (23m 0s): Well, on the high volume side of the house, I would assume that, and I'm not sure if PageUp is working with a bunch of high volume types of customers or not, but I would assume, and we're seeing this at least here in the States that not just for the candidates, because they really need to get through the application process fast, but also for those managers who are looking to hire having mobile apps to make their process much quicker as well. Do you guys work with high volume that much, or is it really just more steady corporates, white collar types of positions that you guys are, or at least designing for. Lital (23m 41s): We have a mix? So we do have high volume, let's say, especially in retail and so on. And that's exactly right. We have, you know, store managers, for example, they don't necessarily have a computer. So they usually use tablets or their mobile phone. So everything with the hiring managers, so hiring manager experience will be slightly different mostly than the recruiter experience. So everything that we do is mobile friendly and mobile first, but I would say that it's, especially, we do it for hiring managers and candidates. Chad (24m 18s): Okay. So quick question, I'm always hearing that experience equals speed. So if you have speed, then you have great experience. Is that the case? Is that, is that something that you think about in design is always speed or is it really case by case? Lital (24m 36s): So I don't agree with the statement. I don't think that speed and experienced are equal. I think it totally depends on what you're trying to achieve here. And also, what do you mean by speed? So speed of the system performance of the system. Yes. Sure. Yep. You want to, you want it to be, to be quick and fast, but to know from someone that is using the system, I would say, overall, if you look at, the ultimate job to be done, yeah, you want to be quicker and more efficient in your decision-making when you know, you choose a candidate and hire them and so on, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to, you know, to complete a task in three steps. That's, you know, you can't do that and I disagree with this rule, cause I heard that like, everything needs to be three to three steps. Lital (25m 23s): Sometimes something will be, you know, five or seven steps, but it will be better because you added a step that just makes sense! Because you need to do, you know, to drive them, to add an additional layer of whatever. You know, you want to go here or you want to go there, or you want to give them those options. You want to be very clear and I think this is more important. You want it to be usable. You want it to be easy and clear on exactly what you're doing and when you use those complicated systems, sometime you will just get lost. You're not sure, like, okay, I've never seen this screen before in my life. What do I need to do here? You know, I'm not sure about it. Lital (26m 4s): Being able to complete a task in whatever time that you need to complete the task, that's much more important than speed. And sometimes, you know, people need to review applicant applications, and you know, it will take them days to do that. So it's more about the ease of use, than anything else. Chad (26m 20s): It's all about the flow. Lital (26m 22s): Exactly. Joel (26m 23s): Lital Sherman, everybody from PageUp, let's all for our listeners who want to learn more about you or PageUp, where do they go? Lital (26m 32s): So if you want to learn about PageUp, visit our website PageUpPeople.com. And if you want to learn about me, I'm on LinkedIn Lital Sherman in Australia. I'm the only one in Australia, very happy about that. So yeah. Feel free to reach out to me and say, Hello! Chad (26m 50s): Excellent. Thanks for coming on. Joel (26m 51s): Put one on the Bar-b! Fosters, we out. Chad (26m 53s): We out. Lital (26m 54s): Thanks guys. OUTRO (27m 13s): This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast, subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit Chadandcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome.

Crazy shit has been going down, right? What we need right now is a good exorcism but it's so damned hard to allow your demons out for everyone to see, let alone exorcise them. If you live in the U.S. or have been watching the events over the past four years the demons are out, but not even close to exorcised. The Chad & Cheese sit down with Torin Ellis for a series of very uncomfortable conversations that need to happen. If you can't handle truth tellin' this interview with Torin Ellis might be too much for you, although it is something we all need. Sit back, listen, tweet, and do whatever it takes to unload as we all disagree, yet try to find our way back to common ground. This Chad and Cheese counseling session is powered by Sovren, AI so smart it doesn't need this kind of drama. Listen to episode 2. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Chad (0s): If you can't handle truth-telling this interview with Torin Ellis might be too much for you. Although it is something we all need. Sit back, listen, tweet, and do whatever it takes to unload as we all disagree yet, try to find our way back to common ground. This Chad and Cheese counseling session is powered by Sovren AI so smart it doesn't need this kind of drama. Sovren (27s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. INTRO (1m 30s): 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 (1m 50s): Oh yeah. Checking in with Torin Ellis on the show, everybody. Hey, how's it going? You were listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast as usual. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my faithful cohost Chad Sowash and today you asked for it by back by popular demand, Torin Ellis diversity strategist and risk mitigation, professional Torin. Welcome back to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Torin (2m 19s): I'm just, I'm I'm wondering how popular was the demand has been like since September of 2018, like shit three years? Joel (2m 29s): Not much has happened since then. Torin (2m 30s): It must only been like three people that said, you know, bring that kid back, I wanna here his voice again, but you know, that's when you all were a little newer in your podcasting chops and so you got more listeners now, so it's all good. Chad (2m 46s): Dude, dude, we, we actually had a video with you in London last year. I think you're forgetting that we actually saw each other. Torin (2m 55s): Nope, Nope. That was July of 2019. You are actually forgetting. So see, look how long ago that was. That's almost 18 months ago. Chad (3m 6s): That's a while. Why haven't you come back onto Torin? Torin (3m 9s): Well, I would say that, you know, I think life has been a little bit different. First and foremost absolutely appreciate the both of you just, you know, thank you for spending a couple of moments with the voice of mine and what it is that I have to do to try to contribute. I would say that part of the reason why I hadn't been on is, you know, one of you had an incredible idea of hooking me up with this woman out of Indiana, by the name of Julie Sowash and said, you know, you should have a podcast around diversity and inclusion. And at the very same time, I was starting a show on Sirius XM. So literally within like days of one another, I'm launching a show on a syndicated platform, a podcast, trying to grow both of those audiences. Torin (3m 54s): So we've been working for a little bit. Joel (3m 57s): So you've been, you've blown up since meeting us is basically what you're saying. Torin (4m 0s): And you had something to do with it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be right to not give attribution to a Chad and Cheese. Like literally I remember standing in London at that letter, having that conversation, we are all probably overdressed. Well, at least I know I was overdressed. I had on chinos and a button down shirt. Joel (4m 23s): It was hot as shit. Torin (4m 25s): You know, so certainly I was the one who was probably out of place if you will, but I absolutely appreciate the idea and it really has been, you know, Julia and I are now in our third year, speaking of which, congratulations, pre congratulations to you all for approaching yet another anniversary, Chad (4m 45s): It is four years. Joel (4m 46s): Almost almost four years, four years is when most marriages end in divorce, right? Fourth year is when the shit hits the fan. Chad (4m 54s): It's the itch. And not to mention, I don't think Joel gets any credit for Crazy and the King. I mean, come the fuck on. I mean, seriously? Torin (5m 8s): There's enough love to spread around the country and Western. Joel (5m 17s): So you're 220, 221, whatever. Chad (5m 19s): Joel And I thought that, you know, a weekly podcast, we would probably be hard to find enough content to have a weekly podcast going. And we were incredibly wrong. I mean, we, hell we probably do two to three podcasts a week now! What about you guys? I mean, cause you're even more focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, do you find it hard? And I would say probably over the last four years or so, it hasn't been that hard, but have you found it hard to find topics that you really want to focus on and talk about? Torin (5m 52s): No, I haven't. I think the harder part for me is trying to nuance some of the topics because a lot of the content, you know, when we are looking at stories of workplace aggression and bias and you know, harassment, when we are looking at those types of stories and certainly we look at positive stories as well, around culture, around inclusion, around representation, equity. But when you're looking at these stories and you're dissecting them, I find myself challenged with not with trying to not sound like the nightly news. Like think about the nightly news in any alpha city that, you know, in the US you know, a Baltimore, DC, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, the nightly news news tends to start with something negative tends to be something around crime and more often than not, it tends to have a black or Brown face on it. Torin (6m 48s): And so I try not to fetishize on the topics that we have sounded as if I'm being racial, being angry, being one sided. So that's the bigger challenge for me. How do we pull the story and find something that's educational, something that's actionable, that we can share with our listeners so it doesn't come across as if we are only complaining each and every week. Joel (7m 12s): If it bleeds, it leads baby. So I assume you're pretty bummed that Trump is no longer in office and that the Dems are in control that you won't have enough news or do you think we'll still be talking about issues that we have the last four years? Torin (7m 25s): No, I think, you know, again, no more often than not on the show, Julie is the one who will address things that are political. I tend to stay away from the political topics only because I'm not a big fan of politics in the sense of, I understand where it sits in our, you know, life and I get it. Joel (7m 47s): What were you thinking during the Capitol riot? I mean, I know you're not, you want to stay away from politics, but I think everyone, regardless of what they focus on, had an opinion as they watch that happen? Torin (7m 57s): I have a very strong opinion I'm infuriated. And when I think about us being in black history month, you know, you think about what folks in the, I mean, pick a decade, what black people had to deal with in the twenties or the thirties. What they had to deal with in the fifties and the sixties, when they were building that civil rights era. What we've had to deal with over the last 20 years. And we still want to say that we've had progress. Think about that. Now compare what they went through in the fifties, in the sixties with politicians saying that they are afraid to vote their character, that they are afraid to vote for impeachment, that they are afraid to speak negatively about what happened on the sixth, because people may have threatened members of their family. Torin (8m 43s): Like how much of a coward are you? And so when you asked me, how do I feel? First and foremost, I was angry on the sixth when it was unfolding. And I'm even more angry now, knowing that people lost their life following an incompetent and ill equipped leader, that you are still propping up to be a leader, in my opinion, unwilling, to find every possible measure, to get those lawmakers out of politics that had something to do with it. And I honestly believe Joel, that that's part of the reason why the Republicans are reticent around having this trial and having this discussion because they don't want it to come to light, what complicitness they had in that. Torin (9m 29s): Whether it be giving people, the tours, as some have said a day or two before the insurrection happened, whether it be having inflammatory commentary on their social media, which contributed to the insurrection that we saw, whatever their contribution was to January 6th, I feel like they should be held accountable. And you can miss me with the bullshit around, you know, well, it's the same as black lives matter. No, it's not Joel (9m 57s): To paraphrase the great Rick James, power's a hell of a drug, right? Torin (10m 2s): Absolutely. Joel (10m 3s): So these, these folks that have been arrested, if they don't go to jail or come to justice, what are your thoughts? If that comes to light? Torin (10m 14s): My thought is just I'm infuriated again, it is, to me, I don't want to make it seem like what they did is worth worse than, you know, rape or murder or some of the other felonies or crimes that could be committed. But the symbolism of the crime that they committed, it is like the pinnacle. I mean, I don't know if you can create a more visible, more symbolic. I just don't know if you can do anything that resonates and vibrates around the world more than what we saw on January 6th. Like I thought about Bernie Madoff like as big as that was. I mean, I thought I even thought about 9/11. Torin (10m 54s): Like I actually thought about 9/11. And I said, you know, this is like one of these events where we will absolutely never forget what was going on. You won't remember one of those riots from last summer for black lives matter, but you will never forget the visual that we saw on January 6th. So when you asked, how do I feel about some of them, many of them perhaps not being convicted of the crime that they committed, knowing that people lost their life that's infuriating to me for real well. You know what, Joel, you asked me how I felt. How'd you feel? Joel (11m 32s): I think I went from like amusement and then it quickly turned into Holy shit. When I found out that they were going into the Capitol, that they were trying to locate folks and let me, let me sort of set the table on this. I went, I went to the grocery store and I came back and my wife was like, Oh my God, they're raiding in the Capitol. And my wife tends to be little bit prone to hyperbole, right? So I'm like, okay, they're raiding the Capitol, whatever. So I turn it on and I see flags and Trump, I'm like, Oh my God, these idiots are like outside the Capitol. And then that turned into they're breaking windows. They're going into the Capitol. They're ripping up shit. And then enventually found out they're killing people and hurting people and someone got shot. Joel (12m 17s): So it quickly turned into sort of a disbelief. And I guess a numbness, you mentioned 9/11. And I think there was a similar feeling as the Towers are going down of thinking, I don't really know what to think. I need to digest this for a little bit to really truly think about what happened. It's one of the worst things, that's happened to our Republic. And I feel like the Republic was pushed to the limit for the most part, it held. I think the immunities kicked in and so far, you know, I think we're, we're getting away from Trumpism. Joel (12m 57s): I think that the lie that he told those folks, they're finally understanding that they were led by a false prophet and that they'll slowly start to dislodge their trust in him and their loyalty in him. But it was a cult sort of situation. I was shocked that the amount of security was so low. And one of the things that when that came through my head, was if this had been a black lives matter protest, or, you know, if the black lives matter folks were in town, there would have been a military style presence around the Capitol. Chad (13m 31s): So it was before yeah, it was before. Joel (13m 34s): Yup. So to me, I thought, why, you know, why is shit so messed up that, you know, millions of people were supposed to come listen to the president and they knew what was going to be spewed at a Trump rally. Why there wasn't security there? So, you know, a lot of questions came into, came into play, but a lot of it for me initially was just, I was, I was gobsmacked and I've been digesting it. I hope those folks go to jail. I hope they come to justice. Otherwise it's going to just feel like the same old, same old, and nothing's going to be done. And I actually, Chad (14m 6s): Oh, before we get into that, you talk about immunities working in and how can you say that the immunities are actually coming in when we don't even know if this asshole is going to be convicted or not. We don't even know if these assholes who stormed the capital are going to be thrown in jail and actually being held accountable for something that they were responsible for, that they actually did. I do not believe. And I'm not going to fucking white coat this fucking shit and say that, Oh, everything is fine. The Republic is fine. Bullshit. We need to hold individuals accountable and set precedent. If we don't do that, the immunities have not fucking kicked in. Torin (14m 47s): Let me say Chad, you know, it's not fine. Because again, if that were to happen at said, logistics company or said hospitality company or said restaurant, and I can go down the list, if that were to happen at any of them, we'd have two phrases forward. We'd say someone or some someone's went postal, that's number one. And number two, it'd be all over the nightly news. And of course they would be held accountable especially if it were people inside of said organization. So for professionals to excuse that behavior, because it happened at the Capitol and not their business, they're disingenuous. Torin (15m 33s): And for me, it causes a fracture in their character. And I am not willing to sit side by side with people that I know are supportive of advocates of racist, like behavior. What we saw was nothing more than a racist, like behavior. The protests, you know, the presentation and the speech, I'm cool with that, but marching down and doing the bullshit y'all need to be held accountable. Joel (16m 2s): When I say immunities, let me clarify what I mean, I meant more election immunities. So the votes still did go through the electoral college did still, go through Trump didn't interfere the election, but that's what I mean by the, the immunities, that the system, the electoral system that we have set up held, which is why I say the immunities kicked in. Chad (16m 25s): This time. That's the problem. We have so many areas of gray that we need to turn into black and white because Trump did nothing but playing the fucking gray. Torin (16m 35s): Stress tests. Chad (16m 36s): Yeah. He stress test the entire fucking system. So no, the immunities barely kept us alive. Barely kept us alive. Joel (16m 44s): But it passed. Chad (16m 45s): You're trying to fucking gloss over this shit. Dude. My biggest issue is that we are not holding people accountable that is not passed until we start doing fucking perp walks. This shit isn't, this it's not good enough. And this is not about being militant. This is about somebody who actually committed a crime to be held accountable and to set precedent so that we know that this shit cannot happen again. Joel (17m 10s): When you say perp walk, are we talking Trump? Him too? Chad (17m 13s): I don't think he would. I don't think anybody would perp walk a president, even though they should. But all those motherfuckers who are found guilty, yes. Perp walks, period. What do you do? What do we do to be able to continue to fuel this so that it's not tamped down? Torin (17m 32s): Yeah. It's one action at a time. And I don't know if there's a prescription, a universal prescription. I should say this. Isn't like going to the local pharmacy and knowing that, you know, an aspirin is going to cure the headache. I think that this is a multilayered. It is an absolute contextual approach required. Every individual has got to find a way to do something I've said to you all before that you have to exercise. Pardon me, your voice in that you have to speak up, but that you have to do that on social media. You have to do that in conversations you're having with your clients and vendors. I think it comes down to every single individual, finding a way to, you know, to tap into that humanity and say enough is absolutely enough. Torin (18m 19s): Like we have looked at far, far, far, too many injustices. We've been silent for far too long. This is just not something that we can support. We can't support a 1776 project and not be willing to support a 1619 project. There's just so many things, Chad, when you asked me, what can we do? What can you do to support black history month? I mean, it's absolutely more than a tweet. It's more than an Instagram posts, but, but what are you doing if you're not even doing that, it's making sure that you are on track to live out the declaration or the promise that you made last June when George Floyd lost his life, a number of organizations were quick to jump out and say what it is that they were willing to do, what it is that they were not going to stand for. Torin (19m 4s): Fine. How have you lived out that experience over the last, you know, 10 months or so? Eight to 10 months? My point is you have to do something. We need every single person rowing in the boat that says we are going to do a better job of, you know, socializing, humanity period. And this is not a zero sum game. There is more than enough for all of us. I just don't think that we can afford to be silent anymore. Stay tuned for episode two coming soon. OUTRO (19m 31s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (20m 16s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

What do you get when you combine one of the industry's most popular conferences, free booze and a hoard of ravenous Chad & Cheese fans? A weekly podcast highlighted by sleep-deprivation, hoarse voices and inexplicably unintelligible commentary. In need of some serious hydration, Chad & Cheese still find a way to bring the pain. This week ... - TMP / AIA acquires Maximum. Who? - Bullhorn drops a bomb on the recruiting industry - LinkedIn dances on the grave of Hire by Google - Facebook Marketplace rumor alert! - Uber Work launches. Desperation or Mad Genius? - Bikini shaming job candidates ... just say No ... and much, much more awesomeness. Enjoy, and bow down to our sponsors: Sovren, JobAdx, and Canvas. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides comprehensive website accessibility testing with personalized recommendations to enhance usability for people with a variety of disabilities or situational limitations. Tengai: Hi, this is Tengai, the unbiased interview robot, you are listening to The Chad & Cheese Podcast. I love these guys. Intro: 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, brash opinion and loads of snark, bottle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh yeah, welcome to the phone it in after HR tech in Vegas episode of the Chad & Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad, had a few hours sleep at least Sowash. Joel: Yeah, just call me Joel red-eye Cheesman today. On this week show TMP go shopping in Europe. Uber gets into the world of work and Facebook just might be giving us another reason to care about their marketplace for jobs. Here's hoping my voice doesn't give out. Enjoy this word from Soren and we'll be right back. Sovren: Soren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovereign.com that's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you want to take it to dinner. Chad: Bourbon so good, you want to drink it during the show? Joel: A liver so deteriorated, you want to get a new one. Chad: Dude. So Austin, Vegas, I mean it's a good thing we have a couple of weeks before we go back- Joel: Oh, my God. Chad: Tote I need sleep, my liver needs water. I mean this is, yeah, I'm ready to be home. Joel: Pretty sure my two year old is driving by now. I think he's, my daughter is engaged to be married and calls in the army or something like that. Chad: Oh, dude, don't say all that. Joel: But we a had a good time, right? That was a fucking blast. Chad: I hadn't had a great time, and part of the reason why our livers are shot is Shane Gray from clench. I mean, he's brought beer for us in at least three different show. Shan no, we want to make sure that the show gets what it needs, and he's a big supporter. So I think it was higher COF last year was the first time he brought the big case of Modelo, Austin, he brought Guinness straight from Ireland. He went back home, got more Guinness and came back Hoover and we had Guinness for our last show yesterday. So I mean it was a blast, but in Guinness doesn't taste even close to as good as it does when it's coming straight from Ireland. I mean, awesome. Joel: Yeah, are Irish the most nice people in the world? Chad: He's just amazing dude. I don't how- Joel: Actually Europeans are so much better than us, it's ridiculous. Chad: Yeah, I know they are. It's funny how nice and their sarcasm blends so well with being nice because you don't know if they're fucking with you or not. Most of the times they're actually fucking with you. It's kinda like the guys from talent nexus, we were in Austin with them and the entire time I'm thinking, they're just fucking with me the entire time. And they probably were, but they're incredibly smart, incredibly funny and then they like to fuck with you and I like that. Joel: Yeah. If there's anything that is really cool about this gig is we get to go to places and really get to know the people in those places more so than we probably ever would have doing anything else. So yeah. Chad: So yeah, so shout out Jeremy Roberts from hiring Soft who actually like impromptu, not much lead time whatsoever got on stage with us because he adds something that he wanted to share that we're going to launch next week in a different podcast. But good time with with Jeremy from Hiring Soft. And thanks Sean, the CEO for letting me get on stage. Joel: I think he would have had to because Jeremy used to be a rock star when he was with source gone. He used to be on stage all the time and now he's sort of the back office genius marketier. So he was really pretty excited I think to be on stage. In fact, he was there well before we showed up. So he was stretching and doing his squats and hip thrusts. So he was excited for sure. Chad: Shots of red bull. Yeah. Joel: He's been in the room doing coffee for three hours. He's ready to go. Shout out to Jeanette Meister- Chad: Maiester. It's Maiester. Joel: Jeez, yeah. I've never seen more fire in a four foot seven package like I'd have Janette Maiester, this lady is full of attitude and knowledge of the industry and she made a pretty good request that we need some lady shirts for the Chad & Cheese show because we have a unisex kind of fits everyone looks okay, but she's like, I need the slim fit. I need the V-neck, I need the lady cut shirt. Chad: She also needs like a triple X small because she's not big. And I told her, I said, look, this is a unisex kind of let's say world that we're in right now and that T shirt looks really hot on my wife, so if you can't make it look hot on you, I'm sorry, I'm not getting a shirt just for you. Joel: She knows we're an inclusive podcast, we include everyone. Chad: Everybody. Joel: She goes to baby gap and they say, no, you too, no you got to go. You've got to go to Carter's or wherever the hell she shops. Chad: All the parties, man, that we went to in Vegas, I want to thank the crew at Mya, Mike, Vinita, y'all got a chance to actually sit down and have some drinks with the co-founder CEO over at Mya. Acres, that bastard he brought us into a greenhouse checker in the hacker rank for that first night party and then- Joel: They have tacos. Chad: You can't go wrong with tacos. Joel: Tacos and riddles, yeah, you can't go wrong with that people. Chad: And they just kept bringing the sangria in the riddles. I mean that was a pretty good way to start off a show. Joel: And don't forget Craig Fisher, Charney is a new company that he announced that was a good party. Was it Fetcher? Was that the other company Fetcher? Chad: Fetcher was there, and also Jerome, the CEO of smart recruiters had some time to actually talk to him, so that was pretty cool. And Scott over at Fetcher stay away from firing squad, man, I'll send somebody after your knees. So don't be messing with firing squad. Joel: You got a little bit of sneak preview, we might be attending smart recruiters next year. Chad: It's a possibility. Joel: I'm going to jump the gun, but it happened. Chad: Yeah. And our sponsors were out in mass tower, JobAdX, Talkpush, Soren was hooking us up with bourbon. Joel: The good stuff. Chad: Yeah, who'd we- Joel: We shamed Robert in Austin about going a little light on the bourbon, the wood you can get from your local Kroger store. So he brought the A game and brought the Jack Daniels Sinatra edition. Very nice. Thank you. Chad: That was delicious. And we also have news that this way global received the people's choice award. Joel: Very nice. So the Pitchfest there at HR tech, this is a highly contested competition. And this way global who we interviewed for our first brew review, which is coming out soon won the people's choice award. Now it was a five grand check and not a 30,000, which is what the owner got, but still you're the people's choice, hats off to you Angela Hood and team. Chad: That's pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome. What else do you have to shout out? Joel: I want to give a shout out to my favorite booth because I mentioned it in the show at the show, but I haven't mentioned it and I want to mention it because I think it's funny. Anyway, so in the startup pavilion these aren't booths, these are like little kiosks of going. And you get a little message, a little billboard and then like a little desk and a chair and you talk to companies and these are usually startups. Anyway, it's of my favorite parts of the show because you get to see the new stuff and the ideas and I'm really keen on that. Joel: So my favorite booth and our favorite kiosk in the pavilion this year was I was walking by and the sign said Gen Z is coming, are you ready? Now the funny thing about this is the kiosk was empty, so it was sort of like, yeah, Gen Z is coming, but as soon as they're ready, not on your time there. Chad: Not now. Joel: Yeah. They're eating some quinoa and headed out to the smoothie King before they hit up the trade show. So let's get them on fire squad shall we? That was fucking, that was fucking Epic, like I couldn't stop laughing. Chad: Two quick ones. Tyler Weeks just dropped a pod, he was so excited interview. He's a analyst and automation manager over at Intel. Great shit, great pod look for it, Tyler Weeks. And also our friends over at SmashFly, you are always the gift that just keeps on giving. Joel: And by the way, to our fans who are named Ralph rant, I don't. Chad: Oh God, yes. Joel: People wearing shirts at the show, people showing up at our live show with like shirts and they knew, we have fans, dude and it's kinda creepy, but it's also awesome. Chad: So humbling and so awesome. So thanks so much. Really appreciate it. And- Joel: What a great sort of industry tip that one of our fans says whenever she gets a call from a vendor, she searches Chad cheese and then the vendor name and then she gets the notes on what we said about that vendor. So what a great little bit of intelligence. Thank God we transcribe the mother fucker. Otherwise she couldn't do that. That's up to you for doing that. So yeah, we have value people, believe it or not, we're not just two drunken idiots. Chad: Yes. Go to Google, Chad cheese, whatever you're searching for, and boom, y'all, it'll be pod horrific. Joel: Pod rific that's worse than technologize. Chad: Technologize from like family Jack, our friends at CLO who couldn't find a better word. Events. We have a couple of weeks. We're going to be, we're going to be able to pop out some pods, which is going to be nice. And then we're going to Paris for unleash world. Joel: Which looks fucking amazing. A lineup of speakers. It's gonna be great. Chad: I'm stoked. We're taking the stage October 22nd at 1145 on the influencer stage at the Paris convention center. We're going to be with a Brandy Ellis, head of recruitment marketing at SmashFly, Chris Wray group, head of recruitment for Sainsbury's and Adam years, Lee global head of talent management at Red bull. So SmashFly is sponsoring this trip. We really appreciate it and we'll forward to getting over there and shit because that's always fun. Joel: I still think we could get Bob Geldof on stage. I don't know. Chad: I think he'd be into it. Joel: Obviously. Tell him to SmashFly is one of the new punk groups making waves in America. And maybe it'll show up SmashFly debut album. Chad: Yeah. On on the influencer stage with Chad cheese iCIMs and November. So going to play golf in Scottsdale probably before that and then enjoying some time with our peeps at ICMs. Joel: Yeah, a lot of changes at iCIMs. I'm excited to ask some hard questions about what's going on there. Chad: Not afraid of asking hard questions, just hope they're relevant. Don't know. Where's the beer? All right. This says December 6th. We're going to Dallas for talent net live. And I asked Craig, I'm like, okay, Greg, what do you want us to do while we're there? It's like, Aw. And I shouldn't have asked that question because now we're probably going to be like on every panel and who knows why- Joel: We should be on every fucking panel. God damn it. Chad: Messaged a Fisher message to Craig Fisher. Joel: So we're doing, are we doing the naughty or nice show? Chad: Yeah, I definitely do the naughty or nice show. Joel: That's one of my favorite shows. Chad: That's a fun show. Excellent. Well, let's get into topics. Joel: Let's do this, alright. TMP not slowing down acquisition this week of maximum, who honestly, I've never heard of a, but they're an agency out of the Netherlands. The economic powerhouse, the Netherlands. So yeah, TMPs make an acquisitions. You'll remember they bought was it Perengo the programmatic solution earlier this year and then now who else did they buy? They bought another agency, right? Not- Chad: They'd been buying up small agencies here and there. But I think the big message here is Perengo and Maxim. They're both mainly tech companies to an extent. And, and now, I mean, that's just a tech expansion and upgrades. Not with the pinch, more than a pinch of, of, of Aqua hire as well. Obviously big. I think for TMPs EU division, AIA worldwide and I bet they're just happy as fuck right now. But this is a broadening the market across the pond, being able to kind of spread out and take a competitor off the board. Think of talent brew talent. Barry's been around for a while. I mean, how many years is, I mean it's probably been 10 then. Joel: Yeah, I'd say 10. Chad: Yeah. So you know, some of that infrastructure's gotta be old. So in flute infusing hopefully some of this new tech into it will revive it and provide a more of a broad solution set for these guys. Not to mention again with the whole programmatic play with per Ringo, I'm really excited to see what they do. Joel: Yeah. I think, I think the keyword there that you said was acquires and I think that as we're learning that as the agency gang gets much more complex, it's not the a posted job board on these sites that skill set anymore. It's actually understanding technology and AI and chatbots and programmatic shit. Like you need really smart people to have a successful agency. So I think buying these little companies that are probably cheap for someone like TMP to get the talent that's there I think is a pretty smart move I did. Here I'm, as we're doing this show, I'm remembering some rumors and stuff from HR tech and that there was a rumor I wanna say someone had said fairly reputable that TMP was close to acquiring higher clicks. So that's very rudimentary, a rumor at this point, but that would not surprise me based on what TMP is currently doing. Chad: Yeah. That would be an interesting acquisition. That's for sure. Not a battle and don't get me wrong, but that would be an interesting acquisition. So we posted this out on Facebook and Chad Mullinax actually responded with this comment. Yup. So he quoted from one of the articles, maximum software suite greatly replaces TMPS talent brew, career site and recruitment marketing platform. And then his comment was fixed it. There might be a little sarcasm in there, but I think for what Chad trying to say is, yeah, getting their shit upgraded. It's not a bad thing TMP. Joel: That is one big pile of shit. Well, also in the acquisition news this past week was bullhorns acquisition of a recruit. We did a shred on this. So if you're not subscribed to the show you've not heard this news, but if you have, you're in the know. Bullhorn one of the biggest platform, obviously to bring recruiters together with companies, manage candidates has bought one of the biggest ATS is specifically for the staffing industry. They both raised about 30, $35 million, Born It's been around for fucking ever. And he recruits about a 10 year old company. So the comment I got from someone who really knows the recruiting industry said this is a really big fucking deal. So I'm gonna go with them and say like, this is a pretty big fucking deal. Chad: Yeah, no, it is they're both applicant tracking systems that are specific to the staffing. When you take a look at staffing as it's recruiting as a business, so you have to be really good at what you do on the applicant tracking system side of the house. But still, you know as well as I do, price means a lot. And from my understanding E-recruits has been chopping Bullhorns legs out from under them on many, many big deals. So a comment that I actually had from a listener said, this is huge news within the staffing space. E recruit has been doing well and onboarded some big name clients including manpower and I believe some of the Kelly services side of the house. So now you're not just taking a competitor off the board, but once again, I think much like TMP, you might have an opportunity to broaden up or maybe even refresh or restore some of the technology that you have. Joel: Yeah, for sure, and the terms of the deal were not disclosed. As usual, if anyone out there has information and wants to share it either anonymously or on the record, they can do spiro@chadcheese.com. The one whisper number, I heard that the sound's really low, it doesn't make a lot of sense was 53 million. I'm guessing it was quite a bit more than that, but I have no wordy one way or the other. So if anyone knows, let us know and we'll let the world know. Chad: Let's just hope this doesn't turn into an IBM Kenexa and brass ring type of shit show. Joel: You know it could, right? Chad: It could very well easily turn into that. Joel: Dude, I need to go refill my water. Let's hear from JobAdX and we'll talk about LinkedIn and Facebook. Chad: Let's do it. JobAdX: Nope, naah, not for me, all these jobs look the same. Oh, next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs. Just have heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it. 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Joel: You know, speaking of killing it, fucking JobAdX, dude, it's all of them, but the show, they're hired a lot of people, like they're coaching indeed people. I mean, what happened to our little company that was a sponsor with like two people on board. It's pretty cool to watch. Chad: A little company that can- Joel: And it could. Chad: So they are- Joel: And will. Chad: I always give Isabel a hard time like your ads are too long, but I just realized it's the only time during the show that I can actually get up and take a piss. Joel: Well played sir, well played, well played. Why did we not ask for a piece of that company when we had a chance? Dammit. Chad: Hind sights 2020. Joel: Hind sights 2020. Let's talk about two companies that will never get a piece of LinkedIn and Facebook. So the LinkedIn annual event was last week I think. Chad: Yes, yes. Joel: And obviously people were slurping up the LinkedIn goodness. They had Gary V on the keynote stage, which if you've never seen Gary Vaynerchuk just he's everywhere online. Chad: How have you not seen Gary fucking V? That's the question. Joel: Yeah. If you know what a podcast is, you likely know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. Chad: You've ever been on LinkedIn, if you've ever been on any type of social media, hell, that dude has probably one of the best tick-tock accounts. I mean, it's just like he's everywhere. Joel: Yeah. He's on the corner of my a neighborhood right now as we speak. And by the way- Chad: Hi Gary. Joel: Just the jets sucks and hats off to Lars our industry buddy who got, I think Vayner media's head of talent to get on his podcast. So a shout out to the, I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm sure it's solid work by our boy Lars. Chad: We were talking about LinkedIn from the standpoint of their applicant tracking system, because we've seen a bump. And at least the advertising in kind of like the marketing of talent hub lately, right? Joel: Yeah. I mean, tell me the halls of LinkedIn weren't doing high fives and cartwheels when a hire by Google shut down. That must have been a happy day at LinkedIn. But yeah, so it launched, I want to say a year, a little over a year or more ago. I certainly wrote about it. And we talked about it, but they are full steam ahead hemp and that shit they're talking about one platform which we've been talking about everyone is trying to do. You know, I drink the LinkedIn Kool-Aid like nobody else, and then my money is still on them and they seem to be marching down the path of being, if not the one platform at least one of the top three that people choose to do a lot of their recruiting. Chad: In the actual marketing material, in the video it says the only ATS powered by the LinkedIn network. Joel: That's true. Chad: What did they mean powered? I mean, I don't understand, is it the people? Is it the technology? I mean we- Joel: It got gotta be the people. Chad: What does that mean? Joel: The people is their ultimate differentiator. Chad: Okay. So then they don't have a differentiator then because the people, the database is now open because it's public. Joel: Dude, I can't believe after after our Jeremy Roberts interview and I'm teasing the episode cause it's awesome. I mean, even Jeremy agrees that the ultimate winner in this is LinkedIn because his profiles get commoditized and data gets commoditized. Like all companies that do this shit are going to be marginalized, but I'm giving away too much from the interview. Chad: Yeah, I don't think so. I think core tech and here's what I'm saying is cortex. So let's say take a look at like a company like seek out which has much better power search capabilities than LinkedIn provides. They get bought by an applicant tracking system. So how is LinkedIn the winner then? Joel: Well, LinkedIn is the winner if seek out, can't make money on the data because everyone has it. Chad: I just said seek out gets bought by an applicant tracking system. You need to listen a little bit closer there sweetheart. That's what I'm talking about. That's how you win. That's the next step, how do you not see that? If the data is public and you already have a core system of record, all you need is something that is incredibly powerful and something that can actually index and search on those people. Joel: So seek out wins because they get acquired? Okay. Chad: That's what I'm saying. Seek out wins, and also, yeah, I believe so too. And then the applicant tracking system or the core system that acquires them wins too, what can this LinkedIn applicant tracking system do that no other applicant tracking system can do. Joel: Dude, this is going to be the most fascinating, the whole privacy issue, the whack-a-mole stuff like what happens to hire tool and seek out and I mean I won't give it away, but hiring solve is making serious changes in their business, because of what they see. Like it's going to be really interesting to see how this whole thing shakes out. And I think both of us are slightly pulling shit out of our ass because we really don't know how this is gonna shake out, but it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun. Hell, a lot of fun to talk about and watch. Chad: I just think from a strategic standpoint my question is how, what does LinkedIn have that nobody else has? That's the question. And if I was an external system, could I not just go ahead and buy a startup that does it better than LinkedIn? So those are the kind of the things that are whirling around in my head as other companies try to position themselves against LinkedIn and Microsoft. Joel: I mean, I do think that one thing that you probably can't debate is that LinkedIn has the freshest data of what's out there, and we'll continue to have the freshest data. Chad: Until the go to wall garden status. That's great because everybody is actually pulling the freshest this data into their system. Joel: Seriously, I mean, I think that's going to happen, do you? Chad: Yeah, I can't believe they haven't done it yet. I mean, unless there are some external marketing and they're getting so much traffic from Google right now for people that are actually entering LinkedIn and profiles through Google search. I don't know, that's the big question. Joel: Good stuff. So moving on to Facebook, again from the HR tech rumor mail, I was talking to a popular programmatic solution, I don't think they want to be named in this, but so I won't. But they mentioned that obviously programmatic, they're posting jobs in all kinds of places, they've been posting jobs onto Facebook, you know, for free for a long time since Facebook has been doing that. And apparently Facebook has just introduced an API for those folks to boost certain jobs within Facebook, and apparently they're starting to beta test if it's not live yet. Joel: They've obviously been very quiet about it because they haven't said anything publicly because it would go very viral if they did. So where if you post a job on Facebook, you can have a little boost button, advertise it, give it top rating, I dunno how exactly they're going to highlight those jobs, but we saw this coming and it looks like it's finally almost here. To me it's like a natural progression of Facebook and what they're doing. I wouldn't be surprised to see Google launch pay per click for jobs soon, but it also says that Facebook is still kind of sorta paying attention to this whole jobs marketplace and they're still sort of serious about it. Chad: So just for clarity, can other job boards post their jobs into Facebook for boosting as well? Joel: So my understanding is with the API that the job board could add as you're posting, Hey, do you want to boost this job on Facebook? And then the job would plug in and boost directly from the job board, or the job board could feed in an XML file and just tag, have a certain tag or some scheme that says this is a boost job. And then Facebook would charge the job board, I guess for that promotion of the opportunity. It's really early and this is sort of rumor stuff. I'll dig into it a little more and maybe give you some more information on a future show, but this totally makes sense, I think it's just a matter of getting more information about what's going on. Chad: Yeah, no it does. I mean there are just many problems around duplication and being able to take old jobs off and all that other fun stuff that Google's trying to deal with right now. So it will be interesting to see how this matures. Joel: Absolutely, absolutely. Uber work, you're pretty excited about this one. I actually have not read this story on this, I could probably guess what's going on, but this is sort of your lane. What's up with Uber? Chad: You would think so, but they kind of throw a curve ball, so it's fun. It's funny because we just got back from Austin about a week or so ago, and you see jump bikes, which are Uber, pretty much Uber bikes, jumped scooters, which are, Uber's has AC have Uber's, you have scooters, you have bikes, you have Uber eats, and now you have Uber work. Joel: By the way I hope to God Vegas never gets scooters because that would be a total nightmare, although convenient a total nightmare. Chad: Yeah. But now Uber works, it's looking to steer clear of the conversation around some of the regs that Uber was slammed over in California around contractors. It's really interesting because now instead of being like the platform and the place where you go to get the people, what Uber is looking be is just the technology platform, the staffing platform for staffing organizations. I didn't see that coming. I didn't see that coming at all, I thought they would be much like they are on everything else that they do. They're a full meal deal, you get everything. Joel: So it's like a white label solution for anyone who wants to have the Uber platform for workers? Chad: Yeah, I think it's ... So here's a little bit from tech crunch. Uber believes a new technology first approach can provide faster and easier means for people to get to work while offering greater insights into the many opportunities for work that are out there, improving the experience for workers and businesses like. I think what they're looking to do, and this is a W2 kind of a scenario through the staffing company, is there's a couple of things that they might be going after. They might be trying to slowly get into and Trojan horse this bitch, which makes a lot of sense. You get in there and you get it all and you understand it and then boom, it's all yours. But also, I mean all the money that they're spending in building infrastructure for everything else that they're doing, it doesn't make sense to do the same thing here. Chad: So if you can kind of glom on with the staffing companies and then the staffing companies who we've talked about, like indeed in scene where you see kind of this amalgamation of staffing meets tech and it's more platform based than it is human based. So you don't have the cost because you don't have all those human resources. I mean, it's really interesting, I'm not 100% sure of what they're looking to do other than just provide the Uber platform as tech staffing companies have the actual people, they put them on W2 and then they pay the taxes where Uber doesn't have to fuck with that stuff. Joel: Yeah, I mean to me, like a year ago I would have said this sounds like evil genius strategy to rule the world, now I'm leaning more into, it started to feel like desperation. I mean obviously since they've gone public, their financials and things are more available and the scrutiny is much higher than it was as a private company. That little story for me, I don't know if you experienced this as well, but typically at airports I'll take a Lyft or Uber. It's an easy, convenient airports have spaces now. So in Vegas which historically to get a taxi is like an eight line, 45 minute wait and it's like a real mass. So I'm walking to the section that has the lifts and the Ubers, and I literally look down and see the taxi line which has like 12 people. Joel: But I'm almost to the Uber lift area, so I get there and it's like chaos, it's just overcrowded, people are pushing and shoving. I'm like, well fuck this, I'm going to go back and get a cab. So I literally turned around, went back, went downstairs, and then like just walked up and got a cab. So at some point this thing is gonna have some equilibrium there. They're almost so successful that it's going to hurt their success. You know what I mean? It's sort of a weird dichotomy in business, like it's sort of like the club that's so successful that no one wants to go because it's too crowded. I mean, that's what like Uber and Lyft felt like in Vegas. Chad: Vegas is an anormally for the most part. Joel: True. Chad: But on the work and the staffing side of the house, I think this is going to be interesting. One of the reasons why I think it's gonna be interesting is that they're starting this out of Chicago and one of the people who is actually in, I guess you could say the C-suite is a friend of mine, her name's Jill Erickson. She was the CRO at Shift Gig. So she has great experience behind this whole model, CRO over at Guild, and she spent a good amount of time over building the digital business for TMP. So when talent brew started, she was the one heading that all up. So to have those types of individuals because we're always bitching about you guys are coming to this industry and you don't even know what the fuck you're doing, having the person like that as one of the leaders in your organization, I have to say that is one hell of a move. Chad: Now, here's the only thing that bothers me is that, well not the only thing, but one of the big things is this story title, the next web story title was Uber works is Tinder for blue collar jobs. Joel: Oh God why? By the way, dude I will say this, the little tidbit, the little morsel of information that you just dropped right there, the Shift Gig and all that, that's why our podcast is awesome because we're able to give those kinds of insights. So kudos to you my friend for having that little Pearl of wisdom for our listeners and Pearl of wisdom. Chad: Pearl of wisdom. Joel: Let's hear from Canvas. Chad: Okay. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent, text-based interviewing platform, empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text, and so much more. We keep the human that's you at the center while canvas bot is at your side adding automation to your workflow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day, easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off a Bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiter success. Request a demo at @ gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io, get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: Okay. This next story is what you do not want to do. This is a do not do this story. So a young lady applied for a marketing coordinator internship at a company named Kick Ass Masterminds in Austin, Texas. She was turned down and then found out that the company posted a picture of her in a bikini on their company Instagram with the message with her head cropped out. "PSA, do not share your social media with a potential employer if this is the kind of content on it. I am looking for a professional marketer, not a bikini model. Go on with your bad self and do whatever in private, but this is not doing you any favors in finding a professional job." Joel: And then she reposts it, right? And said, this company called me out and then the internet blew up. Chad: Yeah. So she went to this Twitter account called she rates dogs and apparently this Twitter account calls out dudes in, I mean for boarding and companies for doing this kind of stuff, and it just blew up. Is that really where we're going with this? We're looking to say, okay, she's in a bikini on her own social media, she's not naked for goodness sake, and that's a bad thing. Not to mention the pretty much the staff which is predominantly females at Kick Ass Masterminds. If you go to the CEO's Instagram, she's wearing a tank top that says feisty as fuck, like her whole like management team staff, which are mainly females are in bathing suits. I mean this is definitely not a leaning in kind of moments. That is not how you're teaching people. Not to mention she didn't do anything wrong. Joel: So there are a couple of layers here from my perspective. Number one is, it wasn't a bikini, it was like a crop T-shirt with like under boob showing in the picture. So I just want to be clear with that, that my perspective was, that's not a bikini, that's like sort of revealing cut off T-shirt. Now I will say, whatever, she wasn't naked, she wasn't doing anything stupid. To me that's, if she's on brand with what you guys need, then it's totally cool, and what kills me is the fucking name of this company is Kick Ass, whatever. So the internet blew up and the internet went super, Colombo on this shit and they're searching like, Oh, you say that your company is into rebellious activities and you're questioning authority and like all these things that if anything, this girl is perfect for this company because everything that they're preaching is like, be yourself man, like break things and like do shit and so that killed me. Joel: But also killed me in this story is that the internet killed this company, like their site was literally down for a stimulated. Their social channels were shut down. So yeah, let this be a lesson to any company, like a company shouldn't be doing that seriously. They could post a tweet like, Hey, if you're gonna apply to our company, check your socials or whatever, and I don't even know if it's legal to check social media shit for hiring people. I know that was a big issue a while back and I'm not an expert on that, but yeah, there were many layers to this store and it was like, the company shouldn't do it, get on this, this young lady for a sort of speaking up and then hats off to the internet for like taking it and running with it. Chad: The CEO, I will try to find her LinkedIn and that is down right now. I mean overall, man, if you want to mentor, that's not how you mentor. If you want to be a company that embraces this bossiness, which is what it actually says on their website then do it, but you can't control me outside of my time with you. And I'm going to do what I do, not to mention her wearing that bikini, that swimsuit that she had on doesn't mean that she wouldn't be great at a marketing coordinator internship job. Joel: I feel so badly for young people because we didn't have this shit when we were this age, like pictures I could imagine the dumb shit I would've been doing. I mean, no one would've cared if I had a cutoff T-shirt, but I'm sure I would've done stupid shit that I wouldn't want like an employer to see. So it's just this weird dichotomy and dynamic with the world today and I feel kind of bad that people have to deal with this. We put stupid shit, no one cares because we're established and that's kind of our brand anyway, but like young people have to be cognizant of that. And I kind of feel bad for them that they live in this world of so much judgment and having your self esteem tied to like likes. Joel: Think about like the pictures of the bikinis and all that shit, like that's the stuff that gets liked by their followers, but then it's also in turn, what's not going to get them the job with an employer. So like where do you win? Chad: Here's the thing for employers. Will that photo actually impact how she does her job? Is she going to be wearing a bikini into the office? I mean, no, so that's the thing that you have to focus on. If you're focusing on this stupid kind of shit, then you should not be in leadership because you are not a leader. Joel: We out. Chad: We out. Walken: Testing one, two, three, thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast? Yeah, 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 to people you don't even know and yet you listen, it's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one, not chatter, blue nacho, pepper, Jack Swiss. There's so many cheeses and yet not one word. It's so weird. Anyhow be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode and while you're at it, visit Www.chadcheese.com, just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out. #TMP #AIA #Bullhorn #LinkedIn #Facebook #Programmatic #UberWorks #HRTech #TalentHub #ATS #Marketplace

UK-based and focused car has tickled the industry's funny bone recently. With a series of marketing strategies that have pushed the boundaries of good taste (and made our eyes bleed a little), founder Gareth Peterson and team have gotten our attention. Yeah, they can cut through the clutter, but does their product have what it takes to face the Firing Squad and come out alive? You'll just have to have a listen, mate. Brought to you by Pandologic, a programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any wasteful spending PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Pandologic (0s): pandoIQs, Programmatic recruitment advertising platform helps employers source talent faster and more efficiently than ever thanks to predictive algorithms, machine learning and AI. Buzzword, overdose alert. Yeah. Pando was on the cutting edge of Programmatic, while being deeply rooted in the recruitment industry. pandoIQ provides an end to end Programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any waste spending to maximize the ROI on your recruitment spend.And their AI enabled algorithms use over 48 job attributes and more than 200 billion historical job performance data points to predict the optimal job advertising campaign. Pandologic (51s): The machine does all that shit. That shit sounds expensive! Think again Cheeseman, pandoIQ provides an end to end job advertising solution that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any wasteful spending. Sold! How do I get started? Go to Pandologic.com to request a demo and tell him Chad and Cheese sent you. Ooh. They have a chat bot too, that we can talk to. Oh, kill me now. Firing Squad INTRO (1m 20s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they got what it takes to make it out alive? Dig a fox hole and duck for cover kids the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel (1m 42s): The British are coming. The British are coming. What's up, everybody. Welcome to firing squad. These are your favorite podcasters. I'm Joel Cheesman joined as always by Chad Sowash and today we have a super special firing squad. The myth, the legend, the, the, the envelope pushers Caroo from out of Manchester. England are here. You've seen their videos. You know them, you love them. You can't get enough. Gareth Gareth Petersen. Welcome to firing squad my friend. Gareth (2m 18s): Hey guys. Nice to finally meet you. Chad (2m 21s): (Music playing) Some sexy tunes right there. Joel (2m 23s): Oh, for, for listeners real quick. Caroo is the company that sent Chad and I, a pair of bikini underwear and a condom. So I'll leave it to you now, Gareth, to describe who you are and we'll get to your company in a second, but tell us about you Gareth (2m 39s): About me, right? Okay. I'm Gareth Pearson. I'm a father of two. Believe it or not. And I'm the managing director for a little known startup in Manchester called Caroo. We're a technology-based business. And we essentially use a lot of data to match candidates to the right jobs. Joel (2m 57s): Excellent. Chad, tell him what he's won. Chad (2m 59s): Gareth, you lucky bastard, you will have two minutes to pitch Caroo. At the end of two minutes, you will hear that bell then Joel and I will hit you with rapid Q and A. If your answers start to get boring and they shouldn't get boring on this episode, kids, Joel's going to hit you with the crickets, that's your signal to tighten up your game. At the end of Q and A, you will receive either a big applause, that's right, you'll be able to buy all the black latex you want. Golf clap, you're probably gonna need to keep that Caroo branded toilet paper around and keep it in stock. Joel (3m 40s): Keep it in your pants. Chad (3m 41s): Then last but not least the firing squad, this ain't the thing, man. You're going to have to jump on Facebook. Marketplace, sell all that S and M gear because you're going to need the cash dude. In three, two, one, your two minutes starts. Gareth (3m 58s): A Caroo. We do things differently as you were about to see, firstly, thanks, Chad and Mr. Cheese for having me and these two minutes to introduce our strategy. So this British chap wrote a rap, that's probably crap, but it's our first podcast and we want to leave our stamp. This might be the best chance that a Chad and cheese club and not the sound of a gun hammer, smacking a bullet on the ass. And obviously and selfishly, I'm trying to talk to that attracts brands that want to match to relevant talent in chat. It's as simple as that and in so doing puts Caroo on the map, but wait, the current cartography, isn't the sort of geography that professionals want to see. And through using Caroo, you will see what these people expect from our delivery. They didn't want agencies, they wanted control and transparency, profile anonymity because alas, LinkedIn shows everything and anyone can contact me. Gareth (4m 40s): Even shows stuff, not conducive to diverse teams and inclusivity. Finally, job recommendations need to be a fit for me because relevancy is key, then and only then should you notify me. To enable this we use algorithms and technology. Not using job titles because they mean something different to everybody. You've seen it yourself type into Indeed. Yeah. I look for marketing manager in they're promoted post. Head of IT. I mean, fuck me, Indeed give them back the money please. And last week I told LinkedIn I was open to opportunities. First one I received was PA to an MD, no read, that's not for me. So people said, focus on skills and experience G. We listened, designed and delivered accordingly. We're not about volume, that's a false economy. You don't have time to manage all of those. CVs are ready-made shortlist is what you need with candidates prioritized accordingly. Gareth (5m 22s): Is it perfect? No, it never will be, but that's just tech. We move fast and improve iteratively. And what you see now isn't a patch and what it's going to be. You want credibility. We've worked with Adidas. Added Ask Jim Sharp Disney and over 400 SMEs, the BBC, but we still consider this MVP. So thanks again, Chad and Cheese and the wider recruitment communities. You welcomed me and shared your expertise that helped shape our experience in technology. Now, if I've got this right, that's a two minute delivery and now it's time for me to drop the M I C Joel (5m 50s): And our listeners can learn more at Gareth (5m 55s): Caroo.co.uk Chad (5m 56s): Yes. And don't forget that. There's also a warning that we have to put out on the front end of this. If you're in the US, you definitely want to listen to the podcast because it's going to be fucking entertaining, but the app is not available to you yet. Go ahead, Joel. Joel (6m 12s): All right, dude. I always get to this first, tell me about the name, how'd you come up with it and tie that in with you. You talked about your background, but not so much the fact that you're not from this industry. So I'm also curious about what drew you to the business. So name and the draw. Gareth (6m 29s): Basically, it's just a mashup of kind of like Caroo and or careers and the idea behind sort of deliveroo. So it's, we want it to stay clear of using the word recruitment, because what we found from our research is that generally speaking, the industry has a bit of a negative perception. So that's kind of where the name came from. In fact, actually, if you look us up on the UK's company's house records were originally incorporated as Tiki CV. So thank fuck somebody got rid of that. Right. So, right. Yeah. So actually my background is just a bit weird, really, I suppose a bit like our marketing. I've just got this sort of insatiable appetite for trying to understand problems and challenges and look at suboptimal experiences and then working with end-users to design what that experience would look like in an ideal world, and then understanding what technology we need in order to deliver that experience. Gareth (7m 21s): So prior to working at Caroo and within recruitment, I was at Manchester Airport Group looking at a variety of different experiences that we could, we could implement using digital in the physical environment because well, Manchester airports are really shits experience. And then prior to that, I was in retail. So the attraction of going into recruitment and doing something different is pretty, it was pretty significant to me, Chad (7m 42s): So that''s a big leap. I mean, everybody understands the experience sucks. It, it shit, no matter where you go for the most part, but to be able to make the leap into an industry that you have never been in before, there's a lot of learning to do. How long has Caroo been around Gareth (7m 60s): Caroo's probably it was around about two years prior to my introduction. And we've been, I've been here for three years and ten months. We've been live with the actual sort of beta through to live version of our product since January the 12th, 2019. Chad (8m 18s): Okay. So who on the team actually has industry experience anyone? Gareth (8m 21s): So we have a couple of solid investors who are from the recruitment background, and we also have a couple of colleagues who are ex-recruiters as well. So they know the industry very, very well. Chad (8m 31s): Okay. So on the candidate side, who is your target market? What types of positions are being filled on Caroo? Gareth (8m 38s): Predominantly we focus on sales and marketing and sort of technology and digital skillset. So software engineers, product, project managers, business analyst, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really just those sorts of sales marketing. Imagine if you were to review higher dot-coms target list is kind of not dissimilar to that. Chad (8m 59s): So we talk about developers getting into the tech roles, aside from all the other roles. I mean, it's, there's a different experience that's there. We see that the coding platforms that actually make you prove that you can do the job to make it easier to jump into bigger titles, right? So instead of having a quote unquote "matching algorithm", you have a proof of concept type of delivery and user experience. Why are you trying to be so broad right out of the gate? Gareth (9m 31s): To be fair, we were actually even broader than this originally. And we were going after all head office functions, but I think it's fair to say that we spread ourselves too thinly in the early days. And now what we've done is we've actually sort of honed in very, very specifically on these particular job functions. Joel (9m 48s): So one of the big challenges that most of our listeners will have is that they can't go to your site and actually test drive the app and see what it does and how it works. So I'm going to ask you a real challenging, I'll give you a real, a challenge in saying like visualize the app through words, if I'm a job seeker, what do I see? Chad has a big, a component of your app, for example, and if I'm an employer, what's the experience there because our mature audience can actually sort of test drive the technology? Gareth (10m 21s): Looking at it from two different experiences, really. So employees use the desktop based web experience and they come in, they create a brand profile, which gives some high-level information about the business, the culture, the brand story. This is all sorts of stuff that candidates have asked us to curate on their behalf. So, you know, when we did the research and dug into what was a brand story, or they really wanted to know who founded the business and where it was going and what the vision and the mission were, et cetera, et cetera. So everything that we asked for from employers is really defined by the other side of the marketplace, which is the candidates. So in terms of the experience, they quickly build a brand profile and then they can post as many jobs as they want. And when pro when posting those jobs, they can attack the relevant skills and experience that are required for that job. Gareth (11m 8s): So in the example of a software engineer, I may say, right, I'm looking for a software engineer. This is the salary bracket. Here is the, the skills required front end, back end, full stack, and then into the particular software stack as well. Then there's a variety of different features that you can use around hard coding things and applying filters. And on the candidate experience side, what we have to do is get people in as quickly as possible so they can see a relevance and we can add value quickly. So there's a few screens on after downloading the app, we never asked for any personal information upfront, we just want you to get in and start browsing the app. And then what we do is we sort of look at those similar tags in terms of your skills and experience. And then you can go onto create a profile. So we'll show you some jobs and then you can create a profile if you choose to or write a CV. Gareth (11m 51s): And then we can pick out additional skills and tools, tasks to improve the matching algorithm there as well. Joel (11m 56s): Is the app specifically for England? I mean, what is the footprint specifically and talk about the growth plan, because it looks like you got about 2 million pounds from optimized capital recently, and you're looking to raise 5 million pounds in the near future. I assume growth is part of that. So talk about that. Gareth (12m 14s): So I suppose one of the things I'm a big believer in is let's not recreate the wheel, right? So there's a lot of tech businesses that have grown rapidly and we can sort of take the best bits of how they've developed their business, their strategy, and how they've grown their businesses. So for example, our approach to design is not dissimilar to what you'd expect to hear from the likes of Brian Chesky at a BNB. Right? Then I decided that we would stay regional because sticking regional would allow me and the team to get out and meet users and actually see them and converse with them. Face-to-face to understand their pain points around the particular user experience that we're designing, but also with their frustrations around the industry. And that was, you know, that the idea sort of came from what I've seen Amazon do when they launch products, they launched locally to their head office. Gareth (12m 57s): And I just think, I believe that speeds the process up. Plus we've got a great test bed in Manchester for, you know, it's one of the fastest growing tech hubs outside of London, as well as leads just on our doorstep as well, strong large populations. So it made sense for us to stay regionally and really get this product working really well in the region before we then sort of took the business national. So the yes, you're right, we would look to potentially fund externally for that set, that amount of money. And then we would take the business pretty much national across the UK. I, my ambition is clear. Like I have, I really want to help people improve their lives through their careers, right? Gareth (13m 39s): And at the moment, what you see is an app that looks very much like a, a job app or a more engaging experience, or you can't see obviously, but more engaging experience like a job board, but there's the potential for this thing is so much bigger than what it currently is. We have some seriously shit, ah, ideas for, for where this goes. And we've just started beta testing, the ability to post content for employers, which can then be tagged and distributed to the relevant audiences as well. So our plan really is Manchester leads the Northwest, and then we kind of branch out into M 25, which is the ring road around London, Cambridge, which is another large tech hub. And then we move around the country in a nine to 12 month roll up. Joel (14m 21s): And beyond that, or is it just specifically, you're going to stay in Europe or the UK? Gareth (14m 26s): LinkedIn could do far better than what it does with the amount of data that it has. I mean, as you heard from my relatively crap rap, I mean, you hit go. I switched on my search and I got PA to an MD. It's nothing really sophisticated happening. Then I just think that the scope for awesome shit in recruitment is mind boggling and it's exciting. So I have no other ambition than, yeah, I would like to take this thing international. I only live once, right. And there's no rehearsals in this life, so let's live it big. Chad (14m 56s): So let's talk about the tech then the matching piece is something that you're hitting off very heavily and yes, LinkedIn has shit tech when it comes to matching. So does Indeed. I mean, we're talking about the two biggest brands in our space and they have mediocre at best tech when it comes to matching what makes your matching so much better and you don't have as much information as Indeed, possibly, or LinkedIn from the profiles. What makes your matching so much better working on less data. Gareth (15m 28s): Building around what people want to be matched on? First of all, me, I mean, I think, you know, the research told me so much more than I could ever really, you know, I thought there was going to be all this need for artificial intelligence. I mean, throw some more big tech buzzwords in there if you want machine learning, blah, blah, blah. But actually when you really boil it down to when people said, you know, there were a few key things that came out of the research. First of all, I don't want recruitment agencies because LinkedIn is buzzing with them, right. That's their domain. That's the little beehive. I'm sick of being inundated by messages from them. This is, you know, specific to certain skillsets, but too many, too many approaches from a recruitment agencies and too many salespeople. Okay, cool. So then we would remove those from the community, right? Gareth (16m 9s): And this is a community that's built around the professional for the professional. The second thing was making sure the jobs are relevant. Okay, cool. Now I need you to define what relevance actually means. Well, first of all, show me software engineering jobs. Don't show me product management jobs. Okay, cool. That's a simple heartfelt, all right. Now let's define that even further. What does, what does it actually mean? Do you want to be matched on your interests? Do you want to be matched on any sort of soft skills now, first and foremost, if you want me to consider this job and then progress that. Well, I need to make sure that I can do the job, I need to make sure it's a match for my skillset. Okay, cool. So let's look at what your composition of skillsets are and get you to tag those brilliant, right? Well then there's a set of tools that I'm used to using. So I'm not just a front end developer or a full stack developer. Gareth (16m 50s): I'm actually skilled in these particular areas like php.net, Java, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So let's then look at those, but let's make sure that we weight heavily towards, towards the skillsets and less so towards the tool sets. But if a tool, a particular tool is a fundamental requirement of the job, then let's make sure that that, the employee can stipulate that. And then that re-weights the algorithm. So we're still early days, right? But actually when you start to just listen to what people want, you can already start to see the small sort of changes that we can make to improve the experience. Chad (17m 25s): When you import your profile from LinkedIn? Gareth (17m 28s): I don't think they'd let us do that. Let's talk about, let's talk about the no staffing rule. Because I remember back in the day when 75% of Monster's revenue was staffing agencies and hot jobs at the time they blocked out staffing agencies. And that is where I believe Monster actually won the battle and they actually acquired Hot Jobs later on. Why did you go, why did you decide to go to employers only and not allow staffing to use your app? Knowing you could put limiters on it? Number one. And so to ensure that you're not getting your database killed by staffing and recruiters, but you are cutting off a huge amount of revenue right out of the gate. Chad (18m 13s): That's what people wanted. And I'm a firm believer that if you give people what they want and build a product around their needs, then they'll end up loving you. I mean, from what I've been seeing, a lot of businesses are starting to build their into, you know, pre COVID and even during COVID, a lot of businesses are building their internal recruitment function. And I think there's this, the market certainly in UK is why isn't it, the idea that we'll actually could be cheaper for a scaling business just to implement our own HR business. So we really just did listen and stayed true to the candidate side of the audience. And to be fair, the employers also wanted to remove the noise of recruitment agencies, too. Joel (18m 49s): Let's talk about marketing. If I had to say you have a secret sauce, it would be the marketing side and to say that you push the envelope is probably putting it too conservatively. Talk about sort of the mindset of the marketing. Obviously it's a cut through the clutter strategy and you talk about the partners that you have. Cause it seems like you rely a lot on agencies that are really pushing this and talk about the relationship you have with them and how they'll come into play as you continue to grow the company. Did they introduce sort of a riskè strategy and you guys are implementing what they want to do or did they come in and say, Hey, you guys are, are meatheads you're beyond what's normal we're going to really accentuate that. Joel (19m 34s): How did that relationship happen? And what does it look like in the future? Gareth (19m 39s): Well, we started as every other tech business and we, yeah, first of all, there's a lot of clutter, there's a lot of noise and, and some, sometimes people get a bit worried that investing in content to try and cut through the noise is going to be a waste of time because there is so much of it. But actually that becomes a mountain of shit that you can stand up on and actually screen. Right. You can get some good cut-through we, you know, we started like every other business, which was, let's go with this agency, let's you know what we'll do, you know what we'll do? We'll test a little bit of swearing just to be a bit edgy. And it was like, what, this is bollocks because it doesn't work? You just look like, you know, your dad, your uncle died trying to be cool. And, and I thought, you know what? Gareth (20m 19s): This is our business. And the people that work in this business are confident. We're all a little bit cheeky and we're in a dry, boring industry. And a lot of this, you know, it's full of corporate clutter and people hiding behind logos. And I just thought, you know what? I'm so proud of the team that we've put in place that they should be in front of the camera. And you know, if the Manchester that people buy from people, then we'll, hopefully that's gonna, that's going to benefit us because they'll get to meet our team. Yes. We work with a couple of agencies. The stuff that you're used to seeing on the creative side is Offended Marketing. I, I knew the founder before he sat up Offended. He was doing, I wanted to test him. Gareth (20m 59s): I'll do a lot of testing guys and I'll see what works. And if it doesn't work, we'll kill it fast. But he was testing some stuff on my own personal brand. And I was just wanted to see whether or not that was gaining better traction. And what's really interesting about how they, how they work in their creative processes is really spend a lot of time with you to understand you and understand your background. What makes you tick? What pisses you off, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And I could just see them as getting bad. So I just, I just said to him like, dude, you've got to take the brands. Like you've got to take the brand, just make sure that you don't get many lawsuits. And you know, I want, I want people to know about Caroo, but I don't want them to just know about Caroo because that's easier. I can, you can put a shitload of cash behind paid media budgets and put in front of everybody. Gareth (21m 41s): I want people to love Caroo. I want the following and I'd seen him do a talk at a recruitment event. And I was just like, me and him, me and him, we'll get on, don't get me wrong. You look at us. We're very different looking people, very different backgrounds. I'm definitely the better looking. And you know, it just, it works like, and those guys are for me, they're genius. So, you know, I gave him the brand and I think it's fair to say we've built up a pretty passionate following of people. Even when people don't engage with our content, like they come back to me like in a conversation or an email, it's just like, I love what you're doing. And it's not for everybody. Joel (22m 16s): So for listeners, I want to highlight, you should go check out the download our app for a BJ campaign that you guys did. I thought that was particularly classy and effective BJ standing for better job. Of course everyone knew that. Yeah. So you talked a little bit about, some people are going to be turned off by that obviously. And you could argue that, Hey, at some level there are employers that aren't going to touch a company that sort of pushes the boundaries that much. Do you think it's a hindrance to scale or do you believe it's actually helped you grow? And is there a particular kind of company that's going to hire a marketing, you know, marketing strategy like that? Joel (22m 57s): And are you okay with saying, look for a lot of companies we're not going to work for you and we're not going to be a fit and that's okay. Or does the marketing evolve into something a little more mainstream? Gareth (23m 7s): It's a great couple of questions. I'm going to adjust the first one, first. I think if you're a business trying to appeal to everybody, you're going to fail, right? And we're a small business and we've got to make the best use of a finite budget to cast on it wider to make sure that people know about us. And I think that's exactly what we're doing. It is very cost effective. It's not designed to be super high gloss, you know, stick me on the front of a magazine style type of stuff. It does well because it's entertainment, right? The best company sort of entertain you. So if it turns you off, it is going to turn some people off. There are some people working for large corporates who believe, it's really hard, I've had people approach me and they contradict themselves in the same conversation. Gareth (23m 47s): They'll tell me the it's listen, it's it's genius. Then they'll tell me, but it's really silly to do that sort of stuff. And then you'll get people who say, no, we can't use you. You're too disruptive. Yet you look at their digital marketing jobs and it says, we're looking for a disruptive marketer. I mean, who do you think is going to be on my platform? Yeah. It turns, you know, we did a relatively, relatively provocative piece pre-Christmas where I wore some rather tight and ill-fitting PBC and we, you know, acted out some sex positions that we claimed was Chad (24m 21s): Karma recruit, tra, which is just to take on Kama Sutra. So that was, yeah, let's just go ahead and put it out there, it was sexy. I watched it a few times. It was amazing. Yes, it is. It is crazy. You guys are making noise on the marketing standpoint. Here's the thing that matters though. How are you, how many downloads do you have? And what's your plan to be able to drive downloads from a candidate standpoint? Because as an employer, that's what I gave a shit about that. Number one, the number two are they the people that I want? Gareth (24m 52s): What we do is we take what people say, right? So what are real, what our audiences, when we do these user research sessions, right? We're not just testing product, we're listening to how they communicate about recruitment. And that then becomes that then you can then spin that because it becomes relatable, spin is probably the wrong word, but you get where I'm coming from. If you're going to talk in a conversational manner using terms that people often use to describe something, then you're going to relate to them. So we're going to continue. I mean, we've just put out our most, probably provocative paid media campaign. I'll be happy to share with you guys. But what I've seen from the last six weeks of that media campaign going on is an absolute surge in the quality of candidates that we've had specifically in software development and anything around e-commerce SEO and PPC. Gareth (25m 41s): And that's because we've listened to that audience, we've put it in a visual and in a way that's visual and we're talking their language from the businesses that we've had sign up that, you know, they've been really happy with the quality. So that's the plan really from a, how do we get candidates perspective. In terms of numbers we've got around about 26,000 candidate profiles, just specific to our region at present. Those emanate from probably anywhere in the region of about a hundred, a hundred thousand installs, that's over the course of probably our 12 month period. But we did take, you know, four months sabbatical for the first, you know, from April to look at the platform while the world was kind of figuring out where to go based on the pandemic. Joel (26m 28s): Let's talk about pricing and you guys have, I guess, sort of really drawn a line in the sand in terms of being really affordable. It looks like you actually started as a free sort of a free service to employers. Talk about your current sort of the flat based unlimited. I mean, it's, it, it feels like very early two thousands pricing. Is that gonna, is that gonna hold or is that something that you guys are gonna maintain throughout your growth story? Gareth (26m 57s): That's very much the plan. I didn't want pricing to be a barrier to entry. I wanted this to be affordable. I wanted varieties of different types of businesses using it, and we want volume that's quite obvious to see, right? So I didn't want a barrier to the smaller businesses because this is clearly affordable to any of the larger business, but I didn't want to bury it to smaller businesses. Cause you know, my personal experience has been that, you know, I found myself as a better fit for a small business rather than a large Corp. Right. And I just believe that a good technology business curates the right information and displays it in the right manner that's digestible and engageable and hopefully fun. So we didn't want pricing to be a barrier. Gareth (27m 38s): We haven't modeled any other, we've got various models, but our, our growth is predicated on the model that you see before you right now. And one of the reasons is that we were massively confident in delivering ROI against that. So, you know, if you look at your cost per hire, then you know, we're pretty confident that you're going to get your money's worth out of Caroo very quickly, which that means that anything over and above is really a bonus, which means that, Hey, next year, I can come back and charge you guys more. Right? Joel (28m 8s): And that's the bell meaning that you get to face the firing squad. Gareth, are you ready? Gareth (28m 13s): Let's do this. Joel (28m 15s): Chad? Chad (28m 15s): It's time for tough love Gareth. So I have to say, I have to say that being targeted and not having the app available to the United States, to me, that's not a big thing because you were being disciplined and focused in how you want to grow, right? You have this growth that you want to monitor and you want to make sure that you're giving a great experience because that's what the underpinning of this is, right. A great experience, not just to candidates, but also to employers. So I love that. The marketing stands out in the question is, you know, can you afford it? To be able, to divide and conquer? Chad (28m 58s): I believe in this market, you can't afford not to do something like this. To do the Kama Sutra. S and M types of things, those are brand builders for you guys. Yes. Will people turn away from you? Yes. Guess what? Fuck them. They're not going to be a part of this experience and that's fine. This is a way that you get out there and you can actually reach out and pull people closer to you, as opposed to, again, not, not really being a brand that anybody even knows or cares about. Now, the hardest part for me from a business standpoint and being in this business, as long as I have is that you can't turn a blind eye to the amount of revenue that you're shutting out of the platform knowing that staffing accounts for the lion's share spend on many platforms that are out there today. Chad (29m 48s): Now, that being said, it's a market differentiator, which I appreciate for job seekers and for employers. So, you know, it's mighty attractive to some, you know, to some extent, but my suggestion overall would be using the Indeed Trojan horse model and allowing staffing in with limitations to ensure spamming and the battering of your database doesn't happen. Use those dollars for marketing and to drive downloads. The thing is, it's nice that you're giving people what they want. The biggest question is will they come and pay for it? That's the hardest piece overall, if you can get that, that's awesome. Chad (30m 30s): But it's going to be a hell of a long slog, if you do it without staffing. That's why I think you guys have a great model, a great idea, but overall you're missing the biggest piece and that's the perspective revenue opportunity, which is why Gareth is getting a golf clap. Joel (30m 52s): All right, Gareth, now it's my turn. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I love British rock. Love it. And when I knew you were from Manchester, learned, you're from Manchester. That, that teed up a lot of rock, sort of a nostalgia for me. So looking at, from Joy Division to the Smiths, to the Stone Roses, to my favorite band Oasis, this is I felt, I felt, yeah, I felt a real connection to going forward. And as you look at some of those bands, some of them remained fringe and some of them, you know, sort of made it big. You could say the Smiths and Oasis made it big, whereas the Stone Roses and Joy Division largely sort of stayed regional. Joel (31m 35s): So when I look at your business, I got to ask the question, does this remain sort of a regional phenomenon that that's popular within sort of the UK borders or European borders? Or is it something that really breaks out into the U S and Asia and all parts of all parts of the world? And I tend to think that that you're not so much Monte Python to break through into a global realm that you're going to be largely, very successful regionally. I think that the pushing the envelope, the fringe sort of marketing, the disruption marketing that you're doing plays really well in a sort of small focused business. I think you're going to attract a lot of job seekers, but I don't know how many serious job seekers, how many older job seekers? Joel (32m 21s): I don't know the breadth of which you're going to attract a ton of people, but for the people that you do attract, I think they're going to love you. I think they're going to talk about you. I think that with a certain segment of the population, you're going to be very popular. And on the employer side, I think you're going to turn off a lot of employers. I think that the number of Adidas's that you have, which I think is one of your bigger advertisers is going to be pretty minimal. So do I think you're going to be the next Indeed. Do I think you're going to be the next Glass Door? I don't, but do I think that you can be a very successful focused sort of appeal to you know, a smaller market, but still be very successful? Joel (33m 5s): I think you need to grade your company on that scale. Now, if you had told me, Hey, we want to be a really great regional sort of job resource. Now, companies here locally, I think my grade would have been different, but the fact that you said, we want to be bigger than Elvis, bigger than Jesus. That makes the scale that I'm grading you on a much tougher. So, whereas if you're a regional player, it would have been probably, a rousing applause, because you want to rule the world with sort of your fringe strategies and marketing. I'm going to agree with Chad. It's a golf clap. If you tweak things a little bit, it could be a rousing applause, but I think you're going to be a taste that not everyone is favorable to. Chad (33m 52s): I think it's tasty. Joel (33m 56s): And with that. We out. Chad (33m 58s): We out. Gareth (33m 59s): Thank you. Firing Squad OUTRO (34m 1s): This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the chadandcheesepodcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today that's www.chadcheese.com.

Adzuna CEO and Founder Doug Monro have a thing or two to say about Google's anti-competitive practices, particularly around job search. He's even joined his fellow European industry heads in an official complaint against Big G, so deciding whether or not to have him on the podcast was a no-brainer. In addition to search, Doug has a lot to say about programmatic advertising, fraudulent job postings, problems with your ATS of choice, and XML feeds (boy, does he have something to say about XML feeds!). Enjoy the Sovren powered pod! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Doug (0s): I think the argument that everything Google is doing is, is just to make the consumer experience better is pretty weak. And it doesn't make them. I mean, if they, if they are, they've not done a very good job of it. INTRO (10s): 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 (30s): Oh yeah. The British are coming. The British are coming. What's up everybody? This is Joel Cheeseman of the Chad and Cheese podcast joined as always by the King of quiona Chad Sowash and today we're joined honored to have founder CEO of Adzuna on the show, Doug Monro. Cheerio, top of the morning to you, whatever you guys say over there. What's up? Doug (56s): Hi guys. It's great to be on the show. I'm a big fan. Joel (59s): Full disclosure Adzuna is a sponsor of beer drop, which we love you. Chad (1m 5s): And our fans are big fans. Joel (1m 7s): Your employees are big fans. Cause I think they're getting beer too. But anyway, we appreciate, we appreciate it even though our livers hate it, Doug. For those who don't know what is Adzuna real quick, give us a Twitter description. Doug (1m 20s): Yeah, sure. So Adzuna is a search engine for jobs, we bring together every job in the world in one place, or at least in 16 countries, we operate in US, UK and many others and add great useful tools with data and search to help job seekers zero in on their perfect role. Joel (1m 37s): Founded in 2011? Doug (1m 40s): 2011. So nine years ago. Yeah, in the UK, we expanded over the next couple years to enter into Europe and Australia and Russia. And then we've been in the US and North America for about three years and growing really quickly there. Joel (1m 52s): Excellent. Chad (1m 52s): Awesome. Awesome. Well, tell us about, tell us about 2020. Smacked us around, but we've seen some companies rallied and then into 2021, which seems to be hijacked by 2020 to be quite Frank, how did COVID start to impact the business and what have you seen since then? Doug (2m 11s): Yeah, I mean, it was a crazy year for everyone and I guess, you know, first thoughts with everyone who's been ill or suffered or lost their job in the pandemic, my brother's a doctor in an emergency room, so he's had a fun year. In the UK and we've got the special, extra mutant variant over here. Chad (2m 32s): Thanks for that. Joel (2m 33s): Thanks for that. Doug (2m 37s): So 2020 was a hard year for our business as well. And in April we dropped about half the business from where we'd been on a really nice trajectory prior to that, you know, and it was hard times we cut some costs, but made the tough decision to keep the whole team on and focus and double down on improving our technology and improving our experience for job seekers and to help people who we knew were going to need our service. And every single month, since from April through to November, we grew back and by the last quarter of the year, we were above where we started. So it turned out to be a good decision, lot of hard work by the team. Joel (3m 14s): Real quick. When you say 50%, are we talking 50% decrease in job postings, customer's, head count? What are we talking about? Doug (3m 21s): 50% decrease in inventory. So jobs and in our revenue. And pretty much overnight, within a couple of weeks. Joel (3m 29s): Wow. Doug (3m 29s): So that was a shocker. I'm sure that was the same for many other businesses and some had it worse and some had it better. What we were, and we track the vacancy levels all the way through that and publish a lot of PR and data around that. And they're back, much closer to where they were even now, even with craziness in the last month or two. Which is great to see, and our businesses reflected that and done better than that. So we're up above where we were. That's required a lot of adaptation, we had to change a product focus around remote jobs or the categories that have done well, like healthcare and logistics. We've also been able to use the fact that we're in many countries to, you know, to adapt. So some, you know, some countries have been hit harder than others. Chad (4m 7s): Right. Doug (4m 7s): And not always exactly the job market has been hit exactly as you might think from looking at COVID cases. Joel (4m 14s): Say more about the global predicament, are there countries that are significantly down? Is the US a real, real screwed up case? Like what globally? Talk more about that. Doug (4m 24s): So I actually have all our markets, the UK was the hardest hit. I think that was a combination of being a services economy and also the way that governments reacted. So the British government introduced a very generous furlough scheme, which basically said, "Hey, everybody don't work for nine months and we'll pay you." So that, that doesn't really encourage hiring because everyone's frozen in place. I think the US we saw a much, a big drop as well, but a faster recovery than we saw in the UK, because amongst other reasons, I think a stimulus package was kind of designed to keep business going rather than freeze it, or to encourage people to go out and spend the money that the government sending them. Chad (5m 3s): Not much of that. Doug (5m 5s): This debate about more of it coming or not, I think. Yeah. And then other markets were all over the place. I mean, Italy was hit very, very hard early on, which you'd expect. Germany held up much better because it had very few cases for a long time, although the last few months, I think had been a bit harder in Germany. France has been very up and down for us different market and Australia is pretty solid. Pretty good now. I mean, they've hardly got any cases of COVID at all. And we're in Australia and New Zealand as well, which feel like they've almost come out the other side of the pandemic now. Chad (5m 33s): So, yeah, discipline. Doug (5m 34s): So it's been a real mix. And every month we've had to shift our resource Chad, you know, team members shift between working at one market and another, and I'm focused on sales teams and so on. And we have quite a lot of multi-country business too. So, you know, someone in our US team might sell a campaign in Europe or vice versa. So that, that also helps. Chad (5m 54s): So now have you always been a full remote team? So this wasn't a hard change for you, or was it a hard pivot? It seems like from a business standpoint and being able to stay nimble, as you were just talking about switching resources from country to country or industry to industry, whatever it was, you were pretty nimble there. How, how easy was that for you and was it because you were already remote beforehand? Or why was it, why was it so easy? Doug (6m 20s): So before the pandemic, we were about 40% remote, or at least out of our London office. So we're sort of 60% London office teams in the US and Australia. And then most of our tech team remote, who are literally worked from home and a whole bunch of different countries, the biggest one Greece, but lots of others. So we were already set up for it. I mean our third employee was a remote employee on the tech side. So we've done it for nine years as a business managed multi-country multi time zone, you know, remote work. It was still a big shock, and it's not everyone working remotely because they've decided that will be fun. Doug (7m 0s): It's everyone working remotely, right because of the pandemic and, you know, you might, you're locked in your house because you're not allowed to go out. And, you know, I'm lucky I'm 20 years into my career and I have a house with a couple of bedrooms and a bit of space, but you know, some of our team members in London live in really small, you know, shared accommodation where they're working out of their own bedroom, you know, so it's been a really tough few months for a lot of people. And I think one of the things we did really well, as well as being nimble as a business was frankly just supporting our employees, you know, helping make sure they had everything they needed at home, putting in place wellness support and things like that. And just being flexible about time off and support and all those kinds of things. So I think a bit of empathy and a bit of leadership goes a long way in those situations. Chad (7m 45s): It creates trust and loyalty long-term, does it not? I mean, and are you seeing companies in Europe or in the UK really focusing around that treatment of their employees? Or do you think you guys are, are kind of like a upper-crust when it comes to it? Doug (8m 2s): I think we've done a good job. I don't wanna blow my own trumpet on it. You know, it's like, I think we, I think we've done our best, given a very difficult situation to support our teams. Loyalty is an interesting one too. I think it definitely inspires loyalty. We've seen some funny effects as well, though, with the pandemic, for example. Our tech folks who were remote already are getting more job offers from more places than they ever did before, because all these other companies have figured out how to do things remotely and now suddenly our guys have been doing it for five years and are really good at getting, you know, recruiters funding up and offering them jobs. Also realizing that, you know, Greece is a little bit less expensive than San Francisco as well. So that's challenge that we have to deal with. Chad (8m 41s): Oh yeah. Joel (8m 42s): You mentioned numbers going down. I'm curious about traffic. Cause there's the other side of that, right. As more people are unemployed, you see more traffic. So I'm just curious about the sources of traffic. What did I assume your traffic up, but to what degree, what are some of the main sources of traffic that you guys get? I assume as a 10 year old company, you know, organic traffic is obviously a big driver for you, but what are some of the things that you're using to get to get eyeballs? Doug (9m 9s): Yeah, so we were really lucky as a business that we've been able to build a pretty diversified traffic base. So we have good SEO and organic traffic. And we'll talk about Google in a minute, I'm sure. We obviously focus a lot on emails and CRM and retention with users. We do a lot of PR and that generates a certain amount of brand traffic and organic traffic, but we also buy through Google and Facebook and other platforms like that and work with affiliate partners as well as others do in the industry. So we've always tried to be not too dependent on any one traffic sources of business. And I think that's really important because you become a one trick pony and something goes wrong with that. Google changes their algorithm or whatever whole business is kind of stopped. Doug (9m 51s): It also allows us as programmatics come into the industry and that's something we focused on and to really understand where the best traffic sources for different companies and advertisers are, you know, making sure that we can push a campaign harder on particular traffic sources that convert well for one client and or one industry, and then look at in different candidate pools for other ones. And that's really important for optimizing for those programmatic campaigns as well. Joel (10m 17s): And then obviously beer drop with Chad and Cheese has been a windfall traffic. Doug (10m 23s): 78% of job seekers on Adzuna mentioned beer drop as their primary source. Chad (10m 31s): Oh, okay, Doug, so you mentioned Google, and obviously we wanted to talk to you about this because there's a very long list of job sites in the EU who says that Google for Jobs is unfairly favoring its own service. Can you give us some background about this, this came out, I believe in 2019 and it's, I mean, there've been more and more job sites gaining, I guess the, the list by the day, give us some insights, if you would? Doug (11m 3s): Yeah, of course. So Google for Jobs has been around for a few years. I think the original set up included their ATS product, Google Hire and, and even a sort of certain embedded search product that they wanted to sell to job boards. And those have sort of fallen by the wayside, but Google for Jobs continues to be a thing. Joel (11m 24s): Is the API gone? That's still around. Right? Doug (11m 26s): I think it still exists. I don't know how many people use it. And Google for Jobs is a big box at the top of the page that directs you away from the thing that you were searching for to a bunch of jobs that are sort of hosted on Google's platform. And then you kind of look through those and then you can click off and apply somewhere else. Sometimes there are seven buttons on a job, right. To try and choose where you want to apply. I'm not sure how you choose. So what does that actually do for industry? It kind of diverts traffic away from organic search or from Google ad words searches and into this slightly different part of kind of organic traffic and keeps users on Google's platform for longer. Doug (12m 7s): At the moment they don't monetize it and so I think it, in that sense, it's has a relatively small impact on the industry or we can get into this but I think my, my concern is where do they go next with it? Chad (12m 18s): And that's a good question, but I mean, let's take, let's take a look when this first came out in 2019, Google Hire was a thing, the Jobs API was something else that they were pushing. So back then I, you could see there was a, there was really a lot of effort put into and resources put into this specific arena. Now that those have fallen away, it has this whole endeavor really lost some gaps. Doug (12m 47s): Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I, so I'm not the leader of this effort at all. I was approached by a couple of German websites that were putting this complaint together. Chad (12m 58s): Imagine that you talk about putting a wall around your country when it comes to job search Germany does a damn good job of that. Doug (13m 5s): Yeah. I mean, do it, you know, and, and Germany, Germany in general is a country with very strong views about privacy and competition. I think the media with there have been, you know, fighting Google for 20 years around Google news. So I wasn't surprised at all to see that, but I don't think it is the Germans doing something strange here. I think the complaint is a very reasonable complaint. So the fundamental of the complaint that they, and that's why I signed it, the fundamentals of the complaint that they are bringing is self preferencing, right? So it's Google giving priority to Google's own services that compete with other people. So the Yelp situation in the U S the Google shopping precedent in Europe, where Google was fined 5 billion euros, I believe for basically preferencing Google shopping listings over people like Kelkoo and other others that, that brought that complaint. Doug (14m 1s): And, and those complaints were great, but they were too late. Those businesses had been destroyed by the time a Google, you know, someone brought a legal complaint and Google got fined, right? They destroyed that whole industry. Those companies are out of business. In fact, the only thing that they all have left is a lawsuit against Google. So I think what I think there's a fair complaint, which is self preferencing. You know, you're a massive monopoly. Everyone uses Google for search and, you know, you're now leveraging that monopoly into jobs and other services. And you're just going to carve the people out of the whole industry. That's classic monopoly behavior. And I think that the reason I signed it, as I think bringing these complaints, whether it be in the EU or in the US, is what's going to moderate their behavior. Doug (14m 44s): I don't think Google is going to take away Google for jobs, because someone brings a complaint and writes a letter. But I think if nobody brings a complaint and writes a letter, then they'll monetizing. Chad (14m 52s): Right. Doug (14m 52s): Then they'll stop adding hired, than they'll take, add, trying to use that monopolies to take the whole industry. Joel (14m 59s): It's commercial time. 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So I could push back and maybe someone from the other side would say, look, you know, job seekers are what we should focus on here. And that's probably what Google is focusing on. And from their data they've learned over the last 10, 20 years that, you know, vendors sort of behave badly when it comes to job search. And you're clicking around in multiple job sites and job seekers are confused and basically the results that people get aren't very good. So trust in Google was dropping because of sort of the other side of what the vendors were doing with crossposting jobs and sort of playing this, this whack-a-mole of where do I apply? Joel (16m 46s): And so, so Google was almost forced by the vendor side to create a, to create a search component that basically policed. Okay. Where are you applying from? And who's posting jobs, and then let's letr the job seeker decide, okay. Do I want to apply at Adzuna? Do I want to apply through LinkedIn? Do I want to apply through the corporate website? And then the second part of my devil's advocate would be isn't this largely based on vendor fear, because job seeker behavior is going to eventually go toward people understanding well, if I go to a job board, I'm probably going to have to go to the company's ATS anyway, because that's where companies want me to go. Joel (17m 28s): So I'm eventually going to go to Google and find out, okay, apply through the company website. And I'm just going to go to the company website. And that drives up traffic from you guys. So it's a business saving effort to get Google out of the picture. Am I right on that? Or am I off base? Doug (17m 44s): We at Adzuna, are trying to build a great experience for the job seeker to help them get into work, to help those companies that are struggling to find the right people. And we're trying to make a buck or two along the way. Right? So both of those things, you know, both of those points apply to our business as well. I think on the consumer side, I don't buy it. I mean, I think it's a very disingenuous argument from Google to say, we're the consumer champion. We're doing this to make the consumer experience better. I mean, I've tried to use Google for jobs and it's not great. Those search interfaces in gray, I get the same ad from lots of different places. It takes me even more clicks to find an apply than it does on aggregator like Adzuna or another one. Doug (18m 26s): I still get redirected to eight different places. I still have bad quality content in there. And, and frankly, if you search on Google for the word Adzuna right, that's our brand and exists before I started my company, this big Google for jobs box that doesn't have Adzuna jobs in it comes up. Right? So I think the argument that everything Google is doing is, is just to make the consumer experience better is pretty weak. And it doesn't make them, I mean, if they, if they are, they've not done a very good job of it. So yes, that is the PR line they put out, this is a decision. It's a business decision that Google, you know, is growing at less than 5% a year on search query volume. They've everyone in the world is already using Google. Doug (19m 7s): It's hard to acquire new people. So if you have to do, if you want to do what your shareholders are asking for, which is grow Google's business at 30, 40, 50% a year, you gotta get more money out of every query. And one of the ways you do that is you keep people on Google when they would otherwise link out somewhere and ultimately monetize that traffic while it's on Google more heavily. So I, you know, I, that's the reason Google brought in Google for jobs and that's their motivation going forward for developing the service, in my opinion. 2 (19m 35s): Yeah. And now on the second part was the fear of training job seekers. They could go to Google to find the job directly on the corporate career site, much easier. And all the context to that, you know, we've talked, we're, we're close with iCIMS and I've talked to Colin Day, you know, their founder quite a few times. And they've been really open around the amount of traffic that job boards and sites are losing in light of Google for Jobs. So it does seem like lack of traffic is an issue with Google for Jobs and vendors. Doug (20m 3s): So, so for us, we haven't seen that. I mean, we're growing as a business and it's hard to know where you're benchmarking against, but we are, our life got a bit more complicated because we now have to do Google organic and Google for Jobs rather than one. Yeah. So for the probably same amount of traffic, we have to do more work, but that's okay. We can handle that. But the, you know, we haven't seen it as a big drop-off in traffic. No, nor a massive gain in traffic. I mean, it, hasn't, it's been pretty neutral for our business candidates do want to apply to the job. They don't want to work with seven intermediaries to get there, right? That's not a good experience, you know, we're doing that with our own business. We started working a lot with job boards and over time we've worked increasingly with employers and ATS is to get much closer to the source of the content. Doug (20m 48s): And a lot of those now, actually one Adzuna to host the apply, you know, not for us to click out to their career site users. Don't like that click out and being redirected. I think you mentioned this Joel, on your previous talk about the Google for Jobs situation, but the employer websites are not always the best candidate experience websites, especially on mobile devices. They vary a lot, but even where they're good, there's still that slightly jarring click out. So I think the argument that you want to go to Google go direct to the employer website, especially for employers that don't have big brand names and Google doesn't offer that apply. Doug (21m 29s): So they still have that sort of jarring link. I'm not sure Google is making anything better from a vendor point of view. Sure. We would not be keen on a world where everyone went to Google and that's the only place they applied for a job. And they only went directly to the company website. And there were no other vendors in the whole market. Sure. That wouldn't be good for our business. But I think, you know, we're helping employers to get in front of the right candidates and optimize their campaigns and ultimately hire the right people that they want in their organizations. And they need some help, They're not just, Hey, I've put up a website and Google fill me with candidates. I think that would cause a lot of problems for any number of vendors to handle. Joel (22m 7s): Fair enough. Chad (22m 8s): I totally agree. There's user experience for Google for jobs is shit is horrible. But I do see the, the, the choice, right? The buttons choice, which again, the whole user experience is just crazy. Now before Google for Jobs though, Indeed virtually owned the organic, right? So now doesn't Google for Jobs, give this smaller job sites, these, these job sites that are actually listed, does it give them more of a fair shake instead of before, when they were losing organic search to Indeed because Google was favoring them? Doug (22m 44s): I think in the short term, for some of them who are quite, you know, entrepreneurial, like Cando I just, just like SEO, Google for Jobs creates a little bit of a game as well. You know, like what can I do with my content to be the first guy that's listed for Google for Jobs? And I'm getting the most indexed and so on. And for some players that that will give a benefit. And for some, it will be a reduction. But I think that I think where the hundred and thirty-five signatories of this letter and not, not all end jobs, I agree and are a little bit more farsighted is, is what are these guys going to do next? So when is Google going to start monetizing Google for jobs? I think it was on one of your predictions for last year or this year. And what does that look like and how does that impact your business? Doug (23m 26s): Yeah. Chad (23m 26s): Joel just keeps using that as a rolling prediction until it happens. I appreciate the now 135 different organizations are actually applying pressure to Google so that they know they can't do what they've done in the past. But also on the other side is this helping is Google actually pressing organizations like yours and like, you know, your peer organizations to do a better job on the user experience. They are saying that they're trying to create a better user experience. That's why Google for Jobs exists. Has that helped in our industry at all? Or have we just pretty much just stayed status quo and we still have, for all intents and purposes, the same user experience. Doug (24m 13s): I don't see the Google for Jobs has had a positive impact on user experience. Overall. I think they're pretty strict about what their feed requirements are, but I don't see those as enforcing a better, better practices in the industry. I probably seen more impact from working with the likes of at-cost to improve industry standards than I have from Google in terms of us as a partnership. So, no, I don't think they're having a big impact. And I think there are, I've seen affiliate sites spring out that I didn't know existed that suddenly have a million jobs on Google for Jobs as well. So I think they're creating new opportunities for people to scrape content and push it into Google for Jobs that aren't great for candidates. Doug (24m 55s): So yeah. Talk about that because I think, and I'll come back on onto your side of the things here real quick as well, cause I'm balanced like that. So we're hearing a lot about, and not just jobs flooding, you know, into Google for Jobs, but also sort of fraudulent stuff. You know, the things that existed on Google, you know, 20 years ago by gaming, you know, SEO and driving people to, you know, NASCAR sites with tons of banners and you got to give us your social security number and things like that. That seems to be infiltrating Google for Jobs. Is that your perspective talk about not just the flood of new sites, but also the risk to consumers and in going into fraudulent sites that are asking for a lot of information, what are you seeing there? Doug (25m 42s): Yeah, I mean that, that is a risk and has always been a risk in the industry. There's everything from, you know, fraudulent lead generation businesses to people that I ran a business called Gumtree, the sort of Craigslist of Europe 15 years ago. And we had terrible problems with people putting out fake job ads and getting people to give them their bank details and stealing their money. And that's still around, you know, 15 years later. So there are challenges in our industry and I think the responsible players and I would include ourselves within that, what really hard to clean out that content and, you know, QA and keep all of that bad stuff away and lots of different ways. I think when you're Google your operating a relatively open platform, they want to be seen to be taking jobs from everyone. Doug (26m 26s): And all of those people are sending huge numbers of jobs and yeah, it's very, very high and this isn't monetized at the moment and it isn't even necessarily the only, you know, your main focus as a business, you've got enough verticals to worry about as well enough of the geographies. It's pretty hard to make sure that you know exactly what's going on on the end of that next click and the click beyond that. So I think it's very hard for Google to police that and the relative risk reward for them, isn't it? You know, I think it's very difficult. So that could be something that ends up actually hitting them like it did with Facebook and discrimination related complaints in this area. Doug (27m 9s): But it is an opportunity for, you know, anything from someone's scraping the Adzuna website to get all of the job listings on there, then doing some text churning on them and then pushing them into Google for Jobs. That's a relatively easy and horrible thing to do. Chad (27m 24s): Let's go ahead and wrap all this up with Doug's. What do you call them? Bugaboos? What are they? Joel (27m 31s): Bugger rugs. Bugbears? What was it? Doug (27m 33s): Yes. Bugbears. Joel (27m 36s): I love learning English as an American. Chad (27m 38s): Yes, yes. Doug's bugbear. So the first one we're going to talk about is you mentioned programmatic and we've seen a huge uptick in just the word programmatic and most people don't even know what the hell it means. I mean, and there is probably a very broad definition to this word in the first place and these processes in the first place. What's your, what's your bug bear about this? Joel (28m 2s): IDK what it is, but I gotta have it. I got it. Doug (28m 4s): Yeah. It's great to be educating you guys on British English. You'll have to teach me some American English along the way. Like I said, programmatic, for me, the recruitment industry talks about programmatic and we're not truly programmatic yet today. Truly programmatic in my mind is what happens in display advertising. You bid in real time, on a user, on that session, on that click, on that website. And what we're calling programmatic today is changing your beds once an hour, across a whole bunch of inventory that is then valid for 24 hours. And, and, you know, we're talking about optimization of campaigns and we're on a journey from pay and prey on Monster 20 years ago to something truly programmatic. Doug (28m 52s): And, and I would say at dinner and, and the many agencies we work with are making great progress on that journey, but we're not truly programmatic. And if we want to say that we are, then we need to, you know, start, start taking that to the next level, exchanging data faster, truly thinking about how you do things in real time, which I think leads me to bugbear number two. Joel (29m 11s): Yes. Yeah. I would not have predicted this, this bug bear. XML feeds. You've got it out for XML feeds. Doug (29m 18s): XML feeds need to die. XML feeds. I like the 1980s technology for like lending information. We as a business and all of our partners and all of our customers are exchanging these enormous 50 gigabyte files of lines and lines of text information. 99% is the same as yesterday. And it's, you know, like Amazon, are making a lot of money out of us or Google cloud or all of those hosting providers, but it's not the way to get to truly programmatic technologies to give job seekers up to date information that's not expired to make sure that we deliver really effectively for campaigns. Doug (29m 59s): So we're trying to build API as ads, you know, but we need the rest of the industry to do it too. So I thought today was a great opportunity to shout about that bug bear. So I, I think we'll still be trying to exchange data in real time, trying to offer APIs for jobs, trying to think about the new and the deletions, not just replacing this enormous bowl cup day, every time and trying to, you know, and that requires multiple people to work on things together. Not just me to say, Hey, we're changing. Chad (30m 30s): And you have to get either an intermediary or the applicant tracking systems to start using bi-directional APIs. Right. And to be able to get some of these monolithic legacy platforms like ATSs to do something like that is nearly impossible. So what I'm hearing is there's actually an opportunity to be able to play that layer of a bi-directional API for somebody who wants to do a shit ton of work. Doug (31m 1s): I think that's right. And there are some folks doing some work around that. Like Alex Murphy, business is doing some stuff in that area. I think they were are ATSs that are modern and forward-thinking and ready to do this, we are integrating with some of them with API, so it can be done. Joel (31m 15s): Do you want to name names? Doug (31m 16s): I don't have the list of names right in front of me. Joel (31m 21s): Fair enough. Doug (31m 22s): I do think the industry is getting there and I think there is a perception I've seen at conferences and when talking to other CEOs that, that this needs to change and as an appetite. So it's, it's just taking a few steps towards that. Joel (31m 34s): The Brits are so polite, aren't they? Jesus Christ, Doug Monro, everybody. Doug, thanks for coming on the show, man. We appreciate it. For those of our listeners cause they don't hear enough about Adzuna on the show. Where would you send them to learn more? Doug (31m 47s): So visit adzuna.com and you'll be able to click on a link for employers or hires. If you want to find out bit more or speak to the lovely Mark Anderson our ahead of US. Chad (31m 59s): Nobody's ever said that before. Lovely Mark Anderson. Joel (32m 4s): Chad, another one in the books. We out. Chad (32m 8s): We out. Doug (32m 8s): Good night guys! OUTRO (32m 9s): I'm Rory from Scotland, the country, which brought you electricity! Thank you for listening to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Nada Niente. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Valentine's Day is close and love is in the air. What kind of love are we covering this week? Paychex marries errrr... acquires Danish Applicant Tracking System, Emply Recruiter.com consummates a deal with Scouted.io Paradox gets all sex appealed up with video then love is spread with Buy or Sell including - 1) WizeHire 2) Ethena 3) Nexthink ... and Sunday's Super Bowl ads get us all misty Yup, hooking up, video dating, and slapping around some startups, all on this love-filled episode of your favorite podcast, sponsored as always by Sovren, JobAdx, and Jobvite. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. 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. Valentine's day is here, which means nothing but love and respect on this week's podcast. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese show everybody. I'm your cohost, Joe "Margaritaville" Cheesman. Chad (37s): Chad "Walgreens" Sowash. Okay. Joel (39s): On this week's show Paradox goes visual, Paychecks goes where no payroll service should ever go. And we have some thoughts on the Superbowl ads. Hey, is that Drake from State Farm? SOVREN (52s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. Chad (1m 51s): About matching the match up between Casey in Tampa Bay was for shit. Joel (1m 59s): I have one comment on that game. Unless you're like me and took a flyer on nine-to-one for the Bucks to win it all about six weeks ago. Other than that, it was a pretty shitty game. Chad (2m 12s): It was horrible to watch. I mean, it was horrible to watch. Although, although for you, I'm not going to cry because you're going to be in fucking Key West some time soon. Are you going to like dress up in a hazmat suit to get your ass down there? Cause I mean, you're not a young buck. We got to make sure. Make sure you're good. Joel (2m 32s): You're wondering why my middle name was "Margaritaville" this week. First shout out for me goes to my sister, my wonderful loving sister, Holly who's on marriage number two, tying the knot in Key West marrying some dude named Mike. I'm kidding. I know who he is. And it's a pretty small ceremony. I'm flying down Saturday, staying through Tuesday. Scared about my 81 year old father and 78 year old step-mother are attending. Chad (3m 4s): He better being a bubble. Joel (3m 7s): Yeah. Yeah. That's you know, but he's Texas. He's from Texas. He lives in Texas and he watches Fox religiously. So as far as he's concerned, there is no virus. He'll be fine. I'm glad that the double mask initiative is in play now. So I'm gonna definitely double mask it up. I've promised my wife that if I, if I stop at Shake Shack, I will eat in a janitorial closet somewhere near the bathroom. But yeah, I'm going to be as safe as possible. I'm not hating the fact that I'm leaving the house for the first time in a year. Yeah. A trip to New York Xity would probably be safer than one to Key West. So pray for Joel. Pray for Joel, everybody. Chad (3m 47s): Yes. We need Joel in a bubble for the next, just the long weekend. So you won't be gone that long. Joel (3m 54s): Bubble of linen pants because I'll be on a beach time. And you know, watching my sister tie the knot, Chad (4m 1s): Congrats to your sister, no matter what numbers she's on. That doesn't matter. Congrats to her. I love how you like to, to number these things. It's like, look at this it's number two. The first failure is already over. Joel (4m 14s): Cheeseman's tend to stop it two. So I feel pretty good. I feel pretty good about this one. Chad (4m 21s): Christine will kill you before that happens. And she has the forensics background to make sure that nobody knows that she did it. Joel (4m 30s): Come on, man. Valentine's day is coming and she's, it's all about this (background music plays love songs) in our house, man. Chad (4m 35s): I'll tell you who I show some love to not just, I mean, obviously I definitely want to show some love too to Julie, but Walgreens. They, they named Roz Brewer or Rosalynn Brewer, Chief Operating Officer from Starbucks as their new CEO. That means Roz Brewer actually the only black female as a CEO in the Fortune 500. So that's a good start. Let's get more of that shit rolling. Now also, can we get some shots in our arms? Walgreens. Roz, can you make that happen please? Joel (5m 17s): This shows a big shout out for women. I think. So I'm going to give a shout out quickly to Bumble talk. Speaking of second marriages, Bumble went IPO today and the, the founder they're female 31 years old. She's the youngest CEO female ever to take a company public. Yeah. Congrats to her. That's fantastic. Bumble Biz is sort of relevant. Although I guess no one gives a shit. It's all about dating. Chad (5m 44s): Not really relevant. And so continuing the female talk here, shout out to Zoe Xu, Jonathan Xu's daughter for hooking me up with some friendship bracelets that she made herself. She sold them and used the money to help local families in need over the holidays. Now that is bringing your kids up. Right? Good job. Xu family. Joel (6m 9s): I'm glad you finally have a friend. And friends of the show real quickly, Josh, when right of boom of Poon Tang, I mean, sorry, pontoon and Victoria, Conley of ADP. They modeled some sexy, sexy t-shirts this, this week, their sportin' Chad and Cheese again, sexy love theme of the week. Chad (6m 35s): Valentine's I mean that's to Philly t-shirt shout outs in the last two weeks, emissary.ai logos all over Philly. And by the way, if you're not using texts to recruit welcome to 2021 kids and visit emissary.ai. Joel (6m 52s): No doubt. No doubt, well, shout out to Dennis Tupper. We talked about him yesterday, but he got his beer last night. And boy is he excited? Dennis don't drink it all, we're going to have a little zoom tasting soon. At least save a couple cans for the call buddy. Chad (7m 7s): I had one last night with James Dean, and this is all brought to you by kids, don't forget, AdZuna. Doug Monroe actually has an interview out there we did the last week, I believe, or we talk about Google Jobs antitrust. So go listen to Doug. Then go to chadcheese.com/free and register for a t-shirt, beerdrop, and we also have this whiskey thing that we're going to continue to do, right? Joel (7m 37s): Yeah. Yeah. We got the Chad's choice and the Cheese's choice of whiskey. We're bringing back the Blockbuster tradition and Sovren is sponsoring this because they hate everyone's liver apparently. Every month we're going to pick a winner. They're going to get two bottles of your favorite whiskey as well as one of my favorite whiskeys. I don't know how you beat that deal again. Sign up at chadcheese.com/free to enter for a chance to win some brown water. It's awesome. Chad (8m 5s): It's two bottles of fucking whiskey for God's sakes. Good for you. I've got a rant. Are you done with your shout outs? Because I've got to take a little time. It's time for catharsis and counseling right now. Joel (8m 17s): If you feel a little punchy. I'm ready, baby. Chad (8m 20s): No. Okay. So the Kroger story from last week where they closed two locations in Southern California. Where they, they wouldn't pay the additional $4 per hour for the essential employees that they have. They're essential workers while I did just some quick research, cause I was still kind of pissed about it and saw that Kroger's CEO makes over $14 million a year. So I screenshot that and I tweeted it at Kroger and just pretty much said, Kroger won't pay added $4 per hour for essential employees, yet they will pay their CEO $14 million a year. Kroger replied, and of course they didn't address the CEOs $14 million salary because they don't want to talk about that shit. Chad (9m 7s): They talked more about profitability. So Kroger's talking about profits yet, pay a single person more than 3000 times that of an essential worker. Why do we call them essential workers? If they don't do what they do, does anything get done? But this old white dude sits in a fucking chair and yet he makes 14 million dollars. Anyway, people stocking the shelves, doing the work, greeting customers. This is really Kroger is the shining example of polishing a turd when it comes to inequality. Joel (9m 43s): So I got it. No dude, there's a Kroger like almost within walking distance of you. Are you boycotting Kroger there in Columbus? Chad (9m 51s): Yeah. I'm going to. And see this is the hard part, right? We've got like the, we used to have a Marsh. We used to have like the smaller groceries. Now, you know, we have Walmart and Kroger. So the days of having the grocery around the corner, which was like the family owned or what have you, those days are really gone from most of small town America. These are the hard choices that we have to make because we've got to get our groceries from somewhere. Joel (10m 18s): Look at you, man, putting your mouth where your wallet is. And Julie doesn't shop at Amazon anymore. Right? Julie, doesn't like to get out. She's like wherever I get wherever I get it from that's fine. Chad (10m 30s): Not to mention, she loves the Walmart pickup. So she will do everything online and just drive up. They throw it in the trunk and boom, you're gone. So she loves that too. Joel (10m 42s): Do you feel better after letting that off your chest a little bit. Chad (10m 45s): I do. I do. I think I'm ready. Are you ready for topics? Joel (10m 47s): I'm ready for the news, man. Acquisitions galore, this week! Let's get to this one first, this one's a little baffling Paychex released Lesser Group, the company that owns Paychex acquired Emply or Emply, I think it's Emply, right? Although it's Etsy. So maybe Emply anyway, Lesser Group bought Paychex in 2018, today, or this week they announced the acquisition of Emply Emply as a fast growth. This is from them, a full suite, HR SAS provider, including a, a solutions for HR management, recruiting, onboarding and learning management Emply is recognized as a rising leader with an HR solution space in Denmark. Part of the acquisition is growing into big markets like the U S and Germany. Joel (11m 30s): The company has customers in 30 countries worldwide. The so will accelerate growth throughout the country, quote from the CEO "payroll customers in our main markets, Demark and Germany, have expressed a need for advanced cloud-based HR solution." So apparently there's a huge clamoring for payroll customers to get an ATS. Chad (11m 51s): Paychex sees the writing on the wall. We have all these individuals who are unemployed. That's going to flip, recruiting's going to turn back on, once we start getting shots and everybody's arms. So they see where the market's going to go. I don't want to hear this whole, we hear from our customers. I think that's bullshit. They see where the market's going. So to me though, it might seem odd. And I think to our listeners too, it might seem odd that when there are so many applicant tracking systems in the US that they could have acquired, but they buy a system across the pond in Denmark. And we're talking about a platform that's already, multilanguage not to mention it doesn't have as much leverage against it with funding as most of the U S platform. Chad (12m 42s): So if you think about it, a company like Paychex goes out, looks for a platform that they can use in multiple countries because obviously they have clients in multiple countries. And what can they plug in quickly that isn't incredibly leveraged at say a hundred million dollars in funding from VC or what have you? Right. It seems smart. And it seems easy, right? Joel (13m 5s): We talk all the time about one platform to rule them all right, and have one one-stop shop, make it easy. But I can tell you that the folks buying payroll services are likely not that involved with the recruiting side, the business or the candidate management side of the business. So I get the customer over overflow or maybe being able to add customers, but it just seems like a round peg in a square hole to me, all those round pegs go through square holes, but not square holes through round holes. So it's on the size of the peg. So that's a little bit confusing. I just, to me, this feels like a forced platform play. Joel (13m 46s): Customers will probably be confused because the ones that are on an ATS, aren't going to switch over to this ATS. The people on this ATS are not likely to move over to Paychex. So I don't know the jury's out on this one, I'm no, I'm no payroll expert, but this one seems a little bit strange to me. Chad (14m 6s): Yeah, it is interesting, because they aren't the same decision makers. They're not the same individuals who adopt now. I do like the whole thought process. And again, I think this is one of the deals that works on paper. Overall, you're talking to two groups that really don't communicate or work together that much. There's a handoff and the system hands off through an API and you're done. So we already have enough companies who have to use Workday. They're forced to use Workday because it's their ERP, right? It's their downstream system. I don't know that Paychex or a payroll system can actually have that much force or leverage to make, you know, the ATS decision. Joel (14m 52s): Well, here's our second acquisition of the week that you might be more interested in. A recruiter.com acquires Scouted, a recruiter.com is a public company. I don't know if you knew this or not, but they are a pink sheet penny stock, roughly trading at $3.30. If you're interested, you can find them at our C R T to ticker symbol. They are an on-demand video enabled and artificial intelligence hiring platform. They tout themselves as the world's largest network of recruiters, which is probably news to LinkedIn, but they've, they've acquired. They've acquired a scouted.io venture backed tech startup focused on unlocking human potential by developing deep insights into candidates, using video screening and AI based scoring algorithms. Joel (15m 38s): Does it sound a little bit like Verbo, maybe? Scottish CEO and co-founder Jacquelyn Loeb. This is a female startup, both co-founders are females. I mentioned this was a female heavy heavy show at the beginning. She said, quote "with Scouted's automated video and data forward approach to candidate onboarding recruiter.com can provide a turnkey experience that allows clients to tap more rapidly and more accurately into richly diverse talent pools" terms were not disclosed founded in 2015. Scouted only had an undisclosed seed round. So this baby was bootstrapped since 2015. Joel (16m 18s): So good for them. This was probably a pretty nice payday. Chad (16m 21s): Recruiter.com paid for the acquisition primarily in restricted common stock. So you think so? Joel (16m 28s): Can I revise that statement? Chad (16m 32s): Yeah, I think this is a candidate data play. This is nothing like Verbo. This is a more of a backend assessment. I need candidate insights, Scouted pretty much, it seems like they get a ton of data from the candidates that actually use their system. That's awesome. But overall, the recruiter.com network in itself, I think this is an interesting data play overall. They want to be able to quickly match candidates to jobs, throw a recruiter on it, get a payday. I mean, th th there's there's some mechanics in here that actually makes sense. Chad (17m 12s): But overall, do I think this impacts our industry as much as you know, maybe LinkedIn adding a feature tomorrow? Joel (17m 22s): No, no, not at all. What surprised me was how much recruiter.com is pimping, you know, the quote unquote video enabled our AI hiring platform because forever they'd been a network of recruiters and they've been that for a really long time. So this to me is like, Hey, let's get into some tech shit. Let's throw out some AI stuff. And Scouted as is a nice little, probably technology, a small team to acquire, to bring on and plug that in hopefully to their largest network of recruiters in the world. Don't tell LinkedIn, they said that. Alrighty. So if are we bearish on both of those? It sounds like pretty much. Chad (18m 1s): Yeah, I'm not, it's not that I'm bearish on recruiter.com. I just don't know that this actually moves the industry at all. I think the Paychex one is, again, it's more funny when you look at it on paper versus practicality. Joel (18m 17s): Yeah. Yeah. A couple of pen pushers checked out the Paychex did before that went through. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll talk some more video with Paradox. JOBADX (18m 25s): Are you prepared to engage the wave of returning job seekers? Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for longterm full time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JOBADX (19m 5s): JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Chad (19m 28s): Got another t-shirt announcement here. Kids actually literally just got a message from Jarvis Corral apparently we sent her a Chad and Cheese t-shirt yeah. And she's wearing it and enjoys listening to the podcast religiously to stay up to date. That's right. That's right. Jarvis, not just an Operating System, by the way. Joel (19m 53s): Looking good. Looking good Jarvis. Well, you know what else is looking good candidates in Olivia apparently. So this is one of our shreds. So listeners already know this, but Chadbots are go, Oh, sorry. Conversational AIs are going video kids! Paradox who we've talked about quite a bit on the show, we've interviewed a lot of their employees. So you, you knew at some point the text messaging thing was cute. The automated chat bot was cute, but you knew they were going to go video at some point. And they finally have officially, they're not the Mavericks in this. They're not the trailblazers. And I'm sure Chad will talk about that, but they've added video. Joel (20m 34s): Three primary selling points of this is that as employers can embed videos within messages. So if you got a nice little employment branding video, you want to throw in there to let a job seeker see that, you can do that and it plays within the messaging app. You can also record a short video responses. This is the candidate to standard pre-screen or have interview questions from there. So if you want to like, have an automated, 'Hey, videotape yourself this answer, and then we'll prescreen you through that.' And then lastly, they have hosted video and they've also integrated with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, WebEx, Blue Jeans, and a few others that are integrated. Joel (21m 18s): I'm sure you're bullish on this right video beyond chat bots? Chad (21m 23s): Yeah. I know. I'm totally biased because I'm friends with Adam Godson and I think he's like one of the smartest people in the industry. I think it's between him and Joel (21m 32s): I consider you a friend to Adam, just so you know. Chad (21m 35s): Quincy Valencia, who's the queen of chat bots or conversational AI, whatever. Yeah. I think we take a look at this, right? And we're talking about inline video answering, which is different than actual, lightweight connectors for a video interviewing and the Hirevues of like, you know, they've been around for like what 10 years or so? Joel (21m 55s): Quite a while. Chad (21m 56s): Yeah. They still Hirevue's been around for a while, they built a platform from the ground up, and that was great 10 years ago, but today there's not a need for that. Right? We have Zoom. We have all these different platforms that companies are already using. It's a part of their routine today, right. And instead of forcing a recruiter or a hiring manager into a new technology or a platform that they don't even know, they have to get trained up on. They have to adopt, they have to use why not just use what their existing platforms are and create connectors between those two so that you don't have to go through all of that crazy friction. Chad (22m 42s): And that is what Paradox did. So I know, like it was one of the things that talk push did back, you know, a few years ago. And I think that companies like Paradox will continue to do things like this instead of trying to build platforms from the ground up. Because right now, if you think about it, what kind of technical debt is Hirevue going to have to go through to keep their shit up to date rather than being a connector type of platform, per se, that just brings together all the platforms you're already using and make those a much, just a much more seamless process. Joel (23m 21s): Yeah. I had a note here that says, does Hirevue go downstream. And when you think about the incumbents and when they see a new technology, you know, driven by things that didn't really exist when you started in this case, maybe mobile messaging, sort of the adoption of that, and also FaceTime and Zoom video. And you probably saw it coming, but how does it sort of integrate with our space and when Paradox and Maya and Zaur, and all the ones that we talk about launched Hirevue had to look at that and go, ah, damn it, it's just a matter of time before this starts to get into our space. Joel (24m 2s): And it really starts to cause us some significant headaches. So does, you know, to me, it's like the people who are using Paradox now know that it has video. So it's like, okay, do we need Hirevue? Do we need that contract? So the question I had was now it is Hirevue go downstream and create some sort of a mobile experience, a chat bot kind of thing. Chad (24m 25s): They bought AllyO. Joel (24m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. That's true. So that that's there, right? So they've, at least they've put up defenses against what's going on. So that'll be interesting to watch, you know, I think this commoditizes chat a little bit, maybe the move to sort of evolve into video. I don't know how much importance the texting, the text-based messaging will have as you know, 10 years from now versus video. And we talk a lot about like every company as a platform is going to have to all have all these things. Like we joke about Tengai, the robot, you know, Tengai eventually needs to be a chat bot at some point. Joel (25m 7s): Like there needs to be a full sort of array of experience, with these things. So, yeah, I, when I first read this, I was like, Oh, Hirevue is going to take a shit. And they probably are also think from a standpoint of talent, you know, Paradox has done a really good job over the last year of getting in people that know what they're doing. And I think a lot of that is starting to come to fruition and they keep adding quality people onto the staff. So a Paradox is one to look out for, for sure. I think this is just the beginning of the features that will impress. Chad (25m 41s): Well, I think what we're looking at now is we're looking at a lightweight startups that aren't trying to create something from the ground up in totality, right? So it's try to create their own quote unquote "ecosystem." Rather what they're doing is they're just, they're being the connector to make this whole process easier. I mean, we hear about you know, RPA and, and how just the process automation piece means so much. This is another example of that. And when you're looking at Hirevue, they were on the frontier, let's say of building these things. How do they pivot and try to fight against some of these faster, more lightweight types of brands and platforms. Chad (26m 28s): I mean, it's gonna be different and hard and, and trying to use AllyO to prop up legacy technology is not going to be easy neither. Joel (26m 37s): It disrupts everything, but it's fun to talk about on a podcast. Chad (26m 40s): Oh yeah. Joel (26m 41s): Almost as fun as buy or sell! Chad (26m 44s): Yes! Joel (26m 44s): You ready to play a little buy or sell? Chad (26m 46s): I am. Joel (26m 47s): Alright. First up on the chopping block is WizeHire, that's Wize with the Z kids, you can find out more at wizehire.com. So the Houston-based maker of a hiring solution for small businesses raised 7.5 million in a Series A announced this week prior to institutional funding WizeHire bootstrapped to over 7,000 paying customers and 4.7 million in recurring revenue throughout 2020. WizeHire's recruiting platform has been implemented across real estate, mortgage and insurance industries with what they say is growing traction in the hospitality vertical. Joel (27m 28s): One thing that probably launched them into another stratosphere was that they partnered with lenders for the paycheck protection program, or PPP to make relief, more accessible to local businesses. They also provide job description help, and they blast those postings all around the web for small businesses. Buy or sell Wizehire? Chad (27m 51s): Yeah, I think they've already demonstrated that they're a buy. To be able to make the right types of partnerships, to be able to go grow to 7,000 customers. I do think that the system, you got to remember SMBs are going from pencil and paper and Excel spreadsheets to now this new tech. So they don't know what they don't know. WizeHire has these hiring coaches that actually goes through, they have a chat that's there. So it's like a constant help in a crutch that's there the entire time. So I think that's good to a degree. I would love to see more of an RPA kind of a system set in place for them moving down the road. Chad (28m 34s): But I mean, overall, these are great platforms. And if you make the right partnerships, you can see explosive growth and these guys have already demonstrated they can do that. So it's a buy. Joel (28m 44s): Wow. So for me, it was a tough one, but I'm going to go sell on this one. I hate small businesses, small businesses, small businesses go out of businesses. Okay. Yeah. And you gotta, you gotta recycle this shit. You got a ton of churn. This business has people involved. So it's like heavy with the handholding of these businesses. You got a ton of competition from all the way from Craigslist to the gig platform. You know, the gig economy to the job cases of the world, you know, 7.5 is a drop in the bucket compared to what they're going to need to compete. It's a nice little story. It's a sweet, you know, a sweet deal so far. Joel (29m 26s): And the PPP thing was a good snag for them. Oh, Snag-a-job by the way. There are competitors as well. So it's a nice little story, but for me, it's a sell. Next up on the chopping block is Ethena not Athena Karp, who's one of our favorites on the show, but this one can be seen it goethena.com, the Brooklyn, New York based provider of sexual harassment prevention and corporate compliance training raised an additional 2 million in funding. The startup had it raised 2 million previously in June. Clients include Netflix, Zoom and ZenDesk. They provide bite sized, ongoing lessons for workers. Joel (30m 8s): They launched geez, February, 2020. So just a year old, they also have women co-founders, we always, you know, love that. I love this. They use comic book, light graphics to explain bad behavior, which people like me need keeping companies out of court with comic book graphics. Buy or sell Chad? Chad (30m 28s): So first off it's Ethena with an E as opposed to an a like the goddess of war. Joel (30m 35s): Ethena, Ethena... Chad (30m 37s): goethena.com. Here's here's the biggest key companies are spending billions with a B on DEI training. And now that Trump's dumb ass is out of office and his EO is null and void. DEI training is back on this platform feels like Netflix, TikTok and DEI training had a baby it's curated and updated content, short five minute videos and a nudge when you need to get your training on. So companies are spending billions and humans are always looking for a quote, unquote, "check the box, silver bullet" type of solution and Ethena gives them all of that in one package. Chad (31m 20s): This is a huge buy for me. It's an, it's an easy one for a company that to plug into. Joel (31m 25s): Totally so huge buy for me as well. I'll just sort of reiterate what you said. Like, you know, HR is, is made to keep companies out of trouble, out of court, right? We had a recent background check discussion, which was one of the best interviews in our short year so far. Chad (31m 41s): Kim Jones. Joel (31m 42s): You know, not only is it like a play to keep your company out of trouble, it's the right business at the right time. I love, love, love the way that they give bite-sized TikTok, generational style lessons for people, the comic book sort of animated series about like dating at work and having that animated is fricking brilliant. Love that. So, yeah, to me, this is a year old company. Second round already. This company is going to get gobbled up probably this year and the co-founders are going to be really wealthier than they are today. So big buy from me as well. Joel (32m 23s): Ethena. Chad (32m 24s): Any applicant tracking system that's out there today should acquire this fucking company, plug it into their existing platform. And it's instant cash. Joel (32m 34s): Speaking of instant cash. This brings us to our third and final buy or sell of the week. This is Next Thing. Did I say that right there? Guardian. Gotcha. Okay. So founded in 2004, geez we were just in our teens back then this, the Swiss Switzerland based Next Thing announced a $180 million D round, that's US dollars kids, by the way, this brings their total raise to $345 million. They announced a valuation of 1.1 billion, which gives them what kind of status Chad? Chad (33m 10s): Unicorn, bitches. Joel (33m 12s): Unicorn status. All right, Next Thing gives companies insight into employees, daily experiences with technology at the device level and gives a company the ability to collect and track employee sentiment and broadcast real-time communications. Next Thing then collects activities and metrics such as performance issues, unused software, policy breaches, browser requests, and hundreds of other metrics, and puts them in a nicely, a nice to read dashboard. Welcome to the big brother economy. Everybody by or sell, Chad? Chad (33m 44s): Employee experience is a thing now that we're like not in the office, which is weird because we all had an experience when we were in the office too. So it's, I mean, it's interesting how COVID has really changed everything, but it's important that, you know, we monitor and tap into signals without being all creepy and surveillancy. But I think, I think this, goes way too far because you're creating a platform where a platform really isn't needed. I mean, instead we need to lightweight connections for existing systems, which compile those signals and provides analytics. And this company is 700 people strong with $345 million in funding. Chad (34m 28s): So it feels like a 2010 solution in 2021. Plus again, it's creepy surveillance and I'm going to sell this fucking thing. Joel (34m 38s): All right, we're gonna be on the opposite end of this one, too, this is a big buy for me. In a work from home world companies are freaked out that their employees are doing God knows what, which I think takes monitoring up to another level. Companies are going to want to know what the hell everybody's doing, what software, I mean, this is super creepy shit, but this is the world we live in. Companies want to know what you're doing, especially when you're working from home. This company is in business, has been in business for a long time. They've got a ton of money. You mentioned a ton of employees like companies. Don't just do that without a demand out there for their services. So for me, that's a big applause. It's a big applause. Chad (35m 18s): Yeah. Or somebody big buy them very quickly Joel (35m 22s): Unicorn like a motherfucker boys. So let's take a quick break. We'll listen to our buddy a word from our buddies at Jobvite. And we'll talk about the Superbowl advertisements. Jobvite You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process and all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Still haven't seen Bridgerton. Chad (36m 20s): So meta. Joel (36m 22s): So I feel like this is the only part of the show I really wanted to talk about. So we're saving it for last Superbowl ads, thoughts. Chad (36m 30s): First question. How much money did Paramount pay? Because the Paramount Plus ads were all over the fucking place. Joel (36m 37s): So I gotta admit, I loved the one they said crack, like there's a crack in the rock or something. And Beavis, Butt-Head just laugh and go. She said, crack took me back to being a 12 year old, which doing this show also does. Chad (36m 52s): Of course. Joel (36m 53s): Yeah, dude, I don't, I mean the whole streaming fatigue thing, like I have ones, like my wife has bought some, I don't even know. We have like, I'll just be surfing around and you know, we've got streaming shit. I didn't like the Brittany streaming channel. Like what is that? I'm kidding. We don't have that. But anyway, I'm not going to get Paramount. I didn't, we didn't get Peacock. I think, I think we're at our limit. How about you guys? Chad (37m 16s): Yeah. I don't see anything out there that we really need not to mention a lot of what we have comes free. So, I mean, Julie just bought an iPad. So we have Apple Plus for who knows how long? I've already extinguished all of the good content that's on that platform because they don't come up with that much. That fast. They're not like a Netflix, right? They're not pumping out the content or HBO MAX is fucking kill them. It too. So I think those two platforms are really the ones that to try to beat at this point. Joel (37m 48s): So did you finally get to watch Greyhound? Chad (37m 50s): Yeah. Thank God. Great movie. Joel (37m 52s): Yeah. Great movie. Great movie. Chad (37m 54s): All right. Well, so we're not getting Paramount, so suck it. Joel (37m 58s): One of the, we got, okay, let's talk about Indeed. Chad (38m 1s): I don't think it's worth it. Joel (38m 2s): All right. So I have, I have three comments about the Indeed ad and they're all relevant because they weren't relevant before the super bowl. It was very evident that they brought a knife to a gunfight. The Superbowl at this point is if you don't have Springsteen, Drake, mega stars, cute babies or animal like talking animals or whatever, like you're just going to be lost in the shuffle. And the Indeed ad was lodged between a Jonas Brother ad and Drake from State Farm. Chad (38m 33s): That was hilarious. Yeah. Joel (38m 34s): So they were, I think were basically totally ignored. The other thing that was curious to me is that the ad was really focused to active job seekers. Chad (38m 43s): Yes. Joel (38m 44s): And the number one complaint we hear from Indeed users is that they have too many candidates, right? So to me, they just exacerbated the biggest problem that they already have by appealing to an active job seeker, someone who's unemployed. Right? So I get the warm and fuzzy, but it felt like that these guys really know who their audiences, of who's buying the product. And then the third thing, which is a little bit petty, but God damn it. How many words do you need to put in an ad? Like there's like 12 sentences, over 50 words, the words sort of combined with each other. Cause the same word stay. And then like words go in the middle. But I'm like, you know, if we know anything about the human race, less words is more, total, meh. Joel (39m 26s): I thought it was total forgettable. And it, it was a, it was a fail. Chad (39m 30s): Not worth the time. Well, it was worth the time though was sexy Alexa, the new Alexa design I thought was hilarious. They're touting this new Alexa design and they hardly even show the fucking design because the sales rep is talking about the new design and she wanders over to a window and she's sees on a bus, Michael B. Jordan who's in like a movie promotion on the side of a bus. She starts then fantasizing about Michael B. Jordan, Jordan as her Alexa. It is fucking hilarious. The ad does little to promote the new design itself. Chad (40m 12s): But overall it was funny. Itwas memorable. And I definitely got a chuckle out of it. Joel (40m 19s): So my favorite part of that ad is that is the husband. Chad (40m 22s): Oh yes, no, it is. It is hilarious. Lights on! lights off! Joel (40m 26s): And like the sexual innuendo when he's like, babe, it's, it's wet enough out here as it is. Cause the sprinkler is on. And then it's like, no, turn the lights on, turn the lights back on. For that shit. And that shit was definitely funny. What were some other ones that, that caught your attention? Chad (40m 43s): It wasn't me shaggy in Cheetos. I mean, that was hilarious. I mean, you know, Ashton Kutcher and his wife, Joel (40m 51s): Mila Kunis! Chad (40m 52s): Mila that's she was stealing Cheetos. Joel (40m 55s): I got that correctly. Chad (40m 56s): She was saying, was it wasn't me? So that was funny. And then the m&ms the funniest part about the acronyms people are giving M and M's to people that they're apologizing to. They're saying, I'm sorry. And they're giving them a bag of M and M's well, this lady gives another lady a bag of M and M's and says, I'm sorry, I called you Karen. The lady says, my name is Karen. She gives her another bag of them in the second bag and says, I'm sorry, your name is Karen. Joel (41m 24s): Yup. Yup. Enjoy that as well. I'll throw in the Drake from State Farm. I thought it was great. They brought back the cheese head guy from the Rogers commercial, which I thought was great. The Will Ferrell. I liked with Auquafina and yeah, we hate on Norway. That was great. And then the lemons, I really enjoyed where they were like the, or the lemons seltzer from Bud Light, I think. And it was like, Oh, the whole year has been a lemon. And then like lemons fall from the sky and destroy everything. Uber Eats was sort of a bit off, got a lot of criticism. Chad (41m 56s): Total gaf right there is what that was. Joel (41m 58s): Yeah. While we're getting 30% from these small businesses and killing them, please keep using Uber Eats. Chad (42m 4s): My, my big wins though were from two companies and they're both car companies and they didn't show any product whatsoever. So the first one was Ford finished strong, where they're asking Americans to finish this COVID thing strong also on people wearing masks, essential workers, sanitizing areas, medical workers, you know, patients, all those things. And they're just saying, Hey guys, and it is almost like this. Can we just focus, be disciplined and let's finish strong together because it's the best for all of us. Joel (42m 39s): And buy a Bronco while you're at it. Chad (42m 41s): That was a good one. Yeah, that was good. And that's it. And again, we're talking about really selling brand over product at that point. And then Toyota had one that was entitled Upstream. And that to me was the best ad of the Superbowl. The ad starts out with a woman swimming in the background, and then you hear a telephone call and the call is taken and says, you know, Hey, this is Mrs. Long, we have an adoption, you know, prospect of a little girl who's in Serbia with a condition in her legs will probably need to be amputated, which means her life won't be easy. And it's kind of like asking this question, do you still want this little girl? Chad (43m 21s): And then the mom says it might not be easy, but it'll be amazing. And I can't wait to meet her! And wow! This turns out to be the 13 time, Paralympic gold medalist, Jessica Long. And if you don't watch this as a parent and like get all choked up and I'm crying, I'm not crying. You're crying, then something's wrong with you? Joel (43m 45s): I promised myself I wouldn't cry. Oh my God. So, so getting stars can backfire. And you shared a story from the Jeep ad, which was, was fairly powerful in the middle. What happened there? We just got a little loose, I guess. Chad (44m 1s): Bruce much like a Tom Brady got a little, got a little, you know, liquored up. Joel (44m 6s): Well, avocado tequila. I think. Chad (44m 9s): Got a little liquored up the problem was the problem was Bruce got in a car and he drove and he got caught. So Bruce got a DUI and then Jeep yanked. Yeah. They yanked their commercial out of rotation, which is a lot of fucking money that is going to sit on the shelf. Joel (44m 27s): Oddly enough, the top rated in terms of engagement ad was the, the John Cena Mountain Dew where the lemons or the bottles come out of the car. And they're like, Hey, if you tweet the number of bottles that came out of the car, you can win a million dollars. So engagement on that was off the charts. That kind of surprised me. Cause I thought it sucked. And I would be remiss if I didn't add. I'm sure you saw the SNL before super bowl Sunday. Chad (44m 54s): Yeah. Joel (44m 55s): So they had the CBS pregame crew and then they had ads. So one of them was reminding of the Oreo ad. The we've been coming together. It was like a really emotional ad. And then it was like brought to you by Cheez-Its. They just throw it at Cheez-its. And then the second one was, was better. It was like, it was a Papa John's play on the QAnon thing. And they had like Papa John's Better pizza, Better ingredients, Papa John's whatever. And no sex trafficking in the basement. And then it was like, get your Qpon. It was a cute letter, Q like Q anon, and then pon at PapaJohns.com today. So I, those were fucking great too. Chad (45m 35s): In a creepy kind of way. Yes. Which SNL is very good at. Joel (45m 38s): Yes. Yes. And that's all the commentary I have for the Superbowl ads, anxiously waiting next year, Superbowl, or maybe there will be a hundred percent seated fans in the stadium. Let's hope. But until then, Chad, Chad (45m 51s): Then you be safe on your trip. I don't know how sexy it's going to be, but you be safe. Joel (45m 58s): Well, this is our out music for a Valentine's Day weekend. Are you doing anything fun with Julie? Chad (46m 5s): Yes. Nothing I can talk about. Joel (46m 6s): Oh yeah. And with that, another show in the books. Chad (46m 13s): We out. Joel (46m 13s): We out. OUTRO (47m 11s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Killers, alcohol, marijuana, and the South Pole? We know, you'd rather play with a bag o' glass than listen to a podcast about background checks, huh? Bet you'd change your mind if you knew the guest had worked at NASA and did a stint in the South Pole though, right? In this episode, the boys join Kim Jones, professor at UC Irvine, and dig into the seedy underbelly of the business of background checks and point a big finger at the HR folks who major in laziness instead of getting to the heart of each human being who seek employment. Brought to you by the candidate targeting powerhouse, Nexxt. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Kim (1s): You have companies who potentially decline employment to someone with a marijuana conviction, but you will allow drunk drivers to continue to not just work at your company, but still park on your company property. INTRO (13s): 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 (40s): Every guest should be Jones so he could open every show. Like that. Chad (44s): I wish. Joel (44s): What's up Chad? Chad (45s): Hey dude, it's another day. And we're going talk about something that generally I find boring, but this is a pretty hot, this is pretty hot topic. Actually, we have Kim Jones, If you don't know Super Kim, you will know Talent Acquisition Superhero. She's actually Senior Director at Enterprise Talent, Strategy Instructor at University of California, Irvine, Chief Executive Officer Kelton Legend. She was, this is some pretty cool stuff. Director of Talent Acquisition at NASA. Joel (1m 22s): What? Chad (1m 23s): Yeah, so right out of the gate, give us a little bit more about you, Kim, give us a little Twitter bio about you. And then I will, I want to dump into the background check for NASA. Go ahead. Kim (1m 36s): I thank you, first of all, for allowing me to be here with you guys today. So I will say my career is representative of the inner nerd that I have, and I found a way to marry that inner nerD through HR and talent acquisition. And so I've been really fortunate to work in very technical environments. I learned a lot from engineers and it actually helped me be a much better HR leader because of what I learned from engineers and how they solve problems. So NASA jet propulsion laboratory, Northrop, Grumman, GE Aviation, Raytheon, and Honda. I started my career at Nationwide Insurance Company in Columbus, where I'm originally from. Kim (2m 15s): So I am very appreciative of my life and career journey. Chad (2m 20s): So when we actually got engaged on Facebook and I've been looking for a reason to bring you on the show like that just engaged in the conversation was around something that was, was somewhat boring and background checks. Although background checks, I mean they impact individuals on a daily basis. In most cases, they, they negatively impact you. You were at Raytheon, GE Aviation, Northrup Grumman, NASA for goodness sakes. So you you've gone through a few background checks. How was it for you starting back in the day? It just became kind of like normal to you, but can you talk about, and then how you started to see differences and how they impacted you versus others. Kim (3m 4s): Yeah. So I'll give you a little bit of a personal story and then just kind of professionally. So I have a very common name. Kimberly Denise Jones. William Tincup will tell you he and I had this conversation. I share my name with a rapper, Little Kim. We have this exact name, Kimberly Denise Jones. Joel (3m 25s): Wow. Kim (3m 25s): So with almost every company that I've gone to work for, my background check was always complicated by the fact that I have a very common name and it was not uncommon for things to be reported on my background check that were not mine. And so it would typically take another, a few additional days to clear out negative or just erroneous things that weren't a true. Joel (3m 49s): Little Kim's done jail time, right? Kim (3m 51s): She has. And so when you understand the nature of trying to understand who a person is so that, you know, whether or not that it's safe or if that person can be trusted in your organization. And so then when I put on my HR hat, it is exactly that. Organizations have a responsibility to make sure they are doing their due diligence to say, is this person who they say they are? And can they be trusted to work here around coworkers, around clients with company assets. Where this becomes the evil twin, is when companies intentionally create policies to exclude or misinterpret, intentionally misinterpret information to exclude and now you are impacting people who tend to be in protected classes. Kim (4m 46s): And so when I talk about talent acquisition, it is as much art as it is science this area of background checks really requires a good talent acquisition or HR professionals to understand both the art and science of background checks. Joel (5m 2s): Do you have an example of the intentional screening out or using, I guess, background checks as a weapon to exclude people? Kim (5m 9s): Sure. So, perfect example here in the state of California a few years ago, there was a law passed called ban the box. And I've been in the boxes related to the fact that on an, in a traditional sense, the employment application, have you been convicted of a crime? And when that question is asked at the initial stage of the application, then candidates were automatically being rejected. This tended to impact communities of color because communities of color are more likely, because of systemic racism to encounter law enforcement, to be arrested, to be hailed, to be, you know, wrongly convicted because they don't necessarily have access to the best representation. Kim (5m 54s): And so now I'm standing outside a store, someone doesn't like the way I look, police show up, I'm arrested for disorderly conduct. I apply for a position. And now this question of, have you been convicted of a crime? Joel (6m 8s): Was it a crime or felony? Kim (6m 9s): Every organization may ask the question differently. Crime is a very general, general statement. Let me give you an example. Joel (6m 17s): A speeding ticket. Kim (6m 18s): A speeding ticket is a crime, we're all criminals. Every single one of us are criminals. So when you think about, yeah, like I said, just disproportionately the answer to that question. What California did was that question can't be asked at the initial application, you can solicit that question post offer, because now good organizations say post offer - preemployment. I will now make a decision about your employment, not your candidacy, because I don't ask that question until after and now I will utilize a consumer report to better understand what that crime is and what that crime precludes you from, either performing the job or just in general being employed at this particular company. Chad (7m 5s): So Kim, it's interesting because I know, and to answer Joel's question, I actually was working with an organization to help them in their whole hiring process. And one of the things that they had as a standard, and this is an organization that, that is manufacturing dry wall. Okay. And they asked about felonies. And my question was, why is this even necessary? Are you afraid that they're going to steal dry wall? I mean, what's the purpose behind this, right? What do you, what are you expecting this individual to do coming in at, you know, less than $20 an hour? Chad (7m 46s): And why are you asking this question? Are we not, are we not being bold enough as talent acquisition to go up the ladder and say, okay guys, why are we asking this question? And then also pushing back and challenging them on, this is not necessary. Kim (8m 2s): So you have to have a good talent acquisition, professional who is educated, I will say wise enough to know when to ask those questions. Lots of organizations do it because it's always been done without really understanding the purpose. So specifically, when you think about crimes that are felonies, felony, assault, rape, murder, theft. So if I am looking to bring someone into my organization who will be among coworkers, who may be interfacing with clients either because they come into our establishment or we're sending them out to somewhere. Am I automatically saying yes, because it's a felony or am I simply evaluating what that felony was, how related it might be to the job and how long ago it was, and does this person actually then have multiple felonies that I might need to consider that indicates to me, this is probably a rule breaker who may not do well here? Kim (8m 58s): So it shouldn't just simply be, do you have a felony? There are other things that should be evaluated so that, you know why, what you're saying yes or no to, and you're ready to assume whatever level of liability or responsibility may come with, employing someone who may have a felony. For example, someone who was a convicted child molester probably shouldn't be a security officer. Someone who's been convicted of embezzlement probably shouldn't be your CFO. And so there's a degree of responsibility that you have as an employer to know why you're saying yes or no, and how much risk you may be creating or risk that you could potentially mitigate. Kim (9m 42s): And this is why I talk about, is it one or multiple and the recency of what that offense is. Chad (9m 48s): Also a fairness factor here, right? Because Illinois just expunged like 5,000 individuals of felony crime convictions because of marijuana. And now in Illinois, that's fine. Right? And they don't have a felony in Illinois, but in the state next to them, it's a crime. Kim (10m 8s): Yes. Chad (10m 9s): I agree. We have to have talent acquisition professionals who have the understanding, they want to go deeper, but they also have to have the backbone to make sure these decisions are challenged to ensure that these decisions are being made for the betterment of not just the company, but the community itself. And I think that's one of the biggest issues that we have in this nation is that we're focused more on what we're doing for corporate A instead of the community that actually feeds that corporation. Kim (10m 41s): Absolutely. So, you know, here in California, marijuana is legal, but there are still thousands, if not millions of people who, like you said, either, you know, have some type of conviction or possibly even still, serving time. And here's one of the things I always share and I'm honestly, I'm somewhat biased about this. I don't drink alcohol. I just, I never had. But when I tell you the number for... Joel (11m 4s): I drink enough for the three of us. Don't worry. Kim (11m 8s): The number of times that I have had to review a background check for somebody who had a DUI, but because alcohol is legal, we tend to be somewhat forgiving of if you have one DUI. And I'm like, I have seen alcohol be much more destructive than marijuana on any combination of days. But because marijuana is still considered an illegal substance and it's criminalized, you have companies who potentially decline employment to someone with a marijuana conviction, but you will allow drunk drivers to continue to not just work at your company, but still park on your company property. Joel (11m 47s): So I'm going to play maybe not devil's advocate, but try to try to set an opposing viewpoint here. HRS role in many cases is risk management. Kim (11m 57s): I agree with that. Joel (11m 58s): Keep us out, keep us out of court if you will. So, you know, Chad's example of, we're hanging dry wall and you know, why would I exclude a felon for that? One part of it is that HR has probably enough candidates that they can bypass someone and have someone fill that job. Chad (12m 17s): They did. Joel (12m 18s): And, where were you where you typically have a little bit more leniency on backgrounds is in things where there's really high demand for folks. And maybe the dry wall was an exception, but, no one wants to be the person that hires the one candidate that ends up taking a Hacksaw, you know, to the entire workforce. Kim (12m 38s): Right. Joel (12m 38s): They're going to be sued out, you know, sued out of business by the folks that were there that said, okay, you hired someone and you knew they had a felony. And then they ended up killing some of us. What, I mean, I know these are extreme cases, but no HR person wants to be in that position. They are risk averse. And to me, like, it sounds really good to talk about, we should look at the person and we should case by case basis, but in the real world, the person making that decision does not want to be the one that hires that one person that fucks everything up. Am I wrong about that? Chad (13m 12s): That's the hiring manager. That's not HR. Joel (13m 15s): This, if the company is embroiled in a PR nightmare and in court for years fighting this stuff, they're going to go to HR. Kim (13m 25s): Yeah. So Chad me answer your question. And I recognize, I worked for really large organizations with various established HR departments. Hiring managers were never permitted to see the background checks because we knew that their opinion may somewhat be swayed if it's someone that they really wanted to hire. And we want it also to ensure a level of consistency, but I want to respond to what Joel said. So, first of all, I would tell you, I appreciate the education that I've had, but nothing prepared me for how humble you have to be knowing that you stand in judgment of whether or not someone will get hired. I have taken that very seriously when I worked for Raytheon in particular, especially for the polar services program, 20,000 people apply for 1400 jobs. Kim (14m 10s): It was normal that in a hiring season, I'd have 100 background checks that came back with some type of discrepancy that I had to consider. A lot of which were criminal offenses, lewd and lascivious act against a child under the age of 14, where a guy did prison time, was paroled, violated his parole and had to go back and finish his prison time. And the question, have you been convicted of a crime? He said, no. And when I spoke with him, he said, he didn't remember going to prison. I would remember if I raped a child and went to prison. I would remember that. And the fact that he answered no. So this risk, that we are adverse or risk mitigation, you have to take that very seriously. Kim (14m 55s): One of the situations I shared with Chad is a gentleman that I actually worked with at the South Pole, who, you know, years later killed his wife. Joel (15m 6s): Did you say the South pole? Kim (15m 8s): The South Pole. When I worked for Ratheon. Joel (15m 10s): Like literally the South Pole? Kim (15m 12s): I completed a six week deployment to Antarctica and I worked there enough to go to the South Pole for three days. Nexxt PROMO (15m 24s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. So for those companies that are out there today, who are kind of hesitant, because they're afraid of texting, what do you have to say to them? Get with the program, people are texting these days? You know, I will say that I'm in a different generation, a different point in my career that I agree I would be hesitant, but there are obviously millions of millions of people that are in that demographic that want to receive them. So it's again, know your audience and be able to deliver a message to your audience that way they want to receive it. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Nexxt PROMO (16m 4s): Remember that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com. Kim (16m 16s): And so the science lab manager, like I said, some years later killed his wife because he was in a relationship with a new person. She was coming to see him and he did not want the girlfriend to know about his wife. And he killed her. The wife's family sued the previous employer saying that they would have never met. And so there was this allegation of negligent hiring because he had a previous conviction for a pretty serious felony. And what they found was he had transferred from one contractor to this new organization that was a contractor. Kim (16m 57s): They didn't do a background check, and if they had the offense that he had been convicted of would have precluded him from employment. Chad (17m 4s): And you worked with this dude at one time? Kim (17m 7s): I sat next to him during a recruiting event. And then I met with him while I was at South Pole, because he had some questions about what we were doing with the hiring process to hire technicians. I think he managed the science lab. So I will honestly tell you, I was creeped out after the story surfaced. And I'm like, I remember sitting next to Al Baker with his, you know, silver gray hair, braided it back in a ponytail. The fact that you, you killed your wife and wrapped her body in a tarp because you didn't want her to know about your new girlfriend. And then also knowing that he had a previous felony conviction. And if a background check had been performed, that scenario would have been avoided. Chad (17m 49s): So this type of story is exactly what Joel is talking about. That this happens. And, this is grotesque. It is gruesome. It is incredibly horrible, but that then sets a precedent for high levels of risk mitigation and impacts directly impacts back to my story, individuals who can't manufacture dry wall in an area where they can't find people to, for these positions. They can't find people, but they don't want people with felonies. So there's this overreaction that happens that everybody could perspectively be, you know, a serial Antarctica killer. Chad (18m 33s): So how do we manage that? Kim (18m 36s): It's rooted in good decision-making and good policy. So this can't just be a knee jerk reaction organizations. Your C-suite has to have trust in your HR leadership team to create policies that support responsible hiring and employment. It's not a clinical, if one plus one, two, you need a solid infrastructure around how do we collect information and how do we evaluate it? And that process for evaluation has to be done with a great degree of common sense and some wisdom. So to your point, if I need to hire people to hang dry wall, do I automatically reject every person with a felony? Kim (19m 18s): Or do you rely on having a really good HR person who understands how to evaluate, how to have conversations with people? I will tell you to a certain extent, this spirit of discernment, you know, when somebody is lying to you about whether or not they're truly remorseful. I've had had every version of a story. I've had a guy tell me who had been convicted of domestic violence. You know, I won't fight anybody at work cause I only fight my wife. Chad (19m 48s): Oh my God. Kim (19m 49s): So it is this balance of good policy and good HR professionals. If you don't have both, you are typically, you may be an organization who does not manage this well, but you have to have good policy and good HR leaders. The combination of the two is critical. Joel (20m 7s): And it sounds like you're talking a lot about nuance, like being able to look at it from a human perspective and be able to make the right choice based on the nuances of a case by case, is that what I'm hearing? Kim (20m 18s): There's a great deal of humanity. And again, I have been humbled by the fact that I have had to read background checks. A lady who came home and found her husband in bed with the neighbor and she pistol whipped both of them. But somehow when the police showed up, they still felt like she was the aggressor and she had a felony assault on her record. Joel (20m 38s): So, so one of my questions in terms of like the vendor side, so having nuance, you're better at nuance. The more information you have and the more correct information that you have. So when, when people are choosing a background check provider and most of our listeners have done that at some point, I know that from my experience in the industry, there are certain things that are pretty, pretty much layups, right? National database, I don't know who they think they are, but there's a lot of the industry that is just, just weird, right? Like certain counties are not digital and you have to actually go down to the courthouse and find the right piece of paper. Joel (21m 20s): So, so my question is if we have to be more human and more human means more nuance and more nuance means having the right information than what should people be looking at in regards to, getting a vendor and making sure that they're making those nuance decisions that they're making the right ones, because the information is the best. What kind of questions should they ask and what kind of, you know, belts and suspenders should they be wearing when they're making a background check vendor decision? Kim (21m 49s): Yeah. So it starts with your RFP and your RFP should be written in support of your established policies and then laws. I mean, federal state and local laws regarding employment law, background check, and then policies that you have in place. That should all be embedded directly in your RFP and so when you look at vendors, you do want to look at vendors who are utilizing, you know, current technology. You know, you can check degrees through typically a clearing house. Most large counties do have electronic database that you're checking against, but if you get a candidate from a remote County in Minnesota and it's the middle of winter and you have to send a process server to actually collect that information, okay. Kim (22m 31s): Now somebody actually has to go pull a docket and then, you know, make available a report. So making sure that the vendor has the right systems and infrastructure in place, but they also have the ability to conduct those second and third levels of screening. Let me give you an idea. When you, a County search versus a federal clerk of courts, office search, and I have a name like Joseph Walker that returns a result. Do I have Joseph Robert Walker? Cause because now I need to make sure I'm screening for a little full name, not just the first and last name. Kim (23m 11s): I'm also now looking at the social security number and the date of birth. And if you understand how social security numbers are issued in lots across the country, the same way, the same way zip codes work. And you know, that certain, certain social security numbers are issued at certain times of a calendar year or from year to year, you have to have a background check vendor that really understands how that works so they're not giving you an erroneous is flag that something might be wrong. Or when you have a flag, they are working cooperatively with you to say, yes, this is this person, or no, it isn't. This was a false flag and we will go ahead and clear it. Chad (23m 51s): It sounds like this is so nuanced, especially with, with risk and it could be the person, it could be the tool and here's the hard conversation, because you know, AI is going to be interwoven into many of these things from a scale standpoint. Would you ever trust AI to be able to run through and actually provide kind of like a risk mitigation score card to your organization? Kim (24m 23s): No, I don't think it's that clinical. I recall being at a conference a couple years ago and people saying blockchain was going to revolutionize, you know, how we manage, you know, how we manage background checks. Yeah. I dwill tell you with my current employer every week, we are looking at background checks and there's usually at least two of us together, possibly sometimes three, depending on what it is. And there is a degree of, I will say some ambiguity, but some subjectivity on whether or not you say yes or no to something. And none of that is as absolute as one plus one equals two. Kim (25m 6s): I will also say we've seen enough instances where you can program me in your own biases into AI. And so I would much rather just know that we have a process in place where there's never a single person making a decision. If it's something that has to be evaluated, but you are always screening towards established policy. And also in certain cases, looking back at previous background checks that might've been been similar so that you are making your best attempt to be consistent in how you evaluate information that's reported. Chad (25m 37s): So blockchain, not the answer? Kim (25m 44s): No. Joel (25m 44s): I want to piggyback a little bit on, on what Chad, what Chad sort of alluded to is that technology is really coming into monitoring people, whether it be employees or even candidates, right? Like we talk almost weekly, it seems like about facial recognition, you know, being outlawed or someone suing a company or a government because of facial recognition. And we've even had someone on the show I'm blanking on the name. Maybe Chad will remember it, but what this company does is they go back into your social media, you know, years of tweets or whatever it might be, and try to find evidence of, you know, racism or criminal activity or immoral, whatever that it's pretty subjective in some cases. Joel (26m 29s): And like thousands of pages that are delivered to employers about what someone did on social media. So it seems like we're going beyond even have they been convicted? Are they who they say they are? And we're getting into really, I think, dangerous territory. One, I'm curious about your opinions on, you know, companies that are doing that. And number two, if you, if you agree that that's a dangerous place to go, what should we do? Does government need to get more involved with, what we can look into in the past of people? Or is it totally fair game to look at all your activity, whether you've been convicted or not. Chad (27m 4s): And that company was Fama F-A-M-A. Joel (27m 9s): Fama. Yep. Kim (27m 9s): So I don't think it's a dangerous place to go again. It has to be utilized with a degree of responsibility. And so I had heard someone say, you know, alcohol makes you more who you are, social media does the same thing. And so when I think about people who are law enforcement, high ranking, you know, C suite level people, is there something about their social media profile for things that they are doing both personally and professionally, that really give you a better sense of who that person is and whether or not you are creating some risk for your organization based on the position they hold. Kim (27m 55s): Now, does this apply to the average drywall, customer service rep, person? Absolutely, absolutely not. People should be allowed to live their lives. They're not typically in roles that are going to influence or impact the company to that degree. But if you're talking about people who are being trusted with safety and leadership, who are, who really are in a position to influence and decide, I do believe that there are instances where in a really documented way, are there things about how you, how the decisions you've made and things about how you live your life that have the potential? Let me go back to January 6th. Kim (28m 34s): And the number of people whose lies they reported through social media were completely telling of what was planned before everybody showed up in Washington, DC and the number of employers and coworkers who dropped dime on their coworkers to say, Billy has always been this, go check his social media page. So again, like every other aspect of background checks, if social media will be utilized, it has to be utilized in a very responsible way. Chad (29m 8s): So having Parlor up in running, especially from a background check and kind of like a behavioral standpoint, probably not a bad thing for the FBI and for people they are hiring. Kim (29m 18s): A gold mine. We had a student, when I was in Indianapolis, a computer science student in his boastfulness said, you know, I'm so good at what I do. Go check out my social media, not, this was before Facebook check out my personal webpage. So he includes the link. And so of course, we go take a look at it. And on his page, he had a picture from the Special Olympics. The caption read, even if you win, you're still retarded. Chad (29m 53s): Ooh. Kim (29m 54s): We didn't go looking for it. He boasted about it, as let me show you how much more qualified I am than other candidates, look at this page that I've built. And, here you go. And you know, Ratheon is a company, before diversity became sexy for everybody to talk about Ratheon had always been a promoter of diversity. And so when we saw that we knew this was not a person who would align well with established values. If you thought that that was appropriate and something for you to boast about. Joel (30m 30s): Kim Jones, everybody, can we thank you for your time? We know you're a busy person. For those who want to know more about you, where would you send them? Kim (30m 41s): They can find me at Kimthej@keltonlegend.com. They can also find me on LinkedIn at Kimberly Jones, Talent Acquisition Queen Superhero, and over on Twitter @KimtheJ. Joel (30m 53s): And if you're at the South Pole, you know, Kim already. So it's all good. Chad, we out. Chad (31m 1s): We out. OUTRO (31m 24s): I'm Rory from Scotland, the country, which brought you electricity! Thank you for listening to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Nada Niente. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

When I grow up ... Super Bowl ads in our industry are back with Indeed's decision to drop $10 million plus on an ad in the Big Game. Where's the flag on jobseeker encroachment? What's more? - Job.com pulls of a read headscratcher of an acquisition with Talenting - Buy or Sell with 1) GoodJob 2) Oyster and 3) Careerist - Kroger believes Essential Employees aren't worth an added $4/ hour - Google gets caught while DOL looks stupid - Activision misses a diversity layup - and Holland McCue is not to be messed with. Enjoy this Jobvite, JobAdx, and Sovren powered episode. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. 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 (22s): Oh yeah. When I grow up, I don't want to be a yes man. Yes, sir. Yes, Ma'am. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, boys and girls. I'm your cohost Joel space laser Cheesman. Chad (34s): And I'm Chad executive order Sowash. Joel (37s): And on this week, show Indeed jumps into the Super Bowl Ad arms race, job.com has a scratching our heads and do not get on Holland McHughs bad side. Sovren (50s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. Music (1m 49s): Y'all trippin Tyler when it comes to hourly jobs, and this is how we do it. Chad (1m 58s): Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Joel (1m 59s): Guys. If you haven't seen this video and heard their whole song, please, please go to YouTube and watch it. Fuckin epic as the kids say. Chad (2m 15s): It's hilarious. It's fun and nothing this cool ever happens in HR or talent acquisition. Joel (2m 24s): By the way, if you're, if you're looking for a special gift for that special someone, because Valentine's day is coming up, Chad. Chad (2m 30s): Oh yeah. Joel (2m 31s): Montel is on Cameo. So if you want to have a little lovely note for your spouse or girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever, have Montel drop the love for Valentine's day. Little tip from the love doctor, Cheese, Chad (2m 45s): You know, who also had a sweet hit, Jason Putnam from pandologic. The dude is an artist and I don't mean musical artists. Well, maybe he is. But in this case he drew his very own version of the Chad and Cheese for his bookshelves, the background for his zoom. So now I would assume if you had take a call with Jason, if you focus a little bit harder over his, one of his shoulders, you might see the Chad and Cheese and Jason Putnam version. So yeah, that's a big, applause. Joel (3m 18s): I only have a little issue with his dimensions because he has me about a foot shorter than you even with the captain's hat. And I'm not sure, you know what he was thinking on that one because I'm clearly a good six inches taller than you. Chad (3m 33s): You're you're you're standing in a hole. No big deal. Joel (3m 37s): I look like George Castanza with a beard. Chad (3m 43s): Well, I like to say we had a great time last night with our Pappy's winners. Morton over at Tradify, Matt O'Donnell from People Scout and sponsor Robert Rough from Sovren. Unfortunately, Pete Suchi from CVS, he couldn't make it, he was sick. Hopefully he doesn't have the Covid. Joel (4m 4s): I can confirm it's not a Covid thing, but Pete Sushi has the flu. He's going to be all right. Well, we'll try to reschedule it. Good. I kind of feel like because he was the Blanton's winner, he felt a little bit, you know, less than, less than worthy of being on a call with two Pappy's bottles. But I don't know, we'll see. Chad (4m 24s): A $500 bottle of bourbon. Yeah. Blazer, Joel (4m 31s): Chin George Costanza. Well, the nineties made another newsworthy thing this week that caught our attention. Screech from Saved By the Bell passed away this week, Screech 44. Chad (4m 44s): Did it say how? Joel (4m 45s): Cancer. Chad (4m 46s): Wow. Joel (4m 46s): Teachable moment kids. If you're hitting that 40 plus age range, which a lot of our listeners are, make sure you go see the doctor on a regular basis. By the way, little known fact, a Screech was in a sex tape. Come on in the mid two thousands. After his career was on the skids. He tried to jumpstart. If you will, and get it back to growth mode with a, with a sex tape, which nobody remembers. So it obviously didn't work like it did for the Kardashians Chad (5m 14s): Saved by the dildo. Please keep that in. Cause I got nothing. Before we forget God, my brain is total mush this morning anyway. We're giving away free t-shirts kids. That's right. Sponsored by Emissary ed from Philly. One, one he guys, so John, go to Chadcheese.com/free or just click on free in the upper right-hand corner. You can win t-shirts we have free beer from Adzuna. We've got something to talk about there don't we? Joel (5m 48s): Yep. Yep. So Dennis Tupper a big fan of the show for probably when we first started was our random winner. So we'll be sending out beer to Dennis there in will be scheduling a call to do a little zoom tasting connect with him, free beer. And by the way, there's a new one. You mentioned Sovren, they've agreed to kill everyone's liver. We're giving away bourbon, whiskey, Scotch it's a Chad and Cheese pick. Remember blockbuster where each employee had their picks for movies. We're going to do a whiskey pick and we're going to send whiskey to some winner. Joel (6m 28s): So yeah, you just go to one place, Chadcheese.com/free. And we're talking t-shirts beer and whiskey. I mean, until we start giving away weed, I don't know what else you can can up that. Nothing can better that. Chad (6m 43s): Again, this is not just a bottle of whiskey. Yes, we did give away Papi's. That was a 2000 over $2,000. Joel (6m 50s): Yeah. Don't get your hopes up on the monthly. Chad (6m 53s): But we're actually, Joel is picking a bottle. I'm picking a bottle, which means one person will get two bottles and we'll be able to sit down and again, have a little gathering, a little, a little a zoom drinking. So it should be, it should be fun. Joel (7m 7s): Yeah. And I'm excited. Spring is right around the corner. I'm ready for a little drinking outside on the porch. I'm excited to do some of that with some industry folks. So head on out to Chadcheese.com/free today. Chad (7m 22s): I'm going to pimp the recruitment flex with a surge in Shelly. They obviously did a dry run with you. They wanted to get it right. Or at least try to tune out all the kinks before they, they brought the big guns in. Joel (7m 37s): I was the beta version? Is that what you're saying that I was the test case? Chad (7m 41s): We talked about the shit show. AKA the last four years here in the US. Recruitment tech, mainly programmatic video interviewing systems we had a blast and we also talked about the prospect of doing a crossover like we did with the peeps at TApod. Joel (7m 57s): TAsies? Chad (7m 58s): Yeah. Where you could actually go on the, be a guest host at Recruitment Flex, and you and Serge could talk about tragically hip for a fucking hour. And Shelly could come down here and we could pretty much just talk about recruitment tech, get drunk. Joel (8m 12s): Tragically Hip, Arcade Fire, Justin Bieber. Yeah, we could, we could do it all, man. All the Matt Good. Chad (8m 20s): I threw out Rush and BTO. I mean, those are solid rock bands. Yes. They were in the eighties, but there are solid rock bands. And then you've got these like tragically bad bands. Listen. Joel (8m 32s): Oh, don't don't sit the Canadians are gonna stop listening If you dis Tragically Hip. That's like Springsteen, REM and Dylan, all in all in one band, if you're Canadian. Chad (8m 44s): Tragically sad. Joel (8m 45s): Celine Dion is more my speed. Avril Levine, Nickelback. Chad (8m 51s): And last but not least, March 18th kids, our friends from Sweden, that's the Sweden's TNG and ADA Digital. They're having an, an unbiased day. Just go to TNG.se scroll down a tad, you'll see a little painted little painted lady there register. It's free. Some of your favorite people from TNG and age a to digital will be speaking ASA, Sarah Elan, plus my lovely wife is going to be speaking along with a Bas van de Haterd on. I know I'm getting closer to saying that right boss, but it looks like a pretty awesome event. If you are here in the U S or you're over in Europe, it's time to go global people. Chad (9m 33s): We should be used to this by now. So go check it out again. TNG.se Joel (9m 38s): Now the painted woman. Isn't a tin guy as it should be like a wig. Chad (9m 42s): Yeah, it should be, it really should be. Elan, you need to get on that. No, actually Charlotte, you should be on that. Joel (9m 48s): Charlotte or paint up Elan. She'd be, she looked good in some, some neon pink and some Abba blue. I don't know what that means. Let's go to the new. Chad (9m 59s): Topics! Joel (9m 59s): Chad, you remember 1999, don't you. And the first Superbowl ad, what you remember it very well. And you've, I think you've told the history lesson pretty, pretty well in the past, but Indeed has decided they're going to get into the arms race. So they've announced the first half of the big game, they're doing a 30 second ad reportedly at a cost of roughly $5.6 million. They'll be utilizing the hashtag #nowhiring in coordination with the ad, which means every job board and staffing agency in the world is going to be trolling. The hashtag #nowhiring up until the game. Going for the warm and fuzzy. Actually it's a 60 second spot, forgive me. Joel (10m 41s): So they're gonna drop roughly 10 plus million on this thing. Chad (10m 43s): Have you seen it? Joel (10m 45s): I have not seen it. It's yeah. It's warm and fuzzy, right? Yeah. Chad (10m 49s): I've seen it. It depicts everyday people overall. It's the big theme behind it is it's called "the rising," but the song rise up is behind, it's playing in the music bed. It's very well done. It tugs at the heartstrings and the product is woven into the story itself. This is really a Superflex against the rest of the industry. Hindsight being 2020. Why, why do this? Joel (11m 14s): So I wrote a post on this over at poach and historically speaking, and you and I are old enough to have sort of this context to the issue. You know, there was a day in 99 when all this happened, you know, before YouTube, before social media, before really Google was a thing where the mindset was really, you have to be Coke or Pepsi, or you're just going to be feeding on the crumbs of whatever industry that you, that you're in and a way to become number one or two was well drop a bunch of money on the Super Bowl. And Monster had this vision of being sort of this monolithic brand that was every job was posted there, right? And they could, they could increase prices accordingly and be the, you know, be the 800 pound gorilla, hot jobs advertised sort of for a different reason. Joel (11m 60s): Now they definitely shot themselves up into the top echelon of job sites, but then they sold off to Yahoo a couple of years later. So I think they sort of achieve what they wanted to do. Whereas Monster had a little bit of a longer horizon. And for the, you know, for the next up until about 2008 or '09, I'd say we talked about CareerBuilder and monster ads on the Super Bowl almost every year. And it was part of that same sort of mentality. Well, the 2008 happened, 2009. There've been very few Superbowl ads since the great recession, probably for good reason, the world has changed. There's a lot more fragmentation. There's Google, there's Facebook, there's LinkedIn. So it's really hard to sort of justify an investment like that because it's not just the, the ad itself. Joel (12m 45s): It's the making of the ad. It's the followup stuff. It's the branding and things you do after that. So I feel like whereas 1999 was more of a, Hey, we want to make a big splash to be number one today. It's more like we want to make a big splash to keep hold of number one for as long as we possibly can, because we kind of feel like the ice is melting under our feet. And we want to get a life raft if we can possibly do it. So to me, it's much more of like a desperation or a clinging to power than it is a new kid on the block. And we want to be the big swinging Dick. Your thoughts. Chad (13m 21s): One thing this does is it provides a, it's a job seeker specific commercial, right? The call to action, everything that's happening around it around it is for job seekers. Indeed has bigger problems than traffic. So this commercial in itself is very well done and on point, but unfortunately we're when hearing from employers using Indeed, they are already providing enough traffic. It's just overwhelmingly the wrong candidate. So Indeed needs to bolster its matching tech and a much like ZipRecruiter deliver better match candidates. I mean, companies don't need more, they need more targeted. Chad (14m 5s): So much like Monster, Hot Jobs and CareerBuilder. It looks like Indeed doesn't really understand what the real problem is for customers. And it could be their downfall. I remember when we looked at CareerBuilder and we looked at Monster and we thought, God, these guys are going to stay on top forever. They didn't. Is this predicting the demise of Indeed in 2021? No, it's not, but the crumbling starts when you can't understand what the real problem is when you spend money on something like this, which really defeats the whole purpose of why an employer is using you in the first place. It's not for quantity. It's for quality. It's for matching it's for the right types of individuals. Chad (14m 47s): And what we've seen with Indeed is they have no discipline. The Indeed of old, had discipline. They had focus, they had strategy. They were the Trojan horse strategy and they've lost all. Joel (14m 60s): Yeah, to me, it smells a little bit like jumping the shark. If it smells a little bit like a peak, I feel, I feel similarly about Indeed today, as I did about monster in 2006 or '07, obviously it took 10 plus years for sort of that demise to happen or that downfall to happen. But to me, this sort of reeks of desperation and also a good level of hubris, they have a new CEO, I think, with the organization. So maybe a little bit of him making his mark could be part of this, but, but yeah, I, I can't find many good things about this move. I will say also add that that Fiverr is sort of in our space as well. Joel (15m 41s): We'll be advertising. And to me that feels a little bit more like we want to make our claim as the top gig platform or be talked in the same breath as some of the bigger ones. So to me, the Fiverr feels more, will feel more like a Monster did in 1999. Yeah. Chad (15m 56s): It makes it makes sense to be able to allow individuals to know that they can have a gig. And here's where you go to have that gig, whether it's a side hustle or a full project type of a gig. So yeah. I mean, that's, it's an industry, it's a different type of strategy altogether. Indeed. Again, just feel, feels like they're off the rails. Yeah. Joel (16m 20s): Well, speaking of off the rails, one of the more curious, I'll say acquisitions was announced this week are our buddies at jobs.com. If you haven't heard the death match with Aaron Stewart or the interview that we had with him, I invite you to do that. They bought a company called Talenting. You can find more at talenting.io, but I warn you that you're not going to find much because the webpage is literally one page. And the only thing you can do on it is join or log in. There's no, what we do, there's no about us. There's nothing. So you're not going to find out much. If you go to the site, it's the press release was really focused on Blockchain, which was kind of a thing a few years ago. Joel (17m 6s): And unless it's cryptocurrency, I don't even know what the fuck Blockchain is in relation to job seeking or resumes and why people should care. But that's a different issue, I guess. So they're really pimping this Blockchain thing. In the PR they actually have a quote from the co-founders of Talenting and they don't even name them in the press release. They just say the two co-founders said, and then like the quote, after that, according to according to LinkedIn, there's like six employees they're based out of Manhattan Beach, California, which is a pretty nice place to have a company. So at least there's that. But yeah, this was, this was a weird one. This one felt like we do Blockchain job.com does Blockchain. Joel (17m 48s): They have some money let's call them and see if they'll write a check. Chad (17m 52s): From the press release that says candidates will be able to access, control, distribute insecure a lifetime of career information with one click while providing employers with a verifiable and trustworthy curation of services and solutions. And so Joel (18m 10s): Whatever the hell that means? Chad (18m 12s): Does regular Joe and Jane job seeker see this as a problem. Does Jane hiring companies see this as a problem in today's market? The game is adoption adoption adoption. And this seems like a solution in search of a problem. Nobody feels as real. Joel (18m 31s): Yeah. This is like, we expect people to be impressed with this and to buy it because we have it because it. Chad (18m 37s): Cause it says Blockchain. Joel (18m 38s): Yeah. And I mean, resume resumes are, are by default public. Like people want them to be found as opposed to my bank account or my money Chad (18m 47s): And your social security number is not on your resume. Right? Yeah. Joel (18m 50s): So like, I mean, someone really has to explain to me and please on Twitter, hashtag Chad cheese, why should anyone care about Blockchain technology when it comes to resumes? Chad (19m 1s): Now on the other, on the other side of the fence, vendors, if they can provide background checks and to some somebody's personal ledger and not have to perform that check over and over and over, well, then they can charge the same rates in boost margin substantially. Right? So I believe there are business cases for job.com. It's like they're taking the wrong path every time. When we look at them trying to, or wanting to buy up staffing organizations, that's much like Indeed Flex wanting to compete with staffing organizations. It makes no sense. Chad (19m 41s): Provide to be the platform for that entire industry and take all the money. Joel (19m 44s): So I saw on the calendar, we have an interview with Aaron in the near future. So hopefully we'll get to the bottom of this Blockchain and why the hell it matters. There was no disclosure of the money that transacted or the deal Talenting has no Crunchbase profile, so I'm gonna assume that they've taken no money or if it's they have, it's not a whole hell of a lot. So we'll find out more. Chad (20m 9s): I can say this. Aaron is one of the most charismatic founders slash you know, executive level startup guys that are out there. He's going to be able to raise some money, I think overall. And we'll definitely, we'll have a, we'll have a really good discussion with him because he enjoys having these debates, but it'll be around business model. And I'm excited to hear what he has to say. Joel (20m 31s): Yeah, me too. I mean, there's, there's no lack of, I don't know, vision and bombastic strategy around this company. So I, you know, there's probably something that we're just too dumb to see, and hopefully Aaron can come on the show and, and clear it up. Chad (20m 48s): Yeah. I don't think that's the case, but okay. Joel (20m 51s): Let's take a quick. Hear from Jobvite and we'll do a little buy or sell. Everyone's favorite game. Jobvite (20m 58s): You know, Steve, it feels like we keep getting pushed to hire more and better candidates with no more budget. Right? I wish there was a way to get better results from what we're doing. Actually, I heard in episode of Chad and Cheese about this framework from Jobvite. Oh yeah. Evolve. It's a technology agnostic framework to help TA teams get better results from their recruiting efforts. And we don't even have to be a Jobvite by customer to use it. I bet we would get better results if we orchestrated all of our efforts. You mean like a centralized process in all of our channels working together? For sure, whether it's job boards, social, or even texting with candidates. Let's do that. jobvite.com/evolve. I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Chad (21m 43s): And don't tell me you've watched all of Bridgerton. Joel (21m 46s): Since I know what the fuck is Bridgeton is. Chad (21m 49s): Fuck. I don't know. Anyway, it's on Netflix. Go binge it. Joel (21m 54s): Sexy and say more, say more sexy. Speaking of games, you're a Jeopardy guy, right? Chad (22m 0s): Yes. Joel (22m 0s): Obviously we lost a legend this year, but any, any opinion on Ken Jennings as a replacement? Chad (22m 5s): Is he going to be the replacement or is this just kind of like an interim thing? Joel (22m 10s): What I read is that there, there are quite a few that are going to try their hand at being Alex Trebek. And so, yeah, so they'll test a few and I guess the people vote or the ratings will vote for them and they'll pick the line on somebody, but I've been all right. He's all right. He's sorta nerdy, approachable. Well, you're ready for a little buy or sell? Chad (22m 38s): Let's do it. Joel (22m 39s): First one we're going to talk about is Good Job. Chad (22m 42s): Good Times Joel (22m 42s): goodjob.io So the Birmingham, Alabama based, we don't say that very often on the show, raise 3 million to fuel marketing and sales efforts and major markets across the US. They're primarily in the South in Alabama, currently they're using psychology and data science to cut through the clutter to improve time, to hire and retention rates by quickly identifying the right candidates. They launched just in June of 2020. Their claim to fame is a unique technology, a new science psychology called path assessment, which is a Harvard base from the eighties. I guess the way that you can ask a few simple questions to get to the heart of a candidate and weed through to the right person, their CEO, Stephen D. Joel (23m 32s): Johnson said, quote, we've gotten great feedback from clients here that we've used to improve the product for a national audience, buy or sell, Good Job? Chad (23m 46s): I like the test market focus right out of the gate, instead of most startups, we know what the problem is. Let's go global right out of the box. So I dig that I really like it. You test market it, and then you roll from there. A good job is somewhat of a model like Alexander Mann's Hourly plan. They're leaning very heavily on this path assessment. There's there's no, there's no question. And personally, I like these types of platforms. These are the types of platforms that Indeed it, I think if they bought they'd probably fuck up, but this is kind of like the path they need to be going down, pun intended. Chad (24m 32s): So this is to me, I love these types of organizations. This is a buy for me. Joel (24m 37s): Okay. I'm going to be on the other side of the island, this one. So path assessment, great. It's not proprietary from what I can tell this, isn't like their own secret sauce that they can leverage. Stephen Johnson, Johnston, sorry, their CEO is a finance guy, like decades and finance. So to me, this feels a little bit like calling up your VC buddies, your guys with money and saying, Hey, you need a tax break? You want to invest in some money on this new venture that I've got and then writing a check to do so. I got to see this thing grow past Birmingham, Alabama, to be impressed. Joel (25m 21s): So for me at, for now, this is a sell. This is a sell. All right, let's go to Oysterhr.com I believe is the URL. oyster.com would have been cool. But anyway, they raised a Series A 20 million, they've raised 24 million to date. Oyster helps companies through the process of hiring onboarding, and then providing contractors and full-time employees in the area of knowledge work with HR services like payroll benefits and salary management. They're already in a hundred countries. Their website says, quote, "the HR platform for remote working anywhere in the world," Oyster does not cover candidate sourcing, however, or any of the interviewing and evaluation processes, which Tech Crunch believes could be a growth area. Joel (26m 10s): A quick reminder. This is a very competitive industry with companies like Remote, hi Bob, which we've talked about on the show, Personio, another one, Lattice, Touring, Rippling, and many, many others. Buy or sell Oyster? Chad (26m 24s): So we talked about these guys on the show when they receive 4.2 million in seed last April, I wasn't a fan because their deliverable at the time seemed to be incredibly nebulous. Today, it seems more thought out and focused on providing HR with a platform to manage remote workers. But the promise of quote, "a platform for everything" end quote is too damn big. I'm usually a fan of platforms like these, but they've bitten off more than they can chew and startups without discipline, are doomed to fail. Chad (27m 5s): So this is a total sell for me, not to mention, I hate the name and doing a review of the site, the color scheme, the light purple and the dark green together made me want to vomit. Wow, look at you. Joel (27m 19s): So, I mean, overall, I don't like it because again, from a business standpoint, you have to be disciplined. It doesn't sound like they're disciplined at all. And they're in there in their color scheme, their marketing, it just shit to me. So again, we're going to be in the opposite side of the fence here. This is good. This is why we do a podcast. So if you're a, if you're a surfer, it's much better to be a bad surfer on a big wave than it is a great surfer on a shitty wave. And I think Oyster is on a really good wave right now, which is indicative of all the money and the companies that are starting up in this space. Joel (27m 59s): Obviously remote, how to manage people across multiple countries and all that other shit is going to be successful. I don't know if these guys particularly are the ones that are gonna make it big, but they're going to be some big winners in this space. So for me, the mere fact that this is a wave that I would want to be on, makes this company a buy for me. Let's get to Careerists previously known as Job Easy, I guess, I guess Careerist is better. I don't know, easy job. I don't. So their site says, meet the fastest path to start and grow a high paying career in tech. Joel (28m 40s): You get taught like you do in a college, and then you get placed in a company and they have some really great logos on the site. A whole lot of them too, like, I mean, it's a who's who of logos on Silicon Valley and elsewhere. So their guarantee is to pay, that you pay no to win no tuition until you get a job. Tuition is only owed if you ended up getting hired after completing their career accelerator, the application fee is paid up front. Anyone who follows their notes, speaks English and believes in their new skills will get the job. They promise within one to four months after successfully completing each course. Joel (29m 23s): Most of the courses are in quality assurance development, sort of basic baseline stuff in the trenches development kind of stuff. So by or sell Careerist, formerly known as Job Easy? Chad (29m 40s): I love the idea of providing credentialing and pipelining talent into organizations. It's the smartest and most disciplined model. But I do not believe the individuals should be charged rather freight should be paid by the employers themselves. So I really like, I like this. There's no question I would buy this, but I would say to the founder and anyone involved, this should be pivoted slightly so that the companies actually pay the freight. Overall though, it's a buy. Okay. Joel (30m 12s): So the main issue is they're double-dipping right. Like they're getting money from the student after they complete the course. And they're obviously getting paid from the company who's using them. So that's a good business model. I mean, the capitalist in me really likes that as well. But we've talked about this sort of alternative career path for people. Yeah. I'm spacing on who we talked about. I think even last week, about apprenticeships, you know, alternate career paths, and this is right up there with that. Right? So come learn development. Don't pay anything up front. I think a lot of colleges sort of mainstream colleges, we see it here in Indiana with Purdue University, where if you get an engineering degree, you know, you don't pay up front, you pay on earnings, you know, after you graduate. Joel (30m 56s): So the model has been there and seems to work. So these guys are just taking it to a different level of people who don't want to go to college or don't have that don't have that initiative or care to do so. So for me, I also like the fact that this was sort of born out of necessity. Apparently this guy, you know, had development friends and educated some in college and got them into jobs. So it sort of grew organically, which I really like it wasn't forced. So for me, this is a Careerist is a pretty big applause. And I like all these companies that are helping support alternative career paths, because I think that's well overdue. Joel (31m 36s): Well overdue. Chad (31m 36s): Agreed. I think this is better than getting out of school and having six figures to pay off. I totally get that, but I really believe in companies should be tapping into these types of organizations and manufacturing their own talent. I mean, it's pretty fucking simple. Joel (31m 56s): Yeah. I mean, if you're on this path, would you rather go to Careerist or would you rather go to Google and get certified through Google for free or for very little money? Which one would you prefer? Chad (32m 7s): I do both. Why not do both? Yeah. I mean, they're both available. Take the time and do both. Joel (32m 17s): Love it, love it. Well, we've got some companies behaving badly. Geez, we got Kroger, Google and Activision. Who do you want to start with? Chad (32m 31s): So Kroger boasts revenue in 2019 of $121 billion. And th this is just another Amazon moment waiting to happen because they don't want to pay the additional $4 an hour to essential workers. Amazon is trying to kill the unions right. To, to be able to stop wage rising and, and, and benefits and protections and those types of things. Kroger, in this case, they actually pulled out of two locations. They shut two locations down in Southern California because this was mandated. So what Kroger really means to say is they, they don't believe that essential workers are worth an additional $4 an hour. Chad (33m 19s): When in 2019, they made $121 billion. Joel (33m 21s): I find this whole struggle between sort of commerce and government. Interesting. And it's a story that we keep talking about, and it's, it's all about the companies holding onto power, holding onto the narrative and doing everything they, that they can to stop that even, even to some degree, Google saying, I'm going to get the hell out of Australia. If you start tack creating a tax, basically for me there. So, you know, this was an ordinance in Southern California. It applied to companies with 300 or more workers nationally, and more than 15 employees in each H story and will remain in effect for at least 120 days. Joel (34m 6s): So this targeted bigger companies, it wasn't forever, right? It was a fairly temporary tax, I guess, on companies, Kroger said we've done above and beyond to help our workers and, and do things for them. Obviously, does the market decide how you, you know, how you support workers or does government step in Kroger came in and said, fuck the government. We're going to get the hell out of Dodge, which is a pretty draconian decision to make, to just pull shop out of a region, which I assume is a big region, right? Long beach, California. I assume that's a pretty profitable area for Kroger. So man, this is just this whole like commerce versus government scenario. And at some point it's going to come to a head or it's just going to keep being these little fires and battles that, that play out over around the globe. Chad (34m 53s): Yeah. Over the last close to 50 years, companies have been used to pretty much doing whatever the fuck they want to be able to drive margin. And now that government is seeing how all of this has worked. It's only taken fucking 50 years and they're starting to apply pressure, especially when we have a pandemic. And these are actual people who are essential workers, $4 an hour compared to $121 billion. It just, again, this is horrible optics. Joel (35m 20s): I'm curious, I was thinking about this this the other day, and it's sort of putting you on the spot. So don't feel like you have to answer, but I'm really curious if you could choose universal health care, universal basic income, or let's call it $15 minimum, a minimum wage, which one would you pick? Chad (35m 40s): It's hard. I would definitely go straight to healthcare because that is for everyone, whether they have a job or not. And I think we have to take care of everyone, but I think those are all steps. So to me, it's like, which would you do first? It would definitely be universal health care. Joel (35m 60s): Yep. Okay. Good enough. Google or Activision. Chad (36m 3s): Google. So let's jump into this bitch real quick. Joel (36m 5s): All right. So Google will be forced to cough up roughly 3.8 million to settle allegations of pay and hiring discrimination. The U S department of labor announced on Monday at issue or allegations that the company paid women engineers less than their male counterparts and had a hiring process that disadvantaged both women and Asian applicants for software engineering roles. One point 35 million of the payout is back-pay and interest that will be paid to 2,565 women. That's a lot of women working in engineering positions, subject to a pay discrimination, end quote, an additional 1.2, 3 million is slated for both women and Asian applicants. Chad (36m 50s): Damn. So where is the fine? This is just leveling the playing field for the individuals who were underpaid. And it doesn't even level the playing field for the women who weren't hired. So yes, Google was caught. They were caught fucking red handed, but where is the fine? There should be a major fine that changes behavior. I mean, they should be slapped with a few billion dollars at least to be able to ensure this shit doesn't happen again. These large corporations are able to do these things. And again, $3.8 million for Google is what a few seconds. Joel (37m 31s): Yeah. Clearly, clearly some of these things are a math problem, whether it's Facebook dealing with, you know, facial recognition, Google dealing with pay inequities, you know, someone with a calculator says, okay, here's the risks that we're taking on. And in most cases with someone like Google, it's not that risky. And, and in addition to you agreeing with you that the fine should have been much more strenuous. I think it also sends a message to everyone else that's in Google's, you know, universe to say, Oh, keep the pay and equity. The only, the only penalty you're gonna get is a little slap on the wrist for a few million dollars. So the message should have been much louder and clearer from the U S department of labor, which I think is additionally, a little frustrating and disappointing if it had been like the California government or local government, but the fact that the U S came in with a $3.8 million fine for this is total bullshit, Chad (38m 33s): Static. Now moving, moving to Activision where they think diversity and inclusion and hiring individuals from diverse backgrounds is unworkable. So Joel (38m 46s): Yeah, it's, it's unworkable. So and its proposal. So the AFL CIO is proposing to companies in this industry to basically doing a Rooney rule strategy. So those who don't know the NFL football, if football is soccer in your country, the Rooney rule means nothing to you, but basically it's any NFL team. When they interviewed for a head coach, they have to have at least one applicant of color come in and interview for the job. So lawyers for Activision blizzard have deemed this proposal to be quote an unworkable encroachment on the company's ability to compete for new talent in a highly competitive, fast moving market. Joel (39m 30s): In quote, in other words, it would slow down Activision's ability to make a profit. Chad (39m 36s): Once again, a company whining about not being able to compete for talent and yet why aren't they manufacturing talent? We just talked about a startup that is set up to help manufacturing talent, seriously build talent pipelines, and just start to push them into your organization. I seriously cannot believe that a brand like blizzard couldn't start a high school development program and fast track kids out of high school with credit stations and pipeline them into jobs. So to me, this only demonstrates that TA is still working in a 1950s model and can't stop creating excuses for living inside the box. Chad (40m 22s): I mean, seriously, how damned easy would it be to start a recruiting program with kids at, you know, disadvantaged high schools throughout the United States and start the credentialing process there? How fucking hard is that? It's not guys. The problem is companies are looking for corporate welfare from the government and they're looking for them to spoonfeed them the fucking talent and give them money because they can't find it that's bullshit. They should be able to fix this and they should be able to fix it easily. And there's an organization. They, they can model themselves after it's really fucking simple. It's called the U S army. Joel (40m 59s): Yep. And by the way, you know, who plays video games, kids of every color, race, creed, sex leg. The fact that if you, you know, I think we talked about, I forget what, what company was, but it was like, if any company should mirror employ like the talent base of what its customers are. It shouldn't be the gaming industry. Yeah. It's just a, it's pretty, it's pretty baffling. So, well, I mentioned the Rooney rule in the NFL. So we got to talk about the Superbowl, right? So are you gonna, you're going to watch obviously, prediction, you got a score for me, what what's, what's going to happen? Chad (41m 35s): Yeah. I, I think Brady's gonna win and I hope he doesn't, I'm going to be cheering for the chiefs. I really hope chiefs win, but there are so many damn weapons for Brady and the defense is fucking tremendous. So it's going to be really hard with his composure, his experience. It's going to be, it's going to be really hard, but I really, I really hope Kansas city wins. Joel (42m 1s): Don't forget home field advantage for Tampa. No fucking, you know, to me, to me, there's obviously talk about my homes and Brady, which I think is, is warranted. But to me, the game, the game come down, it comes down to Leonard for net. If, if foreign can get over a hundred yards, say one 2140 and they, they can maintain the clock, keep my hands off the field. They're going to win the game. If four net doesn't. If, if four net comes up short, I think it's, it's a, it's a video game. It's a pinball machine. And the score is going to be 52 to 49 or something. It's going to be just crazy. And whoever has the ball last is probably going to win Chad (42m 38s): Hope and pray that Kansas city blows them the fuck off the field. Joel (42m 42s): So if I don't want to sleep in the basement, I have to root for Tampa Bay. Cause my wife is a Tom Brady fan, but I just want to see a good game. I think the chiefs are going to win. I think my homes is just ridiculous and can score at whim. By the way, we did a, we did a chat cheese poll on LinkedIn this week we asked who would be the better coworker Patrick, my homes are Tom Brady. I was pretty close. My homes were 56% to Brady's 44%. We had about a hundred votes. So a decent, a decent number of people voted. But yeah, I thought it would be a lot more a lopsided to one of the other, not so much. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll talk about the strong woman. Joel (43m 24s): I guess I'll leave it at JobAdX (43m 26s): Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for long-term full-time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer automate the details of your programmatic job. Ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management, reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the US and Canada simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest getting an influx of applicants already that just are the right fit job. JobAdX (44m 7s): Ad X presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign. jobadx.com, that's JobAdX.com, by the way, Joel (44m 35s): You know, strong women, shout out to at least mayor Chad (44m 38s): VP over at paradox. Yeah. That's awesome. SmashFly then transition into symphony and she finds herself over at paradox. So yeah. Joel (44m 46s): Yeah. They've had a few big hires lately. Chad (44m 47s): Very smart errands doing some, some damn good hiring over there. He's got Jay Z. He's got Adam godson and now, you know, he's picking up a lease good stuff. Joel (44m 58s): Yeah. Yeah. Big, big people. So another buddy of the show holon McHugh was pretty upset this week. I don't even know who the fuck the rally awards are. Do you know these guys? Chad (45m 14s): I did not. So rally RM aka recruitment marketing rally recruitment marketing sent out emails to individuals in their space pimping the rally awards, but to nominate someone or yourself, you have to pay $395. And that my friend is the early bird fee, right? That's the early bird fee Holland's response on Twitter was quote, rally RM really $395 to recognize someone doing bad-ass work in this industry. How about making that cost $0? Because those bad-ass people are your content engine. Chad (45m 55s): You make dollars off of them are ready. Give them some well-deserved love for free hating the game, close tweet. Amen. The thing that I don't get is why you would charge somebody to nominate the cup again, th th th the coverage should be by the sponsor overall, right. And everybody gets to participate, but this is one of those velvet rope. Hey, you know, if, if you can afford it, come on in. But what about those people who are doing great fucking work, but they're not going to pay 350 bucks or 395 bucks early bird. Joel (46m 29s): Yeah. And they're already a customer, right? Or like, it just seemed really strange. It seemed like a really weird double dip money grab by these guys. So Holland, you go, girl, you tell me to go, by the way I, something pissed me off this week, I got to get off my chest real quick. So we both get LinkedIn invites, connection requests, right? Like very common. And obviously a good number of those are automated. We have no idea who these people are. And the message is like, Oh, I'm selling insurance and I'd love to connect. Okay. Good deal. So I get one this week. That totally was crazy. So this was from David Cutler, who I assume is a real guy. Joel (47m 9s): So his request was literally this quote, hi there. This is David Cutler's virtual assistant. David asked me to connect with him and connect him with people like you in the B2B tech sector. My research indicates that you both share common goals. Would you like to connect and include David in your growing network? Thanks. Virtual assistant. Like, are you fucking kidding me? Like the automation is so bad now that we're getting virtual assistance. My research indicates get the fuck outta here. We out. 5 (47m 46s): Thank you for listening to what's it called podcast with Chad, the cheese and the 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 chase, not one cheddar blue nacho pepper, Jack Swiss. There's so many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any ho be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. 5 (48m 27s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese is so weird. We out.

It's a new day in America. New president. New Vice President, who's also a minority woman! The new attitude in the New World, if you will. The sun rose and the weight has been lifted. Unfortunately for you, dear listener, this is the same craptastic podcast you've grown to love (or at least tolerate). Rejoice! This week, - Personio rides the dinosaur HR industry into "Unicorn" status - Another game of Buy-or-Sell ensues for 1) Betterfly 2) Kanarys 3) HiPeople - Alabama is ground zero for workers-of-the-world uniting against Amazon, ya'll, - WFH is a financial coup for Corp America while workers get f'd, .. and lastly, Brits think they know best when it comes to mood tracking. Hey, this isn't the '70s! Take that mood ring nonsense and put it in your fish-and-chips! Anyway, enjoy this Sovren, JobAdx, and Jobvite powered production. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. 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 (22s): Aw. Yeah. Vice president. Mike Pence is back home in Columbus, Indiana. You partied at his pad last night didn't you Chad? Chad (31s): Fuck him. Joel (32s): This is the Chad and Cheese podcast AKA boys who love bourbon. I'm your cohost Joel JLo Cheesman. And this is Chad (40s): Chad fireworks Sowash Joel (43s): And on this week, show job postings as Easter eggs, workers of the world unite in Alabama and this wristband says my mood is extra salty. Now past the Tabasco. Sovren Promo (57s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (1m 57s): Oh, it's back. Let's go... (🎵🎵 🎶 🎶 Music 🎶 🎶 ,🎵 )This is how it felt when Biden spoke, yesterday, last night, when the poet girl spoke (Amanda Gorman), this is what it felt like. Chad (2m 9s): Feeling, feeling the groove. When you woke up this morning was feeling the groove. The air felt crisper, the birds were singing louder with joy. And last night, did you see the, the like fully produced inauguration movie slash music video that they had last night? Joel (2m 30s): I did not. So you'll have to enlighten me Chad (2m 33s): The ability for us to be able to produce a much more enjoyable time for all Americans, not just ones who can afford to go to these inauguration balls and whatnot was pretty amazing. I mean, it had some amazing talent. It started off with Bruce Springsteen ended with Katy Perry where she sang fireworks. And I tell you, man, I've seen so many fucking fireworks in my life. It was awesome. Biden was in the White House, watching Kamala was on the steps behind Katie Perry, right in front of a Lincoln, at the Lincoln Memorial. Chad (3m 13s): And I mean, it was just like this experience that there was no way in hell we could have ever had. If we didn't have the scenario, play out all America got a chance to kind of dip into it and enjoy it. Where for the most part, we just don't. We don't get to we're just commoners. Joel (3m 31s): Yeah. It's usually a really a exclusive event and we get to see pictures and some highlights. You go to the other end of that spectrum. I think it was Andrew Jackson who just opened up the White House to everybody and it turned into a big orgy party, whiskey whiskey. So, so this is somewhere in between. We get to sort of partake, but there's no whiskey orgy in the White House that goes, so I'm guessing you were not at the Columbus airport when our illustrious former vice-president landed yesterday. Chad (4m 1s): No, the plane went over my house though. So I knew when I knew when that asshole was in town. Joel (4m 6s): The, the crowd looked bigger for him than it did for Trump as he was exiting on Air Force One yesterday, no one on CNN said that that the crowds at the Apple store are bigger than the crowd for Trump, which I thought was pretty funny. Yeah, of course. I had to watch Fox and Fox's take was like Trump landed in Florida to mass crowds and jubilation. So, you know, we live in two news universes. Chad (4m 33s): Just imagine if he would have pardoned the Tiger King. I mean, the crowds would have been so much larger. Joel (4m 41s): Are they gonna, they're gonna do a Tiger King II. When's that shit come out by the way, this is how the pandemic has progressed. We've gone from like Tiger King and we all hate ourselves and eating Cheetos all day, which is actually what I call Tuesday. But anyway, and we've sort of ended with the Queen's Gambit and more like, sort of thoughtful programming so I feel like we've had our white trash moment ending, ending with the Capitol riots. Chad (5m 8s): Yeah. I don't know that America is done with its white trash moment although I have to say props to Airbnb and I'm going to start off with this with a little news, but also some shout outs. I do remember you, kind sir, saying that Airbnb and now has stockholders. So the founders will start to act much differently because money rules all and Airbnb says, sit down and shut up Cheese. They shut down 3,400 plus DC listings on their platform while covering the host for their losses. Chad (5m 48s): Airbnb made a similar move in early co COVID pandemic days when it allowed guests to cancel without penalties. I remember we had to do that because we're getting ready to go to London. All this shit happened. We had Airbnb set up and we, we got to actually cancel without penalty. So ultimately I think this gives me faith in brands. I'm starting to get faith in government just because of yesterday and shiny videos and fireworks. I'm getting there, right? But this gives me more faith in brands, Amazon, Google, Apple, severely hampering, hate speech with their kicking Parlor to the curb. Chad (6m 29s): And now Airbnb lessens the likelihood of large groups to use their platforms, to travel to DC, to perspectively cause harm so it's a good day in America today, people. Joel (6m 42s): Yeah. We talk a lot about corporate corporate entities taking the lead on a lot of these social issues. Shall we say whether it be black lives matter. Yeah. So yeah. Hats, hats off to them now. Now Twitter's stock has taken a big shit since they've dumped Trump off the platform so we'll see if this becomes a trend that is everlasting. I may, I may end up being right about Airbnb when else all of a sudden done. You never know Chad (7m 10s): This moment in time, my friend. Wrong. Joel (7m 16s): All right, I'm going to give a quick shout out to personal fave her on the show, we interviewed him a couple of years ago, Mike Timkin. Chad (7m 24s): Love that guy! Joel (7m 25s): Recruitment Marketing. Chad (7m 27s): Love that guy! Joel (7m 28s): The dude's been around since T-Rexes we're doing recruitment marketing, and he's finally finally hanging it up. So Mike, enjoy it, man, go golfing, play chess, whatever it is, gets your, get your juices flowing. It's been a fun ride and we hope that you won't disappear. Totally. We hope that you'll still be around to give us some social media commentary, if nothing else. Chad (7m 51s): He is known for being an amazing mentor, he's an awesome storyteller. He has stories out the wazoo and he's just an amazing human being. So I think seeing a guy like that leave our industry really, to me, leaves a huge void and hopefully a vacuum that many of us can actually get sucked into and start to work more as mentors. Joel (8m 15s): Well, fortunately for me, I've, I've been bringing millennials under my wing of mentorship for many years, so it's, I'm already doing my part. Dammit, Chad (8m 24s): Calling them dumb asses I don't thinkis mentoring. Joel (8m 28s): I got some poison for them in this week. Show you just wait, I'm going to give a quick shout out to, because when you think of Mike, Timkin you think of Van Halen and you think a diamond David Lee Roth, and you think of Sammy Hagar. So, so I put out a poll, which is sort of a Chad Cheese, you know, help us with an argument thing who who's a better front man, David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar, not surprised by the result, but we've been talking about bringing it up on the show like two or three weeks ago and we still haven't. So David Lee Roth is the, it wasn't even close, right? 73. Yeah. I mean it was Diamond Dave, when you can, when you can, when you can do the splits and saying, you know, jump, you're going to win this competition. Chad (9m 12s): All you have to do is look at their top 10 hits. I mean, that's, I mean, Sammy was like around, during like more mainstream Van Halen and they had some good stuff and nothing compared to when David Lee Roth was actually the front man. Yeah. Joel (9m 26s): I was trying to think of a band that became better after the front, the lead singer left. And the only one I could kind of think of was like ACDC. That was the only one. Chad (9m 36s): That's exactly what I was going to saying. Joel (9m 42s): Let's let's give a quick shout out our Pappy's giveaway, we've been talking about that for months. Now, we finally had winners. This is a Sovren sponsor giveaway! We gave away two bottles of Pappy's Family Reserve! We gave away a Blanton's Special Japanese Import. So I can confirm that one of the Pappy's and the Blanton's have been delivered, the other Pappy's is in route. So hopefully we'll be able to talk about that soon. The winners, again, as, as we mentioned, Matt O'Donnell, Pete Suchi, they've both gotten their liquor and Lynn Morton is the unlucky one, who's still sort of waiting out there in limbo, but big ups to them, big ups to Sovren. Joel (10m 29s): I'm hoping that we can keep this bourbon flowing with something after this, we'll have to put our heads together and figure out what we can do. Chad (10m 37s): The people have spoken they want bourbon. Joel (10m 39s): They want liquor. People want to be drunk. Chad (10m 42s): It might not be Pappy's for God's sakes, but there's still good stuff out there. Joel (10m 45s): It'll be brown people. It'll taste great. Chad (10m 48s): Yes. And we we're actually going to be enjoying some beer this week from the beer drop win, right? Joel (10m 56s): James Deneen. Jim Deneen, whatever his mom calls him a beer drop. We're going to sample some IPA's with him next week. Chad (11m 4s): Yes! Joel (11m 5s): We're going to bring, I think Mark Anderson from AdZuna. We may throw our buddy Doug Monroe an invite who knows he might want to want to join it. It's a little late in English time, by the time we do that. But we'll see. We'll see. It's always fun. Chad (11m 18s): Perfect, perfect time. And we still have plenty of beer to give away kids. So if you haven't registered, I don't know what you've been doing, but you should go to beerdrop.net or go to chadcheese.com click on the free up top because we are still giving away free t-shirts and you'll also be included in the registration for the AdZuna beerdrop contact-free beer on your front porch, it's a good time. Joel (11m 49s): You can't miss you. Can't miss. Let's get to topics! Chad (11m 54s): Topics, money kids we're talking about Personio. So who, who? I I've never seen it. Joel (12m 2s): You say Personia I say per I say Personio, who? Chad (12m 5s): It is Per-son-i-o. Okay. Who's purse whose persona Joel (12m 11s): They're a German startup. Yes. German startup target, small and medium sized business. The best way to think of them as sort of Workday for the small guy, these guys just got $125 million bringing them to a $1.7 billion valuation. Chad (12m 30s): Crazy Joel (12m 31s): Holy shit. Holy shit. Thoughts. Chad (12m 33s): Yeah. Here in the U S we have bamboo HR. Namely, those are more on the, I think the SMB side or the S M E if we're talking to Europe. Yeah. So the valuation is super crazy. 1.7 billion, their revenues doubled last year, they weren't even looking for a raise. I mean, pretty much they have investors coming to them and say, Hey, you want a little bit of this, $125 million crack here. So their valuation . Joel (13m 2s): Alright twist my arm. Chad (13m 3s): Their valuation last year where they received $75 million in January of 2020, their valuation was 500 million. They receive 125 this year, a year later, still had cash in the bank, by the way, revenues doubled $1.7 billion. Total funding is 250 million. And they were founded in 2015 as per Crunchbase. Joel (13m 28s): Still a baby. Chad (13m 30s): Man. I mean, that's fast! Jesus! And we've talked about this before. This goes beyond just the recruiting talent acquisition side of the house. This goes into HR. This goes much further. So I think the pandemic not only pushed enterprise organizations to reinvest in tech for automation and build the better ability to scale, but the opportunity in the world of small to medium businesses, incredibly large, knowing that most are still using Excel spreadsheets, accompanied by a pen and paper. So the opportunity in this market is large for an overall market standpoint, but it, I mean, it's a pain in the ass, hurting all these cats. Chad (14m 14s): So, I mean, they are going to have their issues. I would assume if you're in Europe, they're probably doing ads, TV ads, and whatever they can to target these individuals much like we see with namely here in the US but it's, I think it's, it's a great space and this is hypergrowth. This is unicorn growth. Joel (14m 35s): Yeah. Yeah. You see these smaller companies, you know, they don't have the resources to like RFP, you know, the top hundred technologies out there and to give small businesses, a one place, one stop shop, these guys are covering recruiting, onboarding, payroll, absence tracking, and other major HR functions. So for a small company that doesn't have the resources, doesn't have the time, it doesn't have the money for them to go to one place and feel like they're getting, you know, a pretty good solution for their problems. Like, yeah, it's, it's a home run. And, and these guys obviously have the cash now to try to take this message and product to the rest of the world. Joel (15m 16s): It will be interesting to watch. Chad (15m 18s): And we've talked about small business before, because I mean, remember if you're going from an Excel spreadsheets and pen and paper to something like this. Yeah. This is the crack. You're not going to want to get off this. This is where loyalty just skyrockets. So the big point here, is how are they going to go through client acquisition? That'll be the most interesting, I think, right out of the gate, because it's easier to build for smaller, medium size businesses when again, you know, they're using pen and paper. Joel (15m 49s): Yeah. And let's, let's be real. Like it's hard to be super profitable. Maybe these guys have cracked the code, but small businesses are a bitch to sell to. Chad (15m 57s): Yeah. Joel (15m 58s): It's much easier to land a whale and then milk that whale and try to get a few more, you know, in a year's time than it is to like, you know, get a bunch of guppies that make you rich or profitable. I mean, small businesses typically don't understand tech, like you said, spreadsheets, and they're still posting on the equivalent of Craigslist or ZipRecruiter. So to get out of that box into like an all encompassing technology is going to be a stretch for a lot of companies. I mean, 3000 customers is good on them. That's a hell of a job being a five-year-old company. And again, maybe they've, they've figured it out, but typically selling to SMBs have been the death now for a lot of companies. Joel (16m 38s): So good on them. Chad (16m 39s): It seems as if there is a shit ton of cash in the market. Joel (16m 44s): Shit ton. Chad (16m 45s): That's what George Little Rock says. What does George say? Joel (16m 49s): Yep. So, so George is talking about a work tech X estimate that came out this week. So the entire market for HR tech is now at $380 billion. I said, billion with a B in case you missed that. So this is all categories of potential market, as well as serviceable market, that these companies are looking to grow into a total of $5 billion was invested in global HR technology firms in 2020. You, US leads the way in terms of money, that's been invested, followed by the UK, Germany, France, Australia, Spain, and Ireland. Joel (17m 30s): I'd like to know where China is? I don't know, apparently that's not being calculated cause I know there's a lot of money going into Chinese firms. And I mean, come on Canada, let's get in the top five, come on. Let's where's, where's our Canadians at. Chad (17m 44s): So this data very high level and love this data, but this is perfect for investors, for boards and for strategic planning, because you're talking about the total addressable market, the serviceable market. And then you can start to dig down into the actual serviceable obtainable market. So, I mean, these are great numbers that George is actually flushing out there. Who is this really relevant to? This is relevant to the more, the upper strategic crust. When you're starting to look at markets and perspectively, expand in the markets, as well as a startup. And you want to create a narrative around that. Chad (18m 24s): This is the kind of data you start off with, right? So that's, that's good stuff, good stuff from George. Joel (18m 29s): I may be wrong and I'm sort of anecdotally. Chad (18m 32s): I might be drinking. Joel (18m 33s): But I wouldn't want to say, like the last time I saw something around a full number, like this was roughly eight to 10 years ago and I want to say it was at like a hundred billion. So in a fairly short period from the last numbers I've seen, you know, 4x from 10 years ago, a lot of money is going into this. And I assume it will continue as we automate more and more and provide tech and unplug these solutions into our hiring system. So, Chad (19m 0s): And as we start to get SMEs involved as well, that's where you have a full market. That's where the total addressable market just exploded. Joel (19m 10s): Damn it feels good to be a gangster. Well, Chad, we played buy or sell, last week and people loved it. So we said, let's, let's keep doing it. So we got three, we got three startups, that all got money this week. I'll run through them and we'll, we'll play a little buy or sell. Sound good? Chad (19m 29s): Yep. Joel (19m 30s): All right, let's do this. (Ding, ding, ding) So Betterfly. I hope I'm saying that. Right. And it's not Better flee. I'm sure it's Betterfly, so they raised $17.5 million. They are a Chilean startup. We don't get a lot of South American players so that's nice. They offer a wellness benefits platform that rewards people's good habits with social giving and life insurance that grows at no cost. I say millennials rejoice, but life insurance is for old people. So I'm a little confused about the social giving piece that appeals to younger people. Joel (20m 10s): But then I don't think any of them give a shit about life insurance. So I'm going to go ahead and leap frog, leap, frog you, and say, I'm going to sell Betterfly. Chad (20m 19s): Hm. And the interesting thing about that is you did not even mention the domain, which I thought you were going to take about five minutes to pounce on betterfly.cl. Yes. Yeah. So from my standpoint, I mean, when you take a look at integration with activity apps like Peloton, Adidas, Under Armor, Samsung, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? This is an everybody type of a thing. And I think that yes, millennials are into this, but I mean, who's, who's buying all the Pelotons right now? Are the older people who are stuck at home. Right. And they want to be able to actually integrate and be a part of the quote unquote "community." Chad (21m 5s): To me, this is something that is hot right now, especially with the pandemic. So for me, this is a buy. Joel (21m 12s): Yeah. Okay. Do you know, you know, the app Acorns, I assume, you know, you buy and then they put the pennies in an investment account and you feel good. Like, so to me, this sort of is on that trend of you don't even have to pay attention and we'll give to causes that you love, and we'll put money into a life insurance policy that you'll be able to take advantage of at some point down the line. Chad (21m 32s): Or what other prizes are, I mean, it's just, it's, it's like all of this stuff is like, here's a store of the things that you can do. So, yeah, I think, again, I think a lot of this is going to revolve around the interconnectivity and all of the buying of the home gyms that we've seen just in the last year that I believe will continue. Joel (21m 51s): Yeah. Yeah. It's also hard to get a gauge on these guys because their site is in Spanish. I assume that's what they speak in Chile. Chad (21m 58s): All the way to the bottom. There's a little tab that says English. Yeah. Joel (22m 3s): Or they could just automatically give you the English version. If you come in from Indiana. Chad (22m 8s): You would think, you would think. Joel (22m 10s): Start up number two canaries. Hopefully I'm saying that, right. It's K A N A R Y S. So these guys got 3 million in seed funding for its platform focused on, well, we've heard this trend before diversity, equity and inclusion. They look to leverage job and company search, employee reviews, demographics, statistics, and DNI news to help candidates navigate the job market with an eye on DNI and employees better understand how they're really doing. So taking the hood off, the veil off, of companies in regards to DNI, I assume you are a hot buyer of this startup. Chad (22m 52s): A couple of things here. If you go to the site, the site is sexy. I mean, it, it really is. And then you dig into it. It has two co-founders and they're both Harvard law and they're both women of color as well. They're both black females. So they're taking pretty much their experience into really trying to help others with this platform. It's interesting. I think because it has, you can write reviews on company profile, search jobs, plus I believe there's also a community aspect to it. So this almost feels like kind of like a "fairy God boss"w type of platform. Chad (23m 34s): And there's no question with DEI. If they have all the data that they say that they do, and they can help from an outcome standpoint, this is a buy every single day. And just as a side note, I've already reached out to the CEO and we're planning an interview. Joel (23m 52s): Ooo. Nice tease. You, you dirty boy. So, so yeah, Fairygodboss was exactly what I thought about when I, when I heard about these guys and, and the verdict is still out. The jury is still out on "fairy God boss," they've been around a while. Haven't gotten gobbled up yet. The review, the review universe is sort of engulfed by Glassdoor and Indeed. So that's a really tough market to tap into and cut through that clutter. However, I do think that, you know, if timing is everything, this is a pretty well timed business. And it's going to be ripe in a few years, if not months for someone like a Glassdoor to come in and, and add this review piece, this DNI piece to their business. Joel (24m 35s): So yeah, I'd say by, in terms of an acquisition target in the future, I would go ahead and buy that I would buy that. So our last and final startup, Hi People. Chad (24m 46s): Hi People. Joel (24m 47s): Hi People, not H I G H a, which a lot of people may have mistaken this for its HI people. This is a Berlin startup. So the Germans are very well represented here today. So this startup has raised 3 million in seed funding to automate the reference checking process. This follows a 1.1 million pre-seed round that occurred in 2019. I will note that our buddy, Tim Sackett posted an article this week about how he hates manual reference checks. Where do you fall on this one? Chad (25m 25s): This is a sell if I've ever seen one, it seems like it's just so narrowly scoped number one. And then on the site, it actually says, quote, we make it easy to understand and analyze reference data by automatically detecting and flagging outliers within a group. What that says right out of the gate is bias, bias, bias. So yeah, overall, it's incredibly narrowly scoped and it just doesn't do it for me. Yeah. Joel (25m 56s): Yeah. I'm going to sell this Turkey too. Yeah. Reference checks seems even if it's automated seems really antiquated. All the reasons that you said, you said before there, I agree with, so let's say we've got a Betterfly. Was a sell for me. Was that a buy for you? Chad (26m 14s): Buy for me? Joel (26m 15s): We both like Kanaries and we're both selling Hi People. I love it. And that's an episode of buy or sell. Let's get a quick break. And jeez, we'll talk about remote workers and labor unions. Jobvite PROMO (26m 29s): 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. Joel (26m 60s): (music) Oh, damn it. Won't go away. Chad (27m 5s): Oh! I don't want it to go away. Joel (27m 7s): Have you seen to do a Geico commercial with Tag Team? Chad (27m 13s): Yeah. That is scoop where it is Scoop. That is awesome. Yeah. Joel (27m 22s): And do you note at the end, when the guy he does like the LeBron he's like... Chad (27m 26s): Sprinkles. Joel (27m 28s): Yeah. That's, that's fucking good stuff. Chad (27m 31s): This is another ode to the White House. This is a recruiting trick from the White House. This is smart. And it's easy for, from a recruiting standpoint. So today, if you go to whitehouse.gov and then you look at the source code, you'll find this message. Quote, if you're reading this, we need your help in building back better. usds.gov/apply that kids. Is that simple? Joel (28m 2s): Yeah, that was, that was pretty sneaky and pretty cool. I'd love to know how many people they actually attract through that, although I'm sure the people they do think it's pretty cool and are pretty good candidates for jobs. Now, what I would love to see as well as some sort of tracking mechanism, it's just the URL. So if you type it in or copy and paste it, I don't know if there's any way of knowing aside from asking them, although I'm sure they say, yeah, I saw it in the code. Ha ha ha. Very funny. But yeah, some tracking would be nice, but yeah, it's very clever, very clever White House who knew? Chad (28m 33s): Very clever. So, so we got, we got the final four in the NFL. I got to ask you, you got some of the picks wrong last week, as well did I? So we're down to the final four and I know no one outside of the US gives a shit, but so we've got, we've got Julie's Packers playing my wife's, Tom Brady's. Joel (28m 53s): Yeah. And then we've got the Bills taken on the Chiefs with hopefully Pat in Mahomes. It'll not be a fair fight otherwise, who you got to go to the super bowl? Chad (29m 3s): Unfortunately, I just think from the Packer standpoint, I don't know that they have the defense to stop anything. So, I mean, I don't want to pick Brady, but I just, again, I think the Bucks are going to win just like I thought they would last week, but I went over that with my, my, my pick for Brees because I like Brees a lot more and obviously I'll be rooting for the Packers and then the Bills, I think the Bills overall, even if Mahomes is in, I just, it just feels like they have the momentum and it's just fun to watch. I mean, it would be fun to watch both of them to be quite Frank, but very incredibly skilled quarterbacks and teams. Chad (29m 44s): Yeah. Joel (29m 45s): I'm going to go to the exact opposite. I think the Packers are the best team in the league right now. It that's at, and it's at Green Bay where they are incredibly successful in the playoffs. Brady may pull a rabbit out of his hat. He's got immense weapons, obviously on the offensive side, but I'm going to go Green Bay. And I think if Mahomes is healthy, they can just score it. Well, they're just fucking unbelievable. And I know that from last week and also thing that the bills, particularly Josh Allen, not quite ready for prime time, I think they'll have their day in the sun, but I don't think it is 2021. So I'm going to go Packers/Chiefs in the Superbowl and just thank God we have a fucking super bowl. Joel (30m 26s): That's what I'm talking about. And speaking of Superbowls, I bet you saw a big W in terms of our debate of paying people less or more, if they work out of market. When you saw this story, employers could save $11,000 per remote worker. I bet you got pretty excited when he saw that. Chad (30m 45s): I think you're setting me up is what I think. Joel (30m 47s): I am. I'm leading the witness. Chad (30m 49s): Yeah, this is, this is the one that actually comes article from newsday.com. US businesses compatible with work remote could save almost $11,000 per employee each year if workers telecommute an average of two and a half days a week, that's coming from a new study. So yeah, I think overall that's great for the employor. What's great for the employee, just actually, there was another survey that was on livecareer.com, 81% of employees today enjoy working remote. 65 state work, remote helps their work-life balance. Chad (31m 30s): And then 60% feel like they're more productive working from home. So there is a great balance here, but I really think companies will fuck it up because they'll start playing the Facebook rule and paying employees less. And it's capitalism. Don't give two shits about our people and we care more about the bottom line. And I hope that's not the case for the most part. I know it will be for some companies, but for the most part, I hope that's not the case. Joel (32m 2s): Well, Chad, sometimes in the market, everybody wins. So, so part of that story, as well as they researched how much employees will get more per year based on lower costs for transportation, lower cost to meals, by having to buy less work clothes. And they estimated that at $3000 per year, yes, that's not $11,000. And by the way, the $11,000 is based on two and a half days. If you go full work from home, we're talking 22,000 a year per per employee. If my math is correct. So businesses win, workers kind of win because I have to buy, I can buy more sweats than, than Dockers and the market wins. Joel (32m 43s): So I was hoping you were going to go for a win-win-win scenario, but you say, no, the workers get screwed again. Chad (32m 49s): I mean, if you take a look at history over the last 40, close to 50 years, you know, wages haven't grown and employers have been looking for ways to engineer lower wages so that their profits grow. That's what we've seen. I mean, that's what studies show. So this is another way and again, I go back to Facebook as kind of like the unfortunate, unfortunate benchmark is that companies are just going to look for another way to engineer an opportunity to boost profits and fuck their employees. Joel (33m 22s): Yeah. And the big one being real estate, which the article kind of goes down to the bottom, which we're not even talking about because they're talking about halftime at the office. But the study estimated that employers could save 25% or basically averaging out to almost $2,000 annual savings per half time, remote worker. So if we throw in the real estate into this equation, companies are saving big time. So the headline was $11,000 per remote worker. When it should have been more like $58,000 per remote worker cause that kind of what it looks like it might come out to. By the way, this was, this was the, the San Diego based Global Workplace Analytics Organization, like who wouldn't want to live in San Diego and just think about Global Workplace Analytics? Joel (34m 14s): Doesn't that sound like a fun gig. Doesn't that sound fun? Chad (34m 17s): Yeah. Just as long as I can work remote. Yeah. Joel (34m 21s): Just as long as it's on the beach or mountains today, I'm not sure which I'm going to pick. Right? Chad (34m 25s): Yeah. I'm not sure. I know that a, you're not going to get much of a beach. They, Alabama does have some beaches, but not where Amazon is. Joel (34m 35s): How much do you miss San Diego? How much do you miss traveling? By the way? Chad (34m 38s): Yes. Let's just go with that right now. Joel (34m 41s): So my sister's getting married in Key West in February, so I'm going to actually travel to Key West in February. So I'd say pray for me. Pray for me, pray for my liver and pray for my healthy return. Chad (34m 54s): That's irresponsible. Yeah. Joel (34m 57s): Totally. So workers of the world unite in Alabama, you're going to love this story. So we talked about the avocado toast eating millennials were unionizing in Silicon Valley. And we had a fun conversation over that. So this is the kind of Workers of the World unite that I'm talking about 6,000 Amazon warehouse workers will hold a union vote in Alabama on February 8th and cast their ballots via mail on whether to join the wholesale and department store union. I'm assuming that's a federal or a national organization. The decision means Amazon will face its first union vote in the US since 2014. Joel (35m 42s): Not shockingly, Amazon pushed for the vote to be held in person. I don't know why they would want to do that. I don't know why they thought voting in person might be a little bit stressful for people? Chad (35m 53s): Does that sound like voter suppression to you? Joel (35m 55s): Or a little bit of intimidation, maybe? So they got it to be held via mail. The strategy that Amazon is taking to, to get them to not vote for union is mostly monetary. No shocking. They're they've sent out messages to workers, as well as I believe a website or webpage talking about how, why join a union when we being Amazon have got you covered with high wages, healthcare, vision, and dental benefits, as well as a safety committee and appeals process. So they're hoping to nip this thing in the bud. Is it going to work? Chad (36m 33s): Yeah, they actually, I have a website called, called doitwithout dues.com and the entire thing, the entire thing just says, well, why pay $500 for this, this, this, this, and this? And it's like, okay, Amazon, why are you working so hard for me not to be a part of a union? For me to hear Amazon say high wages for essential workers, right? So we're talking about, well, we pay them $15 to let's say $20. Okay. So $15, $15 an hour, 40 hours a week for a year is $30,000 before taxes, kids. Okay. That's not a lot of money. That's not high wages. Joel (37m 15s): Yeah. I couldn't help. But think about like Jimmy Hoffa era, if they had websites and it would be like, keep your kneecaps.com on how to vote. Anyway, February 8th and I think the results come back in March. So this is something that we will definitely be watching. Chad (37m 35s): Yeah. I think what we need to do though, is we're going to have to take a stand federally because bayzos can start playing the same game he did with looking to award States with the new Amazon hubs. I mean, he can threaten Alabama to move to Arkansas because he doesn't want his employees to enjoy essential wages, essential benefits. And actually, yeah. Having unions to ensure protections, you know, to ensure that we've got great places to work and we're getting good wages and benefits. I mean, this is the problem with capitalism. Joel (38m 11s): Alabama. JOBADX (38m 12s): Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for long-term full time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. JOBADX (38m 53s): We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Joel (39m 24s): Oh, here we go. Well, you know who else is trying real hard, Chad? Chad (39m 34s): Who's that? Joel (39m 36s): Indeed. Chad (39m 37s): Oh Jesus. Joel (39m 38s): Oh, we got to have a show talking about Indeed. Chad (39m 40s): Oh my God, come on. Joel (39m 42s): So we, we reported a while ago about a Talent, Inc. Our buddy Jeff Berger selling the company for a hundred million, was it? It was a lot of money anyway. Resume Rabbit and Resumes App and everything. So, so Indeed his launched Resume Help: get help with your resume professional feedback on how to improve your resume for $19. You can also get a report for free, which I assume they're automating. So I don't know, a little shout out to Indeed, doing a little diversification of their business, hoping to make a little more money off the backs of job seekers. Chad (40m 19s): Yeah. I'm wondering, I'm wondering if this is something they built themselves or it's gotta be through like some type of partner network, but overall, I mean, this, I think, I think this is just another one of those not focusing on it being Indeed. Like, I mean, it's just, it's not, they could push them off to, you know, different organizations or what have you that do this. Like we're talking about Talent Inc, but you know, they are just not focused. They're not disciplined like we've known from Indeed's day past. Joel (40m 55s): Yep. I mean, someone, someone in an executive meeting said, where can we skim a few bucks off of our job seekers? And someone said, resume writing help. Okay. Who does that? Okay. Let's partner. Although it does look a little bit like, you know, they're, they have a blog they're providing articles. And so, you know, there's a little bit of focus on this, but yeah, it looks, it looks like a little bit unfocused for Indeed like stick with the tech folks. Yeah. Chad (41m 21s): Allow the experts to do the shit that they do. And just step the fuck out of the way. Joel (41m 28s): Small beans, small beans. Well, Chad, my moon beam bracelet says I'm pissed off. Tell us about the Mood Beam wristband. Chad (41m 39s): So Mood Beam is a wearable technology in isn't here to monitor your physical health. Instead it allows your employer to track your emotional state. The gadget, which links to a mobile phone app and web interface has two buttons, one yellow and one blue. The idea is that you press the yellow one if you're feeling happy and the blue one, when you're feeling sad. What is this? Joel (42m 9s): Yes. This kind of shit has been around for a long time. You've probably been in a restroom in an airport, or it says like, give me the smiley, moderate or frowny face about your experience in the bathroom. As if people want to like relay their experience in the bathroom. So companies are doing this where like, as you leave the office, you punch, you know, smiley face, frowny face, or you're just sort of in the middle. This is a manually like it's your choice to during the day provide insight into whether you're happy or you're sad. It's a company out of England, I think. And I don't know why I get that blue is your sad. Joel (42m 49s): I'm not sure why yellow is happy. Maybe someone in England can explain that to me. I was thinking like green and red, maybe like green, I'm good. Red, I'm not so happy. Or I don't know the color seem a little bit stranger. Just give me a happy or frowny face. I assume this is this isn't anonymous. And even if it is no, one's going to feel like it is because you're hooked up to an app and the internet. So people are gonna answer strangely. They're not going to answer honestly. And I feel like, yeah, or at all, or like, fuck you. I'm not gonna tell you how I feel during the day. Or am I, is it cause I'm happy personally or I'm happy professionally or just in general. And, and I get the idea like people are at home, there's all these issues around depression and loneliness and blah, blah, blah. Joel (43m 32s): And, and people are focusing on this more and more. But to me, it's like, don't, if it's a manual process, it's just not going to work. It has to be either. It's a like they actually have a ring that, that, you know, how your body temperature, your heart rate, you know, stuff like. Chad (43m 47s): Mood rings? Joel (43m 48s): Well, they're like mood rings, but they're like 21st century mood rings. To me, there are better ways to gauge someone's sort of health and happiness and just centerdness than asking them to wear a bracelet that looks really dorky and asking them to tell me if you're happy or sad during the day. Chad (44m 6s): OK, companies, this is so analog. I mean, seriously. So why wouldn't companies just give away free Apple, Samsung, or Fitbit watches with an app that provides them with a button, but also provides with biometric information. I mean, if your pulse is racing during a meeting or while making phone calls, I mean, if you're going to ask for any information whatsoever, provide a luxury experience and ask for it all. Joel (44m 33s): And if you really wanting to be happy through the entire day, send them some headphones, Chad another week in the book, I'll wake up. No one got... We out. Chad (44m 49s): We out. OUTRO (45m 42s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Take a break from counting your Gamestop millions! Lots happened this week in the world of recruiting. Bayard got acquired TMP rebranded - let the debate fireworks fly! Workday went shopping Google threatens the Aussies Costco shows us how to TikTok for talent, ...and another round of Buy or Sell with 1) Teamflow 2) Clubhouse 3) Multiverse Here's to the podcast you'll never short, powered as always by JobAdx, Sovren, and Jobvite. Transcription Sponsored by; Disability Solutions helps companies find talent in the largest minority community in the world – people with disabilities. 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 (20s): Oh yeah. We just sold all our stock shares, which means next week show will be live from the Bora Bora bunker, baby. What's up boys and girls. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. And I'm your cohost Joel "short seller" Cheeseman Chad (37s): and I'm Chad "suicide watch hedge fund manager" Sowash. Joel (42s): And on this week's show raid and see isn't just a capital rioters battle cry bear gets bought and back by popular demand, buy and sell baby. Let's do this. Jobvite (54s): 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. Joel (1m 25s): Y'all Tripping Tyler here. Chad (1m 27s): Oh yeah. Joel (1m 29s): Selling Game Shop shares and doing cocaine and champagne all night. Chad (1m 43s): This is totally funky. Joel (1m 44s): If you haven't seen the video to this you have to check it out on YouTube. Chad (1m 44s): I'll wake up and check the phone. No one got back to me. perhaps the attachments forgot to attend. Let me guess you need to cross reference another references. Cross references pay-to-play and pull your C-suite sheets away. You need 12 weeks to get back to me because your application is under review. We'll know with Dani non more in the air talking shift again, delivery someone else you want to hire 44 don't care. Chad (2m 28s): Montell Jordan, kids. Damn. AMS and Hourly come out of the barrel hot with this hilarious video Trippin' Tyler, if you don't remember Tripping Tyler actually did the conference call video when they were actually making fun of getting on conference calls. Joel (2m 50s): That's where I know those guys from. Chad (2m 52s): Where you come into that conference room and they're like, no, no, you're on mute. You're on mute. And there's actually somebody there that's like mouthing work and the guys are fucking hilarious and they bolt. They pull Montell Jordan in. And this, this is, this is awesome. I've been singing this stupid thing for weeks now. Joel (3m 9s): Good stuff. Good stuff. Hat tip to Hourly. Well done. Well played friends. Now, if we can just get Montel on the show, we'll be complete. Chad (3m 18s): Dude, dude, it has this kind of like lonely Island vibe. You know the Michael Bolton? Joel (3m 24s): Yeah, Chad (3m 25s): Where the Michael it's my Dick in a box. God, Joel (3m 33s): I like that too. Chad (3m 34s): That was good. That was good. Very nice. Very nice. We got a lot of show, dude. Let's let's do some quick shout outs and get to the news man who you got? Joel (3m 42s): I got something in the mail the other day. Chad (3m 44s): You did? Was it more bourbon? You son of a bitch. You get more bourbon than I did. Joel (3m 50s): Yeah, but this is different. Chad (3m 51s): So Indeed sent me something. Joel (3m 53s): Was it a pile dog shit sent you something, Chad (3m 58s): Dude. So I got this flyer and it's three simple ways to hire using Indeed. And I'm going to go through the three steps with you really quick. Joel (4m 7s): Three steps. Wow. Chad (4m 8s): Yeah. It's just that easy. Joel (4m 9s): You've been doing it wrong everybody. It's only three steps. Chad (4m 12s): If you're using Indeed. So here it is. Step one, post a job with clear requirements. Step two candidates delivered to you immediately. So what they're doing is they're dipping into their database and all they're doing is matching against your jobs. Joel (4m 29s): Yeah. Chad (4m 29s): And this in itself is a step where ZipRecruiter kicks their ass because what happens is they're dipping into a bunch of candidates who haven't shown interest. They're just in their database and the candidates haven't applied, right? So ZipRecruiter a little bit different, you put your job in, then it's blasted off to these individuals. Now only when they say yes, I'm interested in, they apply, will the employer see it? So the employer gets interested candidates quickly. And these guys now Indeed wants you to now go through and ask them all to apply for the job. Chad (5m 13s): So it seems fast. And step three is interview and hire right from your dashboard here on Indeed. It makes it sound so simple, but ZipRecruiter and ZipRecruiter, just so everybody knows they are not a sponsor, but their process methodology and technology blows this Indeed shit away. Joel (5m 37s): Speaking of blowing away, I got to mention, not necessarily shout out, but are you watching this whole Game Stop pumping down short, sell David versus Goliath. I mean it's any thoughts. It's crazy. Chad (5m 51s): It is crazy. I think it's interesting because you get all of these hedge fund fuckers who start short selling things. And then they start leaking things to press and investors and those types of things to be able to drive down the stock, which is what they want. They're selling short. And these guys from Reddit, they see it happening and they start buying up all this stock. They start making money and they start killing these hedge funds. So hedge funds lost, I don't know how much money they lost. It might've been in the billions why these motherfuckers are making millions. Yeah, Joel (6m 25s): Yeah, yeah. Literally one had to borrow 2 billion plus I think and lost it like within hours because of what was going on. Yeah. Hedge funds get screwed, but you know, getting old, like we, we are Chad, we get to have the benefit of hindsight and you know, you, and I remember the, the nineties and the.com bubble and how crazy shit was when Ameritrade and E-Trade and everything else. And it's this isn't gonna end well, I mean, it's already down 50 some % today. I'm sure. It's like, it's going back to 10, $5. So people are going to get hurt. It's going to get, it's just fucked up. Joel (7m 5s): It's going to be it's kinda funny. And people got rich, but there's going to be some people holding the bag that aren't real happy about it. Chad (7m 12s): We're talking about hedge fund people who are already millionaires as it is. And for me to feel sorry for them. Joel (7m 19s): They're talking about Robin Hooders that are retailers that are people at home and see this shit going on. Chad (7m 26s): Robinhood's a scam by the way. Well, we can talk about that later, but that's, I mean, that's where I think we really need to take a look at how, you know, we obviously do business in the market. We can't allow the Robinhoods of the world to do that. Selling short is just to me, fucked up. Anyway. Joel (7m 42s): And you and I clearly aren't competent enough in this area to do a show on it. But yes, we wanted to mention it because it's really fucked up. I'm going to mention something. We do know a little bit about hats off to our buddies at Jobvite who, who introduced a free job description helper tool called the job description grader. If you need some help with your job descriptions, particularly when it comes to bias, go check out Jobvite's new tool, the job description grader. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is great for talent acquisition, to be able to put it into a third party because we've been telling hiring managers for years, their shit sucks, their requirements, all that stuff. Joel (8m 23s): So it's a couple of different things. First and foremost, you already know that your shit, your job descriptions suck. Now you can show the hiring manager. You can hopefully work through something, but what I want to see Jobvite, do Aman Brar. I know you're listening. I want you to acquire somebody or at least partner with somebody to fix this problem, showing us that the shit sucks and the UI is really cool on this grader, by the way, showing us at sucks is step one. Let's get to that next step, because this is the basic foundation of where everything in hiring starts. And with there's extra money left over, he should buy a podcast. I'm just saying, you know, I, I know, I know a guy, I know a guy. Joel (9m 5s): That's a good idea. Another quick shout out for me. And that's it for the intro here. I wanted to just point out, you know, LinkedIn and we got to talk about LinkedIn in every show and we've already got Indeed checked off. So let's get LinkedIn checked off. I noticed on LinkedIn today that their analytics or their views of your posts on LinkedIn are much more robust than they used to be. And I've always thought that it was good that LinkedIn showed you how many views your post has gotten, your video or your share, something that sets them apart from other social media networks. So now if you click on that, it shows you what company, what title, where and where in the world they came from. So it's just a nice little shout out to LinkedIn for giving us a little bit more data. Joel (9m 49s): I think it's, I think it's nice. Chad (9m 51s): Transparency is a good thing, Joel. Joel (9m 53s): It is. And not enough people practice it. Chad (9m 55s): That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm mean. Joel (9m 57s): Okay. Chad (9m 58s): Topics! Bayard gets bought! Joel (10m 4s): Bayard Recruitment Marketing Company, that by the way is like a hundred years fricking old family business, Shamrock Capital, which I guess is a bunch of leprechauns came in LA based investment firm acquired Bayard again. I said, family run since the 1920s Bayard who both of us have friends and people we know really well there and have been working for a long time. They have companies like LL Bean, Walmart, Pfizer, as clients. They told customers that it would be business as usual, which is what they always say, but that customers will benefit from Shamrock's support and expertise. Joel (10m 45s): Shamrock has quite a portfolio of media companies. They do have some core competency here. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, shocker Bayard employees, about 200 folks according to LinkedIn. My source says that this was mainly a timing issue. Apparently the founder's son had recently passed away and the time just sort of seemed right to do a deal and Shamrock seemed like the right company. So from my, from my sources, this wasn't a fire sale. This wasn't a shit's shit's going down. It was sorta like timing, right partner seemed like the right time. Chad (11m 25s): Yeah. So yeah, I do. I'm not exactly sure who passed away, but I know that they, the families had a hard, you know, 2020 and that, and that is unfortunate. Our condolences go out. No question. Yes. This is awesome. I think from Bayard standpoint, because you have this capital investment, that's actually there. It's interesting, I did hear that it D it definitely was not a clearance rack deal, which is so that, you know, from my understanding, they got some good multiple on it, but, but overall, I mean, buying an agency is buying people and buying those people is really related to buying the portfolio. Chad (12m 8s): So yeah, they do have great logos. They really don't have any tech. Right. And if you're a tech company, then your multiples go up dramatically. So they're not really a tech company. The hard part here is if people walk out the door, especially the ones that are not in leadership, but ones that are very integral to the portfolio that could go away quickly. So hopefully that doesn't happen. But that's the volatility of buying an agency is right in your face. Joel (12m 39s): Yeah. Yeah. I love the, the wording on the press release. It was a partnership on all the literature and then he got into it and was like, Oh, we've been acquired. So they're definitely pimping this as it's a partnership, and we're going to go into this together and we're going to benefit from all the things that Shamrock brings to the table. So I was trying to keep score in the past couple of years, we've had Arland off the board. We had NAS get acquired as well. And I know I'm missing one or two, but do you think that the trend of acquisitions in the agency space are any telltale signs for what's going on? Chad (13m 17s): Obviously hiring's down, recruiting's down, Covid et cetera, et cetera. Right. So we're seeing a lot of infusion of cash in this area because everybody anticipates it's going to come back because it is. Joel (13m 30s): Yeah. Chad (13m 31s): So this makes sense again, I think that having more capital in Bayard's corner doesn't hurt. It's just, again, it's one of those things you're, you're balancing against volatility and when you have technology, it's not as volatile, right? Joel (13m 47s): Yep. Chad (13m 48s): It is an asset that you will keep it as yours versus talent, which again, it's not always there. Joel (13m 56s): Yeah. We've always talked about sort of the, you know, the timeline of agencies and from the days where they could just answer the phone and get, you know, 20 grand for a display ad in the New York times are gone. And the type of person that sold that is gone and the person that is selling, you know, high-tech solutions like the are now are really skilled salespeople. And you could argue for sure that that agencies are more important now than they ever have been because of the complexity of buying now. And what tools should you be using. So, yeah, the people are super valuable. So in terms of acquisitions of these companies, it's not just the portfolio, but also the salespeople and the people, they are really, really smart and really, really, really bring value, I think, to the acquiring company. Joel (14m 46s): So hats off to this, to them and congrats Bayard, I'm a little disappointed their CEO said he would not come on the show because he wants to keep a low profile, which, you know, agencies love low-profile. So why, why come on and do some media, hopefully he'll change his mind about that. Chad (15m 4s): On a beach with a little umbrella drink right now. He doesn't want, he wants nothing to do with you, Cheeseman. Joel (15m 10s): I'm going to be in the Bora Bora bunker with us next week on the show. Chad (15m 14s): I appreciate that. Joel (15m 18s): All right. We go from an acquisition that we like to maybe a brand change that we're not too excited about. What the hell did TMP do last week? Chad (15m 27s): First off, I think it's very, very important that we talk about history here. So in 1967, Andy McCalvi founded the Telephone Marketing Programs, which is TMP, right Telephone Marketing Programs, a directional marketing company, focused on yellow page advertising for large multi-site clients. So in '93, McCalvi then partnered with Don Tendler to launch the recruitment division of TMP that happened in '93. In '95, they bought both the Monster Board and Online Career Center, smashed them together in '99. Chad (16m 10s): But before that, they went public in '96. In 2003, they were rebranded to Monster Worldwide. So there's been, there's a lot of history that's here. We say that Bayard has been around almost a hundred years, right? What we've seen with TMP is this a huge evolution name, changes people. I mean, it's just, again, it it's a big industry leader that has turned into a more of a tech company, or they've tried to become more of a tech company. Joel (16m 40s): Yup. Chad (16m 41s): On Facebook and this, I thought this was interesting, in a private group, about 150 people voted on a Facebook poll and 90 of them voted "I don't care." You voted that you hated it. So why did you hate, why do you hate it? Joel (16m 60s): Okay. Well, first of all, kids, this is why you listen to the show because the historical breakdown that Chad just laid on you is priceless. Like you're not going to get that on any other podcasts. So I just want to first off say, that's why you listen to the show. Why do I hate it? First of all, I don't know how to pronounce it. I don't really know how to spell it. And the CEO, Michelle Abbey's posts on LinkedIn, she had to like show you after the name, how you pronounce it, which is never a great sign. When you have a new brand and you have to like show people how to say it. So from that viewpoint, I think it's, it's challenging. Joel (17m 39s): Again, your history lesson you gave, I'm going to give a little history lesson on my own and you and I went down the same path as contrast to the TMP thing. I don't know as well as you, you and I both remember New Coke. Chad (17m 54s): Yeah. Joel (17m 54s): Horrible idea. One of the best known brands in the world changed the recipe, changed the branding, what happened? Right? It, it was fucked up and they even used Coke and the brand, they went back to Coke Classic. And now it's back to Coke. I'll go a little bit closer to present day. You may or may not remember that Netflix launched Quickster about 10 years ago. Quickster was going to be their streaming service. While everybody hated it and the backlash was really serious and the stock went to shit. So they said, no, we're just joking. We're not Quickster, we're still Netflix. Right? They kept the brand. Brands usually change when there's something really bad that happens. Joel (18m 37s): You might remember the WorldCom fiasco Anderson consulting that did the books on that deal was kind of a brand in the shitter. So they are now Accenture, right? So brands usually change when they're just bored and have nothing to do. And marketing says, we need to do it. And then they either regret it. Or it's, it works out pretty poorly in most cases or they're in the shitter TMP, I don't think is either one of those. So I'm generally against brand changes. I don't think anyone knows what TMP stands for, except you. And maybe a few other people. I get the idea behind it. The CEO said, quote, "you know, why did we decide to change our name? Joel (19m 17s): It's simple, really. Over the past several years, our business has seen tremendous growth." Growth is not a reason to change a brand. But anyway, "both through organic means like our unified platform and through strategic acquisitions around the world rate and see", I am saying that right, right. And see "represents the full integration of TMP worldwide, AIA worldwide. Pringo, CKR carve and maximum combining the best technology solutions and talent under one global roof. This allows us to simplify our story, eliminate brand confusion."You didn't eliminate brand confusion lady "and take ownership of all that we do." That's why I hate it. Chad (19m 53s): Wow. I say haters gonna hate and creating, creating a word for global brand instead of finding a word that's already in use. Cause I know we talk about that. Why don't we just find something that's already in use? Well, it might be smarter than you think to make up your own damn word. There are 200,000 English words in the dictionary about 2 million registered companies. Not to mention, you have to be very careful about how, how these words translate into different languages. So overall, I think coming to a new name. Joel (20m 27s): I'm sorry, is TMP offensive in Asia? Chad (20m 30s): No, let me finish, that's why AIA is in the UK, right? They can't use TMP because there's already another TMP. So legally what they have to do with CARVE, what they have to do with Maximum, what they have to do with all these, these logos. This was an issue that I had earlier on when I thought they were having a civil moment because they could not really consolidate a message into one brand. Now they can. And from my standpoint, the only con I see here is that Radancy sounds like agency. Joel (21m 7s): Yeah. Chad (21m 8s): And Michelle and team want to move away from being seen as an agency. They want to be seen as a tech organization. Why? Because when they sell this and they're going to sell it. When they sell it, the multiple is going to be so much higher as a tech company. So why pick a name that rhymes with agency? That was really my only con I think them bringing everything under one brand like Symphony is doing, is incredibly smart and necessary if you want to grow globally. Joel (21m 43s): My con, is that the M and T and P doesn't sound Stand for Montell all right. Damn. This one came up, came over the wire today, before we did the show. So we don't have a ton to say on it, but Workday acquired People, Analytics and engagement tool pecan, not like pecan pie, but like Peakon U, I guess. I don't know. I don't, I'm sure I'm saying that. Right, but it's look of using a, so Peakon was founded in Copenhagen in 2014, they've raised a shit ton of money, 68 million. So this is kind of a COVID work from home play without the ability to have face-to-face meetings with employees, managers have struggled throughout the year, work from home and the trials and tribulations of the last year have affected the workforce. Joel (22m 33s): So Peakon elevates, employee engagement, inclusion, and growth with an all-in-one employee success platform, $700 million. That's a lot of money. Chad, A lot of money. The only thing I think is the biggest con about this is it's with Workday and Workday doesn't integrate anything. Well, I mean, that's, the problem is, you know, Workday has this, this arrogance that, you know, we are all things to everyone. Have you ever tried talking to one of their fucking reps? I mean, they're the most ignorant about our industry, but yet the most arrogant, it just drives me fucking crazy. When you start to talk to them about, okay, usage for multiple platforms, even with point solutions, you guys have to do better with regard to integration and they just don't, they don't fucking get it. Joel (23m 23s): So I think that if Peakon was actually bought by somebody else who gave a shit about experience and integrations, it'd be great, but I think Workday has money to throw around. Yeah. Chad (23m 36s): And that's what they're doing. They're looking to try to increase wallet, share in a shitty system. Joel (23m 42s): Well you know who doesn't give a shit about that. The investors in Peakon got 10X their money, which is great. Chad (23m 48s): Good for them. Joel (23m 49s): Yeah. Workday is not really the poster child for solid acquisitions and integrations. My viewpoint of this is like, here comes the snowball because we've been talking about work from home companies all year, getting a ton of money. Like this is the trend and Workday basically just set the price for these companies. And so I wouldn't be shocked if you start seeing the dominoes, companies like Remote and other companies that we've talked about, they've gotten money this year, getting gobbled up and flipped. So that was, that was my take from this is that Workday broke the seal for acquiring work from home companies. Joel (24m 32s): I guess. Chad (24m 34s): There we go. Sovren (24m 35s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (25m 34s): How much do we love Sovren dude? Chad (25m 36s): How can you not love Sovren? Joel (25m 37s): Everyone knows that's listening and listens to us, knows about the Pappy's giveaway. We've talked about it. And we went to Robert CEO of Sovren and we said, dude, we want to keep the party going. And we want to do more bourbon. We know we can't do Pappy's one because we can't find it. Chad (25m 55s): It's fuckin' expensive! Joel (25m 56s): It's not exactly like you go to your local liquor store and it's expensive. So, so Chad and I hadn't had an idea of saying why don't we do like a Blockbuster thing. Blockbuster they used to have people's names and they would choose movies, someone to be into like romcom, someone to be into horror movies, et cetera. So why don't we say, why don't we do like a Chad, Chad's choice and a Cheese choice. And so every month we're going to pick a lucky winner. You can register if you haven't already at Chadcheese.com/free put in your information. And Chad and I are going to pick a bourbon of our choice or whiskey of our choice, send it to a lucky winner and then we're going to do a zoom tasting with the bourbon and have a good time. Joel (26m 36s): So Sovren hats off to you, baby, keeping the party going in 2021. Chad (26m 42s): And they get two bottles of bourbon is what I'm hearing. Joel (26m 47s): Deuce. Chad (26m 47s): Holy shit. That's awesome. So, so awesome. I want to do some buy or sell! Joel (26m 52s): Oh, buy or sell. We love us some buy or sell. All right. First up in, buy or sell, we have Team Flow, a name that's easy to pronounce and spell! They've raised 3.9 million for what it bills as a quote virtual headquarters to engage distributed teams and work based on the screenshots provided to tech crunch in an article, it presents as a sort of visual intranet, like a floor plan that would lead a user to rooms, to collaborate chairs, to have a chat, an area, to collaborate on different apps and so on. It feels so if you've, if you go to the site, like you have a picture profile picture, you have a little halo that shows where you're going. Joel (27m 38s): They sort of replicate your office and people that are in it, you can walk around. And if you're in the bubble or the halo of someone, you connect with them on video, I think so it's sort of like Second Life meets Slack or something? Like buy or sell? Chad (27m 54s): Yeah, fuck. This one is hard, dude, because I believe companies will like it more than employees, but companies are the ones who are buying, setting protocols, that kind of shit. I don't like it because working in a distributed workforce means I'm knocking out work at eight o'clock at night. And this type of platform makes me feel like I need to be back to my nine to five clock. Right. So I think it's trying to bring the 1950 style of punching a clock into a virtual environment. To me, this is a big sell. Joel (28m 27s): Yeah, to me, this feels like the new ping pong table. Like, it sounds really good in theory, but no one plays it because if you play it, you look like a slacker and that you're not working. So to me, if you're dislike, bobbing around on Team Flow, bugging people and talking to people like someone's going to ask, why is, why is Jimmy always, always just pimping around the office, talking to people on Team Flows. So to me? Sell. All right, next up we have, we have Clubhouse. So not specifically a recruitment tool, but this thing is all the rage on the internet. So this is a San Francisco based audio, social network. Joel (29m 7s): They just raised a hundred million dollars by a Andreessen Horowitz. They have a billion dollar post money valuation. So I have downloaded this. Hats off to them Aman Brar, who we've talked about. He actually sent me an invite after I joined. Nice. This is a little bit like if you envision a conference and you have people talking about whatever, and then people can join and listen in, they can ask questions. They can follow or connect with other people that are in the room, as well as other people that they know. Topics range from, you know, marketing to Bitcoin, to whatever. You set your interests, so they send you a little alerts about topics that you might be interested in. Joel (29m 50s): I just, I'm going to, I'm leaning, sell, but it's really early to tell because I've only dug into it twice. Chad (29m 59s): Make a decision. Joel (29m 59s): My problem, all right, I'll sell. So my problem is, and I'll regret that for the next year, but I think five years from now I'll be proven, correct. So one problem is scheduling on this is really hard. So it's not an on-demand thing. It's not like a podcast or even a video on Netflix. Like you just sort of have to go in and be part of it. If you get in the middle, you're kind of screwed. Like I missed, I missed it and I don't know what's going on. Connecting. I don't know how that's going to work. Like just cause I follow someone. I don't know if eventually I'll be able to talk to them or we'll have a group that we can all talk together. Come, I've seen a Personia who we talked about. I think last week they actually had a little thing about recruiting and tips and whatever. Joel (30m 42s): So brands are going to be all over this I'm sure. But for me, it's like just, just do a podcast and talk on that and have it on demand. Have people subscribe if they want to hear your shit, it is kind of good for just, I just, you know, I want to see what's going on in Hollywood and you know, Jay Lenos on it and Oprah's on it. So I guess there's some, some popular pop culture thing going on, but I don't know. I don't think it's, it reminds me of, if you remember, about 10 years ago, there was a site where you could DJ, do you remember this site? So, so there were like five DJ tables. There were different rooms with different kinds of music. And if a DJ spot opened up, you could take it and play songs. And each DJ would play different song and you'd have little icons in the crowd bobbing up and down and those were real people and they would listen to songs and it was really cool at first. Joel (31m 30s): And then after a while, it's like, well, I can't decide what song comes on. And I don't know what, like, so it was a cool discovery techie thing. And it's gone now. I think, I think Clubhouse is similar. Chad (31m 40s): This is a sell. I think it's overinflated already. I'm a big fan of audio because it's portable. And it seems like, you know, this is a situation where you don't, you don't want to be portable and distracted. I mean, listening to a podcast, mowing the lawn in the grocery store, on the treadmill. That's typical. Shit I do all the time, but trying to engage in a conversation by being portable, it sounds good. But overall in practical experience, it's just not going to make sense. Joel (32m 9s): Yeah. And there's also issues with a you and I understand this doing a podcast is that the quality of the sound is really, really important. And trust me, Clubhouse is a variety of quality of sounds, right? People who are on good stuff and people who just are like, who knows what the fuck they're on. They're in some bunker somewhere. So anyway, all right, two sells on that. Let's get to the last company we got Multi-Verse yes. They just raise 44 million in a series B, they've rated it raised a total of 64 million. Their goal is to match young and diverse talent with apprenticeships. Multi-verse positions, apprenticeships as an alternative to the traditional graduate path. Buy or sell? Chad (32m 48s): Buy, buy, buy. Companies should be manufacturing talent themselves in this manner, but they aren't. And this is a much easier way for them to execute. So big names already backing the initiatives in big names are already using multi-verse. We should be doing this already. We're not, this is a plug and play environment. Go fucking do this. Joel (33m 11s): Yeah. Big, big buy for me as well. Like, you know, we're going to talk about with the democratic led government about raising the minimum wage and you know, the path to getting a job. And you know, when you and I were getting our first job like entry-level and minimum wage was, it was a stepping stone, right? And you went on to the things. Well, the world is different. Now you have gig economy dynamics that come into play, like the career path for people is much different. Now not everyone wants to go to college, obviously. And to have a platform where you can have an like just an old school apprenticeship to learn welding or whatever the hell you want to do, I think is incredibly powerful and will be a fantastic funnel into the real world and getting real jobs for people that want a second, a second option in terms of their career path that doesn't include, you know, college or the traditional traditional routes. Joel (34m 6s): So two is that two sells and a buy? Chad (34m 10s): Yup. Yup, yup. Yup. Sell, sell, buy, baby. That's a good, that's a good way to, to get into our next segment. Are you going to buy or sell Google thinking that they can just go ahead and quit Australia. Let's get it on you can't you can't quit me. Google. You can't quit me. Joel (34m 29s): Yeah. This is some saber rattling shit. Now keep in mind. Australia is the size of Canada, which is the size of California. So I, you know, it's not a huge, huge battle, right? This isn't the US banning Google. Our chair. It's not about Australia though. Chad (34m 49s): None of this is about Australia. Joel (34m 50s): This is this. This is the first line of defense that Google has to make to basically fend off every European country, probably a lot of other countries that say you need to pay to play. And if they don't take a stand in the first battle countries, are just going to roll over and get in line to get a check from Google. So they, they have to rattle the saber. And I, I tend to think that they're willing to fuck over Australia if it means they don't have to take on Germany and France and all the, all the other countries. Chad (35m 25s): Oh. But they will, but they will. And that's the thing is as soon as they pull out of Australia, there's a vacuum. What's next. They pull out of the UK? There's a vacuum there, which means Google is not going to be the prominent player. They already own 90% of the traffic in Australia. They pull out and they try to go back later. Will they get that back? Not to mention you are allowing competition to come in and perspectively, just start to own what you've owned before. This to me again is saber rattling. But it is. I mean, it's not going to work. Joel (36m 1s): Yeah. There's a good chance that the blueprint for this was the whole Uber employee, categorization of workers and all that. Yeah. So Uber threatens to leave or close shop in California. They pay them a bunch of money to lobby and market as to why, you know, a law should be passed. There'll be certain, certain politicians that come to Google's defense and say, Hey, there should be, they should be able to operate. But like let's compromise. And there'll be sort of a surface level compromise of what Google has to do. Australia get paid a little money, people will wet their beaks a little bit. Chad (36m 40s): Yeah. But here's the thing, dude. Facebook is already showing that they're going to outflank them in Europe, in the UK. So the thing is, Google is trying to do this bullshit, saber rattling while Facebook is showing, okay, you can go ahead and do that asshole, but guess what? We're going to come in and take your place. Now they're not a search company, but it doesn't mean that a search company can't fill that void as well. Facebook with the news and then a search company comes in or maybe who knows maybe Facebook starts to do search well, cause they currently suck at it. Yeah. Joel (37m 16s): And frankly, Facebook needs to do news well, and they need to make nice with like legitimate news sources and content. So, you know, they don't want to relive the Russian Trump fiasco that they've been through the last couple of years. And, and repeat that. So yeah, this is super interesting. And this is going to lay out sort of the future of, of both these companies and the internet and how they engage with the society as a norm, I'm really interested to see what happens with, with section 230. And whether that gets revoked here in the States, and these companies are treated more like media companies, as opposed to just, you know, dumb pipes that, that flow through content. Joel (37m 58s): And I got to think they're gonna be, they're gonna be on the side of media and that's going to bleed into, into everywhere in the world. And they are prepared for it. Chad (38m 6s): I think I stand behind Australia. Joel (38m 8s): Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, 90% of the world's venomous animals, by the way, everybody that's, that's what you get here: facts on Chad and Cheese. JobAdX (38m 17s): Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for long-term full time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. JobAdX (38m 58s): We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Joel (39m 17s): Hold on. I want to close the show feeling good. Can we do that? Can we do some feel good? Feel good? You know? Chad (39m 22s): Good feeling time. Joel (39m 23s): So Adam Gordon, massive fan of the show, arguably our, our, our, our best fan in Scotland. I think our biggest fan! It's his birthday this week, 44, 46? Chad (39m 38s): I thought he was 74? Joel (39m 40s): He's not, but anyway, I was going to make a kilt joke, but it was inappropriate because we're feeling good. We're gonna do a feel good show. All right. So happy birthday, Adam. Also Alison Holbrooke. One of my buddies from Boston. She is now the head of marketing at Beamery, who we love, and hopefully we'll be great at, and lastly, this story was on as I was eating lunch today. So in Oregon, there was a huge snow storm and a major traffic jam, like stop traffic. And there were, there was a healthcare truck that was delivering vaccines and the vaccine was going to go bad because of the traffic jam and the stall that they were on. Joel (40m 20s): So they literally got out of their health, whatever healthcare vehicle and started vaccinating people that were in the same traffic jam instead of having the vaccine go to waste. So I thought that was a real feel-good story. Way to go Oregon! Way to go humans! Way to go. Chad (40m 39s): That's good stuff. Joel (40m 41s): And that leads us to some good stuff recruiting on one of our favorite apps TikTok. Chad (40m 47s): Everyone's been asking, how can I use Tik TOK for recruiting? Not really everybody, but anyway, we've found a winner. Rather, Rick Carsley found a winner and then he shared it on LinkedIn. A Costco worker explains on a Tik TOK video, how you can work at Costco and make really good money in detail. He's real, he's authentic. And he answers a question. Everyone who's interested in perspectively working at Costco wants to hear, as we ask ourselves, how do we use social media to be able to connect with people? This is it. People be real. Give them, give them the, the real information, be authentic about it. Chad (41m 29s): Don't bullshit them. Joel (41m 30s): Yeah. Chad (41m 30s): I'm thinking of Tony as he's mixing paint. I mean, that's what he loves to do. And it comes through in, in paint mixing, which just blows my mind. Just do what you love and get it out there in an authentic way. Joel (41m 44s): Yeah. That's, Tony's exactly what I thought about. And if you haven't heard that episode go the archives. Great story. So this is, this is not a Costco account. This is not any sort of official Costco approved account. This guy works at Costco. Apparently he took talks about working there and his day, his days at Costco, he took Q and A from folks, someone asked what it's like to work there. He talks about compensation, benefits, career path. Again, this is not a Costco account, but Costco apparently has at least at the, in this instance, empowered employees to talk about the job. This guy is doing this for free. Joel (42m 25s): The companies need to really rethink about social media and what they empower their employees to do, because it's a tale of two stories. The Sherwin-Williams where they fire the kid who has a million plus followers and viewers on posts and Costco, who apparently is empowering this user to talk about the company show what he's doing throughout the day. And obviously a great recruiting and branding employer branding tool. So feel good at Costco. Paint and trim, try the salsa, If you ever go to Costco, it's solid. Trust me. Chad (43m 1s): Try the salsa tub. Joel (43m 3s): And try the Montel. So while you're at it, let's have this take us out Chad. Chad (43m 8s): All day long. OUTRO (44m 34s): I'm Rory from Scotland, the country, which brought you electricity! Thank you for listening to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Nada Niente. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are on the lips of Talent Acquisition professionals all over the world. Many of those companies talk-the-talk when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but most do not walk-the-walk. Of course, vendors who service the recruiting industry have a heightened level of responsibility to be good corporate citizens. That's where popular ATS solution SmartRecruiters comes in. The company has committed to going above and beyond talking about diversity by actually becoming a force, beyond press releases and empty rhetoric and it all starts with an anti-racism stance to doing the work. Enter founder and CEO Jerome Ternynck on the podcast to dig into what's going on at the company, and learn what others in the space can do to model themselves after SmartRecruiters. Another The Chad & Cheese podcast challenging the status quo, powered by Nexxt. How are you going to target more diverse candidates for that requisition you just opened? That's a good question to ask Nexxt. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Jerome (0s): Well, you either enjoy the system which makes you a racist or you fight the system, which makes you anti-racist INTRO (9s): 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 (30s): Oh yeah. 2020 is not so bad we've got one of our favorite guests coming back to chat with us. What's up everybody? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman joined as always by Chad Sowash. Chad, how are you? Chad (46s): Good man. Joel (47s): Welcome to the show. A past guest Jerome Ternynck founder, CEO board member, geez. How many more titles can you get? Chad (59s): Stud. Joel (59s): From Smart Recruiters, Jerome, welcome to the show. Let's go. We're talking about diversity. Chad (1m 4s): Ah, we're talking about anti-racism today. We're going beyond diversity. My friend, we're going into the anti racism waters and I don't, I don't think anybody else in our industry has actually used that terminology in a manifesto like Smart Recruiters has? Have you seen that? Joel? Joel (1m 25s): Nothing. Nobody touting it as much as these guys for sure. And no, one's sort of putting their balls out there for, for guys like us to put into the test. So big applause, big applause for that just by putting yourself out there. Chad (1m 40s): Yeah. Joel (1m 40s): So, Jerome, the last time, last time we chatted you were pimping a book. Just really curious how how's the book going and how was it received since we last spoke? Jerome (1m 48s): It's actually been received really well. And if I judge by the fact that I recently got a note from someone saying, Hey, Jerome, your book is in back order. I can't seem to get it on Amazon. And yeah, we've actually been selling everything that we created initiative, which is a few thousand copies and it's generally being well-received. So I'm happy about that and know that people have something else to do these days, then be at home and read a book. Joel (2m 16s): Yeah. Are you going to add a chapter on the Covid phenomenon and how things might have changed might change from that? Jerome (2m 22s): That might be a book in itself, right? Joel (2m 24s): Yeah. Good point. Chad (2m 25s): Yeah. I want to know if Jerome actually voiced the audible version because I think that would be a very tranquil. Joel (2m 33s): It sounded like a Jacques Cousteau, deep sea mission. Chad (2m 36s): Deep sea hiring. Joel (2m 37s): Hello everybody. We are talking about hiring success tests, how visionary CEO is compete for the best talent. Jerome (2m 44s): Here's an anecdote for you. I actually go down to a, a TV, a live show like this probably four or five years ago. My PR team was all excited! "Hey Jerome, on this, there's a segment. They're going to talk about unemployment. And they won't to talk to the news anchor, like to prep the show. And I get on the phone with this reporter and like literally four sentences in she says, I'm sorry, do you, do you have any one American in your team? I don't think your accent is going to make it. And she totally kicked me out of the show. Oh, anyway. Chad (3m 21s): Oh, that's awesome. Oh, well guess what, Jerome, this is your second time on. So we're not kicking your ass off, but that being said, we talked before about your plan to become an anti-racist force in the recruitment market. And again, that's going beyond pretty much what everybody else is saying. Everybody's talking about unbiased tech, but they're not talking really anti racism. So what's the difference between not being a racist and being anti-racist. Jerome (3m 51s): Like, there's no option to be like, non-discriminatory I think you either enjoy the system and which makes you a racist or you fight the system, which makes you anti-racist. And I think that applies with that applies for everything. You know, the conversation has been a lot about race and forever, but it's valid for forms of discrimination. And so we're really here. What we're saying is we're going to actually take a stand and actively fight all forms of discrimination. Obviously starting with racism in recruiting. Chad (4m 31s): If you're just sitting around and you're a white guy, like Joel and I are not doing anything, you're not voicing anything and you're not actively combating racism then. I mean, really you're just enjoying the racism that's happening around you. You might feel like it's wrong, but that doesn't mean that you're anti-racist? Anti-racist means you're actually standing up, you're saying something and you're doing something about it, right? Joel (4m 55s): Speaking up. Jerome (4m 56s): Yeah. You're you're speaking up and well, first I think it means you understand your privilege and it, again, it can be your privilege about being white and racism. It can also be your privilege without not being disabled. And you know what, maybe you don't even think about it that you're like, you're not disabled. Oh, that's great. Well, who cares? Right? What are you actually doing for people who are disabled? So you can extend this to any form of minorities or underprivileged, underrepresented groups. Obviously the ethnic diversity here as it is at the heart of the conversation. And as a white man, you have a lot of privilege. Jerome (5m 38s): I happen to have most of them, both being a man, being white, being privileged having a good job. And I personally like this is a pretty compelling reason was like, Oh, I might just going to continue to enjoy my good life or I'm going to put my privilege to work, to change life for others. Chad (5m 56s): So the big question is, you know, 3 (5m 59s): When you hear cause racist is, is a very, very tough, hard smack you in the face word, right? It's uncomfortable, which is exactly what white, white dudes need right now. When it comes, when it comes down to using that kind of verbiage, do you find that it could perspective repel some people and push them away from what the good that you guys are trying to do versus bring them in? Jerome (6m 26s): You know, I think that goes to white silencing, right? And to the whole tone policing that goes around, this is like, Oh, let's not be too hard. These poor white people, they actually, you know, I disagree like, no, let's not turn police. And yes, as a black person or a person of color, you have the right to be angry. And as a white person, I have to listen to your anger and not ask you to tone police yourself cause it makes me uncomfortable. Yeah. Chad (6m 59s): Hundreds of years of people, of color being uncomfortable and that's putting it nicely to get into an uncomfortable conversation, being a white man. I think you can handle it Joel (7m 10s): No one's rying for us. No, one's crying for us. Jerome. So, so I'm curious from you guys kind of made some official statements and policies in your recruiting. So for the listeners that don't know what exactly is Smart Recruiters doing now to include diversity and racism at the company. Jerome (7m 29s): We published a plan a few months ago that we said, this is what we're going to do. And the plan has four, four key action. One is awareness. So we're going to start by making sure that all Smartians is how we call ourselves. You will have a good understanding of what white privilege and over discrimination looks like. So that, that part is easy. It's probably every, every company should do it. Second. We said, we're going to be a role model than ourselves. And so that, you know, we're not out there educating the market about what they should do without doing it ourselves. And that goes into, you know, diverse leadership, diverse team, diverse hiring, obviously inclusion and development. Jerome (8m 9s): So just us, ourselves being a role model, then we three and four are kind of more interesting cause they go to, what can we do to change the market? And so we've been busy setting new standards. So we want to actually help organization understand what diversity hiring is and how to implement. We can talk more about that. Cause we're, we're building a new standards for Diversity Hiring Success, as we call it. And then the fourth point is innovation. I mean, we have 130 engineers and developers, designers, product managers, that's a pretty big innovative force. And so we said, we're gonna put engineering efforts towards diversity innovation. Jerome (8m 53s): So innovation, in D&I hiring. Joel (8m 55s): So you guys have been around for, I don't know, 15 years or so, definitely over a decade. Well, over a decade. Jerome (9m 0s): We are actually going to celebrate our 10 year anniversary in two weeks. Chad (9m 9s): There it is. Jerome (9m 10s): I'm not even a teenager. Joel (9m 12s): You're officially a decade old or so. Jerome (9m 15s): Yes. Joel (9m 16s): What was the catalyst to do this now? Was it the black lives matter movement? Was it me too? Was it just sort of the political environment? Like what took you 10 years to sort of take this initiative? Jerome (9m 27s): The realization that there is no such thing as being passive on the right side of history and clearly George Floyd was that realization for me personally, if you look at what we've done in the last decade, as much as you look at the agenda of our conferences, and we've brought a lot of diversity discussion to the table, a lot of inclusion, we created the reverse recruiting movement that helps underprivileged candidates find jobs. We had like literally half of our agenda conference would be around, around discrimination. We brought numerous under privilege candidates and thought leaders to TA leaders. Jerome (10m 10s): Like we've been sort of absolutely on the good side of history and also our, how we design our software. But we never really said, Hey, could we become a force against discrimination? And I seen, this is the realization, is that go? Actually, if you, if you really do want to change things, if you want to be a good ancestor, as they say, then, then you're going to have to fight it. And you have to be a force in the market. Chad (10m 35s): So is speaking up pretty much the extent because most vendors we're seeing today, they're talking about D&I, they're talking about D&I. They're talking about unbiased in some form or some virtual, virtue signaling that's happening in their messaging one way or the other. But in most cases we're seeing that it is attached to a product or we're seeing that it's attached to check a box, to be able to include them prospectively in their tech stack or what have you, what makes Smart Recruiters so much different than everybody else out there who's talking the unbiased game? Jerome (11m 14s): So we're not tender commercially selling something. We're actually establishing a new standard for diversity hiring. So we've spoke to probably 50 TA leaders, global TA leaders to draft the 10 Principles of Diversity Hiring, which we published as a draft on hiring success.com. We are at this moment actually going through think tanks and discussions with our wider ecosystem was anybody really who wants to participate. And by the end of the year, we will, we will actually publish those stand diversity standards for hiring. Jerome (11m 56s): And we, from there, we will actually create a diversity hiring masterclass. Part of our hiring success methodology. We're create a maturity model that allows companies to measure their diversity hiring practices. And we're actually looking at to getting companies to take a pledge, to go and achieve those diversity hiring practices and put a badge or some form of public recognition for those who do. So we're really trying to say, look, we have a thousand enterprises using SmartRecruiters some huge names like LinkedIn or Visa or Twitter, boys, like really big companies. If we can grab our customers and say alright, together define what great diversity hiring looks like and see if we could actually help other TA leaders who often really want to do the right thing, but don't know where to start. Jerome (12m 46s): If we could actually guide them and help them with content, with education, with a proper standard and rewarding those who do with public praise, then we would probably be able to move the needle. Chad (12m 59s): Okay, can you do that without workforce composition transparency? Can you do it without that? Because really there's a lot of talk. And I've seen this throughout my years, being obviously a veteran and trying to be able to build veteran hiring pipelines. And also obviously, Julie works on the side of the individuals with disabilities and diversity and so on and so forth. We hear a lot of talk from companies who say they want to do things, but overall, the outcomes just aren't there. Are you going to make it standard that your organization and all the other organizations who want to be included have to be transparent to make their information public so that we can all see that they really are driving outcomes? Jerome (13m 44s): I think that touches on a bigger topic is that before you make your numbers public, you actually have to get numbers and categorization in itself is already a problem. Like there's many countries, France being one of them where it is illegal to ask someone, are you black? Are you white? Yeah. Chad (14m 3s): Well then you don't start there. Jerome. I mean, that's the thing is like, let's say for instance, like Atlassian, right? Take a look at Atlassian and they have like 5,000 employees and they're spread all throughout the globe. You start where it's easiest to start. Right. As opposed to not doing it at all. Jerome (14m 21s): Yeah. I, I agree in one of the principles of one of the 10 principles is actually clear representation objectives. And that treats to the extent permitted by law, the company has stated representation objectives for a job category and executives are measured against those targets. Chad (14m 43s): Yeah. So, yeah. So of Yes. Jerome (14m 47s): You do need a baseline. Yes. You do need to communicate this baseline. And more importantly, you need to make your executives accountable, not the TA leader. If you're a VP sales for, for Georgia only, you know, has zero, whereas super bad representation numbers, then he should be fired. Not the TA person who didn't manage to get, you know, pipeline of black candidates like this, right. So you have to make your executive, your executive responsible for it. Nexxt (15m 16s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt Andy, if a company wants to actually come to next and utilize your database and target texting candidates, I mean, how does that actually mean? Right. So we have the software to provide it two different ways. If an employer has their own database of opted in text messages, whether it's through their ATS, we can text on their behalf or we have over eight and a half million users that have opted into our text messaging at this point. So we can use our own database. We could dissect it by obviously by geography, by function, any which way some in sometimes we'll even parse the resumes of the opted in people to target certifications. Nexxt (16m 5s): So we really can dive really deep if they want to hone in on, you know, just give me the best hundred candidates that I want to text message with and have a conversation back and forth with versus going and saying, I need 30,000 retail people across the country. And that's more of a, you know, yes, no text messaging back and apply For more information, go to hiring.next.com. Remember that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X hiring.next.com. Chad (16m 35s): One of the reasons why I ask, obviously it's incredibly important because if you put your numbers out there, you automatically become accountable for everybody because they can see it. Now we challenged Patrick Sheehan from CERCA because they are an organization who presses unbiased, hiring and diversity and so on and so forth. And, and we challenged Patrick. We said, Patrick, if you believe in it, show us. Like it at LaSeon and Apple and many of the other organizations show us and they did so to be able to start to see organizations do that, and then hopefully it becomes expected. Chad (17m 20s): And you playing the leader in this role is, is pretty profound, don't you think? Jerome (17m 27s): I think it will be. And I think this is where, what excites me in this whole thing is that where actually we can drive change. I mean, we process 4 million plus applicants a month. So that's kind of a lot of people that are actually going through SmartRecruiters software every month to find a job. And that's a lot of recruiters and hiring managers on the other side, who are reading those resumes, making those decisions, publishing those job descriptions, setting standards for hiring and actually if we could change those, that already would be a market change. So that's where becoming a force and foreign state anti-racism anti-discrimination, the word force is important here. Jerome (18m 9s): Like we really need, we really want to apply all of our force, like put all of our power into this battle. Joel (18m 15s): Real quick Jerome is pay transparency part of this initiative? And if not, will it be in the future? Chad (18m 20s): Good question. Jerome (18m 21s): Yeah, it isn't at the moment. It's one of the topics that's been most debated actually to put pay transparency in there due to the two things that are related to this in the plan today, the diversity principle are abusive, neutral job descriptions. So job descriptions are inclusive user language and they, you know, they only have minimum requirements. And so it's like hire for skills, not schools. And the other piece that I think is really important here is fair internal hiring. So all internal jobs are made available to all employees and they go through a fair and standard hiring process to design, to avoid arbitrary promotions. Jerome (19m 3s): Because right now what's happening is yeah, you could solve the initial hiring, but then most of the internal hiring goals, not really through recruiting. And I think it's really important for many reasons, but for diversity as well, that talent acquisition should own internal recruiting. They should own internal mobility. Don't leave this to HR and to managers to, so I want to promote Bob because we play golf together and it's really results are this. And if you do create an internal talent marketplace, if you make that transparent, if you let TA actually proactively market and hunt internally, you're going to have that salary balance and that salary transparency get better, right? Jerome (19m 51s): Because yes, there is an entry point, but there's also how it's being managed after that. Joel (19m 55s): So, the answer, your question is you're debating it internally on the right way to do it, but it sounds like it is something that you want to move toward. Is that correct? Jerome (20m 4s): Yeah. I think we, I think yes, pay transparency is important. It's a bit nuanced, but it is important. Joel (20m 13s): Okay. Let's talk, let's talk a little tech. You mentioned how many applicants SmartRecruiters gets, how many resumes you're you're processing? How does tech automation, whatever come into play when you guys are recruiting? So we hear a lot of technologies where, you know, they'll take out the name of the person, the school, the things that aren't necessarily important or they'll have an automated scoring system. What exactly are you guys doing from an automation standpoint or are you not doing anything in regards to making your hiring and recruiting more unbiased? Jerome (20m 47s): Specifically to the selection process? I think there are two big aspect to that. One is the resume screening. So the screening stage and how you avoid bias. So no bias screening is one of the 10 principles. And if you did need to leverage technology or fair process to ensure that applicant profiles qualifications are consistently evaluated. We use an algorithm there, which actually gives good results and removes the human bias. So people are like, Oh yeah, but it replicates all bias and say, yeah, it does replicate all bias. Jerome (21m 30s): Like you like to hire people from Stanford. I get that the machine likes that you like people from Stanford, but also the machine doesn't know that your candidate is Mohammed and not Adam. And last time I checked or actually last time, the BBC check Adam is getting four times more interviews than Mohammed for exactly the same, the same resume today, across a hundred companies in the UK, that was a recent survey. So we see that actually solves a lot of issues. I'm on the fence with resume anonymization. It's nice. But I, to me, this is a band-aid on a cancer. And if you start there, like how far do you hide it? Jerome (22m 10s): France had the big debate where they ended, ended up making an anonymous, resume a law in France, like 12 years ago or so I was at the heart of those conversations and the rule had really poor effects. So anyway, I'm on the fence about that particular feature, but using technology to remove bias at screening is important. Now what's actually really, really removes bias is if you make it transparent, the reason why recruiting is prone to discrimination is because there is no technology being used because hiring decisions are made at the water cooler by a single hiring manager who can use the full extent of his or her biases. Jerome (22m 52s): And we all have biases. I mean, this is a natural thing for human beings. It could be more pronounced. It could be, you know, good or bad, but we all have biases. And so the way to combat bias is actually to have a team and a process evaluate candidates. And so there we enforcing a collaborative hiring process, which is structured interviews and structured scorecards ensures that you have a bias reduction or actually no bias in the actual hiring decision. Chad (23m 23s): It sounds like you want to have more transparency internally, but externally, externally from a public standpoint, that's that that's in some cases, a bridge too far. Jerome (23m 33s): Nope. I wouldn't say that. I'm all for transparency. Yeah. I think transparency is the best way to fight discrimination. Chad (23m 40s): Agreed. So in what I'm hearing is that technology, not the silver bullet, if you don't have an organization who is trained to be, anti-racist the technology isn't going to fix it, is that what I'm hearing? Jerome (23m 55s): Oh, the technology will take you a long way actually it will do a lot. If you have no technology, you have no, no ability to control or to make a process structured and transparent so you have inconsistency and decisions being made behind closed doors. That's where discrimination strikes. Joel (24m 13s): We love talking about marketplaces. Whenever we talk, talk to ATSs and you guys have categories. And as of, right now, there's nothing around diversity and inclusion or unbiased recruiting. Now you certainly have apps like Zaur, chat bots that that promise to take a lot of the unbiased recruiting out of it. But I'm curious, is there any initiative to have a separate category for diversity and inclusion and highlight those companies that help employers hire with less bias is there may be a plan to take a, you know, some of the 50 million that you guys raised last year and put towards maybe helping some companies that enable unbiased recruiting. Joel (24m 55s): Any plans around the marketplace and helping this initiative? Jerome (24m 58s): Yeah, absolutely. So we have, we hired a chief diversity officer actually that started a month ago. Rocky Howard. One of our assignments is to actually look at the diversity ecosystem and all the vendors we have, we have over 300 vendors pre-integrated to SmartRecruiters, there's a lot of them and we've actually been reviewing them. And definitely we'll be pushing and putting some vendors on the spotlight. We're building now like a community of the chief diversity officers or diversity officers of all of our customers. And as we discuss those standards, which technology would help us for it. So yes, a big plan to highlight and extend the market based on that. Jerome (25m 40s): Awesome. Joel (25m 40s): Awesome. Okay. Thanks. Jerome. Chad (25m 42s): Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Jerome, I got, I got to say, I got to say, man, I love seeing that you guys are actually pushing the discussion even further, not just talking about, you know, bias, you're talking about being anti-racist, you're talking about forcing the discussion about forcing decisions and doing things that we have to do overall. Joel (26m 8s): Walk the walk. Chad (26m 9s): And we're going to continue to challenge you on this as you challenge everybody else. And we appreciate you coming on every single time. Again, everyone, Jerome Ternynck CEO from SmartRecruiters, Jerome, if they wanted to find out more about this initiative, where should they go? Jerome (26m 27s): On smartrecruiters.com? We have a diversity section there. And then on hiringsuccess.com where the standards are probably right. So hiringsuccess.com is really the industry standards for hiring success. We're not meaning to make this as much SmartRecruiters initiatives. So go there and be part of it. Grab the standards, make them yours, make them better, give us feedback and let's see if we could change it. Chad (26m 51s): Love it, love it. Joel (26m 53s): Thanks, Jerome. Jerome (26m 53s): Chad (26m 54s): We out. Joel (26m 55s): We out. Bon Soir! OUTRO (26m 57s): Thank you for listening 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.

Jobvite's yearly recruiter survey is always a highlight, and this year is no different. From Social media to video recruiting to job board investment to all things pandemic, this year's is no different. The boys dig into the survey with Jobvite SVP of Talent Kelly Lavin. The future is crazy, you guys! It might be crazy, but it's powered by NEXXT. Connect with NEXXT to create efficient hiring strategies today! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. 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 (24s): Oh yeah. It's the all Indie interview today, kids. Welcome, once again, you are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by Chad Sowash Esquire. Chad (37s): Hello! Joel (38s): Chad, how are you today? We are honored to have Kelly Lavin SVP of Talent, at sponsor, Jobvite, Kelly from Indianapolis, I'm assuming how are you? Kelly (51s): That is correct. And I am great. I'm very excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Joel (57s): Awesome. Excellent. Well, well we have a lot to cover, so give us kind of a bio tweet on you and tell us a little bit about the survey that we're going to be talking about today. Kelly (1m 7s): Sure. So a little bit about me. I am, as you said, SVP of Talent at Jobvite. I have been in the talent space for over 20 years. I have just previous to Jobvite, I was on the founding team of Canvas. Chad (1m 25s): That's gocanvas.io people. Kelly (1m 27s): Yes. I love the applause. Thank you. Joel (1m 30s): A Chad and Cheese favorite. Kelly (1m 33s): And I actually took a career diversion during that adventure and I ran Customer Success so it was a short two year journey, and then we were acquired by Jobvite and we have been kind of running fast ever since. And then previous to that, I've just been another technology companies, media, manufacturing, all over the HR space. Joel (1m 57s): You've been following Aman Brar around your whole career. Let's be honest. Kelly (2m 0s): Yeah. I mean, it kind of feels like it. I don't, I kind of don't remember a time when I wasn't working with him. Joel (2m 6s): Nice, nice. Well, tell us about this survey that you guys recently did here, that I think you do every year actually. Kelly (2m 10s): Yep. It is something that Jobvite does every year. We surveyed a little over 800 US-based HR professionals and recruiters. And this year survey, we also added, you know, several questions just based on the changing times and all of the disruption that COVID has presented and definitely had some interesting results that I'm super excited to chat through with you all. Chad (2m 38s): We've seen some big flips and I mean, we always want to talk about trends. Everybody wants to know what's happening in a year like 2020, nobody knows what the hell is happening. So I think the trend section for me, the difference between 2017 to today, when you have a non COVID, obviously doing whatever we've done over the versus lock down 2020, what were some of the biggest down turns and then upturns? Kelly (3m 6s): Yeah, so kind of biggest, biggest downturns. We saw a decrease in growing the talent pipeline, which was very fascinating when we went from 52% to 22%, which was a huge dive down. And so that was it. That was one that was really interesting to me. The other one that was a downward trend that I thought was really fascinating, was improving time to hire. And I definitely have some, some thoughts around that one because my own team and I have been discussing that, but I think that that's going to be an interesting one to dig into, for sure. Chad (3m 43s): Let's dig into it. Let's dig into that real quick. We're here. Let's do it. So your perspective, I mean, you actually do this and the time to hire, obviously isn't as important at least this year, is that because we're not doing as much hiring? Is it just that simple? Kelly (4m 0s): You know, I think it might be a little bit more complicated than that. You know, for my own team, you know, and this kind of couples with one of the biggest upward trends and that's in diversity hiring. I think with, you know, 2020, we've had a lot of events happen that have opened our eyes and I think really helped to evolve the way that we're thinking about hiring and I think that if you, if you look at time to hire, which I've traditionally had is one of my main metrics. It is in kind of direct opposition to really trying to improve the diversity of your team. And so you kind of have to manage both for sure, but I do think that if you're going to try to reach different types of people and really broaden your outreach, that time to hire, isn't going to be the metric that's going to drive that. Kelly (4m 52s): What do you guys think? Chad (4m 54s): Love, hearing that from you? Because when we actually spoke with Douglas Adkin, who used to work with Airbnb, they said they took many months to hire their very first engineer. Who's not one of the founders and they took much longer than they should have because they had defined the right person. And what this sounds like is the same kind of line of thinking is that we have to find the right person, the right people to be able to dig into a culture that we want to create for our current employees and our future employees. Is that, is that what you're feeling? Kelly (5m 30s): Definitely. And I think like if you're going to try to drive behavior change, you have to look at how those metrics are going to impact the behavior, right? So if you're telling your recruiters, Hey, you got to fill this position. This is your number one metric. We got to do it fast. It's not going to help you really talk to more candidates and really get the right people in the door. Joel (5m 53s): So, so Kelly, there's a little bit of a, I guess, contradictory findings on the report. So we're talking about culture being one of the main reasons why time to hire, hasn't been as important. However, if I'm reading this right, in terms of cultural add as being a priority for recruiters, according to your survey, you had 83% of recruiters in 2017 said that cultural add was important, but only 27% in 2020 said that a cultural ad was important. Chad (6m 29s): Ouch! Joel (6m 29s): So is it culture or is it quality and the skill sets of the folks that, that were, that were interviewing and hiring? Cause to me, it sounds like if you go from 83% to 27%, I mean, I don't want to say employment brand is dead, but good. God, that's a big, that's a big decline. What do you read into tha? Kelly (6m 49s): Yeah. You know, so I think it really depends upon your definition of culture. Right? And I think like, I feel like there might be a little bit of a crisis of like culture going on in terms of, are we hiring people to fit into a mold or are we hiring people to be additive to a culture? And so it kind of depends upon your definition of culture. I absolutely agree with you that statistic stood out to me most definitely. And I think like the fear that I have is that people think that, you know, if you're hiring for culture fit, it doesn't need to be as important in this remote world. Kelly (7m 31s): And I would disagree if you're thinking about culture being kind of like a collection of values and the things that you, that you do to drive the business forward. So I think that it really depends upon how you look at culture versus how you look at quality of hire. And so I think for some organizations, culture fit has traditionally meant like hiring people that fit into a mold. And I think that's the thing that we're trying to move away from. Joel (8m 0s): And how much does a work from home reality come into play with culture fit? Is it less important when everyone is working from home? Is that maybe why there was such a decline in the importance of cultural add? Kelly (8m 14s): I fear that that's where it's going, but I think, yeah, I think it's harder remote. Like when we're remote, it's harder to figure out kind of how to instill those cultural values within the workforce and within your organization. But I still think it's important. It's just, we don't have it all figured out yet because this is such a different world that we're living in than we were a year ago. Joel (8m 39s): Right? Chad (8m 39s): Well, let's jump back to growing the talent pipeline. Now I can understand that people aren't looking to grow the talent pipeline because there are only so many jobs available and there are many more applicants coming in and flowing in. Totally get that. But my, to you is, are companies starting to understand that they really don't need to grow their talent pipeline as much because they do have a pretty deep resume database as it is. And some organizations like Jobvite have actually invested in matching technology. So instead of going out and buying the same candidates over and over and over quote/unquote, "growing the talent pipeline," Chad (9m 21s): you're using what you already have and you are more you're working on what you've already invested on, which is talent in your database. Kelly (9m 29s): I think that that is absolutely something that traditionally we've not been great at doing in recruiting. And I do know that there has been a major emphasis on figuring out how do you leverage this current database of candidates and how do you invest in longer term relationships with your candidates, especially your silver medalist candidates. So your runner ups or, you know, the group of people that you, that you didn't end up hiring, but you ultimately really liked. You know, I, I do think that it shows that there's a little bit of a longer term focus, but I also think a lot of the data in this report shows that there's been a lot of stuff happening that is really created a lot of, kind of rethinking of everything as we're recruiting. Kelly (10m 18s): Right. And so I do think that all of those things that you said, I completely agree. And I think that as recruiters, if we're thinking about building our talent pipeline, we should be looking at, you know, like the pipeline we've already built first and foremost. But I do also think that we have a lot of recruiting teams that have been downsized and they're kind of getting back to basics and trying to figure out what is the most that I can do with what we have right now, Joel (10m 45s): I think in terms of some of the upward twin upward trends that you guys focus on. Obviously the one that we talk a lot about on the show automation and AI was, was one of the big ones. Chad (10m 57s): Robots baby! Joel (10m 59s): And I look at, you know, two of the big things that you talk about in the survey at the beginning is number one, fuckers are stressed out, like there's incredibly high levels of stress in recruiting, and you have a decline in head count of about a third, which to me feeds right into, Hey, I need some help with what I'm doing and AI fits right into that. Talk about sort of your take on, on how AI works and how people are using it. Cause you guys talk about that in the survey as well. Kelly (11m 29s): I think AI is an amazing supplement to help recruiters get back to doing the thing that they love to do and get away from the things that I would say that a lot of recruiters feel like are just the parts of the job that they have to do. Like sifting through resumes, like, you know, screening people to make sure that you have the right skillset, et. And I think that, you know, recruiters have to be really smart about how to integrate technology into their work. And I think just based on a lot of the recruiters that I'm talking to anecdotally, I think a lot of recruiters have been left during this crisis, you know, behind the curve a little bit. Kelly (12m 16s): And I think that the recruiters who have embraced technology and maybe their teams have been downsized a little bit, I think that they're going to be in a better position to recover because they've embraced that technology. I don't think that the best scenario is for it all to be technology, because I think like that the human to human connection matters so much in the recruiting experience for candidates. But I think that you do have to use technology to automate, you know, especially at the top of the funnel where you're trying to like automate screening of candidates. What about those things, like going back and forth with candidates that you're trying to schedule interviews for? Kelly (12m 56s): Like you absolutely should be automating that part of it. So it's like, I always, like when I was at canvas talking about how to utilize our bots and that type of thing, I would always say like, think about those things that are not super value added to making your job meaningful and think about how to put technology into that. Yeah, it sucks. Joel (13m 17s): So I love that you mentioned the human side of it. And one of the survey data points that really stuck out to me was that 77% of recruiters prefer to interview in person or do things face-to-face, but one half of them do video interviewing. So to me, it seems like there's a little bit of a disconnect with, I'd rather not be doing video interviewing, but I kind of have to. When we got to get out of the pandemic, are we going to get away from video recruiting? Because according to the survey, you said 40% believe that virtual interviews will be the default going forward. So how do you reconcile? Joel (13m 58s): Like we want to be face-to-face, but sorry, we're going to have to start doing this in video in the future. Kelly (14m 3s): Well, Hey, so I think like myself included, one of the coolest things to be able to do and to be able to provide for a candidate is an in-person experience to be able to walk through the office and, you know, see how people are interacting and, you know, be able to, you know, just get the feel for kind of how your business looks and feels and your culture and all of that good stuff. Ideally, I mean, that's one of the tools that you can use to help, to bring a candidate into the process and to help them to lean in a little bit. Right. So that's ideal, but the not ideal part of the face to face, let's say we get out of this pandemic and the vaccine is widely administered and we're back to in office. Kelly (14m 54s): I think one of the things that we've learned through this process is A, we have the capability to do it. It, in some instances can be a little bit more efficient. And most importantly, it broadens our ability to be able to build a more diverse workforce and it opens up other locations. And so if I'm thinking about finding someone with a very specific technical skillset, now my talent pool is a little bit broader. Now that I know that we have the ability and we've unfortunately had to build this muscle through no choice, but I think through necessity, we've had to build this muscle of being able to virtually recruit onboard, et cetera. Kelly (15m 39s): And so I think recruiters are smart to flex that muscle sometimes, that that doesn't mean that the in-office culture isn't going to be beneficial and I think a lot of especially extroverts would say that, you know, like they can't wait to get back to that. But I do think that there are benefits on both sides of it. Chad (15m 57s): Covid no question is for forced us out of a 1950s stamp the time clock mentality, we do have options. We can be more flexible and hopefully we understand autonomy actually means a lot more. And in more companies, I think that actually consume this kind of data and they understand that and they really embrace an opportunity to be more flexible, they're going to have an opportunity to have better talent. And that being said in the upward trends, the direct applications went up about 8%. So companies who are looking to actually focus their recruitment investment and shift that investment to direct application. Chad (16m 41s): So instead of using the Indeeds of the world, instead of using, you know, some of these other job sites and whatnot, and even possibly programmatic advertising, how do they do that? Do they hope that platforms like Jobvite do great job on partnering and SEO? How does that actually, how do they shift into more direct applications? Kelly (17m 2s): My feeling is that it comes from employment branding and building kind of direct relationships with candidates through broad social media outreach. And, you know, I think that really, really smart forward thinking organizations are thinking about recruiting, like marketers do, like, you know, just in traditional marketing. And you're, you're thinking about how do you reach applicants directly through kind of the content that you're pushing out about who you are, what you do, how you treat your employees, you know, how you interact with the world. And I think like, I mean, I started doing this, you know, years ago I would find brands that I just became fans of their employment brand. Kelly (17m 51s): And I think that that's becoming more and more the way that a lot of companies are actually connecting with their applicants. I think that they're finding that there are new ways to do that. And then it, you kind of start developing a relationship with them in the same way that consumers meet each other through social media, you find commonality and then you end up connecting and following each other, Chad (18m 14s): Having an employee who has a TikTok channel with a 1.5 million subscribers is a good thing is what you're saying? Yeah. Kelly (18m 23s): I'm very fascinated by this, this whole TikTok movement, honestly. Cause I, I don't have a Tikok account personally and you know, Chad (18m 33s): You're missing out Kelly, you're missing out. Kelly (18m 37s): No, I deserve the buzzer for that one. Nexxt (18m 45s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt Andy, for clients that are sort of married to email, and a little hesitant to text messaging, what would you tell them? That text messaging is part of any integrated strategy. There's not one size fits all for anybody. Job seekers opt into different forms of communication, whether it's with Nexxt or anybody else they might want to receive email. They might want to receive SMS. They might want to receive targeted retargeting on their desktops. So it's one piece of an overall puzzle. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Remember that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com. Kelly (19m 37s): You know, I think though that recruiters who think about kind of how, how the world consumes content and meets their candidates in, you know, the way that the world is consuming content, namely TikTok, or Instagram or whatever else it might be. I think they're really smart to be doing that. And I think they're smart to be thinking about like 30 second recorded snippets over video and, you know, being able to, you know, let people, all of the world, meet their employees and see their diversity and all of that stuff. And I, I do think that even though I'm not as progressive personally on social media clearly, because I'm not cool enough to have TikTok. Kelly (20m 23s): I do think that it is super smart. Chad (20m 29s): You're definitely cool enough to have TikTok Kelly, don't put yourself down like that. That's okay, Kelly. Cause my, my line of questioning next is about My Space. So let's, let's dig into social here for a little bit. So according to the survey, 78% of your respondents said that their investment in social media will be increasing in 2021. We mentioned TikTok and Snapchat. 7% say that they're using TikTok, 13% say Snapchat. One, I'm curious, are they advertising, do you think, or are they simply connecting? Chad (21m 10s): Are they creating stupid videos on these sites? So that's sort of one of my questions, but one of things that really struck me as, as notable was LinkedIn usage for recruiters of your survey decreased 20% from 2017. I think it's went from 97%, use it in 2017 and that's down to 77%. Joel (21m 34s): So I'm really curious your thoughts on why LinkedIn is seeing a 20% decline and then maybe secondarily, how are people using TikTok and Snap currently to recruit? Kelly (21m 45s): No, I think we all have a bucket of time, right? And a bucket of energy. And I would say that, you know, if you're gonna start. Joel (21m 54s): And a bucket of money. Kelly (21m 55s): A bucket of money, some buckets are bigger than others. And I would say that, you know, A. you know, LinkedIn is kind of tried and true for a lot of recruiters. You can see like, you know, percentage wise, it's still pretty high. But I would say that as recruiters start to think about how to reach candidates, that maybe are not as represented on LinkedIn or, you know, they, they may want to try to broaden their candidate pool, of course some of the time and money that's going to be moving away from LinkedIn, you know, that that's going to move towards those others is going to move away from LinkedIn. Right. I also know that, you know, there are certain people who don't do the LinkedIn thing, but could be an amazing candidate and amazing employee. Kelly (22m 41s): And so I think you do as a recruiter, you have to be smart about diversifying that. And I would also say that other methods of being able to display your content, it's really interesting, you know, if you think about these growing social media platforms, and like I mentioned before, the way we consume content it's, you know, in visual short snippets, et cetera. And I would argue that like, that is one of the best ways to get candidates to lean in is to really think about, you know, how does your marketing team market your services and are they pushing out like really consumable content? Kelly (23m 22s): You know, that's approachable. And that kind of gives them a peek inside virtually into what your culture looks like. Some of the other platforms are much more compelling to do that. Like if you think about, you know, Instagram and you think about TikTok, I mean, I don't have an account, but I do know what it is. I think like I'm not that uncool, but, you know, I think like we become with those types of platforms because the content is really compelling. Right? And so why would you not want to push out compelling content about your employment brand and be where a lot of people are. Joel (23m 56s): So do you think that basically time, money, energy, et cetera, is moving a little bit away from LinkedIn into other social platforms? Is that sorta what you're summarizing? Kelly (24m 5s): No, that's my thought, you know, I think for some of this data, you you'd have to dig in a little bit more with focus groups and that type of thing to really get to a really deep level of understanding. But, you know, I think it's really smart for recruiting teams to be utilizing other platforms as well as LinkedIn. Joel (24m 27s): Yeah. So talking about other platforms and you guys spoke briefly about, I don't want to say the death of job boards, but how theirs their usage has gone down. However, according to your survey and this really popped out to me as well, is that job board investment is going to increase to 34% this year up from 29% in 2017. I would have guessed the opposite. Yeah. What do you what sort of your take on that? What exactly is a job board? Is this only specific kinds like LinkedIn and Indeed, or is this sort of a broad investment across a lot of job boards that would certainly surprise me, but I'm curious your take on the job board increase. Kelly (25m 11s): I like you, I don't completely understand that response. What I can glean from it, logically is that there are candidates, you know, if you think about like your D&I hiring, you know, one of the ways that you can try to broaden your outreach is to find job boards that maybe traditional candidates wouldn't, you know, necessarily be on. You know, it can be maybe like a targeted strategy for trying to increase the diversity of your workforce. That's like there, where my logic kind of ends because I do feel like, like the modern, Joel (25m 52s): I'm glad to know you're as confused by that as I am. Kelly (25m 56s): Like the modern recruiting function should really be embracing the mindset of a marketer, you know, and really building their candidate database that way. But when you think about D&I efforts, that's where I would say, you know, it is smarter to try to broaden your outreach proactively in some of those job boards that may not be as commonplace. Chad (26m 20s): Yeah. Just trying to find the job boards who are really diversity types of, they don't just have it in their name. They actually have diverse candidates. That's the hardest thing. Kelly (26m 31s): Oh yeah, it's true. Chad (26m 33s): It's all about outcomes. Kelly (26m 34s): And we're not as sophisticated as that at this as we should be. Right. Like, I mean, I think we're way behind. And I do think that there's a lot of education that is happening right now. That's going to be happening in the next couple of years and a lot of opportunities, I think for recruiting teams to become better at this. But I think we are, I would say most companies are much further behind in terms of knowing how to do this and how to reach diverse candidates then they should be. Chad (27m 4s): Yeah, 1969 we put a man on the moon, but we still don't know how to do this. That tells us where our priorities are. It says 33% of recruiters though. I think on a good note. And I might just be, you know, Pollyannish about this, but if 33% of recruiters report that job seekers are inquiring about D&I initiatives more than they did the previous year. So from my standpoint, this is a lot about what you talked about before. It's about that brand element. It's about what does the organization stand for? And 33% is a pretty, pretty big number, especially over the year over year. So talk a little bit about that. Kelly (27m 45s): Yeah. I mean, I think that if you know, if you think about the way that candidates are looking at their future employer, it is so much different than it was 20 years ago. Really, really smart companies and really, really smart recruiting teams understand the implications around how not only, you know, they operate as a business, but how they interact with their communities and how they, you know, give back to their communities, how they, how they hire people. It's like, if you think about someone having their own personal values and, you know, thinking about what's important to them, it used to be that it was like, I would go find a job somewhere and it didn't need that company's value, like values didn't need to align with my own personal values. Kelly (28m 43s): And those days are completely gone, you know, candidates are looking at okay, how have you treated your employees during this pandemic? How are you trying to make an effort to increase the diversity of your workforce? How are you interacting with and giving back to your communities? What types of benefits are you providing? You know, from a mental health support standpoint, from a being able to provide family planning services, to giving your employees days off to vote. All of those things, I think have shown that we have this major shift going on and it's been happening for a number of years, but it's really, really prevalent now that I think like candidates really care about what their employers stand for and how they're really exhibiting their values and how they're actually showing the world that they care about, you know, making the world a better place. Kelly (29m 42s): And so I think you can't ignore those types of things because it, every candidate, you know, it's very important to nowadays. Joel (29m 53s): So we talk about caring, Kelly, but I want to end on this. There are a lot of people that don't give a shit. Your survey talks about ghosting for those who don't know, this is when you get ignored by a candidate. Now forget the fact that employers have been ghosting candidates for decades. We won't get into that. But according to your survey, 56% of recruiters have been ghosted. And the larger companies have a bigger problem with this. What is your take on that? And when I read this, I thought about Aman Brar's, your CEO's comment, when he was running Canvas, that text messaging was quote "anti ghosting magic." Joel (30m 39s): So I want you to talk a bit about the problem and what your take is and why bigger companies are suffering. And then maybe solutions wise, if a recruiter is listening to this podcast, what can they do to beat back ghosting? Kelly (30m 54s): Yeah, ghosting. I have to say like when that first happened to me many years ago, I was like, what in the world? Like, I don't understand this at all, but, you know, I think when you take a step back, you have to think about, you know, the choice about where you're going to work is a huge choice. It involves logic and involves emotion, and your families are often involved, you know, so you're not just negotiating with a candidate, but you're also negotiating with their significant other. And at any given time, a candidate can be pulled into another direction emotionally after they've accepted a position. Kelly (31m 35s): Right. And so I think that, you know, the whole magic around texting and that type of thing is really around, like, how do you utilize technology interwoven with like your relationship with the candidate to make sure that that candidate feels cared for all the way up until the time that they're starting their job. So, you know, are you, once the candidate has accepted, a lot of companies will say, okay, we got them locked down. You know, like, we'll see them in two weeks, but really smart teams will say, okay, during those two weeks, that's like a time when there's going to be a lot going on with that candidate emotionally. So they're going to feel pulled in a lot of different directions. They notify their current employer. Kelly (32m 17s): Sometimes the fight is on with the current employer, trying to convince them to change their mind. And so to the extent that you can start to help that candidate feel engaged during that time between offer and start, you have to do that. You have to send text messages to them, let them know how much you're looking forward to them starting. You know, have other team members do that. You know, utilize as many tools as you possibly can, between that offer acceptance to that start to be able to get that candidate to continue to lean in. Joel (32m 52s): Are big companies failing at that more, or because my impression is that, you know, Oh, I got an offer from a big company, like a well-known brand. I can brag to my friends and my family that I'm interviewing. I would think that big companies would have less ghosting. What is, what's your take on that? Kelly (33m 10s): You know, the other thing that I can think of there is that it could be that the candidate, you know, may A feel like, well, it's a big company, they have a lot of resources. Like, it's not that big of a deal if I change my mind. It could also be that, you know, in a bigger company, you're a little bit further removed, you know, from your immediate team. And it could be that they're just not engaging and leaning in as much. Like, I think like that those are the only things that I can really think of. Joel (33m 42s): Or maybe they don't want to go through the 18 interview process, 68 hours to maybe not get the job. Kelly (33m 49s): It could be too. Yeah. It's maybe a little bit less white glove. And so I think big companies would be smart to figure out how to make it feel more white glove in terms of their candidate experience versus like that, you know, big company, I have to fill out all of these forms and I have to cross over, I have to do all of this work just to get in the door for the first day. So I think all of those things could be something that are part of that. Joel (34m 15s): Love it. Yes. So that's Kelly Lavin everyone as VP of talent over at Jobvite. Kelly, if people want to connect with you, they want to find out more about the report. Where would you send them. Kelly (34m 30s): I would send them over to jobvite.com and to kind of check out our site. I'm on there. My socials are linked on the leadership page, and then you can also get to the report, right from jobvite.com Chad (34m 46s): Soon you'll have Tik TOK link on there. You can watch Kelly doing her Tik Tok. Joel (34m 57s): Does Jobvite have a TikTok is the question? Kelly (34m 58s): I need to check into this. Joel (34m 60s): We're calling Jeff Rohrs right now. Kelly (35m 3s): Yes. Chad (35m 4s): Can you see, can you see Jeff having a TikTok? Come on. Okay. Joel (35m 8s): Okay. I want to see Jeff doing the robot on TikTok immediately. Love it, Chad, another one in the books. We out. We love it. We out. Rory Outro (35m 17s): I'm Rory from Scotland, the country, which brought you electricity! Thank you for listening to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Nada Niente. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

While the world of recruiting is running toward a future of automation and a process devoid of human beings, others are championing a hybrid approach: Part human, part machine. Sorta like the Six Million Dollar Man. That brings us to BrightHire, which aims to equip human beings with technological advancements that turn them into cyborgs of the employment game. Think Robocop without the cool cars. Anyway, does cofounder Teddy Chestnut have what it takes to survive the Firing Squad? You gotta listen to find out. Brought to you by Pandologic, a programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any wasteful spending PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. 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Go to Pandologic.com to request a demo and tell him Chad and Cheese sent you. Ooh. They have a chat bot too, that we can talk to. Oh, kill me now. Ooh, they have a chat bot too, that we can talk to God kill me now. Firing Squad Intro (1m 20s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they got what it takes to make it out alive? Dig a fox hole and duck for cover kids the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel (1m 42s): My trigger finger is itchy. Welcome to the Firing Squad. Everybody you're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by Chad Esquire Sowash. Chad (1m 57s): Get in my belly! Joel (1m 58s): That's right. And today we welcome BrightHire to the show and Teddy Chestnut. He's taken a break from his world tour. Teddy, welcome to a firing squad. I hope you know what you've gotten yourself into. Teddy (2m 13s): Thanks for having me. Yeah. Let's see where this goes. Chad (2m 16s): All those, after all those platinum albums on the country circuit, man, and you're doing this, I got to give you a big applause. Joel (2m 23s): Do you, do you even like country music, Teddy? I mean in New York, I assume that where you're in New York, right? Yeah. Teddy (2m 28s): Right outside of New York. Joel (2m 29s): Not a big country fan. So we're like totally being assholes at this point. Teddy (2m 34s): I don't dislike country music. I just can't say that. Chad (2m 37s): So his answers yes, you're being assholes. (Don't be rude) Joel (2m 41s): Teddy, give us a little bit about you? Give us a Twitter bio and then we'll get into the company stuff. Teddy (2m 46s): Co-founder BrightHire, six and a half years at LinkedIn before that. Started my career doing HR research as part of the corporate leadership council of CEB, which became Gartner. And I'm the son of two 30 year HR professionals. My dad and my mom's a recruiter. So some people fall into recruiting and TA and HR tech. I was born into this space. Joel (3m 5s): I'm sorry. You were in HR what? Teddy (3m 8s): Research analyst. Joel (3m 9s): Oh my God. How did you not slit your wrists? A lot of opiods? How? Anyway... Chad, tell him what he's won. Teddy (3m 19s): All right, Teddy, you have two minutes to pitch BrightHire. At the end of those two minutes, you will hear that bell then Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start rambling or is get boring, Joel is going to hit you with those crickets and that is your signal to move along and tighten up your game at the end of Q and A, you will receive either a big applause. That means you'll be the first in line to get the COVID vaccine. (Don't be rude) A golf clap. Eh it's okay. But you're going to be in line with the rest of us. Teddy (3m 58s): Or (machine gun fire) Joel (4m 1s): That's go back to HR analysis. Chad (4m 4s): That's right you're not going to be maskless for awhile or traveling, but you'll have plenty of time to find another whiteboard because you're going to need it to build something different. That's firing squad my friend, are you ready? Teddy (4m 17s): Here we go. Joel (4m 18s): In Three Two One... ding, ding, ding. Teddy (4m 22s): At its heart. Hiring is human. Every hiring decision is driven by what we are doing right now, talking to each other. It's a series of conversations and because hiring is human, it's also inconsistent. It's inefficient. And there's a tremendous amount of space for subjectivity, room for bias. I co-founded BrightHire because I saw an opportunity to transform the heart of the hiring process and specifically to build a new kind of interview platform that could drive better, faster and more inclusive hiring decisions. BrightHire does that first by raising the quality of interviews in real time. So when a recruiter or an interviewer uses BrightHire, they have an interview assistant riding along with them as a heads up display to guide that conversation. Teddy (5m 3s): And as that conversation unfolds, it's recorded with transcribed and annotated. They're producing real evidence to support more rigorous and fair hiring decisions. So instead of relying on, you know, shorthand or scribbled notes or nothing, but our best recollection to fill out a scorecard and make a decision, you can quickly pull up candidate highlights to recall key details and make a decision based on that candidates merits not your memory. And then you can show those highlights across the hiring team to make a seamless handoff or calibrate based on real substance or check each other's biases. And for the first time teams can actually effectively all be in the same room together for every interview. So we can actually work together to make better, less biased hiring decisions. Teddy (5m 45s): You know, every other team designed product engineering sales, has had a collaboration platform built specifically for them. Now finally hiring teams have one too. And then finally we give people leaders transformational insight to improve their hiring outcomes, and to enable their teams to predictably replicate success. So whether that's through search or analytics or alerts, we're also enabling teams to hold up a mirror to their own hiring practice and see how it's done and make data-driven improvements to ensure they're running a consistent quality and fair hiring practice. And one last thought our first value of the company candidates first and a big part of our mission is to give candidates a hiring experience that they deserve by reducing bias and instilling good practices where it matters most in every interview and hiring decision. Joel (6m 33s): And they can find out more at? Teddy (6m 35s): brighthire.ai Joel (6m 36s): Which leads me to my first question, because I always ask this question. So obviously I have to go to brighthire.com whenever there's a not.com on our show, and it looks like it's a parked domain, like it could be gotten. Did you guys try to get brighthire.com? Is it, is it something you're not, you don't care about? Cause you're an AI company and.ai is what you want to do. Like talk about how that happened. Teddy (7m 0s): I never really thought about getting brighthire.com. We've been reached out to, by a couple we've been reached out to, by a couple of vendors that said, Hey, we've got this parked and you can grab it. And it's going to cost an arm and a leg and we're a seed stage startups. So I'm not going to spend my money on that. Like, who's going to go to that website now anyway, like we're driving folks to our press coverage into our app. So yeah, eventually I'm sure we'll grab it, but it's not a top priority. Joel (7m 30s): Help me visualize using the product because when I first sort of read about it, I thought, Oh, this is like Hone it. And I thought, well, maybe it's more like a Vervo video thing. Try to help me visualize a recruiter using this. Are they in their ATS? Are they in BrightHire? How would they typically use the product? Teddy (7m 50s): So if I'm a recruiter I'm running a phone screen, I might be in my ATS looking at a candidate profile with one click, I'm clicking to call that candidate using BrightHire. I might also just be at my calendar using a Chrome extension. It's like call when there's a phone number in the invite, or I've got a web app on my phone putting in a number just like I would put it into my phone app and dialing directly. And before that conversation, we put some structure, right? You might've done an intake meeting with a hiring manager and said, okay, what are the things that we need to cover in this conversation as we're screening this candidate? You might have the basic things around work experience and visa status and comp and salary, but maybe a couple of high signal questions that you want to make sure that you're covering. And so those questions load for you right in the conversation in the interview assistant. Joel (8m 32s): Does BrightHire prepare questions based on the job, or does the recruiter prepare them beforehand and have them handy? Chad (8m 39s): Who builds the structure? Teddy (8m 41s): Right now? We're working with clients, they're building their own structure. A lot of them have it already, they've already built it into a Greenhouse or Lever or their ATS or some micro-sites somewhere. And so working with them to build that into BrightHire, or we're sinking directly to those systems and pulling it in on the fly. Over time though, I think there's a really interesting opportunity for us to be building guidance based on collective intelligence. Like what are other folks doing or what's actually working for you over time. Chad (9m 5s): So you call through your, your computer, essentially, you have a dashboard with like, Oh, here's who I'm calling. The voice comes on. You're talking, it's transcribing the conversation. There's interview help where you're asking questions. You're making notes. I assume as you're talking to someone, have I got it? Teddy (9m 21s): Right? Yeah. You're leaving freehand notes. You can leave reactions like a thumbs up or a star or a flag and every single one of those timestamps of the conversation. Okay. Chad (9m 28s): The website and I love the whole rigorous, fast and fair. And that's what hiring should be. The problem is you're building structure around old shit. I mean, all of those companies who have their quote/unquote "interview process already lined out" is probably old antiquated, and just slow. How can you make them more rigorous, fast in fair if all you're doing is adopting the structure they've already had? Teddy (9m 57s): Well, first of all, a lot of companies may have, if you mean adopted, maybe you meant built a micro-site or a website or a set of interview plans, whether they actually get used as another question altogether, right? If I'm an interviewer, I'm back to, back to back, I'm jumping into the next meeting, candidate's on the zoom. I'm pulling up their resume in real time. And I'm now like, well, tell me about your background, right? And I'm looking at/ Chad (10m 19s): okay. Teddy (10m 19s): Gardner did a really interesting study actually last year that showed that one of the biggest drivers of extended time to fill is hiring manager indecision. It's not like it takes a long time to schedule or screening resumes. It's we pushed the candidates through the process and then we can't make up our minds. And we get to that point because we haven't actually assessed people on the things that matter for the role, because we haven't actually used structure or consistency or rigor in how we assess. It's all by bringing that directly into the moment and being able to see whether we've actually followed the script. Like have we asked the questions that we intended to? If we missed a couple of, can we pass it on to the next person to make sure that they cover those questions? We can ensure that as somebody goes through a hiring loop, we're actually covering what we need you to be able to be confident in that decision at the end. Chad (11m 1s): Okay. So what you're saying is really what we've seen as quote/unquote, "standardized" has not been standardized, and this is a way to really mandate a standardized way of hiring. Is that what I'm hearing? Teddy (11m 14s): Mandate, might not be the right word. Chad (11m 16s): It's probably what's needed, but okay. Yeah. Teddy (11m 18s): I mean, there could be a role, that you say, okay, for this role, this is exactly how are we going to assess every single time. But we know that, you know, both companies open up new roles that they haven't hired for, before, or they're open to candidates from different profiles. And so just being able to build structure so that everybody on the hiring team is aligned on what we are actually looking for and has that to follow in the moment, you know, going from zero to something, can make a huge difference with respect to the quality of that assessment, the fairness of that assessment and ultimately how fast we can move folks through the process cause we're confident that we've covered the right things. Chad (11m 50s): Gotchya, Okay. So Joel did, he was talking about some of the competitors out there, Hirevue, Vervo, Hone It, Zaur transcriptions all over the place, process all over the place, standardizations pretty much Teddy (12m 4s): All over the place. What makes you guys different? I think the biggest differentiation is collaboration. So BrightHire is unlike a HireVue, not built as an independent platform that sits that, you know, everybody's got to log into and, and go into and sit separate from the platforms and the tools that a hiring team would use every single day, email, zoom, Slack to actually communicate. And so we've built BrightHire from the ground up organized around collaboration. The idea that you could at mention somebody in the middle of a hiring conversation and pull them into that conversation, you know, 10 minutes after it's done so that they can get their same eyes on the highlights and then leave comments and collaborate back and forth on a candidate. Teddy (12m 43s): Being native in the workflow and facilitating that collaboration is truly what differentiates BrightHire from some of those other platforms. Chad (12m 50s): So you're working with really asynchronous collaboration, which is almost like the Slack, I guess, for the hiring process. Teddy (12m 59s): Think about, think about, you know, Designers and Figma or Whiteboarding and Miro like every single remote team engineers and Get Hub. They have a platform that they can access, where they all get access to the same thing. We're looking at the same digital whiteboard. We're looking at the same design. We're looking at the same set of code that doesn't exist for hiring. When we have an interview loop and there's four interviewers, I have my half hour, you have yours, you know, if somebody else has got hers and then we come to the table and we're recounting what happened across those three, four conversations based on recollection and judgment. Now we could actually all get access to the same evidence and truly collaborate. Joel (13m 37s): When I asked you about the.com you played a really nice sob story about how you have no money, but you did get 3 million dollars, you did get 3 million in seed funding funding in September. So we know that that money isn't going towards the.com. What is that money going toward? Teddy (13m 55s): Building the team, building the product, primarily. So we're a team of nine, team of nine today. We raised the seed back in, in July of last year. And so, yeah, it's been, you know, building a world-class product from the ground up. Joel (14m 7s): Gotcha. So Chad mentioned the competitors is as I did as well, some of that has to go toward marketing, right? Like you guys have to be able to get your message out and your differentiators. So how are you guys marketing the product and getting new clients and particularly in a world of COVID and work from home, how has that been either a challenge or a benefit for you guys? Teddy (14m 30s): We actually just posted literally today ahead of growth roll with our first marketing hire up to this point, it's been outbound through deep connections that we have in the TA space and through earned media. So Adam Grant came on as an advisor and then that got picked up by Courts and Inc that, you know, right now with COVID and also with the broader conversation around social justice in the world and the place and in hiring, those two themes were very relevant to what we're building and so we got some great coverage about that, which is turned into a lot of really interesting inbound. Joel (15m 8s): You mentioned posting a job and I was, it was sort of struck me as curious that your job posting solution is essentially angel list, which is a startup sort of funding information site. Why did you choose angel list to be sort of your ATS or your job posting platform, as opposed to like an industry applicant tracking system, or even like a LinkedIn. Teddy (15m 30s): When you're building a team that's starting at two and then hiring the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth hires, you need to be, you need to be advertising in places where people are looking for that kind of an experience, right? Building from the ground up, you know, building the ship while you're sailing it. And Angel List is one of the places that attracts that profile. And so it helps us, you know, screen for that interest and motivation from the start. Now, it's not always, you know, nail on the head, but we've seen success there. Chad (16m 2s): For clients. Do you integrate with programmatic players, like the Joveos and Pandalogics of the world, and then also the Broad Beans and some of the, some of the kind of like dumb distribution players. How does that work and how do they feed back into your system? Teddy (16m 17s): Yeah, our main points of integration, are applicant tracking systems are like, you don't want it to be doing dual entry, that's your system of record, that's your source of truth. And so we're pulling information out of those applicant tracking systems with respect to who are we interviewing, what role is it for and if a company's built structure into those systems we can pull that into BrightHire on the fly. And then of course, right back to those systems, right? The notes that link to the conversation, et cetera. And then the other, the other main point of integration is video platforms, right? Zoom, Teams, et cetera, so that we can capture those conversations. But we're picking up at the first recruiter phone screen and going through to the offer conversation. So a sourcing platform, a job description platform, those aren't really platforms that require API integration for us to be, you know, in the work, right. Chad (17m 3s): The applicant tracking systems, you're, you're using a by direction bi-directional API? Teddy (17m 8s): Correct. Chad (17m 8s): Okay. So what applicant tracking systems and/or CRMs are you currently integrated with? Teddy (17m 14s): So we're currently integrated with Greenhouse. We are building into Lever next, and then we're going to tackle the Enterprise ATS. It's kind of, as they come. Joel (17m 23s): Curious about what's next for you guys in regards to their raising more money, new technology or new features that you're going to be adding in the future, and particularly how the work from home sort of phenomenon is impacting how you guys are building new products and features. Teddy (17m 42s): We didn't really touch on any of the analytics side yet. And that's probably where I'm most excited about from a roadmap perspective, to be able to say, for example, this interview is supposed to cover these eight topics, competencies, questions, you know, skills, experiences. And we know reliably that we covered six of the eight, or we only cover two of the eight. And we can start to look at that systematically over how we actually run a hiring practice. To be able to actually not just design structure and rigor into it, but to measure it. And then to be able to measure that not only based on, you know, the role or the interviewer or the team, but to turn the tables as we do API integrations with applicant tracking systems and look at that from a candidate demographic perspective, when we're interviewing men versus women, are we asking different questions? Teddy (18m 23s): So we have different levels of rigor, like do we set up those conversations in different ways? Do we run them in different ways? That's a really fascinating roadmap for us that requires investments in NLP and a little bit of machine learning, and on the data side. And so from an investment perspective, we'll be growing the engineering team, you know, over the next couple quarters, to be able to realize that vision, that which will be super exciting. Joel (18m 45s): I didn't hear in that answer diversity inclusion and it seems to be a really focal point for the business. It's actually one of the main navigation links on your site. I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what about the product makes it so inclusive for candidates. Can you help me grasp that? Teddy (19m 6s): Sure. Most solutions today with respect to DNI are either looking at your funnel to understand where conversion rates are lower than they are for, you know, fully represented candidates versus underrepresented candidates or tweaking things at the top of the funnel, like wherever we saw sort of blinding resumes to try to open up doors to folks, to at least get into the hiring process that would not have made it into it. Otherwise once you step into that hiring process, if you really are trying to run an equitable, inclusive hiring practice, you need to ensure that you treat people consistently and the same every single time, right? We ask the same questions of the same effort of every candidate that we use actual evidence to assess folks so that we're assessing them based on their merits, not based on our judgment and bias and memory. Teddy (19m 50s): And ideally we can triangulate perspectives across the team. It's the same reason that teams build diverse interview panels, right? Because we know that I might see something in a candidate that another interviewer might not. And so it's really important for us to get our multiple eyes on them. We can facilitate that now for every conversation asynchronously, to ensure that hiring teams can mitigate each other's biases. So there's no magic bullet solution to building an inclusive hiring practice, but by putting structure, evidence and then insight, right, are we treating male candidates differently than female candidates systematically without being able to see otherwise, are we treating white, black, and Latino Latina candidates differently without being able to see otherwise, those are elements of how we can ultimately help the hiring team run a more fair and consistent hiring process. Joel (20m 34s): It's still primarily people interviewing people. And then you're just, you're just the technology in between that. So there's no, just so I'm clear, there's no scoring system based on skills that says, Hey, this candidates you a 97, this one's a 96 and there's no basis upon race or where they went to school or name or anything like that. It's still people talking to people. Teddy (20m 56s): It is, I don't have a tremendous, I don't have a tremendous amount of confidence in a machine's ability to assess a candidate. I don't. And so I have a much more, you know, I much more competence in analysis, being able to show patterns of behavior that may lead to systematically unfair outcomes and shining a light on that and saying to a talent acquisition leader or sales leader or an engineering leader, Hey, this is this warrants, your attention, right? How you're assessing candidates needs to change in order for you to actually deliver a systematically more fair experience to them across the board. Joel (21m 29s): I want to touch on some of your core values that you have on the site. And I just want you to sort of elaborate on, you have put candidates first and you have invest, invest in our people. Can you just briefly talk about those two and how you put candidates first and two, how are you investing in your people? Teddy (21m 45s): Putting candidates versus about making product decisions and go to market decisions that first and foremost, to have the candidate in mind? So I think like disclosure is a great example of that. There's no instance where a candidate comes into BrightHire and isn't given a heads up that they're being recorded. Right? We work with our clients to give a heads up to candidates in the email that would go out to them to schedule that conversation and the, in the phone or the video interview that they jumped into. And if they didn't feel comfortable, proceeding being recorded, an interviewer or recruiter always has the opportunity to cancel the recording, to turn it off or to go off the record. In that way, we want to ensure that every single candidate feels comfortable going through an interview that's being hosted on BrightHire, whether or not they feel comfortable being recorded. Teddy (22m 29s): And on the backend, being able to bring that evidence into a hiring decision, ultimately, I feel really strongly as in every candidates best interest, because now they can be very confident that they're going to be evaluated, not based on what that interviewer happened to remember, or the impression that they developed based on, you know, maybe they had that interview before they had their coffee in the morning, right? And now they can revisit it, re-look at it, check that first impression and ultimately assess that candidate based on their merits. And so that's how we think about putting candidates first` making every decision from a product or go to market perspective that puts the candidates interest in mind first and foremost. In terms of investing in people, it's about allowing people to grow into roles, giving them the trust and the freedom and the flexibility to do things they haven't done before, which is also really important for us as a business, right? Teddy (23m 19s): As a seed stage startup you're growing and building from the ground up, everybody's got to do stuff that they've never done before. And so giving folks the trust, the confidence, the leeway to stretch into those roles is super important. Chad (23m 29s): All right, now, get, get away from the fluffy Cheeseman stuff. Let's talk about, go to market. Let's talk about, let's talk about business stuff. Let's talk about, go to market. How are you going to market? Are you primarily B to B in paralleling with partnerships, how's that working out and what's working right now in your young age, what's working thus far? Teddy (23m 52s): Direct to market B2B SAS enterprise model, where our main buyer is the head of talent acquisition or the chief people officer in concert, often with the head of sales or the CTO or another functional leader who's thinking a lot about the quality of their hiring practice sometimes because they're scaling really fast and thinking about driving consistency and rigor into that practice as they scale. Sometimes because they're thinking about solving a specific problem with respect to attrition or, you know, performance in the first year and are tracking that back to how the team interviews. Chad (24m 25s): Well, you talk about scale, you talk about scale real quick. How has Covid impacted perspective customers coming to you? Because they know they need to scale because they don't have the people they used to and they know they are, they're going to be hiring quickly soon. Teddy (24m 42s): The biggest tailwind from COVID has been that in seven or eight months, we never got asked the question "what happens when people go back to the office?" The idea that Zoom, Teams, that phone is going to be the primary way that people interview for the foreseeable future has opened up talent acquisition and people leaders eyes to the opportunity that that creates with respect to bringing technology into that part of the hiring process, where it wasn't there before. And I don't think that's going to change, and that's what our clients are feeling as well. So that's been the biggest driver from a go-to-market perspective. The other is this feeling of the inability to quality control. Like I can't sit in on an interview. I can't, you know, walk the floor. Teddy (25m 22s): I can't, you know, quickly debrief in a room together. And so building a remote collaboration platform around hiring and the same way that Miro has taken off, in the same way that Figma has taken off, really has resonated with hiring teams very strongly. Yeah. Chad (25m 36s): The compression of adoption is glorious and hate that people have to die. And there's a pandemic for God's sakes for us to actually do this. But overall, what's this cost? Teddy (25m 46s): We price on an Enterprise model based on hiring volumes. So if I'm a team that's doing, you know, two, three, 400 hires over the course of the year, you're talking about like a low, mid figure, low mid five figure contract. And again, we adjust based on your hiring volumes year to year. Joel (26m 7s): You spent six years at LinkedIn, you said? Teddy (26m 9s): Yes. Yep. Joel (26m 10s): Obviously working there sparks some ideas you saw what LinkedIn did correctly did incorrectly. You saw obviously an opening there to start to start BrightHire talk about exactly what that was or what was it about your six years at LinkedIn that that's helping you or enabled you to get the idea, the epiphany to create BrightHire? Teddy (26m 30s): Part of it was working directly with talent acquisition leaders and seeing the hunger for data about their operations and how excited they were when I was at LinkedIn, right. We could bring data to them about who their teams were in mailing and who they were competing against and where their people were going when they left. And that stuff was gold, for those talent acquisition leaders, to be able to say, Hey, we can create an entirely new dataset around the most important activity that your extended teams do that drives every single one of your outcomes that you have zero visibility into, that seems like a really interesting opportunity to run at. So that was one, this idea that we could create a completely new data set that would be incredibly valuable to that audience. Chad (27m 9s): Ding, ding, ding. Oh, there it is. Teddy. Teddy (27m 12s): Teddy's done. Teddy's done. Chad (27m 14s): Teddy's done! Hit him, joel! Joel (27m 17s): Me first! Me first! Me first! Chad (27m 19s): Go, go go! Joel (27m 20s): Okay. All right, Teddy. So I feel like you have a lot in common with, with Hone It. And we were very big on Hone It and continue to be a champion of their service. I'm sure as you guys grow, there'll be some, more differentiation and more bells and whistles to divide you from them. But are my main sort of initial criticism or skepticism was that, that the world is moving towards a more automation, AI environment. So I think, you know, a big number of companies when we come out of the pandemic and they have to make decisions on how many recruiters do we bring back and do we even go, you know, to the model that we had before, can we just automate, you know, the, the interviewing the pre-screening, the scheduling, like, and let's agree that a lot of companies and a lot of platforms, whether they be, you know, iCIMS or JobVite or Smart Recruiters, they're all trying to go down that path of, Hey, we're going to automate this entire process. Joel (28m 22s): But I also do believe that there's going to be a lot of companies that say, you know what we want a hybrid model. We still want recruiters, but we want to empower our recruiters as much as possible with technology to make sort of a human technologically advanced decision on who we hire. So for me, like where you guys fit in is, is in that company that still wants to be a little bit human, but still wants to have, you know, humans with the computer chip plugged into their brain. And I think solutions like yours can probably accommodate those needs. I think that you have to continue to build out your integrations, which I think you understand is important. Joel (29m 4s): I think you need to continue to add bells and whistles. Like maybe there is an automated scheduling component. Like once they're done with the interview, that they go into an automated process to get them on the calendar and get them, you know, in the office with a face to face or something along those lines. So for me, I think that is companies come out of the pandemic. They make decisions on how to build their teams, what you guys offer is going to be one of those things that a lot of companies choose to do. So for that reason, that's a big applause for me. I think the 3 million seed round as well is really positive, obviously I think you, you understand more money will be needed to take you guys into the future, but I think that'll be something that is doable. Joel (29m 49s): I'm done. Chad, you ready? Chad (29m 50s): All right, Teddy noise, man. So much noise. So many companies out there are saying, they're bringing efficiency, they're bringing structure, they're bringing an unbiased process. So that's one thing that you are really going to have to cut through, which is obviously what Joel said earlier, from a messaging standpoint, you're going to have to find that one message and just beat it like a drum. But your background pretty much coming out of the room already with a SHRM certification, does it hurt for God's sakes six years at LinkedIn in the industry, a huge plus we're already fans of organizations like Vervo, HoneIt, XOR. Chad (30m 37s): Ones that are either conversational AI or they're really flushed when it comes to standardizing a process. I love the idea of a collaboration platform in this space. I think for me, that's your sweet spot and overall, I love the pitch. You do have some issues that you're going to have to work through, there's no question, but every single startup does no matter. I'm giving you a big applause. Joel (31m 10s): Woo Teddy. Teddy (31m 12s): Thank you, Gents. Joel (31m 13s): How do you feel? Teddy (31m 14s): I feel fucking fantastic. Joel (31m 18s): And for my next song, everybody. So one last time, Teddy, if they want to know more about you guys, where do they go? Teddy (31m 27s): brighthire.ai Joel (31m 27s): Excellent and with that, we out. Chad (31m 31s): We out. Firing Squad OUTRO (31m 32s): This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to The Chad and Cheese podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today that's www.chadcheese.com. Chad (31m 58s): Come on man.

Hallelujah podcasts can't be impeached! Because Chad & Cheese are always dancing on the line of what's legal in at least 17 states, and this week is no exception. On this week's show: Big investment in popular ATS Greenhouse Buy or Sell with Syndio, JobandTalent, Swyg, and, Employee Navigator HireVue finally buys a clue on facial recognition NYC cracking down on hiring algorithms Insurrection firings go into high gear Get reincarnated as a Microsoft chatbot zombies Yeah, we're not right in the head, but we go great with a nice bottle of bourbon on a cold night. Enjoy another week, sponsored by Jobvite, Sovren, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. INTRO (1s): oHide 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. udible> Joel (22s): Thank God podcasts can't be impeached. Am I right? Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, boys and girls. Your favorite guilty pleasure. I'm your cohost Joel "banned from Pinterest" Cheeseman. Chad (36s): Chad "never been on Parlor" Sowash. Joel (39s): And on this week's episode, Greenhouse just got a lot greener, Hirevue gets nervous and rioting on the nation's Capitol will get your ass fired even if you live with your mother, which reminds me, Hey mom is my grilled cheese ready yet? Chad (56s): The meatloaf. Joel (57s): Hang on, people. Jobvite PROMO (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. Joel (1m 30s): Oh shit. Chad (1m 32s): Oh yeah! Joel (1m 34s): This has me dancing. Like after the Browns won, hell yeah. Chad (1m 41s): This is a groove right there, man. Joel (1m 43s): Total groove. This is our new intro music right? Chad (1m 45s): That's that's that's our new group. That's all I got to say. We've got we're grooving. Joel (1m 49s): Heall Yeah. Chad (1m 50s): Wooo. Joel (1m 50s): Love it? Love it. Get funky with it. That's got some stuff Chad (1m 54s): Talking about grooving and some stank that then, then Browns put some stank on the seat of the Steelers A Team. Joel (2m 0s): Holy shit. I still think it's a dream. I'm ready to wake up, but they're their reward for winning is go play the number one seed at their place Sunday afternoon. But hey, stranger things have happened. My homes, my homes is due for a bad game. My homes is due. Chad (2m 17s): You got to wake up from the dream sometime, unfortunately. Joel (2m 22s): So he liked this weekend real quick. We got a Bill's and Ravens. Who you like there? Chad (2m 27s): Oh, I love me some Dobbins, but the Ravens are, the Bills are hot. I I'm sorry. I still gotta go with my heart. Ravens. Gotta go with Ravens. Joel (2m 36s): Okay. You got Ravens there. I guess you got Chiefs based on your last comment. Chad (2m 40s): Yeah. Yeah. Joel (2m 42s): And then we got Rams and Packers in Green Bay. Chad (2m 45s): Yeah the pack. Joel (2m 46s): Pack should roll that one. And then the old man go at it with the Buccaneers and the Saints with an average age quarterback of what? 43, 45, something like that. Who do you got there? Chad (3m 0s): Drew Brees has his boys back. So Camaro's back. And so is, you know, our boy Thomas. So I'm hoping they can pull it out. The problem is the saints have not been putting up the offensive numbers that we're used to seeing in past years. So, I mean, I really think that the Buccaneers that, they have the upper hand in this one. Joel (3m 24s): Well, considering the Buccaneers barely beat, like some dude that was packing groceries before he was quarterbacking the Washington team. Brees should have a pretty solid effort on him. But man, those Buckaneer weapons are tough. Jesus Chad (3m 41s): It's hopefully it'll be a good game and hopefully Brees and the Saints come out of it. But yeah, I have to think that the Buccaneers, they've got a pretty stout crew, especially on defense. Joel (3m 53s): And we won't speak of the college title game this week. Who you got in shout outs? Chad (4m 1s): Little shame going to Lockheed Martin in the United States Department of Labor because Lockheed Martin, they found out just what hiring discrimination is worth. It's about $1,137 per affected American workers. So we're talking about Lockheed Martin having the Department of Labor, the OFCCP, meet them and say, look, we see instances of hiring discrimination. And Lockheed Martin says, no, you don't. And they're like, yes we do. And they're like, no, you don't. Okay. So what's going to settle this? What settles it is and there were 616 affect affected individuals. Chad (4m 42s): Those individuals in total got $700,000. Now that seems like a lot of money, but for an organization with annual revenue, again, annual revenue of about $60 billion, it is total horseshit. We're talking again, $1,100 per person. Buzzer (5m 4s): Buzzer. Chad (5m 5s): So overall, this is one of the things that we always talk about. If the United States government is not going to slap these organizations with fines to actually make them change their behavior, they are not going to change their behavior. They can pay this kind of money all day and they don't even feel it. This is coffee money for Lockheed Martin. So yeah, this is a big shame on Lockheed Martin and an even bigger shame on the US Department of Labor. It is your job to protect individuals. And when this kind of shit happens, you send a bad, bad stank through the ranks of discrimination. Chad (5m 46s): Right? Joel (5m 47s): And speaking of saying, have you heard the new intro? Oh yeah. All right. I'm going to, I'm going to go from a big loss like you, but I'm going to go to a rebirth of a rising of the Phoenix. I want to give a shout out to QR codes. The once mighty technology fell on hard times, thanks to the pandemic. QR codes are back, baby. Chad (6m 13s): Such a hater. Joel (6m 14s): No one, no one wants a menu that they have to touch. You know, no one wants to grab anything off a shelf like QR codes are back baby, and I couldn't be any happier. So shout out to you if you QR Codes, enjoy your time in the sunlight. Chad (6m 30s): Excellent. Well, shout out to the new recruitment automation conference, the Weyden windy peeps, Dave and team over there. They had me on with a star studded panel, go check it out. I'm sure they have the video, the recording somewhere, but we talked about diversity, equity and inclusion. We talked about process, methodology automation. It was all over the place, but had some amazing panelists. I mean, Jen Terry, who's now at Joveo. She had 20 years at AT&TT. Had Stacy from the New York Times, she's the head of their TA function there. EA Sports, Trent Cotton, Crystal Jay. Chad (7m 12s): It was just, lit! Joel (7m 13s): It was lit. You know, I think we, we determined that you were the bat boy to that line up. Chad (7m 18s): I was the water boy. Yeah. I was getting coffee. Joel (7m 21s): Well, dude, I want to get to the news unless you got to enter the shout outs, we can sprinkle those out to show. Cause there was some big, big news that dropped today. This shit is fresh off, fresh off the press still smells like, like a Chad (7m 35s): Teen Spirit? Joel (7m 35s): Yeah. Like Teen Spirit and Inc. Greenhouse popular applicant tracking system has nabbed, am I looking at this right, $500 million from TPG and Investments? Taking a majority stake in the company. This` is following a year when they laid off a bunch of employees, but also reported surging revenues. Yeah. Yeah. Thoughts?` Chad (8m 1s): And you know, we, we did cover when they, Daniel Chait or Marcomm or whoever the fuck did it, they put out a message to pretty much everyone in which iCIMS didn't do by the way, talking about, you know, the need to contract, right? During COVID and what they did and what many companies did was they had to focus on being able to stay sustainable. And then also, if you, if you take a look at the numbers, they had only taken, I say only, but they are a core platform. They'd only taken about a hundred million in funding. This is something that no question puts a staple in what we've seen over the past couple of years that these applicant tracking systems, aren't the old legacy types of applicant tracking systems that we once knew that just stood there withered away and became, you know, these old warehouses full of data that were really just shit to maneuver through that. Chad (9m 6s): They're really making a charge, Greenhouse, Jobvite, iCIMS, Smart Recruiters. I mean, they're really starting to be the new age of tech, right? Joel (9m 17s): Yeah. So the new valuation of the company, let's just call it a billion dollars for shits and giggles. This is super big and, and Greenhouse, I think, you know, couldn't have gone to a better company, you know, they were born out of sort of that post web 2.0 era. Whereas we talked about iCIMS, JobVite were sort of pre all that. They were sort of born out of the old technologies. Greenhouse was one of those that had the nice balance of technology from an openness platform that you could build apps upon as well as looking at how design matters in employment, whether it's the consumer side or whether they're they're hosting career sites. Joel (9m 60s): And, and you, and I think are pretty universal when we hear a startup ask us who should I integrate with, like, who should I build an app upon Greenhouse is always one of the first that we talk about one, because it's so easy, they've sort of built their business on that. It's free. That has been sort of their secret sauce in my opinion, is that the app store and their integration with companies because of that tech infrastructure and that foundation has really carried them on. And they've been a really sort of slow organic success story and hats off to them. I do think they are quickly going into that, that tier two or tier one ATS, where they're in the discussion with iCIMS and JobVite and those guys, and certainly make themselves a candidate for an IPO at some point and/or acquisition talks here in the future. Joel (10m 56s): So, so good on them. They did it right. They grew slowly and organically built a really fanatical user base. The customers, I know that use, them really, really like them, so good on them, good on them. And they've come out of the pandemic stronger, I think from that. And they're ready to head into the new, the new decade with a lot of fire under their ass. So it's good. Chad (11m 18s): And what are they going to do with that cash? So startups across the world need to have better ATS, CRM, partnership strategies. I understand if you're trying to gain proof of concept and you're working with a company here and there, but if you're beyond proof of concept, you're beyond that phase in your main focus is on partnership strategy, which includes acquisition you're in for a wild ride. These are the organizations who now have a lot of power to be able to provide you a new client base, possibly. And also if you perform well, guess what the prospect of acquisition is there too. Joel (12m 4s): Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, just to go back to the app store, you know, you and I both work with quite a bit of startups. And I can say that I definitely push all the ones I do that want to integrate into Greenhouse. And I can say that of the three or four that typically are the first in line Greenhouse regularly performs better than most of the others. And I think that, you know, promoting their store in the marketplace again has been a real, a real win for them. They reported growth of 30% year over year in 2020. So they're definitely a good place. Chad (12m 38s): It's the easy answer when you're talking about integrations. Joel (12m 41s): No question. No doubt. No doubt. Well, cash is raining, dude. Whew. Cash is, they're passing out money. We decided we're gonna do a little, a little rapid fire of whether we'd buy or sell these, these companies. I'm going to go through them. Give just a little explanation. If you want to talk about a more in depth, that's fine. Chad (12m 58s): Sure. Joel (12m 59s): But we can just kind of flow with us. So Syndio yes, who we've interviewed before. Chad (13m 4s): Maria. Joel (13m 5s): Maria. Yeah. So they scored 17.1 million. For those that don't know they do real time pay equity. They have an analysis software to help equalize the pay structure and company. So Chad, buy or sell? Chad (13m 21s): This is a big, big, big buy because every organization who is touting pay equity, in most cases, they're doing it with spreadsheets, right? They're doing it with calculators and shit. They don't have tech to be able to integrate to, I mean, pretty much instantly tell you where your warning signs are. This is the platform, right? And all those old time organizations that are out there that you've been using for years where it takes a month for them to actually digest your data and get back to you. Guess what they should be partnering with Syndio, if not go direct. Joel (14m 1s): Yeah. That's a, it's a strong buy for me as well. Just for all the reasons that you talked about there. So our number, number two here, this is the big daddy in terms of the check that was written jobandtalent.com, horrible domain but we'll digress from that just nabbed $108 million. This company is largely European and they commit to find 'consistent work with renowned companies that enjoy professional stability in a contract environment.' So it's a gig platform basically, but they're really touting that they work with well-known companies. And there's some stability in these gigs that you're getting. Joel (14m 43s): It's not just, you know, drive Charlie to the airport and call it a day. These are sort of real, real job contract opportunities, $108 million dollars, buy or sell? Chad (14m 53s): Right out of the gate, Madrid based jobandtalent.com. Never heard of them. I thought, what the hell is this? And why so much cash? Then I dove into the actual tech process and it looks like they're actually getting the whole 1099 process, right. It's app based. And it's kind of like that Uber for jobs that we've been talking about for a while, these guys, it seems are on the right path, if not already have the infrastructure in place to build that. So I was tremendously surprised and doing research on these guys, and this is a big buy for me. Joel (15m 30s): All right. For me, frankly, I can't get past the name, Job and Talent. So for me, fuck it. I'm selling that shit. Chad (15m 39s): All right. All right. Joel (15m 40s): Let's go to a Swyg, which makes me kind of thirsty that's SWYG.com, it is the.com though. So hats off for that. They get 1.2 million in pre-seed money, which we both kind of scratched our head about pre-seed I guess that's family and friends round. I don't know for family and friends. Yeah. So these guys actively detect and correct for bias in interviews. They're also putting a human face and sort of going after chat bots and automation, their site says, quote, "you don't want to hire robots so why have a robot do the hiring?" Question, Mark? Hmm. Buy or sell? Chad (16m 21s): Sell. When I started researching this, it was like, okay. Yeah, this all sounds great. But how do you provide the data? How do you, I mean, none of it made sense until I dug into it. And this is a candidates interviewing other candidates with one-on-one video type of a platform. Yup. So overall, I, I think it's, it's a great, fuzzy, wonderful, fluffy idea, but I think this just falls flat. Joel (16m 50s): Yeah. So if you were to go back to 2002, which by the way was when the Browns last made the playoffs, this would have been a great company, but for 2021, yeah we're selling this turkey. All right, let's get to the last one. Another great name, Employee Navigator raises 34 million in growth equity financing. Now these guys are in the exciting business of benefits, compliance and HR software. 34 million for Employee Navigator. buy or sell? It's not exciting by any means, but this is infrastructure that you have to get right. You're talking about money. You're talking about benefits. You're talking about compliance. Chad (17m 31s): Yes. This is a buy. Joel (17m 33s): Yeah. Dammit. I hate these boring, successful companies. They suck. They suck. All right. That's been a, that's been our episode of buy or sell everybody. Let's see if I got a sound bite for that one. There you go. Okay. Let's get to some acquisitions that caught our attention. Chad (17m 51s): Yes. So we saw that jobsintheusa.com a network of state focused job boards was actually acquired by their CEO. So this was a managed, this is, was a management buyout. I had a chance to actually speak with Saeed and he was excited to have pretty much full control and all the reigns, obviously to drive his network of 400 plus sites forward. Joel (18m 19s): Good for Saeed, what a good guy. Chad (18m 22s): I think, I think this in itself, will be able to have this kind of opportunity to take something where you have a vision, but as CEO, you have to do pretty much what you're told. Joel (18m 33s): Right? Chad (18m 34s): And in this case, you are the CEO. You are the owner. Now you have the freedom. So I'm excited to see what, what they come up with. Joel (18m 42s): Was he at Monster? Chad (18m 43s): Yes. Joel (18m 44s): Okay. Okay. Yeah. Speaking of URLs from the past jobsintheUS.com, that might be his first order of business has changed the name. So these guys are based out of like Maine or some weird, like a state you wouldn't normally think of, I think Maine or Connecticut or somewhere, they were bought by a newspaper conglomerate, I think 10, 10 years or so ago. And newspapers can't figure out job postings for the life of it. So why not sell it to the CEO? And by the way, when you sell to the CEO, there's not a lot of due diligence. They kind of know like what they're buying. So good for him for making that probably a seamless transaction. Joel (19m 24s): The newspaper gets to throw off some, some profit. Chad (19m 27s): Amen. Joel (19m 28s): Wonder what he paid for it? He didn't tell you did he? Chad (19m 31s): No Joel (19m 31s): Okay. All right. Well, whatever, maybe next time. Over a few drinks, maybe he'll tell us what he paid for it. All right. There was another acquisition. This one really got our attention. One because we know these guys, the Moonlight, the Moonlighting guys pretty well, but it was also sort of strange. So Career Gig, a site that's less than a year old. I think they officially launched in July of 2020 acquired <oonlighting, who we've talked to at least once or twice a ten-year-old com or like an eight, seven, eight year old company. They raised $8.8 million 70 some employees, according to LinkedIn. Career Gig, brand new company, less than like a dozen employees, I think. Joel (20m 12s): So when you think about who would be the acquire of this, of this transaction, you would default to Moonlighting buying Career Gig, but that's not what happened. So something is a little bit weird about this one, but good for Moonlighting. If it's good for them, they're both really into the blockchain thing, which I know feels a little bit, 2019 or so, but they're both into that. So that's going to be something that they're going to build on. Any, any thoughts on the Career Gig, Moonlighting acquisition? Chad (20m 44s): Back and forth with Jeff Tennery, who was the CEO of Moonlighting? And I said, yeah. So what's up with the Moonlighting and this whole blockchain thing that we talked about a couple of years ago, and he said, yeah, the Moon bit is pretty much died in he, the SCC deaths. But, but yeah the portable blockchain verified resume, he believes still will disrupt screening companies and save hiring companies time and money. So, and freelancers will obviously get hired too. So it's that whole still conversation of trust in the blockchain itself. I think it's going to be incredible. It's going to be on the vendors, not to be able to have something that's complex, whether it's blockchain or not. Chad (21m 30s): It doesn't matter. It's kinda like we, we talked, we've talked about cloud computing way back in the day. Today just happens. Right. I don't give a shit how that happens. Tell me it's blockchain. It's verified. It's trusted. Great. That's all you have to tell me. I don't have to go through the entire process. Will they get there? That's the question? Joel (21m 50s): Yeah. I mean, we talk a lot about, you know, two dinosaurs cuddling up to stay warm when the nuclear winter hits. And this sort of feels a little bit like that. You know, the, the gig platforms are blowing up, right? Upwork's blown up Fiverr, Uber. Like all these companies are on the upswing because of the, the public markets and where the world is going. These guys are at least Moonlighting, Career Gigs, probably too new to sorta make that, that statement. But Moonlighting missed the window. They spent too much time on, on whatever Coinbase, whatever spun their wheels. And I think missed the window. And this is their fate. Joel (22m 29s): So I suspect Moonlighting will disappear in the next year. And Career Gig will sputter around for a while. Maybe get some money, but I don't think we'll, we'll be lighting the world on fire with this, this acquisition. We'll see, Chad (22m 43s): But you know, what's not going to disappear? SOVREN (22m 54s): Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry, the more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com, that's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren ~ software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad (23m 19s): You know who, I want to take the dinner? Actually, they should be taking us out to dinner. Joel (23m 24s): What? Chad (23m 24s): Yeah, listeners, Kevin Kirkpatrick, who just took a new gig as the VP of Search Solution, but Optimum Talent and Jonathan Zhou who stepped into a VP of Sales role over at Jumpstart. Congrats guys, the beers are on you when we finally get the shots! Joel (23m 45s): By the way, speaking of Bitcoin, which we talked about briefly, I got a shout out for Red Balloon Security. Oh yes. So talk about your prescreening tests. Like they don't need no chat bots. So what these guys do is when someone wants to get a job at their company, they send you a little, a little puzzle kit with, if you, if you crack it open, if you hack it open, there's about $4,000 worth of Bitcoin. No, I did not say 4,000 Bitcoin. I said $4,000 worth of Bitcoin. So of the people that they send this out to that want a job at the company, roughly 1% can crack the challenge. And of course, those people get four grand in Bitcoin, but also they get a job. Joel (24m 28s): The CEO of the company says the money is well spent based on what other, you know, areas that we would spend money on. They do change the challenge pretty frequently. So you can't just go online and figure out the answer. So this is how one company does pre-screening and frankly, I salute them and they deserve a shout out for that's going the extra mile. That's totally a gangster Red Balloon Security, check it out, kids. Chad (24m 53s): In an article from Wired, it seems like Hirevue a leader, a leading provider of software for vetting job candidates based on an algorithmic assessment, said Tuesday, it is killing off a controversial feature of its software, analyzing a person's facial expressions in a video to discern certain characteristics. How did it take this long? Joel (25m 20s): It took a change in government to probably spur, spur everyone, to do this similar to how Twitter and Facebook realized they should bounce Trump off the platform because they realized that a democratic house, Congress and White House, and a Senate and White House are going to be in power. I keep going back to this privacy facial recognition shit as a governmental issue and state governments are coming after these companies, whether it be Illinois, we've talked about, we've talked about New York and New York continues to be on this a big time. And look, when, when governments get involved and you know, the Democrats are in power, like laws are going to be made. Joel (26m 1s): And when you have laws, guess what you have lawsuits. And the last thing any company wants is a lawsuit like HR exists to keep companies out of court. So the last thing they're going to do is like hire a vendor or pay money for a solution that could get them sued, which makes it very hard for companies to sell to a customer that doesn't want their product because they could end up in court, which means their job is in jeopardy. Because now the CEO is all pissed off that hiring practices got them, got them thrown into court. So Hirevue had to make some changes and which they've obviously done. They see the writing on the wall. And this is, this is, this is very foreboding for anyone in the facial recognition business, unless maybe your in security, maybe the government will overlook security issues. Joel (26m 49s): But yeah, if you're doing hiring where this is where bias and, and you know, racism, or, you know, run rampant, like facial recognition just does not, does not mix with that very well. Chad (27m 1s): Was about a year ago when Illinois actually put out the legislation to nix this shit? Not to mention, we continue to see how facial recognition doesn't work very well with individuals of color. And we already have enough discrimination as it is, but yet, but yet it took them this long to shut this shit down. I mean, that's the thing that bothers me the most. As somebody on the outside, looking in from an optic standpoint, if I'm the CEO, I shut that shit down quick, because I see from not just a diversity equity and inclusion standpoint, it's an issue, but it's also a justice issue. Joel (27m 38s): Yeah. Chad (27m 39s): So these guys shutting this down is a fucking layup a year ago, doing it now I look at them and say, what the fuck are you even thinking? Why even throw a press release or even let anybody know that you're shutting it down, do that shit quietly because you didn't do it fast enough. Joel (27m 55s): Yeah. It may be a bad sign for automation in general. So one of the story, Forbes writer, Forbes, or Fortune, I forget where we got this from. So Alex Angler, who's a fellow at the Brookings Institute, which is a left leaning think tank, if you will. He studied AI on hiring. He says the idea of using AI to determine someone's ability, whether it is based on video, audio or text is farfetched. He says that it is problematic that the public can not vet such claims. Quote "there are parts that machine learning can probably help with, but fully automated interviews where you're making inferences about job performance, that's terrible." He says, quote, "modern artificial intelligence can't make those inferences" Joel (28m 39s): end quote. Chad (28m 40s): Yes, which is why New York City is proposing regulations against hiring algorithms, not just facial recognition, but hiring algorithms entirely. So this is another Wired article in 1964, the Civil Rights Act barred the humans who made hiring decisions from discriminating on the basis of sex or race. Now software often contributes to these hiring decisions, helping managers screen resumes, or interpret video interviews. So we talked to Ahena Karp from HiredScore just a few weeks ago. If you haven't heard that interview, go back, look for it. Those organizations are specializing in certain areas to ensure that bias does not creep in and they're doing that through constant auditing as well. Chad (29m 31s): But one thing that we have to do, and this is actually something that we talked about on the rack panel today is that none of this is a silver bullet. There's no thing as an easy button. So if you don't think that there's work involved, you just need to walk away from the table now. Joel (29m 48s): I want, I want to know where this rack panel is and how I can like be a part of it. Anyway. Yeah. So the story talks about HiredScore and Piametrics, which are, I think, both New York-based companies. I mean, my fear for them, and we both know Athena and Tyler Weeks who, our buddy from Intel is now at that company as well. So we feel very confident that they're doing the right thing and doing things that they need to do. My fear for them is similarly to how companies will just buy something, because it's on the checklist. Maybe it'd be a SEO, or maybe it'd be chat bots or programmatic. My fear is that there's going to be a list of things you don't buy no matter what. And if anything, that has algorithm, automation, you know, any of these words that companies think are going to get us thrown into court or get us sued. Joel (30m 35s): And just because you're on that list makes you a no buy. I fear that companies will get swept into that category. And that would be a shame for sure, but I fear that it could be the future. Chad (30m 47s): Keep the attorneys out of the conversation because they fuck everything up. That's all I got to say. It's all about ensuring that you know exactly what's going on. It's white box, it's defendable, it's explainable, but these are things that we need as businesses to ensure that we can scale to the need, not to mention many, many of these technologies, will give our candidates and our customers better experiences. We won't have that shitty black hole that we've had for decades, which we've really treated human beings badly during the hiring process, these technologies can help with that. Chad (31m 29s): We just have to be smart. And we have to ensure that we're dealing with the right vendors. And we partner with the right people. Joel (31m 36s): Yeah. Let's hope that in a world where we leave behind governance by Twitter, that we start making actual thoughtful decisions and get people with brains to think these things through, because that would be a much better future. But speaking of Trump, God did I say that? All right, soon, we won't be talking about him. Right? Anyway, the layoffs are happening by the rioters. We all knew it was coming. Apparently the, the dude with the Buffalo, Buffalo soldier, I don't know what this guy was. He's sort of the face of the movement, the guy with the Buffalo wig and a face. Yeah. There are a few, I guess, faces of this thing. Joel (32m 17s): But so this guy apparently lives with his mother, which I think is very appropriate. Chad (32m 20s): Big surprise. Joel (32m 21s): Based on what happened. But yeah, we're seeing tons of layoffs. This was my favorite direct marketing company, Navistar. It had an employee with their actual company badge on that was visible during the riot. Yeah, he got fired. A Pennsylvania teacher, Chad (32m 39s): Not rocket science. Joel (32m 40s): Not a rocket science there at Navistar. They had a Pennsylvania teacher get fired. A Texas lawyer, an ex-Pennsylvania state representative resigned from a teaching position. Chad (32m 53s): CEO Joel (32m 53s): Yeah. Seattle police are investigating two of its officers. I feel like this is just the beginning. I'm sure you're seeing these tapes where people have inside jobs, this thing. And they like, I don't know, blueprinted the Capitol. There are people in the window saying, Hey, if you go down these stairs directly, that Pelosi's is on the right. And so they've, they sort of pan this all out. And as, as these people get identified, I fear that they're going to be a lot more layoffs and fortunately, a lot more arrests because of this shit. Chad (33m 24s): Yes. And one thing that we have to get beyond is we have to understand the actual narrative that's being pushed back and you'll see false equivalences of like black lives matter, which shouldn't be in the conversation in the first place. Joel (33m 39s): No. Chad (33m 39s): This comes down to criminality, right? So if we break it down in the very simplistic area of, did you commit a crime, right? I don't care what protest you were at, right. Did you commit a crime? Were you committing a crime and you were you the rocket scientist who actually wore your badge while you're committing a crime. Joel (34m 2s): Genius. Chad (34m 3s): We have as HR professionals need to help our organizations better shape the narrative and the understanding of what this actually means. Joel (34m 12s): Yep. By the way, I mentioned it in the opening, and we've all seen the platforms that have like pushed the eject button on, on Trump. Why is Pinterest on that list? Like, was Trump sharing lasagna recipes that I didn't know about? I mean, what in the fuck is Pinterest blocking Trump for? Am I missing something on that one? Chad (34m 33s): It's cool to block Trump right now. And I, and I agree. Joel (34m 37s): And we get on that list. I want to be on the list with everybody. Chad and Cheese have officially blocked Trump from being on our podcast and Parlor too. Wow! Parlor's out of business. That's kind of crazy though. Chad (34m 50s): Well, it's interesting because somebody actually responded to a post that I put on LinkedIn around Parlor, having an issue with Amazon web services. And the response was it's no big deal, they'll find somebody else. No, they won't. Right? If you get kicked off of Amazon web services, everybody's looking at them going, huh? There's a reason why they were kicked off. Yeah. We don't want your business either. So, you know, there has been this rolling effect that, you know, if you're going to harbor and you're going to allow these types of things to happen on your platform, especially if you're a young platform like Parlor, you're easy to kick the fuck off. Chad (35m 33s): If Facebook was doing this and it wasn't happening, it would be a lot harder. Joel (35m 38s): Yeah. Yeah. They can a server. It's just going to be in, you know, in Istanbul somewhere, or, you know, some third world country where the uptime will probably not be guaranteed to 99.9%, by the way. So yeah. They're going to have some real challenges and by the way, the, the duopoly of iOS and Android, like how powerful is that? I mean, if you can't be on those, your kind of fucked. Yeah. Chad (36m 1s): Yeah. Kicked out of the app store. You are gone. Joel (36m 5s): Especially if you're a social media application, like you're really, you're really fucked. You're really fucked. Chad (36m 11s): You know what? You might not be gone if you die because Microsoft, well, let's talk about it after the break. Joel (36m 18s): Yeah. Let's take a break. We'll talk about Microsoft zombie chatbots. Jesus, that doesn't get you to stick around. I don't know what will. JOBADX (36m 25s): Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for long-term full time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. JOBADX (37m 6s): We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Chad (37m 49s): So guess what? There could be an opportunity where there will be a Chad bot. Joel (37m 57s): That's bad dude, When they're dad jokes and Chad jokes. And that's good. That's like, so what are you talking about, Chadbot? Chad (38m 5s): Microsoft has filed a patent, which raises the intriguing possibility of Joel (38m 13s): Digitally reincarnating people. Chad (38m 14s): Reincarnating people as a chat bot. Instead of using the conventional method of training, chat bots, using conversations and material from a wide sample of users, the system would use quote/unquote, "social data," such as images, voice data, social media posts, electronic posts, and written letters. Written letters? To build a profile of a person. So it would actually take you and try to create pretty much your persona and then apply a chat bot behind it. Joel (38m 47s): Yeah. Why not? The Chad and Cheese podcast can live on forever. Well, after we're dead, we'll just have our voices, AIed and we'll report the news that comes in through RSS feeds and whatever else. No, I mean like my first impression, of this is like, it's a bit crazy, a little bit like the movie, Her, where you have relationship with voices and AI. Now, if you can recreate someone's voice, that's pretty crazy. Chad (39m 11s): They should be able to, with us all the content that we have. Yeah. Joel (39m 14s): I think it's going to happen whether we care or not. But, you know, I think about like, you know, I lost my mom last year. Like would I want to have conversations with her still? If it knew exactly the kind of thing she would say or advice she would give, like, I guess? Would I want to talk to my grandfather, you know, decades after he was gone, when my grandchildren want to know, like, can you re-connect with people and family that you wouldn't be before? Could I talk to Ben Franklin someday? And what would he say about stuff? Like, so I guess it's kind of cool in that way, although it's a little bit creepy, but yeah. It's probably the future anyway. I think you also get to the point where like, you know, if you're dumped in a relationship, but you still want to be in the relationship, even though that person doesn't, you can still kind of be in that relationship, if you want. Chad (40m 8s): No, Joel (40m 8s): You don't like that one, like, you know, like I'm going to, I'm going to, before I go to bed and I'm going to talk to like 25 of my exes to see what, what they would do about my marriage or something. Chad (40m 26s): No, that being said, I think I need a beer. Joel (40m 28s): We need, we need a little funk to take us out, man. Ask, Oh yeah, everybody have a good week. We out. Chad (40m 39s): We out. OUTRO (41m 30s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Adding to the long line of guests much smarter than the podcast hosts, The Chad & Cheese welcome author, entrepreneur, filmmaker, tech philosopher, and Death Metal singer Somi Arian to the show. Did someone say Death Metal? Somi is plugging her new book, "Career Fear (And How To Beat It), which talks about how A.I. is changing the world and how savvy professionals - talking to you, recruiters - can prepare to thrive in this fast-evolving world. Tiger matching prowess powered by Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Sovren (0s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. 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 (22s): In the long line of interviews where we talk to people much smarter than us. Chad (27s): That's easy. Joel (28s): Welcome Somi Arian, to the show, everybody. Chad (32s): There we go. Joel (33s): She is ready for this, Chad. Yes. She is a tech philosopher, filmmaker, author, entrepreneur, speaker, and a quote "transition architect." And she's the author of a new book, entitled Career Fear (and how to beat it): Get the Perspective, Mindset and Skills You Need to Futureproof your Work Life. That's a mouthful. So me, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. What did I miss in the bio? What else should we know about you before getting into the Q and A. Somi (1m 3s): I guess the main thing that's, I'm working on these days that maybe the people haven't gotten the memo yet because it's only three or four months is I have a Think Tank for women in business and technology that's been taking all of my time. You know, that's started as a side hustle, but it's becoming my main hustle now. So that's probably the main thing, the think tank for women in business and technology. Joel (1m 27s): So, so talk about that. Our listeners might not know. Somi (1m 30s): So, I use the term think tank quite loosely. This is a big platform that I'm building, where women will be able to find new opportunities and the main, the main kind of thrust of it, is the fact that it there's the fact that women have been held back in business and technology for for many years. And when you look at you go back to the past few hundred years, you know, since the start of the industrial revolution, when we've actually had entrepreneurial endeavors, women have been in the shadows. And same thing is in science and in STEM fields. Somi (2m 14s): So the whole point of this is to bring them in back into, or bring them into not back, but bring them into maybe even for the first time into these fields and trying to get women to think about what young girls especially think about changing that mindset of, you know, girls play with dolls and boys, you know, our engineers and changing that mindset and getting girls to actually think about building businesses and learning how to use technology. And the bottom line is I want to change this scenario where, but you look at the top 10% or top, you know, even 1% of people who are in business and technology, the leaders, they're all men. Somi (2m 55s): You know, you look at the top 10 companies that run the world, right? Top 10 companies around the world, five in the US Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. And then in China, we have Jami, Walway, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent all run by men. There's not one woman in that picture. I want to change that. Chad (3m 14s): So today you're Founder, Managing Director at Smart Cookie. You're an opinion columnist at CEO World Magazine, obviously author this new book. But before that you were a visa officer in the Netherlands are, I'm sorry, Somi (3m 30s): In the Netherlands embassy. Chad (3m 32s): The Netherlands embassy, you're a program officer for the International Organization for Migration and a program officer for the UN. Yeah. So what, what brought you to talking about careers, robots, millennials, marketing, what actually brought you here? Why do this? Somi (3m 50s): Well, you know, I have a very diverse background. I suppose my biggest passion in life is philosophy. You know, the thing that interests me more than anything else is on the standing life, understanding what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What is this all going? Where is this all going? And what's this all about? And since I was a child, I was always asking that and I was terrible at math and I wasn't very good at, I wasn't generally a good student. And they told me that I wouldn't amount to anything. Chad (4m 20s): Ouch. Somi (4m 20s): And my father said, so what are you going to do? And I said, Oh, that I want to get paid to think like, I want it, I want to make a living to think, and my dad said, like, that's not normally he gets paid to think. And I was like, yeah, there are philosophers, like, you know, Aristotle and Nietzsche. And he was like, well, first of all, you know, nobody will pay you to think. And secondly, those were men and women can'tNietzsche become philosophers. And, you know, like nature didn't exactly have the best of the endings. And I was like, no, I'm going to become a philosopher. Chad (4m 56s): It sounds like to me. And I have, I have two daughters and Joel has a daughter. It sounds like you actually put your foot down and said to the world, fuck you. I'm going to be who I want to be. Joel (5m 7s): Amen. Somi (5m 8s): Exactly. Actually, there's a, there's a Persian poet. Now I'm actually going to get a Kelly Grafton and put it on my, because I come from a very traditional, my parents had no money growing up and they made, they forced me to marry my first cousin, which is quite common in Iran, when I was 17. And I was like, no, I don't want to do that. And, and, you know, went through a, it, it caused a whole breakdown of family relationships. Ad I was like, I don't care that it's going to break all the family relationships. So everybody thinks that, you know, I'm quite selfish, but I was like, you know, no, it's my life.. And I'm not going to let that happen. And there's this Persian poem that says, basically says, like, I'm not the one that would let the world fuck with me. Somi (5m 56s): Like if the world fucks with me, I'm going to fuck it up. And you can, you can beep that. Chad (6m 4s): Well, that let's go ahead and parlay that into the, into the next topic. The world is fucking with us. It's called Covid in many companies are focusing on, or at least they're talking about safety per se. And they're bringing in more robots. I mean, we see Microsoft robots for replacing news producers, Tyson robots are replacing butchers, gas, the Gap robots and Walmart and Amazon for warehousing. I mean, the list goes on. So I mean, this to me, and we were talking before, before the interview, this seems like a fairly simple math equation. Humans should be talking about universal, basic income, not about their next job. Chad (6m 48s): Can you give us some insights on what you found? Somi (6m 51s): Well, I actually, I wrote an article it's on my LinkedIn. I hope that your listeners will check it out. It's four and a half thousand words so prepare for it. It's going to take a while to read. And it took me a week to write it. And it's been probably my most engaged article today on LinkedIn and, and it's, it's called COVID-19 and the Future of Business, Economy and Democracy. COVID-19 whether, you know, however, it came upon us COVID-19 is it has accelerated that trend. It's definitely making it easier. I guess it's making it more acceptable people would for people to accept the adoption of robots. Somi (7m 33s): Right. And so when I wrote my book, I talked about all of these things in it. And my book, I finished it at the end of 2019, and then it was going to go to publication. It was supposed to come out in July, which it did come out a little bit, like I think about two, three weeks later than it was supposed to because of COVID. But essentially what my point is that when I was writing that COVID hadn't happened, I was predicting a five to 15 year transition. All I can say is that instead of five to 15, now think about one to five years. Joel (8m 6s): Yeah, summarize the book for us real quick career fair and how to beat it. Like if you're, if you're describing the book to someone in our listeners, what would it be about? Somi (8m 15s): So at the bottom line, is it all comes down to my philosophy of "transition architecture." You know, what ""transition architecture is about is understanding that we should not think about necessarily transformation, like digital transformation. We need to think about constant transition. The bottom line is if you go with the idea of singularity, basically they're saying if people like Reiki as well, that in the next 20 - 25 years, we're going to come to a point where AI is going to supersede human level intelligence, and there will be pretty much nothing to do for 90% of society. Somi (8m 56s): Well, that's already happening. You know, I don't see like anybody who says that's not true. It's just simple math. Computers are becoming smarter in an accelerated fashion. You know, it almost exponentially humans aren't we have a skull and we, our brain is limited to what we have in that skull. And it's like, it's not going to expand any further. You're not going to be able to learn any faster if you're not going to be able to, to compress data any faster, you know, even if you were connected, you know, like companies like Neuralink, right. They're now creating Elon Musk's Neuralink. Normally, you know, even if there was a way that I could connect myself to say my phone directly so that I could have access to all the information in Wikipedia, it doesn't necessarily mean that I would be able to process that information with the same speed. Somi (9m 49s): Right. So, so if I can, so what is data processing? You know, what is understanding, what is knowledge? You know, it's essentially being able to compress that data that you take from the world and, you know, to be able to summarize it and understand it, right? So if we can't speed that up anymore than what it is now, maybe to some degree, you know, you can improve your nutrition or whatever, but, but we can't really process it any faster. And there is the possibility of brain machine interface, but we don't yet know how that could work and whether it would be accessible to everybody. So it's math, machines are superseding in every way. Joel (10m 28s): We both have children. Chad's are a little bit older than mine. I have, I have as young as a three-year-old, what skills should they be learning to sort of survive in this future? And you talk about like, how quickly change is going to happen. I'm ready. What'd you get in terms of, you know, how fast is change happening, what skills will be in demand and what, what should essentially younger people or people for sure be prepared for and doing the work. Cause I'm guessing that schools are, are ill prepared with the changes that are happening and how fast they happening. Somi (10m 57s): Basically you must have a technical skill or several technical skills, preferably. So I talk about this quite a lot in the book in the sense that you need to be multi-skilled, that's very important. And, you know, you'd think about like, I used to be in a death metal band, you know, like I know that that's not exactly it has had an impact. You know, it's definitely had an impact. I assume you're in a band. I, you know, did a lot of fitness modeling when I was younger. I have a background in politics and philosophy, you know, filmmaking, you know, now I'm teaching myself Python, so it's constantly learning. So you need to have technical skills. Somi (11m 38s): You've got to have that, but in addition to that, you need to have four human skills. And that's what, there are four chapters in the book that are about that. Those four human skills are emotional intelligence, contextual creativity, critical thinking and mindfulness. And when I talk about mindfulness, I'm not talking about sitting there 20 minutes a day. And meditating, I'm talking about full participation with the world, with what's happening. Like, for example, since exactly since the beginning of last year, October, I haven't even watched a single Netflix series or film or movie or nothing, because I think that when you spend a lot of time watching, you know, doing entertainment stuff, because you need to be in full participation instead on Saturdays, all of my day, like I wake up in the morning sometimes, you know, I sit there with my pajama and this is my, like absolutely my relaxation to practice coding and math, like seriously. Chad (12m 34s): So you don't want Netflix and chill. You don't Netflix and chill. You math and chill. Somi (12m 40s): Yeah. Algebra and math and algebra and chill. Yeah. Or Python and chill. Yeah. Why am I doing that? Not, I don't want to become a coder. I don't need to do that. I'm teaching myself that because I'm hiring people who are going to need to have those skills. It's kind of like, if you want to be a producer director, it's so much better. If you can also film and edit, not because you need to do it, but because you know how to speak to your, to a crew, to your editors. So it's really, I think, important that people learn lots of different technical skills, you know, and get really good at a few things and have an intermediate understanding of a few others and some basic understanding of some of the others. Somi (13m 25s): And, and in addition to that have those four skills. Chad (13m 28s): So for the bulk of it, for the bulk of the human population, we're mostly all stupid. Okay. We're not doing algebra on the couch, we're watching Netflix. I guess the question is how do we start to provide premium types of content that push our brains in that direction? Because instead of watching all of this, a reality TV, bullshit, that's out there, there are a ton of great documentaries or what have you to actually watch and consume. How do you do that? And how do you do that? As again, as a two things, not just as a parent, but also as a boss that, the millennial disruption that you talk about is definitely, I think it's here. Chad (14m 15s): I don't know that it's coming. I think that it's here. How do you, how do you, as a mentor, as a boss, try to help those individuals steer toward that versus, you know, reality TV. Somi (14m 29s): I think you do it by leading, you lead by example, you know, like I have a team and we are, they are you. I think, I wish I think they would be better people to talk to tell you how I do it with them. I pushed them. I really pushed them. You know, there's no easy moment. There's no day that's like yesterday, in our office, you know, it now our team, as some of them work from here, some of them work remotely, but no two days are the same. And it's a constant battle of, you know, them pushing themselves. And I, everybody has read the book and, you know, I give them examples of like, when things go wrong and I'm like, this is an example of critical thinking that I was talking to you about. Somi (15m 14s): This is your lack of critical thinking, or this is your lack of contextual creativity. This is what I want from you. You need to just think, I want you to bring something new to the table. Something unique, something that's not, I can't that I can't get from AI. And I show them examples of like how a lot of the stuff that they are now doing could be very easily. You know, it's just that somebody hasn't yet created an application for it, but they can all be automated 80% of it. So, so you do it by leading by example. If I sit here and watch Netflix and you know, like they come in and we talk about some reality show last night. No, there's no conversation with that. Chad (15m 51s): How do you shut that down though? So me, I mean, how do you shut that down? It's like, no, we're not talking about that stupid shit. That's dumb. You stop talking about that. I mean, how do you shut that down? Do you just kind of like, do you pivot, do you pivot into something more intelligent? Somi (16m 6s): I think that, like, I don't, I guess I'm quite a dominant character. Yeah. If I'm in the room, nobody dares. Okay. I come from Iran, right? Dictatorship. No, I'm joking, I'm joking. Chad (16m 22s): Is there a ducks hat they have to put on? I mean, it's almost like this public shaming that. Somi (16m 29s): No, no, no. I'm joking. No, no, no. Seriously. Like, no, no, everybody looks, we have, we have written our, our values on is on the wall and you know, our values, our speed, right? Number one is speed. And honesty and curiosity, if you don't have these things, you don't work for my company. We need to, we need to develop curiosity in ourselves and we need to help our young. And you know, like the girls who work with me, you know, they're like my children. I try to instigate that sense of curiosity in them. And if we are say with a client and somebody looks at their phone or something, and they're not fully engaged, like that person is probably not gonna last long. Somi (17m 12s): I need full engagement. I don't take anything less than that because we are like, that's what the company is called, Smart Cookie Media. I said, I'm only hire smart cookies. Chad (17m 22s): Okay. We get it. You're a tiger mom. Okay. Joel (17m 27s): We talked a lot about recruiting on the show. It's sort of the main theme of what we do and recruiting and automation and AI, it's sort of a scary environment, right? Cause it's, two-sided not only are there going to be less recruiters theoretically, because a lot of things like scheduling interviews, sourcing candidates, a lot of that's going to be AI and smart. And on the other side, there are fewer people to recruit. So you're almost getting a double whammy. And I'm curious, you, you say in one of the videos that I watched about you, you talk about outsourcing our brain. And the equivalent of that you talk about is, you know, when we cooked our food, we outsourced our digestion. I want you to talk about outsourcing your brain and how recruiters and professionals in general will have to be in will have to be able to live in this world and what that world looks like. Joel (18m 16s): Can you talk about that? Somi (18m 17s): Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So as humans, we have three main capacities. Those are physical, emotional, so physical, cognitive, and emotional in that, in that order, I believe. So the first thing that we did, you know, that's what really put us on the top of the food chain historically, was that we outsourced a lot of our physical tasks, right? So a lot of our physical capacities, when we outsource something, it enables us to increase our capacity, that we can do more of that. So it outsources and it enhances right. And we did that with our physical abilities and the industrial revolution. Somi (18m 59s): The first industrial revolution was the biggest, the most prominent example of that, where we were able to produce a lot more stuff. And we were able to have for the first time mechanization in factories. And then the next thing is that we are outsourcing or we have outsourced since the start of the digital revolution. And actually, I would say since the beginning of the time when we created the first computers, so we started to outsource our brain, right? So our cognitive abilities. So when you use a calculator, you're outsourcing you know, your brain, your cognitive abilities. Somi (19m 44s): So the next thing, the last thing, the only other thing that's left for us is our emotional capabilities. And once that is also outsourced, because we are already doing that, you know, where there are people that are maybe talking or using, interacting with their machines more than they are interacting with humans, and this will be increasing over time. So increasingly actually I mentioned Ray Kurzweil in the beginning, Ray Kurzweil wrote a book in the 1990s, it was called Age of the Spiritual Machine. And in it, he says that eventually we will be in a position where a majority of communication on earth is happening between between computers, between machines like two machines. Somi (20m 31s): And then it will be between human and machines and the least amount of communication will be between human and human. So that's like we are increasingly outsourcing all of these things. Like I gave the example of, if you're using, if you're, you know, cooking food, you're outsourcing your digestion to fire. So likewise, when we use these technologies that we are surrounded by, we are outsourcing. So recruiting, when it comes to recruiting, there's going to be two kinds of roles that we are going to be recruiting for. There are roles that are going to be replaced, you know, pretty soon. So like, so there's this interim you're we talk about this transition, you know, period, there, there will be, we will reach a level of plateau. Somi (21m 19s): We will be, we will get to a point where it will be quite clear what tasks we need humans for and what tasks we are gonna need. You know, that we can, we can outsource to machines. Very soon in the next, I would say, five years or so, we will get to a plateau level. And, and I think we will be left with about 10% of, yeah, roughly about 10% of tasks that we are going to need humans for. And those are going to be so complex that you, you really don't want to be really using machines. You know, I think that's the level where you do want to, you know, find the right people for those, because those people need to have those four human skills or, you know, and to give you an example, even if a new car, when it comes to things like creativity, you know, like in the past, you used to be able to hire, you would think like designers, right. Somi (22m 13s): You would bring in somebody and say, you know, I want you to design something for me. And, and you, you know, you marveled in their creativity, but actually now all of that can be generated by AI. And in many ways it can be done more, interestingly, much better because the AI can pull from so many different sources. Whereas one human is bringing from only one human's intuition and sources. So for example, we used to think of music as a creative task, but actually there in the book, I talk about contextual creativity as opposed to normal creativity. So normal creativity is like, you know, or artistic creativity or narrow creativity is like things like music and design and painting and things like that. Somi (22m 55s): All of those can be done by machines. And there are already examples where, you know, for example, the machine has created music that sounds better than, you know, Bach and Bach lovers have thought that was Bach, you know, so there's, so increasingly those tasks are going to go. So the kind of creativity that I'm talking about, let's think about, I always give this example of iPod. You know, when Steve Jobs came up with the idea of iPod, that's contextual creativity, and that's the kind of people that we need, you know, like, like the creme de LA creme, you know, that the top 10% of engineers and people who are going to be really present and engaged in their work. Somi (23m 38s): And then there's a top 1% of people who are like the driving force and the thinkers. I think over the next five years, we're going to see that, yes, we will be using algorithms to choose people. You know what those, but most of those jobs that algorithms can, we can use algorithms to choose they are going to be jobs that have a shelf life of about five years. Joel (24m 5s): I'm going to push back for a second. Do you really think a machine can make, you know, Bohemian Rhapsody or Smells Like Teen Spirit or the Mona Lisa? Somi (24m 14s): But that's where you go into contextual creativity, because that's like, you know, Bohemian Rhapsody is like about understanding the feeling of, you know, that like the, it really absorbing. Then I talk about concepts of contextual creativity. It's like, you need to absorb the essence of the society at that time. Right. And you, but when you, I think like something like Bach is a lot more mathematical, to be honest. I mean, I remember Bohemian Rhapsody has got a band, right? It's a lot more complex, complex. It's not one person's music. You know, it's a, it's a band they have put it together. Somi (24m 54s): So maybe it conceivable that you could have a group of, you know, you could have AI developed in a way that does, if AI could break down the role of each of those people, you may be surprised by how good something could come out of it and it may not be Bohemian Rhapsody, but it may sound very pleasant to the ear. And, and ultimately, you know, I think you can break it down to it's. It's a mathematics of colors is a mathematics of, of music and tone. And one of our biggest clients is Steinway pianos. And Steinway is like the Rolls Royce of pianos. Somi (25m 35s): I've been working with them for the past four or five years. And I actually just filmed an entrepreneur in Germany who is an amazing musician, but he chose to go into IT because he thought that he would never make enough money from if you went into music. So he went into IT and I interviewed him for my podcast. And actually he said that he's absolutely, you know, perceivable, that AI can create better music. Chad (26m 1s): Well, you heard at first here, kids get off Tik Tok, get off Netflix, do your math. The book is Career Fear. The author is Somi Arian. Thanks so much for joining us Somi. We really appreciate it. Somi (26m 18s): Thank you. Joel (26m 18s): I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me. Somi, if somebody wants to learn more about you, where would you send them? Somi (26m 25s): You know what, these days you just Google the person, you know, Somi Arian and then all of my social media links come up. Somi Arian, Google me. Joel (26m 35s): I love it. Chad (26m 35s): She knows search engine optimization. I love that. Joel (26m 39s): Chad, another podcast in the books. We out. Chad (26m 42s): We out. OUTRO (26m 43s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (27m 27s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

What a year so far, huh? The world needs a new beacon of hope, and Chad & Cheese are here to fill the void. On this week's show Paradox learns how to Spetz CareerBuilder does the walk of shame Google Union is not a new band Facebook helps clean your gutters and mow the lawn Albertsons kicks delivery to the curb and Illinois cleans up with weed Smoke up, Johnny, then pay homage to sponsors Jobvite, Sovren, and JobAdx. Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. 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 (22s): Live from your favorite new Banana Republic, affectionately known as the US of a it's the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joe "banned on Twitter" Cheeseman Chad (32s): and I'm Chad "25th amendment" Sowash. Joel (35s): And on this week's episode, Spetz or Swallows. Chad (39s): Ooooh. Joel (39s): Facebook goes gig and nerds look to unionize, power to the privileged. Take a break from hoarding your golden Bitcoin. We'll be right back. SOVREN (49s): Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry, the more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com, that's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren ~ software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad (1m 16s): Yeah. So how's 2021 working out for you? Joel (1m 19s): Yeah. Here's to 2022, damn, the dumpster fire just rolled over January 1st and then heads down in the new year. So what are your thoughts? Obviously we have to touch on a little bit. It's such big news, anarchy and America. What are your thoughts? Chad (1m 34s): Yeah, I think this is what happens when you allow a bunch of white privileged men who were in governments to incite a fucking riot. Joel (1m 44s): Whitey gone wild! Chad (1m 46s): That's exactly what's happened here if black lives matter, what a rolled up like those guys, we would had dead people, people in flex cuffs. I mean, overall, Anne Applebaum. She wrote an amazing article in the Atlantic this morning, and it's what Trump and his mob taught the world about America. And she nailed it. I mean, we, we were the bright shining. Joel (2m 12s): Beacon on a hill. Chad (2m 14s): You know, I talked to people from the EU all the time, all over the world and they're just like, fucking Americans always, always beating your chest. And this is what happens when that's all we do is beat our chest. We need to stop it. We need to be more humble. This shit happens and now we are not the pure democracy, the bright shining Banana Republic on the fucking Hill. I mean, it's fucking crazy. Joel (2m 40s): Come on, don't we get a Trump Mulligan, once every 200 years. Chad (2m 43s): Nope. Joel (2m 43s): I think that's somewhere in the history books, that we get a Mulligan. Chad (2m 46s): No. Joel (2m 47s): So yeah, we both talked about sort Chad (2m 49s): How many votes did he get? Joel (2m 51s): Yeah, I know 71 million. So yeah, you and I, you know, we've been more global than ever before, but the opinions of people around the world are important and we've heard it. I married a damn Canadian so everyday I got to hear about Trump, this and Trump that, so that's fun. My, my 2 cents around this whole thing is like, you know, if you have a democracy Republic, you know, trust and truth seem to be paramount in all of this. And I think truth has gone off the rails. Chad (3m 21s): It's not there. Joel (3m 22s): You know, having to take a really deep look at social media, you know what Facebook does to be more profitable in the short term while, you know, throwing democracy into the ground, needs to be evaluated because the truth, I literally think the people that stormed the capital believe that they are the revolution, revolutionary war reincarnated. I really believe that they think they have been screwed over that. They are waving the flag. They are Patriots that they're doing the right thing, because I think we all live in two different universes of truth. And I think social media media in general, I mean, I watch Fox and I go, is this what really? And then CNN, like, they're not even on the same page in many cases. Chad (4m 5s): Yeah. Joel (4m 5s): So truth is really out the door and then trust in terms of who we are as a people, do we trust our institutions? Do we trust, you know, voting literally no trust in our institutions and the rule of law and the democratic process. And like all that stuff needs to needs to be repaired. That was my takeaway from yesterday without trust and truth things just fall apart. You and I are old enough to remember the days of Tom Brokaw's and even, even further back than that with Walter Cronkite, right? Chad (4m 35s): Uh, huh. Oh, yeah. Joel (4m 35s): Hearing our grandfathers talk about when JFK got shot and Walter Cronkite was the voice of sorta reason, and we all have that one voice and that's totally off the rails. Russia infiltration is a problem. So yeah, shit's fucked up. We look bad in the world. I still believe call me naive. What's right with America, what's wrong with America. Isn't bad enough that it can be fixed with what's right with America. And I have a little bit of faith in Joe Biden, super loved his comments yesterday. He went on TV, like he had a pair, unlike, unlike the other guy down the street and that was really heartening. Chad (5m 14s): I'd like to say in pivoting toward the more optimistic yes, Stacey Abrams, you give that woman whatever she wants. She allow her to do the vaccination rollouts, allow her to do whatever it is cause she's going to do it right. She's going to execute and she's going to make shit happen. Right? And that's what we saw in Georgia. We saw a rally of truth. We saw a rally of people who never voted before and mainly I believe have taken a look at the demographics. But I mean, mainly I think it was, was black people. They understand that they do have a voice and they did with Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Chad (5m 56s): And I think to the whole day was overshadowed. That that topic in itself was overshadowed by the shitstorm of yesterday. But we have to remember that has happened. And hopefully God, please a new day is going to be coming soon. And we can change this shit. Joel (6m 14s): Talk about in defense of the long game. I mean, Stacey Abrams seems like a, sort of a overnight success. She's apparently been building this foundation for over a decade. So, you know, these things don't don't happen overnight and hats off to her that she played the long game and is reaping the rewards, you know, years and years hence, hats off to her, for sure. Chad (6m 35s): So let's talk about winners! Joel (6m 37s): Winners! Winner, winner, winner!. All right. So listeners know about our Pappy's giveaway sponsored by our buddies at Sovren, who we love to no end, we, we did a random drawing. We went to random.org. So by the way, if you need to ever pick a winner of something, randomly check out random.org. It's what my wife uses for all her science shit. So anyway, so drum roll. We've got Matt O'Donnell! Chad (7m 3s): Whoa. Joel (7m 6s): People Scout is our first Pappy's winner. Matt, congratulations to you. Our second Pappy's winner goes to Lynn Morton of Tradify hats off to you guys. How great is that? All right. Then our constellation winner bummer. You just get a, a bottle of Blanton's Japanese Export Exclusive. Chad (7m 27s): A $500 bottle of Blanton's Joel (7m 30s): Yeah. You, you can cry in your DRAM as far as I'm concerned. It goes to Peter Suchi. There you go. Peter at CVS Health. So again, that's Matt O'Donnell, Lynn Morton and Peter Succhi. Hopefully I'm saying that name, right? It's not sucky or Suki are all big winners in our Pappy's Free giveaway. Again, thanks to Sovren. We're hoping that we can get a zoom tasting with everybody. Chad (7m 56s): YES! Joel (7m 56s): Cause we're gonna, we're going to have a drink and celebrate a little bit. Chad (7m 59s): AMEN. Joel (7m 59s): So big ups to them. We appreciate you guys. And we have more winners. Everybody wins. We're like Oprah on this fucking podcast. We got James Dineen from Recruitix. James is our beer drop sponsored by AdZuna winner. Man, dude is hyped. He is super hyped. He's an IPA drinker. We're getting that out to him now. We're gonna have a zoom tasting with James soon. He's out in California, so hopefully he can be on a beach while we're freezing our asses off here in Indiana. And let us know what life life is really like over some beer. Thanks Adzuna and Sovren. You guys rock the house. Chad (8m 40s): Amen. Amen. So a couple of weeks ago actually said that more of us should actually reach out to friends, old friends, new friends, and just have like virtual beer time. Right? Have this cathartic time that you and I enjoyed doing a podcast. Joel (8m 56s): Amen. Chad (8m 56s): But, so I was having virtual beers with an old high school buddy who works security in a hospital where we grew up in North central Ohio. And he says, I got vaccinated last week. And I'm like, damn dude, I am so fucking envious right now. He said, yeah, I was number seven in line. And in the medical facility in Mansfield, they have about 2,700 employees. Guess how many people were vaccinated on the first day? Joel? Joel (9m 25s): Oh, it's gotta be a hundred percent right? Chad (9m 27s): 75 people, think about it. Think about it. We see, we see news reports of people lining up, taking selfies, showing their like shot marks and getting excited about getting vaccinated. Nope, not at redneck central, my friend. Joel (9m 46s): So my sister manages a senior living center and she got her second shot today. So shout out to my sister for that one. This shit is real. Like she's had an outbreak of 28 people and she's had a super tight facility, an 18 year old who came in, brought it in and it shit spread like wildfire. So glad the vaccine is rolling out so glad that we can save the people that we can. And God damn it, get the shot, man. The people that can get it like Chad and myself were jealous, man. And the fact that you don't want to take it, like what the hell is wrong? Chad (10m 19s): So, so the Hill reported in Ohio, 60% of nursing home staff elected not to take the vaccine. What the fuck people, you are the ones taking care of the most susceptible citizens in United States. This to me is a bridge too far. And, and we talked about this last week. This is going to be something that the EEOC has already has already supported. If employers mandate you get that fucking shot before you come back to work, guess what's going to happen, kids. You're going to roll up that goddamn, that fucking sleeve. Joel (10m 57s): Yeah. We debate all the time of whether or not employers should require it. Like if any, should require it. It's these folks, senior living centers, healthcare facilities, Lord people, teachers, how about them. Yeah, it's crazy, man. It's going to be a weird year. Let's talk about some news. Chad (11m 13s): Event events. I have an events. I have an event, so, okay. Go figure it's virtual because I don't have my shot, but the Recruitment Automation Conference, which is next week, I'm going to be leading a panel of heavy hitting TA pros, Crystal Johnson from EA sports, Trent Cotton from BBVA and Jen Terry newly with Joveo after leaving AT&T after 20 years, we only have 40 minutes. So it's going to be fast and furious. I promise. But check me out on LinkedIn and Twitter for the registration link or go to wadeandwendy.ai. Joel (11m 54s): Those are some heavy hitters, but I guess, I guess every, every baseball team needs a water boy. Right? That's where, that's where you come in. All. That's that's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah. Let's get those stories. Chad (12m 5s): Topics. Joel (12m 6s): Paradox acquires Spetz, not Spitz that would be much more entertaining. Spencer swallows Paradox knows the answer, they acquired spetz.io on Israeli startup. It's raised a little less than a million dollars. Founded in 2017. I had never heard of them. I'll be honest and say, I'd never heard of them. And we talked a little bit about chatbots and know a little bit about people who do it. So they're selling, this is an Aqua hire, some smart people that are going to be joining Paradox. They're selling it as a global sort of footprint. They'll be able to serve customers all over the globe, more easily through an Israeli headquarters. Joel (12m 47s): They're playing, you know, everyone's giving the standard PR we're excited. This is awesome. Our customers are gonna love it. To me. It feels a little bit like consolidation, a little bit like a small up and coming player maybe, with some smart folks, there wasn't much talk about technology. So I don't know if that played into it at all. I'm guessing not so much. My guess is this was not a big price tag. There was no disclosure on the price, but my guess is knowing, knowing the Paradox leadership is I do they were probably pretty smart and got this guy on the cheap. Chad (13m 21s): It's less than a million in funding. And they're in Israel where we've seen companies like ZipRecruiter make large investments in building AI teams, but they did have some, some, a handful of notable brands. But I, I think to be quite Frank it's just another smart move to check the global box when selling to enterprise. iCIMS buys Opening and Easy Recruit, Smart Recruiters by JobPal and Phenom buys Endouble. So I think we're going to be seeing more of this. We're going to see the expansion and this, as we talked about before, I think buying chatbots or Aquahire per se, because they might just trash the tech overall, but being able to have those individuals much like AMS did when they bought, was it Jane or Karen or something like that, that was an Aquahire. Chad (14m 19s): And they bill hourly out of it. Right. So, I mean, it's like, let's get those engineers, let's get them where they're at. Let's expand. Let's check that global box and let's start building shit under the Paradox brand. And guess what? You get a big payday or a good payday. Joel (14m 36s): Yeah. Well, first of all, I love that they highlighted SodaStream as one of their clients because it was news to me that Soda Stream was still around. So that was nice. And secondly, you know, when you build these technologies and you've raised a million dollars and you look around and see, Oh, they've raised 40, they 50, like at some point you go, I'm bringing a squirt gun to a Howitzer fight and you say I better get and the right on the right playground and get the right partners to actually make my business viable. So I don't, you know, I made light of like discount shopping, but there may have been a real original effort by Spetz to say, look, we don't want to raise the money, or we don't want to focus on that. We know that we need more resources to be competitive. Joel (15m 16s): Let's call up, you know, some of the players that we, that we respect and see if we can get a deal done. And maybe that's what happened there. Chad (15m 23s): Yeah. Pepsi owns SodaStream by the way. Joel (15m 26s): Ooh. Yeah. Who knew You got, you knew Sodas so well, you're such a sugar fiend. Chad (15m 32s): We've got the internet. Joel (15m 34s): You have the internet. The internet, what the hell is that? Chad (15m 40s): I want to take a quick diversion away from, you know, Spetz listeners sent us an email that they received from CareerBuilder the other day, where CareerBuilder was looking to enforce their auto renewal services a little bit, a little bit tighter, right? Joel (15m 57s): No shit. Chad (15m 58s): Now, generally, generally we wouldn't see this as a big deal at most organizations, I believe moves that appear to be small like this for CareerBuilder are indication of that companies move away from humans and toward bleeding as much from the bottom line as they possibly can. Joel (16m 16s): Sure. Chad (16m 16s): The big question is how long do you think CareerBuilder can milk what they've been doing before? They just, they just dry up and die. Joel (16m 24s): Yeah. By the way, it's hard to ignore something that's running around with its head on fire. It tends to like draw the eyeballs to it. But yeah, this new sort of, I dunno, policy where you have to give a 90 day notice if you're a one-year contract, which is that's crazy. Right. But what's crazier. This is really crazy. If you're a monthly contract, you have to give a 15 day notice that you're canceling. So in 15 days of your contract, you got to let us know if you're in or out, which I think is ridiculous. It reminds me of the original Star Wars. There's a scene where Princess Lea, Darth Vader talking. And she says something like, you know, the tighter you, you make your grip on the rebellion the more we slipped through your fingers. Chad (17m 9s): Yeah. Joel (17m 10s): And when companies like have to grasp onto those last straws of customers, what ends up happening is all the customers just slipped through their hands and go somewhere else. And that's essentially, I think what CareerBuilder is doing here, they're thinking that they're holding onto customers when they're really losing them. They're on the wrong side of history here. The world is moving towards, you know, software as a service, pay us by the month, pay us for the year you'll get a discount for doing so. Cancel any time, no long-term contracts and this, yeah, this is gonna, this is just going to play out poorly for them as everything else does. They're going to lose more clients. People are going to be pissed off at them because they're renewing that they don't want renewed. Joel (17m 52s): It's just the dumpster fire, continuing to blaze at Careerbuilder. Chad (17m 56s): How long do you think they'll last a year? Joel (17m 57s): Oh, the company. Sure. They'll last. I don't think Irena will last, I think she'll be gone. And they, I mean, they may sell it. I mean, look, there's a big hiring spree coming apparently from the pandemic being over. So, you know, a year from now might be the time, the right time to like unload it to somebody who wants to pay for a premium for it. Chad (18m 16s): I don't know what they have left other than broadband, but okay. Yeah. Joel (18m 19s): They have 90 day notices on their contracts, but that's what they have. You buy CareerBuilder you've got cashflow for at least 90 days. Chad (18m 27s): They might, they should probably switch to the gig economy. Joel (18m 31s): They probably should, as is hot these days, as you know, when something is hot and profitable, guess who pays attention? Mark Zuckerberg and the kids at Facebook. So we've got word here recently that Facebook has taken a look at the growth of Upwork, Uber, Instacart, Door Dash, you name it and have said, we might want a piece of that. So they're looking a little hard at the gig economy, no specific plans or official plans. This is sort of rumor mill stuff, but they've gotten into jobs. They've gotten into sort of Slack territory with messaging. What are your thoughts on Facebook heading into the gig economy? Joel (19m 12s): Like all the cool kids. Chad (19m 13s): Yeah. Get a, give a shout out to the job board doctor. I read this on his blog personally. I think this is like a side hustle. Joel (19m 20s): Happy New Year doctor. Chad (19m 21s): Yeah. I think this is kind of like a side hustle, more of a come over and set up my Ikea kind of platform more than a, a major project based gig platform. I mean, I've used the marketplace to sell lawn mowers and furniture and it's easy. And I think this might be a great way for people to get like task rabbit types of hustles, but this is not a steady platform to find gigs, to feed your family. Joel (19m 47s): Gotcha. So mowing the yard. Yeah. Thumbs up. Coming in to be chef of my restaurant. Not so much. Chad (19m 54s): Old ladies wanting their light bulbs changed in their home. I mean, stupid shit like that. Right. That needs done Cleaning up, cleaning out gutters, you know, that kind of shit. Right. But this is, this is, this is not going to be really anything other than again, like a task rabbit. Joel (20m 9s): Yeah. Yeah. They're going to be too worried about replicating Cameo apparently. And we'll get to this later, but all their workers are going to start unionizing soon. So they've got bigger problems and taking on Fiverr, Upwork and Uber. Chad (20m 22s): Well, a bigger problem though, is that in a story from MarketWatch, the first signs of the broad effects of the passage of prop 22 in California. Albertson's confirmed Monday that it's moving away from doing its own grocery delivery in Southern California and toward using third party delivery services. Albertsons is also Vons, Pavilions Safeway, and they decided to shift in early December. How does this shape the market moving forward? I mean, if you have FTEs and/or, you know, part-timers out there under your umbrella, you're mainly just pushing them out into the jungle of gig work. Joel (21m 4s): I think if you are a big enough organization and I would put Albertsons in that category, you should be running your own show. If you're a small, you know, one restaurant, you know, a couple, a couple businesses locally, like you should totally be leveraging Instacart, Door Dash or whatever, because you do not have the capacity to have an army of people delivering shit for you. But if you have the wherewithal, you should have a mobile app that has rewards, that has a branding experience, when someone delivers something that makes you feel a certain way when it's delivered by your company. And aside from the branding components of that and you know, I mean, I know there are issues with, we have more employees and it's a whole thing. Joel (21m 48s): And like the technology around that what's gonna happen is, you know, take heat from Netflix, Amazon, like these things sound good until Instacart launches their own grocery store and they already have the data you laugh, but I'm serious. Chad (22m 3s): No, I agree. Joel (22m 3s): They have all the data of all these customers, what they like to buy when they like to buy it. You know, they have all this data and data is the new gold, right. Or the new Bitcoin. One of the two. Yeah. So, so, you know, 10 years, five, 10 years down the road, Albertsons is going to go, Holy shit everyone's just buying directly from Instacart. Like, no one's buying from us anymore because it's a better experience with Instacart. So to me, like, if you're big enough, you should make the investment to have your own delivery, have rewards, hook people in, give them, you know, shit, extra like Prime video and stuff that makes it even better. Give them local cue. I don't know what, what you have to do. Chad (22m 42s): Yeah. And when Albertsons itself has revenues of $62 billion per year, and then Safeway, Safeway's at $38 billion. It's like guys Kroger, they own the ecosystem, the data. So I agree a hundred percent. I think this is a bad move. Joel (22m 59s): Yup. Yup. But what's not a bad move is choosing JobAdX. JobAdX PROMO (23m 4s): Are you prepared to engage the wave of returning job seekers? Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for longterm full time talent your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX (23m 43s): JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Joel (24m 18s): You ready for a big sports weekend? Chad (24m 21s): Kind of. Joel (24m 22s): Yeah. Yeah. So I got, I got to give some quick shout outs to my sports, my sports. So, my mighty ball State Cardinals Church, they have, they have a football team chirp chirp motherfucker. So my balls day Cardinals played the San Jose State Trojans or nights or something and, and kick their ass. So shout out to my ball state cards, shout out to my Browns who made the playoffs for the first time in 18 years, they're going to get their asses whipped by the Steelers A team. But anyway, that's a different story. And shout out to Indiana. If you're a basketball fan, specifically, a college basketball fan, the entire March tournament is going to be in the state of Indiana. Joel (25m 6s): So that'll be a party. And lastly, in sports, the Red Sox hired the first woman coach ever in pro baseball. That is a little bit of progress. I'm guessing she's going to be on the, A squad, a single a ball, but Hey, it is progress. Shout outs in sports. Chad (25m 25s): You missed the best sports overall Dabo Sweeney get smacked in the face by Ohio State. Joel (25m 31s): I was leaving it for you. Chad (25m 33s): Dabo Sweeney starts talking smack to Ohio State saying Ohio State doesn't deserve to be in the top four. Joel (25m 41s): Number 11. Chad (25m 42s): Yeah, number 11 that's what he put them as 11 and then Ohio State just gobsmacked the fucker. And yeah. So enjoy your time at home Dabo. Joel (25m 52s): All right. Give me an Alabama Ohio state prediction. Chad (25m 54s): I'm gonna go 49- 28. Joel (25m 58s): Blow out. Okay. I like your 49, but I'm gonna, I'm going to skew to like 45 for Alabama at Ohio, Ohio State win. Definitely pick the Ohio State to cover in your betting activities. Speaking of betting activities or betting it all, Google employees or Alphabet are unionizing. This is a story that got your attention. Chad (26m 18s): Yep. This one is from the LA times. More than 400 workers across Google and other units of Google's parent company Alphabet has signed up for the union, which has been quietly in the works for over a year. People involved or familiar with this organization said it marks the "culmination of a year's of walkouts, petitions and increasingly public discussions among tech employees related to race, ethics and technology and other issues. Yet very few have voted to formally join a union until now." So unions have been really a staple for working class jobs to provide protection, collective bargaining, fair, pay benefits. Chad (27m 5s): But this is more than that. These are white collar and better paid individuals. Well, why do you think they're doing this? Joel (27m 12s): Yeah. I have visions of like a bunch of millennials eating avocado toast and saying like, it's wrong and then fill in the blank of whatever, whatever it is, right. I mean, when you, when I think of unions, you know, I'm thinking Jimmy Hoffa, you know, war on the streets with scabs and, you know, poor families and towns in West Virginia digging coal and shit. I mean, this flips that totally on its head. These are like knowledge workers. These are educated folks that could probably go anywhere and get a pretty good job. Now, while I, while I'd rather see Amazon warehouse workers, unionize, and we've seen Amazon, you know, do back flips to try to get unions, like not to come into Amazon and firing people that talk about it or do activities. Joel (27m 57s): I am skeptical that this will have any kind of long-term impact on anything. I think these folks, they're not badly paid. They're not stuck in this job. It's not like, again, like the West Virginia coal mine, where like, there are no other jobs in town. This is what I have to do. We're going to get together and, and demand more wages that we can make a living. I have a hard time seeing that with these folks, if I were them, I'd say, look, take the money that you're getting, you know, the stock that you're getting in these companies, and just write a check to clean the oceans, you know, donate to black colleges or cure cancer or whatever, whatever initiative or cause that you want to support. I just don't see a lot of legs and, and you know, a union at Google call me crazy. Chad (28m 42s): Well, I think, I think you're dealing with different types of workers and there are a couple of quotes. So "if your main motive is profit, you may not put ethical concerns as high as the profit motive. We want to serve as a counterbalance to that," that's from one of the employees who is a reliability engineer. Another one says "I'm happy with the money and the benefits I make, but I can't be content with that. If I don't think my work is helping out the world." See, that's the difference between you Joel and the kids of today? No, no, seriously, seriously, you and I grew up where we were just pouring gas and coal, into the atmosphere. Chad (29m 25s): And we'll probably die out before this shit actually hits the fan. These guys care because it's going to impact them. So your thoughts are saying, write a check. It's gotta be bigger than that. You have to be able to, again, this is the difference between sitting on the bench and saying, that's wrong and getting the fuck up and doing something about it. Don't write a fucking check. Don't. You can do that if you want, but this does more, you get more people involved. You create community, you create movements. That's what they're trying to do. The big question is, do you think this union bug will spread to other big names inside Silicon Valley? Joel (30m 2s): I think that it will start sprouting activities at other companies. Again, I think like Amazon, there's going to be a real, a desire to squash it. You know, I've talked about making change through voting in the past. And I think similarly with these types of things, if you want to make a difference, don't buy shit. Like delete Facebook or stop using Google and use Duck Duck Go. Like these companies make so much money, their shareholders are so happy. No CEO wants to face the wrath of the public markets saying we're going to be less profitable because our workers don't like a certain thing. Chad (30m 42s): Again, this is a change. This is a change in the way we've done business. You're still in the eighties mindset. Joel (30m 49s): Still like money, right? These are spoiled brats. And as soon as the coffee shops and the pubs and the dance clubs opened back up, we won't hear about this anymore. Mark my words. Chad (30m 58s): The old white man in the room, you, you are the problem. Joel (31m 2s): I'm totally the problem, but this makes for good podcast doesn't it? Let's talk about jeez, facial recognition is just taken hit after hit this week. Chad (31m 11s): Dude. Joel (31m 11s): So recently we had a New Jersey man was accused of shoplifting and trying to hit an officer with a car. These are two, at least one really, really serious thing is a third known black man to be wrongfully arrested based on facial recognition. What are we going to do about this? Chad (31m 30s): So this is one of my predictions for this year. Last week on last week's podcast with Tim Sackett, check it out if you haven't listened to it yet, I predicted that the legislation against facial recognition and then the New York times prints this, which pretty much just fortifies, hopefully the prediction. And now this happened in February, 2019, Nijeer Parks was accused of shoplifting candy. And then exactly what you'd said, trying to hit a police officer with his car, except Nijeer was 30 miles away. When this happened, the software failed yet, he spent 10 days in jail and paid $5,000 to defend himself. Chad (32m 11s): This happened in February, in November, they finally dropped the charges. The thing that we have to take a look at here, whether it's hiring, whether it is social justice, which this definitely is, is are we using technology responsibly? And is it ready for general usage? It's not. We've got to get rid of this shit. Joel (32m 35s): Yeah. If the facial recognition camera can't capture the license plate of the car that tried to hit the cop, like, why should we think it should actually figure out who the hell is driving the car? The feds are going to get involved in this. I think this is a state issue, but I feel like with a liberal leaning government coming into power, these rules around privacy, facial recognition are going to come to a head. I assume that we'll see legislation at some point making this illegal, particularly for like security purposes and law enforcement and hiring. I think it's different. It's advertising or something like that. And that'll probably come to a head at some point as well. Joel (33m 17s): You know, will conservatives fight it. You know, I assume they might, you know, the party of law and order, right. They screwed that up yesterday. But anyway, the party of law and order, right? Like, so we're seeing stories of facial recognition, software sort of saw Antifa members in the crowd. And so, so there's this, I think there's going to be an element of pushing back on it, but man, you, you can't be putting people in jail because a computer says, yeah, that's who did it? Like, that's just a bad future. Chad (33m 48s): This is Minority Report shit. Right? This is like predicting that somebody is going to fuck something up and do it wrong. And just go, just go ahead. They're going to kill somebody, throw him in jail now. Joel (33m 57s): Yeah. And we're seeing that in the workplace, right? Like who's more likely to leave a company and we have companies that are trying to figure out, okay, who's a flight risk in terms of your talent, you know, your talent base. And that shit's all going to be, you know, I don't know something that is going to be dealt with. And I think ultimately the federal government is going to make some laws around. Yes, that's fine. Or no, it's not. And in most cases it's not. Chad (34m 19s): It's not. Joel (34m 21s): Well, what is right and who has great technology and is not in facial recognition whatsoever is Jobvite. Jobvite (34m 28s): 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 (34m 58s): So did you get your present from the boys at Karoo? Joel (35m 3s): Oh God, you didn't warn me you're going to bring this up. Yes I did. I got a, Oh, so this is great. My wife goes to get the mail or the package or whatever it was delivered. And when you, when you send international shipments, you have to put what's in the package on the slip. Right? So my wife brings me this packet and it says, Oh, you got some underpants from Europe or whatever. And I'm like, Oh, this isn't going to end well at all. And so I opened this thing up and I, it's a, yeah, it's a pair of skivvies with download now on the back and a big kuru logo, the front. And then I look a little further in the package. Joel (35m 41s): There's a fucking condom in there too. And it says like, I slip into your next job with Karoo. So great. You know, this is me like clapping personally for that. These are, our kind of people, but man, they, they push the envelope. They push the envelope Chad (35m 58s): We're gonna have to get some pictures of you wearing those. And so we have a that's good that's social media gold right there. Joel (36m 7s): I'll model the Uggs, but I won't model the Karoo underwear. Okay. Chad (36m 12s): The Karoo underwear in the Uggs. And don't even ask me to model the condom. Cause that's way out of bounds. My friend, I won't, I will not entertain that. You like you like you like the Wolf of Wall S Joel (36m 27s): treet, don't you? That's one of your favorite movies. Chad (36m 29s): No, I have not seen it. Joel (36m 30s): You haven't seen it? Chad (36m 31s): I haven't seen it. Joel (36m 32s): We'll put, all right. Chad (36m 33s): I'll put it on my list. Joel (36m 34s): Well, for someone who watches Spiderman 18 times a year, can you put Wolf of Wall street by Martin Scorsese on your, on your watch list? So anyway, so it tells a story of Jordan Belfort who scammed, you know, Wall Street in the eighties and what are, so he went to jail and I just want to give a shout out. He's doing something pretty interesting with salespeople. So it's almost a hybrid staffing slash certification business. And we talk about Google giving, you know, certifications and big companies. But, but Jordan is basically training salespeople, but he's not just training them in a Tony Robbins fashion and saying, okay, good luck. He's training them and then he's placing them with companies. Joel (37m 15s): Some of them are pretty big names to sales jobs. And so this is a really interesting hybrid. I want to know your thoughts cause you're, you're a sales guy. Is this something that will take hold, will companies look to someone like Jordan Belfort to play salespeople and, and his sales sort of a unique function in that you can't really teach it or you can teach it, but you know, finding the ones that you want and getting the train is a pain in the ass. So this seems like this could work. What do you think? Chad (37m 43s): No. Unless you outsource the entire sales process? I mean, that's the thing is that it's a system I've seen so many sales systems spin selling. I mean, just all these different, you know, methodologies of sales. If you do it that way, it's gotta be something that, that your whole department management, everything buys into. But generally it just turns into a fad. When I was first hired to be in sales, I had no sales background and I was told that my military background was what they were really looking for, had nothing to do with sales. It had to do with knowing that I was mission-oriented, focus on the objectives, I would be there on time and I would be respectful. Joel (38m 28s): Yeah. Chad (38m 28s): Those are really the core pieces to having a great salesperson, at least the starting of a great salesperson. So yeah, I think, I think this kind of stuff, the guy's a scam artist. Joel (38m 42s): Well, you know, who's not a scam artist or maybe he is Elon Musk, now you gotta be happy is now the richest dude in the world. He leapfrogged your buddy Jeff Bezos this week to be the richest guy on the planet. So Elan congrats to you, man. Yeah. Chad (38m 57s): And you can ask me to take one of his rockets off of the planet and be the richest person wherever he goes. Joel (39m 3s): So as long as he puts a microchip into my brain before he leaves, that's all, that's all I want. Chad (39m 8s): Yeah, you do that. Okay. So we're going to end on a high note. Joel (39m 13s): That's that's not, that's not funny. Chad (39m 16s): Okay. So this one comes from the Huffington Post. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker closed out 2020 by expunging, nearly 500,000. That's right kids, half a million, half a million non-felony cannabis related records an action mandated by Illinois marijuana legislation law that went into effect a year ago. The governor also pardoned over 9,000 low-level cannabis convictions, conviction records, part of the state's efforts to repair the damage inflicted by the war on drugs, which we knew because we lived through that shit. Joel (39m 57s): Just say no. Chad (39m 58s): Yeah. I mean, we lived through the commercials. Let's let's just say that we didn't, we didn't actually get nailed and get thrown in jail. Right. And mainly because we were white kids. Joel (40m 8s): I was good too. Just so you know, I was a good kid. Chad (40m 12s): And a unique twist though the law also created a program that reinvests 25% of the cannabis tax revenue into a fund for youth development, anti-violence programs, re-entry programs, economic development, and civil legal aid services. Those dealing with high rates of gun violence, child poverty, incarceration rates. So we started talking about weed and we talk about what it could perspectively do to help the community, a couple of things, expunge the records and then use that tax money for something good. And that is at least what appears Illinois is trying to get done. Joel (40m 53s): All I know is how pissed are you being locked up with like all these states going legal and thinking I'm going to be free eventually this is going to be off my record eventually. Chad (41m 2s): Oh, you mean in Indiana? We're sitting here. You got people like right across the next state over. Joel (41m 7s): We're, surrounded by the weed. Chad (41m 9s): Yeah. We're the next state over Indiana. You got these guys who were sitting in jail right now, going, what the fuck? Joel (41m 15s): We out. Chad (41m 16s): We out. OUTRO (41m 16s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anyhoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (42m 1s): And while you're at it, visit chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

It's finally 2021. Can Artificial Intelligence finally takeover hiring? HiredScore's founder and CEO Athena Karp is one of the world's experts on A.I. and its impact on recruiting. Is it really the panacea to unbiased recruiting? Is all A.I. created equal? And will there still be human beings in recruitment 10 years from now? The boys cover all this and much more on this NEXXT exclusive. Enjoy! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. 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): We've got the Greek goddess of war on the show today, everybody. This is Joel Cheeseman, and you are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast as usual. I am joined by my cohost, Chad Sowash. Chad (36s): Well, hello. Joel (38s): And we're joined today, honored to introduce Athena Karp, founder, and CEO of Hired Score. Athena, are you still there? Athena (49s): I am. Thank you so much for having me. Joel (51s): We haven't scared you off. So for the listeners that don't know you, give us a little Twitter bio and then tell us the elevator pitch for Hired Score. Athena (1m 1s): By the way, one correction Athena is the Goddess of Victory in war, gentlemen. Chad (1m 7s): Whatever. Joel (1m 8s): What a flex. Yeah, that was, that was a major cause of is not enough. Chad (1m 15s): The Goddess of War isn't enough, it's gotta be the Victory in War. Joel (1m 18s): You got olives according to what she eats. Chad (1m 20s): What her mom told her, she's like, remember victory. We're not going to take anything less. Joel (1m 24s): Go ahead and give everyone your siblings names. Athena (1m 27s): There's a Ulysses. A Penelope, and Ananda. We've got some Indian as well in there. Chad (1m 34s): Did you have a tiger mom? Was she one of those? Athena (1m 37s): No, never. A Tiger Dad actually. Anywho. I'm Athena Karp CEO, Founder of a company called Hired Score. We power hiring internal, external, permanent flexible workforces across the global fortune 500. Live today at over 20% of the fortune 100 powering efficient and fair hiring decisions and always a fan of the Chad and Cheese podcast and Joel and Chad, both of you. So really a pleasure to be on. Chad (2m 13s): Very smart sucking up to the sucking up to the hosts already, that's already getting points. So quick question right out of the gate. Can AI fix stupid humans? That's that, that's what I think we're going to be really focused on this show. Joel (2m 29s): And stupid podcast hosts. Can they fix that? Athena (2m 32s): Maybe in future deployments we'll tackle podcasts? No. So I think, I think a lot of the discussions around how far can AI go? You know, we hear a lot garbage in, garbage out, but there's a much deeper discussion here that I think is really important. One to have, which is what is it you're asking the system to either solve partially or fully and go back to when we think about artificial intelligence, it's far less, you know, replace the humans and now the AI takes over. We're not building that, most of those, I know building AI or not building that, or, you know, that's not being deployed. Athena (3m 14s): What we're really trying to do is say, what do we augment the human doing with an AI and, and what processes aren't done today are too cumbersome or impossible for a human to do at the speed at the amount of data that we would need process automation so that they can then continue on the rest of the processes? So I think when we break the world down into what are we augmenting or automating with process efficiency, we can then have a clearer discussion. And then what data sits below that for us to do machine learning and understand what would the best human being do in these situations? Athena (3m 56s): And how can we replicate that with a technology? You know, when we think about fixing the human decisions, there's also a number of data science techniques you can deploy, that correct for things that a human might consciously or subconsciously be doing, that we would actually not want ever replicated number one. And we would want a human to stop doing if we knew that data, right? So in our world of identifying candidates that are relevant to the job, when we talk about correcting humans, I think one of the big fallacies is that if I were to read a job post that says, you need to have a degree in a related field, as an example, I have a recruiter might only know the related fields that I've come across at my time in that company or that I've come across across the ethnicity groups or the gender groups that I'm used to hiring. Athena (4m 55s): I might be far less good at understanding that a degree in African-American studies and a degree in literature and comparative writing and all these other areas are actually really good fields of study for a content manager, for example. So there's a lot that we can detect from data that is generated by humans. Like what degrees have they selected when they looked for a degree in a related field, does that degree selection generate a bias against any ethnicity group or gender group or other disability groups like veterans. Maybe I'm looking for relevant experience and it's a sales manager and I keep going back to territory managers or sales managers at companies like us before, but I don't understand military taxonomies that these sergeants have actually great experience managing, building and growing teams. Athena (5m 55s): But to me that doesn't speak my language. So there's a lot of testing that we can do bias understanding what generates the bias. Is it acceptable job related, defined by a wreck? For example, if it's because you required a PhD for this researcher role, and we know that that generates a bias, then we can at least have a data back discussion of, do we actually need a PhD? Is that truly required for this role? Or if we dropped to a master's and three years of experience, how much would that open it? So I think people tend to maybe underestimate those working in the cutting edge space here of how much we can actually diagnose, detect, choose what goes in, what doesn't go in or at the very least have data back discussions of what we've learned from the data before it's implemented to decide if that's appropriate, if that will have a bias, that is what we want to have, or if we want to undo that, remove that and go more broad. Chad (6m 59s): Who makes that determination though, Athena, because going back to the veteran example. Veteran background and qualifications, in many cases, they have training and work experience for the job, but they are passed over. And historically military veterans, their experience is not understood and they're totally undervalued. As a matter of fact, for the most part they're accepting positions that are several pay grades under their training and experience. So if an individual who doesn't understand any of this is making those definitions, those decisions because of prior behavior and said, Hey, we're hiring a lot of military veterans. Chad (7m 39s): What they don't understand is they're actually they're hiring individuals at way below the level of their capability who makes that decision. That's the hardest piece. Athena (7m 50s): Yep. Well, and I think for our listeners here, this is actually one of the exciting places where I think AI has a starring role because a lot of companies, as you're saying, Chad only know what they've ever done, which may or may not be good or right, right. But when you start to say, well, there's also general understanding of a better way or a different way, right? So a great example is we have a large, large global client that is really good at promoting from the lowest ranks of the org into managers and into very high ranks of the org and the majority of the company is run by people who started truly at the bottom, this continues today. Athena (8m 37s): And you know, it's not that their competitors couldn't implement similar models of, you know, from blue collar workforce to white collar workforce, they're just not used to those career trajectories happening. And I think Chad similarly, companies that aren't used to hiring air force pilots might not know that an air force pilot can be so much more at your company than the company pilot. You know, they might not know about all these other roles, but if you took examples of companies doing it well, and you brought those models into companies that have the desire to increase the presence of military veterans within their orgs, increase the ranks, increase the diversity of role types that they recruit for. Athena (9m 24s): You can almost let, you can leverage a more general understanding that helps your org shift in a way that you've not shifted to date for any number of reasons. And de-risk it because you're saying, well, if it's been possible here, you can bring these logics and share them in more places. Or if these, if these orgs didn't discriminate and require that you have this specific degree type or this specific job training, and instead we saw this other training course, and this all these different experiences, you actually led to success in the role. So I think a lot of this goes to how much we can democratize the bright spots of where we see these positive trajectories and shifts and positive inclusion models to more comfortable. Chad (10m 15s): That's the hard part though, because that's all hiring data for the most part that companies are incredibly protective about whether it's aggregated, it's anonymized, what have you to be able to get to that level you have to be able to grind on a lot of data, not just for one organization, but for a multitude of organizations to get that underway. Athena (10m 36s): Yes, it definitely takes a company that's been at it for a decade plus, is very diligent in the level of anonymization and aggregation meeting, you know, all the global standards that are required to do that and never, you know, be identifiable by company, by individual, for sure. There's also, you know, a lot of learning that we see companies themselves could understand from their own data, but because these systems don't give them easy to understand ways of plotting that without massive data science teams and data engineering teams, they themselves lose the insights of how things might be done differently even within their own org. Athena (11m 19s): So I think it's both the democratization of the bright spots, of course, where, where that's never translatable back to individuals or corporates in any way, shape or form. And then number two, the helping companies understand where are there non-traditional things already happening in their company successfully today that they've just never shown a light on to make sure it happens more and more. Joel (11m 45s): I want to back up for just a second Athena. I didn't go to Georgetown and, and you're talking, you're talking to the Chad and Cheese audience. So I want to back up for just one second and explain to me in layman's terms, your definition of AI, because I think a lot of people think of AI and it's, you know, because I watch a Hitler documentary on Netflix, it recommends Saving Private Ryan to me, but I assume your definition is much more congruent than that. So can you do that for me real quick? Athena (12m 14s): Absolutely. It's quite simple. I think in just saying to us, artificial intelligence is computers, machines learning how with great human examples to replicate tasks, processes, or augment certain places of work in a sophisticated, intelligent, efficient manner. And I think that the new definition of AI also requires a layer called, transparent, explainable, tested, you know, both viable in terms of results, but almost as important if not in many places more important, especially when we talk about hiring decisions and hiring decision support and internal mobility and redeployment and all these things that algorithms are supporting that both from an efficacy standpoint, which I think is what you mentioned of, how do you teach it, what humans do in a effective manner, replicable manner, but it's also, how do you do that in a way that the system can fully explain itself, can log everything it thought through and how it came to its decisions and the weights that it put on the different parameters, the weights are so important, and then that last piece that it can test. Athena (13m 35s): Are there any pieces of its decision that might adversely impact a certain group of individuals? And if so, by design, before even going live, exclude that. And then we talk a lot about how AI learns after it goes live. That can be completely controlled learning that's fully tested before deployed. It's not just that the, you know, algorithms built the right way, don't just on their own, unsupervised learn and get bolder and bigger and grow over time. You can always control, almost think about it like updates you can always control how it gets updated, how the update gets tested in advance. Athena (14m 18s): If the update fails, then you can limit the pieces of it that failed so that you don't have to deploy that or totally limit the update itself until it would ever pass those tests and control that learning over time. NEXXT (14m 35s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. What kinds of companies should be leveraging programmatic? Every fortune, 1000 company out there, anybody with extreme volume of jobs, you're recruiting for 20 positions a year. You don't need programmatic, you can go to a recruitment marketing agency or a job board to do, a direct email with your company only. You're not in with another 20 companies and a job alert, or you're not just on a career site or a job board. You could do banner advertising by premium placements. So where programmatic again is one piece of the puzzle. It's not going to ever be the end, all be all. And I do believe all the programmatic platforms out there have ancillary services to support that, knowing that you can't just survive on a one trick pony For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. NEXXT (15m 28s): Remember that's next with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com. Joel (15m 40s): I'm curious about consumer the level of consumer sort of understanding of this. And I'm guessing that when you field sales calls and get RFPs that people, at least at this point, don't think, well, this AI is the same as this AI is the same as this AI. So to answer the question of how is your company's AI different from another company's, whether it's more advanced or it's just different, I think you alluded to that when you talked about, you know, how your finger on the scale and to what degree are you doing that. Talk about what you would say to a customer when they say, how is this AI different from this AI? Athena (16m 13s): First of all, just like any spectrum there's companies that need, you know, power tools and companies that you just need a hammer or something basic to get the job done. I don't, I don't think one is lesser than the other. And I have a lot of respect for most technologies across the spectrum, as long as it's actually doing what it says, it does to verify for bias and, and building responsible technologies. But when you go across that spectrum, we sit in a place in that Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, that especially our, you know, government contractors, they need something that is the highest level of explainability, fully tested, understands what OFCCP and EEOC means, not just for a human, but for a technology that helps a human and holds itself at minimum to the best human standard and at maximum two ways that a human would never even be able to explain all the different levels of decision and test out all those different levels. Athena (17m 17s): So, you know, when we think about our solutions, it's definitely for those larger companies that need that level of explainability and auditing and vetted solutions, number one. Number two global, so, you know, global is often swept under the rug of, Oh, I used Google translation or I translated from native language to English. And then I did match. That will never work because if you take a country like China, Brazil, UK, and US. I'll give you a great example, in the UK, they don't ask for a number of years of relevant experience in China, they have foreign language certificates and in Brazil versus US versus France, the way that they describe their degrees is, is all very different. Athena (18m 10s): So you can't just take the local language, drop it in this magic box called, make it English, make it Western, and then term for it. We go through, you know, over the last nine years, a lot of painstaking, I think I have some gray hairs over this thing called global localization because actually almost every country or at the very least every region, you know, with countries that are small enough need to be looked at in their local taxonomies, local understanding of how they post jobs, how people express their professional data, how you match between that. So that global lens is really important. And then the last piece, the connectivity across the ecosystem. Athena (18m 53s): So where companies have a few recruiters and ATS and they just need something to, you know, surface a few people that's probably less important, but what we see as a lot of companies are expanding the ecosystem. So they have an ATS, a CRM an HCM, a chat bot. You know, some companies would kill me that I called them that the conversational layer, the scheduling, the scheduling automation, the assessment test, different for tech jobs versus campus recruiting versus so when you start to look at these seven to ten point ecosystems, all generating data on people, we take a lot of pride in pulling all of that together, wrapping our AI around that. Athena (19m 43s): Never assuming that we're the only decision parameter, there's a lot of other data points. And at certain points in a candidates or employees journey, they might be much more important than my score in who progresses and who doesn't so incorporating that holistically is kind of that third piece that's important for us. Chad (20m 1s): So one of the things that, I mean, this is just human behavior, the silver bullet, and in this, in this case with AI, it's more of like a set it and forget it behavior. You mentioned auditing a little bit earlier and to be quite Frank, I don't know that I've actually heard someone in an AI discussion say anything about auditing. So there's a big applause for that, because understanding the difference between, where you're going wrong, kind of like the, the whole Amazon idea of they had, they had an algorithm that obviously started to become biased against females. Well, there was no audit that was happening and they were just going off of the behavior of dumb humans. Chad (20m 46s): What do you expect? Right. My question is going into a white box versus black box conversation. But two years ago, when we started having a lot of these conversations, most vendors were saying white box, isn't doable, pretty much humans. Aren't smart enough to understand what's going on. You talk about explainability, which I like to call defendability because that's exactly what a federal contractor does they defend against, against the OFCCP. Can you talk about that? How, what's the difference today of white box versus black box and what can, what should an employer expect when they're buying tech today? Athena (21m 27s): Yeah, it's a great discussion. I'll just give a plug for a nonprofit, the World Economic Forum. We've been working over the last year on a global frameworks for ethical AI and HR. So that will be coming out soon and people should definitely subscribe to that. It's a cross section, all different views and included in that, in that working group. Chad (21m 48s): Nice. Athena (21m 48s): But one of the things we've been working a lot on, I assume a plug for nonprofits are okay, or NGO or two, what should you expect? And what can you get from vendors? And we tend to see this either. I've got to take all the risks and go black box for the sake of innovation and efficiency and business impact, or I've got to restrict to nothing because nothing can meet that. And we'd like to talk a lot first, I think the spectrum of it, if you're just, you know, the, the way your, where you're applying an algorithm in HR, in recruiting, and specifically what we do, how you prioritize people, or even surface people who applied in the past, you really want, I think you need that explainability and justification that it was done for every single person in a fair, consistent manner. Athena (22m 49s): Maybe if you're talking about the chat bots or some other things that are lower risk, if I say hi to you versus hello to you versus something else to you, then, you know, who really cares? So looking at the spectrum of where are you planning to deploy this? I can answer that in the specific area that we work, which is, you know, candidates and jobs, and passive candidates and opportunities, and employees and jobs, which I think takes a really vigilance if you will over not having a black box technology and requiring, I can tell you, for example, we see some of our most innovative clients launching ethical AI reviews. Athena (23m 34s): So, you know, and even a good warning here, there's a lot of vendors that come in as one thing, and then just flip the AI switch cause it's a feature for free for you time. That's not going to get you out of a government audit or a bias or an Amazon like investigation, or, you know, the FTC is recently investigating our space for AI video, for example, because you turned on the AI feature. You know, I think is often a misnomer of it's just as important to vet anything and everything that's helping you make decisions across the spectrum. So I can tell you, for example, the standards that we hold ourselves to, and our clients hold us to, is that before we go live, we've fully tested this system to understand, are there differences between groups? Athena (24m 27s): And if there's differences, they have to trace back to job requirements, basic requirements that are actually specified on each individual job. And if there's anything else, the algorithm or the treatment, or the progression logic that creates a difference across any group, then that's not acceptable for launch, right? So one that audit and that explainability of what's creating a difference? Is it acceptable? How do we define it? And is that defensible that should be provided before even go live. We also provide explainability that the data we've learned from has been balanced. Athena (25m 9s): So I think this is a really important point. Chad, you mentioned the, how do we make sure the same things we're doing over and over, or if we want to start doing things differently that we're not barred from the technology we've deployed. So we test our, the data we've learned, we're learning from before learning to make sure it's fair and representative a great example in technology roles we see on average men apply at a rate of one to four to women. And when we start to look at highly technical roles, women on average have six years less relevant experience than men. So when you start to think about, if I studied in the machine learning interview rates and offer rates, and this is what good looks like, I can end up with an Amazon problem unless I'm studying instead, not here's what good looks like, but I'm balancing that data. Athena (26m 1s): Even if the men are one to four likelihood of getting an interview or an offer that doesn't mean I need to, or should learn one to four and the learning I do want to do so I can balance that down to equal. So only take 25% of that male learning data. If all I have is that complimentary female data set so that the system is always learning balanced, and even, and then number three, after launch, I need to have monitoring that shows is the system learning, what is it learning? Do I want to deploy that? Is there any trade off in efficiency and effectiveness to fairness? And if so, does the, is that valid? Athena (26m 43s): Is that explainable, is that justifiable? If not, you know, so all those different levels, the pre the learning and the post all should have that level of audit explainability and testing, aligned with however you run your adverse impact testing. Chad (26m 59s): Yeah. I think it's interesting. And for all those employers listening, who always think AI should be perfect when humans aren't even fucking close. So I'm going, I'm going to go ahead and lighten things up really quick. My last question to you, what is more scary to you? The Netflix documentary, the Social Dilemma or Elon Musk putting microchips in human brains? Athena (27m 26s): Because I'm not a doctor. I would have the chips because I'm not sure what else is happening once we've received chips and the God modes of biology are always more scary to me than things that I think are far more controllable, testable, explainable, which are, which are algorithms, the right algorithms. Right. But I guess I have a bias. Joel (27m 53s): I'll let you out on this with a fairly more intellectual question, but not, not much more than that. I want you to get your crystal ball out for a little bit and paint a picture for me post COVID. Chad and I talk quite a bit about, you know, everyone who was on the fence about AI in their recruitment technology are going to come off the fence and choose that over, hiring more recruiters. I'm curious about your opinion on that. And then just a general, you know, what does recruitment technology look like let's say 10 years from n Athena (28m 22s): So I think the, the discussion of technology versus humans, I just got off a call with a client who is hiring a few dozen recruiters in Q4. I, you know, because there's so much work to be done and there are such challenges. I don't see it as a clear, you know, the tech or the human. I think it depends what work you need done as this opening and in this crystal ball. And I really truly believe in one of my favorite client question is what's your view of recruiters of the future? I've never heard anyone say, well, there are none in 10 years because we've got technology. Technology, doesn't build human relationships with candidates nor hiring managers. Athena (29m 6s): It doesn't, there's a lot of limitations, to it. So I think what it looks like is the function of recruiter, really being able to kind of be the workforce advisory. What are our needs, what's the best way to get that? Is it contingent talent is a permanent talent in snap of the finger and oppressive the button having that automatically delivered to you across internals and externals and passes and actives and employees that have never done this before, but are taking courses online and showing promise in this area. I think we're going to have a lot more opening up of opportunity on less frequently use and increasingly reliable de-risk factors, like if people are showing promise in tests or in new ways of assessing potential or in other skills that they're learning, how can we include them in new job trajectories across the company? Athena (30m 8s): So I get really excited about kind of the ability to open the funnel of job opportunities and reevaluate people in new ways. And I think the recruiters are going to be driving those changes across the org, by explaining to people why they're doing things differently and that's okay and it's not so risky. And here's why that's necessary for the org! Number one, I think that there is also a lot of exciting opportunities for technology that people maybe thought about before we built some processes of, but, but had an implemented, like talent redeployment, bringing people back from furlough in a fair, consistent manner where humans would be riddled with bias and keywords and who they know and who the manager liked. Athena (30m 55s): So I think there's a lot of democratization of opportunity because of those deployments of technology that does really excite me. Chad (31m 4s): Well, excellent, Athena. Joel (31m 6s): We're excited you joined us today. Chad (31m 8s): We were happy. Yeah. Obviously you classed up the show. You smartened up the show. Thank you for taking the time, joining us here, talking about all this smart stuff. If somebody wants to find out more about you or I don't know, maybe Hired Score where, would you send them? Athena (31m 23s): If any of these topics are interesting to any of the listeners, you can find me Athena Karp at LinkedIn or at Twitter. I do have social media accounts, or even Athena@hiredscore.com. Chad (31m 34s): Excellent. Joel (31m 35s): Chad We Out. Chad (31m 37s): We out. Athena (31m 38s): Thanks guys. OUTRO (32m 2s): Thank you for listening 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.

It's the return of Sackadamus! Industry icon Tim Sackett joins Chad & Cheese for their 4th annual predictions show with an eye toward 2021. Thank baby Jesus 2020 is almost over! Enjoy this recap of 2020's predictions (spoiler alert: wrong buzzer soundbites aplenty), three predictions each for 2021 and even a listener question. Cheers to a New Year, and more of the same excellence from HR's most dangerous podcast. All 2021 predictions powered by Sovren, Jobvite, and JobAdX. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. 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 (20s): Oh yeah. You want predictions? We got predictions and Tim Sackett to boot! What's up everybody? This is the Chad and Cheese podcast and 2020 is almost fucking over! Chad (34s): Yes! Joel (34s): I'm your cohost, Joel "crystal ball" Cheeseman. Chad (38s): And I'm Chad "Sacadama" Sowash. Joel (40s): And on this week's show. Tim (43s): You can't steal my name. Chad (44s): I had to. Joel (45s): We're doing our annual predictions with our special guest, as always, Tim Sackett. Get comfy people. Tim (51s): The original predictor. Sovren (53s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (1m 54s): Sacradamus, Tim's never coming back. Never. Tim (2m 4s): I know. I was just thinking like you guys get, like, I have to do a takeover show sometime if you guys ever went on vacation and didn't do like 250 shows a year, I could just come in and take my pants off and totally lay the wood to your show. Joel (2m 16s): That'd be a, that'd be a high moral ground for our show. Chad (2m 22s): It'd be hard to stand up to. Oh, so what'd you guys get for Christmas? Favorite gifts go? Joel (2m 28s): Ooh.... Tim (2m 29s): I got an advent gin calendar. Chad (2m 32s): An advent gin counter? That's awesome. Yeah. I love that. Last year I got an advent, a whiskey calendar and that was one of my favorites. So awesome. You Joel? Joel (2m 43s): All right. I'm I'm totally going to emasculate myself, but I don't care. My favorite gift I got a pair of Chad (2m 49s): yoga pants? Joel (2m 50s): I got a pair of Ugg slippers and they're fucking amazing. Like lamb's wool, soft inside. They're like, you know, in Die Hard when Bruce Willis takes his shoes off and socks off and does little fists with his toes because the guy says, that's how you relieve stress. This is like that, all the time. Like it's like little fingers massage. My, my Ugg slippers are my favorite, gift that I got this year. Chad (3m 20s): Oh, my God, you see you're. So Joel (3m 22s): That's our starting off the show, everybody. Chad (3m 26s): I got a couple sets of Beats earphones, which is funny. One is for running and the other word, like the over the, over the ear, hopefully for this year, we'll be able to use them on, on travel during trips. Joel (3m 43s): I wear my Beats over the years when I'm curling pints into my mouth. Chad (3m 47s): That's a good call. I like that. Joel (3m 50s): Good, exercise. Chad (3m 51s): And you can do that with an advent calendar. Joel (3m 53s): Sure. Let's get this shit going. Cause I know we've got a lot of opinions and we got a lot of predictions. So we always, we always recap. Chad (4m 1s): Oh yeah. Joel (4m 2s): One the year prior. So Tim (4m 4s): Have we ever, we ever gotten one, right? That's the question, right? Chad (4m 7s): Right. Yeah. I think that that's debatable, but yeah, this year, this year, I think we actually might've hit one or two. So let's go into that for the first one, Tim in 2019 predicting for 2020 said Indeed would cut UK organic traffic. And I did check with, I did check with, yeah. I checked with some of my friends over in the UK, in the programmatic space, so on and so forth, that did not come true. So sorry about that, Tim. So Joel then predicted Google for Jobs monetizes. Chad (4m 48s): That's a big bugger. That's a no. Joel (4m 50s): I'm so forward-thinking though that's more like a 2024 prediction. Chad (4m 55s): Oh, don't worry. We'll continue to use it over and over. Then my first prediction was multiple chat bot acquisitions that did happen. Job Powell and Allenco threw it out. Tim (5m 10s): We'd be out there on the edge. Chad (5m 12s): Yeah. Well, yeah. That's, that's the only way you can get those is fishing with a net instead of a spear. Joel (5m 18s): And then the rest of them get gobbled up this next year. Chad (5m 21s): Yeah. Tim then said, end of human to human interviewing. I think that's an applause, right? That didn't happen. It was more pandemic, I think, than it was anything else. Right. Tim (5m 34s): Oh my God. Notrodomos, they knew the pandemic was coming. Chad (5m 38s): Then Joel said, Ron Stodd would sell Monster buzzer. Tim (5m 43s): Because theycouldn't find a buyer. Chad (5m 47s): Yeah. That was the only problem I then said, iCIMS acquires a programmatic vendor. They did a lot of acquisitions, but that was not one of them. Tim (5m 56s): They did. That might be a 20,21. Chad (5m 58s): Tim said team. He was very specific that Teamable would be acquired. That did not happen. buzzer. Tim (6m 6s): I actually recommend them quite a bit to people. And I've had multiple people reach out and go like, they're hard to get ahold of, bad business strategy. Somebody might've went and bought them, but nobody picking up. Chad (6m 20s): Yeah. It really sucked not just for acquisitions, but also just for the little thing we call revenue. Joel (6m 26s): Yeah. Maybe that's just a response on how bad the leads. Tim, maybe Tim's leads are a bunch of cheap asses who don't buy and just kick tires. So they're like, we don't want any more Tim leads. Chad (6m 40s): So then Joel said that Recruit Holdings would by ZipRecruiter did not happen. Buzzer. And then I crowdsourced my last predictions overall, Tom Kenny said, AI bites everyone in the ass, black. And, and I think he gets an applause on this because we saw AI move the needle from black box and to more of a transparency model. Dennis Tupper was on board with Joel's prediction that didn't happen. Google for Jobs starts monetizing. Buzzer. And then Richard Collins, believe it or not, I can't believe this didn't happen he said a major job board goes bust. Chad (7m 24s): And this year, I guess we could probably say Dice, but we weren't sure if that was a major job board or not so that don't even make the requirement. Joel (7m 33s): No one in Sweden knows who they are. So they're really not a major job board. Chad (7m 38s): So that was last year. We got a couple of them, which is much better than we did the year before. We'll go ahead and before we go to break and we get into this year's Steven Rothberg, who was Joel's favorite listener. He had a prediction that... Joel (7m 54s): Love you Steven. Chad (7m 56s): That obviously in-person conferences would not come back into Q4 and they definitely would not come back at the size and strength that they were in 2019. Let's talk about that after. Joel (8m 9s): So his bold prediction is vaccine is released, but we still don't go to conferences. Yeah. All right, we'll be right back. Everybody. JobAdX (8m 16s): Are you prepared to engage the wave of returning job seekers? Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for long-term full time talent. Your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. JobAdX (8m 56s): Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Chad (9m 21s): The first prediction comes from our listener, Steven Rothberg. I would say probably our number one listener might be him. Not sure, not sure. Joel (9m 31s): Gauntlet to the competition. Chad (9m 32s): His prediction was, we will start to see the return of in-person conferences by Q4, but attendance will remain low due to the long lead time. They required a plan and market. Everybody wants to get the hell out of the house. They want to go to conferences. That vaccine is getting rolled out. Do we all believe that in Q4 conferences, aren't just going to explode. Steven doesn't believe that. What do you guys think? Joel (9m 57s): I'll let our special guest start. Tim (9m 59s): No, I like, I think because, you know, Sherm has already come out and said, Hey, Sherm National Chicago in June. That, I mean, that's the biggest conference out there in our space. And they're already said like, Hey, we're going to do it now. And we all have obviously multiple opinions on the SHERM leadership. The one thing that they've been known is that I truly believe that they're going to try to pull this thing off. If they pull it off, you're just going to see everybody else. And we know that conference season starts in September, so that's Q3. So I would say that's, you know, we're, we're definitely going to see that happening, come Q3. Now, will the numbers be as big? I don't think so. Cause I think a lot of people will stay home, but I still think they're going to start trying to do them. Chad (10m 42s): I think it's going to be a vendor sausage party, what it's going to be, because you're going to be the only ones who are looking for leads. They're hungry for leads. Everybody wants to get out. But the problem is I don't believe talent acquisition or at least the people I've talked to are even going to be budgeting for travel this year for conferences. Joel (11m 3s): Yeah. I think June is really early. Chad (11m 5s): Yeah. Tim (11m 6s): Yeah. It seems early. Joel (11m 7s): I think they're setting themselves up for failure. I think the real test will be in the fall when HR tech and Unleashed in Paris and some of those conferences happen. I personally think that the big ones will, you know, will survive and sort of probably thrive as we come out of this. I think my question will be, you know, the EREs, the SourceCons, the TA Techs, the sort of the smaller ones where this is, all they do is, are these conferences and they don't exist without the revenue from them. And I'm curious as to whether those smaller niche conferences will evolve into sort of the corporate conferences, which I think have been gaining in popularity for the last five, 10 years, right? Joel (11m 48s): Like everybody wants to go to LinkedIn's conference and now it's, now it's more, I want to go to Smart Recruiter's, or I want to go to Jobvite. Or I want to go to SmashFly or Symphony Talent. You know, they've been, they've gotten really good at the sort of niche conference. So I think the big ones come back in a big way. I think they have the resources and power to do it. I think the corporate conferences gain in strength as we come out of this because they didn't rely on conferences for revenue. The real question for me is the, the small niche standalone conferences, like the Source Cons and those guys Chad (12m 21s): Do we see consolidation in this space? Joel (12m 24s): You should. Tim (12m 25s): Yeah. Joel (12m 26s): I don't know what assets they have that the big guys don't. The lists are probably the same. I mean this, the sales calls and who they're calling are the same. So I don't know. Tim (12m 35s): Well, I think 2020 proved out to like the virtual conference thing now isn't necessarily, I mean, here's the hard part, is it? Didn't the people who put them on don't make money. The vendors I talked to actually like them because the number of attendees, the lead generation has been huge. But the reality is, is you're not going to see those continue because the vendors weren't willing to pay the money as they were on the in-person stuff. Now that changed over and they were like, Hey, for a 5,000 person list, I'll pay X. Then maybe that would work. But like, we are all in the same stuff. Like we saw that, like we were, we actually spoke at a lot of these virtual conferences and the numbers were giant, but nobody was paying anything to be there, attendee or vendor. Joel (13m 16s): Be curious. I'm sure the marketing people liked it, but I wonder how many sales guys and gals said, Oh, these are really quality leads and I closed a lot of deals. Whereas I think the value of the face-to-face is you can build a little bit of relationship. You can, you know, buy drinks and meals, which you can't do via, you know, email marketing. Yeah. Chad (13m 35s): Yeah. And I think that any of these conference companies who understand, obviously there's a huge difference between in person and the online, the virtual, but there, there is that lead generation piece that Tim talked about. If we're not just doing PowerPoints and just the same old bullshit, we're actually providing premium content, those guys will win. So I think Jamie in the Recfest crew over there, those guys actually put out awesome premier content and they were experimenting with things, where at other conferences, they weren't as much, they were just trying to keep it as, you know, same as it ever was. Chad (14m 15s): And that will not get you what the actual sponsors the vendors need. Joel (14m 21s): Thanks for your prediction, Steven. Chad (14m 23s): Good one Steven, good one. We love that. Joel (14m 25s): So let's get into our predictions. Chad (14m 27s): Let's get into Tim's predictions. Smackadamas. Joel (14m 30s): That deserves the bell. Smackadamas man, what you got start us off. Yeah. Tim (14m 37s): So my first one is, is about SAP and their need to acquire someone in the talent acquisition space. And when I say someone, it's not just a chat bot, it's something bigger than that. So it's like a Greenhouse, a Smart Recruiters in Avature, a Jobvite, a Lever, an Eight-fold, Loxo might be the cheapest one they could go out and get, but I was on a Workday call and Neil was answering a bunch of questions and he pretty much just laid out like, Hey, it's us in Oracle. SAP is so far back. We don't even really consider them competition any longer. And so I think they're going to have to do some acquisition stuff to kind of catch up into that space. Otherwise, you know, Workday and Oracle are just eating their lunch at this point. Joel (15m 19s): If you held the keys to the car, who would you acquire or who would be the smartest acquisition for them? I liked the Greenhouse and I like that. Tim (15m 28s): Well, except that except they're so, you know, leveraged with money that it becomes super expensive to get to buy them. Avature is still private so I think you could actually get the most bang for your buck out of them. And, and their tech is actually a really, really good. Jobvite is already private equity so we probably could make that deal happen. Lever you could probably get on the cheap. Again, I love Smart Recruiters. I think there are really good tech as well. I, you know, I just don't know, if they want to be acquired. Joel (15m 56s): I like the Eightfold too, that could do good too. Tim (15m 58s): Yeah, that could really do well. And again, I mean, Loxo is same tech is Eightfold, but it probably a cheaper price point. So again, if they were smart, they would go that way. Chad (16m 7s): I would say same on premise, but not same on scale and power. Tim (16m 11s): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, but again, I, you know, it just depends on what SAP has from a standpoint of how much money they want to spend and what they want to turn into. Again, I would also go if they didn't have already acquired well, back in the day, Success Factors, you know, Cornerstone would be a great acquisition for any of those really. I mean, Workday could really use Cornerstone on their learning side, but you know. Chad (16m 36s): Now this to me is interesting, cause you just mentioned in December of 2011, SAP acquired Success Factors for $3.4 billion. Okay. And they could have, if they focused, they could have been up with the Oracles today. If they wanted to, if they actually focused on this segment of the business, what they didn't, they let it atrophy. Tim (16m 58s): Yup. Chad (16m 58s): At that point or goal Oracle acquired Taleo in 2012, IBM acquired Brass Ring and Connexa in 2012. Do you think this'll trigger that same kind of domino effect for some of those bigger players? Tim (17m 12s): Well, I mean it could, I just don't think Oracle or Workday have any desire to go out and make big acquisition around their core HR talent suites. I just don't. I mean, I think they feel good, Oracle Recruit Cloud is a good product. Workday clearly is, is confident in what they, what they have. And I think they're more kind of interested in building out the partnership network at this point, SAP, they, eh, they just have some real like needs. In the next that's factor is just, they never put the time and money into actually making and continuing to, you know, continue to kind of raise their game. And so now at this point now they're like, well, either we totally rebuild success from the ground up or we just go purchase somebody and make it work better than what we know what we can do. Tim (17m 55s): So, yeah. Chad (17m 56s): Agreed. I mean, that's what happens when you spend a shit ton of cash. And we saw, we've seen this with Monster, with all the products that they bought and they threw in the closet and they didn't pay any attention to that's what happens when you just allow the car to sit in the driveway and rust away. Joel (18m 10s): Sacadomus has spoken everybody. All right, now it's my turn. Tim (18m 15s): Do I get a commission fee on this, by the way, come on, everyone that got mentioned, give me something, bottle of gin. Joel (18m 22s): My prediction is no. How about that? That's my prediction. This is probably a little bit further down the road, but what the hell I'll go ahead and predict it for next year. I think that Airbnb launches Airbnb Work. Knee jerk would be okay this is like a Rework thing. So WeWork was onto something with, with what their business was, obviously it was a train wreck and a lot of different ways where I think that they probably overextended themselves was that they were actually buying the properties or leasing the properties that they were then turning around into workspaces. I think what Airbnb is going to do is look at all this commercial real estate, all these owners that have leases that are going defunct or people that are just going away. Joel (19m 6s): And they're going to try to figure out how do I lease this space? How do I get butts in seats? How do I, you know, get money in the door? And I think Airbnb is going to create, leverage their platform for these commercial real estate vendors to create even if, even if it just desk by desk or workspace or conference room for people to be able to go and just basically rent, you know, for the day for a couple hours, whatever, to leverage Airbnb's technology to go in and leverage this commercial real estate. That's going to be just not in use from the pandemic and they're going to make that work. And then I think that companies will then buy credits for their employees or their contract workers to then leverage Airbnb, to go into the office for a day or whenever they want to and use those credits accordingly. Joel (19m 56s): So my prediction number one for next year is that Airbnb Work is launched and that's, that's what it is. Chad (20m 3s): Hmm Tim (20m 3s): I like that, it's actually two predictions in one though. Cause you're also then predicting that this remote work thing is going to continue and companies aren't going to want their people to come back, which I think is complete bullshit. Joel (20m 14s): Right. Tim (20m 15s): Which, I think is complete bullshit. I think what we're going to see is like bad business results in Q1 Q2, and that the CEOs are going to stand up and go, Hey, remote work failed, get your asses back to work and let's get some shit done. So, Joel (20m 27s): So, so a couple of things, one, I think a lot of companies will be like that, but I think some companies won't want to pay for the real estate that they're paying and every everything that comes with that. But you can also say, Hey, we're going to give you X amount of Airbnb credits and you need to use them. You need to be in the office. So there is a way that you could sort of be on both sides of that coin and say like, Hey, we're going to be virtual, but we are going to require you to be in the office and be amongst each other for a certain period of time. Chad (20m 55s): Okay. So they're, they're not actually, they're not putting up the overhead? Joel (20m 59s): And they're not buying these commercial spaces. They're giving the people who own them and need to fill them up. And the easier way to fill those spots through technology and Airbnb obviously has the best technology as well as the best brand to get that done. Chad (21m 13s): Yeah. Tim (21m 13s): It's a Wework model without owning the real estate. So it's yeah, it makes sense. Joel (21m 18s): Yep, without any long-term leases by the folks that are in the company. So yeah, I think, I think it's a no-brainer really. Chad (21m 24s): I think it's gone smart for anybody who doesn't understand Airbnb's mission. Cause this is not Airbnb's mission. Airbnb's mission is belong anywhere and they want to be able to ensure that they actually drive people into spaces where they feel like they belong. So I like that idea with regard to being able to do this in other people's homes, just like they have Airbnb now, but being able to go into a corporate structure, I don't think that aligns with their mission. And then they just become again, another WeWork. So I like the idea. I just don't think this is an Airbnb idea because it doesn't align with their mission. Chad (22m 5s): And they've been very solid in disciplined with their mission. Joel (22m 10s): Well as a public company their new mission is to make shareholders happy. So we'll see if they stick to that, to that warm and fuzzy. Chad (22m 17s): Imagine an old white man saying that. Joel (22m 22s): All Right, Chad, you're up buddy? Chad (22m 23s): Oh, you're going to love this one. Okay. Kids now I actually, actually did some, some coordination and some crowdsourcing for all of mine. So this one was sent in from Dennis Tupper and his prediction, which I believe is Glassdoor's going to take a dirt nap. So all signs point to the demise of Glassdoor revenues are down. Their best revenue stream jobs has been handed over to Indeed and Indeed has more reviews and will take over the reviews mantle as well. So I think what we're seeing is indeed strangling Glassdoor with the pandemic happening. Chad (23m 5s): They've automatically started that atrophy not to mention they don't have that revenue source that they had before. So overall the glass door brand, dies in 2021. Joel (23m 17s): So there's the prediction that if I go to glassdoor.com, I just get redirected to Indeed like there's no Glassdoor Branding whatsoever. Chad (23m 24s): Kind of like that Simply Hired model. Yeah. The simply hired or what they did with Workopolis. But to totally deep six the Glassdoor brand I think is a stretch. Tim (23m 34s): Hey, do we know how much they paid for Glassdoor? Joel (23m 36s): 1.6 million? Something like that. Tim (23m 38s): Now do you think you could sell that to like a LinkedIn or a Microsoft or somebody like? That would say, Hey, there's so much value in that brand, we think we could actually keep it as the Yelp of Jobs and still create it because of that traffic, is that worth 2 billion or whatever? Joel (23m 54s): No. Chad (23m 54s): They wouldn't because the traffic that's being driven there now is hitting Indeed jobs. Right. So it's masked right now instead of having Glassdoor. Yeah. Instead of having Glassdoor jobs, they have Indeed Jobs. And they're the only thing I think right now that is worth anything are the actual reviews pieces. And that's what's driving a lot of that traffic, right? So it's kind of like you can't rip one away from the other. So they've got to come together. I think it, it would stay if it did, they would do a Simply Hired model like Joel was talking about. But overall, why have so many fucking brands? Get rid of that shit, own it yourself. Joel (24m 31s): Well, the other addiction that Indeed has is organic search traffic and Glassdoor is still a cash cow if you will, of organic traffic and even Simply Hired is still I think a cash cow of free traffic. So that would be hard for them to say goodbye to as well. And those reviews are nice juicy content for search engines. Chad (24m 49s): They are juicy. They're juicy. Joel (24m 51s): All right, let's go to round two of predictions. I'm leading off this round. I believe that we're going to see an incredible amount of investment acquisitions. Consolidations happen the low rock meter in terms of dollars that come into this space are going to blow up as we start to reemploy people and get people back to work. But I wanted to throw out three specific acquisitions. Again, again, Tim, I'm getting greedy. I'm putting like multiple predictions into a prediction, but fuck it. Chad (25m 22s): He's casting the net wide. Joel (25m 25s): This is my podcast, by God damn it. So, so number one, I think, I think Seek out of Australia acquires Talk Push in Vervoe. They're already an investor in Vervoe and they've just partnered with both of them. I think that that acquisition would be very smart for them. And I think it happens next year. I think the other thing that happens is that Dice goes private. We've talked a lot about dice on the show, their stock prices virtually done nothing since our, our boy Art Zeal took over. I think they're going to be continually just stuck in the quick sand and the only way to sort of get out of it. They should go private. They should probably get private equity to come in, fix the company. Joel (26m 5s): If they go private, I think they can start making bigger bets around tech community, testing that we're seeing, frankly, they're getting lapped by so many other startups that are out there that are helping companies employ engineers and because I predicted that Recruit would acquire Zip last year. I'll just go ahead and, and re predict that. So the spin on this is the word, is the word is that Zip is going to go IPO in 2021, which they definitely have to have a liquidation event because of all the money they've taken. Chad (26m 36s): So you think that was bait Joel (26m 37s): So I think they're going to pull a Glassdoor. I think they're going to pull one of these, like we're going public to get a price for what the public or the market thinks that their value is. And then they're going to take that to Recruit and say, Hey, Recruit for this price tag. You can create a triple headed monster against Google, Google for Jobs and Indeed, Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter. Tim (27m 2s): Where do you guys think that the valuation is going to land on zip for the IPO? Ultimately? Joel (27m 7s): They want $3-5 billion? Chad (27m 8s): Yeah. Joel (27m 9s): Glass door is the number two player and they got 1.6. So they're basically asking for double plus as the number three player versus the number two player. The other, the other challenge that Zip has is that, you know, according to Yelp, a hundred thousand plus small businesses have tanked in the last year, right? So those small businesses were ZipRecruiter's, you know, bread and butter, and now they're going to have to make up whatever that revenue was. Tim (27m 36s): Yeah. Depending on, well, depending on when that IPO hits, I can, I still think that they'll be valued more than what we think is just been an insane world over the last, you know, 12, 14 months. Joel (27m 46s): How would you spin it? Would you spend it as an AI? Tim (27m 49s): Part of it's programmatic built-in right. So there's, I mean, there's a little MarTech, you know, involved from that, but God, I don't like, again, you know, they're kind of next generation job boards, so it's difficult to kind of say how you would spin that. But I agree. I mean, Joel, they are what they are. Right. So it's hard to Joel (28m 6s): Is it a stock that you would buy? Tim (28m 7s): I mean, if I could get in on the IPO price, I would probably buy. Joel (28m 10s): Way to dance around that one, Tim, nice job. Chad (28m 15s): If Seek wants to be more than than Australia, and Indeed they need an acquisition like Talk Push and Vervoe that brings tech to them that Indeed doesn't even have. Dice in itself is dead no matter what. Art has made sure that they are going to die a very slow and stupid death and Zip's going to go IPO just because again, I think the valuation is high. I do think that Indeed in many, I think Recruit Properties could use the type of tech that Zip has, but I don't think they'll buy it. I don't. So I think they'll end up going IPO. Joel (28m 53s): And is that a stock you would buy, Chad? Chad (28m 55s): No, I wouldn't buy it either. I can get pre IPO prices. Yes. Joel (29m 1s): Tim Sacket. So that is a possibility. Chad you're up, man. Chad (29m 6s): All right. Okay. So this was Actually inspired by Angela Hood and Richard Collins. It's not their prediction just inspired by. I am going to predict that black box AI and facial recognition will be quote unquote "outlawed" in 2021 to provide guard rails, to drive hiring companies and vendors out of their wild, wild west patterns of discriminatory hiring behaviors. Companies will be able to explain their algorithms and defend hiring decisions while ensuring bias tech and humans aren't provided with more tools that will make them more fucking biased. So we saw what happened with Illinois and facial recognition with Hirevue right? Chad (29m 50s): And I think that companies are definitely going to have, and we've seen it this year. Many of the AI companies who actually, we're saying, well, the algorithm is just way too complex for humans to understand. Well, this year we didn't get that excuse anymore. It was more that they were trying to move to something that was more explainable. I think companies are going to move that way, but there's going to be the big Senate leaders, the Elizabeth Warrens and whatnot of the world are going to go after this really hard, because the bias is very high. Joel (30m 24s): And there are a lot of lawyers just foaming at the mouth for a class action lawsuit against everybody. And we saw, you know, Facebook, I think they were, what were they fined? 500 million, not a lot, right? Like it was, it was something out of Zuckerberg's couch cushions. Right. But, but when they start going after, you know, mid-sized companies that will be out of business with such lawsuits, you're going to see companies just not do it. And I think that facial recognition and that shit, they're going to come to roost pretty quickly on that. And I think the antitrust lawsuits that are coming to fruition in 2021 are going to like pull off the veil of what these companies are doing in terms of facial recognition. Joel (31m 8s): And the public is going to get scared. And like Chad said, Congress is going to act and that's it's. Yeah. The whole facial recognition thing is interesting. It'll play out next year. Probably. Tim (31m 19s): Does that have an impact on cause so right now you have Amazon, Walmart, two largest employers in the world for the most part hiring without interview, right. Using technology at different levels in the low skill, no skill arena. Joel (31m 33s): That's easy though. Tim (31m 35s): But like, I think they're constantly trying to figure out how do we increase the quality of hire in that same kind of process of a no touch kind of interview or not interview, but no, no touch selection process. Chad (31m 46s): Yeah. Tim (31m 47s): So you would think that they have a stronger desire to continue even, even deeper into that. Hey, how do we, how do we screen, you know, individuals in a really robust way versus the other side? I hate that when our government tries to put legislature around technology, because you have, you know, ancient old fucking dinosaurs out there that have no, they can't even use their iPhone, let alone figure out what the hell an algorithm is to try to, you know, put a law around that. Chad (32m 14s): Like, that's just the worst. Oh yeah. Well, if you read the Illinois, if you read the Illinois legislation, it was, it was like a kindergartner fucking did it. But the problem is that it's the wild, wild West out there. And we are not, we're not actually putting those guardrails in place ourselves. Right? So unless we start to demonstrate that that's going to happen and we won't. They're just going to go ahead and come at it and do it, do it anyway. So that's, that's the hard part. And when it comes to Walmart, the turn and burn that they have for those low, those low wage positions in the first place, they don't care. I mean, they really don't care. Joel (32m 50s): So specifically, do you think being able to interview on video and being able to see, you know, facial things about I'm lying, or like, do you think that will be outlawed? Chad (33m 1s): Oh, yeah. Joel (33m 2s): Or we'll have to get specific sort of approval to use that tech before they even start talking to a candidate? Chad (33m 9s): Well, okay.So let's just talk about the, like the touchless recruiting all the way, like Tim was just talking about all the way to hire. There's going to have to be an explainability factor there. Why were these five people hired and not these 25 over here? Right? So there's gotta be some type of explainability so that you can defend. And that's what it's all about because, enforcement in this administration is going to look much different than it did the last four years. So overall, it's going to have to be something that you can explain. It's going to have to be something that's easy. So I suggest if you are a company, any company, and you're doing any type of high volume hiring, any type of hiring at all, if you don't know what your algorithm is doing, and you can't explain it, you can't go in and say why these five people made it to interview and the rest of them didn't then, that vendor does not deserve your dollar because they didn't train you well in the first place or the tech just doesn't do it. Joel (34m 7s): Enough said. Tim. You're up. Tim (34m 10s): I am? All right. There's only three us right? So my second prediction is that right now, we know we have a lot of private or even publicly held organizations, employers going out and making orders for vaccines, to make sure that their employees can get the vaccine, when you know, the timeline works, whatever. I have a feeling that we're going to see, organizations are going to dole out the vaccine based on performance. High-performers we need you to make sure you get the vaccine so we can keep you working. If you're some, you know, dead man walking in the bottom, 10%. Joel (34m 46s): Good choice of words. Tim (34m 48s): We're going to wait to first, see if you just die from the virus or at the least, you know, we'll wait until you get the vaccine at the end. But I think we're going to see some weird stuff happening with employers and vaccines, and who gets that because you can, like, at first you go, oh, well, if I'm an employer of a thousand people, I bought a thousand vaccines for my employees. You go, okay, the executives are going to get theirs first. And then all the way down, I think you're going to see a lot of organizations really struggle with how do we dole out the vaccines and how, and how do we do this and not going well, we have Sheila over a year, she's old. And then Timmy, he's fat. So let's give them, they're not, I mean, they're not gonna want to do that kind of thing. So they're going to go, Oh, well, how do we do this? Chad (35m 30s): Performance baby, yeah, I think they're going to, I think they're going to have to, I think they're going to have to take a look at the, the government guidelines on how they're rolling it. And they're going to have to adopt those, but either way we can all sit back, pop some corn and watch. Tim (35m 43s): Like it's fight club, Monday morning at the office. All right. Whoever beats over who eat your vaccine first, let's go. Chad (35m 50s): And it's going to be illegal shit show that's for sure. Joel (35m 53s): Holy Holy lawsuit, Batman. I mean, Tim (35m 55s): Oh sure. Joel (35m 56s): If companies dole out vaccines based on performance or potential, I mean they're gonna get their shit sued. Tim (36m 4s): Joel, if we can think about it, they're going to do it. Chad (36m 6s): That's we? Yeah. We know it's gonna happen. Joel (36m 8s): They can't make it public. Tim (36m 10s): Instead of your 15% bonus, we'll give you the bonus or we can give you the vaccine, which one would you like? Joel (36m 15s): They'll make it look like a lottery. Tim (36m 17s): I love the lottery idea. That's awesome. Because you could tell the guy going to be in my HR office going, okay. I just picked Joel, Joel, come on down. You're the next one up. Joel (36m 26s): The constitutionality of employers requiring people to have the vaccine will be another lawsuit thing waiting to happen. It's going to get ugly. Chad (36m 35s): The government will get behind that one though. Joel (36m 37s): Yeah, probably. All right. Let's take a break. And when we come back, our final predictions. Jobvite (36m 42s): 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 (37m 12s): All right, last one. Joel (37m 14s): Love it! Chad. Chad (37m 17s): All right. So this one comes from an anonymous listener. Tim (37m 20s): Wait a minute Chad, before you start. Can we just say Joel, like, fuck for Christ sakes, Chad doesn't do any work for this. He just went out and stole the ideas from everybody up. Chad (37m 30s): I didn't steal them. I'm giving them props. Joel (37m 32s): I just want people to know when, when Chad gets on me about I nap too much, or I'm lazy. Like just remember shows like this where Chad just outsources all of the ideas. Chad (37m 41s): Exactly, just because I'm smart, smarter than both of you doesn't make me wrong. Joel (37m 45s): Thanks for bringing that up, Tim. I appreciate it. All right, Chad, what does your network say for 2021? Chad (37m 52s): So I had to make sure that everybody understood that this one is not from me, but I did like it. Microsoft acquires iCIMS to understand their true potential in the recruitment space. Microsoft doesn't have the expertise to understand the attraction to recruitment space. It needs a global team and tech that can lead the initiative. So iCims dipping. They started dipping their toe into the global waters with the acquisition of opening.io, added a very small non U.S. footprint, but massive power to their system. And then about two months ago, they landed a big deal with Easy Recru, a power player in the EU video interviewing space. Chad (38m 34s): So I believe the tech time and the team is right for this acquisition and the next six to nine months. Tim (38m 41s): I don't, I actually liked that because I had one of mine cause we got, we kind of go back and forth. Right. And I had like a list of like seven and one of my, one of them that I didn't write down was LinkedIn's going to acquire. And to me it was like a big, like they could finally get a full ATS, like involved in LinkedIn. Cause they're so cause if you think about the TA world in general, where we're just so drunk on LinkedIn, we can't even stand ourselves anymore and that's just continues. But like the thing that we need then is a full blown ATS built into LinkedIn, which they don't have. So I, they iCIMS acquisition makes sense. Joel (39m 13s): Yeah. We talk about this on the show and I agree. I think the only thing that, that is a hangup is the LinkedIn buffer and LinkedIn did launch an ATS a few years ago. No one I guess noticed. So the question will be okay, do we drop, you know, X billion on an ATS or do we build it in house? And I think that could be the only hiccup, but for sure, LinkedIn, what they're missing is what Tim and what you guys say is a full-blown sort of ATS. And if they did have that, you know, watch out because then they've got about everything, right. Then you bring in all the fucking Microsoft shit. Yeah. Chad (39m 46s): That would fuck things up. So yeah. Tim (39m 49s): Why wouldn't LinkedIn just by ZipRecruiter too? You know, Joel (39m 53s): or Dice Tim (39m 55s): No, no. Joel (39m 57s): Two-for, with Monster. Monster and Dice, they have a Groupon for that I think running right now. We all agree on that one. All right. So it's my turn. So speaking of big, big gorillas, one of the big news items of 2020 was Salesforce acquiring Slack. The more I think about this, the more I really like it. And I, I really kinda think that Slack will be the main brand of the company in five years. And I think that when you look at, you know, who bought Slack being Salesforce, there's a lot of history there of Mark Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce being at odds with both Microsoft and Google. Joel (40m 41s): And I think his sort of secret underlying ambition is to kick both of those companies in the nuts. And I think in a company like Slack, he really has the engine to do that. And I think that one of the big moves and something I think Slack should do is create basically Slack profiles, similar to your LinkedIn profile or what might've been a Google plus profile or a Twitter profile, like you'll have a Slack profile and that messaging platform will follow you to any job that you have. Any project that you get into, it'll be a personal messaging device as well. So in one fell swoop, Benioff, we'll be able to create a LinkedIn competitor as well as a Gmail competitor. Tim (41m 25s): Did you guys see the Slack shoes that Cole Haan produces? Seriously? So Cole Haan actually had four versions of Slack shoes. So like if you're like either worked for Slack or if you just were like head over heels in love with Slack, you could have your own Slack shoes. That was going to be one of my predictions was going to be Apple was going to release shoes. Cause I would definitely have Apple shoes to go with my Apple calmer, my Apple watch my Apple dildo, like everything, you know. Joel (41m 51s): The Apple car's coming. Tim (41m 52s): Oh for sure, can't wait. Joel (41m 54s): Apple, Apple dildo. Is there something you want to expand upon, Tim? Tim (41m 59s): I mean, any, anything Apple sells? So like, I mean just keep, you know, keep producing it, right. Chad (42m 4s): As long as it has a Bluetooth available to it's fine. Tim (42m 7s): But Joel, don't you don't you discount Microsoft Teams because people are so addicted to email Teams is in there. They could, they could do the same profile. I just think they have a hard time disrupting, Slack does, because Teams came out so hard because of the pandemic. Chad (42m 22s): Well, and Salesforce, Salesforce doesn't give a shit about recruitment now the Gmail piece. Yes, I get that. Do they want to disrupt LinkedIn? I don't think they give a shit. I think they are more focused on Teams than they are anything when it comes to LinkedIn. Joel (42m 36s): Think there's an immense value in a directory of people or being a network of some sort. And so I don't necessarily think Job Postings or Recruiter, you know, the counts. But I think that they'll create some sort of a network. Chad (42m 49s): I do like the transferable profile piece. Like this is the one thing, you know, and then also, you know, I use both, right? So on Teams I'm a Slack user that you can do your entire world in Slack, whether it's it's work, it's I have like a hobby or whatever, like, you know, conference stuff. It could all be in one place and Teams hasn't truly, really figured that out yet. Yeah. Joel (43m 8s): Yeah. And the app infrastructure, there is something that email has never really done. They're on a lot of cool sort of email applications that people are using. And Slack has sort of tapped into that. And I think they could leverage that going forward. Chad (43m 20s): Whatever did my Bitmoji, right in. Tim (43m 25s): Oh, Bitmoji. Joel (43m 28s): Alright Tim, what was the, this one? Tim (43m 31s): In 2021, we're going to see a large enterprise company actually give their employees the option of getting paid in Bitcoin. Now we've seen employers at a very large level, allow people to say, Hey, we're going to do a one-time spot bonus, or you could take that in Bitcoin, but we haven't seen full payroll go Bitcoin yet. And I have a feeling that, you know, based on the, just I think how Bitcoin has become like the cryptocurrency it's actually, you know, from a financial standpoint, you know, just gained so much more respect over this 2020 that we're going to see Bitcoin become the currency of payroll in some large enterprise. Tim (44m 14s): And I, if I had to guess it's either going to be Uber or Tesla. Chad (44m 18s): I think Tesla might as well just go ahead and start printing their own money with Elon's face on it, because that'll be an easier sell than Bitcoin. Joel (44m 27s): I think you're saying your salary will be in Bitcoin. Tim (44m 31s): Yeah. Joel (44m 32s): Okay. So, so I think that the challenge of that is the, I guess one part is the mainstream of that. The second one is, you know, to, to use Bitcoin and I'm no crypto expert, but as I understand it to use Bitcoin to buy stuff is super challenging. Do people want to be paid in Bitcoin, I don't know. Will they want an annual bonus in Bitcoin? That seems interesting. I think the more feasible option will be, Hey, as part of our 401K program, you know, one of the funds you can invest in is Bitcoin. Tim (45m 2s): Yeah. That's bold. Joel (45m 4s): That's what we do on this show. Chad (45m 5s): This year has been bold predictions. I have to say. Joel (45m 8s): And in 2021, after the year we've had, why not make some bold ass predictions? And that's what we did. My friends Happy New Year! Chad (45m 16s): Happy New Year! Tim (45m 17s): Happy New Year! Joel (45m 17s): I do hope that we do some face-to-face drinking time in 2021. That's a prediction that I hope we can all agree on. Chad (45m 24s): Please, God, please. Joel (45m 26s): And get that shot in my arm as soon as possible. Chad (45m 30s): In line, you're not in the high performers. So I don't know if you'll get it. Tim (45m 35s): II told him my wife I'm going to volunteer to give shots to people just so I can get it. And she's like, you don't, you couldn't even give a shot without passing out. And I'm like, well, they'd have to give me mine first. You know, Joel (45m 45s): And with that. Tim lead us out. With a we out. Tim (45m 50s): We out. Joel (45m 50s): We out. Chad (45m 51s): We out. OUTRO (45m 51s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anyhoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (46m 35s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Ya' better watch out. Ya' better not cry. Better not pout ... 'cause this is the naughty and nice edition of The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Who was bad? Who was good? Gotta listen to find out, but - spoiler alert - it's full of Floridians, webcam debauchery, and "wokeness" gone awry. Ho! Ho! Ho! And be sure to give the gift of visiting our sponsors, Jobvite, Sovren, and JobAdx this holiday season. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Christmas Intro (0s): Merry Christmas. Ya filthy animal. INTRO (3s): 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 (26s): Jingle bells, jingle bells. Keep the change of filthy animals. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast where we're always recording from home alone. I'm your cohost Joel "Griswold" Cheeseman Chad (42s): and I'm Chad "tinsel" Sowash. Joel (46s): On this week's Grinchy episode, we go through this year's naughty and nice lists as well as, you know, stroke, our own egos and sucking up to our sponsors. Ho, ho, ho. SOVREN (1m 0s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (1m 60s): Is 2020 over yet? God dammit. Chad (2m 3s): Not yet. We're close, but what you can say that we've definitely gone into content overdrive in 2020. This is our 215th podcast this year alone. Joel (2m 16s): And the money I've saved on therapy has been fantastic, thanks to the podcast. By the way, did you see the picture on social media of the mom who let her kids write let it snow on the house windows and the first two windows, the L and the E were on the side of the house. The front of the house said 'tits now.' Classic. Chad (2m 46s): I'm sure the kids engineered that one out. I'm 100% sure. Joel (2m 51s): I am sure they had no idea. No idea. What are you doing for the Christmas holiday? You're going to be at home, I assume. Chad (2m 57s): Yeah, we're going to be home. We're going to be smart. Going to be responsible, like we have this entire fucking year. One thing I am finally happy to announce is that I was able to watch the Tenant movie. I've been waiting for this fucking thing. The movie studios really need to get their shit together. The movie was out in theaters only then it was on Blue Ray. Who the hell uses blue Ray anymore? And then, and then it came out on Amazon Prime. Joel (3m 27s): Yep. Chad (3m 27s): Apparently Christopher Nolan. Isn't happy about the, the whole Warner Brothers 2021 releases going to HBO MAX and theaters at the same time. I mean, this is it's, it's just so fucking weird that we have these rich white dudes saying, you know, I want everything in the theater, right? It's like, do you not know we have can pandemic going on? And Disney plus is going to eat your goddamn lunch if you don't do this shit. Right. I mean, it's just, it's really, what's really surreal right now. Joel (3m 59s): Yeah. Did you have to pay extra for it or was it part of your Amazon Prime subscription? Chad (4m 4s): It was extra. We had that and it didn't give you, it didn't give you an option to, to rent either. Joel (4m 10s): Wrong. Chad (4m 10s): That's ok, I'll watch it again. Joel (4m 11s): My favorite. My favorite Hollywood news tidbit was the Tom Cruise, just ripping of anuses on this set of his latest Mission Impossible movie. I assume you've heard that little soundbite, right? Chad (4m 24s): I have, I have. Yeah, he makes it sound like they're like literally saving the world one movie at a time. Right. And I appreciate, you know, trying to try to stick by, you know, the COVID measures that they have in place and the bubble and those types of things. And yeah, I should have fired the fuckers right on the spot. But I mean, seriously listening to it come out of his mouth, first off, nothing sounds genuine anymore coming out of Tom Cruise's mouth. But it was like, you know, it was like, we're saving the world one movie at a time. And I was like, wow. Joel (4m 58s): I'm trying to save the fucking industry. You know how many jobs are at stake? Chad (5m 2s): Yeah. That was good. Joel (5m 4s): Tom's Tom's good stuff. Tom's good stuff. He is psycho. But the dude connect, he is committed to the craft. I will give him that. Chad (5m 10s): He should be committed. That's what it is. Joel (5m 16s): That was good. Chad (5m 17s): Thanks. I got to say Robert Pattinson, in the movie Tenants, Julie and I are sitting there watching it. And I look over her. I was like, who does he look like? And she looks at me in a very disconcerning way, says Max, he looks exactly like Max Armbruster from Talk Push. I couldn't, I couldn't believe it. Joel (5m 40s): If the lighting's right. I guess I could, could maybe see that. Chad (5m 43s): That's crazy. Joel (5m 45s): That's good for Max. You ready for some shout outs, man, let's get this show over with so I can drink some Christmas ale. Chad (5m 50s): Good Lord. Hit it! Joel (5m 54s): I'm going to keep it pretty short aside from, the plugging of stuff that we always do on the show. So we sent out Christmas cards this year, as we did last year. The list this year was much larger than last year because we have people signing up for free shit. And we'd just sort of expanded the list. But my shout out simply goes to our fans. Like, so the story is that, you know, my wife, she sees that I'm mailing Christmas letters and she wants to help. And like, why don't we get, why don't we get the kids to address stuff? Chad (6m 27s): Yeah, Joel (6m 27s): And I'm like, you know what? Like, it's kind of cool for me to see who the people are, where they live, you know, just, just to somehow connect with them in this way. Now that said, this is the last year that I'm doing Christmas cards because next year, next year, we're sending them out through some service that sends out postcards. Like, we're not, I'm not doing that again. You can do it, but I'm not doing it. And it's just really cool to see where everyone is from, kind of what they do because they, they fill that out on their form. And it's just really humbling to know that so many people listen to us and are willing to give us their time and energy and efforts. And so my shout out, as cheesy as it is, shout out to the fans, they are simply the best. Joel (7m 12s): And they're the reason why we exist. Chad (7m 14s): Yes. Joel (7m 15s): And what better time of year to, to acknowledge them and then the holidays. Yes, Chad (7m 19s): I agree. I've got to, I've got to say thanks to a couple of presents that Julie and I got in the mail. Gem and Thomas from Talent Nexus sent us, a box of British chocolate goodies. Whenever you can get chocolate in the mail, especially chocolate that you can't get here in the States. That's awesome. I asked my British friends here locally, what order I should eat them in because I don't know what's from what? Joel (7m 46s): You're sure there, wasn't a note in there saying like, Cheeseman gets some of this. It was, that was all for you. That's exactly right. Chad (7m 52s): The last thing you need is chocolate. Then I received a, a package from Latasha Sherman from Page Up one, a shout out for her for sending us Turkish coffee. She said that, you know, instead of sending me beer, she sent Turkish coffee. I've never had it before. It is amazing. And I was just drinking some out of my Chad and Cheese coffee mug. By the way. Joel (8m 17s): And what makes it so different from, you know, the Americana stuff. Chad (8m 21s): So if you take a look at like espresso grind, it's very fine. Well this Turkish coffee is even finer than that. Number one, you don't filter it. It has a special pot that you put it in. And I mean, there's a whole process not to mention it has cardamom in it, which is a spice. So it is delicious. Joel (8m 44s): All right, cool. Turkish coffee, put it on the bucket list. Chad (8m 47s): Turkish coffee baby. Joel (8m 50s): Shout out, to Beau Higgins from Amazon, he was our beer drop winner for the month. And we sat down for a little zoom tasting with him. The dude's kind of nutty. He wears like a candy cane sport coat on the call and he loves stouts, which aren't at the top of my list usually, but it was nice to do that once in a while and a shout out to Beau. That was a lot of fun, man. We appreciate it. Yeah, that was on sponsored by AdZuna got to put that in. Chad (9m 20s): And thanks to the boys that AdZuna for joining us on the call. It's always nice to sit back, have a beer or two and just bullshit on a video call. I'm hoping that everybody out there, because we're on so many video calls a day. I hope that you guys are all taking the time to connect with friends and just have a beer. I mean, I'm next week, have something scheduled with one of my high school buddies, I haven't talked to in a long time and we're going to sit down and have a beer. So do that, treat yourself and reach out to some people that you haven't connected to in a while. Joel (9m 58s): Reach out and touch someone. Chad (9m 60s): Next. A shout out goes to shaker who sent us popcorn. So which one did you open first? So I'm going to, I'm going to go ahead and say it was probably you opened the cheese before you did the carmel. Is that right? Joel (10m 14s): I did not take advantage of the free popcorn offer because as you, as you say in your last comment, I don't need any more food in my life. And Shaker's been so nice this year, redoing our website, supporting us. They always have. I thought, you know what, like taking popcorn is maybe one step too far. And so you enjoy that popcorn. And think of me when you, when you down that caramel corn. Chad (10m 38s): Well, the girls are home, so, so they need something to munch on. I also did a LinkedIn poll just to, just to see, you know, which one I should open first and in caramel, just edged out the cheese popcorn. So thanks Shaker, the popcorn is delicious. I have had some, yeah. Joel (10m 58s): I like it like it. Well, what I like even more with that popcorn would be some Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve bourbon. And if you haven't gone to freepappy.com to put in your address for a chance to win a 2000 plus dollar bottle of bourbon, Chad (11m 17s): Jesus. Joel (11m 17s): There's still time to do so. Just head out to freepappy.com. I think we're doing the drawing January 4th or fifth, just to make sure everyone's over there. New Year's hangover before we do the drawing and you can't lose. Even if you don't want one of the Pappy's third place is a bottle of lovely Blanton's reserve from the beautiful country of Japan. A very, very hard to get all of them, bottles of bourbon, and it's free to give us your info and get a chance to win. So why not? Chad (11m 49s): Amen. Shout out to Adam Chambers who scored first North American clients. Kevin. Yeah, Kevin Kirkpatrick, over at Humber River Hospital. They made that magical connection just by listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. So, Kevin, I obviously heard Adam pitch Apleychats on Chad and Cheese, and that's what we do. Joel. We bring people together. Joel (12m 15s): By the way, I think Adam has submitted his information for free beer and/or Pappy, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to do an ID check on Adam, because I'm still not convinced that dude is over 21. So, Chad (12m 27s): I agree. I agree. Joel (12m 30s): Shout out to Emissary our texting sponsor. We love those guys. Hope they have a good holiday. If you're not getting Chad and Cheese in your pocket, if you're not getting news alerts, if you're not getting the real nitty-gritty behind the show, you need to text the letters. CC to (833) 799-0321. That's Chad and Cheese in your pocket letters, CC to (833) 799-0321. Chad (13m 0s): Huge Topics! Joel (13m 3s): Topics, let's do this thing. All right. So every year we love this show. We do our naughty or nice list. Oh yeah. So Chad and I will go through naughty or nice lists. We'll sort sorta coordinate go one after the other. It'll be fun hopefully quick. And we can all get along, get on with our lives. So I'm going to start off with a naughty one. How could I start off any other way? Chad (13m 26s): Good call. Joel (13m 27s): So my, my first naughty, naughty list recipient goes to Indeed. Okay. So this is sort of dark, I hate to start with this one, but vice reported back in may Taylor Gilbert, a 27 year old senior account executive who still works at Indeed this, this many months after Gilbert alleged, that she was basically raped on a sales trip. In 2015, she was a new employee, she was taken advantage of apparently allegedly listeners will also remember a similar case with CareerBuilder. Joel (14m 8s): Similar allegations came, came to the front. This is sort of this whole bro culture that happens in every industry, but certainly ours as well. Indeed is not immune to this stuff. I'm still really impressed that that Taylor still works at Indeed. That's gotta be an interesting situation. I did reach out to both her and her attorney for comment on where the lawsuit is. I did not hear back. If I do hear back, I'll let everyone know what they, what they say on the, on the weekly show, but yeah, indeed get your shit together. This whole bro culture is over with, and we need to treat everyone with respect. So for that easy decision, indeed made my naughty list for 2020. Joel (14m 55s): Yeah. Chad (14m 56s): And I'm wondering, you know, just from this year, honestly, we don't have that physical interaction really anymore. You know, this year, I wonder how that's going to change moving forward. You know, so it's having, having drunk sales conferences, which is pretty much what happens, you know, that's that, that that's, that's always, always, always been an issue. And I wonder how, you know, this new remote kind of work is going to be is going to be different. It's going to change things. I wonder, if it will? Joel (15m 30s): Well, a lot of attorneys with a little less to do this year, because less, less interaction between young people working at companies with a lot of alcohol and exotic, exotic locations, offsite. Chad (15m 42s): Not cool. Well, I am going to turn it to nice. Joel (15m 47s): Aww... What you got? Chad (15m 49s): So what happened this year that I thought was nice for us and for the entire industry was the ATS arms race. New CEO Steve Lucas takes the iCIMS reigns in February and in May, iCIMS acquires opening.io. Then about a month ago, it's that 2020 acquisitions continue to go. We've got EasyRecru and then Altru, but you've got to remember this new tech arms race started with JobVite in that one roll-up then Amman took the helm in 2019, he stayed aggressive with 2020 acquisitions. Chad (16m 31s): Like Talentagy, then there was an Aquahire of a AI data science team at Predictive Partner. Then we've got Smart Recruiters snapping up conversational AI, Job Power from the EU, which I believe was an incredibly smart acquisition. So I love seeing this action in our space because remember the Taleos of the world, they did partnering, they did shitty integrations. What we're seeing now is we're seeing a bunch of smaller, nimble companies being zapped up by these organizations who are like an iCIMS. You could say as quote unquote legacy, but they're trying not to be legacy. Chad (17m 12s): They've got this new brand, they're getting these new technologies integrated into their system. So I'm glad to see this refresh instead of just a constant atrophy of technology. Joel (17m 24s): Rolling. Rolling. Rolling. All right. So I'm gonna go with my first nice choice of the show. Obviously, there was some big themes to 2021. We had the black lives matter movement. We always see that Covid a lot of things went wrong in 2020. So a lot of, a lot of people shined when the world got darkest. And my first one goes out to Reed Hastings, founder of, co-founder actually of Netflix. One thing that Reed did that was very exceptional in 2020 is, is he committed, gave $120 million to the United Negro College Fund, Spelman College and Morehouse college. Joel (18m 9s): That was exceptional to me. Hastings said, quote, "generally white capital flows to predominantly white institutions. And we need to, to change that." So I thought that he put his money where his mouth was, made a real commitment. So Reed Hastings is a big, nice guy on my list for 2020. Chad (18m 30s): You take a look at the endowments of the historically black colleges and universities versus some of the other like Stanford's or the MITs or what have you. There's a huge difference. So, I mean, there's much of an equalizing that we need to do in this country and definitely around the area of academia. No question. Yep. Joel (18m 56s): No doubt. No doubt. Chad (18m 58s): Excellent So I get to, I get to share my first naughty. Joel (19m 2s): Naughty boy, let's hear it. Chad (19m 4s): You're going to enjoy this. So remember last year in Austin at TA Tech, right after death match, you and I were pretty much arguing, pretty hard between Seek Out and job.com being the death match winner. One of the big points you made for Aaron was job.com bank role, which I agree. And he said on stage, they bought out three staffing agencies just that month. And that to me was a baller move. And I think that was one of the things that you said it was like, dude, they're bank rolled. It's a, it's a baller move. Well, we found out that wasn't true since job.com first acquisition actually happened in August of this year. Chad (19m 48s): So my first naughty goes to Aaron Stewart for trying to bullshit us onstage in public and while he was being recorded, that was a naughty thing to do. Aaron, don't do it again. Joel (19m 60s): Now, Aaron, heard us comment on that a few months ago and wanted to come on the show. Right? What happened to that? Did that just fall through the cracks? Chad (20m 8s): Yeah, we had something scheduled, but he had other things going on and the reschedule never happened. So Aaron, anytime you want to come on big guy. Joel (20m 16s): So that's, that's a good naughty. That's a good idea. What's, let's take a break from all this naughtiness and we'll, we'll continue with the list. JobAdX (20m 23s): Your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Joel (21m 5s): Back to my naughty list. My second one for the year, this one was really easy. And I was trying to think back if they were, they were one of my turkeys and I'm pretty sure that they were as well. So I apologize, but these guys are just too easy, too naughty to me. They were the sort of symbolic bad story of the year. So for me, my second naughty goes out to unwoke.hr. Yes. unwoke.hr. Okay. So back in July, Vice broke a story about a site called unwoke.hr that essentially was a Trumpy in website for jobs where companies could quote, hire courageous free-thinking and freedom, loving individuals, not ID logs, whose only agenda is to weaponize your brand and business to further a radical cause. Joel (22m 0s): These guys got trolled, they got hated on. They got really chesty at one point saying FU. We're a real site. We're legitimate shortly thereafter, they sort of became a password protected site. We didn't think much of it. I went to the site a few weeks ago and it was gone shocker. So this idea stunk, it was a, you know, it was a symbol is symbolic site to Trump and, and just sort of the shitty toxic mentality that had been ravaging America. I'm glad that they're gone. I also think that is symbolic to a new day, hopefully that we are looking forward to in 2021 where people don't do this kind of stupid shit. Joel (22m 46s): This was very naughty. unwoke.hr. Don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split ya as my dad used to say. Chad (22m 54s): Screw you guys. And we're glad that you're dead. Joel (22m 59s): We'll never know who launched that. I bet we'll never know. No one will ever come out and say, I did it. I did it. Here's why. Sorry. Chad (23m 8s): But I mean, overall, if you believe in it that much to actually put up a divisive type of site like that, then yeah. I mean, you should, you should definitely be in front of it. Joel (23m 18s): Yeah. And they got real chesty, but that wilted really fast, I think for a lot of reasons, namely, that no company wants to post a job on a site like that, that might've been there first. Chad (23m 30s): Yeah. That gets categorized under amateur hour. Joel (23m 34s): Stupid. Chad (23m 35s): My next nice goes out to diversity equity and inclusion talks. So George Floyd, Ahmad Aubrey, Briana Taylor, and the countless other murders that have heightened the conversation of fairness and equality. 62% of employees want to know what their companies black lives matter stance is. The SCOTUS backs LGBTQ employees against workforce workplace discrimination. The women's soccer team demands equal pay. Torin says he's not taking the vaccine. And guys like us stand back in white bewilderment. Joel (24m 12s): White bewilderment. Chad (24m 14s): And we're confused. And why are we confused? Because we weren't on the playing field. We placed ourselves on the bench for those uncomfortable conversations, the marches, the rallies, but in 2020, we got the fuck off the bench and actually dove into those uncomfortable conversations, pressing equity, trying to find guests who could school us and our listeners on topics. So what made my 2020 nice was having Cindy Gallop, grace, this show, and being on two episodes, Madison Butler, challenging racist hiring practices, Alison Robinson from the Mom Project, remind against why mommy tracking hurts business, Maria Cola Cortijo developing tech to help identify and close the wage gap. Chad (25m 5s): And Kate Lance helping us understand the science behind a solid and equal mix of men and women at all levels in our workplace. These conversations were hidden to most of us because we chose to sit on the bench. In 2020, we got the fuck off the bench, we're having uncomfortable conversations, we're being more comfortable with them because everybody needs to understand this is who we are and we have to change and be more equitable. So as we, a couple of white guys were sitting in London last year with Torrin said, what do we do? He said, speak up, do something about it. Right? Chad (25m 45s): And at that point, I think, you and I, and this podcast got off the bench. Joel (25m 51s): It was very impression for what the year would become that you and I had that conversation with Torin. And not only did I think we speak, spoke up, but we had voices on the podcast that obviously spoke for us in a way that we definitely could not. So amen to that. That was, that's an easy, nice list. And you said it much better than I did. I'm going to go a little bit granular on my diversity. My next nice list recipient goes to Jerome Tarnik, a show favorite. Jerome is co-founder of Smart Recruiters, which you know, talking about, you know, walking the walk Jerome, came out, his organization, Smart Recruiters came out public with, I guess I call it a manifesto in terms of what we're going to actually do to make equality a reality in our industry. Joel (26m 44s): He came on the show, which was pretty ballsy. We asked some hard questions around pay equity and a few things, and yeah, to his credit, he answered all of those. They appointed a Chief Diversity Officer this year. They've hired, I think, a women of color to executive positions. And in addition to that as if, as if Jerome and I can't say it in my French accent, because I'll butcher it, but Jerome also wrote a fucking book called Hiring Success. He came on the show as well to talk about that. If you want to know more, just dig into the archives at chadcheese.com, but Jerome, Jerome, you make my nice list for 2020. Joel (27m 25s): Well done, sir. Well done. Chad (27m 26s): Yeah. Joel (27m 28s): And with that, let's take a quick break and we'll get into some more naughty or nice. Jobvite (27m 34s): 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 (28m 4s): I'm going to jump right back into naughty because I haven't had enough naughty. Joel (28m 8s): Get dirty. Chad (28m 8s): Rebounding, what we were just talking about DEI. And then, then also Jerome, I'm going to say, you know, we've also seen a lot of naughty in diversity and inclusion vendors, taking advantage of corporate DEI efforts with meaningless offerings. In September, Glassdoor announced their diversity and inclusion ranking. So first and foremost, hiring companies already hate Glassdoor because they feel like they're being strong, armed into paying Glassdoor to help them quote, massage the message around a brand, right? Just, just, just normally. Joel (28m 49s): That's a bad touch. Chad (28m 50s): That is a bad touch. The platform is predicated under transparency like any review site, but Glassdoor has become nothing more than an expensive game to play for hiring companies, hiring companies look for ways to manipulate the system and their rankings. So it it's, it's lost time. They could be spending doing something with actual meaning rather than just thinking of different ways to engineer a better score. We need to focus on outcomes and those outcomes being either hiring outcomes or retention outcomes, right. When we're spending our time and our effort doing stupid shit like this on Glassdoor, just to, and I've been a part of companies and have consulted with companies, who've actually had strategies on how to manipulate the system. Chad (29m 41s): That is time and money wasted for something that you could be doing that could actually be helping your organization. Joel (29m 48s): I like it. I'm going to get nice on your ass though. You'll like that. So employees had a hard time in 2020 as in all of us, regardless of race, color, creed, age, et cetera. And I want to give a nice shout out, I guess, to all the employees or the employers, excuse me, who added mental health benefits and other supportive benefits to their workforce in regards to let's agree, the mental strain that was 2020, a few notable, a few notable companies, Starbucks increased employee mental health benefits. Joel (30m 29s): We talked to Chipotle on the show this year, who talked extensively about not only how they were protecting their employees in a virus environment, but also how they are increasing mental health benefits. We see someone like LinkedIn offer courses to help workers get their professional credentials upgraded on their site. We saw City Group, Bank of America with telemedicine options for employees. So not necessarily a specific company, but just the group of companies who stood up and said, you know what our employees are dealing with at home boredom, depression, alcoholism, angry kids, noisy kids, kids that have a ton of issues and stepped up to the mic and said, we're going to increase benefits to support our employees in this rough time. Joel (31m 20s): So I applaud and put them on the nice list this year. Chad (31m 25s): Yeah. Say that Covid, I mean, all those things existed prior, right? It's not like they just came, they just exacerbated what was already there. So Covid from the standpoint of how horrible it has been for us. It's also shown how we need help. Your people need help. And it's great to see companies finally respond with something that again, is meaningful. So, that is a big, nice. Joel (31m 56s): Yeah. We always talk about the pandemic being an accelerant of all these trends. And I think providing not only just work from home benefits, but things that come along with working from home and working virtually to help employees navigate the waters of things like depression and loneliness and seclusion and whatnot. So yeah, there are some silver linings to 2020, I guess. Chad (32m 21s): And here's my last silver lining, my last nice. So a kid named Tony Piloseno got fired from his part-time job at Sherwin-Williams for loving his job so much. He recorded paint, mixing and shared it with his 1.2 million TikTok subscribers. So Sherwin-Williams, Joel (32m 42s): I'm sorry. Did you say 1.2 million? Chad (32m 45s): 1.2 million TikTok subscribers? Okay. Now Sherman-Williams loss was Florida Paints gain as Tony took a gig with Florida Paint, he was this week relocated by the company to Orlando and is doing what he loves with a company that loves what he loves. We had a great interview with Tony called 'Lightning in a Paint Can' that you gotta check out, just go to the site, check out in our interviews area. But again, this is a great story of a company identifying and actually seeing that passion in an individual around something that they're passionate in Tony saw himself being in corporate at Sherwin-Williams well, guess what? Chad (33m 34s): Now he's now Sherwin-Williams and they're dumb asses lost something that was big. Good on Florida paints. Florida paints gets my nice, my last nice for the 2020. Joel (33m 46s): Very nice. Well, I can't wait to see if Sherwin-Williams made naughty list, but before we get to that, this is my final naughty list recipient. And this one was pretty. So I, I started the list a little heavy, ah, a little, a little, a little dark, but I'm going light on this one. So my last naughty recipient is Jeffrey Toobin Oh, a name that's now a verb. Yes. For those who don't know, Toobin, 60 year old Toobin was seen lowering and raising his computer camera exposing and touching his penis and motioning and air kiss to someone other than his colleagues on a zoom call the New York times reported. Joel (34m 30s): A hashtag #meToobin became a thing on a play on the #metoo movement. Yeah. I, I caution you to, to look at that on Twitter at your own, at your own discretion. Chad (34m 40s): Don't do it. Joel (34m 40s): Toobin was not fired. He is still holding his post, his senior legal analyst at CNN, although he is taking a break, that is how long will be to be determined. He did have some supporters and whatnot, but overall, this was a naughty thing to do for sure. Someone in the story that I read said, quote, "I think it's tragic that a guy would get fired for really just doing something really stupid. It is the zoom equivalent of taking an inappropriately long lunch break, having sex during it and getting stumbled upon." Not sure about that was one of his defenders said, but no doubt. Jeffrey Toobin undoubtedly deserves to be on this year's naughty list. Chad (35m 25s): He is definitely a 2020 punchline. That's for sure. Joel (35m 30s): I'm applauding too. But on the naughty list, I don't know what that says about me. Chad (35m 35s): Yeah. I think, I think we all know what that says. All right. So my last, my last naughty goes out to an organization. I'm kind of Florida heavy on this one, but say the idiots at Florida SHRM. If you, if you remember HR Florida State Council, AKA Florida SHRM had an in person conference in September. And then guess what happened in Florida in October, other than cases rising? Joel (36m 10s): I can't imagine? Chad (36m 10s): They had an in person conference. Number one, they posted videos on Facebook with some idiot running around with a mic doing face-to-face interviews. And one of the organizers doing an interview had her damn mask underneath her chin. So seriously, this is why Americans cannot have nice things. These are probably the exact same 19% of Americans who said they pour Clorox on their food. So as we go into 2021, happy a vaccine is on its way. Yes, we can all thank idiots for these motherfuckers at HR Florida State Council and people like them AKA Florida SHRM for making 2020 such a bitch. Chad (36m 59s): You guys suck. And we all hate you. Joel (37m 4s): You make me want to drink. Dammit. Chad, Happy holiday and yours man. Chad (37m 10s): Happy holidays, dude. Fun as always. And we out. Joel (37m 16s): We out. Christmas OUTRO (37m 16s): Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal and a happy new year. Outro (37m 42s): This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast, subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit Chadandcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome.

It's 2020. If you don't laugh, you'll cry. That's why the boys bring Ray Ellin, comedian and founder of Comedy Cloud to the podcast. Ellin's company brings top-notch comedians to corporate Zoom calls. In addition to laughs, we're talkin' better employee morale, engagement and just a break from the daily monotony of working. Take a break, grab some headphones and have a few laughs on us and our sponsor NEXXT. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Chad (1s): Well, you said that first show went really well. How do you know? Because when you're on stage, you can engage and you can see, and you can feel the crowd. How do you feel the crowd when you're on a zoom call or what have you? Ray Ellin (13s): It was the strangest phenomenon. I was, I was a little, I was really kind of apprehensive, but the key was when I'm scrolling through people's screens on the zoom and you can see them laughing, I mean, up close, and that was good, but I found myself clicking a lot on those, like really like rifling through the pages of the webcams. INTRO (33s): 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 (54s): It's a new day in America and Waka Waka, we got some comedy for you, everybody. Can you believe? Chad (1m 0s): Oh, Yes. Joel (1m 1s): On today's show, we welcome, Ray Ellin, comedian and founder of comedycloud.co. Ray, welcome to the show, man. Ray (1m 13s): Thanks for having me. Joel (1m 14s): This guy's got chops. Chad (1m 15s): He's got chops, Comedy Central. I mean you did Fox, Nat Geo. I mean you you've done some shit, Ray, you're from what I hear, you're a pretty damn funny guy. Joel (1m 25s): You're kind of a big deal. Ray (1m 27s): Thanks guys. I feel very, very, very, very impressive sitting here in my tiny New York City apartment. But thank you. Chad (1m 36s): We do what we can do. So give us, give us a little bit about you. Little Twitter bio. Ray (1m 40s): Well, I started doing standup throughout high school and college. And then when I moved to New York, did a bunch of TV commercials and while I was doing standup, and then I made this movie, I produced and directed a film called the Latin Legends of Comedy, which did pretty, pretty nicely. Chad (1m 59s): Nice. Ray (1m 60s): And I was most recently I was an executive producer of a Comedy Central show called This Week at the Comedy Cellar. And that we did three seasons of that right before the lockdown. And then I also started a comedy club called Aruba Ray's Comedy Club, which is the number one nightlife activity on the Island of Aruba for the past seven years. So. Chad (2m 24s): Got to love that shit, right? I mean, when you're going to Aruba, you got your own place. Ray (2m 29s): It is nice. That's why I really, I set it up. I've been going to Aruba for a bit and I fell in love with the Island. And I went every month for a year. I kept going back and forth like eight days, nine days a month. How could I spend more time here? So I set up the comedy club in April of 2013. Not really thinking it was gonna, I thought it'd be like, it'd be like an okay little thing, but it's turned into like a pretty solid place to go. So, it's awesome. Yeah. Chad (2m 53s): Well, that's the state of New York? We hear it's dying out here in the midwest. Ray (2m 58s): It doesn't feel like Aruba. I could tell you that. New York has gotten, has gotten much better. I mean, compared to when I, left and went down to Aruba mid July, as soon as they opened up. And at the time that I left, like my neighborhood in New York, which, which is a pretty nice neighborhood, it just felt really unsafe. You know, it wasn't, you didn't feel so great walking around the neighborhood. There was a little more crime and so on and everything was closed. I mean, I had the supermarket, the pharmacy and a deli, those three things were open pretty close to my apartment, which is great, but everything else was, was shut down. And it was a pretty dreary vibe. Ray (3m 40s): Most people that left town, probably 80% of my building, 90% of my building had left and went somewhere else outside of New York. But then when I came back early September, there was, there was a lot of outdoor dining had now opened up, a bunch of stores that opened up. But that being said, there's still some terrific places that I've been going to for the last, you know, 10, 15 years that are, are gone, that went out of business, you know, restaurants and some other mom and pop stores. And that, and that really, it sucks. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a bummer and I feel bad for the owners and, you know, they're hoping they can reopen maybe in a year someplace else that maybe at better rent, but it's disappointing, you know, it's, it's difficult. Ray (4m 23s): It's very difficult, but you know, what can you do? You have to move forward, right? It's all difficult. Chad (4m 27s): Talk about that. I mean, overall, you're a comedian. You make people laugh, but that doesn't mean that, you know, sitting in your apartment in New York City, doesn't suck, during 2020, this shitstorm, we call 2020. How do you cope? How have you actually moved through this? Ray (4m 45s): Well, pretty, it's difficult, but it was pretty challenging, you know? Well, first of all, I think you guys know, so March 1st, my oldest sister passed away. She was based in California. Joel (4m 57s): Sorry to hear that. Ray (4m 58s): And no one really knew that much about COVID at the time was this brand new thing. And so, you know, we get this terrible news. So, and then a week after her funeral, we basically go into lockdown. So we had just wrapped the third season of the Comedy Central show, right as we're going into lockdown. And a week prior, I had this terrible thing happened with my sister. So I kind of had this, you know, there's like this global pandemic that everyone is a part of. Then I have my own little personal crisis, you know, for me and my family. So when, when we first went to lock down, it was just like, it was, it was just a bizarre, it was just a surreal feeling, you know, like you're alone in your apartment, it's is a lot to sort of figure out. Ray (5m 41s): And then they say, all right, you're going to be locked in for two weeks. And at first, alright, like two weeks, I guess I have some food in here. There's a supermarket around the corner. Okay. I'll just, I'm going to read binge Game of Thrones. And literally that was the game plan. I'm going to, let me see what the Starks and the Lannisters are up to again, for the next couple of weeks, Joel (6m 4s): It was Breaking Bad for me. It was Breaking Bad. Ray (6m 7s): I did that at some point. I think I did that hit that in June, but it's, you know, that's really what I was doing at the time. And I knew comedy clubs weren't going to be open and comedians were hurt. I set up a fund for comedians. I knew, there's a lot of comedians that hadn't worked in quite some time. So I set up a fund for that, not for me, but for my colleagues. And that felt good doing that of course. I was talking to friends of mine who work in at law firms and in banking and advertising and they're working from home. And some of my friends were saying to me like, you know what, Ray, I love my wife. I love my kids, but I am losing my fucking mind. Ray (6m 49s): Just going crazy, you know. Same thing, my friend Barbara said to me, she was like, you know what I, my husband is I am going to murder him. Like they, you know, they were really, they were just going nuts like each other. So, so I, I really thought, okay, comedians have no place to work. I have, you know, friends who need some sort of relief. I, I, you know, I would say to them, you really need to laugh right now more than anything. And then I get a call from a guy who had been to my comedy, the comedy club in Aruba. And he said to me, you know, you want to put together a show online for, for my employees? Ray (7m 28s): And I, on the one hand I wanted to perform, on the other hand, I was feeling kind of lousy, but on the other hand, I knew people really needed an outlet and they needed a hoot. And he said, you know, we're having motivational speakers come in every week. And at this point I don't really think my employees feel motivated anymore. So, you know, what do you say? And, and I thought, you know, this let's give it a shot. So it was myself and three other comedians, all of whom, you know, everybody's been on the Tonight Show and America's Got Talent and Last Comic Standing and Jimmy Kimmel and everything. And, and the show I produced, I would also work with probably about 180, 190 different comedians. Ray (8m 8s): So I just, from being in the business a long time, I know a lot of different comedians. What I didn't realize was there's some comics that are great when you see them live in the feeder and a club, but online either they're not into doing it online or where their act just doesn't work well, going through the webcam. So, yeah, there was also a learning process with that to discover who was really great online. And who's not. Joel (8m 33s): So, just for a visual, is this like a zoom call? Like, it would almost be a fellow employee on the screen. Do you set up, do you set up a stage? It's just sort of, it's the same as a zoom call? Ray (8m 44s): Same as a zoom call. Yes. And I we've tried different types of backdrops and some backdrops, you know, you kind of get lost, you look like a, you look like, BooBerry, you know. You just of floating, but some are better than others, but yeah, just like as a regular zoom call. You know, and we have to learn about the best way to do lighting and audio and that sort of thing. Joel (9m 6s): Yeah. Ray (9m 6s): So we do the show for this company, and it went great. I was like, much better than I expected both their reactions and, and how it felt to perform, you know, on your laptop. So I knew it had it to be modified. It had to the format, the flow of a show, a totally different from seeing a regular comedy show. And also becoming more proficient at zoom, you know, being able to spotlight people and tweaking the audio and that sort of thing. So I bring in a small production staff each time we do a live event to make that go smoother, but it went really well. Ray (9m 47s): And I said, there's something here. And I kind of thought, and it was great because it gave me something to think about, something more constructive and creative to think about during the... Chad (9m 56s): A purpose right? Ray (9m 56s): Press, right? Yes, exactly. It was really like, it gave me some sort of purpose that, you know, not only, you know, was I able to, Oh, this is something that can, you know, can boost people, make them feel better? You know, everyone's stuck at home, everyone's cooped up, it'll boost their morale. Also give some comedians a place to work. And then for myself, just a great distraction from, you know, from just from everything else that, that was on my mind, you know? So, so that was really, it, it was the first time, you know, people come up to me after shows and comedy clubs before, and they would say to me, I've been going through such a hard time, and this was pre pandemic, you know, thanks. It felt so good, that sort of thing. Ray (10m 36s): And I always appreciated hearing that, but this was the first time that for me personally, comedy really was a coping mechanism. I mean, who knows for the last 20 years, it's probably been a psychological coping mechanism for me as well. Chad (10m 51s): But, but you've, but you've spun this thing up where you have like six comedians that at comedycloud.co? I mean, this is, this is actually turned into something more it seems like, because you could have just done this yourself and said, okay, yeah, I'm going to give myself an outlet this is a coping mechanism, but you went many more steps to start to include your community to obviously perspectively help give them a coping mechanism. But also, I mean, we're talking about people who don't have jobs right now really, giving them an opportunity to perspectively, earn a wage. Chad (11m 31s): Tell me how that all came together in your mind, because this is very community centric. And I, and I love this comedy cloud idea. Ray (11m 39s): Oh, thank you. Thanks. It's yeah, it was, it was one thing I, you know, from talking to my fellow comedians, I knew how down they were and, and not only for not having a place to perform, but also they're worried about, about making a living. So I really thought to myself, you know, why not, why not include other people now? There's probably, there's a stable of about 12 different comedians now that I primarily use that I use in a rotation. And I like to, for every show, I like to always have myself, plus at least four and A, it gives other comics an outlet and, and a paycheck. And also just like a regular comedy show. I think it's good for the audience to have a mix and have a variety. Ray (12m 22s): You know, when we do a show in Aruba, at the club down there, or at a place in New York, I like to always have at least, you know, two other people. So I figured, you know what? This is online. I don't have to fly comedians down to Aruba. So let me make it four or five, just so just to spread the wealth a bit. Joel (12m 41s): How do you match companies with comedians? Does a company come to you and say, Hey, I want somebody really edgy, like cussing, or like, Oh, I just want some safe water cooler talk. How do you match the companies with the comedians and what does it typically cost? Ray (12m 56s): Yeah, it's funny you said there. I do get information from each company. I do want to know, you know, what's the makeup of their staff, you know, what's the age range? What's the ratio of men to women married, single? You know, there's a variety of questions I do ask. I've had companies say to me, you know, we, I would like an all Latino lineup if you could do that. I've had one, there was a women's organization that we did a show for, and they wanted an all the comedians to be women. So I can, you know, definitely. And that makes it, there's a challenge there because in sometimes maybe I'm performing, doing, going to put together a show with some people that I haven't worked with. Ray (13m 38s): I might not even have worked with them live outside of a computer. So I like to also then do sort of, sort of almost like a fake, like almost a dummy show, just to get a sense of who works and who doesn't, you know, cause again, there are, there's, there's a technical aspect as well, performing on your computer to me. And I think at any comic would agree, is much more challenging than just doing the live show, you know? And, but in a fun, challenging way, you know. When you get done with the show afterwards, it's sort of like, well, okay, I'm a little tired, you know that it takes something out of you, but at a regular comedy club, after you do a show, let me hang out with your, your friends, your fellow comics have a drink, whatever. And here it's like, you know, you log off and you're like, okay, I'm back alone in my apartment. Ray (14m 21s): This is a... Chad (14m 23s): Well, you said that first show went really well. How do you know? Because when you're on stage, you can engage and you can see, and you can feel the crowd. How do you feel the crowd when you're on a zoom call or what have you? Ray (14m 35s): It was the strangest phenomenon? I was a little, I was really kind of apprehensive, but the key was when I'm scrolling through people's screens on the zoom and you can see them laughing, I mean, up close. And that was good. But I found myself clicking a lot on those at first, like really like through the pages of the webcams on zoom. Like I really want to see everybody as much as I could. And you also, you can't hear all the audio because you get feedback. If you turn on every mic. Right. So, you know, I only open up a certain amount of microphones and that has to be monitored to see if anyone's popping during the show, that sort of thing. But I was just like, you know, and it's, and you get a kick out of it watching, you know, performing and you see somebody like stroking the cat, you know, or, Chad (15m 18s): Oh, you didn't have Jeffrey Toobin on, did you? Ray (15m 22s): That'd be a pretty interesting show. And I'm sure it would go viral if you recorded it. But, but there's been no Toobin. I've always said that, that that's a verb now is, is if you, if you take care of yourself during a zoom call, you are "toobin", which is why I prefer a free conference call, don't take the risk. Nexxt PROMO (15m 46s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. So for those companies that are out there today, who are kind of hesitant because they're afraid of texting, what do you have to say to them? Get with the program? People are texting these days. You know, I will say that I'm in a different generation, a different point in my career, that I agree I would be hesitant, but there are obviously millions of millions of people that are in that demographic that want to receive them. So, it's again, know your audience and be able to deliver a message to your audience that way they want to receive it. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Nexxt PROMO (16m 27s): Remember that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X. Hiring.nexxt.com Joel (16m 33s): Do you find that companies usually want work-related comedy or do they want sort of just your act as you would normally do it? Do you need to spin it usually for comp like company humor, Dilbert type stuff or not? Ray (16m 50s): It's both, it's both, you're doing, you're doing material from your act, you know, relationships and that sort of thing. And our relationship material has gone in the direction of, you know, wow. Breaking up during a pandemic, you know, there's that there's, you know, bits about that or, or, or being with your spouse 24/7, you know, there's, there's that type of humor. And then also sure there's work-related humor that if some comics have it, I think it's good to, to use because you know, anything that's relatable, you know, any, you know, and now we're at the point where it's like, yeah, everybody knows that person at the office who like, you know, loves to dominate the zoom meeting, you know, before it was like, they wouldn't, they wouldn't shut the hell up by the water cooler. And now, you know, they're, you know, completely like, you know, just yelling everybody down on their laptop. Chad (17m 33s): So, so this has given you tons of material. Ray (17m 37s): There's a lot new stuff. I mean, there's only so many jokes you can do about, about, you know, sitting alone in a studio apartment in NYC, you know, surrounded by bottles of a wine. But, but yeah, no, there's definitely, there's, there's, there's always new material that evolves and stuff you learn from watching the news and that sort of thing. We do tend, we, I, we never want the shows to be really political or racial because just like doing a live corporate event, you know, you're not supposed to do that kind of stuff. You know, that's, it's not in New York city nightclubs. So I always make it very clear with everybody what the guidelines are and those things, you know, no politics, no race material. Ray (18m 22s): That's always been a constant with all the show, we've done over 80 shows now. Chad (18m 26s): Wow! Ray (18m 27s): Yeah. And for all, and for, you know, tech companies and financial companies and media companies, shipping companies, we've done a few of those and anywhere from 18 people up to 900, usually it's around 150, 200 people, but they've gone anywhere, you know, up close to a thousand people. And as low as when we did it for, you know, 16, 18 people, I, those are actually harder because you have fewer people to work with because the best part about these shows. And one thing I do love is that, so when I, if I'm live on stage in a club, you know, I'll interact with people primarily in the front row, you know, and improvise and ask them. Ray (19m 6s): So what's great about these shows is theoretically everybody's in the front row. And so it was kind of exciting. Now you don't feel the energy the same way that you do in a live club, but I have learned how to sort of pick up the vibe just based on visual cues. And look, if somebody has a webcam off there, there's a visual cue right there. It's gonna stay off. But, but generally speaking, you do pick up energy from someone just from the way they're sitting in, in relation to their webcam and that sort of thing. Joel (19m 37s): Have, have you been, have you been heckled yet? How does that work on zoom? Ray (19m 40s): Only one time! I've learned that really remarkable. You don't have to worry about a bouncer or, you know, you don't have to be afraid of having a bottle thrown at you. You can just, with one finger, you can click that mute button and that's the heckler disappears. That's remarkable. Only one time there was actually got drunk in his living room and he Joel (20m 2s): So HR wasn't on that call, I guess? Ray (20m 7s): It was pretty, it was kind of something to see, you know, if someone's sitting on a couch leaning back and just shouting things at a comic, but it was, it was, it was fine. Chad (20m 17s): And so with the holidays, have you seen like an uptick in interest because everybody's always looking for their holiday party, right? Now, and I mean, from a scalability standpoint, I would assume that you can probably even do more than you could before. I mean, you don't have to travel, you don't have to go to all these different places. How has that changed? Have you seen, does it even matter that the holidays are happening? Ray (20m 40s): Yeah. Well, we've been, we've been doing tons of shows from, May up until now. You know, it's been about 84, 85 shows. That's been great. And then, yeah, the calendar is really filling up in December. There's some days we have two a day. I mean, theoretically, you know, it's, you could do, we do four of these a day, you know, it's but the calendar is definitely been filling up for December for holiday parties. And truthfully, this is objectively speaking. This to me is the most fun you could have on zoom. I know people do trivia things and scavenger hunts and wine tasting things. Ray (21m 20s): This is the most fun as long as people are into comedy. It's great. And the other thing is the interactive part, the interactive component of these shows is excellent. It makes, when you pull up somebody on, if I spotlight their video on zoom, they feel like they're on the jumbotron in Times Square. You know, they feel appreciated. They're engaged in a way they haven't been in the last, you know, seven months and it really does boost their morale. And it's incredible. I've had companies that have booked us again, as soon as we're done, they'll email me and they'll say, can we do this again next month? Because you're just people. And then employees willing to interact with each other on some level during the shows as well. Ray (22m 2s): And that's great. It's great to see. I mean, it's really, really satisfying when you have a bunch of people that you know, are isolated and you can see them all laughing together on your screen. It's oddly satisfying. So the interactive part of these shows is really special. And that's the other thing I learned in the beginning. I was talking to people in the audience and the virtual audience just a little bit. And it was usually later in the show. And now that's, that's something that I'll get into early in the show and it'll be a constant throughout the show. So A, you know how to work a crowd, which is something I knew how to do from doing stand-up in clubs. Chad (22m 42s): Yeah. Ray (22m 42s): And then it is fun. It's all. And also you get sick of your jokes and you've done some of the same jokes, hundreds of times, like some names rebel had said, he said, your jokes are like your kids, you know, you love them, but you get sick of them sometimes. So, you know, it's, it adds, there's always something new when you talk to someone and, and to see how people live is also fascinating. You know, like, you know, when you have a bunch of hedge fund guys and you're performing for them versus a bunch of interns from a shipping company, it's a world of difference in the backdrop. Joel (23m 19s): Yeah. You've mentioned a lot of industries, a lot of demographics, a lot of, you know, just different businesses and I'm assuming locations, how much homework goes into each show and how much, I guess, customization do companies expect? Like, do you, do you make fun of the CEO, for example, are you on, you know, Wikipedia and checking out their history to make jokes about them? Are you learning more about different industries and sort of what's timely jokes there? Or is it basically just, we're going to give you the show and there's not going to be a lot of sort of really inside baseball, with the comedy? Chad (23m 58s): The comic stalker. Ray (23m 59s): You're right. Exactly. No, I, I always liked to learn more about the company and I'll share information with other comedians about it as well. And, you know, I, the comics act, you know, their tried and true material. You want to make sure they get to that because that's the stuff that, you know, works. But I always like to make the shows as, as personalized as possible and as customized as possible. So I'll learn about what the company does, what sort of, what their mandate is, what their sort of, what their one company had, like their own sort of bill of rights, which I, I learned with those were. And then I found a lower level employee and I unexpectedly quizzed them on some of those, which was really, which actually was a lot of fun. Ray (24m 40s): He didn't know any of them. But no, I always want to learn about, about the company and what their mission is and, and how they've been doing as a company and what the culture is within their organization. And some CEOs are very happy to engage. I always will find out from, before the show, give me a list of people you definitely don't want us to speak with during the show. There's some, for whatever reason, maybe they say our boss, isn't going to want this. Or we have so-and-so works in whatever department and it's better if you stay away from that person. And then also give me some names of people you, that you definitely want us to talk to. Ray (25m 20s): Because a lot of times people will have not just for their employees, but they'll have do shows for their clients. Joel (25m 25s): Interesting. Ray (25m 25s): So, you know, talking to a guy in Delaware, please talk to the person who's in an Austin, Texas, please talk to this guy in Idaho. You know, cause, we've done events for people where, if it's their national sales meeting and they, and they have clients all over the country, which is the other thing that becomes kind of interesting is that we've done shows for people in different time zones. So we'll have people that are watching in New York, Tennessee, Los Angeles, and London. And we'll start the show at like two in the afternoon. And you see people, you know, sipping a cup of coffee at the same time, someone else's sipping whiskey. So it's kind of cool, you know, it's kind of cool to bring people together from, you know, different parts of the world. Ray (26m 8s): It's pretty fun. And the other thing I'm going to say is shockingly, I enjoy doing shows at, at two o'clock one, two, three o'clock in the afternoon because the audience, the employees, they love that a typical workday is getting broken up with doing something fun. You know, as opposed to come back at eight o'clock tonight, you know, we're going to log in front event. That's great, too. That's fine. But to let them to interrupt a typical workday where they might be bored out of their mind, that works really, really well. Chad (26m 44s): I'd like to say, I'm going to put this out there and I'm going to go ahead and wrap up Ray first and foremost, you know, again, yeah, the holidays are coming up and we definitely need to laugh, especially as 2020 for God's sakes. But this comedy, I don't care what time of the year it is. Yeah. We don't need any more of those goddamn motivational speakers. Let's get some comedy in there. So, Ray, let me ask you real quick so that everybody knows where to go. Where can everybody find you so that they can get perspectively in the queue to get you in some of your comedians to their conference or their just their company meeting. Ray (27m 19s): And they can go to comedycloud.co that's the website comedycloud.co. You can also find us on LinkedIn, and those are the easiest ways to get in touch. And it's a pretty simple, straightforward process to get things rolling. And I guarantee, I promise it will be the best event you can do for your staff or for your clients. For sure. It really there a lot, a lot of fun. Joel (27m 46s): Awesome! Chad (27m 46s): Excellent man. Well, we appreciate you taking the time and being our being on the show. Ray (27m 53s): I appreciate you guys having me. It's a lot of fun and I hope to see you guys again, live in person. Chad (27m 59s): That's awesome! Joel (28m 0s): Sounds great. Chad (28m 1s): OK. Excellent. We out. Joel (28m 3s): Chad, we out. 7 (28m 5s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. 7 (28m 49s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Buy! Buy! Buy! The money just keeps flowing into the employment industry this holiday season, as - Talent Inc. - the folks behind ResumeRabbit, Top Resume, and others - has sold for a reported $100 million. Yowza! Plus... - Did iCIMS really pay a reported $60 million for Altru? - Phenom acquires who? - Jobvite lands a LinkedIn power move - Turing raises $32 million, and ZipRecruiter eyes a 2021 IPO. Pandemic? What pandemic!?!?! As always, this podcast is proudly powered by Jobvite, JobAdx, and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. 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 (22s): Oh yeah. Chad (23s): Sell, sell, sell... Joel (25s): Buy, Buy, Buy. Welcome to HR's most dangerous and jolliest podcast AKA the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel "shitter's full" Cheeseman. Chad (37s): And I'm Chad "kick that football" Sowash. Joel (41s): On this week's show $60 million for what? $100 million for what? Phenom acquires who? So many questions. Can two podcasters answer all of them? I guess we're about to find out. SOVREN (56s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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: That's always a nice way to start off the show. Chad: It is she's so calming. I love it. I love it much like Sarah Fuller. Joel: I know the Commodore's the first woman to score a point in a power five game in history. And that was pretty fucking awesome. I mean, you could tell she was hyped. I found out that she's paid the same as all the boys. So there is pay equality in college, college sports. So that's, that's nice. Chad (2m 23s): They're all getting screwed. That's for sure. Keeping with that, with that, that theme, I'm going to give a shout out to my Alma mater ball, state. Number one, they're playing for a Mac championship probably the day that this, this podcast drops. Joel (2m 41s): And if you, if you haven't seen it, it's the best ending of a game that no one will ever see, but their, their game on Saturday, the ending of it was so insane. Chad (2m 52s): It was crazy. Joel (2m 53s): For those of you who know, the California vs Stanford game from like the eighties, I think it's crazier than that. The only thing that doesn't work is I will, I won't ruin the ending, but go to YouTube search Ball State vs Western, Michigan, and watch the ending of that football game. Chad (3m 7s): Hint, lateral, lateral, lateral. So something else that's being lateraled is a Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. They're they're rolling out. Joel (3m 19s): Mike's my sister, my sister got her shot yesterday. That's nice. My sister manages a senior living group of facilities so she has been deemed an essential worker and she got, she got her shot is good. That's awesome. I'm so proud of her. Chad (3m 35s): Thoughts on how this plays out for the, the rest of the country. I mean, is this something that's going to be mandated by employers? Joel (3m 44s): For big time employers that don't want to get sued? Yeah. For smaller companies that just need bodies to do stuff, maybe not, but the, the big ones certainly will. And no one, no one wants to walk into a Walmart. If all the employees are all, you know, dangerous, right. Chad (4m 3s): Nobody wants to get on a plane. I mean, nobody wants, you know, and nobody wants to walk into the office. But I mean, I mean, there are still, and I understand there are still reasons for people to be hesitant for. This is the first RNA vaccine. It's the fastest vaccine produced ever. And so there are those people who have legitimate concerns, and then you have group number two people who didn't even wear a damn mask. You have two separate groups who will possibly be slow to take the vaccine. And the first group might be nudged into the second more radical group, if you know, if they're forced into doing so. Chad (4m 44s): So I think it's really important that, you know, we do this smart, we do it with education. Definitely the leaders have to get their shots, but it's going to be, it's going to be interesting because this will be something that's mandated and masks were even mandated throughout the nation, but yet we had such an upheaval of people who were pissed off because they had to put a mask on. I mean, do you talk about fucking sensitive people? Joel (5m 13s): I say the government needs to give out a hundred dollar bills for people that get the vaccine. If they really want people to get the vaccine. Going back to my, my family for a second, my father this month, this coming Sunday will turn 81 years, young man, happy birthday. So we wanted to get him a little something, you know, interesting. Chad (5m 36s): Yeah. Joel (5m 37s): You know, he has everything, he's trying to get rid of shit. So we didn't want to send anything. So we went to, we went, we went to Cameo and funny story. I called my sister and I said, do you know what Cameo is? And she goes, you mean the band from the eighties, that sang Word Up!? and I said, no, not that Cameo, but you are correct. So dad played baseball, his whole life, little league world series champion, little known fact about my father, Pete Rose is one of his heroes. So Pete Rose is on Cameo. He's available for $159. We thought my dad would probably cry. Love it. Pete is not in the greatest shape. Joel (6m 17s): And he may or may not do your Cameo sober, but shout out to my father for his birthday. And I bring up Cameo in part, because it's interesting. But in part, because Facebook, apparently in the news today is looking to copy Cameo. Could you imagine that. Facebook copying a successful business? So anyway, and my wife's university where she teaches they Cameoed Snoop Dog to give, to give a shout out to all the students for finals week, which is a great use of, of, of tuition funds. But that's a, that's a different podcast. Chad (6m 54s): Awesome. Well, somebody who is doing a video right or wrong, depending on, on how you're looking at it is a, the boys over at Carrue. So they did, they did very, remember we talked about the very tantric karma recruit, tra video that, that kind of set some people off. They weren't very happy about it. So they, then published an apology, really not an apology video, which was fun. Joel (7m 24s): Sorry, Not Sorry. Chad (7m 25s): Yeah, it was so fucking hilarious. And then they put out two more videos. They did a Christmas ear shattering video, like a Mariah Carey Christmas song. And then they dropped a holiday cooking video today. I mean, those guys are fucking hilarious. Joel (7m 43s): I would say the new ones. Are they wearing latex in the cooking video? Chad (7m 47s): No, actually I was looking for it in the other two videos because they did where in the apology video, they under underneath the shirt, but no. So we will I'm sure see more latex in the future, but probably not until 2021. Joel (8m 2s): Yeah. You don't, you don't want to stick that latex anywhere too hot in the kitchen. I can assure you. Shout out to, to Greenhouse the popular ATS, has launched a podcast! That's where they have a shout out. But I think that we'll see more companies here in 2021, similarly to how they all launched blogs around 2009 and 10, we're going to, we're going to see a, a bevy of podcasts from the corporate world here in the next 12 months. Chad (8m 30s): In the ones that we have seen over the past two years that came out of the barrel hot have pretty much shit the bed. Joel (8m 39s): It's great marketing from a perspective of you interview your clients, which is what Greenhouse is doing so they feel special. Yeah, you can, you can social media, that shit and tag the customers and they'll share it with their friends who are probably potential prospects for your business and around and around we go. You produce good content and you solidify the brand. So it's a good strategy, it's just, it's a shame that companies don't commit to like more than six episodes. If you don't, you don't get listeners overnight, you got to work at this shit. We've been doing this for three years. Chad (9m 10s): Or you can just aligned with somebody to do it. Joel (9m 13s): Or you're just dead sexy. Chad (9m 15s): Or neither Talking about dead sexy. A big shout out to Doug Updike over at Nations Lending in Peoria, Arizona. I didn't know there was a Peoria, Arizona and then Frank Lennon with Tri-Star energy in Nashville, Tennessee thanks for listening and connecting on LinkedIn gents. And another thing that you just don't want to see, you don't want to see Darren Westhall over in Loughton, England. He's the CEO of Pager. Yeah. You don't want to see that dude in his holiday jumper. Joel (9m 51s): Yeah. Is that, is that the one with peppermint nipples? Chad (9m 55s): Yes. Yeah. So there's nothing sexy about Santa, kids. Joel (9m 58s): Oh no. Oh, when you went sex, I thought you were going to go the ting guy caroling a robot. That was good. Shout outs. I was good. So, so tin guy, most of our listeners know this talking head recruiting robot also carols during the holiday season. So if you haven't seen that, go check out their, their LinkedIn page. It's heartwarming in a creepy, scary kind of way. Chad (10m 21s): Yes. Jingle bell robot is what it is. Yeah. Shout out to Michael Cox over at Zackworks. And again, Jeremy, Robert Robert's over at Seek Out for showing off their Chad and Cheese swag in social pics. Remember if you'd like a chance to win a free Chad and Cheese, t-shirt go to Chadcheese.com/free and register, not to mention we're sending out holiday cards and a bunch of who knows what you'll get in the mail from our dumb asses while you're registering. Remember it's gift giving season. And the first part of the year's coming around as well. You can always give gifts, go to the swag shop, take a look at the t-shirts beanie caps, ball caps, all that fun stuff, buy some Chad and Cheese swag. Joel (11m 9s): Trucker hats for everybody I say. And speaking of little housekeeping here, if you haven't registered for beer drop, we're giving out chances for free beer. We're in a little bit of a delivery delay for December, but we will be, we will, we'll be doing the Beau Higgins zoom tasting here soon. Hopefully, go to beerdrop.net to register. And we're also giving away Holy shit. Two bottles of Pappy's Family Reserve bourbon, as well as a chance for third place. Everyone's a winner. Blanton's Special Reserve import from Japan. Joel (11m 49s): Ooh, my God. We're talking about $2,200 retail bottles of whiskey. Take advantage of that by visiting freepappy.com. That's free P A P P Y.com. We'll be doing a drawing. I think we've timed that around January 3rd or fourth. So time is running out for that free Pappy opportunity. Chad (12m 11s): Register now, that's powered by our friends at Sovren. Joel (12m 16s): Beerdrop is powered by AdZoona. Chad (12m 18s): T-shirts by Emissary. Joel (12m 20s): Websites by Shaker. Chad (12m 21s): Good Jesus Christ. Joel (12m 22s): We're for sale people. Chad (12m 24s): Yeah, last but not least. Adam Gordon. Thanks for allowing Rory to voice our new outro. I've heard so many people say they love hearing Daniel fellow's son Chester and his English accent. Well, now we also have a Scottish accent of Rory to throw in the mix. So thanks Gents, the child labor laws are obviously, are less stringent in Scotland and England than they are here in the U S. Thanks guys. Joel (12m 54s): Love it. Topics. Chad (12m 57s): Topics! Joel (12m 59s): Oh man. Acquisition city! Chad (13m 1s): A hundred million dollars. Joel (13m 2s): Let's start in just descending order from highest to lowest. Here we go. Chad (13m 6s): So a hundred million dollars. Joel (13m 7s): Yeah, man. Chad (13m 9s): 885,000 people apply for unemployment just this week. Okay. So think about that. Think about that. Now, here, here, here, it comes kids. Talent Inc. was founded in 2014 as a resume writing service and has grown to offer related services. Its brand includes Top Resume, Top CV, Top Interview and Resume Rabbit. It uses a network of freelance contract and staffing writers, including a team, based in South Africa to produce resumes and CVS for job seekers. Not to mention they get job seekers ready for interviews, Resume Rabbit, blasts those resumes out to a bunch of different websites. Chad (13m 55s): So now I kind of get an idea why BV Investment out of Boston bought them. The hundred million dollars though. That to me is a lot of money because I think Top CV or Top Resume, at least the numbers that I saw was about 3 million in annual revenue. Joel (14m 18s): This just came across our desk today. I don't know if you can even find anything on it, aside from AIM Group who, who tipped us off to the news. Chad (14m 28s): Peter Zollman, baby. Joel (14m 29s): Yeah. So Jeff Berger, who we've known for over a decade, I think. Chad (14m 34s): Yeah. Joel (14m 36s): He's always congenial, classy, nice guy. But I feel like I've never really talked about his business with him because I just didn't give a shit like resumes are super boring. The Resume Rabbit thing. I remember the deal with Simply Hired. Do you that where they partnered with Resume Rabbit? So you mentioned 2014. I think that's when they raised their first of three rounds of 5.3 million and another 1.5 in 2016. But Holy shit, I mean, a hundred million for this business is really wild because you look at so many dynamics in terms of resumes are going into like gig, you know, gig sites. So resume writing is a little bit antiquated when you have LinkedIn profiles, you have gig platforms and you have manual parts of this, right? Joel (15m 24s): So they literally have writers around the world who are helping you write your resume. So it's really manual heavy. So the trend of automation is going to really take a piece out of the manual, resume writing business. I think, it just feels like so many trends are going against the traditional resume. That my guess is these guys sold at as close to the top as possible. So good for them. Chad (15m 49s): Oh, yeah. Joel (15m 49s): One thing that also stands out to me is that wasn't in the AIM article, they bought JobFox back in like 2011, 12. Do you remember this? Chad (15m 58s): I don't remember them buying JobFox, so I'd have to ask them why the fuck they bought JobFox, but go ahead. Joel (16m 5s): Yeah. So if you want to go back in the archives, go to YouTube and search Cheeseman, Jeff Berger. And I did an interview with them about it, but JobFox for the kids that don't remember was Rob McGovern, founder CareerBuilder's site that failed. It was, I won't go into it, but. Chad (16m 22s): Horrible. Joel (16m 22s): He got into a lot of trouble with like, not paying resume writers, stiffing folks, being sued. And Jeff Berger comes in and picks up the brand, all the technology that was there, the writers that they had, he also picked up all the legal debt that they had. So I don't know what they did with all the lawsuits that were going on. It was also a pretty shitty brand. So I think if you go, if you go to jobfox.com, now it redirects to, I think, Top CV, but the brand is still sort of available. But these guys have been cranking out business decisions and obviously making money for a long time and good on them. I think they sold at the top and at the right time. And I'm excited to see what, what Jeff Berger and the company does next. Chad (17m 3s): I have to agree that a lot of this manual output piece, is, it's interesting that somebody would put this kind of cash into it, not to mention they have 1500 on demand career experts, right? So this is a human network. This is not a technological network. Joel (17m 22s): Yeah. Chad (17m 22s): But overall again, I mean, if, you know, if the song and dance works, obviously it did. BV investment, out of Boston thought they're going to invest in it and they're going to see what they can do with it. I don't know what they can do with it. Joel (17m 34s): Yeah, I mean, if it's making 10 million a year, you could probably milk this business for another 12 to 15. Chad (17m 40s): Yeah. If you take a look at the amount of people that are out of work, now this is the time to actually buy this business. Joel (17m 47s): And so another one we're trying to make sense of is what Tech Crunch reported was a $60 million price tag for Altru in terms of iCIMS paying price, which kind of struck you and me as a little bit high. Chad (18m 3s): Yeah, yeah, no, it was, I actually reached out to the reporter to talk to them about that. And this was a single source who said that they had documentation about the sale. But I mean, I just don't understand how? There's no way that Altru had the revenues to support that valuation. So number one, do you think the number is real? I've actually got some insider information that the number's not what 60 million, but do you think the number is real number one and number two, if it is, why would they pay that much money for a video platform? Joel (18m 39s): Yeah. So the first part of that is I don't believe it was 60. I think these guys raised about $1,500,000? Chad (18m 46s): At $1.4. Joel (18m 47s): At $1.4 it. So to say that would be a premium, would be an understatement revenue wise. I can't imagine that they were anywhere near $60 million or even, even if you valued it out, that it would equal add. So to me, maybe they added a zero by accident. Cause if you tell me this was a five or six kind of deal, then I might believe it. Yeah. But at 60 it's it's ridiculous. And I know that the new CEO, you know, he came out of Marquetto, he's used to dealing with a lot bigger numbers than maybe the employment industry is used to dealing with. But yeah, if he dropped 60 million for basically a user generated videos for companies, I'd say like, he needs to, he needs to have some psych evaluation or come on the show and explain why the hell they paid $60 million for user generated videos for employees. Chad (19m 37s): Yeah, I mean, in their, their acquisitions up to this point. So think about an opening.io earlier this year was acquired by iCIMS. This is a heavy lifting matching tech that can be a major part of the iCIMS infrastructure. So that is an easy fuck yeah. Buy that. Joel (19m 55s): Love it. Chad (19m 56s): The easy Recruit Acquisition, once again, heavy lifting with video interviewing and creating a much larger footprint in the EU. So that is a must. Then we get Altru, which I really like don't get me wrong, but it's a vanity play more than heavy lifting. And adoption won't come as easy. Imagine pulling together all the videos provided by employees, editing, reviewing, and all of that takes a lot of work to get to the video that you want to go live. So I'm sure Altru makes it easy, but it's not automated, which means there's still going to be work to do, which we know the friction points suck. Chad (20m 38s): So Opening does the work, Easy Recruit does the bulk of the task work and they're not going to see that with, with Altru. So we got, I got a shout out to Hallam Beckett at Delta airlines who loves Altru and she asked me via Twitter, why I thought it would take so long to adopt. Cause I said, I thought, you know, this might be a good long-term five-year adoption kind of trend. And those are my reasons I'm sticking with them. I just don't see this as an easy adoption. I think early movers, like you, will do this, you will take part in it, but the rest, the mass of the lemmings that are out there, there's no way in hell they're going to want to touch it. Joel (21m 17s): Yeah, it's an acquisition that's very out of character for iCIMS, in terms of their previous acquisition. So I I'm open to believing that they know what they're doing, but on its face, I'm very cynical at this point about the Altru deal. Even if it was much less than $60 million. Chad (21m 34s): So who did Feena Hum acquire? Joel (21m 37s): Somebody in Europe, the Netherlands. And I assume you pronounce it Endouble? Chad (21m 43s): Endouble? Joel (21m 43s): Endouble. And I don't know if you're, if you're French. So this one, this one Phenom announced terms were not disclosed, but this was based on all the press that was out there was all about European growth. So Amsterdam based Endouble is a company known for enhancing the candidate experience again across Europe. I think the word Europe was in the press release about 18 times, so they wanted to really underscore that. Endouble was founded in 2006. So these guys have been doubling for quite a while. Privately held. It looks like they've got no venture capital. Frankly, I've never heard of them. Joel (22m 25s): Maybe, you know, a little bit more about them than I do? But to me like no money, 2006, it sounds a little like a couple of founders that wanted to get the hell out of the business. I'd also caution people who are touting this acquisition by saying that if you go to Endouble's website and look for job opportunities at the company, they don't have any. Which says to me, there's not a whole lot of growth going on there. Chad (22m 50s): Yeah. Joel (22m 50s): And that's, that's a red flag for me. This looks like something that a Phenom got off the clearance rack there in Europe. Chad (22m 58s): This is a Phenom's second acquisition of the year. They acquired My Ally in September and right out of the gate, I was like, wait a minute doesn't Phenom already have the ability to create career sites? I mean, I thought this, why aren't you buying? Joel (23m 15s): It's about Europe. Chad (23m 16s): This just didn't make that much sense to me. Then I thought about, well, maybe it was on the clearance rack and they had a bunch of logos that that could be, you know, an opportunity. Then it did a little digging and Endouble owned or was under RGF staffing, AKA Recruit Holdings. So this was a recruit company and to my understanding, and to the opinion of many sources, Endouble was in big trouble, good rhyming. According to LinkedIn insights, they've dropped 50% of their staff, during just the last year, they filed for 160,000 euros from the government for support this year. Chad (23m 58s): And rumor is that they were really having issues sourcing for current projects and weren't able to take on new accounts and to be quite Frank, Recruit, just can't put up with that kind of shit. Right? Joel (24m 11s): No. Chad (24m 11s): So overall this was Recruit saying, Joel (24m 14s): Bye, bye. Chad (24m 16s): Yeah. And it's interesting because in a quote from Phenom CEO to Technical.LY the quote was "we're excited to begin working with Endouble's customers." So if that doesn't tell you where their mind is, nothing will. Joel (24m 35s): Think I'm Endouble do Jobvite Promo (24m 41s): Jobvite has changed our recruiting practice by making us more nimble, we're able to hire faster, that means that things like where it would take us weeks to get approval from hiring managers or the next level up that's now minutes. It's one of the best cutting edge tools out there available for talent acquisition today, I would absolutely recommend Jobvite to my peers. It allows you to get in front of talent that other tools won't do. Learn how you can evolve your TA function at jobvite.com. Chad (25m 13s): So that was a great segue because we're going to talk about JobVite in LinkedIn. So Jobvite's ATS will be the first applicant tracking system to provide their customers with all three LinkedIn integrations, unified search recommended matches and apply connect. So with unified search and really the matching piece, you know, I think those two are pretty big. The apply connect piece we should have been doing 10 years ago. The unified search, recruiters can easily select the most qualified candidates by searching top talent from both LinkedIn network and Jobvite record using a single search through LinkedIn or Jobvite. Chad (25m 58s): That's good stuff, not to mention the matching automatically happens. So this to me, those two in them themselves, this is the future of all integrations. And I mean, vendors need to listen up and watch because if you cannot provide a robust bi-directional API to allow for real-time access of information inside the core hiring platform, either it's an ATS, or maybe it's in some cases, CRM, you're totally dead in the fucking water and a big props to JobVite, because I've heard from many vendors, that core platforms, different ATS do not have the speed and power to keep up with fast paced vendors. Chad (26m 42s): They just don't have what it needs to grind on all that data. So core systems need to allow the free flow of validated vendor data get inside their system so that recruiters don't have to go back and forth and use third-party dashboards. It sucks. And whenever we talk to recruiters, it's like, how many dashboards, how many tabs do you have open with all these different dashboards that you feel like you have to use? It all should be consolidated. Joel (27m 11s): Yeah, no doubt. Look, if you know, all these companies are racing to be the platform of all platforms, right? And be the one destination. And to be that platform, you have to be able to bring in LinkedIn, you know, knowing that, you know, 80% of recruiters use LinkedIn, you know, a little teaser there, but look, LinkedIn doesn't do integrations into LinkedIn very nicely, but you know, good on Jobvite for being able to go into LinkedIn, work with them, to bring those pieces into JobVite because that sort of backwards integration is something that we don't talk about very often, because it's hard to do, and you have to have the resources, I think, to do it. Joel (27m 55s): To me, the interesting thing here, if you look into, if you look inside of, you know, the track into Microsoft and an acquisition, you know, we talk a lot about iCIMS, you know, playing real nicely with Microsoft and what's going on their Jobvite, you know, with deals like this are doing their own sort of little romancing of LinkedIn and the folks in Redmond. So, you know, I think it's a toss up right now as to whether Jobvite or iCIMS has the inside track into getting acquired by someone like Microsoft. What do you think? Chad (28m 28s): I think some of the legacy platforms that are out there, and we know like the brass rings that are dying, right? The Tullos those, they, they are legacy tech and they wouldn't be able to give you the type of power necessary to do a big time matching inside your system, right. Or big time search inside your system. So I think overall, this is where we're going to see the entire applicant tracking system and CRM ish market shake out. And when they start to shake out and they start to show these types of integrations, that will make them so big of a target for acquisition, I agree a hundred percent. Chad (29m 8s): The big question, is who can actually pull it off? And we don't know that sitting from the outside, looking in. The only ones who know that right now, are the vendors who are trying to work with these applicant tracking systems and the ATS' are kicking them back because they don't have the power to process all the shit that this new tech can do. Joel (29m 27s): Just to get me that iCIMS may have acquired Altru at the right time in which LinkedIn launches stories, because you could easily turn all these employee videos into stories on LinkedIn and company pages. Hmm. Interesting. Chad (29m 43s): TikTok baby. Joel (29m 44s): Yes. Yes. Literally. Interesting. Interesting. Not too bad. One more investment Turing. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (29m 51s): Last week we talked about Code Signal getting $25 million and now Turing nabs $32 million from Turing's website, "Turing is where US companies hire remote software engineers. Apply to a full stack front end, backend mobile, dev ops, UI UX, machine learning." I mean, the list goes on, dude. Yeah, I was, I was really impressed by, and I love this segment no matter what, but I was really impressed by Turing right out of the gate. Because when you apply, they don't ask for your, your profile. They don't ask for your resume. You know what? They automatically do? Joel (30m 28s): Test you. Chad (30m 29s): They test you when you apply. They don't ask for a resume like dice. They automatically start testing your knowledge. If you've got a Dice today, it's the same old fucking job board process. While Turing wants to know if you're qualified before you're even allowed entry into the community. This, this to me is exactly what a developer wants to see. They get in there and they're like, Oh yeah, they're going to make me pass the test. That's right. That means all those who can't develop can't get their ass in here. Joel (31m 1s): Yeah. And it's exactly what companies want to. I mean, the, the vetting process is no joke. I mean, if you dig into the site and I mean, we're talking, they're talking about four hour tests and vetting of, of people that, I mean, you're going to get the best of the best that come out of the site. And these guys are on fire! Founded in 2018. I mean, brand, I mean, barely diapers off of these guys built by Google, Facebook and Stanford engineers. So they obviously have insight track into some of the biggest tech companies in the world. $32 million raised in a very short period of time. And they just raised $14 million in September. COVID is going to put this shit on steroids, these companies. And they're just on fire. Joel (31m 41s): I mean, these, these are really exciting companies, all the ones that you named because they are, they are primed for owning the next five, 10 years of tech recruiting. Chad (31m 51s): Yeah, the model is no nonsense. It makes it, it just, it totally clean. What Turing does is they source candidates, vet candidates, then they match and onboard the candidates and then they can manage them. So, this can be almost like a managed resource, almost like an RPO to an extent. Joel (32m 13s): Yeah. And I love that their focus is sort of US companies, right? US companies that want to hire engineers from outside of the US what's a good way to do that because right now, if it's, if it's Upwork or something else sort of platform like that, you're dealing with, you know, five star ratings, you're dealing with reviews, something like this, you're dealing with hardcore skills. And I think a lot of companies are looking for stuff like that. Not to open up the box of should be paid the same if you're in Toledo as if you're in, you know, the Bay area. But if we start expecting tech companies to pay the same amount for people in, you know, Toledo, then eventually the net keeps going wider and wider and wider. Joel (32m 54s): At least the desire gets wider and wider. Because if, if I can hire someone working in Milwaukee, I can hire someone that's in Bangalore. I can hire someone that's in Egypt. Right? So a service like this is really prime for companies in the US to say, look, I want good people, but I don't want to have to pay them what I'm paying someone in the US and a service like Turing, I think is really prime to take advantage of that, of that initiative for companies. Whether you agree or disagree, that that's what they should do, I think that's what a lot of companies are going to be looking at. Chad (33m 26s): Yeah. But I think, see that's a race to the bottom, and that's not what a company like Turing should be doing. Joel (33m 31s): Not if it's skill-based? Chad (33m 32s): No, no, that's, that is a race to the bottom, cause you're talking about paying the lowest you possibly can for the exact same skill that you want no matter where they sit. So you were playing that race to the bottom game. That's bullshit. What Turing should be focused on is making their community better. You don't do that by taking the lowest bid because they live in India. That's total bullshit. They're putting together great code. They meet our standards. That's exactly where they should raise the community versus try to pound them down and race to the bottom. Joel (34m 3s): So I think from whatever country these folks are in, they're going to be the highest paid engineers that you can get in that country and they're going to be paid well for that environment. I think the race to the bottom comes when I have a five star rating, you have a five star rating. There's I mean, that's just because someone had a good experience. These guys or are tested and vetted. I think for their, for their market, they're going to be paid as best as they possibly can. So race to the bottom is at a bottom for, from America's perspective. I don't know, but from their country's perspective, these guys are going to be paid really well. And they're, I think they're going to appreciate that they were vetted and are working with really, really good companies. Chad (34m 40s): That that's an excuse to pay people less, but, okay. Joel (34m 44s): Dude, you can't pay someone in Bangladesh, $150 grand a year. They'll leave and live in mansions and have boats and hoes all day. Chad (34m 52s): So what's the matter with that? I mean that, there's nothing wrong with that. If they're doing the exact same work. Joel (34m 57s): That's just unrealistic. Chad (34m 59s): It's unrealistic because your brain is in 1930 that's why. Welcome to 2020 motherfucker. Joel (35m 8s): All right, it's the Christmas season. Let's take, Let's go in our respective corners and listen to the JobAdX ad. JobAdX (35m 16s): Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for longterm full time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. JobAdX (35m 57s): We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Joel (36m 37s): How long have we been predicting the ZipRecruiter IPO? Is it two years or one? I definitely you or I, or both of us definitely have predicted that on multiple shows. Chad (36m 46s): Yeah, no, you all on prediction shows. You've done it for two years in a row. Joel (36m 52s): I'm finally going to be right in 2021. Yes. It's about, I'm so ahead of the curve. It's ridiculous. Chad (36m 59s): You're an early adopter. Joel (37m 1s): Early adopter. Yes. So Reuters is reporting that along the way to ZipRecruiter IPO could and will be happening in 2021. The company has raised over $200 million. So a liquidation event is going to happen, whether it's this year, next year, or sometime. Your listeners will remember that they laid off about 500 people, a quarter of their workforce. I think 25, 30%, quite a few people. They employ about 800 folks, their latest round of funding by them at $1.5 billion. And they're looking for three to 5 billion in public funding. Joel (37m 46s): Now keep in mind, they are the number three site here in the U S in terms of traffic behind Indeed and Glassdoor and Recruit bought Glassdoor 2019 for 1.6 billion. So these guys, the number three player are looking for much more than the 1.6. I kind of thought that Recruit might snap up ZipRecruiter, but if they're looking for five or three to 5 billion on the public markets, that's going to be a really high price tag for Recruit to pay attention to. Chad (38m 18s): Yeah, this is an interesting story because Zip has been around for awhile. They've they've pivoted and they've turned into, at least from what we understand, just an AI powerhouse recommender system. Right now, when COVID hit, obviously took one square to the jaw, but I believe, and this is just my personal opinion that actually helped them do what they needed to do in the first place, because they were bloated. They needed to get rid of some of the individuals that they had, which sucks too, because they had to start focusing more on the enterprise. They weren't doing enough on the enterprise. Chad (38m 59s): They're spending a shit ton of cash in trying to get mom and pop to spend a $300 job post to $300 job on ZipRecruiter. Now that that's, that's great, but it's not sustainable unless you continue to feed that fucking monster. Joel (39m 16s): Yeah, I think to me, it's you mentioned, I mean, Enterprise, but also the global opportunities that Enterprise represents and opens up for you. And you know, here in the U S I think, I think Yelp was reporting like a hundred thousand restaurants have closed up. So imagine not just restaurants, but just small businesses, that would be ZipRecruiter's core constituency, you know, prior to the pandemic, like they've lost a lot of customers in terms of the small business. So yeah, I, I agree that the pivot has to happen in enterprise and they have to grow globally. And, you know, I think they can grow into the three to 5 billion valuation, but this is by no means an IPO. Joel (39m 57s): That's going to excite a ton of people. This is not air Airbnb part two. And when you look at what, what is on the public markets from our space, you look at the Dices and the, the 51 jobs and, and others, like, it's been a really tough, I don't know, five years to a decade for these folks. And can ZipRecruiter turned that around. I'd say, they've definitely got their work cut out for them. Chad (40m 20s): Yeah. And I think one other aspect and market that they're missing dramatically, I think, is the tech market. So if they could get into maybe buy, who knows, acquire a Code Signal or a Woven or, or something like that, to be able to really bump that valuation, I mean, three to five that we wouldn't even be talking those numbers, we'd be talking about more like LinkedIn numbers. Joel (40m 46s): Yeah. And it's also going to be tough for them. And at least in the U S the ZipRecruiter brand, I mean, people know it as, you know, service jobs and, you know, hourly jobs. And so for them to sort of crush past that brand, at least in the US is really going to be tough. Chad (41m 2s): Agreed, good luck. Zip. We out. Joel (41m 5s): We out. OUTRO (41m 6s): I'm Rorry from Scotland, the country, which brought you which brought you electricity! Thank you for listening to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing, nada, niente. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Review sites are hot and valuable. Just ask Glassdoor, which sold for over a billion dollars last year. But do reviews translate to staffing agencies and recruiters? Startup Sourcr thinks so, and their founder, Chris Almond, is willing to face the Firing Squad to pitch his business. Will this Australian-HQ’d biz survive the harsh Q & A or be flushed like a rotting bloomin’ onion? Gotta listen to this PandoLogic exclusive to find out. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Pandologic (1s): Programmatic recruitment advertising platform helps employers source talent faster and more efficiently than ever thanks to predictive algorithms, machine learning and AI. Buzzword, overdose alert. Yeah. Pando was on the cutting edge of Programmatic, while being deeply rooted in the recruitment industry. pandoIQ provides an end to end Programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any waste spending to maximize the ROI on your recruitment spend. And their AI enabled algorithms use over 48 job attributes and more than 200 billion historical job performance data points to predict the optimal job advertising campaign. Pandologic (51s): The machine does all that shit. That shit sounds expensive! Think again Cheesman pandoIQ provides an end to end job advertising solution that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any wasteful spending. Sold! How do I get started? Go to Pandologic.com to request a demo and tell him Chad and Cheese sent you. Ooh. They have a chat bot too, that we can talk to. Oh, kill me now. FiringSquad INTRO (1m 20s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they got what it takes to make it out alive? Dig a fox hole and duck for cover kids the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel (1m 42s): I just want to know why we don't do all our firing squads during happy hour? We need more Australians on the show, I think guys, welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast! I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by not quite drunk yet Chad Sowash. Chad (1m 58s): Dude, we both have BrewDog beers, which we didn't plan either. Joel (2m 4s): No, no, no brothers from another mother for sure, which is always the case. Well, anyway, we have a, we have a, an Australian company, Goodday, you bastard as we always enjoy the Ozzies, our first firing squad was an Australian company. Welcome to the show, everybody. Chris "don't call me an almond brother" Almond. Chris, welcome to the podcast, buddy. Chris (2m 27s): Hey Joel. Thanks for having me mate. Joel (2m 29s): Sure. Well, give us a quick Twitter bio of you and then we'll eventually get to the company stuff. Chris (2m 36s): Yeah, sure. So I'm actually not originally an ozzie, like you can probably see by the accent, I'm from the UK originally actually got a background in finance, but then when I moved to Australia, like a lot of my compatriots ended up falling into recruitment and then a few years ago is when I started Sourcr. Joel (2m 55s): Good enough, Chad, tell him what he has won. Chad (2m 57s): Chris, you will have two minutes pitch sourcer at the end of two minutes. You're going to hear that bell then Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start rambling or you get boring, you're going to hear the crickets, that means tightening, get shit moving. At the end of Q and A, you're going to receive either a big applause. That means you're cooking jumbo, shrimp and lobster on the Barbie cruising on that new yacht. Joel (3m 27s): Ignited out back with a bloomin' onion, baby. Chad (3m 30s): A golf clap, ah, we kind of dig it, but it's Fosters and microwave chicken for you until you can get your shit on course, or last but not least a firing squad, start hoarding that Vegemite now because you're going to starve if you keep this business up running this way. Man, are you ready? Chris (3m 52s): I'm ready. Joel (3m 52s): Yeah, let's do this. In three, two, one. Bells (3m 56s): Ding, ding, ding. Chris (3m 57s): Cool. So Sourcr really exists to help build credibility in recruitment. And we're actually on a mission to help build stronger connections between candidates, employers, and recruiters. And the way that we do this is through the power of reviews and social proof. So really the reputation economy has continued to grow and influence the way that we all make buying decisions. And now the way is the organization's must build and maintain trust and even own credibility continues to evolve. We've got a world now, even with COVID, that's probably more in line than ever before. And that means that almost all of our customers have already formed an opinion of us by doing their research online. Chris (4m 38s): And that's a lot of the time before they've even spoken to us. And it main goal of that research is, is reviews, the stats down 91% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. I know I wouldn't have been probably most builders wouldn't have to a new restaurant book, a holiday or even and buy a TV without checking reviews online. And these same customers are deciding which recruiter will help them with their next career move or even help them find their next critical hire. So that's why we created Sourcer to give recruiters a credible way to highlight their experience and showcase their positive feedback from candidates and clients. So whether you're a recruiter or an agency owner, we can help you get real customer feedback. Chris (5m 20s): And that helps you attract new customers, retain existing and really stand out above the other competitors in your market. So the way it works is Sourcr helps recruiters collect reviews on autopilot after every placement they make. And we've got a bunch of digital marketing tools in the background and integrations to make sure that those reviews are everywhere that their clients and candidates could be looking. We've actually also recently released a full capability in net promoter score tool designed specifically for recruitment businesses as well. So they can capture real time insights on all their client and candidate interactions and then segment that by the things that matter. And that could be Bells (5m 57s): Ding, ding, ding. Chris (5m 58s): Cool well, there we go, guys, tying it up. Chad (6m 1s): All right, Chris, first right out, right out of the gate, employers hate Glassdoor in the review system. They believe it's an extortion racket. So why are recruiters and staffing firms going to feel good about reviews on Sourcer? Chris (6m 16s): Well, it's a great question. I think one of the, one of the challenges that I see with Glassdoor is the lack of control that recruiters have over where these reviews come from. And it, and probably the lack of verification as well. You know, anyone could leave anyone a review on Glassdoor. So the lack of control that the recruiters have over their reputation becomes a challenge. Whereas a big part of Sourcr is the verification. So we, we verify that those reviews are legitimate by tying them to a placement. So we know that that relationship or transaction in the sense of recruitments actually occurred. Joel (6m 50s): Let's talk a little branding, Chris, you are sourcer.com. There's no E at the end of that, I'm curious sourcer.com. The, the S the S the actual spelling of it goes pretty much nowhere. Was there any attempt to buy or acquire the.com? Is there any desire to do it in the future? Is it a hurdle to have to spell the name to everybody that you talk to from a sales side? How did the branding come about, and is it a strong point, or is it a hurdle for you? Chris (7m 20s): Yeah, it's a good point. You know, originally we looked at the branding cause we were really focused on getting that sourcer.com. We will focused on getting the.com, but as with a lot of, a lot of businesses nowadays, the.com is, is hard to hard to get. So that's when we came up with Sourcr and knocked the E off it, so we could get the.com. We thought a lot of work on our SEO recently because being a public sort of online directory, it's really important that we do rank. So we've done a good job recently of improving that. It was historically a bit of a problem, but now, you know, I've not seen a problem and I don't know whether you spell it wrong, but sourcr.com does go through to our website, not when I'm not with the E though, not with the Joel (8m 4s): Sourcr.com. Right. So my next, so there's no, no desire to sort of obtain the, the common spelling or you don't own sourcer.co.uk or .au or anything like that? Chris (8m 16s): No, not with the e. No. Maybe in the future, we'll, we'll check that out or it's off brand as well. So it's a tough balance. Right. Joel (8m 24s): Okay. Okay. So my next question again with branding, when I go to the site, it has me select, you know, UK, New Zealand or Australia. So one of my questions is why wouldn't you just redirect based on IP address. And secondly, are you only going to be focused in those three markets for the foreseeable future? Or are there growth opportunities in your strategy to go to other markets? Chris (8m 50s): Yeah. Good question. So we did actually originally redirect based on IP address, but we found that often people wanted to check out the other websites as well. So we want it to give control and flexibility over checking them all out. We were originally Australia, New Zealand. We launched in the UK crazily during COVID and yeah, that's, there's not plans to stop there as we start to scale and build the team out. We'll be definitely looking to other, or the recruitment heavy markets, like the U S where you guys are over there as well. Chad (9m 24s): So what are the major differences between you and a company like a recruiter inside? Chris (9m 29s): Yeah. Great point the way, I suppose, the way I like to put it is, you know, if you want a learning and development tool, and you're really focused on that performance management side of things, Recruiter Insider, it probably more fits that mold. If you want to use your reviews for sales and marketing and really amplify your brand and use that to grow your business that's really where Sourcr comes up top trumps. Chad (9m 53s): Well, who, who are you selling to? Are you selling to just staffing companies and recruiters, or are you also selling experience and data over to the employers? Chris (10m 5s): Our customers primarily are the recruiters at the minute. So we, we really pitch ourselves as a digital marketing platform for them. And, I suppose, the engine that does that is the reviews and the placements that they collect to showcase on their profiles. But over time as we start to grow and we start to build the traffic to our website, a secondary customer does actually become those employees and candidates because they're able to come onto our website, they can search by location, search by recruit, especiality, and then see a ranking of all the recruiters that we've got based on the reviews that they've received. And as we get more and more data and information, we can super drill down on that. So not only looking by location, especially our age, but we can also eventually look at, you know, specific job titles or things that are even more relevant to the employees and candidates out there that are doing the research. Chad (10m 54s): So most top notch recruiters that we've actually talked to here in the US will tell you that 95% of the recruiters out there are horrible. They're just shit. But your platform makes everyone look like they're top 5% or at least the ones that I've seen thus far. So I feel like there's some cherry picking going on. Are there reviews being cherry-picked by recruiters and staffing organizations? Can you kick out bad reviews? Can you contest them? How does, how does the process work with regard to the actual review system itself? Chris (11m 28s): Yeah, so sure thing. So there's no cherry picking involved the way it works for the agencies is we connect with their applicant tracking system. So a resident example, when a placement gets recorded by a team member that triggers an event tours, and then we flick off the review request to the candidate in glide. So they receive that once the reviews received back, we verify the review and we verify the placement and then that sits on their profile and is available for them to use elsewhere. So, because that's an automation, there's no way that they can cherry pick. Now the reality is, you know, because we're focused on placements, at least currently, you know, most reviews are going to be good, but our job at the minute isn't to highlight bad recruiters is to highlight good recruiters and highlight good work that they've done. Chris (12m 17s): And we think we do that in a pretty verified and controlled manner. Chad (12m 21s): And you're only touching a very, very small percentage of the individuals who are actually having interactions with those recruiters in the first place. So if it's from my standpoint, from a staffing organization, that's worthless to me. I mean, obviously that recruiter did a good job and the candidates going to love that they got a job for the most part. So all the data that I really want are those shit interactions that you're not going to provide me. Is that, is that true? Chris (12m 51s): Well, that's a good question from the performance management perspective. Yeah, absolutely. You want to get the feedback from all the client and candidate interactions. So internally we've got an NPS or net promoter score tool that does that for them, but externally the goal for the recruiters and the agencies is to showcase all their good work in a verified manner through a third party. So that's where the agencies really see the value it's, Hey, we've already done this good work by making this placement. We've already got a happy client. We've already got a happy candidate. How can we project this across all our other digital investments, whether that be our website, LinkedIn, or any other channels that we work on to make sure that any of the prospects that we're working with can see that. Chris (13m 34s): So it's all part of brand management. Joel (13m 35s): Chris, it looks like in, in 18, you got 300 around 300 K in seed money, correct? Chris (13m 42s): Yes. Joel (13m 43s): And so is there, is there a plan to raise more money? Is that going to be enough and particularly what did you do with the 300 seed money? I actually don't know if that's Australian dollars or exactly what that is. So you can clarify that for me, that'd be nice. And then marketing wise, I'm curious, you know, you have to hit a pretty high level of scale and critical mass of recruiters to sort of be valuable to a large set of people. So I'm curious about the marketing strategy and how you're growing that number of recruiters. Chris (14m 12s): Yeah, sure thing. So to answer the first question. Yeah, we raised 300 and I think our first round was AU$310K and that was Aussie dollar we've raised in printing around since at the start of COVID just to help, you know, put a bit of buffer in the bank account, while we go through what's happening at the many, well, absolutely I'll go list to be raising a Series A early next year. We, you know, we're already already revenue making, which you'd obviously hope after 2018. And the goal for us really is to get pretty close to that break even point. So when we do raise that Series A round, you know, we're not, we're not in the pockets of the investors. We have a bit more flexibility over who to choose, but yeah, absolutely, it's a bit, and that really folds into, I suppose, the second question, which is around that marketing piece. Chris (15m 1s): So our, you know, I, I would go to market is we we're a free product as well. So we've created direct a directory of what we think is about 80% of the recruiters in Australia. So we can mark out to them to claim their free profile, it is free to claim the profile free to collect their reviews. And then when they wouldn't really want to take that branding and marketing to the next level and get access to some of those or the features to help them integrate it elsewhere, that's all, you've got the paid models on top of that. So by doing that, it allows us to help that help achieve that critical mass that you mentioned, because it's absolutely, you know, something really important for an open online directory like this, like, you've worked out. Joel (15m 44s): Yep. And so you, you, you talk a lot about SEO benefits of via the profiles being find-able and I'm sure that plays into your marketing. And I'm curious about sort of the cultural angle of this. So in the States, there's very little of searching for, you know, staffing agencies or recruiters. It's usually, you know, we look for a job and if we apply and if it's a recruiter, great, if not, if it's the employer, great. Culturally do Australians and Brits actively search for actually, you know, recruiters and maybe even names of recruiters. Does it get that granular? Chris (16m 17s): Well, I suppose as a first, as a first point of call, the answer's no, because there's never been older than LinkedIn, which is sort of difficult to compare one to the next, there's no way to look for recruiters. So you may type in something like best recruiters, Sydney, or best recruiters in technology and check out what comes up. Where it sort of really works and helps with the agencies in that in SEO is post engagement. So the likelihood is, you know, I think it, I think this starts 82% of people will probably Google your name or Google your business's name once you've got in touch. And that could be before they even respond to an email. So we want to make sure when they do do that, the first results that come up as a Sourcr and we can showcase those reviews in Google search results. Chris (17m 2s): We're yeah. Yeah. So we're actually a Google review partner. So what that means is we can show up reviews in search results. I don't know whether you've ever seen before review snippets on other platforms. I think like Glassdoor, we've, as a verified review partner of them, we've got that same ability to do that so it really helps us get them ranked high and make sure that those reviews are visible for anyone on page one. Joel (17m 26s): And can you break down your free, the, you know, what, how many people are using the free product? How many are paying, or maybe a percentage ofwhat that is, if you don't want to, if you don't feel comfortable revealing the actual numbers, I'm curious how many you have in each of those sort of universes. Chris (17m 43s): Yeah, sure. So I'll just, enough to muddy up the waters, I'll just pick Australia, as an example. So I think there's about 17,000 recruiters that we've got profiles for on the platform. 1500 of them, thereabouts, who've been claimed and collecting reviews and around 30% of our claim profiles, or maybe just under are around unpaid accounts. Joel (18m 7s): So are you collected, is there a database that you're pulling from, and then putting those on your site, like, or people actively putting on profiles, are they sort of claiming the profile that you already have? So there's one more, it's three? So there's three buckets there. One is our directory that we pulled fromm two is the actual people that have claimed their profile, and three of the actual paid members. Chris (18m 28s): Exactly. Yeah. So for, for the most part, we've got a data team that runs in the background to get publicly accessible information on who these recruitment agencies are and who these recruiters are. And that allows us to go to market with this claim profile strategy. Now. Yeah, we can market out to recruit as individually, whether that be paid advertising or email marketing and a lot of content that you might've seen. And then we encourage them to claim, activate them, get them collecting reviews, and then the next stage is hopefully moving them. Okay. Joel (19m 1s): Just so, so it's 17,000 total of that, how many have claimed? Chris (19m 6s): About 1,500, yeah fifteen hundred. Joel (19m 9s): 1500 and paid? Chris (19m 10s): About 30% and that's just in Australia and then we've obviously got people in New Zealand and under the UK as well. Chad (19m 18s): Okay. So yeah, it was funny. I reached out to a couple of recruiters in Australia and they didn't realize I actually had a profile on your site and they were, they were somewhat astonished that you had data on them and one of them, it wasn't correct. Tell me about the candidate reviews. They're really more like Facebook comments. Why did you decide on freeform reviews instead of pointed questions so that you could provide structured data that the employer, the staffing company could use? Chris (19m 55s): Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's two parts to it. We do provide limited structure day, which is at five star review. So they leave a five-star review and the testimonial. The first part to that is, is speed and conversion. The more, the more questions that you put within a survey or review request, the less likely it is that someone's going to leave that now we're fully mobile responsive survey. Our response rates sit between sort of 35 and 40% depending on the industry. So that's really important. It means that we're collecting reviews on most, from most candidates that they've obviously been placed. Chris (20m 34s): And then the second part of that is the testimonial is actually probably one of the most powerful parts of the review for anyone who's looking and checking out that recruiter, because it provides context to the actual service and experience that candidate has. You know, people mostly look at the overall rating, so it could be yeah, 4.5 stars out of five, over X amount of reviews. But when they're searching through the profiles, they really want to see what the comments are from the people that they've actually worked with, because that's really what helps build that trust and credibility in inexperience for anyone considering using that recruiter. Yeah. Chad (21m 9s): I love the transparency, but I'm sure there are a few firms that have pushed back. Have you actually had firms say, look, I'm not going to participate, get my recruiters off your platform. Chris (21m 21s): Yeah. We know there's always going to be people who aren't early adopters. We, you know, our, one of the goals of the platform is to make sure that we have a fully transparent online directory as well. So we work with the RCSA, which is a member organization for recruitment agencies over in Australia. And we want to maintain that online directory so if they don't want to participate, that's great. The basic profile will still say that there is no detailed information as such on who that agency is. You know, it's pretty much just their name, location, and what markets they work in if you've been able to gather that and it really sets it up. Chris (22m 1s): Now, if there's incorrect information, they're more than welcome to claim and change that information. There's nothing that forces them to collect reviews book for as if it is a legitimate recruitment agency in the market, we do still want to include them in the directory, but much as a Yelp word for businesses or anything else, like a trip review for restaurants or cafes. Joel (22m 23s): What's the biggest threat to your business? Is it a giant, like, you know, Google, like Google launch, sort of these profile cards in search on their India sites, which I assume will sort of sprinkle out into the world at some point. I mean, LinkedIn is a behemoth? Is it firms have been that have been around for a long time that could just sort of replicate this, this review, this review technology or feature, like, what do you, what keeps you up at night, if anything? Chris (22m 55s): First mover advantage, or at least from number one, number two is probably really important in a space that we're in. So getting market, getting, getting that critical mass that you mentioned before me is, you know, that that's pretty critical. I think, you know, if anything up, I'd say that's the thing that keeps me up at night, looking at, you know, unique ways that we can add value, provide content and you get up to the market, so we can get as many people as possible claiming their free profile. Because the way that we see is, you know, there's no limitations to that, we're helping the individuals and we're helping the agency brand themselves better. And there's that SEO element even behind it. So just claiming your profile and collecting a handful of reviews is better than not. Chris (23m 39s): And that's what we want to try and encourage all agencies to do. Chad (23m 42s): So Chris, this is a marketing play, pure marketing play. What's the next step past what you're currently doing today? Chris (23m 50s): Yeah. It's look for us for this, for the staffing agencies that we're working with the next play that, you know, we've already sort of dipped our toes into is that performance management or candidate experience side of things as well. And that's where the net promoter score tool tool that we've built sort of falls into that bracket. So we've got all these public reviews and, and the ways that we integrate them as part of LinkedIn, Google, and a few of the other things that we've got, which is sits on the marketing side of reputation. But as a reputation management platform another part of that is managing the team to make sure that they, you know, they deliver the reputation that you've built to the other clients and candidates that they work with. Chris (24m 34s): So we're starting to build that out as well. So that sits internally so they can measure their performance and segment it by team or by outcome of all those interactions that they have with the nine candidates that they didn't place or the employer that they weren't, they didn't manage to fill a job with. Joel (24m 50s): I wanna give you some kudos. Chris, your transparency in pricing is refreshing. Most of the companies we bring on, you have to schedule a demo and they're sort of a lot of mystery around pricing, but you guys have laid it out pretty, pretty clearly. It looks like you can obviously have a free account, which you guys set up for them for the most part and they can claim. Up to about $150 per month and then $49 per additional user for agencies. So you're, you're right around the 100 to $200 per month for an individual user. I don't know what your average average pricing would be, but I'm curious, you know, when you, when you have a freemium model to have that incentive or you know, those features that are gonna, that are gonna turn people to the paid version, what is your hook to really get someone to go from claiming their profile to then actually paying you guys to sort of get that boost? Joel (25m 48s): What's the catch? What's the hook? Chris (25m 51s): Yeah. Look, first of all, the most important thing that we encourage them to do when they claim is collecting reviews in the first place. And then once they do collect reviews, to be honest, the way that we pitch or demo and have conversations with moving people onto pricing is showing the results that we've managed to provide to other agencies that are on paid. You know, showing examples of where they type in, you know, a particular agency or particular recruiter's name, how they rank on Google or the testimonials in the full case studies of how we've been able to deliver support for other agencies on paid is, you know, it's, it's an ROI question for a lot of agencies. Chris (26m 32s): You know, marketing is something that more and more of them are investing in which is awesome, but they just want to see ROI, which is often quite difficult in marketing because it's, it's sometimes indirect. So, you know, our goal is, you know, we'll rely less on paid advertising. You can reduce your paid advertising spend if you can implement reviews in all these various different areas online. Joel (26m 56s): And you said, you're looking for a Series A funding, what kind of valuation do you think you'll be looking for? How much money can be made? Cause it, it seems like it's a little bit restrictive in terms of how much you can grow. There's a finite number of recruiters. There's a finite number of markets where this would be really valuable. What would, what's your valuation when you're shopping this company? Chris (27m 17s): Yeah, look, I'd be lying if I knew the exact valuation now, cause it depends where, what sort of position that we're in come March or April when we're looking to raise. But you know, given where our projections are in terms of revenue, we'd be looking to raise it, you know, around that six mil mark to really help accelerate into the UK and Australia more. And then the next step after that is how can we get into, you know, the older markets like, you know, we look at your represent example. There's I think there's, there's more recruiters per capita in France than pretty much any other country apart from the UK. Chris (27m 57s): Germany is really high recruitment, so that there's plenty of markets out there. That means that, you know, there's a good total addressable market to go up. And then I suppose outside of that is once you've got the buy in and the trust of the industry, there's, you know, whether it's, whether it's mark single performance management or even something else that's closely related, there's other revenue streams that we can potentially open up to look to provide more value to the agencies that we've obviously built trust with them in a working with. Joel (28m 26s): Gotcha. Gotcha. Bells (28m 27s): Ding, Ding, Ding. Joel (28m 28s): All right, Chris, are you ready to face the firing squad? Chris (28m 33s): Go on. Let me have it. Chad (28m 36s): I'll make this quick. I just finished my beer, so I needed to open. Alright, Chris, so the site looks great. I got to say, you know, going into this, I wasn't really sure where your focus was going to be in, you know, it is around looking good, feeling good and being able to promote whatever brand is on the site, right? Unfortunately, the candidate reviews are ambiguous and fairly useless from a user standpoint. I mean, I felt like I was on Facebook as I was reading through some of them. The hiring company reviews are more structured, but there's still much to be desired. And from a staffing standpoint, you want structured input or data points to provide better guidance and training for your staff. Chad (29m 23s): And, and really, if you take a look at the NPS score overall, I mean, you are dealing with a cherry picked group. If you did allow every single individual that you connect with, or they even gets touched by the recruiter to provide data to you, that be something that would be worth much more. But once again, I think you're being smart with regards to saying, Hey, this is warm, fuzzy, this is a great way to at least push your brand out there. Because most of the individuals I see on the site of the recruiters all have nearly five star reviews, which doesn't feel like a real world to me, but transparency does win the day. Chad (30m 6s): And SEO is obviously another great way to drive recruiters and staffing companies into your platform. Overall, I think you're going to have to get beyond the warm and fuzzy marketing play and being able to do, to try to ask for more data. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel that's where you're at now, so that my friend is why you're going to get a golf clap. Golf Clap (30m 34s): Hands clapping. Joel (30m 37s): All right, Chris. All right. So it's my turn. All right. So I always have a hard time with these sort of geographic plays where the culture is different than it is in the US. I'm American that way, so it's hard for me to wrap my head around how staffing agencies are so important, but I can wrap my head around the business of reviews. Certainly restaurant reviews and in our own industry, company reviews, employee reviews have been big business. Chad and I have talked in length about Glassdoors, exit of one point, whatever billion to recruit holdings who owns Indeed as well so there's definitely money and them thar reviews. Joel (31m 23s): So for me, I think you have a limited ceiling, but I don't think you need to have a billion dollar plus business. And if you're talking about, you know, 6 million, five, 6 million, you have to have a fraction of what the global sort of employer review business has to be successful. I also think that I loved being able to hear you say, looking at adding new things and features as we sort of build out the company because Glassdoor, although they started with just reviews, obviously are basically a job site now, and they're an employer branding play and they're making money in a lot of different ways. Joel (32m 6s): So I think that, you know, the key for you will be if assuming you get the funding that you're looking for is how do you take reviews to the next level and add things on top of it? I think Chad is right when he says, look, you can't just continue to be a marketing play and have longevity because that is, that's a moat that can be penetrated in my opinion. So to have like a unique technology and something that can build that moat for you, particularly in markets that you're in, are going to be important. As I understand it, the UK is incredibly competitive, but I also understand there's a ton of money in that market as well, even much more so than I'm assuming Australia and New Zealand. Joel (32m 49s): So as you grow new markets, the value obviously goes up. But I think the opportunity to have an exit where a UK staffing company, a big company over in Europe, just write you guys a check because you're getting some critical mass with reviews and engagement is a real future for you guys. So for me, I'm a little biased on the review side, cause I've talked about it and have businesses around that. But for me, I mean, I think there's a real opportunity here and my Australian friend bring out the bloomin' onions, there we go applause from me, my friends. How do you feel? Applause (33m 27s): Clapping. Chris (33m 27s): Yeah, thanks guys. It was good feedback as well, you can't complain with a good clap and a golf clap, so I'll take that. Joel (33m 37s): You could because you're Australian. And with that, we out. Chad (33m 43s): We out. OUTRO (33m 41s): This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to The Chad and Cheese Podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today that's www.chadcheese.com.

Ever been stood up on a date? Yeah, we know the feeling after being stood up by our TOP STORY this week, although we're making lemons into lemonade and point you toward an acquisition. Shhhh, don't tell anyone. Plus Shakespeare, Wonder Woman, and free flights to Hawaii means this episode has it all. Another active week in recruiting saw more start-up investment, more shots at Dice, more competition for Indeed, and much more. Enjoy this Shaka-filled edition, sponsored by Jobvite, JobAdx, and Sovren. Mahalo! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies find talent in the largest minority community in the world – people with disabilities. 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, Thanksgiving surge? In my pants. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, boys and girls, I'm your cohost, Joel "all I want for Christmas is some Airbnb shares" Cheeseman Chad (38s): And I'm Chad "I just want to use a fucking Airbnb" Sowash Joel (42s): This week show Indeed, watch it's back and Hawaii wants you and Oh, how I want Hawaii. I need a lay, a Pina Colada and some sunscreen stat! JOBVITE (55s): "Jobvite has changed our recruiting practice by making us more nimble. We're able to hire faster, but that means that things like where it would take us weeks to get approval from hiring managers or the next level up, that's now minutes;" "It's one of the best cutting edge tools out there available for talent acquisition today;" "I would absolutely recommend Jobvite to my peers. It allows you to get in front of talent that other tools won't do." Chad (1m 24s): 2020 is off the fucking rails. Okay. We've got AI machine guns, killing people. I mean, did you see the space X lauch yesterday? Joel (1m 36s): Oh yeah. Would you call that a lot? Well, it was a launch not a landing. Chad (1m 40s): It was not a landing. That was my point. It was a launch. It was cool as hell. I, you never knew what was happening because it was a different type of landing. It just wasn't one of those straight down landings that had kind of like a glide in and then it swung over so that it could land and... Joel (1m 57s): Did the Jersey curve there at the end, just kind of couldn't straighte out. Chad (2m 1s): I didn't quite do that. And the, but that was one hell of an explosion though. I have to say! Joel (2m 7s): It was, it was! Pass the eggnog. I say, dammit, Christmas is Christmas is coming. Have you guys bought a tree? Like what's, what's the Sowash house household looked like as empty nesters? Chad (2m 20s): Yeah, well again, it's just Julie and myself and that being said happy 29th birthday to the executive director of Disability Solutions, podcast co-host of Crazy and the King and my lovely wife, Julie Sowash. We just run around doing whatever we want. It's not really Christmasy around here because we're not that big into decorations in the first place. And since the kids aren't around, I mean, we're not doing it for ourselves, so. Joel (2m 47s): So our house looks like the Griswold starter kit. It's kind of a, we have three trees currently up, lights on the house, inflatables in the front yard. The sidewalk is lined with candy canes and some sort of like peppermint swirl little decorations. So it's, we went all out this year and we put it up right after actually, well, we started before Thanksgiving, because we thought, fuck it, 2020, let's get in the spirit. We did it Burger King style and we launched Christmas all early this year. So it's all good. All we need is snow. Dammit. Snow would really complete the picture, but I'm not sure we're going to get that in the Midwest this year, at least in our neck of the woods. Chad (3m 30s): Yeah. Well, you're doing enough for both of our homes, so I appreciate that. Joel (3m 34s): Oh, sure. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think we're keeping it up until February 14th. Valentine's Day we'll take everything down, everything down. So are you, are you, do you have a buyer for those Airbnb shares? And did you buy some DoorDash, DoorDash shared yesterday? What are you, what are you thoughts on that? Chad (3m 52s): First off the door, I'm not going to buy into Door Dash. I think Door Dash is artificially inflated because of what's going on now. It's COVID right. We're going to go back to somewhat of a normal later. And then, you know, everything's going to flush out. Airbnb on the other hand, is something entirely different in their, in their pre IPO. Some of the information came out that 90% of the traffic that goes to Airbnb, the app or the website is totally organic. It's direct, which means they're not spending money on Facebook. They're not spending money on Google and they don't need those other pieces. They are a lifestyle platform. Chad (4m 33s): We talk about lifestyle platforms all the time. They have become a lifestyle platform. So I believe them easily. You put some cash into them over Door Dash. Joel (4m 44s): Yeah. I, I totally agree. I mean, air, Door Dash competition. Well-funded competition. I mean, one of these companies went public because of the virus and one of them went public despite the virus and Airbnb long-term, we were not an investment show. Don't everybody buy a bunch of these things and blame us when they go down. But DoorDash to me is it's just an opportunist in terms of the, the virus. Now they are talking about, there'll be able to deliver, you know, pharmaceuticals from Walgreens and there'll be sort of the last mile for, for things. So, yeah. So we'll see what happens, but, but Airbnb, I mean, they're globally known. Joel (5m 25s): You talked about the 90% traffic. I mean, we talk about brand awareness a lot too on the show and these guys have really solidified a solid brand. If people haven't heard our Douglas Adkin series, they should, I'm guessing Douglas is drinking a really expensive wine on a beach somewhere in Italy, because he's a rich man after today. So yeah, I think, and then he looked at the work, you know, the work environment in terms of, you know, what we talk about on the show, look, people are going to want to go to offices, but not like big ass headquarters, like before younger people I think are going to want to be, have flexible workspaces. Joel (6m 6s): And Airbnb is sort of really primed to take all this commercial real estate that's empty and turn it into some sort of fun Airbnb workplace, whatever, where you just sign in, pay by the hour or pay by whatever. And I think that's a whole opportunity for them and the experiences as well. I mean, they launched that quite a while ago and it's a huge business. And I think that's only going to get bigger as people get the fuck out of the house and want to do some shit. Chad (6m 32s): Yeah. If WeWork doesn't die because of this, they haven't died yet. Right. I think they will see a huge explosion. There will be cheaper office space available. People will want to have quote unquote "offices", just not headquarter type offices. Yeah. I think there's going to be a different appeal to how we do work. I hope, I hope we don't go back to the 1950s. Get your ass in the chair at 8:00 am, right? Joel (7m 3s): Yeah. I think they'll have like corporate credits and companies will give employees Airbnb credits for core commercial. I don't know, time at time and offices and whatever, wherever they want to go, whatever they want to do. So I think it's, it's a huge opportunity. Chad (7m 17s): Yeah. Joel (7m 18s): Speaking of macro economic issues, I, I, I'm curious about the movie industry AT&T Warner Media, HBO Max, this week, or recently talked about, they're releasing all their movies in conjunction with, in this, you know, in the movie theaters. Yeah. It's a gangster move. It's the ultimate sort of subscription movie theaters sort of suck for the most part. And you going to more movies than anyone. I know. What's, what's your take on the whole future of movie theaters at home movies? Like what I assume you like that you can watch Wonder Woman 1984 in your house, or you're going to be the first one in line at the theater when the vaccine goes around? Chad (8m 2s): Fuck that I'm not going to, it's so much more expensive to go to the theater in the first place and not to mention, I think Disney plus hopefully has shown us what movies look like in the future. When Mulan came out, now that wasn't a big name, but yet you have to be a Disney plus subscriber to have access to all of their awesome content. But on the new movies like Mulan, you had to pay 30 bucks. 30 bucks is cheap. Man. You can have a, you can have a private screening in your house with all your friends and family. Think of being able to do that with Star Wars or that, or, or what's coming out the new Marvel movies that are coming out right? Chad (8m 44s): Black Widow. I think that is something that will help them drive more cash to their bottom line. And it it's obviously siphoning it out of the, the movie theaters now and an entirely different piece is HBO Max. HBO Max is doing this because most people who have HBO aren't streaming HBO Max, which I don't understand. So they're doing this as a free kind of tug to say, Hey, look, download the app. You have it for free. You're already a subscriber so they can boost their subscription. What they haven't said yet is if they do boost that subscription, will they do what Disney plus did on all those other movies? Chad (9m 28s): Will they say yes, here we go. You have access to them because you're HBO Max user, but it's going to be $30, 50, 15, who knows how much more it'll cost. But I think that's the future of what we're looking at and going to a big screen. I think those days are still there, but they're not going to be there for long. Joel (9m 49s): So Wonder Woman is as I understand it, not an additional fee like Mulan was. Chad (9m 55s): No it's not. Joel (9m 56s): So do you think that's the future where? Chad (9m 58s): No. Joel (9m 58s): We're gonna go? No. Chad (10m 1s): The reason they did Wonder Woman like this, it's a huge box office hit. They're going to pull all those people who are not using HBO max today into that app. Now, hopefully they'll get smart and actually get it on Roku and the fire stick because they don't have it there yet. Dumb asses. But if they do that, they'll be able to pull their subscriber base on and then they can start doing Disney plus shit. Joel (10m 31s): Yeah. So what happens to the traditional movie theater? Chad (10m 34s): What happened to the drive-in movie theaters? Joel (10m 37s): They died. There was one, there was one per town in the Midwest where there was still land available. Chad (10m 44s): There was, there was. Not any more kids. Joel (10m 47s): Part of me thinks like the IMAX experience could still work, like to still have a screen as big as, you know, a billboard and 3d and surround sound like that people will still do that. And the other part of me, like the dining and movie thing and drinking, right? Chad (11m 5s): Yeah. Joel (11m 5s): Let me, it's like a night out. It's like a date night or it's, you know, it's something unique and special. Those two things I think could work. Otherwise there's nothing about a movie theater that's better than your house. Chad (11m 18s): No. Yeah. I think more upscale. Date night, big, big movies. Like again, star war, star Wars movies. You could see those, like, you know, synchronous drops where they're going to an IMAX and they're also on Disney plus they're, they're obviously you're going to be all those people who want to dress up like Boba Fett to go see it at the IMAX. That's cool. You know, but it's going to cost more. There's no question than it used to. And you'll also be able to have all your Boba Fett buddies over to your house and watch it on your TV for a hell of a lot less. Joel (11m 51s): Yeah. And speaking of making movies and experience, I'm committed to watching Wonder Woman 1984, with my 1984 flock of seagulls hairstyle. So that's how, I'm how I'm celebrating this momentous occasion. Chad (12m 6s): All right. That's awesome. Joel (12m 8s): Shout Out to Hyundai! Chad (12m 12s): Hyundai? Joel (12m 13s): Honda Honda, Honda Hyundai, Honda. Jeez. Who's apparently going to be the sixth or seventh or 20th owner of Boston Dynamics, the makers of the freaky deaky robot dog that has scared, scared internet viewers for almost a decade now, I think they're barely buying the company for $1 billion. Keep in mind, Google bought this, this, this company a while ago and then said, we're out of the business. So what does, is this, is this a statement on robots? Is it a statement on Boston Dynamics just doesn't get it right. As opposed to someone like I robot, who just says, we'll have a robot vacuum your house instead of like kick your dog to the shelter. Joel (12m 56s): What, what are your thoughts? Chad (12m 57s): Yeah, I'm thinking military. That's all the only thing I can think about these types of companies, because they're on the cutting edge of what's going to be next and being able to go out to the American population or any, any country and say, Hey, look, we don't have to fight wars with humans anymore. Isn't this a great thing? Hyundai getting into it much like Honda's into it. I don't understand, other than maybe every new Hyundai Sonata comes with a robot chauffer? I don't, I don't know. Joel (13m 34s): Well, obviously there's some smart people there that could maybe help self-driving stuff, but I'll, but also Uber just abandoned it's self-driving initiative, I believe this week. So driverless stuff and robots, I don't know the verdict is still out on that stuff. And you mentioned sort of in the opening, the AI drone machine gun thing, you saw that, right? Like what the hell was that about? Chad (13m 59s): Yeah. I mean, technology is fucking scary. It really is. Joel (14m 2s): The Iranian scientist who was assassinated, apparently AI and machine gun, drone machine gun, was responsible for the death or something. Chad (14m 10s): Yeah. And everything was from at least news reports and you can never fucking know was via satellite. So, you know, having all the geo position, positioning and whatnot, and the scientist who was killed, his wife was right beside him. He was pumped full of lead and so was his body guard who jumped in front of him. But she wasn't hit. That is scary because that's fucking accuracy. Joel (14m 36s): That's AI. Chad (14m 37s): Yeah. 11 shots. Joel (14m 38s): I got nothing. I got nothing. Shout out to William Shakespeare. No, not that William Shakespeare. So England started to shoot up their residents with the vaccine. The number two guy who got a shot was named William Shakespeare. I don't know if there's anything more British than that. Some dude named William Shakespeare. The second guy after him was Winston Churchill. And then after that was King Henry or something like that's a, I don't know, they do it different out there in England, I guess, Chad (15m 9s): Shout out to, to Talent Function and Elaine over there at Talent Function, they were acquired by CLO. This is all about consulting baby. And obviously consulting brings cash into in-house and, CLO has been trying to figure out how to do that for years. So that's your answer. Go buy a consulting company, bring them in house. Joel (15m 30s): Shout Out to Spotify lists. I don't know if you've seen this, but people are sharing their Spotify hot list for the year. Chad (15m 36s): Yes. Joel (15m 36s): And, and many folks have us this damn show at the top of the list. Adam Gordon comes to mind. So we appreciate the listeners and the Spotify listeners as well. You can hear us on anything, but Spotify is the only one that's been smart enough to like get some social media action out of their top list this year. Yeah. Chad (15m 55s): They're they're smart. Dennis Tupper and also Grant Clo grant had us ranked above Joe Rogan. So I'm waiting for our a hundred million to come in from Spotify any day. Joel (16m 9s): Dooo. Shout out to Apple's new head phones. Yes leave it to Apple to have a pair of headphones that cost about the same as a PS5. I think they're up to PS5 now. So yeah, that's that's brand brand power, baby, pricing power at Apple. I'm doubting that won't be under your tree this year. Chad (16m 30s): It cracks me up because Scott Galloway says that buying anything Apple's an IQ test. And in this case I agree a hundred percent only dumb motherfuckers are buying those. Joel (16m 39s): No it's people that want to show off their intelligence. And Chad (16m 44s): They're called fuck you money is what it is. Joel (16m 48s): They're superior DNA over Android, Android users. That must burn you up. When he talks about Android users in such degrading terms. Chad (16m 57s): He's a fucking academic. I mean, he looks down his nose at everybody who doesn't do things exactly like he does. I mean, you know, it's like, I would love to have a conversation with him, but every other sentence I'd be like, fuck you, Scott, but that's cool. That's fine. That's fine. Joel (17m 11s): That's who we are. That's that's the world, baby posing our opinions. Shout out to Transform. I don't know if anybody was, was watching, but you and I made a cameo appearance, fire and bourbon and Santa hats and all kinds of stuff. But that was a lot of fun and Transform knows how to, how to put on a virtual conference like nobody else. That was a lot of fun. And by the way, that the woman who introduced us as the Chad and Chase show that that brought me down to earth big time. So I had the Spotify list and then I had the Chad and Chase show. Ah, Nope, Nope. My name not Chase it's Cheeseman. Chad (17m 51s): Not easy being Chase. Let me tell. Joel (17m 53s): You it ain't easy being cheesy baby. Chad (17m 55s): Topics. Joel (17m 59s): All right. Chad (18m 1s): So, have you ever been stood up on a date then texted the next day with, sorry about that. My bad. Yeah. Welcome to the top new segment we recorded and then had to cut because we were stood up. Anyhow. We thought we'd make lemons into lemonade and give you a hint, just a little something for you to grind on until the news is actually broken. Here's the hint, a major player in our space is about ready to snap up a video platform. What kind of video platform, a platform dedicated to video interviewing? Maybe? What about video resumes? Chad (18m 41s): That's a thing. Video branding. I've heard of that. What about video power, job fairs? Those are popular, or maybe it's a version of video. I haven't even mentioned. Ask yourself who needs video? Who wants video, who is gonna get video? Watch for a Chad and Cheese shred a bite, a breaking news to drop with that answer and until then enjoy our regularly scheduled program. Joel (19m 15s): So, so we agree, this is a little bit of an odd acquisition. Chad (19m 19s): Yes, I like it. I just think, I think it's going to be good in about five years. Joel (19m 25s): Yeah. Interesting. Well, video is, is continues to be hot. Also announced this week, My Interview, I got 5 million for video interviewing. My interview has been used by more than 2000 companies, mostly in the United States and UK. They have a strategic partnership this is kind of their big one with reed.co.uk. The largest job search site in the UK. Chad (19m 49s): That's big. Joel (19m 49s): So far more than 2 million candidates have used My Interview. So video is high. Chad (19m 55s): For me for any core platform that's out there. This is table stakes. If you don't have this and you don't have like a key partner to be able to help you do this. I mean, you're not even a part of the conversation anymore. So I think anybody who has a core platform, whether it's a CRM or an applicant tracking system, this, I mean, they have to have these platforms, these names, My Interview on many of the other ones, they have to be like constantly in contact with them in really gauging how many people are using them. I mean, the partnership with Reed I think is big. Joel (20m 32s): Yeah, yeah, for sure. I, you know, to me, a lot of these feel like they're ripe to just be destroyed by someone like Zoom, right? Like 15 years ago, do you remember job boards had their own video platforms? Right? Like, remember My Jobbing Video or something, and like people had video their own stuff. And then YouTube came along and said, Oh yeah, video. Like we're free. We're HD. We have better reach. We can do all these things. Like it's not going to take much for Zoom or someone that really, really, really gets video really well to start providing APIs or like plugins to these things, to where that's the default that people use for video. Joel (21m 17s): Like, I just feel like these, these solutions are going to get crushed. Chad (21m 20s): It goes beyond video, though. It goes into transcriptions. It goes into being able to share and rank. I mean, there's so many different pieces in one of these video interviewing interfaces that you can't just plunk video into a platform and go, there you go. So Zoom would actually have to work on building an interface for HR and talent acquisition. And I don't see that happening. Joel (21m 45s): No. No. How about Slack that has a video platform and Salesforce? Chad (21m 51s): It's too much of a pain in the ass. Joel (21m 53s): LinkedIn video? Chad (21m 54s): Yes, Maybe LinkedIn, because this is their space. Yeah. Joel (21m 58s): I knew I'd finally get to one. So they, weren't the only one getting money this week, Code Signal caught our eye. What happened with them? Chad (22m 7s): I love these guys. So twenty-five million in series B, 37 million in total Code Signals, a technical assessment platform dedicated to helping companies go hashtag. Joel (22m 19s): Go beach tag. Chad (22m 21s): Go resumes in tech recruiting. I love when that's put out in the press release, Joel (22m 26s): I know right more hashtags and press releases. Goddammit guys. Chad (22m 31s): I mean, they, they, they put out that employment of engineers is projected to grow by 22% adding approximately over 300,000 new jobs in the U S and from my standpoint, for any company that does development front end back end, any type of coding whatsoever. This is the silver bullet platforms like this, right? You have, you have Code Signal. You have Codify, you have Woven Teams here in Indianapolis. Hacker Rank. Because if you think about it, these technical recruiters they're for the most part, they're not, programmers. Joel (23m 8s): You didn't say Dice, Chad, did you forget about Dice? Chad (23m 11s): I'll get to that. I'll get to that. So most of these technical recruiters, they don't know how to program. So these coding platforms get them to the point where the recruiter already knows. Yes, they know how to code. They've passed all these tests, right? They've been certified. Now we can have the conversation with this individual. This is what scalability in technology is about. And it is so smart because talent acquisition doesn't know this and they're looking for a silver bullet, and one of these types of platforms are perfect for this. Joel (23m 43s): You know, we mentioned a Jobvite a little, and we just did a, an interview with them in regards to their survey that they put out every year. And one of the, one of the data points that really sort of surprised me was the 20% decrease in usership of LinkedIn. And I know a lot of that is because of Seek Out and sourcing tools. But I think a lot of it too, is there just, aren't very many engineers on LinkedIn and people are using services like this in terms of where am I going to spend budget to find technical folks. And these guys, I think, continue to take chunks out of the pie that, that LinkedIn enjoys and will continue to do. So some of our customers include big names like Instacart, Robin hood, Upwork, and zoom, who we just, we just talked about. Joel (24m 27s): So they're, they're no joke. They they're legit for sure. Chad (24m 30s): Yeah. Well, two weeks ago I tagged Dice and DHI as 2020s Turkey of the year, because this is exactly what they should be doing. And they're being outflanked by a bunch of more nimble and smarter startups. So Art. Art buddy, listen up , Dice should acquire these guys are a platform like them. Unfortunately, I feel like I'm talking to air because, you know, they won't. And if they did, they would just totally, fuck it up anyway. So just forget what I just said. Older, platforms like Dice, I don't know how they didn't see these things coming. I don't know how they didn't become this. Chad (25m 10s): They had the community. And then the community said, guess what? We don't want what you have anymore. We want something different. And this is it. Joel (25m 19s): Hubris is a nasty thing. I mean, at least pull some Zuckerberg shit and just copy it and see what happens. You know, like TikTok, let's just launch Reels and see if we can compete with these guys. They don't even have the innovative genius to copy all the stuff that's innovative. Chad (25m 35s): Come on Art. 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What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Joel (26m 52s): Watch out, Indeed. Watch your back. Watch your back. Sorry. Our buddies at Jobiak. Chad (26m 58s): You're actually saying it right! Joel (27m 2s): Joe. Okay. Jobiak who we know as being optimized, your jobs for Google for jobs, we did a Voices series a with them, if you haven't checked that out, go to Chadcheese.com/voices. It's a great interview. Yeah. And I don't remember if he mentioned this in the interview or if it was sort of like when the mic was off? Chad (27m 22s): It was when the mic was off. Yeah. Yeah. Joel (27m 24s): So he sort of gave us a sneak peek into job postings and job search, and we're going to have an engine and blah, blah, blah. So they finally did it. It's called the All Jobs, Job Board. And it's essentially aggregating, they're essentially aggregating corporate sites, government shit, just stuff from all around the web and making it a search engine. My personal sense initially was like, okay, this is kind of stupid, but then I thought about it a little more and I thought, you know, what, if Indeed can leverage Google to become what Indeed was, why can't Jobiak leverage Google to become something bigger. Joel (28m 5s): So, if Jobiak who's, you know, purpose for living is to optimize its postings in Google for Jobs and Google for Jobs is getting, you know, 150 million, whatever searches per month in the U S, if they can optimize and get major traction in Google for Jobs, why couldn't they be a major source for traffic? If they can out optimize all the job boards and ATSs on Google for Jobs? I mean, it could be interesting. Thoughts? Chad (28m 34s): If it were that easy. That's the thing. If it were that easy, somebody else would have done it. Right. And I think, you know, take a step back in history. Let's talk about the big player in this space. First, Indeed, didn't start by scraping corporate job content when they launched. Yup. They actually went to Direct Employers back in, you know, we direct employers back in 2002 before, it was actually called Direct Employers, haD this exact vision. We were providing jobs to the entire job board industry. I worked with everybody out there to be able to give them XML feeds of these types of jobs, even Indeed, when they launched, they were working off of our database, but we only did jobs, obviously that led back to the corporate career sites. Chad (29m 19s): The hard part about this, unless they found a different way to do it, is scraping tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of sites is a bitch. Maintenance on those scripts, because they break all the damn time and navigating through the applicant tracking system issues, because, you know, they believe the quote unquote "load" was too much their system. That was always just a pain in the ass because you were always chasing your tail because shit was always breaking. But this is a different day and from my understanding and talking to Venkat and, and his crew have engineered a much more eloquent process to perform this heavy task of job aggregation. Chad (30m 1s): And it's not just a scrape once every 24 hours or a scrape, you know, once every couple of hours, this is supposed to be more instantaneous process. So if they can, this is actually something that a recruit holdings would, would perspectively look to buy so that they can re-up what they've been doing for years, and they can advance their tech. But if I was one of Indeed's competitors, I would be all over this. I'd be talking to Jobiak yesterday. Joel (30m 31s): Yeah. I mean, they talk about real time in the release and he talked about that and, you know, speed kills when it comes to Google and search engines. So yeah, I have a process that can like super continuously get new content and flood it into Google before anyone else sort of does that, or, you know, make Google aware of the content before anyone else. I think that's really intriguing. See how that works. I think the major challenge for them is going to be branding. You know, people do a search in Google and they see Glassdoor and they see LinkedIn and they see, you know, brands that they know and Jobiak is not a well-known consumer brand by any stretch of the imagination. And to get to that point, is either going to take a bunch of money to build that brand, or just build it organically over time, which, you know, we'll see how that goes, but yeah, it's interesting to see how this goes. Joel (31m 22s): The tech is obviously superior, at least in terms of, of what Venkat talked to us about the, the prospect of a consumer site buying this as much better than if it was just a technology to optimize postings. So the buyout price tag becomes much greater if this becomes a major, you know, major machine for putting jobs out distribution and optimizing them and whatnot, that becomes real, real appetizing for a lot more companies. I think. Chad (31m 52s): Yeah, the brand key on this is it doesn't say Jobiak on the button. It says company website, because all of these are supposedly going back to the corporate website. So if they can somehow work that out, then they win at least the Google for jobs. Joel (32m 8s): Yeah. I know that customers have their brand, but I don't know if the scraping part, they can utilize a company brand or a separate brand from that. We'll see. Chad (32m 18s): Yeah. We'll see. Joel (32m 18s): Well, you're all fired up about the new COVID passport that airlines are throwin' out there. I thought it was a pretty, I know it was a pretty safe topic, but you're pretty fired up about it. Chad (32m 29s): Oh, I think this is going to be an issue. So a handful of countries, Germany, Chile, the United States are thinking about immunity passports to make it clear who is immune from COVID. Several U.S. Companies are also examining ways of testing employees, including COVID-19 antibodies. I mean, before we even allowing them to return to work. So this is very problematic because you know what, if again, you know, you're trying to put a roof over your head and your kid's head and food in your kid's mouth, but you can't go to work because you haven't gotten the shot yet. Chad (33m 9s): You know, I think right. Rollout means everything. And if this country, at least the United States, and I would say probably the rest of the world too, you know, the rich white dudes are going to get it first. And they're the ones who shouldn't, they should get it last because they can more than likely do work from home and stay safe for a much longer time. Other than these frontline workers who need it, yesterday. Joel (33m 34s): So what are your thoughts on government versus like the private sector, doing this? Cause it sounds like that the airlines have said, look, government's not going to figure this out. They're going to move too slowly. So we need to have our own thing so that we're not waiting around for government. Chad (33m 49s): Yeah. I don't know that companies are going to have the ability to just because of the ADA. So allowing only people with immunity or evidence of past infection to work, would disadvantage those who haven't gotten sick. There are unintentional consequences. Joel (34m 9s): It's going to be a cluster. Fuck. I think it's going to be a total politicized shit show, you know, on its surface, on its surface, you should be able to go to Walgreens, CVS, whatever, and you go get the shot and then you get either get a card or you get like a little wrist band or something that indicates to the world that, Hey, I've been vaccinated. Right. So, but then you get, it's the political part of it saying, well, half the people aren't going to get vaccinated. So now you've already, you know, half the population, one bucket, and you put the other half in another bucket, or if your children are vaccinated, but you're not like, how does that give you preferential treatment and restaurants and bars and nightclubs and other social things? Joel (34m 50s): And then do people that don't have do they resent the people who do and can do those things? And can you penalize corporations for giving preferential treatment to people that have accent vaccines versus those that don't? This thing is going to unfold as a total shit show. It's going to be politicized. It's going to pit people together against each other, which we, you know, obviously we're there, but let's just have some more of it. I totally get why airlines would say, Hey, let's figure something out. Like the, the speed lane, when you get, you know, you go get your, your pre-check right. And you mentioned clear, which is like your, I, you know, they look at your eyeball and shit, or like, I love being able to go to the airport and I've got my little, you know, ticket thing with my prescreen code on it, and I can bypass everybody, but I'm sure the people that don't have that look at me and go, what an asshole. Joel (35m 44s): Now, if I have a little vaccine thing and I can go into places that other people can't, then I'm just a bigger asshole. So this thing is going to be really interesting. But regardless, I'm getting the fucking vaccine, like how, whatever, whatever, whatever wrist band, hat, underwear, they give me because of it to show it like, I'm ready to do whatever. Chad (36m 3s): Yeah. It's not about getting it. It's when it's, when you get it. Right. It's when they actually line you up to get it. Who gets it first? It's the whole prioritization. It's much like when the NBA was put in a bubble and all the athletes were getting tested when nobody else could get tested in the U S. Right? Joel (36m 24s): Right. Chad (36m 24s): Who, I mean, who is benefiting from that? I mean, obviously the players, but the more so the owners, right? Rich white dudes, who could afford to keep their money machine moving, could do that. What's going to happen with the vaccine. Is it going to be the same thing? Oh, well, we have to keep business moving. So therefore we need to make sure that our players get vaccinated. Well, no, before that we need nurses, teachers, police, officers, fireman, people who work in the community every single day, they are priority. Right? But we have our priorities fucked up. Joel (36m 59s): So here's another one. This, issue is also come out, is like, can companies require employees to get the vaccine before they can come to work? And could companies say, we're only going to hire people that have been vaccinated. Like that's a whole other constitutional thing that could happen as well. But what are you think about companies saying you can only come in or we'll only hire you if you've had the vaccine? Chad (37m 22s): Yeah. I think at that point, the big difference between the conversation is having accessibility to getting vaccinated, having the opportunity and choosing to do it or not do it. Right. The first part of the discussion was who's going to have the opportunity, right? When it's available to everyone, then it's a choice. And if you're a dumb motherfucker who didn't get the vaccination, then you know, I don't know legally what's going to happen. But if you didn't, then I, dude, I got no words for you. Joel (37m 55s): The second Walmart says we only employ vaccinated folks, is the class action lawsuit of all lawsuits, because they're going to be a bunch of people and lawyers chomping at the bit to sue the fuck out of big companies that, that make that decision. But it's probably the right business decision, right? Like wouldn't you rather shop at a store that has all vaccinated employees and has all their customers being vaccinated. Chad (38m 21s): But if I've been vaccinated, I don't care. If you're dumb enough not to get vaccinated. Okay, good. Good for you. Joel (38m 28s): Just give me the fucking shot. Yes. Sovren (38m 31s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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 (39m 29s): Have you been to Hawaii, Chad? Yeah. Chad (39m 32s): I love it. I love it. I can't wait to go back Joel (39m 35s): Now. I've been to Maui. My first marriage was in Maui, so I'm not sure my current wife will let me go to Maui ever again, but yeah, if Chad (39m 43s): You keep talking about it, I mean, Jesus. Joel (39m 47s): So Hawaii was in the news this week that state launched a temporary residency program that they're calling movers and shaka's. Chad (39m 59s): Shakas. Joel (39m 60s): Shaka? Is that a Hawaiian thing? Chad (40m 2s): I'm sure it is. Joel (40m 3s): Okay. Movers and shakas in collaboration with schools and businesses, it's accepting applicants to come live there. They'll pay for the flight and travel out. And you work remotely in Hawaii. Obviously Hawaii being a pretty, you know, dependent upon vacationers and travelers, you know, fund the whole thing, has a little trouble when no one's flying. So this they're hoping will inject some professionals inject some money into the system. Most people will look at it as a great opportunity to go to Hawaii for free and work remotely. Nevermind the time zone difference. That's that's a whole other ball of wax. So they're accepting their first group group of applicants. Joel (40m 45s): December 15th is the cutoff. So if you're listening to this, it's probably about deadline time. The first round we'll only have 50 people chosen. So it's a pretty, pretty small group that they're letting in. Chad (40m 58s): So, you know, the hang loose symbol that they use in Hawaii, that's a Shakra Joel (41m 3s): That's it? Yeah, that's it. Oh really? I thought you were making that up. Okay. Now the shotgun little hang loose thing. Yeah. Chad (41m 9s): Yep, yep. Little hang looser. So yeah, only 50 people is going to be chosen for this. So I think this is a lot about nothing. It's like, Oh look a 50 people. Joel (41m 17s): It's a free ad for Hawaii. So yeah, it's not really Chad (41m 19s): A big deal. Although I think this is the future of the workplace. The remote workplace, these types of programs are popping up everywhere. And I predict this is going to be something that we see permanently in, into more of geo distributed workforce, more States, more towns, cities, hell countries are going to be doing stuff like this, which is again, one of the issues I have with the Facebook payroll, the wage war, right? There's there's no reason why you should tell me where I should live and pay me a different way when I'm doing the same fucking work, I should be able to live everywhere. Right. And getting out of that 1950s mentality, I think we're going to finally get there with the more distributed workforce and what Hawaii is looking at here and what Arkansas is looking at, what Tulsa is looking at is they are looking for. Joel (42m 12s): Don't forget Vermont. Chad (42m 13s): Is for people to come there and spend money. Joel (42m 15s): Yeah. I'm just glad that we're upgrading from Northern Arkansas to Hawaii. If we can keep that trend going, I'm all for it. Chad (42m 27s): Italy. Joel (42m 27s): Italy, Paris, Oslo. Let's get some of these more, more interesting places to give us free airfare to work there for awhile. I like that. I like that. Chad, we shaka out. Chad (42m 39s): We Shaka out. OUTRO (42m 41s): I'm Marie from Scotland, the country, which brought you electricity! 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. Nada! Niente! Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

With the rise of coronavirus, some employers are adapting quicker than others to the changes in human behavior and public consciousness. One of those employers is Chipotle - a favorite guest and Joel's favorite burrito provider - is at the forefront in this movement, which makes them the perfect company at the perfect time for an interview. Enjoy this prescient conversation for these trying times supported by Smashfly. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. SFX: Oh my God, I Love Chipotle. Chipotle is my life. Intro: 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, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Oh, yeah. Chipotle is my life. Chad: My life. Joel: Especially when there's free delivery on Uber Eats. Free plug there for those guys. Chad: Suckers. Joel: What's up everybody? Welcome back. We are The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I am your co-host Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad quarantine Sowash. Joel: We are honored to welcome back for the second time. Chad: Woohoo. Joel: Yeah, they're just that gullible, Joe and Mike or Mike and Joe from Chipotle. Mike Miller: Hey. Joel: Guys, what's up? Mike Miller: How are you? Chad: Just to get this right, first it's Mike Miller. He is the director of TA at Chipotle. And Joe Albino. Joel: Albano. Chad: Albano, that's it, that's it. Yeah. Joe Albano: You're bringing up old childhood wounds of the albino talk. Chad: After our last podcast, we definitely wanted to have you guys back. Unfortunately, it's during a crisis, but fortunately it's during a crisis so that we can talk about how Chipotle is managing a crisis situation. There are tons of companies that are out there today that are on the ropes and they don't know what the hell to do. I know that you guys wouldn't claim to have all the answers, but we've been sitting back and watching some of the things that Chipotle has been doing and I've personally been pretty impressed. And I want to be able to talk about some of those things today because you guys, the reason I believe you have an amazing brand is obviously product has a lot to do with it, but it's how you treat your people. And I think that's one of the things that we really want to focus on today. And also, I know Joel wants to focus on how he can get free food for the rest of the year. Mike Miller: Those are two of our favorite topics guys. And so, no, thanks for having us back. And obviously SFX: Hell yeah. Mike Miller: The times are so different from a few weeks ago, much less a few months ago. But it really is part of our transformation, which is what we call the relocation and the reorg. And it's funny, because the other day I was, Joe and I were talking, I was thinking, "Hey, I think we're kind of post transformation." And in some respects I suppose we are. But here's the deal, is that those lessons that we learn, how can you be flexible? How can you be adaptable? And like you said, "How can you really ensure that you're listening to and caring for your people?" Those have really been the hallmarks of the last couple of weeks. Mike Miller: And watching this team led by an amazing leadership team and everybody in the restaurants and everybody in our support centers has been really, truly, truly humbling. Because we talk about the Chipotle family, but we're seeing it man, we're seeing it every day in action. And for us, this is unprecedented for everybody. We're not going to sit here and be presumptive and say, "We've got this all figured out." That's not a fair statement. But I think what's really fair is to understand that we're caring for our people. And the thing that I was thinking about the other day is, we talk about cultivating a better world and I have a suspicion that we're kind of on the precipice of that being something that will be defined in a way we could have never imagined a couple of years ago. Joe Albano: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that makes me incredibly proud to be a part of Chipotle is, really for the past couple of weeks, couple of months almost, it's every conversation Mike and I have been a part of is, what do we do to take care of our people. And we have an organization of 80,000 plus human beings who rely on working at Chipotle and rely on that paycheck. And every conversation has been, how do we continue to make sure that our employees are safe, our guests are safe, and how are we making sure that our employees during a time of crisis are receiving a paycheck every two weeks. And that has been I think the biggest eye-opener for me. It's not surprising for us to be a part of those conversations. But it's been really inspiring to be a part of this message at Chipotle. Joel: Can you guys sort of paint a picture, what is a current sort of day for a Chipotle worker look like? Are people that go in being replaced with delivery people from DoorDash and Uber Eats like just coming in and out regularly? Sort of, what does that picture look like for those of us that are stuck at home? Joe Albano: Sure. Right now if you're ordering or if you're wanting to eat Chipotle, if you're going into our restaurants, we're offering pickup orders and to go orders and delivery orders. We've shut down all of our dining rooms across the country. In fact, I think we were one of the first major chains to announce that public closing of our dining rooms, even before it was mandated by cities and states across the country. Joel: Good for you. Joe Albano: Thank you. And again, it was because we want to make sure that we're doing our part and keeping our people safe, while also serving safe, delicious, craveable food. We've closed down our dining rooms. And then, since we're opening for to go orders in our restaurants, we've actually marked I guess spots six feet apart for our guests to wait at, if they're in our restaurants picking up food. Again, we are very committed to ensuring we are practicing social distancing. Joe Albano: And then we also have, what a lot of our restaurants are doing is we have a crew member or manager in the front of the restaurant informing guests that we are to go only and our dining rooms are closed. And we actually have our people bringing the to go orders or delivery orders to the front. So eliminating even more people from walking into our restaurant. Mike Miller: One of the things too, Joe, is 2015 we had some challenges and it really gave us an opportunity to build some pretty robust class leading practices from a food safety perspective. When you look at those good habits that we built in addition to the scrappiness that really became embedded in our DNA with our transformation. Again, not saying that we've solved this, I don't think anybody has. But I think that we're really well positioned to continue to be honored by being an essential provider and taking care of our people and people who need a good meal right now. Joe Albano: Absolutely. Joel: What kind of numbers are you guys seeing on the delivery side? And you guys almost have a glimpse into what different regions and cities are sort of preparing for this based on delivery numbers I would assume. What's going on there? Mike Miller: We lead in gratefully, got some really sharp people on the digital side who have been leaning in heavily in building that infrastructure. Joe Albano: Over the past couple of years. Mike Miller: Over the past couple of years. Yeah. Which probably gives us a little bit of an advantage over some of the competitors who are looking to solve this now. Numbers have been really pretty impressive. I was chatting with our CMO, Chris, the other day and Uber Eats was a pretty flawless implementation. And so if you look at the various channels over the ... I don't have the hard numbers, but we're looking at doubling, tripling what we were used to prior to the craziness that we're all in right now. And so, again, I mean, pretty fortunate because I know a lot of our competitors probably can't say that. Joe Albano: And it's really because of our increase in digital business, are we really able to keep our doors open, keep people employed and actually hire more people. Mike Miller: Yeah, we are still hiring. Joe Albano: We are still hiring. And also, we were one of the first SFX: Hell yeah. Joe Albano: We were one of the first national chains to really implement social distancing with interviews. We've been working with our leaders across the country to ensure that we are utilizing digital interviews, whether it's phone interviews, Skype interviews, FaceTime, et cetera. Really creating those best practices and implementing them a few weeks ago. Because we still need to hire people and serve our guests and we're still growing. Mike Miller: We had these planning meetings a couple of weeks back, thinking how do we shift and we have to have these training sessions. And really what's been I guess inspiring from our perspective is that our people know how to shift. They know how to flex and they know how to adjust. And I really think that in all aspects of the business that was an advantage. But it's been really cool to see it because still need people but we want to keep people safe. Chad: Let's jump into what you're actually doing for employees. Because I think that is incredibly important, especially as we see, we saw the unemployment numbers, they're record highs, right? Mike Miller: Oh man. Oh God. Chad: But Chipotle is now offering a 10% increase in hourly pay. First off, having a job is one thing. You were talking about living paycheck to paycheck in some cases. But in this case you're talking about going even further and going after that 10% increase. Tell me how that actually happened. It's an amazing idea. It's awesome. Tell us how that conversation started and how it came to fruition. Was it quick? Did it take a while? Joe Albano: I think I'll kick it off and I'll have Mike close it down. But it was a really quick process and we are very fortunate to have an amazing total rewards team committed to cultivating a better world for the people who work for Chipotle. And when we first started going through this pandemic a couple of weeks ago and we saw the impact it had on the economy and people losing their jobs, the first thought behind the scenes was, I don't think we're going to have to have those same issues at Chipotle. We're growing our delivery business, we're keeping our doors open, we are feeding our communities and we want to take care of the people who are doing that every single day. Joe Albano: Born through this was the 10% increase for our hourly workforce, which is roughly, I would say 95% of our total employees in the field are hourly based. What we did was we implemented the 10% increase for people who worked between March 16th and April 12th. We've given them a 10% increase in compensation. Mike Miller: But Joe, you know this doesn't include you. Joe Albano: It doesn't include me and I am okay with it. But maybe it should. Chad: In this, you also have a paid sick leave starting on the first day of employment. That's fairly standard. What else is happening, again, as a response to be able to manage this crisis and ensure that you're, obviously you're shutting down the restaurant helps the employees to stay away from the public, but it also helps the public to stay away from the public. What else are you guys doing in managing this crisis? Whether it's your employee assistant program, whatever that might be. Mike Miller: I'll touch on something that you were asking earlier, what did that conversation look like? How long did it take? That was a matter of operations leadership, our total rewards team, our people experience team as you guys know what we call human resources coming together in really a couple of days max. Which again doesn't surprise me, but also makes me feel really appreciative. One of the other things that we did was expanded the emergency leave benefits. And so that's really geared towards specifically taking care of those who are directly affected by COVID-19. Chad: Awesome. Mike Miller: And so yeah, it's really cool actually. As part of that, people who are effected would receive, pay this essentially equal to their upcoming two weeks schedule or their average hours worked, whichever is greater between the two. And so for us it's really a matter of ensuring that our people know their family and know that we're never going to make them choose between work and their health, their safety essentially. Chad: Yeah. Well, and that's one of the things that we've seen because the 10% increase is obviously big to be able to help pad what's going on. But also you helping them to understand that you're here for them to keep them safe. You want to keep the customer safe, there's no question, but they are job one. I also like, and this is something that I think you guys have been doing for a while, you offer teams of medical care for $20 a year and it's like 24/7 virtual access with a dollar copay. And I think right now you guys have been doing this for a while. This is I think now going to have to be standard for everybody. And in this type of a COVID crisis, this is perfect. This is exactly what companies need. Mike Miller: We were proud of it but it's, all of a sudden you look at it and you say, "How do we do without this?" It's going to be something that's so critical and such a hallmark of our offerings. And one of the things that we've tried to do too, from an internal employee perspective is make sure that there's one email address, there's one point of contact, there's one number. So essentially wrapping into this concierge service. So you don't have to go fumbling around figuring out if you need help or your family needs help. There's one point of contact. Joe Albano: And I think just to re-emphasize something that Mike just said, it's not only for our employees, you can utilize that benefit for your family as well. And that's the part that I think is incredibly inspiring because we have, we employ a lot of hourly people who maybe they don't come from a family who has insurance or who has benefits that most might have. So being able to be an 18 year old employee of Chipotle and making sure that their family can take advantage of these health concierge benefits as well during a time like this or any time is truly inspiring. Chad: And these are video calls, correct? With medical physicians or PAs or what have you, is that what they are for the most part? Joe Albano: We offer a ... if our employees want to utilize a text-based conversation, a phone call or a video call. Chad: Wow. Joe Albano: All three are available to them and so ... Chad: And good for social distancing. Joe Albano: Especially with social distancing this is huge. And I utilized the service a couple of months ago and it really is as easy as it sounds. I was having a text message based conversation with an actual doctor. It was two in the morning, I wasn't feeling well. She prescribed medication for me and I picked it up at a 24 hour pharmacy about 20 minutes later. She knocked on the door, she hand delivered it herself. Chad: Very funny. Joe Albano: But it truly is a wonderful service. Chad: We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a cult brand is not easy, especially when you're sending candidates into a black hole, which is why you need friends like Roopesh Nair, CEO of SmashFly on your side. Joel: Having someone submit a resume that just goes into the black hole is devastating for candidate experience, doing to close the black hole and ensure everyone has a great experience when applying. Roopesh Nair: We're doing a group of things out there. One is to ensure that the application experience itself is seamless by integrating with ATSs meaningfully and providing the statuses back and forth and ensuring that deliverers of communication are activated every time there's a status coming back and forth from the ATSs. So just kind of providing transparency in the application process by leveraging our candidate relationship management solution. Roopesh Nair: The second aspect is then actually ensuring that we're using our matching algorithm to bubble up people pretty quickly where they are a great fit for that particular role in the company and ensuring that the conversational engagement starts right away and the recruiter is notified while the engagement is going on. It's critical then that ways we are prioritizing those engagements which are needed to the most important applicants right away. And then eventually ensuring that anyone who is not necessarily a good fit at that point, we have continued to engage them. Whether it is the job they applied for or for any other job or for that matter, just general brand awareness and general engagement around what might be a good fit for those guys, and shows that that black hole is minimized. Chad: Let SmashFly help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit smashfly.com. Joe Albano: One of the other benefits that we want to make sure didn't go, isn't forgotten about is, for those utilizing our debt free degrees or our tuition reimbursement programs, were not enforcing the hourly work requirements for this semester. We know that this is a scary time, whether you are impacted directly by COVID-19 or you are afraid to come into work or work as often as you were before. We're not holding that against our people who are utilizing our tuition or our educational benefit. We're waving the hourly work requirements because again, we want our people to focus on staying safe and taking advantage of these amazing benefits. Joel: Hey guys, we're hearing a lot in this trying time about depression and worried about mental health. And not so long ago Starbucks announced that they would be providing mental health benefits as part of their package. Is that something you guys currently do as well or something that maybe you're thinking about with depression and mental health being at the forefront of our daily news cycle? Mike Miller: Yeah. Absolutely. It's something that we currently offer as part of the programs and we're really proud of because there's such a notion that we should work on our physical fitness and sometimes I think historically that's been at the expense of going to talk about our mental fitness. And so actually right around the same time we launched ours as well. And so, again, coverage per incident. I believe we cover six sessions per incident and it's also available to the family as well. Joe Albano: Yeah. And I guess you guys may have forgotten we talked about this on our last podcast, but that's okay. But you guys are dealing with pandemic depression and you just forgot about it, that's okay. But yeah, as Mike said, we introduced our mental health benefits to our entire company. I think it was around October or November of 2019. Anyway it's between six to eight sessions per incident reported. And even after you take advantage of those six to eight free sessions, if you still need someone to talk to or need support, we will recommend local mental health professionals within your area at a discounted rate as well. Mike Miller: And since we last talked to you, we've had so much positive feedback. And we do this because it's the right way. When you look at building a business, you have the what and you have the how, we focus so much certainly in this conversation and with our business on how we care for it, how we take care of our people. And so one of the most rewarding aspects is when we hear back from them about these benefits, which are fairly class leading or we're in a class of a very few at least. It's the right thing, it's very validating, especially now we weren't anticipating the situation when we last talked. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Just so you know, working with Chad means I need mental health all the time. Chad: Like everybody understands that already Joel. Somebody needs to pick up a part time job at Chipotle. Mike Miller: Come on down. Chad: For both of you guys, I mean I would really like to hear some advice to TA leaders because Chipotle, I mean you guys, from a leadership standpoint, you are aggressively going after these issues. I mean, you're looking for problems. You're not just trying to respond, right? I see that these things are happening and you're on the offense as opposed to the defense. Instead of being in the fetal position in the corner, sucking your thumb, like most TA directors and leaders are today. How do you get them into a mindset that is more aggressive and focused on going on the offense, so that you have these wonderful programs and obviously have a brand that will continue to withstand beyond something like COVID-19? Mike Miller: A great question. And I would say that the key aspect is understand how you're collaborating with people cross functionally. We spend more time, I spent most of my career purposely avoiding compensation and benefits. Because I thought, all right, I do the sexy stuff, we bring people in, I get the high fives. I changed it here. So in my relative old [inaudible 00:22:45.05], in my old age, I look at it and say, "Hey look, I know how I think, I want to see which is frightening most of the time. Let me surround myself by people who think differently, who are complimentary." Mike Miller: And then outside of our team we have this awesome team that Joe and I support. Outside the team, we've really forged some partnerships with people who, people in functions that I've never paid attention to before. When we reference marketing and Chris and his team and we reference total rewards with Scott and his team, and the level of partnerships that we have, it's because we're going out there wanting to learn to see how it informs what it is that we do. It's getting outside of the mindset of operations. Mike Miller: Now, the way I look at recruiting operations is you have to have that nailed down and you have to effectively be able to do full life cycle recruiting and be responsive in order to kind of get that speed pass so that you can go play in what I think is such an impactful space, which is that no talent brand integration and forming that narrative. And you can't do that in a silo. You have to understand what it is that we're offering. So for years, a great example of this is, Joe you should chat about how strongly you felt about advocating for our benefits in the restaurants and how the last 18 months we've seen that come to light because of those relationships. Joe Albano: Absolutely. I have been with Chipotle for a little over six years and I was always the person raising my hand saying, "We need to market our benefits." While people who work for Chipotle understand what our benefits are and how class leading they are, the general public doesn't know and we just didn't have the relationships with the right people at the right time. And the biggest part of this transition transformation is we have such an amazing company filled with people who just want to do the right thing. And I think when I look, whether it's COVID-19 or just a typical time in our life at Chipotle, we have the right people who want to do the right thing and work with each other to help cultivate a better world. Joel: In light of that, guys, I want you to bring out the crystal ball a little bit. I want you to try the best you can to look in the crystal ball in the future. What is recruiting for you guys look like say a year from now? Will video interviewing continue to be a thing. Are you looking at more sort of automation tools to keep people out of the restaurant and providing applications that way like chatbots or other tools. Are you looking for a different skill set going forward in light of this tragedy? Are you going to be looking for drivers, you guys launching your own sort of delivery service? Tell us what the future looks like. Mike Miller: Sure. I would say that pretty ... you don't need a crystal ball for this one. But if you look at our business and look at the increase in digital, look at our loyalty program, look at delivery given what we're in the midst of, I would see us continue to lean in pretty heavily in those areas. Joe, with respect to the technology and automation. What are your thoughts for the field? Joe Albano: I think when I looked from a field perspective, I think there's definitely an opportunity to leverage technology to make the interview process easier for our general managers who are running a $2.5 million a year business. There have already been conversations of how do we leverage AI to better select candidates for our restaurants to talk to. But at the end of the day, I think when this pandemic is over, I really see us still being a people focused business, leveraging technology to make the interview process easier and simpler. But again, we are a people focused food business. Mike Miller: And so we've been hesitant. We spend a lot of time really thinking about how we can implement and utilize technology without removing that personal touch and that human connection. And so we will continue to, because now we're really at the precipice of having to solve for a very different situation. So will we continue, will we look to technology? Will we integrate? Certainly. Do we want to have so many filters in place that it's all [inaudible 00:27:20.18], probably not. We'll take a look at how we can balance that. Joe Albano: Yeah. I think I envisioned us utilizing technology to make the life of our crew members and managers easier in the restaurant. Whether it's how we prep, how we cook, how we serve our food. I don't see us leveraging technology to reduce the amount of people we have working for Chipotle. Chad: Excellent guys. This is the reason why we have you on because we can talk about future as opposed to playing in offense as opposed to playing that defense. That's Mike Miller and Joel Albano from Chipotle. Hey guys, where can our listeners connect with you? Jump on LinkedIn, Facebook. Where are you mostly socially at? Joe Albano: You can find Mike on the Craigslist personals. Mike Miller: I just had a birthday, which reminded me that for the last decade I've been all about social distancing. Joel: Nice. Joe Albano: But a more serious answer. You can connect with myself, Joseph Albano, I am on LinkedIn. I'm pretty sure it's just linkedin.com/josephalbano. Mike Miller: And you can always find us on Instagram. Joe Albano: We're Instagram girls, we're LinkedIn bros, we do it all. Chad: Excellent. Thanks so much guys. Joel: We appreciate you. Joe Albano: Thank you. Have a good day. Mike Miller: Stay safe guys. Joel: We out. SFX: Oh my God, I Love Chipotle. Chipotle is my life. Announcer: This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #crisis #EmploymentBrand #jobs #EmployerBrand #CultBrandSeries #CultBrands #Branding #Marketing

Did someone order a weekly podcast with extra Slack? This week, the boys dive headfirst into... Salesforce acquires Slack - what does that mean for the likes of LinkedIn / Microsoft, Stock options for gig workers, Talkpush & Vervoe are gettin' cozy, Hiring in the wine industry going all tech, and Monster has come a long way since Super Bowl ads, not in a good way. As always, your favorite podcast is sponsored by Jobvite, JobAdx, and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. INTRO (1s): 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, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (21s): Oh shit. No, we are not getting a pardon from the president so that damned underage drinking conviction will stand forever. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, boys and girls. I'm your cohost Joel "already in line for the vaccine" Cheesman. Chad (38s): Yeah. I'm Chad "flying to the UK so I can get it first" Sowash. Joel (42s): And on this week's show, Salesforce throws a haymaker at Microsoft, giggers gone be a rich bitch, and you want some cheese with those wine jobs. Everyone needs more cheese in their diet, Chad, which is why only podcast with a side of cheese whiz. Sovren (59s): 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 Sovren 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, one shot deal" like all the others. No, 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. Chad (1m 58s): We actually had a curve ball thrown at us from a Colin over at Crelate. We thought that we both received the same whiskey. We didn't. Joel (2m 8s): Oh no, no. He mixed it up on us. Chad (2m 11s): He mixed it up. Joel (2m 12s): Now yours was from the Northwest too, right? Chad (2m 15s): Yeah. Well, I got the Sherrywood Westland, which when you said it was biscotti and earthy, then I tried mine. I'm like, what does that motherfucker drink it? Cause this is not biscotti and/or earthy at all. So now, now I know. Thanks Colin! Joel (2m 33s): So what, what was, what was the profile of yours? Did it smell like angst and Nirvana? Chad (2m 38s): I wish. No, it, it was, it actually tasted like a very immature scotch before it got that peated shit. Right. And you know, one of the reasons why I don't like scotch is because of that peat ground taste. I don't like that. And this in this was absent of that. So it was very immature. So it was, it was actually pretty good. Joel (3m 2s): Alright. Alright. Shout outs. Chad (3m 5s): Okay. So rest in peace to Tony Shay, the Zappos CEO, he died at 46 and I'm like, dude, what did this dude die of? Well, he was in Connecticut and he died from his injuries that he sustained during a house fire. Joel (3m 22s): Yeah. Chad (3m 23s): You don't hear that often anymore. It must've been a big fucking house. Joel (3m 28s): No, that's pretty fucked up. You know, his legacy is pretty awesome. I actually toured the Zappos headquarters I dunno, 10, some years ago before, before Amazon acquired them. And you talk about like culture. These folks bled Zappos, and I mean, from the cubicles, it was sort of like the ideal nineties dream of what a workplace look like. Yeah. They gave tours of this place and the people really believed in what they were doing. I mean, Amazon came in and kind of fucked it up and they're not quite what they used to be. But Tony then took his, took his fortune and looked to rebuild Las Vegas, the downtown area, which has been revitalized, so, you know, I never met the guy, but everyone that knew him spoke really highly of him. Joel (4m 21s): So to be 46, at that age, and to be that sort of generous and visionary, we've really lost someone special. And yeah, you don't hear about house fire deaths very often. That's really a shame. Chad (4m 35s): Not at all. And, and you talk about somebody who's passionate about what they do. We actually just interviewed Tony, the Sherwin Williams guy who got fired for his big Tik Tok, believe that, 1.5 million followers. So we've got that interview coming up and it was, it was a great conversation. I'm really happy that he had his choice, to be quite Frank of where he could go in the paint industry. Joel (5m 5s): This TikTok is way bigger than mine. Not that that's saying a whole lot. Shout out to, to England, England. Thanks for, thanks for being the Guinea pigs for the vaccine. I guess we're gonna find out if this, this ends up in mass extinction first with the kids on the Island there in the Atlantic. So England, this is to you man. Take that shot and let us know how it goes. Yeah. Chad (5m 28s): Do you have anything to declare? Yeah, don't go to fucking England. So we've got a shout out to Tom Brown, he's the director of talent acquisition for VM ware in Singapore. Thanks for listening, Tom and recommending the show throughout all of your zoom journeys in Asia. Hopefully this time next year, we will be back at events and sharing the Chad and Cheese face to face. Joel (5m 56s): Speaking of Singapore Chad, you know, who's huge in Singapore? Chad (5m 60s): Is that a trick question? Joel (6m 1s): It's not citizen Dick from the movie Singles. It is Monster. Chad (6m 7s): What? Joel (6m 7s): So a kin to the Dice press release about how awesome instant messaging was gonna was going to innovate your ass off. Monster had a press release this week about how huge they were in Singapore and that they were the number one job destination for, I believe roughly America's 20th largest trading partner. So Monster well on the way back, keep releasing those press releases, eventually you and Dice will convince all of us that you guys mean anything in the industry anymore. Chad (6m 44s): Lucky bastards, a shout out to LinkedIn for not policing its platform, again. At first we're talking about catfishing, then we're getting just nailed, left and right with a connections from salespeople, and then right after that, you get messaging. Now it's financial advisors. So I mean, we're getting an onslaught. I did a post on LinkedIn asking if everybody else was getting bombarded, like I was and the post blew up and people are apparently pissed. And, and this is because LinkedIn, somehow, I don't know how, but somehow they're tapping into maybe the sales leads or something. Chad (7m 26s): And next thing you know, we, the users get bombarded with shit. Joel (7m 30s): Yeah. So these are, these are automated tools. Now they are shotgun to the extreme, right? Like if you're going to connect with someone at least get in the contextual like universe of what you do to get financial people or just random marketing folks, or just because they're in the local area, they want to connect with me is not really targeted. And there should be some sort of algorithm where, Hey, if I send out a thousand, you know, req or connection request, and none of them get fulfilled that may be maybe something is going on and we should maybe put them in linked LinkedIn police for awhile, which isn't happening apparently. Joel (8m 14s): Yeah. Chad (8m 14s): Yes. The police, LinkedIn police. Joel (8m 18s): Big government, big LinkedIn, shout out to Mason Wong, big fan of the podcast. Big fan of everything that we do. We interviewed him a year or so ago. Around this time he turned 50 this week. I think so, man, you old son of a bitch. Keep on listening and shout out to you. Mason Wong. Chad (8m 39s): The big five 0 (50) Joel (8m 41s): The big five oh. We're Oh, we're knocking on the door. My friend, Chad (8m 44s): If you want to listen again. Mason Wong, incredibly smart, dude. Over at Lyft, just search on the new Chad and Cheese website for you've Wonged. That's his interview. Shout out to totalent.eu and Jasper Spanjaart for picking up what I was putting down in our last week's episode called Adecco Ménage à trois podcast. He quoting my stance on AI and automation in the article, which was titled AI under scrutiny, new law bill serves as quote "a call to all algorithms" Chad (9m 28s): end quote. So yeah, they were listening to pretty closely when we're talking about Hirevue and how they're fucking it up for everybody. Joel (9m 36s): Yeah. Nice shout out to Dr. Christine Zapata, going back to the Northwest. So a Dr. Zapata every Friday, they're in the Seattle area will go to a local business and leave a hundred dollars to credit the customers that come in after her to buy them their coffee sandwich, whatever. And I thought this was a really cool thing to shout out that people are doing little things to give back, to pay it forward, to do, to just be nice in 2020, because we're all in this shit show. And if you can give back, please do so. Chad (10m 12s): Amen. Amen. Shout out to your favorite Joel, Steven Rothberg. He shared a new way to market the Chad and Cheese in your pocket. He, he actually used Borats Rudy Giuliani scene, where he had his hands down, his pants. Yeah, classy, Steven, really classy. Joel (10m 31s): By the way, speaking of in your pocket, this is an opportune time to let the listeners know they gonna have Chad and Cheese in their pocket. All they need to do is text the letter, C and C to (833) 799-0321. That's Chad and Cheese in your pocket text CC to (833) 799-0321. Sorry. My dyslexia came through there, for a second. Shout out to Elon Musk. Your buddy who recently passed Bill Gates as the number two richest son of a bitch on the planet. So Elan baby, you crazy son of a gun, keep making that money, baby. Chad (11m 12s): Nothing like overpriced stock, right? Joel (11m 16s): He's coming for Bezos, baby. He's coming. He's coming for you. Chad (11m 20s): Big props to Gareth Peterson and David Roddy over at Caroo for creating the comma recruiter, a video series of positions that are designed to teach you how to be an attentive, sensual and giving recruiter. Joel (11m 40s): Yeah. I want you to try to visualize this for listeners. Chad (11m 43s): Oh my God. It's fucking hilarious. So think of it like seventies porn with the Kama Sutra as they wear latex, it was fucking hilarious as it was not something that you should show during any, you know, like all hands meeting or anything like that, but it was incredibly smart and funny. Great job guys over at Caroo. Joel (12m 7s): And that's Caroo.co.uk. If you want to check out these videos. So I needed to take about an hour long shower after I watched the video. And then I looked at some of the other videos. So they do a really creative job of a video. So there's one where Adidas is apparently a client and they go to the Adidas office and someone is actually working out with an Adidas rep for a video. And it's funny, right? Like he bench presses two pounds. He's on a treadmill looking at the cafeteria saying when's lunch? And so these guys are pretty funny and they, they utilize that in a really cool way. So for small companies that are trying to break through and get, get brand recognition, like you could do worse than what these idiots are doing with a video camera. Chad (12m 53s): Exactly, exactly. Joel (12m 55s): Shout out to Katrina Collier. Chad (12m 60s): Oh, yeah. Joel (12m 60s): Your buddy in the UK, who is, is this official now? Chad (13m 4s): Yeah, it's official. Joel (13m 4s): She's officially the first buyer of Chad and Cheese swag. She picked up a female cut t-shirt in blue. I believe Chad (13m 15s): Yeah, the powder blue. Joel (13m 16s): So Katrina. Thanks. Thanks for being our first and hopefully not only customer. And if you want to get more stuff, Chad, where should they go? Chad (13m 23s): They should go to chadcheese.com up in the upper right hand corner just click on swag. Perfect, perfect place for holiday gifts. I mean, if you're looking at, I don't know, a Chad and Cheese trucker hat, maybe a beanie, coffee mugs. T-shirts, there's more coming. There's more coming. Joel (13m 43s): We're lobbying for that Speedo kids. I'm hoping to have it by, by summer, by summer. So this is probably a good time to, to drop all the free stuff. Things they can get from us on the show here, I'll start here with beerdrop, shout out to Beau Higgins. Beau is our November winner. Beau is a TA guy over at Amazon and he's got beer on the way. He went to beerdrop.net, filled out the form. And that was it. And beer is on the way. So if you want your chance to get free beer and have a little zoom tasting with yours truly, head on out to beerdrop.net today. Chad (14m 24s): That's exactly right. And kids, you've got to remember the Chad and Cheese love yet. You've been taking care of us, listening, sharing with your friends, doing all those crazy things, wearing latex. I mean that stuff we like to give things away. Like t-shirts go to chadcheese.com click on free register for the t-shirts or maybe, I don't know, a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle. Joel (14m 48s): Get outta here. What are you talking about now? Chad (14m 51s): We've got two of them, two bottles, they retail for $2,200 a piece, if you can get your hands on them. And we did two bottles of Pappy Van Winkle and a bottle of Red Label Blanton's we're talking about the Japanese edition. Are we not? Yeah. Joel (15m 11s): Yep, we are. Yeah, we are. And let's mention the sponsors that make all of this shit happen. Go out to Chadcheese.com/free for a chance to win a t-shirt sponsored by our friends at Emissary. Free Pappy, of course, our buddies at Sovren, our bankroll on that whole thing. That's fantastic. And then our buddies at AdZuna are supporting a beerdrop and they are all working hard to destroy our livers. So thank you to our sponsors. We'll send the medical bills to you as well. Chad (15m 42s): Topics! Joel (15m 43s): Topics! Big News! Chad (15m 46s): Didn't see this coming did ya? Joel (15m 47s): Big news. Yeah, we did see this one coming. We've talked about it for awhile. Chad (15m 52s): Yeah. So Salesforce acquires Slack. If you thought that 26.2 billion that Microsoft dropped for LinkedIn was a big number. How do you like 27.7 billion that Salesforce just dropped for Slack? Joel (16m 9s): Hello, Hello. Chad (16m 10s): It's roughly 10% of Salesforce is valuation. The news on this has sort of been covered. The real sort of criticism is, or the conversation is what happens now. Wall Street hated this deal, there were like seven analysts that came out the day of and said, we kind of don't like this deal. Joel (16m 32s): They got teams from Microsoft breathing down their neck. I think it's pretty obvious. This was, you know, this was a strike at Microsoft, by Salesforce who wants a piece of that enterprise pie. But what are your sort of initial thoughts on this and what it could look like and was it worth it? Are you buyer or seller of this deal. What's going on? Chad (16m 52s): Are a million different ways this thing could go and that's, and that's the hard part, right? The integration, the user process flow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I wonder what their shared user base is? did you see that at all? Cause when I was doing research, I didn't see it. Joel (17m 9s): Yeah. So there was some comparison in that Slack tends to skew much smaller in company size and, and Salesforce tends to skew bigger. Now there was some criticism from analysts saying that there was a lot of customer overlap. Oh, I want to say that Slack has like 85 customers that are paying a million dollars or so, which is the big enterprise folks. So if, you know, if Slack could put a zero on that eight, eight 85 to make it 850, then it sort of starts to make sense. So I don't think there was a ton of overlap, but there certainly would have been some. Chad (17m 44s): Yeah. And any analyst who think that providing know a much larger of feature rich platform with, with huge marketplaces and with the overlap is a dumb idea is a fucking idiot because retention is key. And if you have a platform like Slack, that's out there and it goes to maybe a Google or something like that, who knows what they would do with it. They know who they want to compete against. And again, I, you know, I, I do think it's Microsoft, but overall we have to think of this from the standpoint of what's going to drive revenue, how did Salesforce start? Chad (18m 27s): It started as a company that sold software for sales teams. I mean, that's what it was. And then marketing followed. And then everybody followed after that. So what they needed to do, what they needed to do, Salesforce is they needed to innovate and make the process easier and flow better for sales and the rest of the ecosystem. And I think if they can use, I try to try to attribute this kind of like back and forth between what we're, what we're trying to do with our applicant tracking systems and chatbots, and then trying to do the same type of a thing with Slack. Is Salesforce is shitty when it comes to collaboration, right? Chad (19m 8s): They really need a tool to help some form of collaboration. Well, if I'm in sales and I have a steady stream or flow of consciousness that works in Slack, but it, it updates all my account information into Salesforce, right. It all pulls out of that database. Then that's a flow that, you know, I think is worthwhile and more innovative than just point in clicking into fucking Salesforce. Right? Yep. So I just, I think there's some great opportunities here. The big question is, and this is always the question with tech companies, how do they integrate it? What's the process going to be and are the base users really going to be a part of this? Chad (19m 51s): Because if they're not, they could, they could fuck this up in a heartbeat. Joel (19m 54s): Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, I hope that they take a lesson from, you know, Facebook leaving Instagram alone, Google leaving YouTube alone. Cause I think if they start just putting it into, you know, Slack by Salesforce or something, that it becomes a Salesforce feature that it'll just sort of fall fade away into the ether with a lot of the other acquisitions that we've talked about on the show. What I would really like to see and what I think, you know, becomes a challenge with messaging is the different platforms only prosper based on people using them in the enterprise system. Right? so Slack is sort of weird in that if I change companies, I have to do a different Slack to join that if I want to bring in like third parties or maybe legal counsel into a Slack room, it's just sorta clunky. Joel (20m 48s): What I'd love to see is something where, you know, I have a Slack that's portable to anywhere that I could just plug it in wherever I go. So, you know, maybe it's a profile thing, like, you know, slack.com/in/joelCheesman or something. And anyone can opt to connect with me there. I can plug in that account to any other Slack communities. And then if you can pull that off, then I think you have something that's competitive with a LinkedIn, something that, on the enterprise level people will take with them as they leave jobs. So if I'm at a startup using Slack, I can take my Slack account and go somewhere else. To me, that becomes interesting because then it becomes something of a utility in terms of how I communicate with other people, because messaging right now is so disparate, right? Joel (21m 37s): Like if, if you and I get a message from, you know, Jonathan Duarte, it, he messages both of us through Facebook or I get, I get a DM on LinkedIn or a Twitter. And then that's where to that. So I have all these little disparate systems. It'd be nice if someone could consolidate messaging with something that everyone could take with them. If the mere purchase of, of Slack is to put Slack into Salesforce, I think it'll fail because we've already seen, they already have chatter. They already have sort of a messaging solution that plugs into Salesforce. Yeah, it is total shit. And I hope that they'll take some from Slack to plug into chatter and maybe chatter will be Slack. Joel (22m 17s): I don't know, to me, that sort of conversation to me, the bigger prize is if you can, if people's personal Slack is what they use to communicate instead of email, if you can displace, Hey, here's my Gmail email address versus, Hey, here's my Slack profile. I think you've won. If you can, if you can have more people do that instead of share email addresses. Chad (22m 40s): It has to come down to the company actually adopting, you know, getting away from email a hundred percent. I think we see more tech organizations doing that than anything else. Yeah. It's really sad. Cause you've seen it. Joel (22m 52s): You've seen so many work from home companies really just blow up in this last six month, 10 month period with, you know, zoom and others and Slack really hasn't shared in that growth. So to me, it's sort of a bummer if you're an investor in Slack thinking that in this time that they should have been blowing up, that they ended up selling, it's kind of a bummer in that way. It would have been nice to see them blow up too and become a, you know, a huge, huge business. Chad (23m 20s): Yeah. And to think that this and Flicker, we're both Stewart Butterfield side hustles. I mean, neither one of these platforms that he sold were his main hustle. And so it is interesting side hustles are sometimes much better and smarter than the main hustle, whether you know it or not. Joel (23m 41s): Yeah. I mean, Flicker became kind of a commodity, right? Pictures became not such a deal and you put them on your social media and messaging is kind of going the same way. It's just kind of this feature that you have on, on sites that you use and you need to, you need to have something that'll, that'll cross borders, so to speak and become a unified messaging platform. And I think Slack could be that. Time will tell, time will tell. Time will also tell if, if your opinion of gig workers will finally change. I don't know if this little news item will or not, but us sacred securities regulator on Tuesday of last week proposed a pilot program to allow tech companies like Uber and Lyft to pay gig workers up to 15% of their annual compensation in equity, rather than cash. Joel (24m 29s): A move it said was designed to reflect changes in the workforce. Are you pro or con giggers getting equity. Chad (24m 37s): Okay. So this is, this is interesting because... Joel (24m 42s): You're struggling with this one. I can tell. Chad (24m 44s): No. Yeah, it's it just oh God. So the proposal would not require an increase in pay. We've got, we've got it. We've got to put that out there first. The proposal would not require an increase in pay, just flexibility on whether to pay using cash or equity. And let's make this very fucking clear people. 90%, about. 90% of the stock is owned by the top 10%. Why is that? Because they have the cash to spend. These people don't have the cash to forsake to put toward equity. Okay. So to be able to think that this is even an option is total absurdity, okay? Chad (25m 30s): This is a misdirection by corporate gig. America look, look, we're offering equity. No, what you're offering is something your giggers cannot afford to buy into. This, once again is nothing but bullshit. It's smoke and mirrors. And it's a what the actual fuck moment, to think that Americans are this stupid. And some of us are, don't get it. Don't get me wrong, but this is not something that they can actually partake in because they need that actual hard cash. Joel (26m 1s): So, wow. You really hate it. So I don't, I don't hate it misdirected maybe. And I think that companies will abuse the shit out of it. I mean, you'll see, although it's only up to 15%, so there is at least that element of protection. So you could totally see startups come out and go like, Oh, you can get a hundred percent of stock. And instead of us paying you and people would do it and then they'd go out of business and not have to pay you anything because it was all in options. So at least there is some security there. And I do at least like that, the FCC is opening itself up from like currently or in the old days, it was like, you could only invest if you were a certified money person, right? Joel (26m 44s): Like you had to be licensed and all this stuff. I think if people, whether it's, if I want to, if I want to give some money to, you know, a startup, like you gave money to a Candidate ID, right? Like you should be able to do that. You shouldn't have to be a certified, you know, Wall Street. Chad (27m 3s): I'm not driving my car. I'm not driving my car for ... Joel (27m 6s): The point is that I, that I like, I like the loosening up of regulations around how shares in a company are being able to be acquired. And to me, like, I'm totally fine. If, I'm a 22 year old, you know, no kids not, you know, no real expenses in my life. And I'm an Uber driver and Hey, I want to put 15% of my stuff and Uber stock. And then 10 years later, Uber blows up and I get a little bit richer and maybe a lot richer in some cases like I don't have a problem with that. And it's voluntary based on the gigger. I think ultimately you have to have healthcare for these people though. That, to me, that's the big thing. Joel (27m 48s): That's like the real negative in terms of the gig economy is these people don't get unemployment insurance. They don't get healthcare, they don't get any of that stuff. But if they, if they want to participate in the free market and, and have stock options in these companies that a lot of them think are going to be huge one day and they might get rich from, I have no problem with that. Chad (28m 12s): That's the misdirection in itself, because we're not talking about what we should be talking about, which is healthcare, which is paying into the UI system, right? Which Uber doesn't do, which these, these gig platforms don't do. So what they're doing is they're saying, Hey, we're going to offer you this, which is pretty much 99.9% of the individuals will not choose equity over the actual cash. So it is a total bullshit misdirection when we should be talking about things that matter. And healthcare matters and having unemployment matters! And that being said, let me also pimp out this week, we had a Suresh Naido on our podcast where we talk about the skills gap, lie, sharpen your pencils, or clean off your iPad or whatever it is, whatever it takes to, to make sure that you can take notes. Chad (29m 4s): Because this dude is a, an economics professor at Columbia knows his shit and it's, and it's good stuff. And we're really happy to be able to bring that kind of brain power to the podcast. Joel (29m 16s): I wonder what he thinks about this? hey, if part of my pursuit of happiness is rolling the dice with Uber, who are you to say, I'm wrong? Who are you to say, I'm wrong? Chad (29m 25s): Sucker! JobAdX (29m 26s): Your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit? JobAdX (30m 7s): JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Joel (30m 29s): Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Chad (30m 49s): We don't, we don't, we don't have a song for Vervoe. So sorry about that Omar Joel (30m 54s): Verve pipe when we were freshmen, whatever that song was. Anyway, couple of fans of the show a bit like our boys here, partner. Chad (31m 2s): That's right. That's right. Omer Molad Vervoe was our very first firing squad here on Chad and Cheese and Max. Joel (31m 11s): And we did not offer stock options. Chad (31m 13s): We did not. And Talk Push was on stage at TA tech in New Orleans as a contestant of our very first Death Match. So a couple of organizations, very first. Joel (31m 26s): A couple of top notch guys. Chad (31m 29s): They have a special place in our heart and I think I'm starting to tear up right now, but we, we heard that there was a kind of like some matchmaking happen here that there were partnering. Joel (31m 40s): Yep. So they're partnering up. Of course we know talk pushes the automation, everything messaging platform and Vervoe is the video pre-screening solution. So here's how it works. I feel like we're on a game show. Candidates can apply through their preferred channel, be it Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, job boards, company's career site, et cetera. Once they complete their pre-screening, they automatically receive a link to the position specific Vervoe assessment. Once the assessment is complete, Vervoe automatically adds the score to the candidate profile inside of Talk Push so that recruiters can easily see it, share it and make the right decision. Joel (32m 21s): Pretty cool. I say, okay. Chad (32m 22s): Yeah, no, it's cool. And, and one thing as a startup you've got to understand is that you cannot build everything, especially again, when you're a startup, even when you're a big organization, like a iCIMS you buy shit, right? You partner, you have a marketplace, you buy shit. So this is this very smart and partnership is a big key to help cover gaps, expand your offerings at a lower cost. And also the big key, open your product up to more customers. Joel (32m 51s): Yeah. You and I are big fans of distribution and I mean Talk Push's API, which let's agree. What Talk Push does is not super easy, right? Like to build platforms on all these are to build solutions on all these platforms is not an easy thing. And AI and the API Talk Push is, is super robust and makes it super easy for people to build on top of it. What I'm really interested in though on this partnership is you might remember Seek the top job site in Australia. And I think most of Asia there in that corner invested 2 million-ish dollars. I don't know if that's Australian dollars or us, but they invested a good amount of money in Vervoe, not too long ago. Joel (33m 33s): I'd love to see them back up the Brinks truck and bring both of these solutions into the Seek platform and really, really launched this thing in a big way. So we'll see, we'll see what that happens. Chad (33m 45s): That's the next big point is that when you can put together solutions like this partner like this with two, I mean really high powered solutions, the opportunity for a roll-up per se obviously is there now, right? So again, this is a very smart move from both Max, Omar, and team. Joel (34m 8s): Yeah. Talk about striking, you know, when the time is right, you know, these guys Talk Push and Vervoe there, their businesses were almost made for a pandemic, right? Like the automation piece, the video piece, I mean, this is the future of recruiting. Thanks, thanks to COVID it's coming a lot quicker than it than it would have otherwise. So we're, we're happy for both these guys and take out that checkbook Seek take out that checkbook. We need more shit to talk about on the show. Chad (34m 37s): Yeah. Joel (34m 38s): Little guys do cool. Shit. It's good. So, you know, Chad, sometimes it's the, it's the sites you don't expect news about recruitment that are some of the most enlightening about recruitment. So I don't know how I ended up on, I don't know how I ended up on winebusiness.com this week, but they had a story called winery hiring in a virtual world, that was really telling in terms of a microcosm of the wine industry, of where sort of recruitment is going as a whole. So some of the things that they talked about as highlights video recruiting of course was hot. They talked about preemployment assessment, software Harver, Hirevuew, or a couple of the companies that were highlighted there. Joel (35m 27s): You know what some of the quotes from the story from recruiters, one was Gallo. One of the recruiters said, quote, "acknowledged remote positions enabled her to recruit from a wider, more diverse pool. So diversity is a big key here." Both recruiters said that they have less than their reliance on recruiters preferring instead to keep talent acquisitions in-house to better ensure all hires. This was aside from very technical people like an IT, et cetera. And they all, they all did this, had to conduct a strategy of job marketing rather than just the old strategy of post and pray. So basically the story highlighted how these folks are, are really ingrained in strategy. Joel (36m 7s): How do we leverage new technologies and get away from the post and prey of the old job board system. Wine jobs.com a site that I've never been on, but I'm guessing it's jobs in the wine industry. Chad (36m 20s): It redirects. Joel (36m 21s): Oh, does it? So this was in April, this is really telling in terms of COVID postings fell 71% in April, and that was followed by another 53% drop in May. Now this is the wine industry. So it's a little bit different than all other industries, but that's a crazy drop, like job boards in pain. If you're seeing 71% and 53% drops, month over month. Yeah. Chad (36m 46s): Yeah. Now here's the thing. I mean, I could be wrong, but the wine industry and hiring doesn't seem like it's progressed far in the last 20 years. So this, this movement seems like it's Lightspeed to them, but it's just normal snail's pace for the rest of us. But without COVID, to be quite Frank without COVID, none of this obviously would have happened. So it's interesting because it is impacting every single aspect, slow movers, fast movers, in the middle. And again, the winejobs.com, which redirects to like winebusiness.com/jobs or some shit like that, it looks like it's straight out of the nineties. Chad (37m 31s): So it's it's interesting. Joel (37m 33s): Yeah. You got to think if this innovation and this progress is happening in the wine industry, imagine what it's doing in every other industry. So this shit is happening fast and all the tech and stuff we talk about is definitely taking hold. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll talk about Monster, which I think we kind of began the show with. So it's a little bit of a Monster bookend. Jobvite (37m 55s): Recruiter Nation Live (RNL) 2020 presented by Jobvite is coming up on December 10th. Join us in imagining a future of talent acquisition that is built for candidates and recruiters alike. With two keynotes, featuring JobVite CEO, Aman Brar, along with the creator of FUBU and star of Shark Tank, Daymond John you'll leave RNL '20 inspired. Throughout the half day event there'll be opportunities to network with your peers, create round table discussions and even win prizes! Head to jobvite.com/RNL to register today. RNL 20 inspired throughout the half day event. There'll be opportunities to network with your peers, create round table discussions. And even when prices head to jobvite.com/RNL to register today. Joel (38m 30s): Chad, you know, I love a good deal. Right. You know, I love a good, good deal on some egg slippers. Chad (38m 36s): So can I get a job posting with that? That, that, the egg slippers? Joel (38m 41s): Yeah. Yeah. So, so Thanksgiving is prime time for deals. I'm, I'm a member of Rakuten. I believe I said that, right? They have a new ad campaign that uses Elton John's rocket man as the sign for lack of Dan Dan. And so it used to be Ebates. So I've been a member for a long time, but anyway, most of the emails I get are about, you know, a deal at a Lowe's or a deal at a JC Penny, you know, a regular consumer type business, right? So this past week I get an email and it's get an extra 10% if you buy a job posting on Monster. Okay. Joel (39m 20s): So I just thought that was pretty funny that they're huge in Singapore, which has nothing to do with the Rakuten deal at an extra 10%, as opposed to the regular 7%. But why the fuck would Monster be on a typically consumer-based site where you get 10% off, you know, a pair of shoes from Crocs? Are any, is anybody really posting jobs from surfing Rakuten? It blew me away. It was worth noting for its stupidity. Chad (39m 54s): This is the official, let's call this the official Monsters out of business moment. Joel (40m 2s): Is this rock bottom, man? I don't know if it's rock bottom or jumping the shark, but it's gotta be one of those two, like who, who in marketing thought? Hmm. You know, I just bought that, that sweater from J Crew on Rakuten, I wonder if we could put job posting purchases on Rakuten? and that sounds like a great idea. Chad (40m 24s): I wonder if Ron Stott is like selling services on Rakuten as well, discounted like staffing placements or something? Joel (40m 32s): So I did, I did check for other, cause I want to know if like Careerbuilder was on this and like maybe it was a theme. They all got together and got a, got a specialty list. So the only other one is some, no name like resume helper thing that you get a percentage off if you, if you buy resume helps. So Monster is the only job site that is dumb enough to put themselves on a consumer based, rebates site. Congratulations, Monster. Chad (40m 58s): Good job, go ahead and cover that thing up with dirt because it's dead. Joel (41m 4s): Rakuten burning. We out. Chad (41m 8s): We out. OUTRO (41m 9s): I'm Ruaridh from Scotland, the country, which brought you electricity! 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. Nada, niente, anyhoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Question: When does paint in a can become lightening in a bottle? Answer: At 1 million+ TikTok subscribers We recently talked about Tony Piloseno, a former Sherwin-Williams employee and TikTok superstar who was recently fired from Sherwin-Williams for posting videos about his passion, paint. It didn't matter that Tony had a million and a half followers or had videos with a million views; what was important was the integrity of the brand, blah, blah, blah. Listen to Tony's story and why companies need to wise-up to the fact that empowering employees on social media might actually be a good thing. Powered by Symphony Talent, where your company can find their inner Cult Brand. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. 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 (23s): Oh yeah, we got paint boy on the show today. What's up everybody. This is Joel Cheesman of the Chad and Cheese podcast always joined by my Tonto, Chad Sowash. Chad (37s): Proudly. Joel (37s): Chad, how are you, man? We got a follow up to one of our weekly stories. I can't wait to get into this one now. Chad (44s): He's he's paint, dude. He's not paint boy, because he's in college. He's a senior. Joel (49s): He's a content creator. Chad (51s): Here's a little bit of an intro from Buzzfeed. Okay. So an Ohio University, senior who worked a part-time job at a local Sherwin-Williams store was fired after the company discovered he was mixing paint on a Tik Tok channel where it's At @tonesterpaints, which currently has 1.5 million followers. So that's, that's kind of like the backstory. We talked about that on the weekly show. Let's go ahead and bring it's Tony Piloseno. Tony, how you doing bud? Joel (1m 25s): Hello, Tony Piloseno. Tony (1m 28s): I'm in Ohio. Where are you guys? Joel (1m 30s): Are you in Ohio network? Tony (1m 31s): Yeah, I'm going to Athens, Ohio right now. I'm still at school for the next couple of weeks. Joel (1m 36s): Beautiful, beautiful school, big, big party school. Tony (1m 40s): Yes sir! Joel (1m 42s): It's home of Roger Ales, which is always nice to talk about. Chad (1m 46s): Known for its painting apparently. So, so Tony give us some, give us some, some backstory on this. I mean, we, we hear what's, you know, the Buzzfeed story, so on and so forth, you go in to work and then somebody gives you a call and you're like, what the fuck's going on here? Joel (2m 2s): Were you always a painter dude or was Sherwin-Williams like just, it was a job. Tony (2m 7s): Well, yeah, I mean, when I first started at Sherman Williams, about three years ago, I didn't know shit about paint. I and I fell in love with the job immediately, man. I mean, I love the industry. Loved helping people with their projects, picking out colors, the process. It was all good. My whole career path was going to lead down through Sherman Williams corporate chain doing all that. But last year, last December, I had downloaded TikTok and I saw that other people at paint stores were doing these paint videos, just the process of a mixing gallon paint. And it fell into like the oddly satisfying category. Joel (2m 39s): So was this like, Oh, I don't know. Lowes, paint. Yeah. TikTok account versus, Tony (2m 45s): Oh no, no. They were just some part-time workers too making the videos at the store. Joel (2m 51s): OK, so same thing. Tony (2m 52s): Right. Joel (2m 53s): Okay. Tony (2m 53s): So, you know, the videos took off almost immediately. I think my sixth video got like a million views. Chad (2m 59s): Fuck! Joel (2m 60s): Christ. Tony (3m 2s): So what I, what I tried doing was I wanted to basically change the digital marketing game for the paint industry and just make interesting content to younger people. And SW didn't really like that. And they canned me for it. Chad (3m 15s): Get a little deeper into this, this wasn't like your manager saying, Hey, you're screwing around on company time. This isn't good for us, blah, blah, blah. This was somebody from loss prevention. I mean some, some suit who had no fucking clue, probably what Tik Tok even is today. Well, he probably does today, but probably didn't even know what Tik Tok was. They were saying that you were a harming the brand. Tony (3m 41s): Well, yeah, dude. I mean, I had made a presentation to show to marketing I showed it to my manager and sales rep. Damn. Yeah. I mean, it was legit. I showed it to all my marketing professors here at OU and they said, move forward with this, get it to marketing. And I tried and basically got blown off for it. They didn't even look at the presentation. So I just kept making videos. And then apparently someone had called customer service up in Cleveland at their headquarters and said, was complaining that I was mixing... Joel (4m 9s): Was it the blueberry? Did the blueberry get you in trouble? Tony (4m 12s): It was the blueberry video. Joel (4m 13s): Wow. So talk about the blueberry video. Tony (4m 16s): Well, what I wanted to do is, I did a bunch of research on like the history of paint and they used, they used to use like natural, they call them natural pigments, as like dyes for the paint, like berries, roots. So I figured, it'd be cool for a video. So I bought, I was buying my own paint for those kinds of videos and thought it would be a cool concept to make a video for. And that video took off that one, got like 20 million views. That's how Sherwin-Williams found out about it. Chad (4m 44s): They weren't excited about this, that they were, that their brand was actually getting out and seen by 20 million different viewers. Tony (4m 53s): No. Joel (4m 53s): Yeah. How was the brand represented? Were you always wearing a Sherwin-Williams shirt? Hat? Was the paint always there? Did you always mention like, Hey, the new paint from Sherwin Williams da da da? Tony (5m 4s): Before, I made that presentation, I was literally trying to promote Sherman Williams, like, Hey, come into the store and get these school colors. But then once the marketing thing didn't work out with trying to show off that presentation, I just took away the label completely. And then yeah, they, they still found out about it because I didn't want to be doing videos like that, that wasn't really approved of without what their brand and you know. Joel (5m 28s): Yeah. Yeah. Chad (5m 30s): It's interesting because first and foremost brands are always trying to look at new, new mediums. Right. They're looking at, they're trying to, they're trying to actually get out into new mediums. Joel (5m 42s): Especially consumer companies. Chad (5m 43s): They're trying to gain traction and, and you had a just add water solution. Cause you already had this, this user base who wanted to see this. And Sherwin Williams, I mean, hell they could have easily just grabbed this up. I mean really just taking it from you to be quite Frank, but no, they kicked you out the door. How did that tell me how that felt, man, because I mean, you were really, you're passionate about what you're doing. How did that feel? Joel (6m 14s): You got to think you're on the fast track to like corporate job in Cleveland, which, who doesn't want that. But I mean, the minute you got a million views and had a million followers, you were like, dude, I'm set. I'm going to be corporate Sherwin Williams for the next 20 years if I want it. Tony (6m 29s): Well, dude, I mean my whole career path was going to go through Sherwin Williams, go. I had an internship lined up, was going to go into management sales. I literally loved the job. It almost felt like I got like betrayed. Chad (6m 40s): You did. Tony (6m 40s): By the company. I did a lot for them, I worked there for a very long time. And then I have some dude in, I like to call them the "paint police" - loss prevention. He basically interrogated me, wanted to know if I was stealing, which I wasn't. They found out that I wasn't, but then they pulled some BS, excuse. Like I was like, what was it? Serious embarrassment to the company. And yeah, it sucked. But honestly I think it's almost like a blessing in disguise at this point. Like you said, they probably wouldn't take taken that from me. Chad (7m 9s): Yeah. Let's talk about the blessing. Because as soon as this hit, not who, who, first and foremost who picked it up? And then after it was picked up, it seemed like it just like exploded. Tell me about that, because this does seem like almost like a blessing in disguise. Tony (7m 25s): If they were to take, if they would've went with that TikTok or my presentation now, after all this had happened, they would have made it into some corporate, I don't even know bit saturated with corporate. Chad (7m 37s): They would have fucked it up. Tony (7m 39s): Yeah. There's there's there's when it comes to social media and these platforms, you have to have authenticity to it and they would have completely screwed that up. So yeah. Joel (7m 49s): And they still don't have an account right on TikTok? Tony (7m 51s): I don't think so. I don't think they're going to now. Chad (7m 54s): You had, you had this broke and you had a bunch of big brands actually get in touch with you. Tell us, tell us about that. And you found a home, tell us who you picked and why you picked them. Joel (8m 6s): Yeah. And what was the TicTok reaction were a million people like, fuck Sherwin Williams? Tony (8m 12s): Oh dude. It was insane. I made that the initial video that blew up and got a whole, the media got ahold of was the story about how I had gotten fired. That video really took off and people were like bashing Sherwin Williams about it. My goal, I don't know if you guys had seen that initial video, but my goal wasn't even to bash Sherwin Williams and be like, Hey, like screw you guys. It was to basically develop like an emotional connection with my audience. Chad (8m 37s): Yeah. Tony (8m 38s): Basically give them a reason why I do what I do. Chad (8m 41s): Yeah. Tony (8m 41s): And people put two and two together, found out it was Sherwin Williams and took it from there and they got grilled on the internet. Chad (8m 48s): Oh, yeah. So tell us, tell us about those big brands that came to to you and why you and where you went and why picked it? Tony (8m 56s): So I, after that video broke out, I got basically partnership offers and deals from basically every major paint company in the United States, like Behr, PBG, Benny Moore, a few smaller ones. And I went with a company called Florida Paints down there in Orlando. Joel (9m 14s): They didn't want to hire you necessarily, but they wanted to sponsor? Tony (9m 17s): Right sponsor the videos. Joel (9m 19s): Okay. So nobody said, come work for us. It was like, Hey, let's partner. I'll pay for you to post videos and promote our paints. Tony (9m 26s): Well they did, they did offer like mainly year contracts. And after I had graduated, I would graduate they would offer me a job. But man, I wanted to steer away after that whole thing was Sherwin Williams from the big corporate culture. Joel (9m 40s): I don't blame you. Tony (9m 41s): Hey, those big companies, man, there's too much of a chain of command. There's too many people you got to filter through it. Joel (9m 46s): Too many lawyers. Tony (9m 47s): Exactly. And so I went with the company, Florida Paints in Orlando. I met with the founder, Don Strubey and he it's a smaller company. They only have a, I think about 25 to 30 stores down in Florida. And Don had called me and he was the only one only person that I talked to through all these companies that I felt connection, like a shared passion for the importance of paint and the art of it. And that was something that really, I felt like connected with me. And I've wanted to work with them ever since that. Chad (10m 17s): He got you is what it was. Tony (10m 19s): Right. Yeah. Chad (10m 21s): You know, this is, this is definitely a message to all of those brands that are out there that we talk to all the time. This wasn't just a consumer play, from the standpoint of Sherwin Williams. This was a guy who wanted to spend his life, give 40 hours a week, plus blood, sweat, and tears over time, all this stuff because he had a passion for what he was doing and they just threw all that shit in a can. And now, and now a company, Florida Paints, I definitely want to give those guys some love. They understood they weren't corporate. They weren't buttoned up in bullshit about this. Chad (11m 2s): They understood that you were actually just demonstrating passion in who you were and that's what they wanted in their culture. And that's why you pick them. Tony (11m 12s): Exactly. That is exactly what happened. Joel (11m 15s): Steer your content at all. How has your content changed if at all? Tony (11m 19s): Well, when I go to, I'm going to be moving down there within the next few weeks, but it's basically going to be tones of paints powered by Florida Paints. They're going to give me all the supplies and resources. I need to express my creativity through my content. Joel (11m 31s): Gotcha. Chad (11m 32s): What's the position title? I mean, what are you actually going to be doing for them above and beyond TikTok? Or is it just that? Tony (11m 41s): Well, I'm going to be working like a, almost like a sales associate job, like I was before in the store. But along with that, I'm going to be doing digital marketing. Basically creating content. Joel (11m 50s): Gotcha, awesome. Gotcha. Symphony Talent (11m 54s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a cult brand is not easy, which is why you need friends. Like Roopesh Nair CEO of Symphony Talent on your side, okay? OK Roopesh, hiring companies can't hire diverse candidates. If diverse candidates aren't applying for their jobs, what should hiring companies do differently to attract a more diverse candidate? Easier than ever before to create video. Yeah. Companies seem confused about how to use video to build an employer brand. What is your advice to companies who want to leverage video? Keep it very, very genuine and only way you can keep it genuine is by making it basically come from people who actually work for you and actually not very tailored. The more you can leave it loose and let people kind of express themselves using video, the more genuine and, and connecting it would be. Symphony Talent (12m 40s): So, yeah, it's good to kind of give people a guideline on how they want to kind of communicate about the brand and ensure that you're hitting the top points out there. But, but frankly, getting it out there to ensure that you're, co-creating those videos with your, with your employees is, is the right way to go. And then bringing that content into your engagement. As I think about it, and I'll give a shout out to our friends at Altru here. I think something like that is the best way to actually actually really build videos than necessarily doing big, you know, video shoots and things like that. I mean, video shoots have their place when you build those corporate videos, but, but if you really want to use video as a marketing content, then it needs to be curated in a very genuine way. Symphony Talent Promo (13m 24s): Let symphony talent help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your talent strategy. For more information, visit symphonytalent.com. Joel (13m 39s): I have to, I have to note Tony, I want to back up a little bit. We have hundreds of companies that would love to blow up like you did on social media. So one of my questions is like, what tips would you give a corporation? You mentioned authenticity, which I think is important, but what are some tips you would give a company to sort of blow up like you did? Cause a million is no is no joke. That's legitimate blown up on social media. Tony (14m 4s): Well, you know, I have always followed three rules of social media after doing research, learning just the platforms and all that. And it really all kind of comes together, no matter which platform you use, my three rules are consistency, you have to post about every day. Quality of content, you got to make sure it's stuff people want to see. And then the third one, is engaging with your followers, making it feel like, they belong there and like they're a part of the page. Joel (14m 32s): Gotcha. Chad (14m 32s): Well, and you mentioned connection though, too, because you said that you wanted to make a connection with your user. So it was the content, but you felt it was really important to make a connection, a human connection as well. Tony (14m 44s): Exactly, exactly. I mean, I hadn't really done that before either. I had basically just been making paint videos and I just, like I said, I wanted to give my audience a reason why I do what I do. I'm not just mixing paint in some basement for no reason. Joel (14m 59s): No, I'm curious as a, because you're a young person, we don't get young people on the show that often, break down for me, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and then, you know, like Facebook and Twitter, like where do you spend most of your time? Where do you see most of your peers spend time? Which ones are sort of like way passe and we're over that. And are there any platforms that we should be looking at in the future to take off like TikTok has? Tony (15m 26s): I mean, dude TikTok I think is, is really in the past year, changed the game completely. It's almost turning into like a, I don't know if you remember Instagram, that kind of, it's almost like I'll TikTok is now. There's not really any like business to or anything, but on Instagram and stuff, now you can shop, you can, it's basically a search engine. Now, Instagram, you can look up anything on there Joel (15m 46s): Predict you there'll be a day where there'll be a Sherwin-Williams ad come before or after your TikTok on paints. So yes. Are you Snapchatting, like Instagram is still hot, right? Like what's the temperature and all these sites Tony (16m 0s): I've been sticking to YouTube, Instagram and Tik TOK. I haven't really gotten into Snapchat yet. Maybe Twitter I would get into, but I mean, man, it's, it's a full-time job trying to manage and upload content to all these, all these platforms, but TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, or like the video platforms, which I try to stay, stay with the most. Joel (16m 22s): And where do you sort of, where do you expect to be in five years? If we had this interview five years from now, where to, where do you hope to be and what do you hope to be doing? Tony (16m 29s): That is a great question. I guess what another reason I had chosen Florida Paints is, was cause I'm going to be able to develop my knowledge and understanding of the paint industry and become more of like a respected personnel in it. Obviously my name's already known throughout the industry, but I just want to grow my knowledge. So maybe, I mean, if the digital marketing thing doesn't work out cause things die, but I'm going to keep at it and keep going with that. But maybe like becoming in sales. I, yeah, it's just something like that. You know, just something. Chad (16m 59s): Has that changed that you want to go up through the ranks in the same organization or are you pretty much open to do whatever now? Tony (17m 5s): Well, I'm open to do whatever, whatever, wherever life takes me, how this whole thing plays out. I'm still not really sure. I mean this whole thing has happened. Chad (17m 12s): Quickly. Tony (17m 13s): Quickly. It's not even been a year since I made my first TikTok. Chad (17m 17s): Wow. Tony (17m 18s): So who knows? Joel (17m 19s): Well from my standpoint, you know what you're doing could not have been done when Chad and I were your age. So it's fascinating. It's fascinating to see. And the fact that you have so many followers on a, on a platform that is not going anywhere anytime soon is, is obviously a big positive to your career. And my guess is you'll be able to take that, you know, that portfolio to anywhere and, and create a living for yourself or create opportunity for yourself. So consider yourself lucky, but also you're talented right place, right time. But I I'd love to talk to you again in five years to see where you are because I'm betting that it's going to be someplace pretty cool. Tony (17m 57s): I mean, yeah, I'll be open for it if you guys want to have me back. Joel (18m 0s): I'm setting my reminder now. Chad (18m 4s): We'll come down to Orlando for that one, but seriously, Tony, you know, I think if anybody who is paying attention right now is really getting a lesson in brand, in how to be human and how to more like just step away and allow your employees to really demonstrate their passion, the way that they demonstrate their passion instead of trying to fit them into a box. Tony (18m 31s): Exactly. Chad (18m 31s): So we appreciate you taking time to come on the show. I mean, this is really short notice. We talked yesterday and I just saw it. Joel (18m 42s): He's a college kid. He's got nothing going on. Chad (18m 44s): He's got finals coming up, dude, but seriously, man, thanks so much. If somebody wants to check out TikTok or YouTube, tell him where should they go? Where should they subscribe? Tony (18m 56s): @tonesterpaints, Chad (18m 57s): @tonesterpaints kids will thanks so much. Joel (18m 59s): Are you even on LinkedIn, Tony? Tony (19m 1s): Dude, I'm on LinkedIn that's how we got in touch. Chad (19m 3s): That's how I got in touch with him. Joel (19m 5s): At least the kids are still into LinkedIn then I'm okay. Then I'm all right. Tony (19m 9s): We had a whole college class on LinkedIn. I thought, I mean, it was kind of BS, but they basically said that LinkedIn was important and all that getting connected, man. That's how it goes. Joel (19m 19s): And it is. Tony (19m 22s): Well excellent Joel, we out. Joel (19m 23s): Chad, we out. Tony (19m 24s): Thank you guys. I appreciate it. OUTRO (19m 25s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (20m 9s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Halloween and Election Day are right around the corner, but that's nothing compared to the scream-inspiring news that came out of recruiting this week. Let's see... Handshake looks like the new MonsterTrak, Job descriptions are actually getting worse, Bomerang layoffs are now a thing (thanks pandemic!), Automation is coming after 85 million jobs ...and reporters are doing Zoom meetings with their pants down. Talk about heads spinning, vomit covering the walls and chainsaws coming after your melon, recruiting has us deep in the fetal position. As always, HR's most dangerous podcast is powered by Sovren, JobAdx, and Jobvite. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. INTRO (0s): Dude, turn off your camera, man. And put that thing away. Chad & Cheese Intro (4s): 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. girls. Joel "Quiby" Cheesman (28s): If you're into mute buttons and debates, then you're listening to the wrong show. Howdy boys and girls, welcome to the podcast lots of vendors would like to silence. I'm your cohost, Joel "quibby" Cheeseman. Chad "Put That Thing Away" Sowash (41s): And I'm Chad "put that thing away" Sowash Joel (44s): On this week's episode, handshake is one hell of a pickpocket. Automation is coming for you, HR and make sure that laptop camera's off before firing up the porn hub here comes your favorite, not safe for work podcast about work. We'll be right back after paying some bills. JobAdX (1m 3s): Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for long-term full time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. JobAdX (1m 44s): We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Joel (2m 23s): It's debate night, Chad. Chad (2m 26s): Dude. Joel (2m 28s): Election day is coming and Halloween btw. Chad (2m 32s): Halloween came early to the Sowash house in the form of an iCIMS goody box. Hahah. That's right kids. I mean, not to mention, had some time with Susan Vitaly earlier this week. So there's going to be an interview coming soon. Joel (2m 50s): Now we know where all that money's going for the, the, the celebrity speakers at their conference because they downgraded my Yeti from two years ago to a Coleman tumbler. So you know. Chad (3m 1s): You're such a Fucking elitist. I swear. Joel (3m 3s): Hey, You know what, dude, there's a lesson in this. If you're a vendor, you got to up your game. Like if you're not giving away Patagonia stuff, Yeti stuff like just don't bother. Chad (3m 12s): Fucking elitists. Joel (3m 13s): It's a good thing. Our t-shirts are such good quality. God, that's the mantra we live by. Chad (3m 18s): Yeah. Yeah. Let's make sure that that happens. So before we get into anything else, we have to make sure that we understand that now through the social universe and poles, that Michael Myers is more scary than Jason Voorhees. That's right. Kids Halloween over Friday the 13th. Here's my thought though, is that personally? I think you hamstrung Jason with your creepy horny teenager comments. Joel (3m 44s): Oh, like I'm the first one to ever make that comment. Chad (3m 47s): Out loud. Probably. Joel (3m 49s): Oh, Come on now. Let's go search YouTube later. Chad (3m 52s): Okay. Joel (3m 54s): Let's keep it positive for a second. Shout Out to our girl, Abby Cheeseman. Applause (3m 59s): Clapping. Chad (3m 59s): That's right. Joel (3m 60s): No relation whatsoever. But she welcomed I'm dubbing and Pepper Jack Cheeseman, or Jack Cheeseman as his parents probably call him, welcome to the world. Welcome Jack. We need more Cheesmans in this world and dammit it's a boy. Who's going to create more Cheeseman. So there you go Sowash Chad (4m 17s): Just as long as it's not in your 23 chromosomes question from Neil Dunwoody, right out of the gate, over in the UK, he asks, why are so many recruiters, ghosting candidates after the interview? So, Joel, why are people getting ghosted? I know it's around Halloween, but what's what's going on? Joel (4m 38s): Well, I'm having a problem getting ghosted by babysitters. I don't know what's going on. I want to have a date night with my wife, but it's becoming harder and harder because babysitters just, they say, they're going to show up. And then they don't. And I don't know, it's a youth problem maybe. It's a culture thing, I guess like nobody learns civility. No one learns responsibility anymore. I guess it's just easier not to show up or not answer a text than to step up and say, you know what? I don't want to do it. Maybe it's a "I don't want to hurt feelings" thing. I don't know. Chad (5m 10s): You're you're so much like a millennial because you make every question about you. So Neil, I'll answer your question. My friend. Joel (5m 16s): I like talking about nothing more than myself. Chad (5m 19s): Think of all the candidates that are out there today and all the recruiters that you don't have, right? So it's really a scale issue. And I think it's one of the reasons why companies are looking to automation and why we're seeing so many companies on the vendor side, actually doing well. They're getting a lot more RFPs are getting a lot more leads coming in. And it's because of this problem, it's scale. And as soon as we understand as human beings, we can't scale fast enough, but tech can do a lot of this stuff and do more scaling. There you go. And then hopefully by then we'll have robot babysitters, and then Joel will be okay. Joel (5m 57s): Don't forget one of our favorite quotes from Amman Brar, who said chatbots are like anti ghosting magic. So maybe that's maybe that's the cure. I don't know. Chad (6m 7s): But canvas doesn't exist anymore. Joel (6m 9s): Okay. You beat me to the punch. You beat me to the punch. Okay. So shout out to go canvas.io. My favorite domain, I know it's close to your heart. Go canvas.io, which I've made fun of so many times since they launched is now gone. It is now redirecting to Jobvite rest in peace. Go canvas.io. Chad (6m 30s): It was going to happen. That's all I have to say about that. Big Shout Out to Victoria Conley from Philly for entertaining, Twitter, snark, John Salt out of London he loves the podcast and Aaron Stewart, formerly of England. Now in Austin, Texas, he loves him some beer drop. Joel. Tell him about beer drop. Joel (6m 51s): Oh sure. Beer drop free beer. So head out to beerdrop.net. We've partnered with Adzuna. Who wants to build that brand in America? And by golly, they're going to do it with us drinking beer. So head out to beerdrop.net give us your address. Don't worry. We won't show up in a Jason Voorhees mask and you'll win a chance to win free beer and maybe get on a zoom call and talk shop or taste test, or I don't know, it could get crazy, Chad beerdrop.net Chad (7m 19s): And it's contactless, my friends. It's coming straight to your front door. That's right. We are COVID friendly here at the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (7m 28s): Shout Out to a NASA. I don't know if you saw this today. NASA is connecting with asteroids. This just blows my mind. Chad (7m 36s): This is Armageddon is what that is. Joel (7m 37s): We get caught up. Yeah. We get caught up in elections and hating each other and a civil war and Russian interference. And there's still really cool shit happening at NASA where they're actually touching down on asteroids, taking samples. They're apparently dodging space material that's the size of buildings. Just really cool shit. Shout Out to NASA. Chad (7m 58s): Yeah. I just keep thinking of Bruce Willis landing on that asteroid. Shout Out to John Thurmond, host of the podcast, HR social hour, half hour, wait a minute that's confusing. He gave us a big plug this week on Twitter. We connected and talked pod shop and it was lit. Also, I've heard that Tom Horribin over in the UK, he actually left the recruiting industry, but he still listens to the Chad and Cheese podcast. So big Shout Out to you, Tom. You keep listening, man. I don't know what's I don't know what your problem is, but you keep it up and last but not least in this barrage, Joshua Seacrest, who is head of McDonald's global talent strategy. Chad (8m 48s): He loves the podcast. And I don't know if it's just me, but whenever I hear the name, Joshua, I think of Gary Busey and Lethal Weapon. Mr. Joshua, Joel (8m 60s): Not Joshua tree, YouTube best-selling album. Chad (9m 3s): Nah, I can't stand YouTube. Joel (9m 5s): That's that's you. And that's me, by the way, anytime you call me a millennial, I'm going to bring up the fact that you said lit in the middle of a Shout Out. And all right, if we're doing a machine gun, Shout Outs, Shout Out for me to Quiby. 1.7 billion raise 3 million in revenue. 63 million spent in advertising did six months in and they're shuttering. Are you fucking kidding me? Shout Out to Google who's going to face antitrust legislation, we'll see what happens. Search engine and how it impacts jobs, which we'll certainly be talking about on the show. Shout Out to big 10 football, which returns this weekend, Ohio state and Nebraska. Yes. Shout out to Bennett Song, a marketing guy at Humanly, by the way, make sure you catch that Firing Squad, which debuted this week. Joel (9m 51s): Bennett on LinkedIn actually gave a guide to surviving the Firing Squad, which I thought was just awesome. Shout Out to Chris Dunn I was a guest on his Best Hire Ever podcast. So feel free to check that out and the Social Dilemma, if you have Netflix and haven't watched it, I recommend it. Chad, I think you'd probably recommend it as well. And lastly from me, Crelate recently produced the recruiter's guide to text recruiting. That's Crelate, crelate.com. And it features a quote from your boy. And that's it for me, Chad (10m 27s): Shout Out. So we're a little SHRM smacked down action. This is funny first and foremost, why do people become members of SHRM? Joel (10m 35s): Peer pressure? Chad (10m 36s): Is that what it is? You think? It's like, all these notifications will, how come you're not a SPHR alla dotious? Joel (10m 45s): Student funneling. So kids in college are told they have to be insured and they joined SHRM in college and then they just stay members the rest of their life. Chad (10m 52s): It's a racket. So I received an email from a few share members that was actually a pitch for the SHRM payroll solution, which is basically a white labeled money network platform. And here's a quote from one of the, the sure members quote, "wow, SHRM selling bad payroll software to members, but presenting it like it's a benefit. This Adam Sohn seems slimy as fuck" end quote. This dude, Adam Sohn is the chief growth officer for SHRM and SHRM members pay dues. So you would think that they wouldn't get this, this bullshit. Chad (11m 32s): Is SHRM the new Amway? Joel (11m 36s): That's harsh. You know, you know, they have some prime real estate there off of Duke street in Alexandria, Virginia, and they gotta pay for shit like that. So they got to make money somewhere. So if it's like blessing technology solutions, then so be it. But yeah, I think membership is eventually going to put up with that or they're not, but certainly picking winners in technology is not the business SHRM should probably be in. They should be pretty agnostic in terms of that stuff. So that's questionable, but yeah, the membership will speak and guide, guide the organization as it should. And if they don't like it, they'll stop doing it. But knuckleheads like us who don't give a dime to SHRM , they could probably give a shit, what we think. Chad (12m 17s): So Events! Really quick, really quick, October 27th coming up this week at 2:00 PM. Eastern Time is Friendly Discourse. It's round to Chad Sowash versus Jim Stroud, we're going to be talking about Facebook's docking of employee pay ~ should individuals who are living in Silicon Valley when they move, should they be paid less because of cost of living. We're going to be debating that, having a great time, check out the socials on how to register should be a great time. If you're listening to this afterwards, go to circaworks.com, check out their events, we will be there and you can watch it recorded. Chad (12m 57s): It's all good! Joel (12m 59s): Topics! Chad (13m 1s): Topics. Okay. So this one we're going to be, we're talking about Handshake getting $80 million. So if you, my friends are subscribed to Chad and Cheese in your pocket you already know this because we sent this out earlier this week. And if you're not subscribed to Chad and Cheese in your pocket, Joel, how do you do that? Joel (13m 21s): Yeah, you just a text CC. Those are the two letters. See the third letters in the alphabet. If you're paying attention, text CC to (833) 799-0321 again, that's text CC to(833) 799-0321 yet could be a jingle folks. (833) 799-0321 Chad (13m 46s): Powered by emissary.ai. Joel (13m 49s): Oh yeah. Chad (13m 51s): So, so Handshake. What do you know about Handshake? Joel (13m 55s): Handshake? What, you know, what we grew up with? I don't know, there were quite a few college recruiting sites, college recruiter. We know really well and it's still around, but so, so it's sort of a new spin on an old model where a company gets college kids to put in their resume or their profiles. And then they go to colleges and employers to build partnerships, and then they sell access to these students to employers. And if you get MIT and Harvard and other really good schools to, to have their students put their stuff, and it becomes pretty valuable and Handshake, which launched in 2013. So it's not that much of a startup, but still technically I guess, has done this. Joel (14m 35s): And they're, they're in the news for raising $80 million this week, which is a lot of fucking money. They've raised $154 million total, founded by three dudes that is now a company of 220 employees, 7 million active student users, more than a college and university partners and more than 500,000 employers. The big selling point and the reason for the money is virtual career fairs. They're really, really confident that they can get a lot of companies to get access to these kids for a lot of money virtually because no one's meeting face to face on college campuses these days. Chad (15m 12s): Yeah. And that brings their valuation to $700 million. I mean, Joel (15m 17s): More than CareerBuilder and Monster sold for it's Chad (15m 21s): Ridiculous. Their revenues appear to be around 40 million, according to zoom info, Grow Joe and Owler. And I got some amazing insights from our friend, Steven Rothberg over at College Recruiter. Joel (15m 36s): Love it. Chad (15m 37s): Which is they're, they're in the same space, but they're not, they're kind of like fringe competitors. They're not like head to head competitors. So he was able to give me some, some really good insights. And there's also a history lesson here. So let's talk about Handshake first. First Handshakes business model seems to possibly put career center service offices out of business. Handshake is providing services that most career service offices provide, which seems like a logical extension for outsourcing. And from my standpoint, this seems like a Trojan horse waiting to happen. It's less money, at the possibility of higher quality than the state the schools can provide and or afford. Chad (16m 18s): Not to mention we have COVID happening, right? So budget cuts are going to be happening with COVID and this might be a prime opportunity hence why they're getting $80 million to prospectively take over as career service offices. Let's take a look at history. You remember Job Track. Joel (16m 38s): I do, but many of our listeners probably don't. Chad (16m 41s): Job Track was really the main platform back in the day, about 20, 20 plus years ago, I was a campus and career center friendly platform that pretty much owned the college recruiting market until monster.com bought them rebranded to Monster Track, and then started on this same line of thinking, get rid of the university career services, use monster track, and you'll cut costs, save money and have scalability. Well, the career center directors, obviously weren't happy with this and went to NACE the National Association of Colleges and Employers, their professional association, asking them for help to head off Monsters Play. Chad (17m 24s): So nays contacted direct employers, and this is where me and the team over there came in and together we with NACE and the career center directors created an entirely new platform called NACElink. And we were able to head off Monster Track, which eventually really died. I'm not sure that this Trojan horse is going to be able to be headed off like that one was. Joel (17m 52s): Yeah. I mean, I think the virtual career fair thing is super hot. I know that we talk about it regularly. I know a sponsor recruit tology and all the chat bots are trying to do it and do colleges do it as well. That's really left to be seen I know college career centers are quite a cost center for schools. So yeah, you know, you, you mix that with sort of COVID and, and the reality of the world we live in today. But you also deal with, you know, structures that have been around for a long time. And you have an organization that, you know, appreciates tenure and longevity and sort of stability. So when you have these companies come in these.com so to speak and try to like maneuver in and take over, schools don't like that a whole lot. Joel (18m 37s): Their investors seem to think that the virtual career fair industry alone is a billion dollar opportunity for them. Very valuable schools are going to be threatened at some point, whether these guys dodge the minefields and make it successful is left to be seen, but the numbers kind of speak for themselves. They're on a trajectory that's pretty good. Yeah. Chad (18m 56s): I think there is a big danger of the traditional career center director and staff being decimated by this, mainly because of COVID because universities are going to be looking at areas to be able to cut costs because they're not going to be able to fill the seats like they used to, until they can really get into an understanding of what hybrid learning looks like. But overall, I mean, these platforms, they're going to be able to help, I think, connection between individuals who couldn't make the track, let's say for instance, like the big brand names who could spend the money versus the smaller guys who just couldn't spend the money so there is a level playing field that could happen here. Joel (19m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, imagine we talk about timing being so important to success. And these guys like you couldn't ask for a better thing than to have an insight with colleges and then have the whole world shut down, but still have employers still want to have access to these students, right? Walla, virtual career fairs. And these guys were in the right place at the right time. Chad (20m 9s): Now you need a challenger brand because these guys are obviously, they're heading everybody off at the pass. Now you need a challenger brand. So what's the challenger brand that's going to come out and be that number two in give universities a choice, because from my understanding Handshake is $90,000 a year for employers to use. Now, again, we were talking about before how we could level the playing field. That's not going to level the playing field for some organizations who don't have big brands. So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Joel (20m 47s): Maybe CareerBuilder. Chad (20m 50s): Hahahahah. No. Joel (20m 51s): One thing interesting about Handshake is they have reviews, like internship reviews, but they're behind not the paywall, but they're there behind the membership wall. So only students can read the reviews for the most part. And the employers can as well what's said about them, but they've really built their brand a lot largely on the backs of the reviews that are on the site that students really love. They love to get the nitty gritty about what it's like to intern at company A, B and C before they, before they sign up. Chad (21m 19s): The thing that you could have a review on is how shitty some of those job postings are. Joel (21m 25s): Holy Shit, this got you all fired up this week. Chad (21m 27s): So, Adam Gordon of Candidate ID fame, I Adam, Hey Adam, what's up. He brought the following job descriptions to our attention on LinkedIn and Facebook and so on and so forth. So, Joel, I can't think of a situation where the job description is not important. Can you? Joel (21m 46s): It's incredibly important. It's the landing page by which you get someone to buy or not your product. Chad (21m 53s): Yeah. In bad job descriptions can increase bias, drive down female and individuals of color applying for the job for starters. And the first one we're going to hit up is a company called Cloud Flare. Yeah. Cloud Flare. They had a head of expansion and they currently do have a head of expansion marketing in a Mia, which is located in London. And the requirements are 12 plus years proven experience in a Mia enterprise B to B, with enterprise software, SAS and or regional marketing background in networking info, info security, or related job fields a plus. Chad (22m 39s): The next one, eight years of experience leading teams and a strong interest in mentorship and professional development, eight years, and the experience leading campaign events and field marketing with a track record in hitting targets. And the one they removed was BaBS in marketing business or related fields. Graduate degree is a plus. So that is CloudFlare. And they did remove one, but the ones they didn't remove, especially the number one 12 plus years proven experience in a Mia enterprise, B2B marketing. Joel (23m 18s): So either someone is really incompetent or someone's been copying and pasting too much in their recruitment career. Yeah. This doesn't like turn off a lot of people and really relegate who can apply to the job, nothing else. Well, at least they got high energy and curious team leader right. In that job posted, by the way, I, I gave a shout out to the Social Dilemma, which I know you've watched. And for those that have, and it's just sort of how social media is built and the algorithms are built to keep you coming to their site and, and keep you engaged. And, and one of the things that it was interesting to me, which is sort of the reminder that, you know, when you search something on Google, versus when I searched something, the searches that they recommend are different for you and different for me, the results for you are different for you in different me. Joel (24m 2s): And I think people sort of forget that. And I started thinking like, why couldn't the actual job posting for people be customized to who they are, and whether it's a business idea out there for somebody, or just my curiosity, if you know that someone is, you know, a certain age, a certain sex, a certain race, do job postings actually become customized, just like search results or search queries. And is that a good thing, if that does happen? Any thoughts. Chad (24m 31s): Yeah,no, you couldn't do that because you're actually delivering a different content, the different people could say that it's bias, right? I mean, you could say just on the pure basis that you're delivering different content to different people, it's biased. So that would be, that would be an issue. What I would say as we go into a Revolut and their head of recruitment operations is that when we set these requirements at such a crazy level, we have to realize that most underrepresented individuals who can do the job, will not meet the requirements, which means you will automatically screen them out. Chad (25m 11s): So let's go ahead and hit this one up Revolut, head of recruitment operations, at least seven years of work experience in process ops driven environment, where you led to the development of the process and the MS, PhD in operations, research engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science, and other related films, head of recruitment ops, familiar with concepts like value stream mapping, lean production, operations research, and mechanism design, knowledge, and experience in implementation of optimization in simulation models, mathematic programming you must have a qualitative background. Chad (25m 57s): I mean, it just keeps going. I mean, we're talking about SQL R Python, Ruby, Julia spark, SAS, minimum GPA. Holy fuck. This is for a recruit head of recruitment operations. Yeah. My mind is just blown at thinking that, I mean, this is basically Tyler Weeks, right? So what we're doing is we're looking for Tyler Weeks from Intel, right? Who is the head of their science analytics and all of that shit. How many Tyler's do you think are out there? Joel (26m 32s): Oh, well, we wish there were tons of Tyler's out there, but there aren't that many, unfortunately. So trying to recruit that in your language is obviously a lesson in folly. You know, another curious that I thought of is, as we're doing this in job postings are awful like, that's not a surprise to people. But shout out to our friend Katrina Kibin of the show, who's a copywriter and she's, she sent out a poll recently. I don't know if you saw this. It was like, how much would you pay for a professional to write your job posting? And I started thinking about like, wow, yeah. Why aren't companies employing professional job description writers to write their stuff? And it seems like, as we're talking about this, that there's a real opportunity to help companies get away from the copy and pasting of whatever they're doing now, or taking old, old job postings or old. Joel (27m 21s): I mean, we we've talked about job postings where someone has to have an ex have, you know, 10 years experience in a technology and the technology is four years old. Like there's such a disconnect in what companies are putting out there and what is really market worthy in terms of getting the right candidates. So there's some real disconnect here. And I think we're just highlighting it and looking at potential solutions. Chad (27m 43s): Are also platforms out there, like text DEO, Get Optimal, that you can run these things through to be able to help you understand bias too, to an extent, right. But I think the biggest issue here is we need to get the fuck out of the 1950s and stop asking for shit, the position doesn't need. If you're a recruiter or you're in, or you're a TA professional, that's allowing these types of jobs to go unchallenged. You're the biggest part of the problem. Joel (28m 13s): Yeah. Now imagine when all these big companies give certifications for, you know, things and that companies can't keep up with all the certifications that are out there. I mean, job postings are only going to get more and more challenging to connect with with buyers. I mean, I know that you look at the, the unbiased angle to this, and that's obviously super important and Textio helps you with a lot of that. But a lot of this is just salesmanship. Like, how do people read? What are the, you know, what verbs and adjectives are appropriate and effective and HR folks and recruiting managers just don't have that skillset. And it's becoming more and more important. Chad (28m 51s): This is the basic foundation and the start of where everything's built off of. Everything with regard to this hire, all the way through, right? So if you're not putting your time and emphasis on writing job postings, ensuring that you're, you're using platforms like Texteo and get optimal. And any of the other ones that are out there, this is the most important piece, because one, remember one of the things that we always talk about garbage in, garbage out. If we don't do this, right, the rest of the whole system is clogged up in fuck. Joel (29m 24s): How many, how many old schoolers out there are probably longing for the days of five line ads in the newspaper to promote a job? All right, man, let's take a break and we'll talk Starbucks and Boomerang layoffs. Chad (29m 37s): Layoffs? SOVREN (29m 37s): Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry, the more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com, that's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren ~ software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel (30m 4s): Five line ads that blows kids minds. Like posting a job in five lines, in a newspaper blows people's minds. Like how did that, how did that happen? It did, Chad (30m 15s): Those are the days when we lived on column inches, that's what it all came down to. Joel (30m 20s): That we live on caffeine inches, which brings us to Starbucks. Chad (30m 24s): Exactly. Right. So to set this up in 2015, McKinsey and Company reported on being able to have a company with more diverse representation in senior management, would the likely achieve greater profits that was backed up by a 2016 report from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. So now Starbucks is looking to tie executive compensation, compensation to diversity. Some would call this really overt quotas. Joel (30m 57s): Yeah. I mean, a little bit of digging into the news here. So Starbucks announced they have a goal to boost the number of people of color within its company, by 30% among corporate employees and 40% among its manufacturing and retail workforce. The goal here is to do this by 2025. And like you said, company compensation will be a link to that goal. Obviously, people are motivated by money, shocker there, obviously we applaud, applaud this to no end. There's a trend in our show every week of corporations, you know, taking the mantle of good. And it's fascinating to watch. There was a story out of Texas, which we nixed, which to me sort of underscored how governments aren't leading the way and, and these diverse, diverse initiatives and corporations are. Joel (31m 44s): We talked about Oreo recently, we've talked about a myriad of companies that are, that are doing great things around diversity. And to me, it's one thing to do an ad that sort of pulls at your heart strings and makes you, makes you tear up. And it's another to actually set goals and pretty lofty goals by the way, and tie it to your compensation like that is going to really bring change into the Starbucks organization. And it'll be for the better, and probably hopefully lead to more companies following suit. Chad (32m 17s): Interesting. You talk about the Texas pretty much anti LGBTQ and individuals with disabilities, the rendering of their policy while also the Trump administration, prohibiting government contractors from offering certain types of racially sensitive and other kinds of diversity training. Joel (32m 40s): And I saw this today real quick, apparently threatening some colleges with federal funding if they don't cut out the diversity training that they've been doing. Chad (32m 49s): So what we're trying to do in making strides to have goals, to have our workforce, the composition of our workforce, look like the people we serve. That's all good for business, research demonstrates that. So you would think that anybody who cares about money, right. Would say, well, yeah, diversity is a good thing, which means it's going to boost profits, which means it's good for stakeholders, yada, yada, yada, right? But there's a constant fight in battle. Instead of calling this a goal to try to actually reach some type of workforce composition that reflects that of the community. Chad (33m 31s): We get this pushback of people talking about quotas and people talking about, well, wait a minute this is anti-American. It's no, we're trying to become continual progression of what America is. And again, we can't return to the 1950s and what Starbucks has done let's not talk about this, let's talk about what they have done with regard to hiring veterans, probably one of the best organizations in our country. Maybe even the world in hiring veterans, not to mention, also pay equality. They were one of the first organizations to actually say, look, transparently, we are, we are equal in how we are paying our people corporate side for HR side. Chad (34m 16s): Does that matter? So they are, as you had said, they're actually not just talking the talk. They are walking the walk. I love the commercials, but you're a hundred percent correct I love this! Joel (34m 28s): Yeah. And by the way, who's really happy are Starbucks shareholders and Nike shareholders I know in particular so in terms of making this making business sense, the proof is in the pudding because shareholders have been very happy with these companies that are making these decisions. So that off add off to, to Starbucks, right? Chad (34m 47s): Well, the companies that are not happy and the people that are not happy are companies like Disney, right. And US Airlines and MGM resorts. And in many of the brands who have had to lay off. But it's interesting because some of these individuals didn't just get hit with one round of layoffs. They were called back and they're getting hit again. Yeah. This was on CBS news. Joel (35m 16s): Yeah. So announced or reported this week. So among an estimated 36 million workers called back to their jobs after the layoffs this year, obviously there was federal funding and a lot of people were furloughed. So of that 36 million, 27% of that have been laid off again. Gee, what a, what a treat that must be, while another 36% were told they could still be laid off again. So boomerang layoffs are going to be a thing that we're going to hear about in the coming months Chad (35m 48s): While Congress continues not to provide additional stimulus. I think one of the biggest glitches in the American healthcare system is being tied to an employer. And then so people are losing their healthcare during a pandemic and trying not to catch the virus. But personally, I'm going to go back into a, kind of like a yang gang mode and say, this is a great time to start a pilot for UBI in the US. Joel (36m 17s): Now you're crazy. The good news is the structure is there to do it right before COVID hit. I think a lot of people were like, gee, could we really put money in people's bank accounts automatically? Like, can we really do that? Well, we can. So functionality of actually putting money into bank accounts can be done and it can be done again and again, so that, so the structure is there, which ironically, if Trump is known as the UBI president, that would be kind of an irony. I think, I think the US is a long way from that but I think ultimately for reasons, multiple reasons, I think that we're going to have to start doing that. I mean, look, we know, we know from research that a thousand dollars given to, you know, low income, middle income folks, that money goes right back into the system. Joel (37m 2s): And, and the boom that we saw from March to now largely has been the money's gone out and the money went right back into companies. So we know that it doesn't get hoarded. We know it doesn't get put into savings or Snapchat stock. It goes into food shelter, things that people need to live. So, you know, the seeds are there, the ability to do it is there, whether or not we have the intestinal fortitude to make that happen, that's left to be seen. Chad (37m 30s): Yeah. Joel (37m 30s): That'll probably be a while. And then you throw an automation. Hello. So we had, we had a research out of Switzerland by the world economic forum. So they reported this week. Automation in tandem with the COVID 19 recession is creating a double disruption scenario for workers. More than two fifths of large companies surveyed by the WEF plan to reduce their workforce due to the integration of technology. A quote here from the WTF was "for the first time in recent years, job creation is starting to lag behind job destruction and this factor is poised to affect disadvantaged workers with particular ferocity," which I thought was a scary word for Halloween. Chad (38m 10s): This goes back to Neil Dunwoody's question with regard to being ghosted by recruiters and then the answer to that is companies are starting to adopt tech faster than they were pre COVID. So what happens when things starts to, when, when things start to turn, we get, let's say for instance, we actually get a vaccine and then we're allowed to go back to work. Well, those jobs, or at least those tasks within those jobs are going to be gone. And that means that individuals are going to have to be re skilled to take those new jobs. Joel (38m 45s): Yeah. The good news in the report is that while they're estimating 85 million jobs will be gone by 2025, 97 million new roles will rise. Unfortunately, the skills that it's going to take to do those high, you know, knowledge-based jobs, we're gonna have to retrain a lot of people to do those jobs. And HR is no, isn't immune to this. I don't know if you saw this as well, a story out of Oracle and workplace intelligence of 1200 staffers. So that 66% strongly agree that the coronavirus has accelerated their company's willingness to invest in artificial intelligence tools elsewhere. The use of employee communication software has grown as more organizations migrate to remote and virtual workflows. Joel (39m 30s): A Company that they highlighted called work Vivo, which is new to me has grown 200% since March. They cater to the growing number of employers managing remote teams. The study also said that, and I found this really interesting. 82% of people believe robots can support their mental health better than humans. And 68% of people would prefer to talk to a robot over their manager about stress and anxiety at work. So these things that HR has sort of been doing, people think a robot can do it better, which is not good for them. Chad (40m 3s): It isn't. And that to me, contests the, the, the numbers 85 million lost versus 97 million gained. I do believe that, you know, we, we, we are dragging the US you know, crying and screaming into the future as we talk about fossil fuels, moving into green, as we talk about task oriented jobs, moving into more, more critical thinking and analysis and problem solving types of jobs, sales, jobs, customer service jobs, those aren't going to go away. But yet, as you had said, I mean, there are going to be many jobs that just won't be there. Chad (40m 44s): The big question is how are we going to re-skill? I hope it is my hope that fortune 500 companies set the standard for spending cash on their own people to get them re-skilled and not waiting for corporate welfare money from the government to have the government do it. Joel (41m 3s): Market forces baby. Also, by the way, hairstylists are in trouble because you've sent me a link. Chad jokingly sent me a link about a robot hairstylist. That'll be cutting my hair in 2021. So be on the lookout there salon professionals. There's a robot coming to cut hair, by the way, this the hair cutting robots sucks. Chad (41m 27s): I was thinking it was probably better for, for Jay because, you know, cutting his hair is not easy. Oh man, let's Joel (41m 34s): Take a break and really, really close the show out. Like it should be closed out Jobvite (41m 39s): 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 (42m 9s): Dude, turn off your camera, man. And put that thing away. Jobvite PROMO (42m 14s): I don't want to touch this one. Joel (42m 19s): Okay. Wow. CNN contributor and New Yorker journalist, I believe, Jeffrey Toobin what a horrible name considering what, what happened? And this week my, so my wife has a CNN junkie. And so she, she first told me about this and she's like, you know, Jeffrey Toobin. And I said, I have no idea who Jeffrey Toobin is. She showed me a picture and I was like, Oh yeah, I know who the, I know that dude. And she's like, he pulled his penis out in a company meeting and he's been not laid off, but he's been on he's whatever. And so I'm like, that's fucking weird. Why would you just pull your thing out in a zoom meeting? So, so I, I researched a little bit more and it, so apparently, like details are a little sparse and no one's really reporting this very aggressively. Joel (43m 5s): But apparently in between meetings, they were prepping for the debate. He thought the camera was off. He thought everyone was, I guess, on a break. And he decided to relieve himself in front of his computer where people could see him. Shit it's the Chad and Cheese show, he was jerking off in front of his coworkers. And he's probably done for quite a while. Yeah. The next time someone gets caught doing this on a zoom call, it's going to be like, Oh man, he got caught. Toobin Chad (43m 35s): He's going to have a new skill set that he can put on his LinkedIn profile when he's looking for that next, next job is going to be master debater. Joel (43m 45s): I don't know. Should we really be so hard on him? We out! Chad (43m 48s): We out! But that was awesome. OUTRO (43m 55s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (44m 39s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.

Halloween is right around the corner, and this episode of HR's most dangerous podcast is full of tricks and treats. For companies like Eightfold, Jobsync, The Mom Project, Gem, Jobscore and Burger King, the bag of goodies is full of M&Ms, Snickers and Reese's. But who got a rock? The Charlie Browns on this week's show include TikTok wannabe Heroes Jobs, MySpace wannabe Everyone Social and has-been Monster. Sorry, we can't compete with the horrors of Election Day and a global pandemic, but for talent acquisition, this week's podcast is right up there with The Exorcist and Poltergeist. As always, Sovren, JobAdx and Jobvite are the ones filling our goodie bag. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. 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 (20s): Oh yeah. COVID is spiking around the globe. The stock market is crashing and election day is coming and Oh yeah. Halloween is right around the corner. So how's your week going? This is the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel GDP Cheeseman. Chad (40s): And I'm Chad "Freddy Krueger" Sowash. Joel (43s): On this week's show. Eight-fold more like a billion fold. Am I right? Chad (47s): Am I right? Joel (48s): TikTok for jobs is finally here and clowns! Chad (53s): Yes! Joel (53s): Be very, very afraid. Jobvite PROMO (56s): 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 26s): Poppy cock! Joel (1m 29s): Cheerio. Chad (1m 31s): All right, kids. It's Halloween. It's Halloween! Round two of the scariest movie characters polls. Here we go. Leatherface from the chainsaw massacre, Texas Chainsaw Massacre versus Freddy "Nightmare on Elm Street" Kruger and Freddy wins in a runaway kids. Wow! Joel (1m 53s): Was this an actual poll that you had? Chad (1m 54s): Yeah, I did a poll on LinkedIn. Joel (1m 57s): See, Freddy, Freddy was scary as shit in the first one, but by the last one he's like break dancing and wrestling Hulk Hogan. So I don't know which Freddy they were talking about. I'd go Leatherface all day. Chad (2m 9s): Yeah. So that's what happens when you have like 27 sequels? I mean, it's like, it just gets out of hand. It's like Jason and Friday the 13th. Joel (2m 21s): Yeah. When the cast of, you know, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure shows up on your horror film, it's probably time to give up the game. Chad (2m 29s): You probably jumped the shark. Yes. Joel (2m 31s): Shout Out to voting. Chad (2m 32s): Voting! Joel (2m 33s): God Dammit. Where's MTV's Rock the Vote when you need it. Tuesday, I've already voted. You probably have too. Chad (2m 41s): Oh yeah! Joel (2m 41s): In fact I'm pretty sure that you have, but if you haven't man. Chad (2m 44s): Weeks ago. Joel (2m 44s): But if you haven't man, everybody vote. That's how you get shit done. Don't break windows. Don't beat up. People go vote. Very important. Chad (2m 52s): Don't put that shit in the mail right now because the mail is running about 10 fucking days behind. Hand carry that shit and drop it off. Just don't put it in the mail now because it's not going to make it! Joel (3m 5s): Yeah. Chad (3m 5s): Shout out to Parker Pell out of Memphis who loves the podcast and uses the Chad and Cheese to help him with his own podcast called the Inchternship Show Parker. You might want to think twice about that, buddy. Hans Mangelschots. We've got the best fucking listener names, Hans Mangelschots. And you think it's B it would be like at a Germany or Belgium or something. No, he's in Silicon Valley. He loves the podcast as well. Hans, Parker did all your friends, peers, family, subscribe, listen, go to Chadcheese.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Joel (3m 44s): By the way, while we're waxing nostalgic on the nineties, do you remember a Parker Lewis can't lose. Chad (3m 50s): Yeah, God. Joel (3m 52s): That starts some dude that went to Broad Ripple High School here in Indianapolis. Anyway, tangent Shout Out to our buddies, Tyler Weeks and Bill Fanning both have new gigs. Tyler's gone from Intel to Hired, Hired a what is it? Chad (4m 11s): Hired Scored. Joel (4m 12s): Hired Scored, Hired Score. Yeah. Anyway, work on that brand. Bill Fanning. Where'd he end up? Chad (4m 19s): He is now at This Way Global with Angela Hood and the AI for jobs claim. Joel (4m 27s): Oh, nice. Well, good luck guys. Keep listening to this show no matter where you're working. Chad (4m 32s): That's right. We have a listener question, Joel. This one's from Matthew Woodcock. You know that dude. Joel (4m 38s): Is that his porn name? What did we get these names this week? Chad (4m 42s): Should I use or not use LinkedIn to talk about topics like politics, social justice and other things I'm passionate about outside of work? Joel (4m 53s): On LinkedIn? Chad (4m 54s): Yes. Joel (4m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, LinkedIn is basically Facebook in 2012 with stories. And, and since they have stories, I'd say it's anything is fair game. Now again, with stories, they disappear in 24 hours. So if you want to like test this theory and see how it goes over, like post a few stories, see how it goes, see how many views you get. And if there's no big backlash, like roll with it. Chad (5m 18s): I think we are way too pensive. And we get this whole it's unprofessional to post things in your own public space. That's my profile page. That's my stream. And as an employer, who's built teams and managed teams over the years. I want somebody who's going to come to me, who is real, not fake and plastic and bullshit. So if you play this that's unprofessional game. That to me just turns me off. I want to know who the real person is that I'm going to be working with day in, day out. And if you're just playing that cosmetic Barbie bullshit game, that's not the type of person that I want. So again, I think this is, it's a personal opinion and you feel about more space, but that is my space on LinkedIn. Chad (6m 2s): If you don't like it ... Joel (6m 4s): Don't follow me. Chad (6m 5s): Don't follow me. It's that Fucking easy. Joel (6m 6s): By the way, I, I posted a picture on our eightfold shred that we did. And it's a unicorn in a donut, like the floaties in the pool. Chad (6m 16s): Yeah. Joel (6m 17s): And someone literally messaged me and said, is that a unicorn having sex with a donut? I'm not sure that's really appropriate for LinkedIn. I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? Like I know, I'm I know I, I am who I am, but I'm not like posting unicorn sex with pastries on LinkedIn. Like, dude really gets your mind out of the gutter. I know it's 2020, but shit unicorn fucking a donut? Nice. Chad (6m 42s): There were sprinkles on the donut too. I believe so. Come on. People just pay attention. Joel (6m 47s): Multicolored, multicolored, sprinkles, all white sprinkles I might ... Anyway shout out to sponsor Recruitology and Job Score on a job score on SMB ATS, Dan Arkin, a friend of the show and fan of the show. They partnered up to provide programmatic advertising to Jobs Scores clients. So a Shout Out to them for doing some good stuff for the SMBs out there. Chad (7m 12s): Very nice, very nice. Shout Out to Christie Weymouth from Indianapolis, right around the corner from you, man. She loves the podcast and the industry insights and Christie. Guess what we love you. And we love you even more when you share the podcast! Joel (7m 28s): Most definitely have fun there at Jobvite. Hopefully one day we'll get to visit the headquarters and say, hi. Shout out to iCIMS new logo. I did my own polling this week and out of 76 votes, 53% prefer the new logos. So Susan Vitale, it wasn't a wrong answer. It was a right answer when you change that logo. Chad (7m 55s): That's right. For some reason last week we had a listener question and everybody's asking us questions. So here's another question from a listener who wanted to stay anonymous and you'll know why, here in a second. Here's here's from the listener. I've noticed some high level white dudes in talent acquisition with diversity and inclusion in their title. Okay, Joel. So I want you to answer this. If you had, if you personally had as a white dude, a diversity and inclusion experience, would you accept the high level position or title in DNI? Joel (8m 31s): This whole fat of like putting me on the spot with these questions is going to be done. Cause last week you asked me about ghosting and I'm like, why is he fucking asking me about ghosting? And I came up with some story about not finding a babysitter so I can like, that's a landmine for me. Any DNI question for me is super landmine. I mean, I'm going to lean yes on this one. I think. Chad (8m 53s): So you would, you would take the position? Joel (8m 55s): I think so. Yeah. Chad (8m 56s): Okay. Yeah. I wouldn't! Joel (8m 58s): See! Chad (8m 59s): This is an opinion. This is there's no right or wrong answer, except mine is right. Joel (9m 3s): Oh, there's the right answer. Chad (9m 4s): Yeah. I don't think I personally, those positions are focused on being able to drive equity and seeing a white dude in that position, I really think sends like the wrong message, not just to the organization, but everybody outside of the organization. So personally, if somebody offered me a position that had DNI, in it at all, I would say, "No." Joel (9m 28s): All right. Let's, let's set a rule that in the future, if it's not a question about like, you know, QR codes, don't ask me, just save it, man. Chad (9m 37s): No more questions for Cheeseman people. Joel (9m 39s): Yeah. We should do more questions. Anyway. Shout Out to Jeremy Roberts looking really good in that Superfly, Chad and Cheese t-shirt that he posts. You're going to see more of these around the internet as we send those out and kids, if you want a free t-shirt you gotta play the game. You gotta go to Chadcheese.com/free. That's Chad cheese.com backslash free. If you want to look like one of the cool kids. Chad (10m 5s): No. Yeah. Jeremy doesn't get a Shout Out on this one. He like blocked out his face. I mean, there's the t-shirt that's there. Yeah. If you want to do, if you want to do a selfie with the Chad and Cheese t-shirt you can learn from Jeremy and not doing what he did. Joel (10m 22s): Did he explain why he, he blocked out his face? Chad (10m 25s): He, he didn't. I don't know. He's afraid of somebody like sharing it or something. Fuck. I don't know. Joel (10m 32s): Didn't look like he was getting busted or something and some, a drug under an undercover drug ring or something. Geez Chad (10m 38s): Oh, God. Tell me about Beer Drop. Joel (10m 40s): Beer Drop is the bomb! Dude. So if you, if you need, if you need some beer and goddammit, it's 2020, and what's going on, everybody needs a drink. Chad and Cheese are making it a little easier. We're giving out free beer, sponsored by our buddies at Ad Zoona. And I can announce October's winner. Yes. If you'd like? It's Jennifer Shanahan. Chad (11m 7s): Yeah!!!! Joel (11m 8s): So Jennifer, if you haven't got it already, by the time you listen to this, a good assortment of IPA's cause that's what she chose is coming your way. We're going to do a little zoom tasting with her probably next week or the week after. Whenever her schedule is free to do that. We're going to talk with her, have some beer and, and have a laugh. But yes, if you want to be like Jennifer, enjoying some free beer, go to beerdrop.net. That's beerdrop.net. Chad (11m 38s): And dude, there's like 20 beers that are going to be sent to her. I mean, that is legit. And they're all, I mean an assortment of different IPA's! When you sent me the list I, I had to give you major kudos. You did a great job Cheeseman. Joel (11m 55s): Thank you! Thank you. Yeah, we don't play on this show. We're not, we're not sending like a six, a Corona worse than being like the real craft local bomb shit to people. Chad (12m 7s): So get their chadcheese.com/free. Not to mention you could perspectively win a t-shirt and a bunch of other shit that we could be giving out throughout the rest of this year. And next year! Joel (12m 18s): We might send you some JobadX shit. Who knows? Chad (12m 20s): Who knows? Who knows? Joel (12m 22s): If you don't have Chad and Cheese in your pocket, you're missing some of the big news flashes in our industry. You don't have to wait till Friday. Just text CC. That's the letter C and C to (833) 799-0321. And as I understand it, we're even in the UK now? Chad (12m 40s): We're we're testing or testing in the UK. Joel (12m 43s): So Gordo, hopefully we're going to be in Scotland there soon. And so you can get our updates Chad (12m 49s): And t-shirts and Chad and Xheese in your pocket powered by emissary.ai. Joel (12m 56s): Oh yeah. By the way, a little tease we're going to really make the holiday special this year. So make sure you listen to the show. We've got a special thing coming. That's all I'm going to say, right? Chad (13m 7s): Oh dude. Yeah. I'm excited about it right now. Topics! Joel (13m 14s): Topics! Chad (13m 14s): All right. So if you have subscribed to Chad and Cheese in your pocket, you would have already known this because we sent it pretty much as soon as it happened. So Eight Fold got some cash. Tell us about it. Joel (13m 27s): Jeez. Major bucks. So these guys are only four years old, which is pretty incredible. San Francisco Bay area based a recruiting firm. They are, they are looking to be the platform for everything. We heare, we joke about the, from hi to hiring. That's sort of like, they want to be everything. They raise $125 million in series D a grand total of 180 million. They have a valuation now of $1 billion, which makes them officially a unicorn. Chad (13m 58s): So bloated! Joel (13m 58s): In the startup world. We don't, we don't get a lot of those in recruitment, but, but these guys have come on 110 countries. They're in 17 industries, they're 13 languages. One of the things that I saw that I thought was really interesting in terms of quotes was the CEO said, you know, "the Eightfold team has been last four years, developing a single platform, servicing all talent, lifecycle needs, bypassing single point solutions entirely. This is the future of our industry." And to me, the whole like no single point solutions is pretty interesting. They want to be everything to every body. Can they pull it off? I don't know. I'm a little skeptical, but we're going to have to see. Joel (14m 40s): I also think that with evaluation like this, an IPO is in their future. And one of the investors alluded that that was probably very likely. So I think this'll be a really interesting company to watch over the next couple of years. And a lot of investors think the same. They're they're really tackling the enterprise. They've talked about business going through the roof since the pandemic has hit. So a lot of things going right for these guys, hitting things at the right time. The trends of automation, sort of virtual productivity and employee engagement that we've seen since the pandemic, these guys are in that, in that wheelhouse. Joel (15m 21s): And we'll see a lot of people are battling for this one platform to roll all. You've been down in it in the past. I assume you still are critical of it. We'll just have to see, but it's pretty clear that money is going into that corner. And we'll see who comes out on top. If anybody. Chad (15m 37s): Yeah. I spoke to about 20 different people about this. Joel (15m 42s): You know, 20 people? Damn Chad (15m 44s): The response from a few of them and I kid you not, it was the exact same response, "this is whacked!" Joel (15m 51s): As in the company's whacked? Or the investments whacked or both? Chad (15m 55s): Let me get into it. And anyone who's ever listened to this podcast knows that I am a big fan of matching tech. It's the hardest, it's the hardest working tech in the industry and could easily facilitate faster, better candidate placements hires. And it's a great market validation for anyone in the space, but I am not a big fan of this move. You can take that. There is a thing where you take too much money and they, what do they need $180 million in funding to do? I mean, what are they going to do with it? Are they going to develop something that's going to compete with the ATS market? I mean, because ATSs, are already integrating with this type of tech in their platform, iCIMS acquired Andre Wade and, and, and her opening.io, Angela Hood and AI for jobs is, is deeply integrated into Salesforce. Chad (16m 50s): Our buddy, Robert Ruff sponsor Sovren, pretty much owns the vendor space and then Hired Scored, I had to put them in there because now they have Tyler Weeks and Athena Karp. So exactly what's going to be different and what's so damn revolutionary? Joel (17m 7s): Well, so these guys are super ambitious. Another quote from the founder was "Our mission is to leverage our expertise in AI to provide the right career for everyone in the world." So... Chad (17m 20s): Come on. Joel (17m 20s): That's the ambition that they have. So... Chad (17m 23s): Come on. Joel (17m 24s): In terms of scale and, and, and achieving that dream, it might take $180 million. Chad (17m 30s): So taking this much money, knocks them off just about all acquisition targets. Joel (17m 37s): Yeah. Like maybe 10 companies would do it and their names, their name, Microsoft and Google, and Chad (17m 43s): I have two scenarios. Number one, they can use this, these dollars for acquisitions to fill gaps, okay. Because to think that they don't have gaps is nothing but naive. Number two, they can run hard with integration combined with a killer sales and marketing team to drive revenue quickly in the hopes that a money pit like SAP acquires them. I think a company like that could perspectively be a target, but most of the other targets just fell away. Joel (18m 13s): Yeah. Chad (18m 13s): This is, this is not a core system. They've just shown their hand to other core platforms. And if a core platform doesn't currently have matching tech to be able to match what they're trying to do, I'm going to say, I predict that that will happen. You also have to remember when you are a Jack of all, you are a master of none. If they could of focused, not taking so much money, they could have focused. And the market was already, already validated in the matching space as it was and just ran hard after that. I think there, there could have been something there, but going on this trajectory, I think personally, I think they're fucked. Joel (18m 53s): So, all right. So Chad is weighed in. Crowd (18m 54s): Booo. Joel (18m 55s): That's a big, big, boo. Let's, let's play a quick game of Who'd You Rather? So we talked about Handshake, I think last week, getting, was it 80 million around? Crowd (19m 7s): Yeah. Joel (19m 7s): And these guys just got her 125, would you rather, but you know, would you rather have the money in Handshake at that, at that kind of valuation or, or Eightfold? Chad (19m 18s): Handshake? Okay. When you take a look at Handshake or somebody who is more focused in a niche, they know I'm sorry, but $180 million is not enough to make you a leader in this industry. Joel (19m 29s): Fair enough. Fair enough. Time will tell. I'm going to get on record as saying I'd rather be in Eightfold's corner as opposed to Handshake. And in five years, we'll do a show and see who's right and who's wrong. Chad (19m 41s): They both kick ass, take names. And we, and we can actually take a look at some, some business cases around this because everybody that I've talked, I mean, everybody that I talked to, they were all like, that's way too much money, too much money, too fast. Joel (19m 56s): Well, someone I think we can agree is a wrong bet is going to be Monster who was in the news this week, they've partnered with Job Sync or should say Death Match winner, Job Sync. They're integrating with monster to streamline the apply process. You know, I think it's, this is similar to Monster outsourcing video to video my job. It's, it's a situation of, we'd rather outsource it, use someone else's tech than try to buy it or try to either buy it or build it ourselves. And I think that in, in hindsight, when we look at the story with CareerBuilder and the outage that they had, and a lot of that was like, okay, let's call back all the engineers that we fired to me. Joel (20m 43s): This is a real nice juxtaposition with Eightfold and saying, Monster should be doing these big things. And they should have been doing it 10, 15 years ago. And they did. And we're seeing these companies die in front of us and leveraging other people's technology when they should be doing it themselves. I think it's a great win for Job Sync. A Monster still gets nice traffic. It's a nice logo to put on their website, but long-term, I think this is indicative of, of sort of like the sickness that's that's had that's had Monster for years and not being able to take the initiative and build this stuff themselves. Eightfold, at least in contrast to that is building this stuff themselves has the core competency so I thought this was a nice story to sort of build, you know, tale of two cities. Joel (21m 30s): Who's up, who's down? Monster, definitely down in my eyes. Chad (21m 35s): Yeah. Well, you see Monster had matching with TroveX way, you know, years ago. And that was the best matching that was on the market back then, period. They bought it. It was theirs. The problem was, once again, Monster wanted to be everything to everybody. They were a Jack of all trades. That's what they started to be. And they became master of the shit pile. Right. So again, I mean, I think, you're making my point for me, whether it's happening now or it happened, then there is so much history to be able to understand that if you can do something and be the expert in it, in this type of a segment and just kill it as opposed to try to do everything, your opportunity indeed, your opportunity to actually win the mountain is much greater. Chad (22m 24s): So that's why I think, you know, that was Monsters folly and it, hopefully not, but I, I th I think it's going to be Eightfolds folly as well. Joel (22m 32s): Well, I think part of Monster's folly was hubris in thinking that they were the shit. Chad (22m 36s): Did you read the press release? Jobs for everybody? I mean, give me a, I mean, there there's, there's the same shit that's happening. Joel (22m 43s): There's, there's, there's, there's a high level of ambition and there's hubris and there's, those are two different tales of maybe the same coin. I don't know, two sides of the same coin, but, you know, and by the way, I mean, monster, I think it's at its height, it was a $10 billion valuation. You would probably know better than I would, at the height of the .com craziness. So it's kind of funny that we're talking about a billion dollar company as being crazy anyway, that's the industry that we're in. So anyway, by the way, valuation of, of Eightfold is more than the selling price of CareerBuilder and Monster together. So you have that. Chad (23m 21s): Talking about money. Joel (23m 23s): Yeah. We're talking about money. So George LaRocque doing work, his partnership with Unleash they've released funding figures for Q3, I believe. And it's, it's a big number total for everything that's gone out is 1.6, for 8 billion that's for Q3 2020 resulting in a 15 quarter average of 862.3 million. This quarters investment was spread across 67 deals. This made Q3 2020, the second largest quarter for HR tech VC investment. Since the rock began tracking it in 2017, the main themes of a lot of the companies that got money were collaboration and communication, learning, wellness, core HR shit and safety. Joel (24m 15s): A few, companies worth noting that we talk about on the show in terms of talent, traction, where Gem, the Mom Project, by the way, if you haven't listened to our interview with them, go back and look at that in the archives and our buddies at Jobcase, we've done a few interviews with them. So that was sort of my take, the money is flowing a pandemic be damned, the money's flowing. Chad (24m 38s): Yeah. I mean, funding was slowed by COVID. So, I mean, there's, there was this buildup that the market was looking in and trying to see what was going to happen? And then that buildup just turned into a huge shot of a wad in Q3. Joel (24m 54s): A lot of pent up. Chad (24m 56s): Yeah. A lot of pent up. Yeah. So, you know, 67 deals, 41 of them happening in the US the number two was UK with seven deals. But George did say what's missing from this report? Job boards and a new COVID world. You know, we've got to ask ourselves, are we going to finally move away from duration based job posting platforms and toward more targeted performance driven, programmatic? Are, we're going to really start looking at, as Eightfold gets a shit ton of cash looking at using that on the candidates that we already have? Joel (25m 34s): Yep. Chad (25m 34s): The necessary evil of posting jobs on job boards goes down dramatically, because you're going to start leveraging the candidates that you've bought over the past, who knows two, three, 10, who knows how many years. So I think COVID is really changed many different ways that we look at this process and this industry, whether it is matching versus posting or automation versus people for scale. Joel (26m 3s): Yeah. Yeah. And it, which is a real contrast to many of his prior reports, which talks a lot about money, still going into job boards. Job boards, aren't dead. And there, there certainly were two on this list, Jobcase, which was sort of a little bit of a, it wasn't like an original deal. That was a little bit of engineering. I think you can go back and listen to that podcast. The Mom Project certainly was a play on job boards, but it was also play on diversity and a few other things. So even the job boards that are getting funded, they have to have something extra. They can't just be, you know, Toledojobs.com and get somebody. Gotta be a little more than that. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (26m 41s): If you want to go deeper into the numbers, just go to unleashgroup.io in a great job. Once again, George, you're already always putting out the money shot, man. Joel (26m 51s): Yep. And he's already building that database cause you got to register for the site to actually read this shit. Very nice. Well, you know who you don't have to register for? Chad (26m 60s): What? Joel (27m 0s): JobadX. Let's take a quick break. JobAdX PROMO (27m 2s): Are you prepared to engage the wave of returning job seekers? Whether you're struggling to fill high volume, hourly roles or looking for longterm full time talent, your recruiting toolkit needs to be lean and mean as you adjust with fewer resources, tighter budgets and rapid hiring needs in a saturated and competitive market. Posting jobs, shouldn't be a lengthy, risky or fruitless process. You can count on JobAdX to be your force maximizer. Automate the details of your programmatic job ad distribution candidate targeting and budget management so you can focus your energy on the big picture and human aspects of recruiting top talent. Reach relevant candidates effortlessly across 200 sites in the U S and Canada. JobAdX PROMO (27m 42s): Simply upload a feed of your jobs and set your budget in less than five minutes. We do the rest. Getting an influx of applicants already that just aren't the right fit JobAdX presents your jobs to targeted candidates based on their job preferences to get granular. Now your advertising spend can go towards more relevant candidates, not just more applicants. What's more your JobAdX programmatic campaigns now reach for government job bank systems in over 30 States, giving you centralized access to the majority of active job seekers, eager to get off of unemployment and get back to work. 3 (28m 13s): Send us a note today with your unique challenge, to see how we can help you in the new state of recruiting, make the next step forward and start your results focused campaign now at JobAdX.com that's JobAdX.com. Chad (28m 30s): Everybody's so sure. Now everyone. Joel (28m 34s): So Chad, I posted on LinkedIn a while back basically like who's dumb enough to build Tiktok for jobs. And a few weeks later, someone messaged me and said, these guys are dumb enough to do it. Chad (28m 49s): Tada! Joel (28m 50s): So, so yeah, they're, they're on iPhone. I don't know if you've checked to see if they're on Android or not. Chad (28m 55s): No. Joel (28m 55s): But it's heroesjobs, which is a great name heroesjobs. So it's awful. If you remember, if you remember like the, the Tinder for Jobs folks or the Instagram for Jobs where like you would, you would swipe left and right. And all you would get is basically a job description. You would get words, you wouldn't get anything cool and interactive from companies, which by the way, you never will. And then like, Oh, that's a job I'd like swipe, right. Oh, that's not a job I want so swipe left. Jobor was an acquisition by Monster that I, that I recall. So this is similar. They give you jobs based on where you are. Joel (29m 36s): They're not relevant at all. I mean, I got jobs for, you know, server and shit that I am not qualified for whatever, would ever do. So that was really a waste of my time. And then it was just job descriptions. And if I wanted to apply, I had to create a cute little video, with filters and everything else to apply to a job. They talk about being able to chat with companies, which I really doubt that because these people aren't actually customers, they're just pulling jobs from somewhere else. So this is a piece of shit. I haven't said hot garbage in a long time, but this thing is hot garbage! It's humorous because they have a ton of positive reviews on Apple, which is bullshit. Like there's no way that many people use this piece of junk and even if they do use it, they're not happy with it. Joel (30m 22s): So heroesjobs. If you want to waste about 10, 15 minutes of your time that you'll never get back, go check it out on your iPhone. Chad (30m 29s): Yeah. The last thing that we need in the hiring process right now is more video applications for goodness sakes. I mean, it's, we just talked about matching and then also screening to be able to make sure that you get the right people faster. This is laden with bias. I mean, this is just, this is dumb. I did just check an Android. It is on Android with like over 10,000 downloads? Joel (30m 57s): Yeah right. Chad (30m 57s): It's just, it's it to me again this is somebody who does not know how this industry works and they're like, Oh, there's no Tiktok for jobs? Yeah, there's a reason for that, dumb ass. Joel (31m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. Are we sure this isn't the Cootbie guys that, that launched this thing? Cause it's really bad. All right. I'm done wasting time on heroes jobs. Let's talk about a real company that we may or may not agree is a good idea. Everyone's Social. They actually got some money, 7.6 million in a series. A Everyone's Social is basically corporate social media. So imagine Facebook at your company. We have Yammer, which was basically Twitter at your company. We kind of know what happened to them, but what are your thoughts on a social media solution for your company? Chad (31m 52s): From my understanding, I mean, it, it, it is, and this is what the description is. Everyone's Social is an employee advocacy platform used by organizations to best engage employees and empower marketing sales, recruiting, and communications through social media. So this is like a social media aggregator and a platform so that you can use it through your company, kind of like aggregator, right. Which is, which is employee social. The big question is, do you want your employer in your social media business? Because that's what it is. They're going to, they're going to suggest that you use these tweets that marketing has created for you or these Facebook posts or what have you. Chad (32m 39s): No, I don't, I don't want to see any of this. And this to me is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Joel (32m 47s): Yeah. Chad (32m 47s): Can employers mandate that their employees use these platforms? I don't fucking think so. So I think to easily round this out, these are two ideas that are hot garbage! Joel (33m 1s): When I read this story, I looked back to Eons. It reminded me of the, and so for listeners that don't know, Jeff Taylor Monster, founder leaves Monster, and he creates a social network for old people called Eons. I know you remember it. Oh yeah. If you go YouTube, the old commercial, it's great. Like see if you can find it on, on, on YouTube. But the thing with Eons was old. People don't want to know that they're old, right? They don't want to be on some geriatric blue haired social media site when all the cool kids are over here on what at the time was probably MySpace, but Facebook as well, like this feels very similar. Joel (33m 42s): Like why do I want to be a dork on my corporate social media site? So anyway, I just think people will use this because they have to, because their boss says, Hey, you're not socializing. And I can totally see like the marketing manager roaming the hall saying, Hey, have you guys posted anything on Everyone's Social today? Or have you guys shared that story on everyone's social and people being really pissed off at the marketing manager for bugging them to do something on this site. To me, it's a waste of time. I don't see a whole ton of value. How the hell they got 7.6 million is beyond me, but Hey, hot garbage for both these guys. I dig it. It's Halloween. Joel (34m 21s): Fuck 'em. Chad (34m 23s): Jeff Taylor with Eons created this community of 50 plus owners who could write obituaries about their friends. Well, that was the only thing that works. All he really needed to do was create a dating network for 50 plus people. That was very specific because again, all people want to do no matter what their age is get laid on the internet. Joel (34m 52s): You're right. And one of the earliest, one of the earliest like good businesses on the internet and still continues to be, is dating. Yes, it will. And forever continue to be a good business model. But yes, Eons is basically become obituaries. I don't think it's still around. Is it? Chad (35m 7s): I do not believe so. Joel (35m 9s): Eons.com. Who knows? They've got a bunch of money, Chad (35m 10s): But, but there, there are 44% of the population who can't even fucking get there in the first place. Joel (35m 17s): Yeah. So it's not so a little correction. It's not 44% of everybody. It's 44% of households with income under 30 grand don't have high-speed internet. So it's not quite as big a number as you related. This is a Pew Report from data. From last year. I got some, I posted this on social media and there was a good amount of, you know, pushback from people like who gives a shit, you know, internet is for fun and internet is checking email and shit. Chad (35m 45s): What?! Joel (35m 45s): And it's unfortunate that people still think of the internet as that. To me, I think we're going to be on the same page here. Yeah. Internet high-speed particularly for, for kids that are in school, particularly now, when they're being homeschooled and let's face it, we're going to lose a generation of kids that can't keep up. That aren't learning right now and are being left behind. But the real question is should, should internet and broadband be considered a utility similarly to how, you know, we all use the same roads. We all have electricity grids that we can all use. I certainly think that we're getting to a point where broadband is as important as the roads and heating and water and running water. Joel (36m 30s): And I think that it could even be considered almost like section eight housing, right, where poor families could apply for it. Government would subsidize whatever service that they were using up to a certain amount of money. You know, if the family, if there's if the felonies, if a felony was committed, you could sort of have that as a thing like, Hey, you're going to lose, you're potentially going to lose your high-speed internet for criminal activity. But to me, like, it's just that important. And, and to think that, you know, what, if we empower the next, you know, cancer cure or what if we empower the next great scientist that takes us to, you know, planets unknown. And it's worth it to me to pay, to make that investment in young people and families to give poor people broadband, to sort of enable them to do that. Joel (37m 17s): I don't like the idea of leaving behind so many kids that just don't have the wherewithal and it's not their fault necessarily that they don't. Yeah. And, and we, as a society should help them to stay, to stay up as much as possible with kids that do have the wherewithal. Chad (37m 35s): Who created the internet? Joel (37m 36s): The government. Chad (37m 37s): Yeah. So why in the hell are companies taking something my tax dollars fucking paid for and charging me an arm and a leg for broadband. I mean, while not affording it to every single American at an affordable price. Now let's jump further into this, this rabbit hole for a minute. COVID is exposing the USA's weaknesses. These are ones that we've known for for decades, but they're becoming even worse instead of investing in people and paying them a better wage, which is one of the reasons why 44% of this cohort couldn't actually afford internet because we're not fucking paying them enough. We're not paying them enough. Chad (38m 18s): And we're not using the money to build infrastructure like broadband to rural communities. We sent the money to the top, waiting for it, to trickle down to the tune of $2.5 trillion per year. We are having these problems today. People can't, they've got, they have to choose between food and rent versus being able to allow their kids to actually go to school online because we're not paying them enough. And because the wage chasm is now part of our lives here in the US. Joel (38m 53s): Was it you who shared the story of the school kid that would walk to his school and sit outside of it, to get the internet connection, because they, the school was closed, but the internet was still available and he would walk and basically sit outside the school to access internet. And by the way, the libraries are closed too. So the argument of like, well, they can just go to the library, is a little bit shallow in my opinion. Chad (39m 16s): The problem is, that the middle class is looking at working class and saying, why can't you do better? There's dissension within those two ranks, as opposed to looking up to the top where all the fucking money's going, that's where we have a problem. We don't have. It's not the fault of these kids that they can't get fucking broadband. And it's not the fault of these, these individuals who are only making $30,000 a year when the fucking minimum wage is only 7.25. Yeah. Or maybe, maybe, maybe $15. We're trying to get it up to $15. That's only $30,000 a year before taxes people. Chad (39m 56s): Yeah. We don't pay our people enough. We need to take care of them and build infrastructure instead of making sure motherfucker has a new yacht. Joel (40m 5s): You know, you brought up, you brought up a good point as well in terms of the rural angle. And I think that, that people default to sort of inner city kids, when there's a lot of evidence that says rural kids are really suffering right now in terms of being able to access technologies like this. And unfortunately it won't happen. Like we can't even agree on, on healthcare for kids that can't afford it. Like, we're definitely not coming to any conclusions on broadband internet for children. So we can argue this till the cows come home, but it's probably not going to happen. Chad (40m 39s): Can we end on a light note after this ad for goodness sakes? Joel (40m 43s): Yeah. Yeah, we can. Is it too early to start drinking? Probably. Chad (40m 47s): No. Hold on. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (40m 49s): Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry, the more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com, that's S O V R E N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren ~ software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad (41m 16s): Eli Dodi and BK Marketing is on fire! Joel (41m 22s): Crushing it! Crushing it! Chad (41m 23s): Fire! so in the spirit of Bloody Mary, get it spirit. If you say canceled clown, three times in front of a mirror in certain Burger King restaurants in Scandinavia, the lights will dim and a vision of a scary ass ronald McDonald will appear. The nightmare is stunt is part of a fast food chains, Halloween campaign in Sweden and Denmark made possible by new voice recognition software. And I was just thinking about this dude, was the Ronald McDonald face one of the new 10 Guy upgrades they announced? Joel (42m 2s): Well, if being interviewed by a robotic Ronald McDonald, isn't scary as shit, I don't know what it is. Did you see the video of the kids that went running out of the restaurant? It's fucking great, man. Crushing it. Unbelievable. Chad (42m 19s): And then a few other stunts in, in July Burger King, Finland offered customers free delivery If they ordered their food to McDonald's and it placed ads for this outside of McDonald's restaurants. Then last month, Burger King Finland unveiled posters featuring Ronald McDonald and their Burger King kissing as a part of Helsinki pride. We talked about this on the show and recently Burger King in Luxembourg. I love this. And Belgium asked the Michelin guide to review its restaurants after suggesting that its new burger was worthy of a coveted Michelin star. Chad (43m 0s): These are all just fucking marketing gold! Joel (43m 5s): For sure, by the way, are you, are you doing Halloween this year? Are you going to dress up? Chad (43m 9s): We'll dress up, but we're going to put candy on the porch like in a bowl and just kinda like let self-serve Joel (43m 16s): So what's your costume? What are you going with this year? Chad (43m 19s): I've got a skeleton with a top hat and a cane. Joel (43m 23s): Okay. Is this like the body suit with the bones? Is it glow in the dark? Chad (43m 27s): Yes, it is. Joel (43m 28s): That's nice. So I'm debating whether I'm doing the prisoner, like the 1930s with the ball and chain prison, prison outfit or the beekeeper, which Christine, my wife has a bee outfit and Peepers, our dog has a bee outfit. So it might be like those two days with me with like the net, the netting mask and all that good stuff. So yeah, we're going to, we're going to find some time to have a few drinks, have a good time. Watch our three-year-old go nuts with candy and run around the neighborhood. And try to forget 2020 for a few hours. Chad (44m 2s): And that being said, you said something about a beer. Joel (44m 5s): I did. Are you thirsty too? Chad (44m 7s): I am. We Out. Joel (44m 9s): We Out. OUTRO (44m 10s): Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with 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 cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. OUTRO (44m 54s): And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.