Remember when you thought Microsoft had lost their collective mind when they dropped $26.2 billion for LinkedIn? HA! Well, it looks like Microsoft is going to have the last laugh because LinkedIn is crushing it. And who’s not crushing it? How about Monster? Shocker, right? Of course, there’s more WFH and COVID insanity that the boys cover. How about some MadMen, 2021-style? Got that too. Oh, and Walmart does some good (suck it, Amazon!) Give it up for our friends at Sovren, JobAdX, 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 (35s): Oh yeah. Yeah. Two guys who will never put their mental health ahead of this show. We're live in Detroit rock city for this one. What's up boys and girls. It's the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host Joel "eight mile" Cheeseman. Chad (50s): And this is Chad "speak for your own damn self" Sowash. Joel (53s): On this week's, show LinkedIn crushes it, the boss wants you back in the office, like now, and job.com calls JG Wentworth 877-cash-now, 877-cash-now! When did we last do a face-to-face show? Chad (1m 13s): I can't remember. Joel (1m 14s): Columbus. Chad (1m 15s): I can't remember. It's been a while. Joel (1m 17s): A long time man. Chad (1m 18s): When we pulled the mics out, we sat down and I mean, we've done them in bars. We've done them in lobbies and he's always fun. Doesn't matter. Joel (1m 25s): That's the morning after. Chad (1m 26s): Warning after is generally in the morning, after which much drinking. Joel (1m 30s): Rubbing the sleep out of our eyes. Chad (1m 31s): And that being said, we're now in downtown Detroit, in the Western, thanks to Symphony Talent. They brought us up and we enjoyed some time in Lansing. Got to go and surprise Tim Sackett. Joel (1m 46s): Beautiful Lansing. Chad (1m 47s): And give him some beer. And that was a good time. Debbie, Gina, Aya, Gabby, and the rest of the Symphony Talent crew, we did, there was a lot of work that we did in pulling together content for Transform. Joel (2m 4s): Transform. Chad (2m 5s): If you haven't registered for Transform yet, go to SymphonyTalent.com, find Transform, register. You're going to love it. They are doing so much amazing fun work. Good to see Tim. Good to see obviously, Joel (2m 22s): You know, easy JZ makes a special appearance. Chad (2m 26s): Josj Zywien, Julie and Torrin, obviously they came up, they came up with us. So it's been a good time. Joel (2m 33s): And thanks to the city of Detroit. Thanks. We're seeing the Renaissance firsthand. The city is pulling itself out of the rust belt brand. It's quite a nice setting. Now, if you come here, it needs to be in July, August. Oh gosh. February. Wouldn't be quite as delightful, but this has been a great time. Chad (2m 52s): Talking about what else isn't delightful. This Olympics is still holding strong as my number three worst Olympics ever, whether it's COVID, whether it's, you know, people pulling out, the marijuana fiasco and this is just turning out to be that Olympics that will have not just an asterisk, but like multiple asterisks. Joel (3m 15s): No, one's watching this Olympics. Really? The ratings are horrible, man. Not no surprise. Chad (3m 22s): Fire alarm. This is the kind of stuff that happens on the live Chad and Cheese. Joel (3m 29s): Do you wanna take a break and edit this out? Chad (3m 31s): We'll take a break. Yeah. Joel (3m 33s): Or keep going? And so my first shout out in relation to your Olympics comment, I talked about the 1936 Olympics last time, and I listened to a podcast called This Week in History by the History Channel. And if you, if you want more information on the 1936 Olympics, this one coincided with our discussion, they talk about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Nazi Germany. They talk about Jesse Owens and Mack Robinson, who is Jackie Robinson's older brother. Yeah. That is awesome. Yeah. They both in the race, they ran both broke the world record Jesse one by then two tenths of a second. Joel (4m 13s): And just the aftermath of the Olympics coming back to a country that was segregated and the challenges there. So yeah, if that's something that's interesting, it's this week in This Week in History by the History Channel, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Chad (4m 28s): Yeah and that being said on the same line, there's a new movie that came out like two, three years ago or something like that called Race. And that is an amazing story about Jesse Owens. And there's a little Ohio state love there, obviously, but it was a great as a great movie. Joel (4m 46s): There's a great statue of Jesse Owens in Cleveland, which I think is where he grew up. And yeah, Hitler would not pose for a picture with Jesse Owens. No surprise there. Chad (4m 55s): Go figure. Joel (4m 56s): But the Olympic committee told Hitler, apparently either you take pictures with everyone or you take pictures with no one and he took pictures with no one. Chad (5m 3s): Yeah. Joel (5m 3s): From that point forward. Chad (5m 5s): Cause he's that asshole. A big shout out to Teg Grenager. Remember that guy? Joel (5m 10s): Yeah, Teg! Chad (5m 11s): Remember Dave from Uncommon. Joel (5m 13s): Teg your it! Chad (5m 15s): He's the CEO now over at Joinable, believe he's one of the co-founders as well. And they just raised 1.5 million in seed funding. So congrats Teg. It's not in recruiting and marketing. Joel (5m 28s): Which is smart. Chad (5m 29s): Yes. Yeah. Joel (5m 31s): He learned from that mistake. Chad (5m 32s): It's like, yeah, let's, let's get the fuck out of this. So congrats, congrats, Teg. Joel (5m 36s): Well, speaking of new faces, a shout out to Sue Arthur. We mentioned her as the new CareerBuilder CEO. So a little bit about her. She's a tech industry leader who's held senior positions at Hewlett Packard and electronic data systems or EDS as it's more popularly known and most recently oversaw $10 billion technology division within the United Health Group. So she's got a little bit of tech chops. So we'll see if she can turn things around there at CB. Chad (6m 5s): Yeah, because they really don't have much left. I mean, they sold everything right. And everything's pieces parts. So they're trying to sell off Broadbean now. So I mean, you know, maybe that changes with her coming in and they don't look to sell it, but all the vibes that I've gotten is that they're trying to sell it. Joel (6m 21s): You think she's coming in to sell? Chad (6m 22s): I don't know where it goes, man. I don't know. Joel (6m 25s): I'm still on the comeback. Still betting on the Yahoo comeback. Chad (6m 28s): They could have stayed with Irina because for God's sakes, that's all she did was sell shit off. Right. So she's proven that she can do that. So this move to Sue is I think it's incredibly interesting, which they could be changing strategies. You talking about the whole Yahoo connection. I think that's all bunk. Joel (6m 46s): I mean, they gotta be looking at all the money going into this space and thinking maybe we should rethink that strategy. Rethink that strategy. Chad (6m 54s): Shout out to EEOC commissioner Keith Sonderling. He's making some waves in a very good way. He asking the hard questions in an AJC column where he faces down discriminations for veterans, hiring discrimination for veterans and asks if veterans should be a protected class. And this is something that in our space we've been talking about for a long time, should veterans be a protected class? So we, I mean, we'll at least start having that discussion at that level, at the EOC level, the commissioner level. Joel (7m 28s): Shout out to the artist, formerly known as the Cleveland Indians, who I'll talk about their new name in a second, but shout out to them for taking the bold step of erasing the name Indians and the derogatory. Chad (7m 41s): They kept the dians though. Joel (7m 43s): Yes, they did the Dians. They should have just been the Cleveland dians. So shout out to them for making that move. That was a strong move of support for equality. Now to the name. I hate it. I think it, it sounds like an arena football team. Okay. It's very localized. Guardians of the Galaxy comes to mind. A lot of people. Chad (8m 4s): I was fighting for the spiders. Joel (8m 5s): Which was one of the original early 1800s names. Now a lot of the local vibe was that the spiders team was one of the worst teams in major or baseball history, so they wanted to stay away from that. But I loved being going, reaching back to the past and bringing in the old name. Not hot on the Guardians. Don't like it, the visualization, the ball with the wings, looks like the old Angel's logo. I could go on for another hour. I will not, but I just want to state, I don't like the name. Chad (8m 35s): And you're still going to buy jerseys. They're just not going to say Guardians on it. They're going to say Cleveland. Joel (8m 40s): That's exactly right. Chad (8m 41s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so no worry about that. You're still gonna get the schwag. You're still gonna get the gear. Shout out to gen X-ers. So apparently it's becoming harder for those 45 plus to find jobs mid-career workers are seen as having weaker skills than younger workers. Do you get this shit? What a great way. And this is another way that corporate America is engineering a narrative, and this is such bullshit and has nothing to do with skills. Rather, the dollars older workers demand for their experience, their connections and their basic value. So, you know, this is where all the smoke and mirrors of the skills gap is engineered. Chad (9m 21s): I gotta thank, you know, our Columbia professor of economic Suresh Naidu for opening our eyes to that bullshit. I mean, you knew it was engineered, but how did it actually impact? Right. A skills gap and so on and so forth. We're seeing it right before our eyes. Joel (9m 39s): We're not the cool kids anymore, Chad. Chad (9m 41s): We're the expensive kids. Joel (9m 42s): We're the outcasts. Chad (9m 44s): We are the expensive kids. Yeah, we've always been the outcasts. Joel (9m 47s): We don't run things and we're not cool anymore. So we're in this no man's land of hipness. And I quote the great, great Nirvana when I say, oh, well, whatever, nevermind. Shout out to free shit, everybody. We just announced the winners from this, or last month, we're going to redrawing a new couple of names out of the hat. So there's still time to put your name in, go to Chadcheese.com/free. We got shirts by Emissary. We got beer by Adzuna and we got whiskey powered by Sovren. If you're not there, what's your problem? Chad (10m 24s): Well, yeah. What is your problem? It was funny. Jonathan Zilla from a recruiter actually posted that. He keeps trying to like go back and register again and again, and the form won't let him and it pops up and says, you've already registered. Joel (10m 40s): Yeah, you don't get any better chances if you reregister, sorry. J-Z out of Philly's trying to work his poach subscription to winning a, some free stuff. So totally random guys. I'm telling you, we go to random.org. We put in the numbers and it spits out a winner. Chad (10m 57s): Too funny, too funny. Joel (10m 59s): Well, speaking of winners, let's talk about birthdays real quick. A birthday is celebrating here this week or next Maren Hogan of the industry. Chad (11m 7s): Oh Maren! Joel (11m 7s): She's a turning another year older. Jim Schneider, Crystal Lay, my buddy up north Serge Boudreau. Chad (11m 14s): Serge! Joel (11m 15s): Kipp Birtwistle is a big fan. Chad (11m 20s): Kipp Birtwistle Joel (11m 21s): Kipp Birtwistle that's a mouthful. His company is a big fan of the show. They wanted us to send him a happy birthday. So KIPP have a couple on us buddy. Happy Birthday. Chad (11m 34s): Yeah. and when you're out with your buddies, Todd and Chet have a beer for us. Topics! Joel (11m 45s): Before we get to topics, we have a sad note that we need to highlight. So John Malore, lot of the industry folks will know. He founded Jobs in Sports, out of Arizona. It's about a 20 year old job site. Chad (12m 0s): Yeah. It has been around forever! Just sold it. Joel (12m 4s): Yeah. He just sold it. And now it's maybe, maybe understanding why apparently John lost a battle with cancer this week and has left us. I've always respected him. He's always been a really nice guy. He's always had sort of an aw shucks, like just salt of the earth mentality. He's always been humble and polite to me. So heart's out a heart goes out to him and his family in this hard time, but he will be missed. Chad (12m 34s): There was never a time at a conference that seeing John Malore didn't make you smile. Cause you know, you got to see him again. You got that, but just handshake. Joel (12m 43s): Just a big teddy bear. Chad (12m 46s): That big smile, you know, and it just going to miss that such a great guy. This is a huge loss, and if we're obviously family, friends, but also for an industry that, you know, we need your guys. Joel (13m 4s): Yeah. Look, this industry is built on people. Our business is built on people and we have some of the best people in the world that play in our space and we're honored to be part of that. And we'll definitely miss the folks that we've gotten to know over the decades. Well Chad a lot of folks thought Microsoft was nuts for paying 26 billion for LinkedIn, but it's looking like they may have gotten a bargain. As part of its quarterly earnings announcement a Microsoft official said revenues from its LinkedIn subsidiary were up 46% compared to the year ago, quarter driven by strong advertising demand in marketing solutions to the tune of 97% growth year over year. Joel (13m 48s): Microsoft doesn't disclose exact LinkedIn revenues or profits, but officials did say the LinkedIn advertising business did surpass $1 billion this quarter for the first time. Microsoft added LinkedIn is now a $10 billion source of annual revenue. Chad, are you finally ready to drink some LinkedIn Kool-Aid? Chad (14m 10s): The LinkedIn Kool-Aid is being gobbled up by talent acquisition and recruiter seats all over the world. Right? Joel (14m 18s): Gotta have it. Chad (14m 19s): Yeah. I still believe that they are not an innovative organization. Right? They're doing and again, in talent, acquisition and recruiting, you really don't have to be innovative. I mean, how long did Monster hang around? CareerBuilder? I mean, we talk about CareerBuilder hanging around and they did not innovate at all, still aren't. So, you know, the big question is how long do they hang on to this kind of market share? But the growth marketing solutions up 97%? LinkedIn advertising business over a billion dollars, like you said this quarter for the first time ever. And you know, we wonder why so many people want to get into the recruitment and hiring game in the marketing space, right. Chad (15m 7s): The market, which is pretty much a feeding frenzy right now. Joel (15m 11s): Yep. Chad (15m 11s): Everybody sees it. LinkedIn and these numbers demonstrate it. Right. So that's why we're seeing so much money that, the first six months it was over $7.5 billion dumping into it. This is the reason why. Joel (15m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. And all that started with Microsoft's writing a check essentially for $26 billion. And that was one of the comments of our industry or comments, comets, asteroids. That's easier to say. In our industry and a little bit of context, this makes LinkedIn bigger than Twitter. Makes it bigger than Snap, a little context there. They're they're well, on their way to 800 million members, they still have a link into China, which other social networks don't enjoy that level of access. So as far as I'm concerned, when I talked to two companies, it's geez, we hate LinkedIn. It's too damn expensive, but yeah, we gotta be there. And I don't see that changing anytime soon, as long as they have the people. Chad (16m 7s): Yeah, totally agree. You've got to remember though, back 10 years ago, everybody was, God, I hate Monster, but we got to have it. And we're like, okay, so what's the ROI. Well, the ROI doesn't really make sense, but it's something that our people just feel like they have to have. I think this is the same kind of scenario. Joel (16m 29s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would have been nice for Monster to have someone like Microsoft out. It's sort of just integrated things into that system. So that's a nice, Chad (16m 36s): a 800 pound gorilla Joel (16m 38s): that LinkedIn has at its disposal. And don't forget they own Get Hub, which is a treasure trove of tech talent. Chad (16m 44s): It is, but we haven't seen any type of the integration that we thought we would. You know, so there's really nothing happening there that's innovative. And we really thought that something was going to happen innovative in that space. Joel (16m 58s): True. True. We have not seen the integration on either of those platforms into Microsoft, that we thought that we would. We're going to another, some other employment industries that are having a good go of it. But we'll talk about a little bit of stagnation in that picture here in a bit. So if you don't believe the world is back, both Randstad and Adecco reported impressive numbers this past week, Randstad reported second quarter revenue rose 38% year over year, while second quarter revenue at the Adecco Group rose 29%. Big numbers, but Monster is still stuck in the mud. Randstad reported the Monster job board business is quote, "showing positive year over year momentum," Joel (17m 42s): whatever that means, but they did not disclose any numbers. So Chad big growth at the mothership, not so much with the children. Chad (17m 51s): Yeah. If this isn't a troubling sign for any business in our space, if you are not seeing growth and I'm not just talking LinkedIn growth, right. I'm just talking growth overall. These guys are really, I mean, they're flatlining and they're happy to be flat lining that's that's the horrible part about this, right? Joel (18m 11s): They're not shrinking. And by the way, you remember, remember this story. I don't know if it was in fortune or Forbes about how Monster was going to reach juvenate itself and target younger workers. I wonder if that's the momentum that Randstad is talking about that article, that bullshit advertorial that was in Forbes or Fortune. Whichever one? Chad (18m 30s): It was definitely an advertorial to be able to prop Monster in, and Scott Gutz guts up, you know, to be able to try to maybe that was the momentum who knows. Yeah. But overall, I mean, seriously, you take a look at Monster, we talked about a little bit earlier. When you are not innovating when you have it and you really can't at this point, here's why you have old ass tech and you have technical debt that you're paying every single day because you did not 10 years ago rebuild right from the ground up with new models, like an Indeed model or something like that. Right. When you don't, when you take that car and you don't service it, or you don't do any of that, it's going to blow up that they can't do what they want with this old jalopy. Chad (19m 16s): Now that remember the video, my job Monster studios integration, right? That was a demonstration because it took like six months a demonstration of what a jalopy they have. Joel (19m 29s): And we're still waiting for Instagram for Jobs, by the way, from the job acquisition. And you mentioned innovation, but don't forget the branding piece of that. We're looking at probably the strongest brand in our space, 20, 15, 20 years ago. They've lost that to an entire generation who thinks Monster is an energy drink and has no association with Monster as a job site. So Monster is getting on, on both ends, no innovation, and they're losing their brand equity. Chad (19m 53s): On the outside of this industry. When people would ask me what I do, my easy line was I was with Monster before it was Monster. And I've had literally millennials say, oh, I love that drink. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no Monster.com. And they look at me sideways, like, what the fuck are you talking about? Right. What Monster, what? And you know, it's, so I can't even use that anymore. It used to be a staple now in our industry, people know you can do that stuff, but outside that brand as has atrophied and it is pretty much dead. Joel (20m 26s): And gen Z starting to come into the workforce. And that's a whole nother generation that it's an energy drink, not a job site. Well, we've gone from a rocket-ship to stuck in the mud to maybe full on, pull the rip cord and get off the bus, kids. Chad (20m 43s): Could be bad. Joel (20m 44s): So we got a letter from a source, a copy of a letter that went out to vendors of job.com that our customers basically saying that they had sold, job.com had sold their receivables to a third party. So for those in America that no JG Wentworth, this is what I thought of. So JG Wentworth, if you have an annuity or a legal legal claim where you're owed cash, then JG Wentworth would come in and they'll buy your debt for a little bit less than what you would get. And then there's usually like a loan and it's so basically job.com said, we need money now. Joel (21m 24s): So let's sell our future earnings to someone in return for that instant cash. It's clearly not a good sign of business health. Chad (21m 34s): It's a payday loan. Joel (21m 34s): When you do that, it's basically a payday loan. It's not a good sign. So job.com again, we both love Aaron as a person, great guy. And this was a company that, you know, you might listeners might not remember. You know, they came out with the model of job seekers are going to get 5% return on their first year salary. They were flipping the whole script on recruitment fees. They had a credit card. They were going to give you, I mean, there were, there were a lot of big visions and big plans for this company. And they've, since they've just become a job site, and if you go to their site, now, they basically said, okay, all this innovative stuff, let's scrap that we're going to be a job board and drive traffic and then go back to the way that it always is. Chad (22m 19s): Yeah, overall, it's like, if you're trying to do something that is innovative in this industry, you had better do it very slowly in baby steps. So that pretty much, you know, the industry can digest it and then adopt it. Yeah. Joel (22m 35s): I mean, dude came in with a sledgehammer and I'm not sure the market was ready for that kind of aggressiveness Chad (22m 42s): Are ready for is for us to take a break and have another drink of coffee for God's sakes. And we are back. So man, this back to work thing. Joel (22m 53s): Shit's getting hectic. You got some rapids bullet points on what's going on, man. What's what's on your list that people should should know about? Chad (23m 3s): Blizzard. You know, the famous company. Joel (23m 6s): Activision Chad (23m 7s): Yeah, Activistion, Blizzard, you know, they do the really cool ass video games. They're back in the news. They had a walkout over rampant sexism and discrimination, which was reported by the Verge. Joel (23m 20s): They were inspired by the Burger King crew that walked out. Chad (23m 22s): Oh my God, Jesus. Joel (23m 24s): A couple of weeks ago. Chad (23m 25s): There aas a Sherm poll said 67% of remote workers, supervisors considered remote workers at their organization more easily replaceable than onsite workers, according to a poll, a poll by Sherm. It's obviously easier to kick people to the curb when you don't have to look them in the eye. Apple is policing their Slack channels we get into that, the Vikings fire an assistant head coach, also the offensive line coach, Rick Dennison for refusing to get vaccinated. Shake Shack mandates vaccines, not only for employees, but for patrons who want to come in, this is in two states, but still, and then last but not least federal workers, seems like, which is a large, large workforce is going to have a vaccine mandate. Joel (24m 14s): Yeah. Yeah. That would be the Minnesota Vikings for our listeners overseas. That's a USA football team, which is going through its own bit of growing pains. Chad (24m 25s): It is. Joel (24m 25s): Some stars like Deandre Hopkins saying that they may skip the season. They may retire because they're being forced to get the vaccine. Chad (24m 33s): He's not gonna retire, Bullshit. Joel (24m 35s): There's too much money in the league to like play around with COVID. Yeah. They're all getting the shot. Whether they like it or not, which is insane. The stuff that football players probably put in their body. And they're afraid to get a little, a little jab of some vaccine is crazy, but of these bullet points. What like sort of stands out to you is? Chad (24m 52s): Let's talk about the NFL rules real quick. If you're not vaccinated, you're going to be named and shamed. I mean, they will know pretty much. Joel (25m 1s): Your teammates Chad (25m 1s): The public will know who's not vaccinated number one. If the team has a COVID breakout, right? They have to forfeit the game. That's a loss. And also fined if that team gets the one that gets the loss, because they had the COVID outbreak, they also have to pay the salaries for the other team. So, I mean, this is really aggressive. Joel (25m 29s): The NFL ain't playing, they want games on Sundays. They don't want to postpone stuff, reschedule stuff. They want shit back the way it was, printing money and everybody getting paid and a few players that are standing up against this, they're making it very hard not to get the shot. Chad (25m 46s): Yeah. And they don't need, fine don't get the shot, but you're going to be named and shamed. And if any of this happens and you, and you're not vaccinated, I mean, just the ramifications overall. Joel (25m 57s): The ball is rolling on this. You've got the federal employee mandate that Biden is putting through, which makes total sense to me. You've got the NFL, you're going to get every sports league. Chad (26m 7s): Shake Shack. It is hard to find employees in retail and restaurants now, right. And the CEO is making a hard and fast rule, which I gotta say I love, but I'm not sure how long he's going to be able to do it. Number one, from the standpoint of employees and getting enough people who are vaccinated to come work for him, but also people who want to come in and get a burger and eat in your restaurant. You've got to prove that your vaccinated. Joel (26m 35s): Yeah. And look, we're hearing that a lot of people aren't going back to work because of fear of COVID. So does it make sense to say, look, all of our employees are vaccinated and all of our customers are vaccinated, how you police that will be interesting, the two cities that are doing it, I think have plans around that. But if they can get more people back to work who are afraid of getting COVID, then this is a good sign to get people, people back to work. Chad (26m 58s): Well, and that being said, the whole remote work, Apple is policing slack channels. And apparently there was some internal Slack channels that were having very heated, remote work arguments, because they wanted, they wanted to be treated like adults. They wanted their freedom. And there are other individuals I'm sure, supervisors who were saying, well, no, that's the first and foremost, not your choice. Right. I mean, there's just, there's a, there's a lot of heated discussion. And it seems as if Apple is just going to shut that down. Joel (27m 32s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, look, from my perspective, this is going to get really messy over the next 18 to 24 months. Companies are going to have to decide what team are they on? They they're either a hundred percent work from home, Shopify, Twitter, a couple of the ones that are there are well-known I've already been on record as saying, we're a hundred percent virtual. If that's what you want in a workplace, they're going to recruit those kinds of people and that's going to be very good for them. As a result. I think more companies will announce we're a hundred percent work from home. You're going to have the Apples that are hybrids. And for people that want that, they're going to stay at Apple or other other companies. And then you have a growing number, by evidence of the Wall Street Journal story this week about most companies are going a hundred percent. Joel (28m 19s): Most companies are the bosses saying, get your ass back to work. Chad (28m 22s): Wow. Joel (28m 22s): I would venture to say, if you're not a tech worker, a knowledge worker, you're not going to have much of a say in terms of whether your work from home or not, your ass is going to be back in the office like it was before the, before the pandemic. I think another thing to mention on that, you talked about the Sherm study, which I think is one of the more interesting things that came out this week. So more than two thirds of supervisors of remote workers consider remote workers of their organization more easily replaceable than onsite workers. 62% believe a full-time remote work is detrimental to employee's career objectives and 72% would prefer all of their subordinates to be working in the office. Joel (29m 3s): So we're seeing a trend rise of people saying, look, you need to be in the office because if you're not, you're more replaceable. You're more likely to get fired. You're not going to get promoted. And we talked about this this week here at the Transform filming is that I think there's going to be a movement to say, look okay. You can work from home if you want, but you're not going to, because you're going to find yourself in a rut of not getting promotions. You're going to be left behind. You're probably going to see your cohorts that are working from home, get fired more frequently. And it's, there's going to be motivation to come in the office. I used to work for a company that had a vacation policy of just take however much vacation you want. Joel (29m 43s): Like we're not going to police it. Chad (29m 44s): Total bullshit. Joel (29m 45s): What happened is nobody took vacation because everyone felt guilty. We should be working. Imagine these zoom calls where, you know, a third of the people are in the office, they're together. You're going to feel like a real outsider being at home in your pajamas with other people that are in the office. So I think ultimately most companies are going to be a hundred percent, whether they officially say it or not. Chad (30m 6s): And if they do allow, and there isn't, let's say for instance, again, it's all about performance, right? It doesn't matter where you work. It's all about performance. If this is the case, and we have the supervisors who don't want to treat adults like adults, and they want to fire them because they work from home. The EOC will have so many cases open. I mean, they will be crawling up these big brand's asses. And we'll talk about it in another discrimination case next, but this in itself, I dare companies to start doing this because the EOC from an enforcement standpoint, especially under this administration, under this administration, go ahead and get your ass crack ready big boy, because coming up. Joel (30m 53s): Yeah, it's going to get ugly. It's going to get ugly. Chad (30m 55s): I can't wait, because you stupid assholes who won't treat your employees like adults. You don't deserve to have them in the first place. Joel (31m 3s): Culture Chad. It's all about culture. Chad (31m 5s): Culture Control. Well that being said, that's a good, that's a good transition into a mad men. So tell me a little bit about this story. Joel (31m 14s): Yeah. So two white male creative directors at a top London advertising agency have won a sex discrimination claim after a female director vowed to quote obliterate it's mad men reputation of being full of straight white men. Chaz Bayfield and Dave Jenner, both in their fifties and renowned creative directors at the J Walter Thompson or JWT agency were among five men axed from the agency, which is part of WPP because bosses, quote "urgently wanted to address its poor gender pay gap." A tribunal court ruled the men were dismissed in November of 2018 shortly after the firm revealed a median gender pay gap of 44.7%. Joel (32m 0s): The agency's then executive creative director, Lucas Peon described the pay gap statistics as quote, "really, really horrible. In the world cup of sucking at pay gap numbers we made the final." Peon an Emma Hoyle, the company's human resources director called a meeting with Bayfield and Jenner to discuss their concerns. The tribunal heard that that bosses thought the men were challenging the diversity drive. Within two days of the meeting, it had been decided that Bayfield and Jenner would be made redundant. I guess that means fired in England. The employment judge Mark Emery said the men were treated in such a hostile manner it amounted to victimization. Joel (32m 43s): No one said equality. Wouldn't get a little messy. Reverse discrimination is an issue here and it's as it will in the future. But what's your take on, on these two dudes winning this case, we're going to see more of this. Chad (32m 53s): I think, I think it's fairly simple. You know, we have to be smarter about how we do business and if we determine there's a pay gap right, I have three easy steps. Number one, make up the gap, pay those women more. Joel (33m 8s): Stop with your common sense, Chad. Chad (33m 10s): Don't get rid of the highly paid white dudes just pay the women what they're being paid. Right. So, that's number one. Number two, focus on hiring in a more diversified way. Look for more people of color, more women, et cetera, et cetera, right? Because you're saying it's very madman, very white male, straight white male, heavy. Okay, well rectify that you can only do that by, you know, you're hiring and then last but not least ensure that you are paying equitably moving forward. So you start bringing new people in, don't go back to your old standards and fuck this thing up again. So it's really simple. Don't get rid of all the highly paid white dudes, don't get rid of them. Chad (33m 52s): Right? Pay, the women more. Joel (33m 54s): Yup. Yup. And while you're doing that, don't say stupid shit in public like you're going to deep six, all the white people or all the white men in the company, like keep that to yourself. That was the big mistake I think that they made there. Chad (34m 7s): And this is just, you say a black eye for anybody who, you know, is looking to diversify and focus on pay gaps. I mean, just the story itself. It's like, oh my God, well, we might as well do nothing because they did something. And it's like, no, it's not that they did something. They did something very fucking stupid and they didn't do what they should have, which is, you know, raise those women. Joel (34m 30s): Yeah. I think part of, part of the story goes to look, companies are going to want agencies that look more like the world, that look more like their customers. And I think this is going to be a trend where all agencies that look like this are going to have to diversify. They're going to have to look like the market that they're catering to because companies aren't going to deal with all white agencies anymore who don't understand diversity. Chad (34m 56s): Dude, think of the demos. And it being, I was in broadcast before I got into this space, the biggest demo that spends is on the female side. Right? And if you don't have females who are actually in charge of campaigns around anything, right? Joel (35m 15s): Cars. Chad (35m 16s): Makeup, I mean, just anything, right. Joel (35m 18s): Yeah. Chad (35m 19s): Then you're not going to be targeting those women who are spending money. Right. Also individuals of color also. I mean, it just goes on and on trans people, so on and so forth, we're starting to see more of that in advertising today, but that will be much more genuine if you actually have those types of people on your team. Joel (35m 42s): Sure. By the way, that inspired me to, to highlight an eighties classic, Mr. Mom, which took place here in Detroit, that features a woman who goes into an ad agency and changes things up because she brings a real mother's perspective to the agency. So if you're looking for a classic movie that sort of, I dunno, foretells this issue, check out Mr. Mom, which is also pretty damn funny. Chad (36m 7s): Or Tom Hanks in Big cause he was a kid. Joel (36m 10s): Yeah. Let's hire kids everybody, only if they're in an adult body. Chad (36m 16s): Yeah. Let's take a break. Whoo. Are we really going to talk good about Walmart? Joel (36m 23s): Let's end the show on a positive note. Chad (36m 25s): I'm all for it. Joel (36m 28s): So Walmart is removing all costs related to its employee college tuition program, investing $1 billion over the next five years to cover the full price of tuition and books for some 1.5 million employees. The nation's largest private employer will waive the $1 a day fee, which was put in place in 2018 for it's Live Better You program starting August 16th and a bit to boost enrollment. Executives say "the goal is to remove the barriers that too often keep adult worker learners from obtaining degrees." Joel (37m 12s): The program has seen more than 52,000 associates participate and 8,000 earn a degree or certificate. As of this summer, nearly 28,000 associates are active in the program. The strategy is this, an executive said in an interview quote, "our education offerings tied directly to our growth areas of Walmart. And what better way to build a pipeline of future talent than with our own associates?" That's poetry. Chad (37m 40s): Huh? Okay. So first and foremost, just to make sure that we get this, you know, out there, just to make sure that they're also paying a living wage, right? That's the thing. This is big. I love this. But also those individuals in different areas of the universe, I mean, Walmart's a big fucking company, right? To make sure that there's a living wage that's being paid. Yeah. I mean, 52,000 participants, 8,000 earned a degree or certification, like you said, this is how you build leaders and provide transparent career paths. When somebody sees that you support them and you believe in them, right? That's when you get loyal employees, they'll stick with you. Chad (38m 21s): Then when you see that there's a path, there's a path for me to grow here. That's when you keep people and you have great retention numbers and those types of things. So, you know, I think Walmart incredibly smart, they already have a lot of cash. We've noticed that during the pandemic organizations like Walmart, their gains went up dramatically. Right? So this just makes sense reinvest in your people. That's where we, that's where we in the US, I'm going to talk about the US cause I don't know about the rest of the world on this, but this is where we've got it wrong for decades now where we're sending that reinvestment to stockholders instead of reinvesting in our people and making our foundation much stronger. Joel (39m 7s): Yeah. And look, Walmart is doing a really good job of become of being the anti Amazon. So I think we talked about Amazon recently about the churn. They don't give a shit that there's a ceiling on how far you can advance. This is an exact opposite of that strategy. And I'm not exactly sure, but I'm pretty sure the CEO of Walmart started as a bag boy, or he started at the bottom. I'll have to check that, but the story of Walmart is much different than the story that they're building there, is one of come here. We'll grow your career, we will enhance you, we'll make you better. And you're right. Loyalty retention are going to be through the roof. Joel (39m 47s): And I think that good for them if they start pulling Amazon employees who want a future and not just a paycheck, cause this is the strategy Walmart is executing on. Chad (39m 57s): And they don't want to piss in garbage cans anymore. They want to be able to go to school. They want to be able to know that they've got, you know, an opportunity that's there. Not just now, but later. So I know that kudos to Walmart. Joel (40m 8s): Maybe if they get rides in the penis rocket they will get people to stay up at Amazon. Chad (40m 16s): Oh, I think that's a we out. Joel (40m 19s): We out. OUTRO (40m 17s): 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 (41m 1s): 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.

Swapping spit. That's how Venesa Klein describes the never-ending shuffling going on in the C-suite these days, swapping one female executive with another one. And around we go, failing to give fresher talent the chance to shine. In this show, the boys peel the onion and let Venessa of Calibre One cook up some tasty education on the problems of solutions of equality in the workplace. Olé' Boys Club beware. Supported by Sovren, AI so human you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability 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 (20s): Oh yeah. It's your favorite podcast the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am your loyal cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by Chad Sowash. And today, we are just tickled pink and giddy to welcome Venesa Klein, partner at Calibre One to the show. Venesa welcome. Venesa (42s): Thanks so much for having me. Joel (44s): Yeah, so that was a really sparse intro by me. So why don't you give the listeners a little bio Twitter on you? Chad (50s): Long walks on beaches, listening to the Chad and Cheese while you take a bubble bath. Venesa (55s): I am Venesa Klein. I'm a partner at Calibre One, which is a transatlantic executive boutique search firm. And I specialize in go-to-market market searches for our consumer practice. Joel (1m 7s): Very, very exciting. You wrote a blog post that caught our attention, and this was at Venesaklein.com for those who want to check that out, as well as on your LinkedIn account. Chad (1m 18s): Venesa with one n, by the way. Joel (1m 21s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll put that in the show notes, probably. So tell us about the post, what was the inspiration for it? And we'll kind of dig into it. Venesa (1m 29s): Well, the inspiration for the post was as an executive search firm, we're constantly asked to recruit women into the executive suite, at our various client companies. And what has come about is some challenges in doing so, for a number of different reasons, but this idea of companies in particular, startups who are being told, listen, there's a bunch of predominantly men in your executive ranks and now that you have a position open and you're recruiting a CFO or COO or CTO or whatever it might be, we like you as the search partner to find us a woman. Venesa (2m 16s): And what I had noticed was that there was no method internally for these companies to promote from within or there was no, there's no thought around what it's going to take to hire a woman into your executive C-suite, what kinds of things they're thinking about, as to, as opposed to some of the male candidates, and why isn't there a program to promote women from within? And that was what started it. Joel (2m 49s): Before we get into some of the nitty gritty. You talk a lot about what's right for women in the workforce, some of the advancements that women have made, I want to start on a positive note and let you talk about, of the good things on that side. Venesa (3m 1s): Well, there have been a lot of good things for sure. There are, first of all, more companies now have are hiring and have hired recruiters, specifically focused on recruiting diversity candidates, which has led to an increase in recruiting those candidates into companies, which is great. There are some companies have done a really good job of this. It started off early like Genentech who in 2007 had learned that there were five times as many men than there are women in their officer roles and they launched a really top down and bottom up approach to changing that. Venesa (3m 49s): And as of a couple of years ago, they had already doubled the percentage of female officers at the company, and they're still working to increase that. So they have done that successfully. Joel (4m 2s): Further back you talk about graduation rates for women? Number women go into college. All those are, all those numbers are trending in the right direction, yes? Venesa (4m 9s): They are, yes, they are trending in the right direction. Absolutely. Chad (4m 13s): So question around Genentech real quick. To be able to hire somebody directly into a leadership position C-suite or what have you is one thing, but that's short term? Venesa (4m 23s): Right. Chad (4m 23s): What about the long-term buildup, because you have to have females within your ranks to be able to get them ready, to hopefully boost into leadership. And that's where, like you'd said from an internal mobility standpoint, we've had a problem, has Genentech identified that problem? And if so, what have they done to fix it? Venesa (4m 47s): Well, the short answer is yes, they have identified that problem. And I would have to let Genentech kind of speak there, their head of talent acquisition, tell you more of the details around how they have done that. But in addition to increasing their effort to recruit women into leadership positions, they have increased their internal candidate pool by creating programs at the organization that identifies their top performers and promoting them within the organization, in particular focused on women so that their internal candidate pool has broadened. Venesa (5m 29s): And there's a big difference between a large company like Genentech and a startup. And the startups are the ones that are often faced with this challenge of, okay, well, we don't have, we're not a big enough company yet to have enough women within the organization that we can promote into leadership roles. And so they're typically looking for a firm to partner with like Calibre One who can identify and successfully recruit executives that are women into the top ranks of their organization. But to your point, that is not an effective long-term strategy. Chad (6m 4s): So as a client, why would I come to your organization that has 20% females as partners when, if I want to boost to 50% myself. Right. So what, what can you guys do from a leadership standpoint when you're demonstrating 80% of your partners are male today? What are you guys doing to be able to demonstrate that you are actually moving that way yourself? Venesa (6m 31s): Well, a few things. I think there's a couple parts to that questions as to why Calibre One. First of all, internally we actually have two, two additional women partners joining yay for us. We do have an internal mobility program. I myself was promoted from within the organization. I had joined as a principal, which is a non revenue generating role and was promoted into a partner role at Calibre One. So we, and we've done that before from junior research associates, two associates, senior associates, principals to partners. So we have a track record of doing that. Venesa (7m 12s): Importantly, we had identified that there would be this need years ago and have organized our internal data to highlight the great women that we all of us collectively, and this is internationally by the way, the great women candidates that we have come across all have gone into our system and are organized so we can actually see who are the women that we know in each industry and in each function. And we started doing that years and years ago. So we've got a huge list already of women over various functions, across various industries and different geographies. Venesa (7m 53s): In addition to that, you know, search firms all operate in slightly different ways. You just search is search. Everyone kind of does, it's the same methodology and the same kind of process with some nuances. We do a lot of work upfront to really understand what our clients need, what are the KPIs for this role, and flesh that out at an identifying the exact right profile that we need, we're able to quickly go back and go, who else, you know, who do we, who do we already know that are already women, that we've been keeping tabs on? And then how do we help our clients to effectively recruit those women, rather than just here, we're going to present you with this list of some, some great talent you take it from here. Venesa (8m 41s): It's have you thought about a number of different things? What's the culture like on the executive team? Would that need to change? You know, are there ways in which you do off sites that may not be as appealing to a top level woman candidate? Are you ready? You know, for a perception change within your C-suite. And here are the things that are going to matter to women. For instance, many women at this level are at a time in their life where they have kids. And especially during, during COVID where school would be canceled, or someone tests positive, and then you're in an awkward position with childcare, there needs to be flexibility built in to the schedule. Venesa (9m 28s): So that matters. And so what does that look like at your organization? How flexible, how flexible are you? Women tend to want to talk about compensation earlier in the process than men do. And so being prepared for that, the classic, well, don't worry about comp, we'll talk about it when, you know, further, along in the process, you'll lose many of the shortlisted candidates that you've been presented with. So you've got to think about a number of different things in a slightly different way than you normally would. Chad (9m 60s): It's interesting that you say comp because females are generally paid much less than males. So, I mean, when you are actually working with that level of female, are you seeing that that is changed? It's different? I mean, only 8% of the fortune 500 CEOs are female today, but do you see that the comp difference is actually understood and they go in at the quote unquote "old boys level," or is it still something they have to fight? Oh, Venesa (10m 35s): You know, that's a great question. And has comp changed? No, but I'm only speaking at, from the experience that I've got, working with the companies that I do and helping to negotiate compensation packages. And what I've seen is actually a little bit different, which is that women at this level that are at the C-suite are right now in very high demand. And because we're not, we're not talking about an up and comer, who's ready to step into the role we're, we're talking about. You're recruiting as CFO, and we've got candidates that are women that are already CFOs at a company that has scaled. And their compensation has actually from the women that I've spoken to has increased because their companies want to retain them and not let them jump, because it will be much, it's a smaller candidate pool to replace them with another woman. Venesa (11m 27s): So I've actually seen compensation increase for women across the C-suite that is existing C-suite executives. What I'm talking about is more around the transparency of compensation. If you've got a woman currently in a role, and she's making $450,000 a year, she wants to know ahead of time, is this opportunity going to be equal to, or more than the compensation that I'm currently making? And standard, at least in our experience is we know kind of a general range, but clients are reticent to have any discussion around hard numbers until they know they really want that candidate. Venesa (12m 11s): Men more often are kind of okay with that progression. And they're betting that their compensation is going to be equal to, or greater to where they are currently. Chad (12m 21s): Because historically it has been. Venesa (12m 23s): Right, historically it has been. And, and it, I think there is a psychological piece with women, of course, around a couple of things, one is, are they going to low ball me because I'm a woman? And two, am I going to waste my time investigating an opportunity that's compensation isn't going to be what I needed to be., Chad (12m 41s): Are we just shuffling executives that are female around to different companies? Are we not sort of growing executives within companies? Is I assume that's a major problem and how do we solve that? Venesa (12m 52s): Yeah, that's the crux of it. And thank you for bringing that up because that that's really what's at the heart of the piece that I wrote was about, are we really making opportunity for women at executive levels? If what we're doing is hiring search firms to poach a C-suite executive from one company and bring it to your company. The answer is we're not increasing the opportunity for women. We are swapping candidates amongst the C-level ranks. And in order to really affect change, it's about creating more opportunity for women, conscientiously recruiting women into your organization at the more junior levels and cultivating that group into leadership roles. Venesa (13m 39s): And that has to start early. So for your you're a startup and you, and you're thinking, well, I don't have enough employees to do that. You're wrong. It means you increase the number of women you're recruiting into your organization, broadly. You identify those top performers and you put them on a career path and that isn't the immediate, you're not going to get the immediate result that you need, but you need to be doing that early in order to really affect change. Joel (14m 11s): It's commercial time. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (14m 13s): Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now based on that technology come Sovren's artificial intelligence. matching and scoring software. In fractions of a second receive match results that provide candidate scored by fit to job. And just as importantly, the jumps fit to the candidate make faster and better placements. 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 (14m 56s): It's show time. Joel (14m 57s): Yeah. And one sounds like you said, really affect change. The other sounds like, you know, you're checking off a box. So I'm guessing the conversation a lot of companies have is, you know, CEO of the board says we need a woman executive so that we can check the box that we are, diverse. The harder strategy is, like you said, let's, let's grow our own, let's hire junior folks, women, and grow them into positions like this. So what I'm hearing you say is the check the box strategy is what's happening. The jury's still out on whether companies are really serious about longterm female diversity inclusion into the C-suite and the rest of the company. Venesa (15m 35s): Exactly. And I think to the point of the startups who need an executive with experience right away, then if you want to really give opportunity to women, then that's when we look at that up and comer profile. Joel (15m 51s): And you talk about the one of the benefits of, of women in the workforce is boosting revenue. And I think, I always say like, the answer to all of your questions is money. And if change is going to happen, it's going to be on the bottom line. So talk about how boosting revenue is a positive that females bring to the C-suite and into companies. Venesa (16m 11s): Well, there's so many statistics on this that it's crazy to me that it will come up in conversation as a question, as a question mark. McKinsey has done a number of studies. They found that companies with more gender diversity at the leadership levels are 21% more likely to outperform on profitability just on that KPI. That has been kind of a fact that based on all of these studies from McKinsey to Harvard, there've been so many. And so there is no question that diversity at the executive leadership level increases profitability, innovation. Venesa (16m 55s): There are a number of important factors. Chad (16m 58s): What we're really trying to do here, and this is the hard part that nobody really talks about enough is busting up the old white boy network, because that's what it is. We have, again, these check the box initiatives that are happening. We have boards, we have C-suites that are very heavily white male, and they feel like they need something to be able to at least look like they're trying to diversify when they're not. The hard question is even with all this awesome information from McKinsey and all these other studies, we still aren't seeing a move that's incredibly fast. Chad (17m 41s): I mean, I think the last number I saw it was going to be over 150 years before we actually see equity in male to female ratio, a leadership positions. Venesa (17m 51s): I think what is really important is around, can we support a woman on our executive team from a cultural perspective? So many of the leadership teams that are these old boys clubs, when you're talking about startup high growth companies, you've got a founder team, usually two founders that know each other. They're usually both men and they're hiring the people they know within their network, their friends, their school chums, and those people all look like them as well. And there's a moment where they need to, instead of their reaction, which is to recruit somebody from their network, that they know they need to look beyond that and bring on board a woman. Venesa (18m 43s): And that feels like a risk because they've created this culture, the executive level and bringing on a woman is it is a different perspective. And the way that they have been interacting might change. You know, there was, I hired a woman into a CMO rural first startup, and she had said that their offsite was at a golfing club, they were all going golfing together. And she was okay with it, but she wasn't a golfer. And that's not to say that just because she's a woman, she's not a golfer. But as an example, you have to look at the ways in which you create comradery among your C-suite and make that more inclusive. Joel (19m 25s): We just need more female founders too. Venesa (19m 27s): Absolutely and that there are tons of numbers around that too. And there have been many firms that are focusing on investing in companies with female founders, which has been great to see, because that is a complete shift. When you have a woman, founder, statistically, they are recruiting a much more balanced in terms of gender diversity leadership team. Joel (19m 52s): You're talking about three tips to help bring more women into companies. You talk about transparency with salaries, flexibility, and promotion from within. Can you talk about each of these a little bit more in depth? Venesa (20m 2s): Yeah. Promotion from within, I think we have talked about, which is really bringing a strategic process into the organization where you were recruiting more women into junior level roles and cultivating those top performers into leadership roles. Then you're able to recruit from within your organization into more senior level roles. That has to be table stakes. This flexibility piece, meaning women and men are not the same. They want to be treated equally, but women typically will need some more flexibility in their schedules. Venesa (20m 47s): So working from home, knowing that they're going to get the job done, but they may have to do some things around a parent teacher conference, or after they put a new baby to bed. That kind of understanding and support is really important. And the transparency around salaries and compensation for new roles, which we also talked about is talking about that earlier in the process. And too, of course, you can't low ball a woman. She's going to be very aware of what her salary, what her salary expectations are for herself and what the market is. Venesa (21m 33s): She's going to check in with other people that have recently taken new roles and find out what market compensation is. Joel (21m 41s): I assume you recommend companies post salary ranges in their job postings and make that public or do you think it should specifically stay sort of in house? Venesa (21m 49s): You know, I think there's so many different schools of thought on that. And I have, because I'm an executive search partner. Our philosophy has always been to not put a salary range in an assignment brief, as we call it, the job description. And instead have that conversation with people as we're interviewing them, what are their salary expectations? Disclosing a range that the client has given us the okay to talk about. In general, my belief has been, you keep it open because it may be that you are targeting a sitting C-suite executive, or maybe we are, but we're also open to a VP level candidate, and we're not going to give them the same bump in salary that we would a sitting C-suite executive or might be tied more to performance and less on the cash side of things. Chad (22m 54s): So many of these females have been stifled throughout their career, and they don't have the experience of their male counterparts. They bade the quote unquote been mommy tracked. So how is that fair? How is that fair to actually say, look, you're going to be doing the exact same job we would be putting a male in here to do, but we're just going to pay you less because you have less experience. Well, I have less experience because of how the system has actually treated females. How's that fair? Venesa (23m 26s): Well, I don't think that's fair. So let me clarify. So for instance, I have a chief revenue officer role that I'm recruiting for right now. And with that in mind, this person is running both sales and marketing. And we talked about, okay, here's the salary comp for this role, for this stage company. Now we also are emphasizing diversity. And if we can find a woman CRO who's right for this role, then she would absolutely fall within that same compensation range. However, we realized that that candidate pool is smaller. Venesa (24m 8s): And so what we said to our client is, what about a VP of sales who has influenced marketing? And we'll bring her in as a VP of Sales. And we've got a director of marketing who can run marketing, and as she hits her her goals, and as she proves her ability to influence marketing, then we'll give her ownership of marketing also. And her compensation will reflect that. But as she starts the role as a VP of sales, her compensation would be in alignment with a classic VP of sales role. Joel (24m 44s): So we talk a lot about on the show as COVID and the pandemic sort of being an accelerant for many things, whether that be adoption of work from home or adoption of automation or technology, but every metric that I've read it's the pandemic has been a negative for women in the workforce, whether it be the childcare issue, which I think we covered as well as some other things. What is the pandemic from your perspective met to this movement of getting more females into the C-suite negative, positive, or neutral? Venesa (25m 15s): I don't know that I have the best answer, and I don't know that I can give you negative, positive or neutral. So I'm going to tell you what, what I do know. Which is that initially during the pandemic, there was a tremendous amount of women who left their jobs in order to homeschool their kids, be present with their family, you know, reasons that we've all talked about. What I saw from a recruiting perspective is women who I knew were interested in other opportunities suddenly were not. And they weren't because they had figured out what would work for them and their families during this pandemic. Venesa (25m 56s): And they didn't want to rock the boat. They didn't want to take a risk on a new startup. They didn't want to take a risk joining another company where they would be establishing their credibility and their work schedule when they had already fleshed that out in such a way that they could be there to take care of their kids, zoom school meetings, and you know, that that whole suite of issues that came up and they didn't want to chance going to a new organization where they wouldn't have that kind of flexibility right off the bat. So there was all of a sudden, a big drop-off in women that were recruitable. Venesa (26m 36s): As things have progressed, there was also a reevaluation of what do I want to be doing with my life? Which I've seen across the board for men and women and women now have become more recruitable than they were just a few months ago. And I think a lot of that based on the conversations I've had, has a lot to do with, Hey, I've been doing this same thing for a while. I need to do, I want to do something different. Either in a different industry or have different responsibilities and/or I want to be doing something that is more mission driven. And I want to work with a company who's making an effort to make a positive social impact. Venesa (27m 21s): And so that I think we're right there where people have, women in particular who have been risk adverse during the pandemic, have now become more willing to take risks in pursuit of something more satisfying. Chad (27m 36s): Excellent. Well, Venesa, we appreciate you coming on, taking the hard questions, the softball questions, all the questions. Venesa if somebody who wants to find out more about you, what you guys are doing, especially with this initiative to try to drive more females from the bottom up and obviously parallel, where would you send them to find out more and also connect on LinkedIn? Where else? Where else are you on the Twitter? Venesa (28m 5s): Yeah. Well, you can certainly connect with me on LinkedIn, Venesa Klein at Calibre One. That's how you find me. You can go to my website Venesaklein.com. Chad (28m 17s): Excellent. Joel and Chad (28m 17s): We out. Venesa (28m 19s): Thanks guys. OUTRO (29m 17s): 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.

... and Swallows. This week, you get not one but two Indeed dipsy-doo, switcheroos. First, they're moving away from the PPC model that helped make them a multi-billion dollar business. Second, they don't really like how employers are engaging with candidates on their event product, so they just shut 'em down from pre-show communications. Beyond Indeed, the boys are talkin' a new unicorn CultureAmp, LinkedIn limits, a lipstick-on-a-pig acquisition, Target telling Walmart to stick it, and, oh yeah, Buy-or-Sell where one of our fearless cohosts goes three Sell ratings in a row. Enjoy this Sovren, Jobvite & JobAdx powered episode. 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. Two guys who definitely need a lifetime moratorium on evictions. What's up boys and girls? It's the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your cohost Joel, Delta, Delta Delta. Can I help you? Help you. Help you" Cheeseman. Chad (35s): This is Chad "honky tonk" Sowash. Joel (38s): On this week's show, Indeed flips the script. Target tells Walmart, hold my beer. And how about some good old buy or sell? Oh yeah. How's Nashville, Chad? Chad (51s): Nashville is fucking crazy awesome! Joel (54s): Crazy, insane? Chad (56s): It's crazy. Insane. I am going to have to go through detox after this. Toured the Grand Ole Opry, went to a Nashville sound AAA game, spent a ton of time on broad and we're going back there again tonight had dinner, cigars and drinks with a friend of the show and talent.com's very own Michael O'Dell. I mean, it's been a crazy week. Thank God. I get to carry Julie's suitcase when she's speaking at events. So I love it. Joel (1m 32s): Have you seen the He-Haw girls? That's my question. Chad (1m 36s): I think they're a little older now. Joel (1m 38s): Yeah, they they've had a bout with gravity, for sure. Since the 1970s. Well, let's get to some shout outs. Shall we? Shout out to Kylie Baker? Chad (1m 49s): Oh yeah. Joel (1m 49s): She's just a big fan of the show. I got nothing else to say, but she loves us and we love you Kylie. Shout out to you. Chad (1m 56s): Love you Kylie. Shout out to Symphony Talent's Transform. We had such a blast filming in Lansing and Detroit last week! Doing the live pod! Fire alarms going off! Anyway, if you miss Transform, I believe they still have content on demand at symphonytalent.com/transform. And if you want to get in for free, here we go. Code ST social that's, STS symphony talent and social. You're welcome. Joel (2m 27s): Yeah. And shout out to Natty light, which was the beer sponsor for the trip out to Detroit that week and shout out to Hong li our favorite porn star. He's got a job board now, everybody, which, which I wish he would have come to me and asked, asked my opinion of that because I have seen this movie before, but Hey, maybe, maybe this one will end differently. Hung Lee's job board. Check it out everybody. Chad (2m 54s): Oh my God. So when the offspring said, keep them separated on come out and play. They really meant it. I mean, it's reported by BBC news that they kicked their drummer, Pete Perata to the curb. They kept him separated when he refused to get the vaccine. Joel (3m 13s): God is the offspring still around? To me that was the new story of the news story. Chad (3m 19s): Wait and Fred Durst at Lollapalooza. Joel (3m 22s): Yeah. His look got him a lot of grief. I looked like he was on an HGTV home flipper show with the new look that he's got going there but the backwards hat is far gone. Shout out to Fleets, Twitter Fleets. Remember those? Chad (3m 42s): Oh yeah. Joel (3m 43s): They're gone. Twitter's answer to stories has been shelved. We're you know, we're still waiting on word as to whether or not LinkedIn is going to keep their stories, but so far so good. And shout out to LinkedIn, by the way. Chad (3m 57s): Yes. Joel (3m 58s): I don't know how we missed this. I guess, it had been rolling it out, they're putting limits on the number of connection requests that people can make. It's only a hundred per week now. Chad (4m 11s): Wow. Joel (4m 11s): So all of those connection requests from insurance agents and car salesman in my local hood have dried up. So shout out to LinkedIn for doing that. I'm sure there are a lot of recruiters using some automated tools that aren't real happy about it, but never fear, recruiters always find a way around. Chad (4m 32s): The best ones do. Shout out to John Graham, I've got my copy of Plantation Theory, started reading it in the bar here in Nashville. And I couldn't put that damn thing down. It's an easy read. It's I think like 150 pages or something like that. It is fricking amazing. So we'll probably have John on talk about the book. Joel (4m 55s): Shout Out to Whiskey Publication recently sent out the top markets, i.e. States for whiskey consumption. Care to guess the top five? Chad (5m 7s): They've got to all be in the Midwest and close to Kentucky because that's where it's at. Joel (5m 11s): Kentucky is number one, obviously. Indiana number two, West Virginia coming in at number three, North Carolina, number four, and number five, a little bit of a shocker for me, Missouri. Missouri rounds out the top five of whiskey consumption in the US. Chad (5m 31s): They're all pretty sad states other than maybe North Carolina. So I get that. I get that. I really get that shout out to Jerome and team over at Smart Recruiters who announced a week long shutdown to give employees a break. That's very European of you, Jerome. I fucking love it. Joel (5m 48s): Yeah. Yeah. Bumble did that a few weeks before Smart Recruiters announced it gave people a week off to, I don't know, recharge themselves. So this might be a trend. This might be the first part of a trend where everyone gets more time off. Who knows? Who doesn't need more time off are government agencies fighting the COVID vaccine and the Delta variant. And they are looking to TikTok to find a cure. So this is from the New York Times: the White House has teamed up with TikTok stars with some states paying local micro-influencers up to a thousand dollars to promote pro-vaccine campaigns. Joel (6m 31s): Those with 5,000 to a hundred thousand followers are the ones that government agencies are targeting to promote the vaccine. I don't know, just pay these dumb asses to get the shot instead I say, instead of giving it to spoiled rotten TikTok influencers, what say you Chad? Chad (6m 48s): I say just mandate the motherfucker and put it in everybody's fucking arm. I was how I did it in 20 years in the military, they would track your ass down. They would put it in your arm and you go off and you do your thing. Have a nice fucking day. Joel (7m 3s): And if you've already gotten the shot and you can get out and enjoy yourself, make sure you sign up for free shit from Chad and Cheese. If you haven't gone to Chadcheese.com/free, we got t-shirts by Emissary. We got beer by Adzuna and we got whiskey, speaking of whiskey from Sovren. So if you love free shit, Chadcheese.com/free. Chad (7m 23s): Love it I have had so much whiskey this week. Jesus Christ. Joel (7m 27s): That's good stuff. Chad (7m 28s): Check out our interview that we dropped this week with Jeff Wald, former CEO of Work Market, which was sold to ADP for a $130 mill baby. The guy is a fire hose of experience, opinion and F bombs, which made him perfect for the show. The episodes called The End of Jobs with Jeff Wald. Listen anywhere you get your podcast, or just jump over to Chadcheese.com and check it out. Joel (7m 54s): The guy knows his audience. Let's say that. Let's say that. A couple of birthday announcements, Neil Costa friend of the show and see CEO of Hire Clicks celebrates another year around the sun. Jessica Lee recruiter, extraordinary, and I guess cohost of the HR Famous podcast. Chad (8m 15s): She's the one who carries that show. Joel (8m 17s): Pretty much. Chad (8m 17s): What is she like 25 now for God's sakes? Joel (8m 20s): I don't know. She looks, she looks amazing. She looks amazing. And on the other side of looking amazing, Brendan Cruickshank celebrates a birthday. Jason Sidon, another industry, mucky muck and Peter Clayton who never met a mic he didn't like. Happy Birthday everybody. Chad (8m 41s): Well, and last but not least Jason Putnam over at Pandologic. I can't believe you forgot him. Remember the guy who sent us all that fucking whiskey? Joel (8m 51s): Yeah, it was his birthday? Chad (8m 51s): Yeah! Next week. Joel (8m 52s): My bad, my bad. Happy Birthday, man. Happy Birthday. And by the way, guys, we don't say this enough. If you like the show or you hate the show, leave a review, go to iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, wherever you listen to us, give us some love or hate. We don't really care. We just want that algorithm to show us some love and get us at the top of the search rankings. And with that Chad (9m 18s): Topics! Joel (9m 21s): Oh, that was good. You kind of scared me a little bit with that topics. Have you been drinking today? Chad (9m 26s): I have not yet, but my God, a guy should just give myself a headache? Oh, Joel (9m 31s): This shit Indeed is in the news. We got two stories from them this week, both from reputable sources. I'm guessing you want to start with the cost per apply start news. Chad (9m 42s): Yes. C-PASS. Joel (9m 44s): C-PASS. Chad (9m 44s): Isn't that the thing that you put on when you sleep at night? I don't understand. Joel (9m 49s): That's a C-PAP I believe I just use a breath right strip. It works pretty well for me. You get an invisible color, no one even knows you're wearing. Chad (10m 1s): Oh my God. Yeah. So apparently Indeed is the had to make some adjustments with all the cookies that are being stripped out of Chrome browsers and Google and just all over the place. I mean, everybody's saying, look, this tracking thing, not good privacy, right? Not good. So they're transitioning from CPC cost per click to this new cost per apply start. They're starting to transition from that. They have their Indeed IQ platform, which is going away. It's actually going to be fully engulfed into their new quote unquote "hiring platform." So I believe this means candidates must, must, must register to apply even for jobs that are going direct to the applicant tracking system. Joel (10m 50s): Interesting. So IQ is going away? Chad (10m 53s): Yeah. It's just going to be absorbed into the actual platform itself. Joel (10m 57s): What's our buddy, Sir. Richard gonna do without IQ there? Geez. He might have to Chad (11m 2s): Continue traveling the world and doing what he was Joel (11m 4s): Selling. He might have to sell one of his Maserati's. I don't know. That's I'm worried. I'm worried about him. So, so what is cost per apply start? So this is the website, an apply start is when a job seeker clicks on the apply on company site, but on the job description page. This signals that the job seeker is starting to apply to that job as clicking on that button will take them to the application process. So it's really convenient to blame it on cookies. Chad (11m 35s): Yes. Joel (11m 36s): Call me a conspiracy theorist. But I think it's a little bit about programmatic and cost per click and that whole game being commoditized. And if Google, I mean, not Google. Well, we'll get to Google in a second. If Indeed is having a hard time having discussions with why they're charging so much per click, because I'm getting a lot less per click on programmatic solutions, then you got to rethink what the product is. And the new product sort of gets away from CPC and you don't have to have that discussion because you are taking a step towards cost per application, right? Which is the holy grail, for our cost per hire, sorry, cost per hire. Joel (12m 19s): We're taking another step towards that. So to me, it's a little bit of smoke and mirrors. You love the, you love the mote analogy. But to me, this is a lot of like uncomfortable conversations about cost per click and why Indeed is so high. And how do we get away from that? Chad (12m 36s): Well, and they've spent a decade educating the market on cost per click, and now out of nowhere, they flip over into C-PASS it. It's an interesting flip, right? You would have thought they might've been able to kind of like transition a little bit differently maybe, but I think overall, and again, this is from talking to many employers from talking to publishers, from talking to individuals actually inside of Indeed. Not, not once, did I get a clear vision of what this thing fucking was? And in some of the publishers, I threw it out to them to ask them what their response was on it? Chad (13m 17s): They had no clue this was going on. So, you know, it's interesting. And again, more I got to say, this is more Indeed. Like it is more a Trojan horse. So I've got to give them that. But you know, this flies in the face of Google for Jobs, new guidelines, I feel enforcing an apply on Indeed or registration on Indeed. And then hoping that the zap info, you know, integration actually works to the applicant tracking system where they can send the data over there and not have that candidate apply again. So I would say for the most part, especially right out of the gate candidates are going to have to apply twice, which means Google. Chad (13m 58s): They're not playing with Google anyway. Right? So overall, they're just, this is a big middle finger to Google. This is a big fuck you to employers and saying, Hey look, all the money that you're spending on us is going to build our product even bigger. And when you come back for renewal next year, it's going to be twice as much probably. Joel (14m 20s): Yeah. Which they'll be able to justify because they'll have that many more resumes in their database because they're forcing everyone to basically become a member of Indeed by doing this. Chad (14m 29s): This is job board 101. Joel (14m 31s): Yeah. It's sort of back to the future on a lot of this stuff. And, and you know, if the paper, if the per click thing on the sort of downstream is hard to communicate or strategize? Upstream is even more difficult because you can't really, you can't really start charging per application the ATS because nobody, I mean, nobody, I mean, filling out the ATS is a pain in the ass so they're losing money if they have a cost per application, because they have to put their code on your site or on ATS sites that doesn't work for them and then the hire thing is that much more of an issue? So this, this cost per app Apply Start is really the only thing that they could do strategically, but it's pretty fucked up. Chad (15m 20s): It is pretty fucked up. Again Indeed is rewriting the rules. Good for them. They're creating an ecosystem that you have to play in, not to mention, don't forget about the interviewing system. They're just going to have to make all of this, something that is pretty much a mandatory process to use Indeed. And if you want to use us, this is what you have to do. Joel (15m 41s): The elephant in the room for a lot of people is click fraud. You know, click fraud tools are generally, if not always a third party solution, that's tracking clicks and policing. You know what you're charging me for a click or what you're telling me, the number of clicks is versus what my tool, my click fraud tool is telling me. You have a way to police the pay-per-click solutions to say, no, my solution says, it's this you're telling me this it's way off. If Indeed is the judge and jury of where the clicks happen. There's no third party they're going to let on their site to track clicks on the apply process. Chad (16m 20s): No need. Joel (16m 21s): I mean, they can kind of make up whatever fucking number they want and. Chad (16m 25s): It's all black box. Joel (16m 26s): Yeah. And good luck auditing them and trying to figure out if that click number is right, because they can always say, Hey, the clicks happened. They just didn't fill out your app, they just didn't finish your application process, so it's your fault because your shit sucks. While they can, you know, I'm not accusing them of this, but it's going to be really hard to police how much Indeed is charging you in this new system, because there's no, there's no policing the police on this one. Chad (16m 51s): It has to be something employers are aware of, period. Right? Yeah. If it's a black box scenario, it's gotta be something that you're aware of. So we'll see, I'm excited to hear what publishers have to say. Employers already hate Indeed as it is. I don't know how many employers that I spoke to about this said, I can't fucking wait until Google for Jobs starts to monetize so that we can plunk our money over there instead of this shitshow. Joel (17m 22s): Yeah. Yeah. And how many publishers would love to be able to put in Google content as opposed to Indeed content? All right. More, more Indeed we'll watch this carefully. So some more Indeed shit. This is from a reputable source, who will be un-named because that's how they roll, but very reputable. So he commented us on LinkedIn quote "in a virtually unheard of move, for anyone other than Indeed, they found yet another way to fuck over employers. In the not so distant future, they are no longer going to be providing candidate RSVP info prior to events, being virtual job fairs on their platform. Joel (18m 3s): Employers will now only get access to this information after the event takes place. Employers will no longer have the ability just to do their own outreach to candidates prior to the events on the Indeed platform. They are hiding behind it's what's best for job seekers once again." I just, I don't understand why they would stop communication prior to events happening. Chad (18m 27s): I have no clue. I have no clue. I'm sure there are fringe instances where individuals who were signing up for job fairs are getting spammed, right? I'm sure that is something that could happen, but that's something they can police and that's something they should police. They shouldn't do something broad base like this, right? You get somebody in your platform. Who's using the platform. If they're a bad actor, you kick them out of the fucking platform. You don't screw the entire platform up. You don't make it harder for a client, who is a good actor and trying to use the platform in which it was made to try to prep those candidates for possible interviews, or what have you, or at least do some research on the individuals who are coming. Chad (19m 15s): So I think this is definitely a dumb move by Indeed, but Indeed loves to make these types of moves when they have some fringe experiences they can point to and just make it easier on themselves, as opposed to doing what they should be doing and policing their goddamn platform. Joel (19m 34s): It's what's best for job seekers, Chad. That's what's best for job seekers. All right, let's get to Culture Amp. Chad (19m 42s): Hello. Joel (19m 42s): Unicorn alert everybody. Culture Amp announced it has raised a hundred million in series F funding. The round bumps the company's valuation to $1.5 billion, more than double what it was after the company's series E round in 2019. Starting out as a survey platform, Culture Amp has grown to encompass analytics for managers like turnover, prediction, and team goal tracking. It also has a sizable online community where users connect and book workshops, including ones run by diversity equity and inclusion experts. Founder and CEO Didier Elzinga said quote "I think for a long time, the HR space and HR tech space have been viewed as not that interesting or important. Joel (20m 30s): But what we see now is that people are the most important thing that most companies have," end quote.` The company launched in Australia in 2009, and about two thirds of its revenue come from the US, the new funding will allow it to target growth in Europe. Hello, Chad. Another unicorn, are you buying this one? Chad (20m 49s): Yeah. I mean, we're talking about they're already service 4,000 organizations with a total of 25 million employees. And this is an area HR has never done well, employee engagement, performance management, employee development, usually HR not great in those areas, or at least they're not consistently great. So getting the pulse of your organization through surveys, and then having a system grind on the data and then move toward taking action in one platform is an easy sell for most HR types. I'm buying this just because I know there's nobody in my organization that can do this shit, and we suck at it now so I need for lack of better, better terms. Chad (21m 34s): I need a fucking silver bullet to throw in there. Joel (21m 37s): Yeah. And I love that unlike someone like Remote, these guys have been around for over a decade, starting with a fairly simple concept. A series E round is progressive amount of funding. I think timing wise, you know, I mentioned in the summary there that they've doubled basically their valuation since 2019. And that's a lot of the work-from-home movement and COVID and where the world is going. And this is just another of a work-from-home moonshot that we talk about on a regular basis. A couple of other competitors that they have with Lattice, Glint and Qualtrics are also getting a lot of attention. But look, as long as workers are at home, companies are going to be challenged to engage workers. Joel (22m 22s): I love the sort of predicting turnover, product that they have as well. People are going to want to try to predict the future, look around corners, monitor their employees as best they can. And Culture Amp obviously is at the cutting edge of that movement. And I think this new funding only proves that it's where you want to be, man. Yeah. work-from-home. Chad (22m 45s): I truly don't think work-from-home has a lot. I think it has a lot to do with the funding, no question. The market has a lot to do with the funding, but employee engagement for performance management and employee development has always been shit. Whether we've been in the office or not. So this makes it easier for an HR professional to say, Hey, look, we never did this well, and we're doing it even worse now. Right? So I get that. And here's the money quote, "Culture Amp saw more employers addressing DEI in surveys" end quote, DEI babies. It's the magic word. And that's where the cash is flowing right now. Joel (23m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. So they a double whammy, they got to work-from-home and they've got DEI, all they need is virtual reality now to really, really hit it hit out of the park baby. Augmented reality. Yeah. Let's take a quick break and we'll talk more. We'll talk some acquisitions and do a little buy or sell. So Instawork, not to be confused with Instacart, which brings my Doritos every Saturday, by the way. Talent platform Instawork announced this week, it has acquired Drafted. Network recruiting platform that helps businesses hire by leveraging referrals our favorite. Joel (24m 6s): The acquisition will enable Instawork, to help grow its pool of skilled hourly professionals. Terms of the deal were not disclosed that's always a red flag, but anyway, the deal follows an announcement last month that Instawork raise 60 million in series C bringing total funding for them at a `hundred million. The drafted platform will support as to work for recruiting and rewards program, and also provide tracking and management tools to streamline and drive efficiencies within the referral and hiring process. Your thoughts? Chad (24m 38s): Instawork is a talent marketplace platform. Let's be Frank here, kids, every fucking staffing organization in the world should already have one of these, but they don't. So I love these platforms because they can catapult staffing and RPO further, faster while providing better margins. Now Drafted on the other hand is a referral platform. And when I dug into it, I could only think of one thing. This is the ugly fat guy that landed the hot chick. Right. You know what I'm talking about, right? Joel (25m 11s): Why are you looking at me when you say that? Chad (25m 14s): I'm not looking at anybody. Why are they together? I mean, is she having a crisis of confidence or something? I just don't Instawork seems sexy. It seems something that, you know, staffing RPO needs now, the referral side. And then you take a look at the URL, explore.drafted.us. I mean, that's even ugly for fuck's sake. Joel (25m 38s): You stole my thunder on the domain. Dot.us, you don't see those very often. So the keyword there is terms not disclosed. And also as part of the news, the drafted team will be all joining Instawork. Drafted will no longer be taking new clients. So, you know, part of it is a little bit of tech, part of it is probably the price, probably, part of is probably just we can add a referral? we can kind of check that off and bring house. I mean, Instawork seems to be hitting it on all cylinders. I mean, founded in 2016, targeted sectors include food and beverage, hospitality, retail, and warehouse logistics. They're in more than 25 markets in the US and growing. Joel (26m 21s): So yeah, it's, it's pretty sexy. Drafted just feels like, you know, a little can on the road, they decided to pick up and put in their briefcase. Chad (26m 30s): Instawork is the hot chick and Drafted is the fat guy and you're wondering why are they together? This makes no, fuckin sense. Joel (26m 37s): Yeah. By the way, cause I play in this space a little bit. So Drafted has a layoff list. Chad (26m 45s): Layoffs? Joel (26m 46s): That's somewhat semi-popular. They claim 7,000 subscribers to this list where they send out rumors and news about companies going through layoffs. I'll be curious to see what happens to the layoff list as they get sucked in and consumed by Instawork. Chad (27m 4s): Hey, Instawork, you can do better. Call me. Joel (27m 9s): Speaking of doing better, how about a little buy or sell? Which I don't know. We haven't, I haven't really done in a while. Have we? Chad (27m 17s): Yes. Joel (27m 20s): Okay. All right. First up is Talview. Oh, founded in 2017, Palo Alto based Talview has raised 15 million in series B funding recently, totaling 21 million. That's according to Crunchbase. Funding will accelerate development of the company's video AI platform to enable global 1000 companies to make smarter bias-free talent decisions. TalentView says it's had a strong year tripling its customer base growing revenue more than twice, and launching a remote and live proctoring solution for education and certification institutions. TalentView, Chad buy or sell? Chad (28m 2s): Sell. So anything that touts face recognition. Okay. And then they say it's bias free. And then they use words like proctoring on the website, quote, "Talview offers advanced facial recognition features to authenticate that your candidate is the actual person taking your exam or assessment" end quote. This is the lead indicator for me, that this company is not watching societal signals. They're not watching the markets. They don't understand perspective legislation. They don't understand what the fuck is going on. Right? They don't, they they're not catching the signals. Right? So when I see this kind of a thing, I see that leadership is they're not doing what they should be doing. Chad (28m 47s): Right? What did HireVue do with their facial recognition as soon as they started to see the signals from all these different areas? They're like, oh, we're we shut that down. Joel (28m 58s): Pull the plug. Chad (28m 58s): They did it too late, but they shut it down. These guys are still touting it. This is a sell. Too easy. Joel (29m 6s): All right, we got to sell. I am going to sell as well. All right. You mentioned Harvey video interviewing has been around since the mid two thousands. I think Harvey launched in 2004. I remember talking to companies that used to mail webcams to people to actually interview. Chad (29m 22s): GREEN interview. Joel (29m 23s): Yeah, you could. You got your logo on a webcam. It was really passionate. And if video interviewing was going to happen, it would have happened by now. And the fact that it hasn't really just tells me that it's not going to happen. So for me, I'm going to sell this, this turkey as well. Let's get on to Homebase. I'm not talking baseball. I'm talking about San Francisco-based Homebase that is raised 71 million for their team management platform aimed at SMBs and their hourly workers. Which values the company between 500 million and $600 million that's according to TechCrunch. They've raised 108 million to date since launching in 2014. Joel (30m 6s): The company says it now has some 100,000 small businesses with 1 million employees in total, on its platform. Businesses use it to manage workers that are paid hourly, including most recently payroll, as well as shifts, scheduling, time clocks and time sheets, hiring and onboarding communication and HR compliance. Homebase buy or sell? Chad (30m 31s): Buy! On their About Us page. It says, quote, "We effing hate paperwork." I already love this company because they were speaking directly to that small business owner. They understand how the small business owner feels right? So small and medium-sized businesses don't have the time or the budget or the big staff. So they need great platforms that are inexpensive, and this one is inexpensive, to help them with scheduling automatic text shift reminders. So you don't get ghosted for shifts, payroll hiring and onboarding and HR compliance because who in their right fucking mind wants to do work compliance. Chad (31m 14s): I mean, seriously, this is a buy for me too easy SMB, Big market. Do do the pieces of the job that nobody wants to do. And it's too easy. Joel (31m 25s): Yeah. They, they're pretty good at the market speak. I think it's HR for people who don't do HR or something like that as on the website. I have a little bit of a different take on this one. SMB's suck. Selling to them sucks. They go out of business. They're cheap as hell. They don't want to pay anything for anything. There's a little bit of a ceiling, in my opinion, 85% of them go away after five years, you gotta, you gotta recycle and new businesses and sort of reinvent what you're doing. I think the gig economy is continuing to grow and we'll move past or we'll move beyond Uber and Upwork. Joel (32m 7s): And I think platforms will basically be a lot of the way that people staff up small businesses and organizations. Yeah. SMBs suck. I've seen too many businesses target them and fail. So for me, this one's a big sell. SFX (32m 24s): Oh hell no. Joel (32m 26s): Let's get to Pangea. Yeah, probably the best name of the three. P and G. If I remember my social or my geography and middle school was all the continents. SFX (32m 38s): One big landmass, Joel (32m 39s): Orangy land mass. Remember Pangea everybody. Okay. The Providence Rhode Island based Pangea I think that's the first time we've ever said Providence, Rhode Island, based on the show, there are freelance marketplace for college aged talent that has just secured $2 million in seed funding. According to the company's blog in the past 12 months, students for more than 850 college campuses across the US and Canada have come to Pangea to find freelance work, which tends to lean on skills like web development and social media marketing. Chad, you buying or selling Pangea? Chad (33m 20s): Well, I don't know if you know or not, but I love me a marketplace. I'm buying. In a world where work is changing, especially for younger generations this is spot on. As a matter of fact, I sent this to both my daughters to checkout, as soon as I started reviewing it. So Buy. Joel (33m 40s): I'm going to sell this bad boy. Why I love me a good marketplace too, but there's too much goddamn competition. Okay. The gig market belongs to Fiverr, Upwork, Uber, Door Dash, Task Rabbit, et cetera. I think that we're finding that the niche, the niche guys are not big enough. They're not growing fast enough. And they're all going to get sucked up by some of the big boys. Both of us are fans of Camino, friends of the show. There has not been a news item on Camino for over a year. And I think that's indicative of the stunted growth that these organizations have. When you're talking about college kids ~ college kids eventually leave college and unless they're going to stay on Pangea for similar gigs, they're going to move to Upwork and that's eventually where everyone's going to go. Joel (34m 31s): Anyway, I think there'll be acquired probably on the cheap by one of these bigger players. So for me, this is three sells for me. SFX (34m 39s): Oh hell no. Chad (34m 41s): Them getting acquired is a great reason to buy. Joel (34m 46s): Not if it's on the cheap, not if it's a terms not disclosed acquisition, baby. I want those big money dollar figures in my acquisitions. All right, let's take a quick break. Chad (34m 56s): Are we doing one upsmanship now? I like this. We talked about Walmart at the end of the show last week. I couldn't believe we were talking about Walmart. Well in a very positive light. And now Target says, hold my beer, Walmart, Joel (35m 12s): Hold my beer. That's right. Announced. This week, Target will pay 100% of college tuition and textbooks. Do they still have textbooks in college? In a bid to attract workers. In addition to a undergrad degrees, Target will also pay for graduate school costs paying up to 10,000 each year for master's programs at approved schools. Target said it plans to invest 200 million in the education over the next four years, participating schools include the University of Arizona, Oregon State University, the University of Denver and Morehouse University. Hold my beer, Walmart, Target just upped the ante on your ass. Chad (35m 53s): Dude. I love this type of it's optics, it's market play, but they also understand that they have to be competitive. And they understand that we have an issue, an epidemic in this country. It's called college debt. And that's one of the things that, you know, as we got our kids ready for college, that is something that is constantly on their shoulders. Whether, you know, we're helping subsidize or whatever it might be. But being able to, this is something else I sent this because one of our daughters is actually getting ready to go to graduate school. Chad (36m 34s): She was just accepted and I was like, Hey, check this out from Target. It just makes good sense. Joel (36m 41s): Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that stood out for me with Walmart was look, we're looking to grow our own future executives, managers, you know, leadership positions. And in terms of building loyalty with employees and also building your next crop of executives, I think is incredibly important. I think organizations have figured that out and the ones that are successful enough to do it, Chipolte does it. Starbucks does shit like this. Like, you know, the bigger companies that can do this, the more reputable well-known ones, are going to be more successful. The rich are going to get richer because they're going to reimburse people. Joel (37m 22s): They're going to keep those folks and they're going to be their next executives while the companies that can't are going to have to find new people or go poach from the competitors that are also not fulfilling those obligations. In other words, I think worth noting is that the organization GuildEducation.com and looking at some of these programs, it looks like they're sort of powering a lot of, a lot of the, the platform or the where people can manage all this. So Guild Education might be one to, to keep an eye on, as we talk about companies like this. Chad (37m 58s): And, and as I said, during the Walmart love that we gave them last week. The first thing that we need to focus on this is amazing stuff. I love it, but we definitely have to make sure that we're paying those kids, those men, those women above living wages for goodness sakes. So yeah, I mean, the wages are important because that's how they're going to eat. And that's something that they need to worry about when they're going to school, because this money is going directly to the school. It's not going to the, it's not going to the people. Joel (38m 27s): I feel like you're looking at Jeff Bezos while you say that. Cause you know, you have a picture of him in your wallet. Chad (38m 33s): Do you know how much one of those penis rockets could actually fund kids going to school? I mean, seriously, I don't know, maybe pay taxes that might help? Joel (38m 43s): Maybe he's building a college in space that everyone can use the rocket to go up and learn all those? Chad (38m 50s): All the rich people. Joel (38m 53s): Hopefully there's some textbooks in those trash cans that people are peeing in and they can get a little bit of education while they do. Chad (38m 58s): That's too much education for me. I need to go back down to Broad and drink. Joel (39m 2s): So enjoy Nashville. I've alerted the police. They're on the lookout. So behave yourself. Chad (39m 8s): Excellent. Joel and Chad (39m 9s): We out. OUTRO (40m 4s): 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.

Like Harvard MBAs and Ivy League pedigrees? How about best-selling books written by industry entrepreneurs? Well, you're in luck, as Jeff Wald, author of The End of Jobs, comes on the podcast and chats the history of his company WorkMarket (sold to ADP), whether or not the iPhone could've been built by a remote team and whether or not college is bologna for high school grads. And that's just the first 10 mins. Buckle up for this no-holds interview powered by our friends at 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 (24s): What's up everybody. It's your favorite podcast? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your host. Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my partner in arms, Chad. Chad (34s): What's Up? Joel (35s): So today we are super excited to welcome Jeff Wald to the show. Jeff is an entrepreneur best-selling author, a keynote speaker and author of a new book, the The End of Jobs: The Rise of On-Demand Workers and Agile Corporations. That's a mouthful, but he's a Harvard MBA so what else would you expect? He's also notably the co-founder of Work Market, which was acquired by ADP and we'll get into that into the show. Jeff welcome. What did I miss that you want our listeners to know? Jeff (1m 7s): Well, first off, unbelievably excited to be here and very excited for this conversation. The only other thing I would say is, you know, look, Work Market was a great outcome and it was a very successful outcome, but this is my fourth startup and the first one failed miserably and bankrupted me. And that's a part of the startup process that a lot of people don't talk about a lot. Joel (1m 30s): You sound like a couple of my friends who have been married like two or three times. Jeff (1m 34s): I've been married zero times. I haven't failed on that one yet, but Chad (1m 41s): Usually obviously we see a history of founders, serial founders. Let's say that's pretty much how it goes. Joel (1m 50s): Why get married when you can start companies? Chad (1m 54s): Well that when there's a question too, I mean, overall, when you're, you're talking to 25 year olds today who were like, man, I want to be an entrepreneur so bad. I mean, you've got to put your life, your soul. I mean, everything into that startup, what do you tell them? Hey, if you want a life outside of whatever this concept is, don't do it. I mean, what, what's your recommendation? What's your advice to a 25-30 year old? Jeff (2m 19s): Well, I will generally tell people you need to be mentally, physically and financially ready, right? Financially is in as much as you may not have an income for a couple of years. And you know, when you run out of cash kind of game over. Cash is, is oxygen in startup land. Physically this is 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah. And if you're not ready for this, if you're not ready to not be able to work out, not be able to see your family, not be able to see your friends and not be able to have a relationship. Like, look, I'm not saying you, can't just, you're going to decrease the probability of success. And the same thing is true about mentally. Jeff (2m 59s): If you're mentally prepared for this up and down, then, you know, again, you're just decreasing your probability of success. Chad (3m 8s): Well, and also be ready to go back to mom's basement, right? I mean, you've gotta be mentally prepared for that. And that's something you had to do. Jeff (3m 17s): Yeah, it is very true. And when I first, when the first startup I had failed, I got the call from mom, do you need to move back home? And I was like, wow, this is fucking, this is, this is bad. And I had luckily already paid my rent that month. And I said, all right, I've got 30 days, mom and 30 days, I have no choice. Chad (3m 37s): Wow. Joel (3m 38s): You're a highly educated guy. When did you think about, I'm just gonna go work for Goldman Sachs or I'm just going to go work for Microsoft. Like, are you just sickened with the entrepreneurial bug or did that thought ever cross your mind? Cause I think for a lot of young people, the best route is like go work at a big brand for a few years and get your feet wet. Jeff (3m 59s): Look, my first job was working for JP Morgan. I spent seven years as an M&A banker at JP Morgan, and it's a great place to start. And it's something I talk about with a lot of people as they talk about what is my next step or what should I start with? Look, whether it's the brand to your point and the brand will carry you for the rest of your career, but the network you build and learning the process and the work ethic and all these other things, it is a gift to be able to work in one of those companies, but it's not an entrepreneurial gift. It's a foundational gift to take the next step up. Joel (4m 39s): Well, let's get into Work Market cause I think it's the most relevant for our audience. Talk about the genesis, the journey, and then I guess the eventual sale to ADP. Jeff (4m 48s): So started the company in June of 2010, over the course of about six or seven years, we raised about 60 million from Union Square Ventures, SoftBank and a few others. And you know, our friends at ADP kind of reached out. I actually reached out, I should say to ADP Ventures and those people started coming in and getting a view of a Work Market and asking about the future of work. And I would always give them an overview and they would always say, oh, can we come back with more people and more people? And this went on for about a year and you know, one of the guys called up and said, Hey, can I come down? They're going to be 30 of us from ADP to come down and you know, look, they had been there maybe 15 times over the course of a year with me constantly giving them an update on Work Market and what we were doing and giving my talk on the future of work. Jeff (5m 41s): And when they said, Hey, can we come with 30 people? There was something about that, guys. I just was like, "What?" And I said to the guys like, you know what, no, no, you can't come. It's like, what, what do you mean? We can't come? I was like, you know what? I'm not your monkey. I don't dance. I can't, I'm not here to dance anytime you want to hear about the future of work. So you guys can go fuck yourself. I'm out like Work Market. What does Work Market get from this? And so then there was dead silence. This dude was just completely Flomaxed. I just told him to fuck himself. And he, you know, it was a big pause. He's like, well, you know, we want to talk about maybe buying Work Market. I was like, oh, well, come on down. I'll dance any way you want. Chad (6m 22s): Why didn't you lead with that asshole? Jeff (6m 24s): Buy the company, whatever you need. And so that led to a process and we hired a banker and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And ADP was just such a great, great purchaser. I mean, they don't buy a lot of companies and we were so fortunate. I was so fortunate. Every day I still get on my knees and you know, thank the big man upstairs for everything we get. Joel (6m 48s): How long were you an employee there? How long were you under contract? Or how long did you stick around? It's still on your LinkedIn profile I think that you're still involved, but yeah. Jeff (6m 56s): It is. I remain involved, but you know, a few days before the acquisition closed, I got somebody in by Carlos Rodriguez who is the CEO of ADP and a nicer, smarter guy you will just never find. I mean, what an amazing human and he's like, Jeff, I want you to help transform ADP and you know, get people more entrepreneurial. I don't want ADP to turn Work Market into, you know, a standard ADP thing. You know, I don't want to change you. I looked at him. I'm like, Carlos, there is no danger that ADP is going to change me. He's like good, man I want you to come in and break stuff. I was like, Carlos, I broke five things on the way in here. And he like, literally looks in the hallway. Jeff (7m 36s): I was like, not literally. He's like, oh, okay, good, good, good. He said, look, I need you to stay for three years. I said, Carlos, I can't, I can't stay for three years, that's too much. I'll give you two years. And he said, look, give me two and a half. I said, all right. So we shook hands. He said, all right, I'll get the lawyers. I'm like, you don't need lawyers. I just gave you my word and I shook your hand. So come hell or high water. I will be here for two and a half years. And over that two and a half year period, there was many, many time where I would storm out of meetings, get very frustrated and people would say, oh my God, are you going to quit? I would say, look, I have said, I can't quit. You can fire me anytime you want, but I will not quit. Jeff (8m 18s): And so my two and a half years was up and then two and a half years, and one day I said hugs and kisses to everybody, but I'm out. And so now I am just an advisor to ADP on the future of work. Chad (8m 30s): So overall funding wise, you guys, we took around 60 million. Was that, is that correct? Jeff (8m 36s): That is correct. Chad (8m 36s): Okay. And the exit, the exit was about 135 million, a hundred and thirty-five million. Okay. So the exit itself has to be bittersweet. It's gotta be exciting, but also this is your baby. So if you could also talk about, you know, this was your baby and you were handing it over to now not handing it, getting paid to hand it over to ADP, and then you have to spend two and a half years. So to all the other founders that are out there, talk about that bittersweet moment and also kind of like the journey in becoming an ADPer, and watching what happens to Work Market. Jeff (9m 15s): Well, I'll tell you this, the day the acquisition was announced, ADP number of executives came in and they had video cameras. They had an entire Avi systems set up. They were broadcasting it. We had offices in multiple parts of the country in multiple countries. The Work Market team had offices and you know, our whole team was, they were shocked. And the initial reaction is ADP. Who the fuck? I don't want to work for ADP. Why do I want to work for some old school payroll company? And my team was very vocal. And so I stood up and I just said, look, I know a lot of you are thinking, I don't want to work here. And you're planning on leaving and I'll tell you now, I think it's a mistake. And my team always knew that anytime anybody wanted to go, I would help them find a job anywhere else. Jeff (9m 58s): Like the only way you're going to upset me is if you just say, Hey, I'm giving my two weeks notice, I already found another job. Come and say, Hey, my time is up. I feel like I need a new challenge and I'll help you find a job somewhere or we'll help change your job within Work Market. And so I just said, look, guys, I get it. But I'm telling you right now, you are having a very rare opportunity to watch as one of the most well-run companies on the planet. Fixes our shit because as hard as we worked and as all innovative and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Chad (10m 28s): Right? Jeff (10m 29s): I mean, this thing was held together with bubblegum and duct tape. And so having the ADP team come in, and whether it's from an architecture standpoint, a code standpoint, a process standpoint, a people standpoint, they helped us build our progress, our process, and our tech to really scale. And that is a unique opportunity. Yeah. So if all of you really want to advance your careers, you should be here for at least a year, maybe two, and then go to another startup and say, Hey, look, I helped build a company. And then I went to large well-run company and I learned how to build really correct for scale. And now I want to go back to the beginning and build it, right. Jeff (11m 10s): That's a great process. And so our attrition actually went to very, very low. During that time. Chad (11m 16s): So ADP is a monstrous company. It is humongous, right? So that the culture is different. All of that, but also the I'm sure. I guarantee you, they went through the strategy sessions on, should we build or buy these guys? And we're seeing a ton of companies today take a bunch of money, which pretty much limits that decision overall, what do you think was integral for Work Market to actually be acquired versus passed on? Because the ADP probably could have built it for less? Jeff (11m 53s): Well, here's the thing. You are a hundred percent correct on two very important things. One is the build versus buying. That's always going to be a conversation. And if you are building something so quickly and the tech is not so unique, then the notion of kind of build it yourself with such a huge installed base and all these other things, very, very powerful. And the build is going to become more important, which is why ADP doesn't buy that many companies. Neither does Workday. Neither does SAP. Chad (12m 22s): Yeah. Jeff (12m 22s): Neither does Oracle. Quite frankly, the big HCM players are not big acquirers. The other part of that are the valuations going on and start up plan right now. Look, I'm a big angel investor. And as of right now, I'm a genius apparently. I mean, I've put money into these companies at five, $6 million evaluations. Now they're raising money at $200 million valuations. I'm like, that's amazing. But the odds of somebody that is doing 4 million in revenue to have a company like a ADP or Workday or blah, blah, blah, by you for 200 million plus, like almost zero, just almost zero. Chad (12m 57s): Yeah. Jeff (12m 57s): The thing at Work Market that works so well is look, we were seven and a half years old. We had built a very, very complex piece of enterprise software. So the build on its own was incredibly incredibly complex and it was outside the scope of what ADP does every single day. ADP is one of the, obviously the largest payroll companies in the planet, which everybody knows people don't appreciate. They're also one of the largest, if not the largest HCM software player, but that software is entirely focused on the full-time employee spectrum. And we were focused on the on-demand. So this was a complete and total bolt-on for them and entirely new. But that being said, there were people, very senior people that post the acquisition still would, you know, would be like, oh, Hey, you're Jeff Wald. Jeff (13m 45s): I really was voting. I was really arguing against the Work Market acquisition. I thought we should build it ourselves. And I'd be like, oh, okay. What the fuck was the point of you saying that to me? Why do I, well, I just think you should know it. I'm like, all right, well, good luck, fuck yourself. And I would walk away. I'm like, why would you tell me that? I don't give a shit didn't want to buy us, like, okay, but you did. We're on the same team now. Joel (14m 11s): So for a lot of listeners that here what Work Market does, and I guess here freelance sort of platform, they think of Upwork and Fiverr. And these are companies that's sort of started when you guys started. I mean, where Upwork was E-Lance and, but this was sort of a trend that was starting for the listeners that need to know how they're different or were Work Market fits in differently to the freelance platform. How would you answer that question? You're not Upwork, right? You're something different. Jeff (14m 38s): We're not, I would draw a distinction between a platform and a marketplace. Upwork is the largest marketplace. And quite frankly, you guys, there are probably 300 different marketplaces out there right now. Marketplace for plumbers. Marketplace for the nurses. Marketplace for translation. Markets, markets, markets. And they're large, and they're growing and they're doing well, a few of them. The platforms are enterprise software that help you scale a process. They help you organize and manage and pay. And so Work Market has a marketplace, but it is a tiny feature of an entire suite of features that allow you to efficiently and compliantly engage a freelance population. Jeff (15m 26s): So most of our customers come on and they have their own group of freelancers. They just need to manage it efficiently and manage the compliance. Joel (15m 35s): I want to jump to the book, the End of Jobs that came out about a year ago, obviously mostly written, if not all written pre-pandemic, what was the inspiration for the book? What might have changed if you had written it post-pandemic? Just talk about that. Jeff (15m 51s): Well, the inspiration for the book was frustration. You know, I had the pleasure of being invited to all these different conferences and panels, and you'd hear all these people that would talk about the future of work. And a lot of people would just talk. And this is, I think, as a general problem in society right now, it's very easy to say something controversial to be heard, even though it is very unlikely, what you're saying has any chance of coming true. Right, you're saying something simplistic and this and that. I would just get very frustrated when I went to the do these different things and I thought, look, if you're going to make predictions on the future of work, you need to utilize the evidence we have. And those evidence are broken into three buckets. Jeff (16m 33s): One is what is the history of work and teach us? What is the data in the world of work teach us? And what a companies actually do when they're engaging in doing labor force planning? So if we can utilize history data and how companies actually engaged labor, we have a much higher probability of not only being correct, but we certainly have something that is logical, reasonable and defensible. And so that was what the book intends, it tries to do. Joel (16m 58s): Do you think it would have been different post-pandemic or that the everything you said in the book still relevant after COVID. Jeff (17m 4s): The book officially came out in June of 2020, and so clearly in May, I was like, oh shit, should we rewrite some stuff? And the publisher said, look, we can do whatever you want. It's your book. But if you pull it back, we're not going to be able to launch the book for another six months, just cause you're going to start from the beginning. You've got to go back into the queue and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know if you guys have heard this from other authors, but writing a book sucks. It's just a very difficult, long arduous process. And it gets very frustrating by the end. And I just was like, no, I'm not rewriting anything. Just, just put it out. Jeff (17m 44s): I'm done. So would I have different points of view? Of course. Of course there are different things, but the main points about history, data and how companies engage workers, that doesn't change. And so would I have focused a little bit more on remote work? Absolutely. But I focused a little bit more on a few other minor points, yes. But the major themes they're immutable to these, these are things that just have been true for hundreds of years and a pandemic is not a unique thing in the human experience. Joel (18m 17s): Gotcha. Chad (18m 17s): So talk about technology. So the industrial revolution moved at a much faster pace than we were used to as humans, no question. But we're going at warp speed. We past Mach speed. We're going at warp speed now. Joel (18m 33s): Ludicrous speed. Chad (18m 35s): Are we still able to use the lessons of the past with the speed that we're actually finding every single day with the, you know, the speed that technology moves? Jeff (18m 49s): There is no question that the movements are happening at a much quicker pace. They're happening at a much more global pace. And they're impacting more industries than the previous industrial revolutions we have dealt with as companies, workers in society. That just simply means we have to do these things quicker, which means the adjustment periods will be picked quicker and the people getting left behind need to be retrained quicker. Chad (19m 14s): Yes. Jeff (19m 14s): And so I don't have any fear about new technologies because we've gone through this change hundreds of times. And we generally go through it with the freak out phase where people go, oh my God, all the jobs that are going to go. And then we get to the point where, or at all the jobs aren't going to go, but some jobs really do go. We have some economic and social dislocation. And then we get to the adoption phase where the new technologies are fully adopted and people have retrained. And that used to take 50 years. Now it's going to take 15, maybe 20, but the outcome will still be the same. Most likely. Nexxt PROMO (19m 54s): 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 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 PROMO (20m 38s): 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 (21m 16s): So do you think that with the pandemic, we've actually seen the industry adopt much faster because they had to/ We were hearing that all of these different jobs that could not be done remotely are now being done remote, right? So they had to adopt technology. They had to become more agile. So from that standpoint, what is, what do you think the future looks like? Do you think that we just snap back into our, you know, like 1950s, you gotta be onsite from nine to five workplace, or do you see more of a hybrid type of a movement? Jeff (21m 49s): So very, very clearly even before the pandemic, we were moving away from that one office, one manager nine to five job, moving towards the fluid team-based work from anywhere, always on job. That is the main thesis of the book. When I say the end of jobs, it's not the end of the number of jobs. It is that nine to five, one office, one boss job, moving to fluid team-based work from anywhere, always on. Chad (22m 15s): Right. Jeff (22m 15s): But here's something that's super important for listeners to understand when you think about the future of work. Simple conclusions are almost always wrong. This whole notion of, oh, this new tech exists therefore that job goes, almost never happens that way. It may happen over time, but anytime people say, oh, you know, autonomous vehicles are coming, all professional drivers are going to go. And you're like, no, that's just, that's not the way it's going to happen. Might that be the case 30 years from now? Sure, sure. But I will tell you this. When you think about truck drivers in the United States, there are 3 million professional truck drivers in the United States of America. They're about a hundred thousand job openings in that space that have been open for quite some time. Jeff (22m 57s): Right? We have a skills gap. People are, don't want to be truck drivers, right? One of the reasons they don't want to be truck drivers is cause people say, oh my God, that job is going to go away. It is not going to go away, for like 20 years, maybe 30, but people make this conclusion, autonomous vehicles are coming. Truck drivers are going to be out of work, not the case. Joel (23m 15s): When you heard Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan and some of the other Wall Street bankers, financial entities say, get your ass back to work. What goes through your mind? Do you think you're totally tone deaf? Or do you think, yeah, you can do that because of your industry. Jeff (23m 31s): Well it highlights a very important point, which is you can't paint everything with a broad brush. So for some industries, for some job functions, for some companies sure. Fully distributed, fully remote. Great. Although keep in mind, most people that work remote work within a commutable distance of the office and still go in every now and again. For different companies and different job functions in different industries, there's a different balance of hybrid. And so, yes, we need some people to go back to the office, for some companies, they will do that. They will face some sort of backlash from their people. And then we'll see where everything plays out. I don't think even for the JP Morgans and the Citi Groups and the Goldman Sachs that have made the statements, especially here in New York City that, Hey, we want you to come back there, I don't believe they're saying you need to come back nine to five, five days a week. Jeff (24m 23s): They're saying we need you back. And then let's figure out what flexibility looks like for you. Joel (24m 29s): Gotcha. So settle an argument that Chad and I have been having, I won't say who thinks what, and I'll let you sorta be the tie breaker. Could the iPhone have been created with a remote workforce? Jeff (24m 41s): I would say no. Joel (24m 43s): Why? Jeff (24m 43s): I would say it's highly unlikely. I think when you talk about innovation and all of the things necessary to have breakthroughs, there are reasons we still have a lot of those things happen. Historically they've all basically happened when people get together and can collaborate and iterate and move things forward. And so things that tend to be done in a distributed way are processes that are in steady state versus different innovative points. Innovative points tend to require a lot of collaboration. We have not seen a lot of great collaboration in the knowledge economy, let alone in the product economy in terms of things that need to get manufactured. Joel (25m 24s): So I won't say who you sided with, but good answer. Good answer, Jeff. You talk about, you talk about three trends that I guess automation and technology typically create with economies. Number one is more jobs are created, even though there's a job destruction, inevitably the net gain is more jobs. Number two, as you say, the standard of living improves or increases. And number three, talk about fewer hours are actually worked. Jeff (25m 55s): Correct. Joel (25m 55s): And when I heard that, I thought, my God, the pandemic is totally putting that trend on hyper-speed because we're talking about higher wages. We're talking about, you know, being more flexible in terms of how many hours you work. Is that your take as well, or is that sort of a head fake in terms of the bigger trend with automation and AI? Jeff (26m 16s): You're certainly correct that those three things: ever more jobs being created, higher standards of living and people working fewer hours are very clear, almost uninterrupted trends over the last 200 years in the world of work. And I don't have anything that would tell me from a data standpoint that there's going to be a sudden interruption of those trends, but keep in mind, these are almost uninterrupted trends. In 2020, we did not create jobs, right? Jobs were lost and we're still below total employment that we had pre-pandemic in the United States. And it'll take time, to get that back. Yep. So what I would say though, when I think about the impact of the pandemic is we just don't know yet. Jeff (26m 59s): We know this tech celebration that occurred and whether it's digital work or digital currencies or digital commerce, massive movements during the pandemic and the tech celebration will be faced with the backlash, a snapback, if you will. And we don't know where that snapback it's we know that people will do more e-commerce than they did in 2019, but they're clearly not going to do as much as they were doing in 2020 when stores weren't open. So where is it going to play out? We don't know. And so until the data settles, it is very difficult to draw conclusions. And I would caution people from drawing too many conclusions. There's a huge difference between someone going back to the office three days a week or two days a week. Jeff (27m 41s): If you go in two days a week, you have a different tax nexus, you have a different infrastructure need. If you go on three days a week, your tax nexus can be in that office and you probably need a desk in that office versus hotel desking. So just that simple distinction between, are we going to settle a two days or three days in certain companies in certain industries and certain job functions makes a huge difference. And we don't know which is which yet. Chad (28m 4s): So here in the lovely United States of America, we have at least, I mean, for probably a century really focused on living to work, right instead of working to live. All of this with the pandemic and obviously the culture shift definitely happened at least we felt some companies have that during the last year. Do you think that will continue and we will become more of a European like society where we are more focused on life than work or do you think this was just a blip in the radar and America's going to continue chugging along and greed is good? Jeff (28m 45s): Well, look, the short answer to that is we just don't know. There's a lot in that question though, Chad, like, you know, what kind of society do we want? Will the business round table, the group of the largest CEOs and companies in America that said we're no longer focused on shareholder capitalism, we're going to switch to stakeholder capitalism. We'll see if that's true. Chad (29m 5s): Right. Jeff (29m 5s): A lot of people were able to take a different perspective on life and maybe want to change. We don't know. I will tell you that the American version of capitalism has upsides and downsides to it. There are trade offs and we, as a society need to decide what kind of capitalism we want, what kind of tax system we want, what kind of social safety net we want. And those are complicated issues that I don't pretend we're having effective conversations on now on compromise in our political process. But I would say that some evolution of the American system of capitalism, history would tell us, we will see. Jeff (29m 46s): We will see a rise of whether it's worker wages or workers uniting in a common cause not necessarily in the union movement. The union may well know, may not recover, but we will see a rise in regulation. And we will see a rise in the social safety net is what history would tell us. Those are the counterbalancing forces that generally follow periods of unrestrained capitalism that occur because of the technological breakthroughs that lead to industrial revolutions. And whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing we can debate and discuss but that is what history would tell us, we are on the cusp of seeing Joel (30m 21s): You mentioned that you've never been married so I'm going to assume that you don't have any kids or at least none that you know about. Chad and I both have done our fair share of breeding. And college is always something that we talk about on the show in terms of how relevant is it, where is it going? You've got quite a few impressive degrees that include the Ivy league, where are you on, on college and the importance of a degree as we go into the future? And we see more companies giving, you know, certificates and that kind of education, where are you on that? Jeff (30m 53s): So, you know, our old friend, Clay Christianson who passed a little bit ago, made a prediction that half the universities will go out of business in the next 20 years. And they'll go out of business because their business model is fundamentally flawed for a host of reasons. I think about one of the contributors to my book, who is one of the largest investors in the education space, Dan Bianco with the Chee Partners. And he put forward a interesting statistic, which is 96% of college administrators believe they're training their students for the workforce. And 94% of hiring managers think that people come in incapable of starting the job and they need to be trained. And so just as huge mismatch going on today, I think about the skills that are necessary. Jeff (31m 38s): I think about the people in trades and what a huge skills gap there is in the trades and how people are being pushed into going to a four-year college and taking on debt. I think about the fact that there's a stigma attached to those that go into trades for reasons beyond my understanding. And so all of those things should yield. And we certainly in our predictions, predict a decrease in the number of people that have gone to a four year college. And I think that's probably the right change for society. Joel (32m 13s): Interesting. So I'm gonna let you out on this. I want to circle back to the book for a second. You have a pretty interesting competition as part of the book, talk about that. And then I'm going to ask what is the most, I guess, wrong prediction that has been made so far? Jeff (32m 28s): Well, again, back to the point that writing a book is really, really hard and I am not a fan of repeating myself. And so when the publisher said, oh, just write a few more examples of the same thing, just over and over and over again that's how business books get done. I was like, no, no, I'm not. I'm not doing that. I have nothing left to say. They said, well, it's not enough pages. And so a friend of mine said, look, you've gotta Tom Sawyer this thing you've interviewed hundreds of people. Why not ask some of them to write what they think the world of work looks like a 2040. And I happened to be an advisor to the XPRIZE. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to borrow a page from the XPRIZE. And so I personally put up a $10 million prize for whoever is the most correct. And I use that as an incentive to get some of the men and women that are shaping the future of work. Jeff (33m 13s): Heads of the largest labor unions, heads of the largest staffing firms, CHR Rose from some of the world's largest companies, you know, legislators, heads of trade associations. And they all basically said yes, and they submitted in their pieces. We selected the top 20 to go into the book and we have a complex voting process that will occur in early 2020. And then the winner will be determined. I'm not so sure that what the Vegas odds would be. I would hope that the Vegas odds would be against our friend, Andy Stern, who is the former head of the SIU, the largest labor union in the United States, because his view of the world is really just very dystopian and very awful. Jeff (34m 1s): So I hope that his view was very wrong and I think that Vegas would give him short odds. Joel (34m 6s): Can you give us a taste of what his world looks like? Jeff (34m 9s): Oh, his world is corporations are screwing everybody and the rich dominated everything and the workers have nothing. And everybody's, you know, scraping by. And I think potentially North Koreans have released some, you know, genetically enhanced bees that are killing everybody. And I mean, it's a bleak world. It's a bleak bleak world. Joel (34m 29s): Now you know what it's like living with Chad. Chad (34m 31s): Well, you know, that's a look inside of his brain, right? Especially since he is on the Union side of the house. Joel (34m 37s): I think it is very much, you know, shaped by his view of the world. That guy knows how to party obviously. Chad (34m 46s): Well, that's Jeff Wald, everybody. The book is called The End of Jobs: The Rise of On-Demand Workers and Agile Corporations. Jeff, if people want to find out more about you, they want to get the book, any of that fun stuff, where should they go? Jeff (35m 3s): The book is on sale at a, this little online retailer Amazon, and we were lucky enough to hit number one on all of Amazon's HR categories for a little while. Joel (35m 15s): Nice. Jeff (35m 15s): And then I finally, after buying Jeffwald.com in 1997, just earlier this year, I finally actually put content up at jeffwald.com. It was very exciting, very exciting usage of Jeffwald.com. So they can certainly go there. Joel (35m 28s): There you have it. It's been fun. Thanks. Thanks, Jeff. Chad (35m 31s): Thanks for joining us, man. Jeff (35m 32s): Thank you so much having me. Chad and Joel (35m 35s): We out, we out. OUTRO (36m 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.

Investment dollars are flowing into workforce tech globally, and Europe is no stranger to big deals. You're going to need a bigger boat though, because we have a giant shark on the show to dig into M&A strategy in the space. How big? How about $400 for starters. House of HR CEO Rika Coppens joins the boys to talk acquisition strategy, as well as dig into some numbers behind programmatic solutions and Google for Jobs. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Chad and Cheese Does Europe Intro (5s): Some podcasts, do it for the fun. Some do it for the fame, Chad and Cheese they do it for global effin domination. That's why bringing America to its knees was just the beginning. Now they have their eyes set on conquering Europe and they've drafted industry veteran Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze of Belgium to help them navigate the old country and bring HR's most dangerous podcast across the pond to trash-talk like never before. Not safe for work in any language. The Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. Joel (38s): Oh yeah. I had a dream that France beat the U S in basketball. How ridiculous is that? Right? Chad (45s): Gotcha. Joel (45s): You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. I'm your cohost Joel "fromage" Cheeseman. Chad (53s): And this is Chad "I told you so" Sowash Lieven (56s): And I'm still just Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze, and you keep trying to pronounce my name correctly. Joel (60s): On this episode, MNA, Programmatic landscape and Google for Jobs strictly from a European perspective, buckle up everybody. SFX (1m 10s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Chad (1m 13s): We've got European royalty as a guest host is what I hear. Joel (1m 18s): What? Royalty. Chad (1m 19s): This is what I hear. It does sound fairly sexy for the Chad and Cheese podcast to have royalty on the show. So Lieven, you have a surprise guest. Who did you bring on the show? Lieven (1m 31s): I know you are Americans. You love royalty. Chad (1m 33s): Yes. Lieven (1m 34s): We have in the studio here, someone uncrowned but royalty altogether, and she could be called the Empress of MNA. So then HR tech, I feel it is Rica Coppens, who happens to be my CEO, my boss. So behave and be even more quietm otherwise Joel (1m 51s): Rica, welcome to the show. Chad (1m 53s): Tell us a little bit more about you Rica. Tell us, tell us a little bit about you. You, what you currently do, what you've done in the industry. I hear about this royalty part. Joel (2m 4s): And more, more importantly, your management style for Lieven. Rika (2m 10s): Well, I like bossing around Lieven because that's what he needs, so let's start with that one. Apart from that, I think, yeah, I don't have a big history actually in the industry. I only started four years ago in House of HR and started also as a CEO of Accent one of the main subsidiaries of a House of HR, the best one I do need to say in staffing. Everyone is trying to copy Accent, everyone is taking Accent as a benchmark, so I think that speaks for itself, but yeah, also House of HR CEO since 2017 and very proud to be. We're a bunch of happy rebels in House of HR. Rika (2m 51s): And we also say HR stands for human resourcefulness. So the type of person I am. Joel (2m 56s): Speaking of happy, what's your favorite Belgian beer? Rika (2m 59s): Oh, now it's the Duvel, which means devil six, six, which has the number of these limits. So Chad (3m 12s): That just makes it better. That just makes it better. So what makes Accent so much different? Everybody's trying to copy you, love that. You're the rebels. You like the Duvel, everybody likes, loves a good Duvel. Tell us about Accent though, what makes that different? Why is everybody trying to copy? Rika (3m 28s): Because we put human first. I think we always believe in, in putting the human first. So there's a very good delivery model towards the candidate, but also towards the customer. So we're very close to them. We mainly also focus on the SME market, Small Medium-sized Enterprises, which is a very good model. And of course, when everyone goes left, we want to go, right? And that's, what's making us a happy rebel. We've always questioned what the industry is doing by actually trying to do exactly the opposite. Joel (3m 60s): I love that. Chad (4m 0s): Joel and I embraced that in every beer we drink. Joel (4m 4s): She's on the right show for sure. Rika (4m 8s): Definitely. We're all happy rebels. Excellent. And for example, one of our applications, because this is about HR tech, right? So one of the apps that we developed was originating from a brainstorm session, which we called "Kill Accent." And now it's one of our most successful applications that is on the market. And we're conquering Europe with that. We started in Belgium. We now launched in, as we already previously announced in the previous shows, in the Netherlands and France and Germany is next on the list. So here we come, Europe. Chad (4m 42s): Very nice. Very nice. Yeah. Joel (4m 43s): Be afraid Europe. Chad (4m 44s): Cheeseman. You wanna start out with shout outs or you want? Joel (4m 47s): Sure, shout outs man. I mean, I touched on it in the opening, but shout out to the France basketball team. I'm not sure how this happened, but they defeated the not so dream team, I guess, from the U S and I was trying to think of a good analogy of what it would, what would equate that? And I thought, well, maybe if the US beat the France soccer team, that might be a good analogy. So here in the U S that was a total shock. It wasn't like the gold medal game or anything. And there's still a good chance that the US will be in that golden medal running. But holy shit, France beats the US in basketball. I got to give a shout out to them. Chad (5m 24s): On Friday's show, you might want to replay it. I told you that the US basketball team was in trouble. They got smacked in their exhibition, prior to. They look like shit. And then they come out against France and dude, they're in trouble. Joel (5m 42s): I literally feel like if you rolled out the 92 team with Jordan, Magic, Larry and everybody at their current age, they could have beat France. So the fact that the fact that these bums couldn't be France in basketball is pretty embarrassing. I got to say, it's almost as well. Yeah, no, it's not as bad as Sweden, Sweden beating in the US women's team. But it's awful. Chad (6m 6s): Unfortunately, Lieven doesn't like football anymore so we should probably start talking about that. I want to give a shout out to Pink. We talked about on the Friday show that the Norwegian handball team, they opted not to wear those slinky panty looking bikinis. Joel (6m 24s): Yeah, lingerie. Chad (6m 25s): Right? Yeah. And so they were fined by the IOC, and Pink, said, guess what? The singer Pink said, I'll pay all your fines, you wear what you want. I love this. What now, now I gotta, we got to ask the Europeans in the house. Rica, what do you think about this? Rika (6m 43s): Obviously, I support Pink and I do support your shout out. I think indeed, it's all about to diversity and inclusion. And I think the way the women were dressed was almost a disgrace. So I would say if they want to wear it fine, if they don't want to wear it fine, as well. So I'm all up for a free choice. Chad (7m 2s): Lieven likes, he likes uniforms though. Lieven (7m 5s): Yeah. I'm more of a traditionalist. So I like Rika (7m 9s): The shorter the better. Lieven (7m 11s): The good old days when they were just nice. I think it's a tradition on, it's kind of egoistic of them not to do it anymore. Rika (7m 20s): This is the point where I need to say, as Lievens, both shut up right. Lieven (7m 24s): Once in a week, she tells me, listen, when you're in the hole digging, and then I know Lieven shut-up. Joel (7m 32s): I have to add, this is like the easiest layup in PR history, because the fine was $1,765 US. Yeah. And Pink makes that before she wakes up in the morning from residuals on. So like this was the easiest PR layup in the history of PR and the fact that not more people were able to grab that opportunity is pretty amazing. So shout out to Pink's I dunno, agent who saw this opportunity for a whopping $1,700 to get on the front page of every news site in the world, Jesus. Lieven (8m 11s): It's about not showing bank. Joel (8m 13s): I guess I'm like suspending $1,700 for 1.7 million in advertising and marketing. That was a pretty good investment. Lieven (8m 21s): You could have paid that. Joel (8m 23s): Next time, next time. Chad (8m 24s): Lieven. You have a shout out, hit us. Lieven (8m 26s): Oh, that's right. Shout out to LinkedIn for creating LinkedIn Creator, which I kind of like, because now everyone can see the big amount of followers I have. Shout out to LinkedIn. Chad (8m 39s): Okay. So the Creator mode in itself, LinkedIn gets all of this original content from creators on a daily basis. Right? Do we believe LinkedIn will ever pay for content? Maybe. I don't know. Facebook starts paying creators and then LinkedIn has to follow. Do you think one of them is going to force the other or are they just going to both stay back and hope to get this free content forever. Lieven (9m 3s): They kind of pay already for LinkedIn learning platform. If you have a very good catalog of lessons, you can put them on LinkedIn learning and they will pay you for it. And that's the best content LinkedIn has, in my opinion. And the other content on LinkedIn basically sucks. I mean, if you go to LinkedIn and you scroll through all those posts, nine out of 10 will say something silly about being a good leader, being on front of the troops, blah, blah, blah, but really good content, you hardly see it. Facebook from time to time, you can find some funny content and that's the best content Facebook has to offer. Joel (9m 36s): Well, you remember, we talked about Bulletin a few weeks ago, Facebook's a medium slash sub stack competitor there they're paying an undisclosed amount of money, which I'm sure is quite a bit when you're talking about Malcolm Gladwell being on the roster, but they added a few more authors, but the Bulletin buzz is pretty much died down. I guess. We'll see what happens, but yeah, you gotta pay for quality and somebody forgot to tell LinkedIn, I think. Chad (10m 4s): Yeah. Rica Where do you go for your quality content? Rika (10m 7s): Well, we try, of course internally we have quite some powerhouses inside House of HR. So the good things is that we always have someone who has had a great idea because we are so many to do different things. We promote entrepreneurship within House of HR so they can all do their own stuff. And then we exchanged best practices. So I do feel that a lot of the best content is coming from the people that are in the field, day-to-day that do their stuff on a daily basis. So looking internally for best practices is where I really enjoyed the most looking for good content. Joel (10m 43s): She also has us on autoplay. She forgot to mention. Chad (10m 46s): Yeah, yeah. Lieven (10m 47s): Can ask something? Chad (10m 48s): Yeah, bring it. Lieven (10m 49s): It's the best content we have our vacancies. And we really try to write our vacancies in the best possible way, taking into account search engine marketing, of course, but also one out of eight by now of our vacancies already has a video added to it. So we use video mind shopper tool, which allows all our consultants to regards some kind of a movie about the vacancy. And we have 8,000 token vacancies for Accents in Belgium today. Something like that, maybe 9,000 over 1000 of them have a video next to it. So I'm not sure how this is in the US but in Europe this is. Rika (11m 25s): Yeah. And we see indeed that 40 seconds, there is a more play or watch time on those vacancies when there's a video added to the vacancy. Chad (11m 35s): I love that. I love that you guys are thinking of your job postings, your descriptions, or what have you as content where on our side, they're more formulized compliance mechanisms. Joel (11m 51s): Formulaic. Lieven (11m 52s): The problem is I always notice people, young marketers putting their agenda from 9:00 to 9:30 I'm going to do my social half hour. And I'm going to try to find something I can share on social media. And the first three days, it works out perfectly. After three days, you have to look for something. What could I share? And I feel the best content we have are the vacancies. That's what we do. We don't need to go look for something to share. Joel (12m 17s): Let's dig into this for a second cause I think a lot of people have questions around what's the best practices for video. So just tell us a little bit quickly, are these homemade videos, do you just turn on the iPhone and record? Is there a crew that comes in and does these videos, how do you guys what's the strategy? Rika (12m 34s): Well, we actually went looking for a tool. We, we had an innovation contest two years ago and out of the innovation contest, the video posting came out. We start, we thought about developing the tool ourselves, but we ended up in Australia of all places with a tool called VideoMyJob. It's a great tool. It's fully on your phone. It has an autocue in it. So you can actually, you look very fluent, but actually you're just typing the words into the app. And it's just your iPhone filming you. And it's working really, really nicely. Yeah. You can add text to it. You can add movies to it. You can add additional graphics to it. Rika (13m 16s): So it's a, it's a very easy tool. You can learn it in half an hour, 45 minutes. And it looks really professional as well. Joel (13m 24s): And everyone records their own. Rika (13m 25s): Everyone records their own. We have had trainings, we've done internal, so now in December, we will do internal Oscar rewards for the best movies as well. So, and we have some lessons with professional video makers on how to make your video look even more professional. But of course there are a couple of hints and tips that we share with everyone, like put your phone in a horizontal mode, don't put it vertically, make sure that your background actually is not boring white, but that you put some nice flowers behind you or a professional backgrounds. So there's a lot of tips and tricks that we're sharing with everyone on how to make the video look more professional. Joel (14m 4s): All right. Chad (14m 5s): VideoMyJob, everybody. We've heard VideoMyJob, they've been around for a while. And it's interesting. And it's awesome to hear that you guys there in Belgium actually found another product, but it wasn't even in your country or in Europe. So that's pretty awesome. The US companies need to start doing the same thing. Rika (14m 27s): Well we're just looking for the best tool. And this was the one where we found had all the features that we needed. It's quite complex to develop something such as a video tool yourself. So yeah, we don't have the not invented here syndrome in House of HR. Joel (14m 43s): Nice. I got one more shout out before we move on. Ted Lasso is back everybody, if you're not watching Ted Lasso it's, I dunno is calling it the best show currently on TV hyperbole I don't know, but it's a great Chad (15m 1s): Dr. Death is a good show on is probably really good too. Joel (15m 3s): You're going to get into Dr. Death with me again, you fucker Doctor Death. Death to peacock, I say. So, yeah. It's called Ted Lasso. It's a story about an American football coach that goes and coaches football in the UK, England specifically, and hi-jinks commence. It's great comedy. Chad (15m 25s): Hilarious. Joel (15m 26s): It's uplifting inspirational. It's a great show. You gotta, you gotta buy Apple plus to get it. But if Chad can buy Apple plus the number one Apple hater in the world, anyone can buy it to watch this show. It's worth it. We'll do it. Lieven (15m 42s): Ted Lasso. Joel (15m 43s): Ted lasso. And with that Topics! Chad (15m 47s): Topics! Joel (15m 48s): All right let's talk a little mergers and acquisitions European style. Listeners will remember we talked about the low rock numbers a few weeks ago. Chad (15m 58s): Money! Joel (15m 59s): So money is flowing into this space, Q2 of 21 set new records for global work tech. $4.9 billion across 91 deals in quarter two, making it the biggest quarter ever in this space. 2021 is already the biggest year for the global work tech and VC investment with H with the first half of 21 totals amounting to $7.62 billion. Just a little over 20 of these deals come out of Europe, seven in the UK, although Lieven is quick to point out that the UK is not Europe anymore, someone needs to tell the Americans. Five of the deals came out of France, a few of the notable ones were Beamery, and Malt. Joel (16m 40s): So what's going on here, guys, let's hear from the Europeans, why so much money? What the hell is going on? Rika (16m 47s): I think HR tech or HR sector has always been defined as the sector, which is the last one to be dis-intermediated. So I think this is what's happening for the moment. Everyone has a little bit of FOMO, fear of missing out, and there's so much money going around that yeah, people really want to be in this space and they just don't want to actually miss out on everything that's happening in this area. And yeah, I think there's very interesting deals out there. There's very interesting applications out there, but there are also things that have not generated one euro of cash and me having a financial background to I've always learned in the end, it's only the cash that counts. Rika (17m 28s): So yeah, I do also like to follow where the cash is coming from in the end. Chad (17m 33s): Right? You were a CFO before you became CEO, right? Rika (17m 37s): Yeah. Long time ago. Yeah. Chad (17m 38s): So right now, take a look at the market. Everybody's looking at the rush back to work and whether it's in remote form or in the office, or what have you, it shouldn't be surprising that so much money is being dumped into the space, right? Rika (17m 56s): No. It's not surprising because of course I think we all appreciate work in a way in the last couple of months, because it was in a way, the only thing that kept on going, and that was more or less normal. So I believe that we rediscovered the value of work. We rediscovered also the value of colleagues, being able to go to the office from time to time was all of a sudden a perk as so yeah, workspace is an important part of our life. And now I think a lot of companies are wondering how will this new environment of work and private actually work? How do we find an answer to keep employees motivated? Rika (18m 37s): How do we onboard employees? Which is a point also where a lot of applications focus in to onboard employees from a distance. Learning and development tools that are being developed to do more and more learning and development offline or digitally. So, yeah, there's a lot of things going on to really help employers and employees find the perfect balance. So, which I think, yeah, for everyone is still a big question mark. Chad (19m 5s): We talk a lot about female funding and female founders on this show and we don't see a very large percentage of it happening in the US. What are you seeing in Europe with regard to female funding, female founders, actual female leadership in the HR tech space? Rika (19m 28s): Well, there isn't that much around either, unfortunately. So I think, yeah, sometimes maybe we're too afraid as women to come out. I do have to say our founder, our one of our founders Conny Vandendriessche, she started with a fund called We Are Jane, which is actually a fund supporting only companies that are either founded by a women or aware that have women leaders. And she has started that fund. And there's another fund like that in the Netherlands. So those are two funds that are existing today in this space to really support female founders, because it's true that women are more reluctant to actually go out there and get funding for their enterprises that they are starting up. Joel (20m 18s): You guys have a, I don't know, let's call it a Howitzer that you're bringing to the MNA fight. You guys are pretty public with the $400 million account that you have to go make acquisitions in this space. Lieven (20m 32s): The whole space battalion it's not just a howitzer. Joel (20m 33s): It's not just a, you know, a whole damn army to go in and take over the world. So what are you guys looking for? What's the strategy? Are there particular countries, particular technologies, are you looking to make more acquihires hires to bring more talent into the organization? A big focus? Do you have an eye towards North America and the US talk about your strategy and where you hope to put that 400 million? Rika (20m 59s): Well we already did five acquisitions actually, because here's the scoop. Our fifth acquisition is Effect. This will be announced later this week publicly. So. Chad (21m 9s): What? Rika (21m 10s): Yeah, indeed so it's our new powerhouse , which is an acquisition we closed in or we signed at the end of June with that acquisition we already did one more, acquisition in the Netherlands to further deepen our offering in the public sector. So here, I already mentioned one of the sectors that we're particularly interested in, that's the public sector for House of HR, which is a really interesting one in which is further developing in Europe. Netherlands being one of the first countries really to have opened up for staffing solutions and HR solutions in the public sector. Now we see that other countries are also following and opening up in that area. Rika (21m 54s): So that's an interesting developing space. Apart from that, for us, a good acquisition is an acquisition that is really specialized. So they are focusing on a specific sector because we do believe that the knowledge of a specific sector of the candidates of the profiles that you are looking for is giving a tremendous added value, not only for the candidates, but also for the customers. So that's definitely the first point being a specialized company. We're not looking for loss-making companies or restructuring stories. We want to have successful stories that we add on to House of HR. Chad (22m 33s): There does need to be a cultural fit. That's a really important one. People always say, oh yeah, right, once you see a good company, you'll definitely go for it and culture is not important, but I can assure you that we have declined companies, because we didn't feel they had the same entrepreneurial drive and spirit as the rest of House of HR. So that one is also really important. So yeah, a lot of criteria actually that we try to adhere to and they need to be specialized in different areas in different sectors. Joel (23m 3s): I think there's an old adage in the US, a journalist asked a bank robber, why they robbed banks. And he said, that's where the money is. So, so when you say we're going after companies with a sort of public public market, is that because that's where the money is? Are these companies with existing clients? Cause that what surprised me was I didn't hear a lot of sort of new technologies or things to add from a tech perspective. It sounds like the strategy is getting in as many countries as possible with companies that have a target of the public markets. Is that correct? Rika (23m 39s): No. So actually public sector is one of the segments that we're serving as House of HR, but we want to be in construction. We also are in the banking sector, so we try to have as many sectors as possible. So that will add to our, let's say internal leverage in terms of sectors, because when one sector is not doing great, the other one will be stable or even growing. And that's also why we like public sector because it's contra-cyclical. So we try to be in as many sectors as possible, indeed in as many countries as possible, stable countries in Europe. So we're for the moment targeting Western Europe. So sorry guys, not yet going to the US or Canada. Rika (24m 21s): So that's a, maybe for our next life, but not in the next couple of years. So focusing on Europe, indeed. Joel (24m 28s): So, House of HR, are you a house of brands? So when you buy companies, do you roll them up into the mother brand? Do you let them keep autonomy and stay the brand they are? What is typically your strategy around, around that? Rika (24m 44s): It's a very good question. Indeed, we look at keeping the own brands. I always say when I would have married, my husband, if my husband would have asked me to marry him and take his name, I probably would have said no. So that's why we also are. So that's why we, we also say when we acquire companies, we let you keep your name. It's an identity in a lot of cases, the founders are still there. So it means that the brand is our baby. And you don't take the away. The human part again, in our business remains very important. And I heard you say, there's not a lot of tech in your acquisitions, and that's true in one side, but we do believe that the future of the HR business is phygital so the mix between physical and digital. Rika (25m 33s): And the HR tech, we develop in a lot of cases ourselves, or we acquire sub-solutions, which, which we integrate into our solutions. So that's the way how we approach it. I do feel that a lot of the tech solutions, they only approach one small part or one small segment of the whole HR cycle. And it's very difficult if you acquire all of these small ones to integrate them into one big solution. So, and that's where a lot of these solutions fail is that they really try to offer a solution or a kind of a simplification of one particular part of a full process and companies, they are not open to acquire or to buy 50 apps to manage their HR process. Chad (26m 17s): Joel, did you write that down? Phygital fidget toll. Write that down. When we're talking about tech, it's a hard discussion to have in many cases of whether an organization builds or buys. So when you're talking about innovation and there's so many different platforms that are out there: Point Solutions, Grander Platforms, when you start to look at the gaps that you have within House of HR, how do you, how do you actually distinguish whether you are going to build or buy? Rika (26m 52s): It's a good question and maybe the honest answer would be, we don't have the answer yet on that one. So part of it is that we look at the maturity of the application that's already there because there's a lot of things out there that are not mature yet, that have very few customers, and that are not yet built to grow massively. Secondly is also their ability of the applications or the technology to link into other software platforms or other solutions. Because a lot of these HR companies or HR tech companies, as I said, they are only looking for a small part of the HR process or simplification. Rika (27m 35s): And they haven't thought about what are the typical applications that I should look into, should link into. So having the APIs ready, understanding already, which other programs and software there is out there with, which they should actually leverage their market position. I think those are important questions to answer for a lot of these HR tech companies. Chad (27m 60s): So talk a little bit more about the future of HR. We talk about phygital. Is this the time where you focus on the other side? Is that what you see the future is where it's not pure digital, it's not pure physical, but there's this hybrid of both. How does a company, or how does HR look in 10 years from now? Rika (28m 20s): We have a vision where we say, ah, we have still quite some offices and branch offices where we interview candidates. Of course, inviting a candidate more and more we see video popping up, but in the end also, and we have done some questionnaires about that. The higher skilled candidates are the more, they are still wanting to have interviews physically, and they want to see a real person. So, but one of our dreams is to have a computer-less office almost. So obviously there will be computers, but we do believe that asking questions, asking the right questions, immediately, having your matching engine put at work to see where would this candidate fit into? Rika (29m 4s): What are the questions that you still need to ask? What is the cultural fit in with which companies? So that you can really give good advice to your candidates and as a company, you then become a job coach for life. So that's, that's our dream as a company that we can become a job coach for life, for our candidates. Thanks to the advice that we are able to give them with all the technology that's behind it, AI, soft skill testing, but also emotion recognition, facial recognition, these kinds of features. Joel (29m 36s): Little known fact, Chad calls me a dream coach from time to time. Let's take everybody. Chad (29m 41s): That's our little thing. Joel (29m 43s): Keep talking a little tech about that. SFX (29m 45s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel (29m 48s): All right. So programmatic. Chad (29m 51s): Yeah. Let's hit this up real quick because Pandologic, which, you know, Rica and Lieven you might've heard a panel Pandologic you might not have, but Pandologic was just acquired last week. We also found out that Vonq, a big player in Europe is hopping across the pond to be able to provide programmatic in the US and also obviously continuing in Europe. So what do you see currently as the state of programmatic in Europe, as we see it really slow to adopt in Europe? Joel (30m 28s): And if they don't know Pando, they sure as hell know, StepStone who bought Appcast back in 2019. Lieven (30m 35s): Do you think they did right buying it? Chad (30m 38s): I think it was smart because they needed roots in the US. How was StepStone going to hop the pond? Right? I mean, effectively, other than an acquisition in Appcast was deeply rooted into just about every recruitment marketing advertising agency here in the US. So I think it was smart now, execution post acquisition that's an entirely different discussion. Lieven (31m 2s): I think you need to start with explaining what programmatics are, because of Europe if you talk about programmatics, we are thinking about the VCR systems, which needs to be automatic so programs to tape the right movie. Programmatics is something most HR managers I feel will never have heard about. Joel (31m 19s): So most so I'll give an attempt at a layman's description of it. So in the old days, you paid to put an ad on a job site, for example, and that ad ran on that job board and then you got the results that you got. Programmatic tells you, okay, put your ad out and we will distribute the job on a variety of websites that could be job sites that could be media sites, newspaper sites, et cetera. And then we will adjust your budget based on the effectiveness of the ad. So if job board a is getting you crappy results in job board B is getting you really solid results, then we will shift more money into a job board B to make sure that you're getting the most out of your money. Joel (32m 5s): So this is obviously a huge growth area in the US for advertising your jobs. I think most, pretty much every agency, this is primarily how they market jobs for companies. So that would be my definition of programmatic. Chad, you can feel free to jump in, but this is obviously the trend, I think, where companies are going, particularly the enterprise level companies. It's a pretty common thing here in the US, obviously from what you guys and feedback tell us programmatic is I guess, an alien concept in Europe. Lieven (32m 44s): I don't think so. I mean, we definitely do it, and of course we should be doing it, but sometimes the cultures differently, we use different terms. If it's like automated recruitment marketing, it's something bigger companies are working on already, smaller companies as amiss, probably are not, in Europe, which has a bunch of different countries, and it's a really fragmented market. So there are so many local job boards and there isn't one player which will be able to cover the whole European markets. You have the global players like indeed, and like LinkedIn, and then you have a bunch of local players, which probably aren't all integrated within the programmatics. So if VONQ and I'm going to look into them, I know them, of course, but I I've never worked with them if they can offer something, covering all the countries who are active in, that would be a great thing, but I don't think one of those companies exist yet in Europe, but I could be wrong. Chad (33m 36s): Well it's interesting because when we traveled to Denmark and then Sweden, it was talking to friends in Denmark and then also in Sweden. And it was like, there was a wall between the two, when it came to job sites. I mean, you went with a Danish website or you went with a Swedish website, there were a few that crossed over, but not many. And there weren't very many that were outside of those borders. I mean, everybody used ones that were specific to that country. So being able to I'll give you a military analogy, instead of all this programmatic tech talk, it's kind of like carpet bombing is how we used to just throw jobs everywhere. Chad (34m 18s): Right? Whether it hit collateral damage of having the right person or not. It didn't matter, it hit everybody. Where programmatic is supposed to be more dynamically targeted. Lieven (34m 28s): Sniping. Chad (34m 29s): Yes. More like a Tomahawk missile or a sniper. Right. You know what the target is, you're going after that target. Lieven (34m 36s): Yeah the money you can save nuke 'em all, but if you have to be more careful than sniping could be the best approach. Chad (34m 42s): Generally more effective, not to mention better for a brand experience. Right? Rika (34m 47s): And you can only do once. So if you know, but it's true. I mean, we have that experience. We have our own chatbot technology called Dora. And we do actually, yeah, I wouldn't call it programmatics, but we try to target as good as possible country by country, which tools we are using and which Facebook audiences, for example, or LinkedIn audience that we want to target on, we do that manually. So I think it's the human programmatic, but it's true that if you are not narrowing down enough, the target group, the next time they won't click on your ads anymore. So you need to be very careful what you do and who you target it to. Rika (35m 27s): And we do have those tools. There's one in Belgium called Simple and also in the Netherlands. So they are doing it a little bit more automated. But then the question I have when I look at the effectiveness of the tools is when you publish an ad, the first couple of weeks, you get tremendous success, you then publish your second ad, the success is already a little bit less and the third ad it's again, less. So the question is also like, what kind of funds do you throw in terms of marketing? Do you throw against the ads campaigns and do they continue? Because then at some point in time, they need to commercialize it and they also need to make a profit. So they're trying to optimize also how much money do I throw into the ads and what is the return? Rika (36m 12s): And you start to see that the response is becoming less and less. And the question I also have there is of course, with our good friends at Facebook and LinkedIn is how much are they kind of engineering the return you get? And for me, that's a big black box still which is annoying to say the least. Joel (36m 33s): Are there distribution tools that are popular in Europe? Rika (36m 36s): Multi posters. Yeah. Joel (36m 38s): Multi posters. Lieven (36m 39s): We have one called Knollenstein, which just for the name itself is a great fun. Chad (36m 44s): It sounds like a beer. Rika (36m 45s): It could be! Lieven (36m 46s): but it sounds like an ancient costal summer in the Hills of Romania Knollenstein, that's one of the ancient multi-posters in our regions. Do you have experience with real-time bidding in recruitment because that's something I'm looking into. Joel (37m 3s): Yeah. Chad (37m 3s): Definitely, and you should take a look at again, this is a great discussion around like the advancements of some of the programmatic platforms that are out there force organizations to pretty much be like day traders, where they're constantly looking and they have humans doing the day trading versus other platforms that are doing it through AI algorithms. So there's more of that kind of like again, onboard computer versus the, you know, the kid over on the side with the joystick. Lieven (37m 35s): That's interesting to me. And if one of our listeners happens to be CEO of one of those companies, please contact me. It's Lieven@ houseofhr.com. And I would be glad to talk. Chad (37m 46s): You're going to get calls Lieven. I guarantee you. Joel (37m 48s): You're gonna get some calls from this episode. We had them at $400 million. So you mentioned, you mentioned Facebook and LinkedIn and, and the black box that's there and we've talked about Google for Jobs on the show and sort of what they've been doing to sort of clean up some of the spam, to create more features for job seekers to easily apply to jobs more and more efficiently. What in particular from Rica, what's your, what's your perspective on Google for Jobs over in Europe? Is this something that everyone should be taking seriously? Or do you think that it's the jury still out on Google in Europe? Rika (38m 29s): Well, when it says Google, in any case, you need to take it seriously. Chad (38m 32s): Amen sister. Rika (38m 33s): So yeah. So with the funding behind it, you would be well stupid if you wouldn't take it seriously. On the other hand, I did expect more from it, to be quite honest. So it hasn't really, we were ready from the moment we heard Google for Jobs was going to hit Europe. We were ready in our, in our SEO trainings that we had internally, how to write vacancies, making sure that Google for Jobs is picking them up. We're still optimizing on that, but the jury is still out there, I think. Joel (39m 4s): Can you share any numbers from what you've seen? Obviously you're posting on Google for Jobs. Do you have any data in terms of what you're getting from them versus the other sources that you have to post jobs or promote jobs? Lieven (39m 16s): Yeah. And it's still growing, but I can only give you your data, for example, right now I have for the other companies as well, but we have 42 brands, maybe 43 now, 43 brands? So I don't know it by heart, but Accent, which is the biggest one here, it was quite interesting and quite an impressive from the start, about 19% after six months after the launch of Google for jobs, 19% came through Google for jobs, which was a lot, but now it's stagnating. And I do feel if the user experience would improve and the usage would improve as well. But I heard about the upcoming guidelines. The guidelines are, and not a rebranding, but they're going to improve it. Lieven (39m 58s): So the improvements of Google for Jobs? Chad (40m 1s): They are rolling out some, some big changes on being able to identify spam jobs, ensuring that there's better user experience. So instead of asking for registration and then pushing somebody to another registration, that's, you know, again, going to be penalized, updating your feed on a regular basis to ensure that you don't have old jobs that are just sitting out there. And I mean, they're doing many different things, but for the most part, they're looking for organizations who are trying to game the system. And there are many of them that are out there. And, but overall, I think the biggest piece is the direct apply markup to ensure that when I'm applying for that job, I'm not going to be whisked off to another site or have to go through three or four different, you know, hoops or what have you. Chad (40m 53s): I think this is them trying, we'll see how well they do, trying to make the experience better. Did you get a chance to take a look at that Lieven? Lieven (41m 2s): Yeah. They give a whole bunch of guidelines about what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing. And I feel decent companies, the good companies, are already doing a pretty, okay. And now they're going to try to filter the bad ones out. And I think the aggregators might have a problem because their database just doesn't clean or as clean as it should be. Joel (41m 24s): For sure. Lieven (41m 24s): Our database is , of course it is because we are not going to leave vacancies online, which are filled in, why should we, I think it might actually improve and it's going to be launched, I thought last quarter of this year? Chad (41m 37s): October. Yep. Joel (41m 39s): When you said, so you said 19%, but it stagnated, did it stay around 19%? Did it dip into single digits? I mean, 19% is pretty impressive. Lieven (41m 50s): No it didn't go down, it just didn't improve anymore. Joel (41m 54s): Just stayed around there. Lieven (41m 55s): Young people graduating now might be, maybe we should, could see a rise. Rika (42m 1s): But if we did a recent questionnaire towards students where we were also asking, what is the job boards that you would be going on to look for a job? And Google for Jobs actually was only listed in the 10th place or something like that. So the local job boards were still kind of the ones that came first. So it goes back to what we were saying in the beginning, like Europe, it's not like the US it has a bunch of countries in it. And each country has its, it's local job board. And those are the ones that are some of them actually government sponsored. So those are the ones that are primarily consulted also by graduates and by people looking for a job. Chad (42m 38s): Well, I think the beauty of Google for Jobs is that most won't know that they're looking on Google for Jobs, right? They're just doing a search and then jobs pop up, right? And then they find themselves on that other site and Lieven, I don't know what it looks like from a performance standpoint for others, but I would say 19% is pretty amazing. And I would attribute that to all of your hard work at House of HR, focusing on the SEO of these jobs, being able to provide all this. And again, you're looking at job descriptions as content. You're not looking at at it as this formulaic bullshit that we're throwing out there to try to just bait and switch somebody. Chad (43m 24s): So I think the way that you guys are looking at this providing video content, et cetera, et cetera, provides you a more of a pretty much springboard to get more traffic. Joel (43m 36s): The more people engage with job postings from Google, the better your results are going to be. So you guys going the extra mile to provide actual content video and your job descriptions, I think, is going to pay dividends with Google. And by the way, for those who haven't listened to last week's episode with Dee from Boundless, the phenomenon of people moving to different countries within Europe, because their employer allows them to do that, I think is going to put a little bit of a highlight on Google for Jobs because people can now search for jobs in other countries more easily with Google. Whereas the country specific job boards, it might be more difficult. So anyway, keep us up to date on how Google's growth goes with your sources. Joel (44m 19s): See if it goes up from 19%. I think it will. Chad (44m 21s): And Rica, I got to say, I appreciate you taking time again, as royalty, in coming on the show. Lieven thanks for, thanks for bringing Rica on. Rica if somebody wants to connect with you, if I want to connect with Rica, how do I do that? Rika (44m 41s): Well, LinkedIn obviously is a good place to start. And of course I'm always reachable at houseofhr.com as well, so don't hesitate to reach out. Lieven (44m 51s): But then we'll have to pass, which is the management assistant, but now's a good day. She's on holiday. Rika (44m 55s): On holiday. Now you will be able to get past. Lieven (44m 59s): Otherwise will be difficult. Rika (45m 1s): Otherwise she guards the door. Yeah. Chad (45m 4s): Excellent. Thanks. Lieven we appreciate you bringing her on and Rica we appreciate you taking the time. Rika (45m 10s): You're welcome. And thank you very much for having me. Joel (45m 12s): Outstanding. Chad another one in the books. Joel and Chad (45m 15s): We out. OUTRO (45m 17s): 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 (46m 1s): 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.

Don't call it a chatbot, they've been here for years... Seriously, call 'em chatbots, conversational AI, or fancy experience and productivity tools. It really doesn't matter if you don't understand the role of the tech and the solution to your everyday problems. ENTER the 2021 Conversational AI Report by friend of the show Madeline Laurano and Aptitude Research. During this podcast we dig into some major points and tease others. We ask: Isn't this tech already part of our everyday routine? Can conversation AI be more than a point solution? Is conversational AI more than a high-volume play? Can the ATS and CRM platforms even compete? Again, Madeline has pulled together amazing intel that every Talent Acquisition, Recruiting, and Human Resources professional should download, digest, and share with their teams. Enjoy the overview, brought to you by those wonderful kids over at Sovren.com. Sovren, was into parsing and AI matching before it was cool. Sovren, AI so human you'd like 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 (2s): 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 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 (1m 22s): Ah, that's right kids. Hey, what's up? It's Chad and I'm joined today looking bastards by Madeline Laurano founder at Aptitude Research. What's going on Madeline? Madeline (1m 36s): Hey Chad, thanks for having me back. Chad (1m 38s): Thanks for coming back. I wasn't sure if you'd come back or not. Madeline (1m 43s): No, always been busy, busy writing so excited to talk about some of the new research. I mean, Chad (1m 47s): You've come on. And we've talked about the ATS report. We talked about the programmatic report and you've got a new report that just came out. Which one is this? Madeline (1m 56s): This is conversational AI. And we started this report last year, we published one around July 2020, during the pandemic and now we revisited the topic this year. So I'm pretty excited about this one. Chad (2m 9s): Conversational AI kids. It doesn't get it doesn't get sexier. Madeline (2m 14s): No, it doesn't. Chad (2m 16s): Let's do this, before we get into the actual report and we start teasing it a little bit. Madeline, just in case our listeners have been in the fetal position or in a closet for the entire pandemic. Tell them a little bit about yourself. Madeline (2m 30s): Sure. So Hi everyone. My name is Madeline Laurano. I'm the founder of Aptitude Research. We do research advisory on HCM and all things, talent acquisition technology. Chad (2m 40s): Excellent. Excellent. So this report has a ton of takeaways, but we're going to only tease a few because people need to, they need to dig into this in total. I've gone through it. It's amazing. It's only 24 pages, which is awesome. It's a little bit easier to get through than the applicant tracking system, 150,000 pages, which was awesome as well, but great charts, graphs, graphics. So everyone listening and your teams should definitely download it, read it, digest it and talk amongst yourselves. So ready to jump in? Madeline (3m 15s): I'm ready. Chad (3m 19s): All right. So one of the points I want to get to is that the report talks about conversational AI is already prevalent in our every day lives. It shouldn't be something that, you know, we find obtrusive or intrusive or because we already use it. Madeline (3m 36s): Yeah. We use it in our personal lives. I think this is very different than other areas of, I mean, it's different than our programmatic conversation. I don't use programmatic in my personal life, but the conversational AI is something we use every day. We're using Alexa, we're using Siri. You know, our weather app is powered by conversational AI, at least mine is and we're used to it. And it's the difference with conversational AI in our personal lives is it's truly an assistant, right? It's like you use the, I need help with something so I'm going to go to Siri or Alexa and ask for help in way that they can support me. And it's that assistant that to me is, is really the differentiator. Chad (4m 16s): I love it. I tell you what I, I remember when I was a kid and remember War Games, the show War Games? SFX (4m 25s): Shall we play a game? Chad (4m 28s): So that wasn't audible where you could actually talk to the computer, but there was an audible kind of like response from the computer. I always waited. I always loved thinking of voice to voice. And now when I'm in the car, I'll tell, you know, my Google assistant navigate me home or navigate here, or I'll ask for, you know, questions for Google throughout the day. And my kids hate it. My kids hate it because they'll come to me, they'll come to me for a question. And I'll pick up my phone and I'll hit my assistant and say, Hey, Google and then I'll ask whatever question they just asked. And they look at me like, okay, I get it. For me, it is a part of it is a part of my life. Chad (5m 9s): And I think it's a part of most people's lives. The thing is conversational AI in our space seems to be seen as a point solution. So first off let's provide some context. What point is conversational AI usually cornered into right now? And where are the other points? Madeline (5m 30s): Yeah, I think it's usually cornered into the apply process or like the, either the recruitment marketing process or the screening process. Chad (5m 38s): Yeah. Madeline (5m 38s): It's like, we're just going to use a chat bot. The candidates have issues applying. We want to make sure they get through the process. They're interested in our company. They're interested in applying for a job as a barista, and we want to be able to show them that there are other locations close to where they live, where there are opportunities or the screening process they're going to ask some questions to get through. So that tends be where companies think that's where it comes in, serves a purpose. It's one thing. And that's it. And that's really a chat bot. A chat bot can just tackle that one thing. Conversational AI and the way a lot of companies are using it today is continuous, it's throughout all of talent acquisition, interviewing scheduling interviews, onboarding, helping a new hire say, Hey, we're so excited you joined this organization. Chad (6m 20s): Yeah. Madeline (6m 21s): Bring your lunch the first day, your manager's on vacation. Like little things like that, you know, people take for granted. So I think even the employee experience, internal mobility are becoming use cases. Yeah. McDonald's we featured them in the report and that's how they use it. It's an end to end. Chad (6m 36s): I think companies like McDonald's have been thinking out of the box for using technology for problems, right? And they're looking at problems and they're saying, how can we address them with technology. Conversational AI for them and if you think about it, it is a heavy load to lift, to be able to provide a much better, much faster application experience, which it does. But as you had said, many companies are actually turning conversational AI back onto employees. Madeline (7m 12s): Exactly, back to employees, thinking about internal opportunities, thinking about that employee experience. So I think it becomes very interesting and it's, you know, Chad it's and we've talked about this, you know, before this report. There've been acquisitions right? This year, we saw some conversational AI providers get acquired to do very specific things in sourcing or, you know, in kind of this one use case and interviewing, you know, AllyO as an example. Chad (7m 38s): We'll talk about that. I promise. So the next one is conversational AI is completely transforming high volume recruiting. So this to me is all about speed, scale and experience. So if any company is doing high volume, are we seeing pretty much, most companies jump into this? And what is the impediment, if they are not? Madeline (8m 2s): It's a game changer for high volume. It absolutely is. And I think it's the efficiency, it's the experience, but it's also a competitive advantage. Like if you're going to go apply for a job and it's quick, easy, you have a really cool experience. You already feel like maybe this is a company you want to work for, and you're going to do that and possibly get an offer in a day compared to what that experience. We all know what the apply process looks like in a traditional ATS, and you're gonna lose people and that's what's happening. Chad (8m 31s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and I've also seen many high volume organizations focus on a couple of different areas and ensuring that that candidate doesn't go into a black hole, number one so they get responses, later with new jobs because it is high volume. So they're constantly looking for people. So you can go back into your database for somebody who just applied, who didn't get the role, but we have a new role, et cetera, et cetera. And also, this I think is huge, is the anti ghosting magic of messaging. Because if you can continue to send messages to candidates who are going to be on their first day, or even their interviewing it doesn't matter, you can keep them engaged. Chad (9m 16s): They feel more accountable and responsible for showing up. And we like to look at candidates for why are they ghosting us? But, you know, we, on our end are responsible for ghosting as well. Madeline (9m 29s): Yeah. And it's 24/7, right? So it's like that relationship can happen if someone's finishing a shift at midnight and they work in a restaurant and they're interested in another opportunity, they can start engaging with that company at one in the morning. And that's not going to happen if you don't have conversational AI. Chad (9m 43s): Yeah, yeah. Speed and scale. And then all the opportunities around that. I think that to me is so compelling, especially for high volume. So what are our next point, I think is a very big point. And you definitely need to read the report and dig deeper into this, but the ATS and CRM markets can't compete. Tell me about this. Madeline (10m 9s): I know this is a bold statement. I think a lot of people might not like this view that I have. But I think, yeah, I, you know, it's interesting because there have been some acquisitions that, but very few with real conversational AI, I think Smart Recruiters, acquiring Jobpal is a very smart acquisition that's absolutely conversational AI. But for a lot of the ATSs and CRMs, you know, aside from Smart Recruiters, they've tried to build their own, which is just a chat bot. It's very transactional. It's just loaded FAQ's and, you know, it's kind of one type of communication that they're just not able to build out what some of these other providers are doing better, true conversational AI providers. Madeline (10m 50s): So I think for those providers that have tried to build their own, or in that process, they just, it's a huge commitment. It seems like an easy thing, right. It's like, okay, why can't we can all build a bot? How could we not do that? But a true conversational AI is really complex. Chad (11m 5s): Yeah. Yeah. From my standpoint, it feels like the market is telling us something different. So stick with me here. So AllyO and Maya received big funding, but yet they couldn't crack the market. Right. Pandologic just bought Wade and Wendy, but was that off the COVID clearance rack? I don't know right? So the question to me is can conversational AI survive outside a core system? AllyO is now inside Hirevue. Maya is now integrating into StepStone's Total Jobs and Wade and Wendy inside Pandologic. So the big question is, yes, they do need that expertise inside the ATS and the CRM and these bigger systems. Chad (11m 52s): But for Conversational AI companies, don't, they have to be focused on getting in there quickly because it, from what the market's saying, they can't survive by themselves? Madeline (12m 3s): Yeah. And I think for some of these companies took a lot of money before they were probably ready to. And I think that part of it's kind of the growth. I mean, it's an exciting, like you said, it's like the sexiest area of talent, acquisition tech. This is where investors want to spend money. And they got a lot of money before they were probably ready to continue to develop. So I think a lot of it is driven by kind of an exit maybe before they were ready or we would have liked them to exit. I think, where I see the challenges and all of those examples you're then limiting what conversational AI can do. It just becomes a point solution. Right. If you're looking at AllyO, I mean, Hirevue does first interview to essentially onboarding that's where it plays. It's not doing anything top of the funnel. So AllyO can come in and play in the interview spot really well. Madeline (12m 48s): If you look at Pandologic, you know, there's a great use cases for using conversational AI, for advertising job advertising and sourcing. I mean, it makes so much sense, but it's limited to that what that vision is. So I think that's, you know, to see this kind of end to end vision, come out, it's going to come from a standalone provider. Chad (13m 6s): Yeah. I also believe, this is just my thoughts, that Hirevue needed something more to expand because they're going to have to take on the ATS and the CRM and become a much larger system. The question is, and knowing that right now it's being used as a point solution. Could they not supercharge that conversational AI later and really spur more business? I mean, I that's, I think it's, there's just a huge opportunity that's being missed by most companies, right now. Madeline (13m 36s): Yeah. I think so too. And I think it's going to be very interesting because now we're kind of left with very few providers that haven't been acquired yet that are doing very well. Like we know these providers that are, have done very well in the past year, they continue to do well. Companies, enterprise companies are investing in them. Plus these acquisitions that have been made and all of these pieces kind of playing out with, with what's happening. You know, the other thing we could spend, like a whole podcast on this pricing, the pricing has gotten so complicated, right? It's like you go in, you're going to give an ATS deal, a CRM deal. And there's an add-on for conversational AI for the chat bot is an add-on. And are they going to try to compete with the pricing of, you know, some of these standalone providers? It becomes really complicated. Chad (14m 17s): It is and that seems like a roadblock. Yeah. What are some of the other roadblocks and or common misconceptions about these solutions? Madeline (14m 26s): So I think one, like a very basic one is chat bot versus conversational AI. And we've been talking about this, you know, throughout this podcast, but just at that very basic level, if you're kind of lumping the two together, I think it does a disservice for what the value and the potential is. And we kind of mapped out like the difference that we see one kind of chat bot being very transactional and conversational AI being like an of your team, a true intelligent assistant. And so I think the first thing, if you're interested in conversational AI and you're interested in what these solutions can do, make that distinction, make that distinction between just those loaded FAQ's and a true intelligent assistant. Madeline (15m 8s): And I think that's, to me the first roadblock, and then I think the other one is we talked about high volume and that's a game changer, but there are so many companies, very interested financial services, you know, across a lot of different technology or a lot of different industries that are investing in conversational AI in talent acquisition for even to support the recruiters. So it's not the manager led experiences, it's the recruiter led experiences and that's a growing area. And I think for so many people, it's like, oh, that's just good for high volume roles. It's not good for any of our, you know, professional hiring. Chad (15m 44s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, the scale and the power, not to mention, you know,throwing all of the acronyms, AI and ML and all that other fun stuff. I mean, this beast needs to learn. So you feed it data signals, right? And that's what the chat bot or the conversational AI does. It feeds the beast with all the signals that you need to be able to make better decisions down the road. One of the things I really believe conversational AI vendors in general are missing the mark in our industry. They're focusing on things like labels that I don't think matters like chat bot versus conversational AI. Rather, they have such powerful solutions stop worrying about that stuff, right? Chad (16m 28s): Software. I don't care if I call it a chat bot who cares right? In this report, I love where you outline the impact on businesses. I believe talent acquisition professionals, HR professionals, and vendors. That is where you focus. Don't spend all your time trying to explain a way what AI is, the difference between chat bots and conversational AI and look at some of the things that you did in the report, the impact on business, I believe personally, that's where you focus because in business, I just want to get to the brass tacks. How are you going to help me get through this? Madeline (17m 5s): Yeah. Especially this year, right? It's like, everybody is overwhelmed. They feel intense pressure. Like we need help with these five things. These are the five things that we're really struggling with. And to be able to say, okay, this is where conversational AI comes in, and this is how it helps you to solve that. And this is what you're going to see, you know, in that timeframe, because of that, I think that to me, I think you're spot on. That's exactly right. It's just focus on what problems are you solving? Chad (17m 29s): That's what I want all of our vendors out in the space to listen, focus on, you know, the actual problems and the solution. So I could sit and talk with you all day about this report, actually just chunks of this report to be quite Frank, but we're going to leave this as a tease. So if somebody wants to download this awesome intelligence, right, where do they need to go? Madeline (17m 53s): Yes. Thank you. So they go to aptituderesearch.com. It's right on our homepage. You can also email me Madeline@aptituderp.com and I will happily send you a copy as well. Chad (18m 3s): Yes and again, I've been lucky enough to already chew through this. Get it, read it, share it with your team and start to understand the power of technology as you need to scale at speed. This is amazing stuff, Madeline, thank you so much for joining us and have a great weekend. SFX (18m 25s): Applause Madeline (18m 25s): Thanks. Thanks, Chad. Thanks for having me on you're the first person to see the report other than Paradox sponsored it, so they saw it as well, but you you're the first one to see it. So thanks for reading it. And thanks for having me on. Chad (18m 37s): Always, always a pleasure. Appreciate it. We out. OUTRO (19m 37s): 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 thought last week's show was a blockbuster, wait until you get a load of this week's episode. Here's a taste: CareerBuilder has a new CEO, PandoLogic has been acquired and SmartRecruiters is a unicorn. Want more? How about a battle between Kroger and Walmart for who's the bigger douchebag? Still not enough? How about porn stars at conservative Christian conferences for teens. Yep, you're welcome. Thank your friends at 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 (22s): Oh yeah. Some call Jeff Bezos a space cowboy but Chad calls him the gangster of love. What's up boys and girls at your favorite podcast, AKA the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host Joel, "midnight toker" Cheeseman. Chad (39s): And this is Chad "is this really going to be the worst Olympics?" Sowash. Joel (43s): On this week's show Smart Recruiters goes full on unicorn, Pandologic tells Appcast hold my beer and porn stars at Kroger. No, wait that that's two different stories. Dammit. Where are my notes? Chad (1m 1s): First and foremost, I've got to say your, your Canadian soccer team took a loss against the US. Joel (1m 7s): My Canadian soccer team? Chad (1m 8s): Yeah. Why are you glad to be US now, is Christina allowing you to actually? Joel (1m 13s): IDK, Let me check the fridge for my nuts. See where they are. Chad (1m 19s): It's the gold cup baby. The US is playing some pretty good, pretty good soccer right now. Or football for our European list ball. We have a running conversation going in this household of what we're or might be the worst Olympics. And we're starting to, I've got my top three, but I want to throw it out to you first. I want to see what Olympics do you think were the worst, top three, including Tokyo. Joel (1m 49s): All right. So top three is a little tough. I mean the one that stands out in my mind is 1980. I was a wee lad at the time, but I very clearly remember my father who was a coach by the way, being really upset because we didn't go to the 1980 Olympics due to Russia's involvement with Afghanistan. We decided to politically make a statement and bow out of that Olympics for the summer, I believe it was. So that was one, I think is number one. The other number two that would, I guess be semi bad would be, I guess, Berlin, when the Nazis put on the games, although Jesse Owens tearing it up with certainly a highlight for Olympic history. Joel (2m 36s): Other than that, I'm not really an officiant auto on Olympic history. Certainly I'll watch it and enjoy it, but I'm not your guy for like the top three worst Olympics of all time. Chad (2m 47s): Well, I'll give you a pass. I mean, this is you didn't this wasn't homework. So don't, don't worry about it. But I got to say that the worst Olympics has to be in Munich in 1972, the Munich massacre, and then 1996 in Atlanta, the bombing, that was pretty bad. And then 2021 in Tokyo, we are in the middle of a resurgence of a pandemic and this is all happening. I get Moscow, but my formula is life over sports. You know what the fuck are we thinking? I get the Olympics is big and we really want to be back and we want everything to be right. Chad (3m 32s): But yeah, it's just not happening guys. Joel (3m 34s): Yeah. There's a, I think a story in the Wall Street Journal about how this is going to be a $3 billion just disaster for Tokyo, which obviously isn't fun. So do you think it's sort of an event past its prime that it's time to move on from the Olympics? Chad (3m 51s): I think it's time to move on from the Olympics. I think it's what we should do is recognize that we are in the resurgence of a pandemic or right in the, still in the middle of a pandemic per se. We need to be smarter about this. I mean, there's no reason we couldn't push this off for another year and make it happen in a much safer, just safer way. It just, it makes no sense whatsoever. Plus you have all these athletes who aren't going to participate because they caught COVID or what have you, I mean, it's just, it doesn't feel right to be doing this. Joel (4m 25s): Yeah. So you're not going to watch is what you're saying. Chad (4m 28s): I'll probably watch much less. Joel (4m 30s): Yeah. So there was, there was a time with, you know, when there were three networks and the Olympics were a huge, huge deal, and everybody pretty much watched all of it. It's becoming much harder to cut through the clutter. And unless you're Michael Phelps, you know, racking up gold metals or Hussein Bolt, you know, with fire under your feet, unless you're really blowing it up, it's sort of a niche audience, I feel like, as opposed to when we grew up, when everybody was hanging on everything that was going on at the Olympics. Chad (4m 58s): There's less content back then. Joel (4m 60s): There was. Chad (5m 0s): Less options, less choices. So everybody watched the Olympics. Joel (5m 4s): Yeah. And now I feel like, so one of the stories that, stuck out with me was the Netherlands, I think recently getting fined for not wearing bikinis. Like how is it a rule that they have to wear a bikini and a sporting event? Like that seems really archaic to me as well. Chad (5m 20s): I believe it was Norway and go figure the sexualization of athletes. You get all these individuals who work their asses off to make sure that they are lean trim. They are ready. And the next thing you know, the IOC is like, yeah, put on this hot bikini. Oh, not the guys. Yeah. The guys don't have to do this, but yeah. You have to put on these bikini pants. Yeah. And those look hot, we want you to do that. It's like, what the fuck are you thinking? Joel (5m 47s): It's not like you remember the shark suits from years back where people were wore full on body suits that were like shark skin in the pool. Yeah. I could see banning those, but to go from bikini shorts to just like boxer shorts or boxer briefs is a little bit crazy to me. Chad (6m 3s): Yes. Very Much. So. Very much so big shout out as you, you through Bezos into the intro, big shout out to Steve Rothberg for posting on social media, that Jeff Bezos isn't Jewish, but his rocket surely is, yes. Let me see what you did there. Joel (6m 22s): I'm going to do a little flip on the billionaires in space a little bit. Last, last week I got sorta har I got sort of negative on the whole billionaires in space, but you know what? I don't necessarily want to be, you know, the, the European in the 15th century saying like, why the hell are you going out in that boat? Like, you're going to die. You're not going to see anything. It's going to be disaster. Like, I don't want to be a negative, totally negative about this. Maybe traveling into space will lead to really, really good things. So I want to pull back my negativity on a billionaires going into space, at least for this week. Chad (6m 56s): Well, I'm going to double down. There's no reason again, what they're doing is they're creating this new amusement park, right? That's really, it's an amusement park ride that costs a shit ton of cash that just, you know, millionaires and billionaires are going to be able to enjoy those monies, obviously could be going toward things that we need to fix here. And I mean, if Jeff Bezos and Amazon was, not to mention Blue Origin, actually didn't get federal government assistance. I mean, actually he received welfare from the federal government, Jeff Bezos. Chad (7m 38s): There's so many layers of irony here. And hypocrisy I can't get on board with it. I just can't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess time will tell. And unfortunately we'll probably be gone by the time we figure out whether it was worth it or not. To be able to come down off this high, this Bezos high. I want to give a shout out to McCormick, you know, the, the spice company. Joel (7m 59s): Sure. Chad (7m 60s): They posted a director of taco relations job. And this is genius. As the director of taco relations, you will be in McCormick's resident consulting, taco expert. You will be our official eyes and ears for all things taco, you'll have the opportunity to work with the McCormick kitchens team to "team to develop innovative and delish taco recipes, travel across the country in search of the latest taco trends, dialogue with other like-minded taco connoisseurs across social media." Joel (8m 35s): Any word on what automated tool they're using to handle the flood of responses to this job posting, cause they're gonna need one. Chad (8m 43s): What they should have used was TikTok. And here's why you have to submit a creative video, showcasing your personality and passion for tacos and why you should be the very first ever director of taco relations. They should have used TikTok and TikTok resumes. This is a part-time limited term engagement lasting up to four months. You're going to be an independent contractor, but I got to say, I saw Torrin Ellis' video yesterday. It is hilarious and amazing at the same time. Joel (9m 23s): He applied officially for this position. Chad (9m 24s): He officially applied for this position. Joel (9m 28s): Well, speaking of TikTok, I have a shout out for them as well. I know we give them a hard time or at least I do with the whole job employment ambition, but a new new research came out really favorable to them for their advertising. So TikTok ads drive higher responses, intent and engagement than promotions on other social media. This is according to a study from TikTok, with neuro insight, which analyzed the neuro responses. That sounds a little scary, a 57 people. That's not a real big, a big universe, but anyway, we'll go with it. 57 people ages 18 to 35. The research also found that TikTok top view and in feed ads had significantly higher memorability than TV spots and digital video. Joel (10m 13s): So a small segment, but Hey, TikTok ads seem to work. Chad (10m 17s): No, they do work, but they can't work as resumes for all the reasons why we talked about before. It's just not practical, right? I do want to say one thing that will work. I believe a LinkedIn poll that just closed today had over 3,200 respondents, supporting a four day workweek at 73%. Joel (10m 43s): And this was your poll or someone else's? Chad (10m 45s): Somebody else's poll that I participated in, but I thought it was a great poll. And I thought, you know, we're talking about, we just talked about the four day work week in Iceland, where they're looking to institute a four day work week. Microsoft had awesome gains when they did their pilot in Japan. And obviously through polling, we're seeing that, you know, yeah, people can do this. Joel (11m 8s): I'm shocked! I'm floored that a majority of people would prefer a four day work week. That is shocking to me. What a surprise! Chad (11m 15s): On LinkedIn many of those people are managers. And many of those people are entrepreneurs, right so who knows? Joel (11m 24s): Shout out to a podcast, I listened to recently the podcast is called Odd Lots. I think it's a Bloomberg podcast. Anyway, checkout an interview they did recently with Omni hotel. It's all about employment, how difficult it is for Omni hotel to find people, to keep people. It's a really interesting sort of inside baseball commentary by Omni about just how challenging it is to keep workers and get workers. And some of the ideas, one of the ideas I thought is worth mentioning. Some of the things that employers or companies and particularly in the hospitality space are looking at is can they, can they have fewer cleaning rooms? All right, that's a time intensive, you know, challenging job. Joel (12m 7s): They're looking at ways of saying like, Hey, if, if you opt out of the room cleaning, which a lot of people probably would, if there were incentives, would you opt out of housekeeping if you got two free drink tickets, or if you got 50% off your dinner at the bar or whatever. So companies are looking at unique ways to sort of fix some of the challenges with employment. And it's a really good, a really good listen. So again, that's Odd Lots. And it's interview with Omni hotel. Chad (12m 36s): It's very nice. I'm going to jump into birthdays. Are you ready for birthdays? Joel (12m 40s): Sure. Chad (12m 40s): Happy birthday to David "Steven Seagal" Bernstein over at the JobSync and also thanks to his boss, Alex, for sharing that David is turning 30 for the 20th time. So appreciate it. Happy Birthday and there's nobody who rocks a pony tail in our industry. Joel (12m 59s): You know, his birthday cake was under siege. Get it? See what I did there? Chad (13m 5s): There's no male who rocks a ponytail like David does, so Happy Birthday David! Joel (13m 11s): Quite a couple of other birthdays that I'll I'll note our buddy George LaRoc out with your cock out LaRoc celebrates a birthday. Sir Richard Collins, formerly of Click IQ and now at Indeed celebrates a birthday. Roy Mauer, our buddy from Sherm, celebrating a birthday and Brian Shanie one of our fans over at Indeed for sure celebrates a birthday this week as well. Happy Birthday! Chad (13m 37s): Happy Birthday! Joel (13m 38s): By the way. If, if it's not your birthday, but you still want goodies coming to you in the mail, you got to go to Chadcheese.com/free. We just had a beer tasting with Barb Francillo out in Arizona. Chad (13m 51s): Yup. Joel (13m 52s): Very nice woman. She's got very good fashion sense. She was wearing a Chad and Cheese t-shirt, which you can also get chadcheese.com. T-shirt sponsored by Emissary, beer drops sponsored by at Zoona. And of course, whiskey sponsored by our buddies at Sovren. Chad (14m 10s): Topics! Joel (14m 12s): All right. This one's hot! Chad (14m 14s): Wait stop, stop, stop. I have breaking news! CareerBuilder names, Sue Arthur, as CEO of CareerBuilder, go figure. So Irina got the boot, kids. Joel (14m 29s): Did this just come across your desk? Chad (14m 31s): All right. This is hot news for me too. I came, this actually just dropped a little bit earlier this morning and it looks like yes, new CEO, Susan Arthur, we're going to have to dig into Susan. Susan, we wish you good luck in trying to steer this dumpster fire we know as CareerBuilder. Joel (14m 52s): Remember I said, when they got acquired that they'd be thrown into Yahoo and AOL and all those news properties. This is part of that move. I'm telling you, this is part of the rebirth of CareerBuilder. Just maybe just maybe Irina getting canned is only more shocking than four week work weeks getting a majority of people a favor, I think. Chad (15m 14s): More news earlier this morning, Pando was acquired by Veritone? Joel (15m 19s): Yes. Now this one I know about, the first one he dropped on me and I might have to research that name. Research that name while I'm talking and see if we would find anything about Sue. Okay. So this one's hot off the press is to what? A busy day we have kids. Okay. Veritone buys Pandologic for 150 million in a cash and stock deal. Veritone which trades on the NASDAQ under ticker symbol, V-E-R-I announced it, his signed a definitive agreement to acquire Chad and Cheese sponsor, Pandologic provider of programmatic ad solutions and recent acquire of chat bot Wade and Wendy, which listeners will remember. Price tag is 150 million consisting of up front payments of $50 million in cash and 35 million in Veritone stock. Joel (16m 3s): The remaining 65 million in cash and stock is payable based in earnouts tied to financial performance in fiscal '21 and '22. The said deal is valued at three, about three times, Pandologic expected 21 gap revenues. The stock is up almost 10% on the news. So Chad, are you ready to add Veritone to your Robinhood account? This Chad (16m 27s): Is very interesting and out of left field and I think we should get used to this. I think we should get used to more companies outside our space, starting to acquire and move into this space. Veritone provides structure to unstructured video and audio through the use of AI. Iit's interesting because we always talk about like with TikTok, how do you, how do you contextualize something that is video or audio, unless you transcribe it, you consume it and then use that data to contextualize it. It seems as if Veritone is doing that and with all of the video and audio that we have available to us, let's just say YouTube alone, to be able to consume and structure that data to make sense of it is, is pretty fucking powerful. Chad (17m 20s): But I think we should start looking for more outsiders becoming insiders core platforms need to start taking a look at this space right now because they need to buy or face new competitions from outsiders looking to disrupt this space. I'm big on it. I think, it's pretty cool. I think Veritone has been around since 2017 or something like that. They're a fairly young company. Joel (17m 48s): Yeah. It's much easier for us to comment when, you know, StepStone buys Appcast than it is Veritone buying Pando logic. In fact, probably most, most of what I know about Veritone is what you just read to me in this podcast now. So what, so, what I did research is that Veritone is a bit of apparently a poor man's Palentier, which has had a pretty big year after going public, I think late last year. Veritone has a market capital cap of around 600 million, which means this is a pretty big deal for them. And it makes sense why they would sort of put a lot of weight on the earn-outs based on performance. Most analysts` that I read for the story are pretty negative on Veritone. Joel (18m 32s): It's had a pretty big drop from, I think, around $40 a share to right around 20 now. And again, I mentioned it's it's 10% on the day. So the market for the most part, at least likes this news and this move. I also think commenting on sort of the dollar amount is interesting listeners, remember StepStone bought a majority stake in Appcast, which most would agree is the Apex predator in the programmatic space. This was in 2019 for $79 million, although it's been sort of disputed on how much Foreman and got out of that deal, and whatnot, but so good for Terry Baker and his team for, in my opinion, landing a premium for the company and the product. I think now it's going to be really interesting to see what happens to a lot of the players in programmatic, like Recruitology and JobAdX who are both sponsors of our show. Joel (19m 21s): You got, you got VONQ and a lot of others, it's a pretty limited number of people. So to me, like the price has been set. Now, let's see if we have some buyers. Chad (19m 31s): And this is going to force the hands of the iCIMS of the world, who have no core programmatic, what are they going to do? Are they going to acquire? They're going to partner. I mean, this is going to force them to take a look at what's in the market, because as these technologies start to get gobbled up, there's going to be much less of an opportunity for them to provide a distribution, programmatic distribution, performance-based distribution to their clients inside their ecosystem. Joel (20m 1s): Yeah. Do they wait to do that until after going public? So in other words, get money from public entities and then go by these folks and say, well, see, they were valued this much on the market. So now our market cap goes up because of that acquisition. I think they'll probably look to do that as part of an add on after going IPO, but we'll see? Chad (20m 21s): Pando has, they've been in the market for a very long time. They were a real match. And then obviously switched over when branded to Pando of the acquisition of Wade and Wendy, I think helps this deal dramatically from the standpoint of more streams of data to feed the beast. It's all about, at this point, we have to start looking at signal liquidity who can gather signals faster, make sense of those signals and use them to deliver relevant content, data actions. And it goes further than that. So from looking at Veritone and what they're trying to do, again, consume content that hasn't been consumed before it in a way that it's never been consumed and then provide signal to it, I think is amazing. Joel (21m 10s): Yep. Well, moving on to a little bit of more money in a bigger story, big story until this one came on, our buddies at Smart Recruiters are on unicorn alert everybody, the one platform to rule them all rages on popular ATS or whatever we're calling the one-stop shop recruitment solutions these days, Smart Recruiters announced new funding this week raising 110 million in series E at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Silver Lake Waterman. Total funding is $205 million according to the company. Founder and CEO and friend of the show Jerome Ternynck told TechCrunch, quote, "recruiting is coming out of the administrative function and into value-add and sales and marketing" Joel (21m 55s): end quote. In the last 12 months, the company added 200 plus Enterprise customers, grew revenue 50%, and experienced 70% bookings growth. Can you say IPO? Chad, your take. Chad (22m 9s): Question is who do they buy with this, right? You know, they bought Job Powell not too long ago. What do they, buy to add into the ecosystem? Joel (22m 22s): perhaps programmatic? Chad (22m 23s): Don't know, but that's the question because as you start to round out and become incredibly integration-focused with partners, but also know that there are huge markets, much like a programmatic advertising, what do you do? You know, where do you go? That's the hard part. And they are seeing dramatic growth. I think Smart Recruiter and we're going to talk about Greenhouse here in a few minutes I think these are some of the new guard in the applicant tracking system game. They are faster, they're much more nimble. And I think to be quite Frank, they they're doing a damn good job. It's awesome to see this. Joel (23m 4s): Yeah. You know, I first met Jerome, I think just when they launched and he came up to me and said like, yeah, we're launching an app, a totally free ATS. I said, well, good luck with that one. It has turned out pretty well for them as they've evolved to me this. Yeah. I just think I'm ready for the IPO market arena. I think iCIMS is probably going to go first and then you're going to see Jobvite, Smart Recruiters, maybe Greenhouse all hit the public markets and then it's game on. We'll have a lot of fun shit to talk about. Chad (23m 39s): Yeah. It's a Jobvite's turn to buy something next. Joel (23m 44s): We'll be watching and reporting on it. Let's take a quick break. That was a lot to digest for our listeners. Well, you mentioned Greenhouse. So yeah, they're in the news Greenhouse this week introduced job ad market, a new functionality that offers customers instant access to thousands of global job boards from within Greenhouse. users save time while sourcing and receive data-driven recommendations to find high quality candidates across large and niche, job boards, John Strauss, president, and co-founder at Greenhouse said in a release quote "data-driven job advertising," is that a nicer way of saying programmatic? "Is an important part of a company sourcing strategy when searching for high performance who have a specialized skill set" Joel (24m 29s): end quote, what exactly is going on at Greenhouse Chad? Chad (24m 33s): In the press release, here's a quote "using the Greenhouse job ad market, recruiting teams are provided recommendations that help identify the best source for candidates" end quote. So, first off, when I read this, I was like, there's no way Greenhouse built this from the inside out. All of the benefits that they cite are really powerful. And it takes a lot of data and a lot of time and they haven't acquired a programmatic vendor or anything like that. So then, I went over to LinkedIn and Garrett Starr who's the VP of partnerships at Greenhouse posted on LinkedIn about this major announcement. In this post, he thanks a bunch of people from the Greenhouse team for making this possible. Chad (25m 18s): And the last two names in that post, one of them was a founder and the other director of partnerships at Vonq. So this is obviously a white labeled Vonq solution. You and I months ago talked about Vonq in one of their press releases saying that they want to use some of the capital that they received to come across the pond. Guess what kids they snuck up on you. Here they are. Joel (25m 46s): Yup. Yup. So yeah, to me, this is a little bit like a Spotify versus Apple <usic for HR. Spotify may be a superior music service just like Appcast or Pando, or others might be superior in terms of programmatic, but you know what, Apple Music isn't that bad and the functionality kind of works better than better with my iPhone. And Siri knows my favorite playlist, so I'll go with that one. So for, for users that don't know the brands that are in the marketplace, it's going to be really easy and native to them to post a job or do things within Greenhouse and go, oh, Greenhouse has another feature like, yeah, I'm going to do that, I'll check that box. Joel (26m 27s): And they can funnel all of those users into their product, which they already know is an in demand product based on the marketplace and what people want. Chad (26m 37s): Right. Joel (26m 37s): So if I'm in the app store and I'm a competitor now two Greenhouses white label programmatic or whatever, our distribution is, you know, I don't know how I feel about that. It places a bigger importance on my brand and making sure, that people like the brand and we'll bypass the Greenhouse product to use my products. So that's going to be an interesting unfolding as I, as I look the next move, I think that will be interesting is do Greenhouse and others bundle all of these quote unquote native services to really get an advantage. So in other words, can you buy distribution, programmatic, chat bot, whatever that's all Greenhouse branded and save money because they're bundling all of that together. Joel (27m 21s): And then that really puts the pain on the single providers, for that. So also Greenhouse gets all the revenue. I'm sure that's, I assume they get the revenue versus the companies in the marketplace where there's actually no revenue share as far as I understand. So that's, to me where it gets really interesting of how the marketplace companies feel about this move, do they, are they really able to funnel a big amount of customers and to their native solution? And do they bundle these services to really put pressure on vendors? Our listeners need to understand first that this is a, and this is a big data point that hiring companies will spend more on recruitment marketing in a year than they do on actual tech, like an applicant tracking system or a CRM. Joel (28m 8s): So that's point number one, point number two, for the most part, the ATS and the CRM are not getting any cut on that big revenue stream, right? This could perspectively be a cut on that revenue stream. So Greenhouse isn't getting the money, right? It's going through a white label, although they're getting a slice of it. This makes it much easier. As we talk about Pando getting sucked out of the market, it makes it much easier for the iCIMS of the world, for the Smart Recruiters, for the Jobvites to actually take a look at a white labeled solution like this and say, okay, first and foremost, I don't want to work with all those fucking publishers. Chad (28m 48s): That is a nightmare. The maintenance on just keeping all those job boards, job sites, performance, all that shit is a nightmare. I wouldn't want to fuck with that at all. So why not partner outsource white label, all of that, and still get a piece of the revenue. I think overall Vonq becomes the rails in this scenario, the distribution operating system for the applicant tracking systems and the CRMs in the market. And if they, if they put a few more of these together, you can't, you can't buy them out. They are already too fucking big because they're tacked into the market. Joel (29m 29s): Yeah. You're going to see a lot of vendors now rethink their business models to try and get into the ATSs as a white label solution so that they can be viewed as a native solution and nail down probably exclusives, probably nailed down long-term contracts, probably nailed down some, I think significant rev share has gotta be part of, of some of these deals or most of these deals. So you're going to see a lot of vendors go to the, you know, conference room and talk about how do we, you know, what's our move here? Do we try to white label or do we keep, you know, keep the brand first and front and center? That'll be an interesting conversation. A lot of vendors are going to have in the next six months. Chad (30m 7s): Think of the amount of transactions that happen through one applicant tracking systems for wrecks that are opening on a daily basis. And every single one of those wrecks, let's say they post automatically through as a process methodology through a Vonq, at a dollar a piece, how much do you think that's going to be per day? Joel (30m 28s): It'll buy a lot of beer Chad, trust me. Chad (30m 30s): Exactly. So I do want to do a little historical kind of like throwback and reminisce that Equest in Toledo. At one time, they did one of these things and it made John Malone rich, or let's say more rich. Okay. He did an exclusive right out of the gate with Taleo, which was the biggest applicant tracking system at the time. And he was the embedded distribution engine, not performance driven, obviously just dumb distribution, but distribution engine for Taleo. It was one of the smartest plays I've seen in the industry period. Chad (31m 11s): This, if this can be pulled off in multiple applicant tracking systems without exclusives that's so much bigger. Joel (31m 21s): Yeah, it's going to be fun to watch the land grab here. Chad (31m 23s): I love it. Joel (31m 24s): Let's let's get onto another land grab. Kroger and Walmart are in the news. Kroger, your favorite. So we'll start with Walmart and let you get fired up, as we talk here. So a federal jury in Wisconsin on Friday awarded more than $125 million to a former Walmart employee with down syndrome who the EOC claim was fired because of her disability. Though, the award is likely to be reduced to $300,000. Let's do the math there, $125 million to at 300,000. Why only 300,000? Well, the award includes 150,000 in compensatory damages and 125 million in punitive damages. However, 300 K is the cap on damages in cases brought under the Americans with disabilities act. Joel (32m 10s): Chad, this is more your lane than mine. What the actual fuck is going on here? Chad (32m 14s): Yeah, Let's be clear. Our society and laws make individuals with disabilities worth less than that of so-called fully abled individuals. We are unfortunately still in the prehistoric days in the United States when it comes to treating humans fairly. I mean, that's it I've had discussions with the EOC, not specifically about this topic, but I've had discussions with them. And I have to say, they've only been this administration's only been in place for six months. There are new players with real world objectives. I believe the EEOC will start to take these major wage and treatment inequities on. Chad (32m 58s): The question is how fast will we see change? Again, $125 million awarded to, and it took six years for her to get here $125 million w and they say, oh, I'm sorry. The biggest organization, the biggest corporation in the world, or at least in America, they're going to pay you $300,000 instead because we don't believe your worth it. Joel (33m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. There is maybe some silver lining, an EOC spokeswoman said. And the story that appeared in Reuters that the $300,000 cap does not apply to back pay front pay litigation costs or interest, which will be decided by a ledge, a judge at a later date. None, none of those are going to be big payments, but at least some of that will be added. So maybe it'll be like 350,000. No it Chad (33m 47s): Won't be anywhere near $125 million. Joel (33m 53s): Well, you know, who has $125 million and most of it going to shareholders, Kroger's in the news, Chad, what the hell is going on with them this week? Chad (34m 1s): So remember Kroger closed stores in locations where they were being forced to pay a $4 per hour hero pay for essential workers. By the way, Kroger said, those locations were failing by the way, that's why they closed those locations. This the Kroger CEO McMullan got a $6.4 million raise, more than 45% in 2020, which was over $20 million. A Brookings Institute report showed the first half of 2020 that Kroger's profits were up 90%, 90%. So this isn't a, we don't have the money or we work on slim margins, bullshit, excuse they're making major bank. Chad (34m 48s): Now using those profits instead of instituting a $4 an hour hero pay for their essential workers, the people who actually do the jobs and look the community in the eye, instead of doing that, Kroger is planning a billion dollar stock buyback. So the Brookings Institute report also says, quote, "we find that while top retailers profits have soared during the pandemic, pay for their frontline workers, in most cases have not. This is not capitalism. This is neo-liberalism. This is more driving plutocrats than it is anything else. Joel (35m 28s): What surprised me from the story? And I didn't realize this, that buybacks were illegal basically from 1930 ish to basically Ronald Reagan in the eighties who killed it. As you said, by short of the trickle down economics policy that ruled the day back then. And if so, make, make no mistake. I mean, politicians as well are getting rich from public companies and that's a whole other podcast where politicians can actively buy stocks instead of like, oh, I don't know, put it in a blind trust where they don't know what they're buying. So to me, like, unless there's a, a huge grassroots movement that takes hold, nothing is going to change here. The rich are going to get richer. Chad (36m 7s): One of my favorite podcasts, Billionaire and Pitchfork economics podcast host Nick Hanauer said, quote, whenever a corporation whines about paying raises, just Google the name of the company and stock buybacks. And you'll see where all the profits are actually going. It's going into the hands of the rich, as opposed to the people that are actually doing the work. It's, it's not that hard to understand. And when we talk about individuals who say, well, that person's a CEO of an organization, they deserve it. Inequity at its best. When we say something like that, the people who are doing the work on the ground deserve to have living wages and to be able to continue to bolster. Chad (36m 56s): And I want to throw your favorite place under the bus here, but when Chipolte says they're raising their prices because of raising wages and then their CEO takes a $38 million salary, you know what that is the worst optics. And that is a total fuck you square in your face to workers, right? We wa we raised your wages. Now we've got to raise prices. That is total bullshit. Joel (37m 28s): Yeah. And to me, most people, if you told them, we're raising costs to pay for our employees, most people would be okay, paying that extra 29 cents, you know, for, for a burrito or whatever it is. And I think Kroger missed an opportunity to say like, forget the-what was it? $4 extra an hour. We're going to go six and use it as a PR tool to get people to think favorably about Kroger. Instead of all these issues of like these companies suck, they're run by a bunch of dickheads, Chad (37m 58s): But don't say, that's why we're raising the prices when your CEO's getting paid 350 to 400 times, Joel (38m 7s): Don't turn around and line the pockets of, yeah. Anyway, well, speaking of lining pockets, I'm going to check my Robinhood count and we'll be right back about, with a story about porn. All right, Chad, you're you're a Brandy Love fan, right? Chad (38m 22s): Oh, she's like hall of famer is porn hall of fame either should be not, should be if there's not. And you and I could probably name at least half of the people hadn't need to book anybody. Who's been a 12 year old boy should be able to do that. Joel (38m 39s): Anyway, Brandy Love, if you don't know, just Google it. I guess a porn star who identifies as a strong conservative was initially welcomed as a VIP. She had bought a ticket at a Florida event by right wing, by the right wing group, turning point USA. So the group sort of focuses on on teens and young folks, which is kind of, will be important here in a second. And so Love initially showed up at the Tampa convention center on the weekend, posting an enthusiastic photo of herself on Twitter with the caption quote. "It's good to be around so many young conservatives gives me some hope in quote, the conference claim. They were protecting the children at the event, which were mostly teens. Joel (39m 22s): A while Love claims she was there as a private citizen and not a porn star. I can say that after a little bit of homework, the post, the photo she did post were not very, you know, pornographic. She was, I think, in a sun dress or something. So conservatives criticized cancel culture, but are they failing to walk the walk by canceling Brandy Love? Chad (39m 46s): First and foremost, optics, this was a youth group. Is that what I'm hearing? Joel (39m 50s): Yes. Teens and young college students, I think. Chad (39m 54s): Optics Not good, not good beyond the optics hormones, not good, not good. Most of the boys in there probably know who you are. Joel (40m 4s): Which totally goes against what the organization is, which is a Christian conservative group. So you have, you have all these opposing forces, right? You have these teen Christian conservatives, who should not know who Brandy Love is, so it looks bad for the organization when they do recognize her. And then you have a porn star, which by the way, is a legal occupation in the United States, a strong conservative, which she is exemplified for her whole life as far as I know. She comes in a conservative dress, you know, she's not there in a bikini trying to get guys to photograph with her. She's not taking selfies with anybody at the conference. Joel (40m 45s): And then you also have this element of speakers at the show. And this was part of the news story, as well as talking about how bad cancel culture is and how conservatives are independent and rugged individuals and yada yada yada, and criticizing, cancel culture and wokeness. And then at the same time, kicking out Brandy Love because she's a porn star. So there's so many perfect storm. None of this stuff should fit and the conference made the decision to kick her out. Was it right or wrong? I guess it depends on what side you're on. Chad (41m 17s): What would Jesus do? Joel (41m 20s): We out. OUTRO (42m 17s): 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.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), love 'em or hate 'em they're the core technology of life as a Talent Acquisition and Recruiting professional. The diversification of different ATS brand visions are finally taking us past the days of tech debt heavy dinosaurs like Taleo and VirtualEdge. Madeline Laurano, Founder of Aptitude Research shares information from newly published research entitled Talent Acquisition Systems Mapping a New Path. In this episode we dig into areas many ATS vendors have never gone like: - Is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion just fluff in an ATS? - AI matching technology become priority - All CRM's are NOT created equal - Getting serious about "Candidate Communication" - Why is Internal Mobility still an unknown? Texting amazingness brought to you by Nexxt. Wait, you're not using texting to attract talent? Get your ass to Nexxt.com now :) DOWNLOAD REPORT 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.irls. Chad (22s): Welcome everybody to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am Chad Sowash. If you listened before you already know that one thing you're going to notice though, is we're going to have a lactose free podcast today because we have drum roll, please. Madeline Laurano, she's come back! She's the heavily acclaimed industry, expert analyst and founder of Aptitude Research. How are you doing? Madeline (52s): Hi Chad, thanks for having me back. I'm glad I didn't spoil it last time and you wanted me to come back? Chad (57s): Oh, you were a hit. I don't know if it was because Cheeseman wasn't on the podcast or just that you're so delightful. I think it's the latter or it could be a combination of both. I don't know. What are you feeling? A little deja VU. Madeline (1m 9s): I am, I am. And it's been a lot of change since we last talked and we talked about programmatic and all the new announcements to Seek Out and some of the other providers and much more has happened since then! Chad (1m 21s): Before we jump into today's research, tell me how was the programmatic research received? Madeline (1m 28s): Very well. I was very happy with it. I think, you know what we talked about last time and I think it still holds true is that I think a lot of people don't understand exactly what programmatic is. And they think that either, as you said, it's just job distribution or they think of it as something that just is going to be an added expense. And I think, you know, what we really tried to show is that this is something that can help reduce costs and streamline advertising. So I was happy with how it came out. Chad (1m 53s): Oh, you don't know how many programmatic companies and agencies. I mean, they were all over it. There were texting me. They're messaging me. They're like this research is lit. I don't say that my kids say that, but anyway, I mean, it was, it was awesome. So if you haven't seen the programmatic research go to aptituderesearch.com, right? Madeline (2m 16s): Exactly. Chad (2m 17s): And it's available there, but today we're going to be talking about your new research and this is, programmatic was big, but this is like the grand daddy, grand mama of them all. So what are we going to be talking about today? Madeline (2m 33s): We are going to be talking about the good old ATS market. And it does feel like a child because it took so long to put this research together. It feels like it feels like another child or grandchild for me. So it's been a big report. We really studied the ATS market to look at what's changed? What these providers are doing, and we profiled 13 of the leading providers in the market that met a certain criteria. Chad (2m 56s): Now, are you picking these or are these companies who are saying, Hey, we want to be involved or is it kind of like a combination of both? Madeline (3m 5s): That's a great question. It's a combination of both. I think a lot of, you know, I'll put out some tweets earlier at the end of last year and said, you know, we're going to look at doing this again. A lot of providers called right away and said, when does this start? And to me, it really had to meet a criteria and they have to be providers that come up in the interviews I do with corporations. And there were some, unfortunately that just did not meet that criteria. Chad (3m 27s): Ah, gotcha. Gotcha. So it's actually entitled Talent Acquisition Systems 2021: Mapping a New Path. What the hell does that mean? Mapping a New Path? Madeline (3m 39s): Well, I think it's interesting because I always try to think about what's the main theme and I've said it before and you know, it's always kind of been ATS is not enough. You know, the ATS itself has just a tracking engine, a workflow engine. It's not enough. We need CRM, we need onboarding. But this year the theme mapping a new path is really that every provider is going in a different direction. It's not apples to apples anymore. It's not this commoditized market. Some providers are going into talent management. Some providers are sticking with TA. Some providers are trying to do this whole skills framework, currency type of scenario. So it's, to me, it's looking at this market that's been in place for so long and seeing how everyone's trying to go in a very unique direction right now. Chad (4m 21s): So can you say, cause I can definitely say that the ATS market right now is probably the most exciting since maybe when it actually launched back in the early oughts? Madeline (4m 33s): I think so. And also I think in the 2005, 2006 timeframe, when all those acquisitions happened, Virtual Edge, Brass Ring, that was exciting too, just because of acquisitions. This is bang for another reason it's companies are spending more money. They're looking at their providers more strategically and they're replacing tons of companies, are replacing their ATS systems this year. It's crazy. Yeah. Chad (4m 54s): Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you say that back in 2005, around that timeframe, all the acquisitions had happened. They went to much larger organizations where they literally just went to die. Madeline (5m 5s): Just to die. It was like where ATS is going to die. They go to big companies and then nothing happens. And what we're seeing right now, and this will come out in the report is a lot of those larger companies that bought ATSs are and have redone them in a very significant way. I mean, ADP and Oracle are two examples. What you're going to see from their ATS is with Orr and with what ATP ADP's offering. It's really impressive. I was very impressed with bot. Chad (5m 33s): But they're a total new platform. They're not using the old plumbing at all. That technical debt is way too heavy. So they're flushing that shit that they bought down the toilet and they're actually creating from the ground up. Madeline (5m 46s): Completely. Goodbye, Virtual Edge, goodbye Tulio, we're rebuilding this whole thing and hoping to retain the Tulio-Virtual Edge customers in the process. Chad (5m 56s): It might be easier than keeping them on the same old that they are right now. Right? Madeline (6m 2s): Exactly. Chad (6m 2s): So we're going to tease, like we did the programmatic research. We're going to tease the ATS research with just bits and pieces. You have a top 10 trends, which I have a scaled down, boiled down to Chad's top five. Madeline (6m 16s): That sounds great. Okay. Okay. Chad (6m 17s): So, so I'm going to hit you with these, my top five from your report, and then we can dig into it a little bit deeper. So number one, DEI is the new AI, but DEI is a differentiator. It's never been a differentiator in ATS before. Why is it a differentiator now? And truly, is this just more of like a vapor kind of DEI? What's going on here? Madeline (6m 41s): Yeah, I think it's, I think it's all of the above. It's certainly never been a trend in the ATS market. I mean, I think I never talked about it. We'd probably always should have been a trend, but it wasn't. And I think what's happening now is you're seeing a lot of organizations. They have budget for D and I, and they're looking at their talent acquisition technology to spend some of that budget. So the ATS providers are saying, aha, let's start to market a little bit more of this into our messaging and what I mean by a differentiator, is there some providers where it's just marketing, it's just saying, this is a priority we can help you with your diversity needs. We can help you, you know, improve diversity hiring. And then there are others and it's not all of them that have really taken a strong stance to say, we're going to start internally. Madeline (7m 26s): We're going to look at our own culture. We're going to look at the diversity of our leadership. We're going to look at having a chief diversity officer. We're going to start there. Then we're going to look at the services that we are customers and partner with them. And then we're going to look at our product. And I think when you think about the product, everyone thinks matching is like these, the be all end all in diversity, it's like this, this solves the diversity question, but it's not. To me it's the analytics it's are you able to show really powerful insights that companies can see and say, wow, look what we're doing when we attract people? We're not doing enough. What can we each, how can we look at the job descriptions? How can we look at the interview process and make this more fair and inclusive? Madeline (8m 8s): And that that's very powerful. So you'll see in the report, there are some providers that are really called out for the work they're doing there. Chad (8m 16s): I have to say that in this area, there is so much vaporware number one. And then number two, if an organization, if a vendor has not eaten their own dog food, if they haven't actually started to boost their own diversity hiring efforts, they shouldn't even be talking about DEI overall. So I think from this segment, and I'm not sure that you put those disclaimers on there, if they are not really focused on diversity, equity and inclusion in their own organization, how badly do you think they really want it for you in their technology? Madeline (8m 52s): Exactly. And you know what? I'm starting to see more and more RFPs from corporations to include those questions, to say, we don't want to just know about the product. What are you doing as a provider in your company to address this? Do you have dedicated roles? What is your leadership team look like? What does your board look like? And those are appropriate questions. Chad (9m 14s): Yeah. So DEI number one, AI is my number two. AI matching is a priority and we all know that AI matching is an incredibly heavy lift. And if you're talking to an applicant tracking system one day and they don't have AI matching, but then the next day they do, they probably don't have AI matching unless they acquired somebody. So what did, what did you find in the report? Madeline (9m 38s): Yeah. I mean the, you, we both love the matching space. I mean, I think we can talk like hours and hours. We can do a series of podcasts on matching. So I love the matching space and it's very interesting to look at the ATS market right now because you've got these matching providers, like Hired Score, and Eightfold and Seek Out now that are really putting a lot into their thought on ethical AI or thinking about candidate consent. They're trying to figure out public versus internal communities of how they look for candidates. Then you've got the ATS is where it becomes more of an efficiency AI model. It's saying, Oh, we just want to, to move people across and help you make faster decisions. It's efficiency and it's free. Madeline (10m 19s): It's included in the ATS versus an investment. So I think it's becoming a very interesting area right now where some of the ATS is have made a little bit more investment in AI matching than others have, but you still have these standalone providers with very robust, you know, matching capabilities. And I think we're going to really see something happen in the next few years as to is this something that should be in our ATS and are these providers really going to make more of an investment here or is this going to be a standalone market? Chad (10m 50s): That's, that's a very good question. Because as we've seen over the years, when a bigger platform buys a point solution, does that point solution generally get better? So I'm going to say for the most part, not so much, right? So is that really the way that we should be going or much like the, a Mapping a New Path, maybe it's a, it's a, it's a new way for applicant tracking systems to start to become accountable and take responsibility for things that should be a part of a core system, much like diversity, equity and inclusion. Right? Madeline (11m 26s): Absolutely. And I think it becomes challenging. You know, I know like you're going to have to cut me off with this matching conversation, but I know it becomes challenging because when you're investing in a solution, like a third-party solution for matching you're spending money, so you can hold providers accountable, you can say, what are you doing? What's your approach to AI. We're not seeing the results we see. We want to see. But when you're looking at an ETF that includes it for free in the product, you don't really hold them accountable as much. It's free there. You know, we like our matches. We don't like matches. We don't think it works. We're not going to complain. So that, that becomes interesting too, where, you know, we're not necessarily holding the HS providers as accountable for the AI matching that we would when we make an investment. Madeline (12m 7s): Yeah. Stay tuned for a Madeline in Chad series on AI matching. I'm going to go ahead and hit one. Excellent. All CRMs are not created equal. And this is something that your research, we all, I think kind of understand, hopefully, but your research digs into this. Tell me what you found. Yeah. So I think everybody's trying to check that box, the CRM box to say, we've got it. We've got it. Right. Chad (12m 32s): These are all boxes, right? They feel, this feels like an RFP kind of like menu. I checked the box, but is it really a box checker? Okay Madeline (12m 39s): Exactly. Is it really a box checker? And I think it, everybody wants a CRM. If you're an enterprise company, you need something pre applicant. So you need a way to manage your talent pipelines. You need to be able to think about this. And the ATS are all saying we have this, but some of them have made very significant investments that we've made acquisitions and others it's, you know, Tim Sackett calls it a light CRM. And I think that's probably very accurate. Chad (13m 3s): We're seeing companies. And it's funny because I've talked to so many platforms where as soon as I say, I want to see it, they're like, well, it's kind of like, it's really a light CRM. It's like, I don't even know what that means. It just seems like most of these pieces are box checkable. But the beautiful part about this for me, and keep me honest here, is that when you dig into some of these things like DEI, CRMs, so on and so forth, you will deny those applicant tracking systems, a box check, because you don't feel like they've actually covered that base. Madeline (13m 37s): Yeah. And we called out those that have really significant, you know, significantly better CRMs. I mean, Jobvite is one example. I mean, they made a significant acquisition and telemetry, and that is a true recruitment marketing platform CRM. When you look at Avature, they started as a CRM, that's going to be very different than a provider that's just checking the box. So, and then there's others that are, they're making investments there. So it's interesting anyone that reads the report you'll see, you'll see my commentary on CRM. Chad (14m 7s): So the next one candidate communication, we're not just talking about being able to send an automated email that says thank you for applying or an automated text message that says, thank you for applying. This goes beyond that. How much more beyond that is candidate communication today? Madeline (14m 25s): Yeah. It's really interesting because to me, that's the candidate experience, right? It's the communication piece and we don't, we don't do it, especially for people rejected. Like we're not telling them until after we've already made decisions that they've even, we're sometimes not even telling them at all. So we looked at it for all the different channels of communication. I mean, everybody has a different way that they like to communicate. So we looked at the providers that have integrations with collaboration tools like Slack and Teams. iCIMs made a huge announcement with Teams this year. And then we look at those providers that have integrations with the messaging apps, WhatsApp, WeChat. Do you want to be a global provider and you don't have an integration with WeChat, that's going to be a little bit challenging. So yeah, so we really looked at all the different possibilities for communication. Madeline (15m 9s): And that to me was where there were the biggest gaps. Is the communication check boxes. Chad (15m 16s): Canvas who was acquired by Jobvite. Yep. You have JobPal, which is more across the pond. JobPal was acquired by Smart Recruiters. So you have more of a robust, I would say language focused type of experience. So we're seeing, we're seeing investment at least. Madeline (15m 33s): Yeah, exactly. And JobPal's great because they integrate with WeChat and WhatsApp, they're European provider. So we're seeing these investments being made and we're seeing, you know, whether it's text or conversational AI or the partnerships happening. And I think we'll continue to see that, but it's definitely being asked for in RFPs. So. Chad (15m 51s): What was, iCIMS the first one with text recruit, really, to start breaking into this candidate communication segment? Madeline (15m 57s): I think for sure. And I think Jobvite was not too far after that. Yeah. Chad (16m 2s): Yeah. Okay. My last one and this is because most people talk about this a lot, whether it's, I mean, people are talking about DEI and AI all the time, but we're starting to hear more about internal mobility and it seems to still be an unknown. Why is that? Madeline (16m 18s): I pulled up a report that I did when I worked at iCIMS like 13 years ago, something like that. And it was an ATS report. So it was similar. It was this monster report and a whole page from it. I took a screenshot, I'll send it to you, but it had this whole thing on internal mobility. And it was the same thing we're talking about now. And it was no coincidence. It was 2008. We're going through the recession. And everybody was worried that we all focus on internal mobility. And I think with internal mobility, there are these waves where it's a priority when we're nervous that hiring is going to be down and external hiring is going to be down or they're going to be hiring freezes. And then we sort of fall off a little bit and don't know what to do with it. I mean, it's an important area for companies, but I think, you know, it becomes more of a priority based on the economy. Madeline (17m 4s): And, you know, I don't think that's necessarily good or bad. I just think right now what I'm seeing is companies aren't talking about it as much as they were, and they're not necessarily looking at technology providers for that. A lot of the work has to be done internally. Do recruiters have to be responsible for internal mobility? Is that HR job? Do you know? It's an interesting conversation. Chad (17m 24s): Is this HRS baby, is this town acquisitions, baby? How long does talent acquisition actually own the experience until it gets pushed off to somebody else? But from my standpoint, I agree, this seems to be very, very cycle driven. Even though internal mobility should be something that we think about on an every day basis, because we want to keep, we always talk about, you know, we want to keep good talent that happens through promotions, that through the ability to find mentors, to be able to up-skill and those types of things that in itself you would think could be wrapped in an amazing experience that would start at least with the applicant tracking system. Chad (18m 4s): Right? Madeline (18m 5s): Yeah. I mean, I think that's absolutely the ideal situation. And I think, you know, the more companies can understand why it's important, not just during these cycles, but year round, the more we'll see it. And not just from the ATSs, I mean, some of the RPOs have, have made announcements with what they're doing for internal mobility and re-skilling, and up-skilling too. Chad (18m 25s): Yeah, very smart. So the last thing I want to talk to you about is there's all this amazing technology data, DEI, AI, CRM. So many acronyms, we can throw all over the place, but when a company fails to implement appropriately or they want to jam their 1990s, early two thousands process methodologies into new day tech, how do we as an industry move forward, if we're still playing old carton horse processes and trying to push new technologies. I mean, is this really something that tech can fix, I guess is the question? Madeline (19m 5s): It's a great question. I know we've talked about this so much. And the answer, I mean, I think the short answer is no. I mean, you have to think about your processes too. And if you have these broken processes from the 1990s and you haven't done much to reevaluate them, you know, DNI is a perfect example. If you're not thinking about as a core of what you're doing in recruiting to think about diversity hiring and to think about inclusivity and fairness, then you're going to have a really hard time with any technology being able to address that. And I think they, I don't think it has to be one or the other. I mean, I used to think that you have to have your processes fixed and then you invest in technology. I think it can happen at the same time, but there has to be a commitment to thinking differently about talent acquisition than what's been done in the past. Chad (19m 48s): Agreed a hundred percent. And, here's the hard question is this where we start getting marketing involved because they really focus on experience and they also have larger budgets? Madeline (20m 0s): Yes. And I think we don't take advantage of those opportunities internally, like marketing has done some of this work and marketing understands the importance of experience and, you know, programmatic was one example of that. And yet those conversations don't happen internally. I think the more that companies can facilitate those conversations with marketing, and I don't think there's, you know, a bad, a bad relationship between TA and marketing. It's just that those conversations aren't happening, you know, but I think it's a great example. Chad (20m 29s): Yeah. I think it's non-existent to some, to some degree, right? Not, not to a business impact degree. Right? Well, Madeline Larano, everybody, this report is coming out very, very soon. When is this actually coming out? Madeline (20m 44s): April 15th is the launch date and yeah. And we'll be promoting it all month so you can follow along and aptitude HCM on Twitter or Matt Tarquin on Twitter too, but we'll be, it's all free too. It's free. Chad (20m 59s): Go to aptituderesearch.com. We're going to be launching the podcast on Wednesday. So we're going to be teasing this up really, really fat and happy. We will also have the link in the show notes. So definitely click on it, download it. It is a major report and read. So if you are in talent acquisition, if you're in this space at all, and you care about core tech, this is something that you have to dig into. So Madeline, I appreciate you coming on the show. I appreciate you doing all this work because it is a gorgeous report and there are a lot of good pieces of information in here. Madeline (21m 36s): I appreciate you having me. You're the first person to see it. So I'm thrilled that you speak so highly of it. Thanks, Chad. Chad (21m 42s): I'm stoked for you coming back on and we'll talk about that, that AI matching series later. I appreciate it. We out. Outro (22m 5s): 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.

Are you an imposter? A fraud? Is that feeling self-imposed? Is anything in the workplace really self-imposed? Is the term "Karen" just a mechanism to manipulate? Wow, that got weird and deep fast, right? Imposter syndrome is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. It disproportionately affects high-achieving people, who find it difficult to accept their accomplishments. Many times, women in the corporate world are impacted the most. All reasons to bring on Jess Von Bank to discuss this important issue and how we might be able to remedy this systemic problem that's unequally plagued the workplace for decades. This smack of reality is supported by our friends at Nexxt. Here's some reality, people respond to texts and yet you're still emailing. Call Nexxt and ask them about how you can increase response rates and candidate engagement with text. 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. We're recording on a Friday, which means you should lower your expectations. What's up everybody? This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am Joel Cheeseman joined as always by Chad Sowash and today we are just giddy. Chad (33s): Giddy! Joel (34s): To welcome Jess Von bank, head of marketing at Leapgen. Jess, how you been? Jess (41s): Amazing. I've been great, honestly. And I love your intro brash opinion. I have been accused of a brash opinion from time to time. Chad (49s): That's why you're here. Are you fucking kidding me? Joel (52s): Maybe you need a podcast. Chad (53s): Oh yeah. And here's the thing. So there are many topics that are out there that we just tap dance around, not us specifically, but generally the population. The general population, just tap dances around fluffy bullshit here and there. Jess (1m 9s): Yeah. Chad (1m 9s): I actually saw you posting on social media about imposter syndrome and we don't first and foremost, we don't hear enough about it. We don't understand cause and effect. And we literally, I think there's just too much tap dancing around this, which is why we wanted to bring you on, because you've done a bunch of research, you know about the workforce you've been in this industry and that's why you're here. Joel (1m 33s): She's done her homework. Chad (1m 35s): That's cool. Right? Jess (1m 37s): Yeah. And that post probably came from I'm. I'm just kind of tired of it. I'm over it. Not that imposter syndrome is not real and valid. Chad (1m 47s): What is it? Let's do that first. Jess (1m 49s): Yeah. So I have done the research. I actually had to like, where did it come from? Who started calling it this thing and when? Like, I like to know the backstory on things. I want it to be a journalist back in the day. And so imposter syndrome seems to have been coined, if this is accurate, but at Georgia State. A bunch of academics came up with this term to describe high achieving people, high achieving individuals who can't internalize their own accomplishments, they feel like a fraud in any room or when they're in a conversation with people who they think know more or know better than they do. And I think, you know, recent stuff, Brené Brown talks a lot about vulnerability and imposter syndrome and somehow over the decades. Jess (2m 35s): I mean, this is a real thing, I'm not denying the validity of imposter syndrome, but somehow we've applied this label more I think to women than to men. Maybe women just talk about vulnerability and emotion and, and whatever, maybe they just talk about it more. I think it doesn't just affect women, but does it affect women yet? So my me calling bullshit, it was not saying it doesn't exist. I said, stop telling women they have imposter syndrome because I think there are core issues that may, if that's a true statement, here's why. Women have not had representation, pay equity, equal opportunity of voice, the same level of influence authority, access, like call it what it is. Jess (3m 22s): If there's imposter syndrome, I wonder why? Like we're sort of tired of overcoming all of these barriers just to perform at the same level as our counterparts, who don't have the same barriers and obstacles to overcome, to enter the same room, in the same way. So when I say stop telling women they have imposter syndrome, I'm actually asking us to solve the real problems that still persist. Joel (3m 47s): Should it sort of stop at women? Jess (3m 49s): No. Joel (3m 50s): Cause I know when I go to my break dancing class, I feel like a bit of an old man imposter, so I guess age could play into it pretty much anything. Right. But we're just focusing Chad (3m 59s): That in itself is not an imposter syndrome, you literally are an imposter, Joel. So what I mean, again, let's jump into some of these topics and talk about cause and effect, right? So let's talk about pay equity right out of the gate, because that is huge, we all know that women make less than men and overall, in some cases it almost feels like women are just happy to take less. Is that an imposter syndrome type of scenario and HR is a very female heavy industry. Why are other women allowing this to happen to their fellow females? Jess (4m 41s): Yeah, that's a great question. There there's actually some research and some data that gives us this belief that men do a better job of faking it until you make it. They ask for promotions, they apply for jobs, they ask for salary increases. They ask for opportunity or project more than a woman might in a similar scenario because like the actual data says that men will apply to jobs if they feel 60% qualified for that job. Women will only apply to a job if they feel a hundred percent qualified or better or overqualified and that's Harvard Business Review data. And in the same way, like raising your hand in the room, asking for asking for an opportunity or asking for a stretch assignment where you're completely outside of your comfort zone, men do all of those things more than women. Jess (5m 33s): And I do think that that there's like there's historical reason for this. Women have been taught to stay small and play it safe and be quiet. And we haven't, I mean, historically I think over time we have to learn how to find our voice and to take up space and to own the room and to take control of the conversation. These are not things that have come naturally, to not just to women, to underrepresented groups or to marginalized groups. We have to learn how to do it. We have to overcome imposter syndrome in order to use our voice and to exercise, you know, to sort of practice doing these things. Chad (6m 12s): How do we do that when we still have other women pushing offer letters across the table that are tens of thousands of dollars less than the male counterparts. How do we do that? When not just other men let's say, or the workplace, let's just say the workplace overall is designed to be a more of a macho place right? Now you have a single, just an individual who feels like an imposter how do you expect them to break out of their shell by themselves? Right? How do we actually, how do we fix that? Because telling a person you need to change is not the answer. Jess (6m 51s): No, this is systemic. This is systemic change that we need. And the system is you, me, all of us. In fact, you know, the stat that I mentioned earlier about, you know, women applying, if they feel 60% qualified. Hewlett Packard did a report that broke that down even a little bit more. When women don't apply to jobs, if they don't feel a hundred percent qualified, it's not actually about their perception about themselves or their qualifications, it's a perception about the hiring process. They don't believe the hiring process is one where they will be advocated for, where they will have the relationships or the influence, or the ability to sort of navigate that hiring process and overcome, you know, am I qualified in my, are we actually going to have a legitimate conversation about my ability to perform in this job? Jess (7m 47s): And so it's more about their perception of an unfair hiring process than it is about their own qualifications or their ability to do the job. And that's a systemic problem. That's the fact that we have not designed hiring and work systems with women's success in mind, or with success in mind, for those who do not have representation, who are currently disadvantaged in whatever way. And so we have to create processes. We have to attract people in a way that says we're going to be fair and equitable and you're going to have the ability to show up the way you show up in the interview process, if not in the employment relationship. Jess (8m 28s): You're going to be able to thrive. You're going to be able to contribute. Like there's a whole trust thing that has to happen, and that has to be built or rebuilt. Chad (8m 37s): There has to be proof. Jess (8m 38s): And then hiring process has to change. There has to be proof. Chad (8m 42s): Yeah. Joel (8m 42s): Where do you think the seed is planted for this systematic reaction to women? Is it in the home? Is it kindergarten? Is it obviously doesn't start in the workplace. When do you think it begins? Like where do we really to change it? Jess (8m 56s): Yeah. I mean, you guys know me, you know socially and outside of the work hats that I wear. So, you know, I'm all about raising girls and I think that it has to start so young. I like literally everything I do, and I'm not even joking everything. I do. Every conversation I have the behaviors I show my girls every single day, the relationships I choose for myself, how they see me engaged with the world. Everything I do is proof to them of what's possible or what could be, because if they just look at the world that exists today, that's not good enough. That is far from good enough. They're not going to see equity. They're not going to see balanced representation. Jess (9m 39s): They're not going to see women performing at the same levels as men in government, in business, in our communities. But they do need to, I mean, you have to see it to be it, right. Well, you know, we've heard all of that stuff. And so how do you start modeling what doesn't exist today? And you literally have to call, that's why I said, you know, stop telling women, they have imposter call it what it is. You have to start calling it what it is. You have to start laying facts, bare and pointing out, you know, when something isn't fair or equitable or pointing out, you know, when we're making progress, that's good and those things should be celebrated. Jess (10m 21s): When we, when we see another female CEO rise to the ranks, is that good enough? No, it's not good enough that we only have three or five or whatever the number is. Chad (10m 31s): 8 percent in Fortune 500 companies. Jess (10m 34s): Yeah. I mean, that's terrible, but should we celebrate that progress and point it out and illustrate it for what it is? Absolutely, because that shows how much work we have left to do. Joel (10m 45s): Speaking of progress, I mean, I know, I think it's 77% of high school valedictorians now are females, obviously more females are graduating from college. Do you feel like that's that solid progress? Or does that not matter to the overall problem? Jess (11m 1s): You know, it probably points to the fact, you know, are women smart and academic? Are we hungry to learn? Are we creative and curious? Yes. All of those things are. Yes, yes, yes. I think it's, you know, remember like decades and decades ago, there was like, this men are from Mars, women are from Venus. I think it's a little dangerous to assign traits or qualities to a gender because I probably have more masculine traits than most of my female friends. I'm competitive, I'm assertive. I know my voice and I use it. Is that a female, a male thing? Should I, am I acting more like a man? I know I'm acting like me. I'm acting like I know how to act. And so I think it's a little, I think it's dangerous and I actually think it works us backwards If we start saying women should act more like men to achieve leadership positions or women make leaders because they're nurturing and empathetic. Jess (11m 55s): How about if we just take gender out of the conversation and talk about the traits and the qualities that make people succeed in various parts of their life, that way anyone who wants to own or develop those traits or qualities can and should advance to those ranks. And I'm not saying take gender out of the equation all together, because how do you know that you're achieving balance and parody? Yes, it should be considered, but I, I hate to limit ourselves to, you know, men are better at this and women are better at this. I think that gets, that's a pretty slippery slope. Chad (12m 29s): Let's take a look at some of the big issues we've talked about, pay transparent or pay already. Do you believe that a solution to be able to drive toward equity in pay is pay transparency? Just top to bottom pay transparency? Jess (12m 46s): Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of things around look at all the conversations we have around diversity, equity and inclusion, we tend to get into race and gender a lot in that conversation, but even, you know, separately pay equity and other forms of parody. Promotions within an organization, true diversity within an organization, lay it all bare, literally opened the books. I mean, I don't know how many enterprises are truly, truly analyzing the numbers, let alone sharing. And I think that exercise could be really healthy. It could expose, you know, what, if we're solving the wrong problems, like expose what is actually happening so you know where to take the conversation next. Jess (13m 33s): You can't do anything without understanding exactly where you're at today. And being truthful, holding yourself accountable and being publicly accountable is a great place to start. Chad (13m 43s): Why do you think we're not transparent today? Jess (13m 45s): You know, that's a pretty competitive data point to share publicly if you're all, you know, trying to poach talent from each other, we're in a talent war again, always. And so it's probably for, for competitive reasons. And maybe we maybe don't, we don't want to expose our warts either. I just read this morning. I wish I could remember. There was a company who literally had not done a cost of living adjustment in 20 years, and they couldn't believe that, you know, or like unskilled low-skilled, hourly rate positions that netted like $30,000 US dollars a year. Once they did all of the adjustments, those people should be paid $45,000 a year. Jess (14m 26s): They did like completely like a mass update. All of those job levels, all of those roles immediately. And can you imagine if you were that job, if you, if you held that job and you were immediately bumped from $30,000 to 45 and that's just fair. I mean, that's not, you're not even getting over, forget getting overpaid. You're finally getting fairly paid. Yeah. Chad (14m 46s): Well, but what about all those years that you didn't receive those pay bumps? I mean, you're still missing wages right now, overall, so I understand where you're going there. So what other points when it comes to kind of like the cause and effect for imposter syndrome and the workplace are, have you seen or read about etc? Jess (15m 10s): You know, I think that the pandemic exposed a lot of warts too, in really interesting ways. We, I read, I've been doing some research this week for some content and developing. If the pandemic had not happened, the world would have created 30 million jobs last year, but it happened. So that factor, plus lots of other factors, we're at a global labor, we're at a global job shortage of around 144 million jobs. That's a job shortage, which seems a little bit, way contradictory, a little bit surreal and way contradictory when I say that we also have 9 million open jobs posted in the United States. Jess (15m 53s): So how can you have a talent shortage and a job shortage at the same time? What that means is we have a complete disparity. Globally, regionally, it's a complete mismatch of talent. The jobs that are open are low, no skill, hourly rate, early career entry level jobs that can not be filled. Yeah, they will literally can, like we have like these reams of unfillable jobs because the people who are looking for jobs, sure some of them are riding out, you know, COVID stuff and unemployment and whatever, not as many as you would think, the ones that are not applying for those jobs, don't want those jobs. Jess (16m 35s): We're not willing to return to shitty works. And I'm not saying hourly jobs are shitty work, but if you were not providing fair, pay a healthy work environment, a positive, a not-toxic culture, let's just say not toxic would be a win, but even a thriving culture. And we don't treat a lot of our workforce in that way, especially if you're early career hourly, low skill, no skill, nobody skills us, nobody takes care of us. We're considered sort of like this transient workforce that just sort of ebbs and flows and in and out of these businesses, that's got to change. And the fact that women dropped out of the workforce at a rate four times higher than men during the pandemic. Jess (17m 19s): Hm. I wonder if something was broken there, the fact that 10 million people are unemployed right now, latest census data shows 10 million people are not actively participating in the labor force more than one third of those are working women with school aged children. Hmm. I wonder what's not working about that? So we have to look at the people who were disadvantaged prior, are now incredibly more disadvantaged and we have to ask honest questions about the way we've treated those workers, those members of our labor force previously. And we have to fix a whole bunch of shit to get them back into the workforce and contributing in meaningful ways, because people will choose to sit out if we can't fix this. Chad (18m 4s): But when you have a government that is trying to create infrastructure around some of those issues, but yet we're told that's not infrastructure. Jess (18m 13s): Oh my God, this is so at the infrastructure level. There are so many policies and programs that need to be updated to correct some of the issues that we have. I'll even take an example like parental leave. Paternal leave specifically. So women saying I want to and need to, and should be able to participate in the workforce even while I'm raising a family means that in the lucky cases where they have a parenting partner, that parenting partner, which may be a dude, maybe a dad is saying, I'm going to help carry some of the household weight so that you can also participate in the workforce. Our parental leave policies are horseshit for men. Jess (18m 54s): So maybe make that a little bit more equal, maybe make it more possible, more, you know, allow us to imagine the possibility of a man taking leave to care for kids on the homefront versus a woman. That's barely an option today because leave policies don't really support it. It's changing slowly, but it needs to change a whole lot faster. Nexxt PROMO (19m 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 of 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 the way they want to receive it. For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Nexxt PROMO (20m 5s): Remember that's Nexxt with the double X, not the triple X hiring.nexxt.com Joel (20m 16s): You're saying we a lot. We should do this and that. Who is the tip of the spear in this movement? Is it the CEO? Is it HR? Is it the board of directors? Is it a societal change? Like who do you feel should be taking the lead on this movement? Jess (20m 31s): Yeah, I think that business leaders have a huge responsibility and and honestly the bigger your business, the bigger your enterprise, your corporation, the bigger voice you have. Because this really does need to be, I believe a lot in the power of systems and like collective, you know, bodies of people. The more people you can rally around a cause a purpose, change, the more, the louder your voice can be heard. To your point earlier, can we expect one woman at a time to find her voice and ask for more? Sure, that's great, but that's not going to drive systemic change. I'll go volunteer at the soup kitchen all day long and that's a good deed, but that's not going to fix homelessness in my city. Jess (21m 14s): And so I think business leaders with, you know, and anybody who has access to fiscal spending, you know, who has influence over spending and budget decisions and where my tax dollars go as a business or as, or as an individual, that's where money's got to talk and systems need to change at a pretty high level. Chad (21m 37s): And bullshit's gotta walk. Joel (21m 41s): This is going to be a weird question. And maybe it has no relevancy whatsoever, but we joke a lot about the Karen movement. Somehow I feel like women who one don't want to be perceived as a Karen, that like that's a barrier to speaking up or taking initiative. Am I off on that? Or is that totally off base? Chad (22m 1s): That's Good. That is good. I mean, yeah, because, I mean, if you think about it, you're talking about labeling somebody and that actually could perspectively suppress what somebody actually feels and thinks because they don't want to be seen as yeah. Joel (22m 16s): As a Karen. Jess (22m 19s): Women supporting women can be so, so powerful right now. Like we have to have each other's back, a lot of these stereotypes and a lot of those, you know, labeling, like we do it to each other. Chad (22m 31s): Yes. Jess (22m 32s): More perhaps than, you know, than anybody does it to us. And so I'll call that shit out all day long if I see it. Like figuring out how to find your voice, own your voice, learn how to use your voice, learn how to take up space in a room. It's not just a woman thing. It's an anybody thing. Like we all, we're all, you know, trying to figure out what hill we're going to die on, in our lives and how do we represent that in all parts of our lives. So if somebody is over-correcting or, you know, kind of fumbling about, as they try to figure that out, at least they're doing the work, at least they care about something and they're speaking up about it. Jess (23m 14s): Are some people have obnoxious? I'm not saying there aren't obnoxious human beings, but let's not make that a gender thing. Or like, oh, like a Karen thing. Chad (23m 24s): Now there was a feminist movement at one time in this country where we saw females banding together to be able to drive through in one voice. Is that something that we need? Jess (23m 35s): Maybe, but I think it's going to take a lot longer and it's going to be harder than it needs to, to have this sort of like rising up movement into this upheaval from the bottom, this, mutiny in the ranks that could work, you know, that's radicalism, you know, that brings change too, but is it going to be sustained change? Will it happen systemically and as efficiently as it can. I actually think ally-ship, I think that tapping into like, let's just call it what it is that we live in a hierarchical, patriarchal, racist society. Jess (24m 16s): Like we were just born into this time and age. So let's, let's be truthful about that. And then let's consider what that means. That means there are a whole bunch of people who are under-represented marginalized, and not treated with fairness and equity. Who can fix that? The patriarchy. The patriarchy needs to make promises. First needs to understand and needs to give a shit, and then they need to make promises and commitments to be part of the solution. So this isn't like, I actually see them as, holding the most responsibility in this conversation, because if you hold the most power and have the most influence, and if you were the one, the category of people who actually created the system we exist in, then I actually need you to be part of the solution. Joel (25m 10s): I think that's a great, great point because one of our favorite moments in podcasting history was when we sat with Torrin who a lot of our listeners know, probably all of them know, but we asked him, look, it's really sort of, you know, there's sort of this cloudy area of like, we have to do things and speak up, but like we said, what can Chad and I really do to sort of shine a light on this movement? What he said to us was, you know, speak up, don't be quiet, you know, share things on Facebook and comment when there's injustice or racism in the world. And I think your comment about that is great. And I'm curious, what are some specific examples for men, the patriarchy in the workforce that they can make a difference? Joel (25m 55s): And one of the things that I think of is, one of the recent studies that talked about, you know, the work from home movement and the number of zoom calls that we're on every day and how many times women tend to get interrupted or get quieted in zoom calls. Like that is an example where a man could say like, look, let you know, let Susan talk, or Susan had a point there let's give her a chance. Like, is that something that we should be doing? And what are some other examples? Jess (26m 22s): Yeah, I think everybody, but especially if you are part of the patriarchy, you just need to get sensitive to this. You need to understand and I think it helps just, you know, objectively laying out the facts and giving examples of what exists. Like that's where I can help or anybody who's on the other end of this experience can help. I think it's so hard, when we throw flames and, you know, we carry torches and like, we blow up a situation. It's hard for people to participate in that conversation. So in a really factual objective way, like, Hey, did you know, this is what it's like? Or did you know that this is really hard for me? I feel really vulnerable, but I don't know if I had equal voice in that project or I don't, I wish I had been given a chance to participate in the same way. Jess (27m 9s): Like that's an incredibly vulnerable thing for somebody to say for the first time. So I think if you're on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you are an authority figure, part of the patriarchy, just get sensitive to it, in an open eyed sort of way. And I think that understanding and being able to participate in those conversations can be used as fuel for empathy, for things that you don't experience. And you don't have to apologize for not experiencing those things, just understand that you don't experience work, other things in the same way that your peers do and use that for empathy and use that to help drive change. Jess (27m 52s): And your example is perfect. See something, say something. And keep it as factual and objective and straightforward as possible so that everybody can sort of approach that conversation in a healthy, constructive way and stop making things sort of like this hot potato, or, you know, we need everybody to be able to participate in these conversations. Joel (28m 15s): Yeah. Another strong personality that we've had on the show is Cindy Gallop, who sort of leans toward the fact that the system isn't going to change. We're going to have to make new ones and part of that is creating more entrepreneurs that are female and people of color. And I'm curious what your thoughts are, if any, about women entrepreneurs, do they have specific challenges as a female entrepreneur? Do they have more of a responsibility to push this movement forward than, than others? Or are they in the same boat as all the rest of us? Jess (28m 52s): Oh, there is research, I've seen it. I don't have it at my fingertips. There are challenges getting funding and things like that. They, and there are specific solutions. That's where we might need some concerted efforts like private equity groups that specifically look at, or advisory boards or whatever that specifically promote and advance women owned business, or minority owned business. Joel (29m 12s): Maybe government loans or programs? Government seems like they could do more. Jess (29m 16s): Yeah. Exactly. So can they, should they, yeah, that's a great place to start. We've actually, in terms of the self-employed, they were one of the first and most impacted groups of everybody who, you know, of the entire labor force as a result of the pandemic, but that group bounced back faster than any other we're at pre pandemic rates. We're seeing the highest rate of self-employment that we've seen in three years. That's a healthy, thriving scrappy group, who's figuring out how to make a dollar and how to move forward in the world. That's a huge opportunity for women to call the shots because they literally can call the shots. Jess (29m 56s): It's a much smaller, more nimble system for them to operate within. They can design their own, you know, business model, put the people in their workforce that they need, they can get, you know, there's a lot of flexibility there so it's a great opportunity, but you know, if you're a founder and you go the startup route there, yes, you'll have unique challenges, but I love all the programs and policy stuff out there that recognize that and say, we're going to fund women and see if we can get more of these off the ground and sustained for longer. Chad (30m 28s): Joel and I, we both have daughters and we are trying to do what we can to design that future, obviously for them, because what's happening now is not working, which is again, why we're so happy that you came on the show to talk about some of these very heavy, you know, very heavy topics, but very important topics. So thanks so much for coming on. If somebody wanted to find out more about you, maybe even Leapgen, where would you send them? Jess (30m 54s): Yeah. Thank you so much for having me number one and for having this conversation! I love this conversation and the more we have it, the more we'll we'll see change in our lifetimes. Like I would really love some significant change in my lifetime, in my girls and your daughter's lifetimes. Like can we see the pay gap close? I'm not sure. I'm not sure it'll happen in their lifetimes either, but the more we talk about this, the more that chance becomes real. You can find me Jess von Bank everywhere on social. I am with Leapgen. I run our Now of Work community and you're welcome to join us anytime. Chad (31m 28s): Excellent. Thanks so much, Jess. Jess (31m 30s): Thank you. Joel and Chad (31m 32s): We out. OUTRO (31m 34s): 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 (32m 18s): 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.

Remember your favorite double album (for those old enough)? That’s what this episode is like. The boys drop news and discuss BIG TOPICS like... Google for Jobs gets serious LinkedIn needs to pick a lane then move onto M&A news from Circa, Hireology, and Yello. $4.9billion in funding!?! ...and well, TikTok (again :) Actually, there’s so much good stuff in this show, I can’t even remember everything. Just get comfy and turn it up, man compliments of Sovren, JobAdX, and Jobvite! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value 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): Oh yeah. I'm back after missing last week show baby Richard Branson went to space and I went to Kentucky. What's up boys and girls. It's your favorite podcast AKA the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host Joel "rocketman" Cheeseman. Chad (38s): This is Chad "Italia" Sowash Joel (42s): And on this week show Google for Jobs isn't playing anymore y'all. LinkedIn keeps getting played and who wants to play a game of M and A? Just about everyone apparently. Sovren (55s): 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 (1m 39s): 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): Did you miss me, man? Chad (1m 55s): Yeah, I did think about it as you buy the campfire with s'mores and the kids and mosquito repellent. Yeah, no, I was, I was envious. I was really envious! Joel (2m 7s): You were envious. Well, anytime you want to take my place, you're more than welcome. I enjoy about 15% of camping. And it's usually between the hours of like six and nine, when it is the campfire, it is, you know, whatever you're eating, it's drinking, it's cooling down, but yeah, it's sleeping on the ground. Nobody sleeps. Everybody's grumpy. It's hot as shit and Kentucky this time of year, by the way. Anyway. Chad (2m 36s): Well welcome back. Joel (2m 38s): It's good to be back in the comforts of air conditioning and you know, civilization. Nice to be back. Chad (2m 47s): Well, I got to give a shout out to Julie for stepping up last minute, last week. And filling in, she did a great job. She's a podcaster, so she kind of does this thing. Joel (2m 59s): Glad she could fill in while I was scratching my mosquito bites. Shout out from me to Richard Branson. I'm sure you saw this in the news, billionaires going in space, something we did 55, 60 years ago, but now it's celebrated because rich people are doing it. Shout out to him. And I can't wait to shout out to Jeff Bezos when he does it. Let's hope that he doesn't die in a horrible accident coming back to earth cause that would break your heart Chad (3m 27s): In his giant penis machine. Yes, I can see that. Joel (3m 31s): Yeah. Why don't these guys just sword fight with their cocks and get it over with? Like put the money to, I don't know global warming, hunger. Chad (3m 41s): Yeah. Joel (3m 42s): Don't spend it going into space. Chad (3m 44s): Well, and Richard Branson doing the whole, oh, as a kid and I wish everybody and it's like, motherfucker, you just wanted to spend your money on this ride. It's what you wanted to do. Just say it. You didn't want to spend it on world hunger. You didn't want to spend it on anything with regard to making lives better. I mean, you just wanted to take the ride. That's what you want to just fucking say it, dude. Come on. Joel (4m 10s): Yeah. And the fact that he moved it up to go before Bezos really kind of tells you right here. This whole thing is, it's like the mother load of midlife crises with these guys. Chad (4m 22s): But we do have some winners though. Kids, the UIFA Euro 2020, and Joel and I, we both picked England. Like I said, my heart was with Italy. I wanted Italy to win, but I thought England had the easiest route in their easiest group. They're on the easiest side of the bracket. After beating Germany, they really had an easy way all the way into the finals. And yet Italy after beating Belgium and really getting smacked around, you know, a little bit, they played a match, dude. It was pretty cool. Joel (4m 53s): Yeah. I'm going to save a lot of my commentary for our European show. So kids make sure you go check that out. But I, you know, by the numbers Italy should have won easily. Damn what a choke job by England. Yeah. And while we're on sports, can we come back to America for a second? So I think it's 13 days before training camp for the real football happens. I'm excited for that. And the NBA finals are all tied up as we record this podcast. Chad (5m 20s): And more winners, we've got a Rocket Mat out of Brazil. 1.5 million in funding. Barb Francillo. Is that how you say it Francillo? Joel (5m 31s): I don't know. Chad (5m 31s): Okay. She won beer Joel (5m 33s): from Adzuna I think. Chad (5m 35s): She won beer from AdZuna so, she's loving her life right now with a fucking big stack of beer that was dropped on her front door and Rob Art wins whiskey. Joel (5m 49s): Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of Barb, she's down there in Phoenix so she can enjoy that beer while she roots on her sons. And if you haven't up for free shit, what's wrong with you? There are real winners. These are real people. Head out to chadcheese.com/free. Give us your info. And we just draw it out of a hat and they get free, free booze, free booze and t-shirts by Emissary, are all an option when you sign up for free. So do that today. If you haven't kids shout out to Candace Parker, she was announced the first woman ever on the NBA 2K that's, a video game, kids cover. Awesome basketball player and quite a looker by the way is. Joel (6m 30s): She's the first woman to be on the cover. It brought Shaquille O'Neal to tears on TV. So it's kind of a big moment in the world of sports and equity. Chad (6m 38s): He's a sensitive guy though. He's big, he's brawny, but he's sensitive and that's okay. This 2021 Joel. If you're out there and you're listening and you have topics or articles you believe we should be digging into here on the show, well, mosey on over to Twitter and share them using hashtag Chadcheese or tag us. You can also tag us on LinkedIn or just go to Chadcheese.com bottom of the page, click on the contact us button and engage. We enjoy it. Joel (7m 10s): Yeah. Shout out to Instawork. This show is so jam packed with news. This thing is a shout out. So Instawork announced a $60 million series C raise in financing, bringing its total funding to a hundred million dollars. Shout out to Instawork, man, in any other week, you'd be a main headline, but this week you're just a shout out. Sorry. Chad (7m 33s): Just a shout out today is going to be the M&A version. You ready for some topics? Joel (7m 38s): Oh my God. No. I've got a few more shout outs to boomers LA times this week reports that a 10,000 boomers are retiring every day in this country. That's going to open up some new jobs for a lot of people and probably some real estate. Shout out to Trump who keeps the fundraising enterprise going by suing big tech. Imagine that the funds that are coming in on that for all the Trump followers. Chad (8m 2s): You know that nothing's going to this quote unquote "suing." he got on a news channel, put a Fox news mic in front of him, started talking about suing somebody and please donate to my, you know, my campaign of suing these assholes. And all he's going to do is bank it. He's going to bank it. And I love how old white dudes claiming to quote unquote, "cancel culture." No asshole. You broke the rules. These are called the consequences. This is what happens when you do stupid shit. Joel (8m 34s): And by the way, when you do donate, you'll be defaulted into the ongoing monthly donations whether you want to do that or not. By the way, there's a new book on Facebook, that's pretty revealing. I'm going to check that out and maybe report back on that. Otherwise we have a few birthdays to mention, Bill Fisher from Vonq. He celebrates a birthday this week. Will Staney from Proactive Talent. Chad (8m 58s): Nice. Joel (8m 58s): Christian Anderson. If you don't remember Christian Anderson was the PR guy for Jobster. Chad (9m 4s): Oh yeah. Joel (9m 5s): And dealing with that PR nightmare had to be fun he's way out of this industry, but Christian happy birthday to you. Jason Morris, founder of Employee Screen IQ and my former boss and client, he celebrates a birthday. And Jeff Hunter, founder of Talentism also the former head of talent at EA and I think Bose really great guy, he's sort of disappeared, he used to blog a lot, but he celebrates a birthday. A lot of people getting older in our industry and shout out to those folks. Chad (9m 38s): TOPICS! Joel (9m 41s): Google for Jobs who would have thought this. Chad (9m 45s): What? Joel (9m 45s): So a little bit here, Google is adding direct, apply markup and new editorial guidelines for job postings, no traffic for you, which you coined. And I'll let you get in that a second. The new guidelines include rules around obstructive text and images, excessive and distractive ads or content that doesn't add any value to the job posting getting nixed. What do you got on no jobs for you? Chad (10m 8s): Dude. So it was funny because I remember we talked about Google Hire being like a 20% time project. Joel (10m 17s): A hobby. Chad (10m 18s): We automatically got calls from the Google team on that one. Seriously, Google for Jobs has felt like a 20% project because it's been a shitty experience the entire time. Now these new changes where they're going to be focusing on really looking for feeds with spam jobs, better user experience, whether you know that the organization is asking for registration, if there's an excessive or obstructive pop-up ads, updating your feeds to make sure that you don't have expired jobs in them, masking old jobs with new date. Joel (10m 56s): That's a biggie. Chad (10m 57s): That's a total Tom fuckery right there. That's when, you know, if somebody is doing that, kill their feed. Kill their feed, they're doing nothing but trying to gain the system and then adding data that wasn't really a wasn't originally on the job like salary, which I thought was interesting because you see Indeed and you see a ton of other organizations who do this to try to make more of a robust type of a job listing. But if it wasn't on the job in the first place, should it really be there? Google says, no, get that shit off there. But the direct apply thing I think is the markup itself. That's big. Joel (11m 35s): Yeah, for sure. So in addition to, I guess the anti-spam moves, which are surprising and probably fantastic from a user's perspective, they added a new direct apply property to the job posting structured data. This property gives websites an optional way to share if your job listing offers a direct apply experience, right from Google search. Google defines a direct apply experience in terms of the actions that are required from the users to apply to the job. This means that a user is offered a short and simple application process on your page without unnecessary intermediate steps. If the user has to click apply complete an application form, sign in or log in more than once in the application journey, it means that you aren't offering a direct apply experience, no traffic for you. Joel (12m 23s): This is really, really interesting on a few levels. I do want to echo your sentiment about the old Google versus the new Google. Chad (12m 32s): Yeah. Joel (12m 32s): And 15 years ago, Google probably would have looked at all the spam and criticism like people like you and me give them. And would've just said, fuck it. And shut the whole thing down. Now they're digging in and caring about the product, which I think may be a component of lawsuits around the world and they're gonna have to pay media companies a lot of money, which will, we'll also talk about, I think, in the European show. But in while they're paying media companies to put their news onto Google, there'll be simultaneously sticking the knife in their back as they take their classifieds money with Google for Jobs and, and other components. So I wanted to put that out there. Joel (13m 13s): But the direct apply is huge. I mean, if particularly ATSs figure out how they can allow users of Google for Jobs to apply directly from Google is game-changer too much of hyperbole around that? Because if you can do that one, people don't even need to go to sites anymore, which they haven't really been doing anyway. And we've been hearing a lot about no one's going to job sites anymore and no one's clicking on jobs anymore. But it also really fucks, fucks you a few if you make your business by pay-per-click ads or clicking on ads, because if no one's clicking there and they're applying directly from Google, that's taking out the middleman almost entirely. Joel (13m 56s): So if this thing takes off and they work with the ATSs, and like, I think it's big potentially for the LinkedIn's where people trust and they maybe have data already in LinkedIn to apply easily. That's huge. Now people like Alex Murphy have thrown out the issue of, well, is there pre-screening in that? Is there any kind of like just basic level, otherwise it's just sort of a CRM and you're capturing data. So it's still left to be determined exactly how this looks and if people will actually embrace it, but if it works right, holy shit, it's a big deal for sure. Chad (14m 32s): I think for the most part, what they're looking at right now for direct apply is that if I am applying for a job at IBM, when I click on that job, does it send me to a job posting on Glassdoor or Monster, right? That's not direct, but if I click on that job and it sends me to the actual job posting on IBM will, that is direct. Now there are other editorial pieces on the guideline process for user experience. And that's when you dig deeper into it. So first and foremost, you have many different components. The first component is that direct apply component. Is it direct? If it has to go through an actual job board itself before they apply directly to them, then it's not direct, right? Chad (15m 17s): And you'll be say penalized. But when you're talking about the actual process methodology and take it half an hour to fill out a fucking application, that's an entirely different conversation and you could be penalized as well. So job boards could, in some effect, whether they're a direct apply or not, could still rank higher than jobs on applicant tracking systems, because the user experience is shit on many applicant tracking systems. And that's not the fault of the applicant tracking system in many cases. In many cases, it's because the company has some old ass process methodology, which they haven't changed in 10, 15, 20 years. Joel (16m 1s): So my interpretation was that there was actually applying from Google for Jobs that you didn't have to click on anything and go to any site, but you could also do it as going directly to apply. Chad (16m 12s): Yeah. But you can't, you don't have your information available on Google to be able to just push it into an applicant tracking system. I think that's something that could come later, but right. Joel (16m 24s): So when did they, when did they launch Google resume or Google profile or something? Chad (16m 29s): You know, if you're using Google docs, you could have it in a Google doc as it is. And if you, if you hit apply, you can choose, you know, apply with, you know, a Google doc or whatever, right? So there, there are some opportunities that could happen there with their current infrastructure of their G-Suite. But overall, that's not going to happen right out of the gate. No way. Joel (16m 50s): I think the summary is Google cares about this shit and if you thought they were just going to ignore it and go away, you're probably mistaken. Chad (16m 58s): And performance based ads, baby, that's the next step. They're cleaning this up so that they can say, okay, look, now we have better rules in place, we've been doing this long enough. We know where we're getting scammed. We know where people are actually gaming us. We've put these rules in place. Now we can start doing performance based ads. Joel (17m 19s): Follow the money. Chad is my mantra. And speaking of following the money, we got some fucking MNA action that went on, went on this week. Which one do you want to start with? We got Yello, Hireology and Circa. Chad (17m 31s): Let's go with Yellow and WayUp. Joel (17m 33s): All right, what's going on there? You did a shred on it. Yep. Chad (17m 37s): Yellow. And this is from the press release. Yello, the leader in early talent and campus recruitment and WayUp the leader in DEI and diversity sourcing announced that the companies are joining forces AKA they're merging. The WayUp team will be joining Yello and WayUp co-founders will play major roles in the combined company. I got to give a shout out to Madeline Lorato over at Aptitude Research for inviting me into interview with her. Liz Wessel, who CEO of WayUp and Corey Ferengul, who is the CEO of yellow earlier this week. And whether, I don't know if you know this or not Joel, but Liz has been a long time Chad and Cheese junkie. Chad (18m 22s): And she actually has a kind of like a podcast book club at WayUp. Yeah. Joel (18m 28s): There needs to be an opioid for that addiction. What struck me was so WayUps total funding was, is 37 million. They were founded in 2014. Yello's total funding is 46 million. They're the old dog here they've been around since 2008, apparently. So an acquisition by those two companies with sort of, I guess, valued at the same I'm struggling with how the deal went down and how somebody had enough money to pay for it. And I, one of the things from the college perspective that I find fascinating is sort of how quickly handshake has impacted that industry. And I'm not an expert on the college recruiting scene, but clearly handshake has, has made a huge dent in that whole ecosystem. Joel (19m 17s): So for me, this is a little bit of, from my perspective, I've talked about, you know, Hey, if two dinosaurs can cuddle together, you know, do they survive the asteroid longer than those that don't? To me, this is like two companies that are sort of, they're not Handshake. Handshake is takes taking all the oxygen out of the room, these guys getting together and saying, Hey, if we partner up this diversity thing is big. Companies have budgets specifically now for diversity and they have new money in those budgets. So it's like, let's join forces. Let's get some of that diversity cabbage and take on Handshake. Am I correct in that perception? Or am I off? Chad (19m 56s): Think of it this way, Handshake and Simplicity, both of those platforms, they own probably 80% of the market with regard to college recruiting platforms, right. But that's the old model Yello and WayUp would be the entirely new model. Right? So if I'm an employer and I go to, you know, all these different schools, I'm using different platforms to be able to do on-campus recruiting. Well, why don't I just have my own platform, right? I should be building my own talent pipelines. Why don't I just have my own platform and a couple of different areas first and foremost, Yello is that enterprise platform. Chad (20m 36s): Now what WayUp does is they have about 10 to 30,000 students signing up with them every week. So instead of having something that is just built inside of the University that sucks all the cash out of it. Joel (20m 49s): Yeah. Chad (20m 50s): Why not have an SMB model where small companies can go and pay a small fee to be able to get candidates from wherever and whatever university? Joel (20m 59s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're touting 6 million candidates, a database of 6 million candidates, recent graduates and students for more than 7,000 campuses. And they're claiming 71% are black, Hispanic, or female as well as tens of thousands of veterans. So they're clearly doing something right. From what you're saying is these two companies combined are going to be a major force in college campus recruiting? Chad (21m 23s): I think even though I sound so bullish about it, that this is really a shot in the dark because the college recruiting industry in itself is built in the 1950s and it still is there. So trying to drag it out of that is going to be incredibly hard for any organization. But I do see Handshake and Simplicity as the old model and then the combination of WayUp and Yello as the new model. We'll see which one wins. Joel (21m 54s): Yeah. And it's, it's tough because you've got, when something like that happens, you think where's change going to happen. And in this model you would say like, well, the students probably don't give a shit, they're not out there with pitchforks saying, get rid of the career centers. Chad (22m 6s): They're just not using them. Joel (22m 7s): The companies are probably where it should happen, but we've heard stories of if you screw over the college, then you get moved down the list of the job of the job fair prime real estate corner or whatever. Like, I don't know if we can mention his name, but the conversation we had on LinkedIn was like, companies are afraid to cross the college because they're afraid that they'll, they'll get, you know, non preferential treatment at the next job fair if they go do something outside of the college campus. Chad (22m 34s): How many students actually utilize the college career center? It's not over 50%. That's for fucking sure. Joel (22m 42s): Back in the nineties Chad, I used to live at the career center. Chad (22m 45s): That's only because they had hot chicks at work there. Joel (22m 49s): That is true. That is true. All right. We still got Hireology and Circa. What do you want next? Chad (22m 55s): Hireology buys EmployUs. So Hireology, friend of the show, "the leading recruitment CRM built for multi location decentralized enterprises" (Wow. Marketing, you need to work on that) announced the acquisition of employee referral technology provider EmployUs. No figures were disclosed, which means to me it was on bargain basement pricing. Joel (23m 19s): TJ Maxx, baby. Chad (23m 20s): Yup. Yeah. I think core platforms, especially niche and SMB they need to be able to provide a reason for hiring companies with the disparate locations to not just go to ZipRecruiter. Right? And this is the biggest issue. Employee referrals are all already one of the best sources for hiring, right? So why do I need a fucking platform to do that? Joel (23m 45s): That's a good question, Chad. And the platform didn't strike me as, you know, superior innovation. It was sort of like email your employees, and say, do you know anybody for this job or text them the same thing? My question is, I mean, we know referral programs work, they are continually the number one source of hire or new hires in a company. My question is, and this is more for you because this is your lane. As we get more into referral programs and diversity, that seems to me like a collision course for disaster, because at its heart, to me, referral programs are recommend people that, you know, for this job. Chad (24m 29s): Friends of Bob. Joel (24m 30s): So at the end of the day, if you're really focused on referral programs, then your whole company just looks like each, everybody looks like each other. Chad (24m 37s): Yeah. Joel (24m 37s): And I know that's general generalizing, but that's kinda what it is, right? If you want to really inject diversity into your organization, it seems to me like referral programs have to figure that out and good luck with that. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, it feels like if we're really focused on diversity, then, then referral programs kind of suck. Chad (24m 56s): Well that's a company issue, not a referral program issue because if you are working on your foundational diversity efforts and you are hiring people of color and more females and so on and so forth, then what you're going to do is you're going to amplify that. Right. So, you know, that's not an employee referral issue, that's a, that's a foundational corporate issue. Right. And so, but, but that's a good question because you've got to fix the foundational issue before you actually start the employee referral. Joel (25m 28s): Think is where a lot of companies are or most companies. Chad (25m 31s): I would think so, but I'm, you know, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I mean, this is a journey where companies really have to focus on and they should be transparent about it. And most aren't, you know, in their workforce composition. And at that point, you challenge yourself publicly to do better. And as you do better, you start to institute employee referral programs, which could if done correctly, amplify diversity within your organization. That's I mean, and that's from the ground up for the most part. So yeah, I think there are two different problems you have to have that foundational change made before you can really Institute the employee referral piece. Joel (26m 10s): Do we know of any referral software out there that sort of incentivizes bringing in diverse candidates? Because that seems like that would be a solid business that would get a lot of money because it's diversity. Chad (26m 23s): First off again, I don't believe a referral platform is going to help you there. What I do believe though, if you do focus on your DEI efforts and you want to be able to amplify them, then you should be doing referrals and like a company like Real Links who, you know, Sam out of out London, I've been working with them for a little while. They've got an amazing platform that is focused on engagement. That's one of the issues that most employee referral platforms have, is keeping employees engaged and actually using the platform. If you've done your job as a company, and you have created that diverse foundation of a workforce, then a platform like Real Links is one that you can plug in. Chad (27m 10s): But again, I don't see an employee referral platform answering any DEI initiatives by itself. Joel (27m 20s): By the way, Hireology has raised a total of 60 million. EmployUs raised $750,000 back in 2014. So your guess today was probably a discounted purchase. Something that Hireology could easily do is probably correct. They've added that technology to their platform. Chad (27m 38s): Last but not least we have Circa buying Lap Pro. So Circa announced to the future, the purchase of Colorado based Lap Pro doing business as Diversity Jobs, a leading recruit, diversity recruitment and OFCCP, HR compliance, technology solution provider, no figures were disclosed on the deal. LapPro CEO, Eric Shannon, who is a stalwart and a veteran in this industry is off to another adventure right out of the gate. This to me is fairly simple. Circa is consistently adding to their diversity and compliance portfolio. The acquisition of AJE was huge. Joel (28m 20s): Yeah. Chad (28m 21s): You know, what about a year or so ago? And this is a continued march toward becoming the best in the space. Overall though, I got to say that, you know, seeing Eric Shannon out of the space gets, you know, gets a guy a little misty. Joel (28m 35s): Yeah. Yeah. Eric wasn't even mentioned on the PR. So that's how gone he is. Chad (28m 40s): That's how Eric is, man. He likes to be behind the curtain. He doesn't like the limelight. Joel (28m 46s): He's an interesting cat. Yeah. I had a few conversations with them back in the day, but so I think a history lesson is interesting for the kids out there, real quick in addition to just Eric Shannon. You know, before social media, diverse recruiting usually meant you had a good URL, like diversity was in it and maybe some search rankings for searches around diversity jobs, which made diversityjobs.com pretty valuable. I mean, they totally nailed it. And employers, you know, this firsthand employers were able to check off diversity for EOC or whoever else because they were advertising on these sites. Since then with social media, sourcing, AI, all kinds of tools, the old ways of targeting diversity candidates were kind of antiquated, to say the least. Joel (29m 35s): So I think Eric probably saw the writing on the wall that he wasn't going to be able to sort of milk that Diversity Jobs cow much longer, and that he needed to put the company into hands with more resources and maybe the ability to provide more services. I think the big play here for a Circa was they're getting 15 some years of clients that care about diversity and are willing to spend money on that. Like that is huge. I mean, just the client base that Eric has built over the last 15 years. That's where the value is not so much the diversityjobs.com domain. Chad (30m 11s): Portfolio doesn't hurt that's for fucking sure and a name that people are used to. Not to mention a line item that people have been paying for 10 years. Right. It's like when you get on to a federal contractors buy list, it's hard to get on, but it sure, it's almost impossible to get off. Joel (30m 31s): Yeah and Eric was probably ready to go. Yeah. He was probably ready to go. Chad (30m 35s): He's in a bunker somewhere in Colorado. Yeah. Let's take a quick break. Jobvite (30m 39s): Last year, Summer-to-Evolve saw us bring together some of the biggest names in talent acquisition presenting, exciting content to help us learn and grow in these evolving times. This year, we're back to do it all again, taking our eight weeks of virtual sessions on tour for the Summer-to-Evolve road trip presented by Jobvite, virtually visiting locations around the world. We're excited to share more talent acquisition tips, tricks, and best practices with you. Visit the summertoevolve.com to learn more. Joel (31m 8s): Unicorns, unicorns everywhere, everywhere. Oh my God. I told you this show is going to be our White Album. So George Larock, our buddy is added again. So he tracks money that goes in and out of the industry. So global investment in work tech exceeded 4.9 billion in the second quarter of 2021 resulting in an 18 quarter average of 1.2 billion. The quarters investment was spread across 91 deals. Q2 of 2021 was the biggest quarter for VC investment in work tech since George started tracking all this shit back in 2017, the amount catapults this year to the biggest ever for global work tech VC investment. Chad (31m 52s): Already. Joel (31m 53s): Combined with Q1 of 21 previous record setting, quarter of 2.7 billion seven point 62 billion was invested globally in work tech the first half of this year. Chad (32m 6s): Yes. Joel (32m 6s): Surpassing the biggest year in the category by more than $2 billion. Holy shit, Chad nine unicorns were added to the list. Those are varying degrees of work tech. You got Loom, Handshake, Degreed, Allen, which does health, mainly for employees, Eightfold, Phenom, Safety Culture, Deal, which has payroll and Vizier. And we're going to add another one to the list here once we get done talking about these nine. Your thoughts? Chad (32m 36s): Yeah. So you and I had a bet. I'm winning that. Human Capital Management Tech represented about 3 billion this quarter, which dwarfed Talent Acquisition and Talent Management, they were both hovering around a billion, a piece, which means in the year over year prediction segments, my friends. Yeah. I'm beating your ass. Joel (32m 60s): Don't forget. I picked ZipRecruiter to go IPO three, three years in a row. And they finally did it. Don't forget that. Chad (33m 7s): But if you take a look at the deals, it's interesting because again, the U S just is killing it. 59 deals. Number two was the UK with seven and France was number three with five. We're always having Europeans ask us why we believe our tech is so good. I don't know, but it's getting a lot of money, guys. The subcategories were number one, benefits. Number two, this surprised the hell out of me, marketplace/job boards. That was the second most amount of money. And the number three core HR. Then the top three was WorkRise with 300 million, Collective Health with 280 million and Beison out of China with 260 million. Chad (33m 56s): If you can't get cash right now, if you're a startup and you're a co-founder and you're listening to us, if you can't get cash right now, you were doing something wrong. Joel (34m 8s): Can you say frothy? I don't, I don't know where all this goes. Like they all have to go IPO. ZipRecruiter being successful, I guess, is only going to spur. I guess it's going. The courage is going to flow. iCIMS is going to go at some point, who knows Smart Recruiters. Jobvite. Greenhouse. Like all these guys will probably go IPO. All these guys that we talked about are going to go IPO. I don't know if it ends well. I mean, for some of it will, but damn, there's a lot of money going into this space and I'm not sure it feels like a feeding frenzy. I'm not sure it's warranted. Chad (34m 44s): It is and the reason it is, is because take a look at 2020, right. There was money spent, but you know, it wasn't, it wasn't following the rise of 2019 because of the pandemic go figure. So you have all these pent up investors who have cash, and they also see what's happening in the jobs market. And they know remote work hybrid work, people getting back to work, working all over the world. All of these things are new opportunities with new concepts and ideas. Now, are they all great? No, not even close. Maybe 10% are great. Chad (35m 25s): So I agree. There's going to be, there's going to be a big shakeout and they're going to be a lot who just fall. Joel (35m 31s): Which always happens. But the amount of money that's being put in these companies is just really, really nuts. Dude. Chad (35m 38s): I guarantee you, some of them are putting money on the market with all that LinkedIn data that was stolen. Joel (35m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. We'll get to that in a second. I want to add another. So another company really quickly that will join George's unicorns list, will be Remote, who we've covered on past shows. The company has a big play on the work from home movement and provides a platform that enables client companies to onboard pay and manage both contractors and full-time employees on distributed teams. Work from home, again this week, they announced a $150 million series B. That's a hell of a B round. The deal valued the New York based company at more than 1 billion, this follows the 35 million they raised back just in November of 2020. And they also had an $11 million seed round. Joel (36m 27s): That's a hell of a seed round. Chad (36m 28s): Yes. Joel (36m 29s): The money will accelerate Remote's global expansion, plans to be in 80 countries by the end of this year. Keep in mind this company was founded in 2019. Chad (36m 39s): Yeah. Joel (36m 39s): Talk about a fucking rocket ship worthy of sir Richard Branson. Chad (36m 44s): So this is a boring fucking company, but it is necessary. So 2019, they saw that obviously there was going to be this need. And again, it luck and timing, right? Nobody knew about this pandemic thing, but from a timing standpoint, this platform helps in organization who wants to hire all over the world, right? Without having to establish an HQ in every single fucking country. Right? So it makes it much easier for companies to do business. It's boring stuff. It is administrative. It sucks. I want somebody to do it for me. Chad (37m 25s): Oh, Hey look, remote. Remote will do it for me. Joel (37m 30s): Holy shit. This story, I don't think gets enough attention in our space. And in fact, I, I didn't know much about it. It gets a lot of news. It gets a lot of up on like hacker sites and all that shit. So LinkedIn recently experienced a huge data scrape. It was their third in four months with 600 million profiles. Keep in mind, they have about 800 billion, I think are 800, 800 million. So 600 million profiles are now on sale online. Reports from various sources say the data is for sale on a hacker forum from an, for an unknown sum. The sellers have shared sample profiles that include full names, email addresses, and of course, professional titles and other work related data. Joel (38m 17s): The company, that's LinkedIn as quick to point out that this was not a breach, so no passwords or payment data or whatever was stolen, but it's still a big deal for a company that cares so much about their data. Remember they're suing itty-bitty HighQ over scraping their public data while they're watching hackers take hundreds of millions of profiles. So Chad, what's the discussion at LinkedIn HQ like this summer regarding their data. Chad (38m 46s): That's a hard one. I mean, it really is because it is public data. Let's face it. This is public data and this is what they're actually fighting in the courts right now with HighQ. So I think, I think overall, LinkedIn's got to pick a side of the road. Are you going to be public or are you going to be private? It's one or the other, you can't have it both ways and they have tried. Joel (39m 12s): Yeah. I mean, look, the old adage of if a product is free, you're the product, right? And Facebook has had sort of no problem with selling data to third parties, whether it be for advertising or data analytics, for whatever, right? For whatever reason, LinkedIn is sort of in this gray area of like, well, this is my professional profile. I don't want my data to be sort of freely, freely distributed where my boss can find out that I'm looking. I don't know what they do. They either pick a side and say, sorry, users. We're going to make money on your free profile. Chad (39m 49s): They're already doing that. Joel (39m 49s): Good luck. Good luck going somewhere else. But I mean, they're not telling people they're making money off LinkedIn's platform, but no one joins LinkedIn and thinks, oh, third parties can just access my data. Chad (39m 60s): Yeah. they can. They're called recruiter seats. Joel (40m 2s): Well, yeah, that's on, let's on LinkedIn's platform. Chad (40m 5s): There's still, you are still the product. It's six in one/half a dozen of the other. It doesn't matter whether LinkedIn, I mean, LinkedIn is going to make cash either way, but you were still the product. And to think that somebody is on LinkedIn and their boss doesn't know that is fucking ridiculous. This is not a monster resume database. Joel (40m 25s): In your world. Open up the APIs, make a ton of money on the APIs and the data and like let the good times roll, which I don't disagree with. They just have to play a little bit of PR on that. Chad (40m 35s): I have no clue why they're I have no clue why they're so reticent to do this Joel (40m 40s): I'm sure. HighQ would much rather pay LinkedIn instead of their lawyers to get access to LinkedIn's data. And I'm sure a ton of companies would follow suit. They could make a ton of money on this shit. Chad (40m 51s): Right? It makes no sense at all. It has been one of the most confusing decisions that I have seen from a quote unquote "professional platform" that everybody knows is already monetizing you and your data. They already are doing it every single fucking day. Right? Yeah. Joel (41m 9s): On paper, it's walled garden, you know, it stays here, we keep the money here. I mean, but they discounted hackers. They discounted scrapers. They discounted all of that and they gotta make some hard decisions. Yeah. Now what do they decide is the question? Chad (41m 24s): This to me again, is a leadership issue. This is the second week in the row that I've called out leadership. Last week, I called out Indeed's leadership and said they need to clean house and get rid of all those fuckers because they don't know what they're doing at Indeed. LinkedIn-wise, I almost have to say the same thing. I mean, they have an opportunity to really streamline partnerships and also revenue opportunities, but they keep playing this fucking game. And the reason that they do it, we all know because they want the opportunity to build it themselves later. Okay. You can still do that. It's called competing products. Amazon does it all the time! Joel (42m 4s): Which they may or may not get in trouble for in the next two years or so, but let's take a break. And my God talk about TikToktok JobAdX (42m 14s): 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. JobAdX (42m 57s): JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Joel (43m 4s): Holy hell. As if Google getting serious about job search wasn't enough here comes some more TikTok shit. Okay. So earlier this month, the company launched TikTok Resumes. I can't believe I'm reporting this. As a pilot program designed to continue expanding and enhancing TikTok as a new channel for recruitment and job discovery. TikTok is teaming up with select companies and inviting job seekers to apply to entry-level and experience to positions with some of the world's most sought after employers, including... Chad (43m 34s): Your favorite! Joel (43m 35s): Chipolte, Target, WWE, Shopify, and many more. According to the company released with a TikTok video resume. Interested candidates are encouraged to creatively and authentically showcase their skillsets and experiences and use hashtag #TikTokresumes in their caption when publishing their video resume to TikTok. TikTok resumes can be found in the app through hashtag #TikTokresumes and at they actually have a site for this shit tikTokresumes.com. Candidates are invited to peruse job listings, examples of standout TikTok videos, profiles of TikTok creators who create career or job related content and submit videos for posted jobs are on the site. Joel (44m 20s): The webpage will be accessible through a number of entry points, including the TikTok discover page. The program is accepting video resumes for US job openings from July 7th through July 31st. Chad does this thing keep going after July 31st, will the nightmare not end? Chad (44m 40s): No. We will not keep going because there's no way to actually go through all of this data in a scalable fashion. I mean, if I get, if I get, you know, 110 TikTok resumes, how do I, I've got to look, I've got to look through them. Every single one of them by video, right? I mean it's to actually source and then screen candidates like this is a fucking nightmare. I've already reached out to our friends over at Chipolte to see how in the hell they're going to, they're going to scale something like this because these guys, they hire hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. Chad (45m 20s): How do you scale that? Joel (45m 22s): And have you seen some of the examples of resumes that they posted? Chad (45m 26s): Yes, I couldn't do it. I it's mind boggling. I love TikTok , but this just makes no sense. Joel (45m 32s): I've tried to go outside the box. I've tried to admit maybe I'm just an old fucker and figure out why is TikTok doing this? Because all the reasons you mentioned it makes it a horrible idea. Are they doing it for like public approval, political approval? Like I keep thinking there's like some deep, dark reason why TikTok would give a shit about resumes and employers. Maybe it's funneled them into advertising. Some, I, it just it's, I really can't figure it out. If someone knows, please please slide into my DMS and explain it to me. Chad (46m 10s): Remember Snap Locations? I mean the application, everybody everybody's got to try, right? Because some idiot in the back room is like, look at the market. People need to find jobs. We can help them find jobs. And it's like, well, you don't understand the problem in the first place. Joel (46m 27s): It has to fail. Otherwise millennials and gen Zs will haunt me for the rest of my life telling me how I was so wrong about TikTok. However you mentioned, you know how it wasn't going to work. They're doing something I think is really smart. This may or may not. This probably will affect our space at some point, but get ready for Bite Plus Recommend, this is a product from TikTok's parent company Bite Dance. With Bite Plus Recommends entrepreneurs and developers will get access to TikTok's recommendation engine, which is pretty good by the way. I don't know Chad, if you've seen this or not, but it's a pretty good algorithm. The adoption of which could impact businesses success globally, no shit. Joel (47m 10s): According to the Bite Plus website, after implementing Bite Plus Recommends Singapore based travel app WeGo enjoyed a 40% increase in conversions. We've talked a lot on the show about how poor many of the job site recommendation engines are. Just this week I was recommended for a job at McDonald's again from Glassdoor. I don't know what the universe is telling me with that, but anyway, so who will be the first to plug-in TikTok's algorithm into job search. I like maybe it's just TikTok itself. I don't know. Get your popcorn ready? What are your thoughts? Chad (47m 44s): I think that it's genius with regard to short form video, the signal liquidity that TikTok has after a half an hour of being on the app is more than some platforms get in a year. The only problem I see here is that you're going to have to be incredibly smart about how you would even implement this, because this is all focused on short form video. How does it learn the signals that you're actually getting? I mean, that's the thing. So do I think it could work? Yeah. But in certain segments and you really have to, you're going to have to engineer your business toward the algorithm. Joel (48m 26s): Yeah. I mean, you're totally right. And you'd have to look under the hood to know exactly how this thing works and what it like, what exactly can you plug it into, but for jobs, I mean, it makes sense to say, Hey, what kind of jobs are you clicking on? We'll show you more of those jobs or put those higher on the list. What are you, what companies you're applying to? Like, there are ways that you could algorithmically make job search better to be seen. It seems like Google's API for search is still a thing, but we don't hear much about it anymore. I guess companies that used it three, four years ago are still using it. Yeah. Chad (48m 58s): They obviously are now focusing on making sure that they get jobs right. Joel (49m 2s): As they should be pay-per-click dollars, baby. Chad (49m 5s): Amen. Joel and Chad (49m 7s): We out. 5 (50m 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.

Lieven has given up on Futbol everybody. Nevertheless, grab your Italian football jersey and enjoy a Guinness, 'cause this Euro show has your name written all over it. The boys welcome Boundless founder Dee Coakley, a Dubliner, to the show to talk about her company's recent round of funding, as well as chime in on all of this week's topics. In addition: Hungary is starving for immigrant workers, Iceland is changing the game when it comes to workforce well-being, testing a 4-day work week, but what does that mean for the rest of Europe (and the world)? Lastly, France is putting a chokehold on Google and Big Tech's inability to play nicely with the country's media properties. Is it a tax Google just pays, or will they really help save journalism? And what European companies pile on next? Gotta listen. Grab a couple Guinness, this is gonna take a minute :) PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Chad & Cheese Does Europe Intro (6s): `Some podcasts, do it for the fun. Some do it for the fame, Chad and Cheese they do it for global effin domination. That's why bringing America to its knees was just the beginning. Now they have their eyes set on conquering Europe and they've drafted industry veteran Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze of Belgium to help them navigate the old country and bring HR's most dangerous podcast across the pond to trash-talk like never before. Not safe for work in any language. The Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. Joel (39s): Oh yeah. There's a big sale on Italian football jerseys at the local outlet mall. That'll meet you there at noon. You were listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. I'm your cohost, Joel, "how do you say choke in English" Cheeseman. Chad (53s): And I'm Chad "Italy wins" Sowash. Lieven (56s): I'm still just Lieven Dee (58s): And I guess that makes me Dee Coakley? Joel (1m 1s): On this episode, startup Boundless finds a little goal at the end of the rainbow. Hungary is starving for workers. You guys see what I did there? and Google fights, France. Who you got on that one everybody? I don't know. SFX (1m 16s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel (1m 18s): Who is that mystery woman in our intro? Dee (1m 21s): It's me! Chad (1m 22s): Must be Dee so Dee Coakley. Correct? Right. That's how? Dee (1m 28s): You've got it right. Joel (1m 29s): She sounds on Irish. Do you know Bono? Dee (1m 32s): I used to work with his brother. Dublin is that small. True story. Me and my co-founder used to work with his brother. Joel (1m 42s): So you've met him. Dee (1m 43s): I haven't met him. No. Joel (1m 44s): Oh, well that sucks. Dee (1m 46s): But I, yeah. I mean, people always joke about Ireland and how small it is and do we all really know each other, but we're all pretty connected as, so my name is Dee I'm co-founder and CEO of Boundless. This is a global employment platform. So I'm here to talk about Europe. Yeah and employment and HR and how all of that is looking in Europe these days. Chad (2m 8s): So you heard all of the UEFA Euro 2020 talk. How was it sitting back in Ireland and watch all this happening and knowing that you guys weren't even a part of it? Joel (2m 19s): You're all rooting for England. Right? Dee (2m 23s): So, you know, I feel really small right now because I actually watched the final. I have no interest in sports of any kind whatsoever. I am never in a position to participate in any conversation about sport. But when the final was on, I thought to myself, you know, everybody's talking about this, they're all going to talk about it tomorrow. I'll have it on, in the background. So I did actually watch the final. And it was, I mean, it wasn't the best football ever but money game that goes to penalties is pretty exciting in Ireland. It's something that should be part of our ancient history. Dee (3m 4s): Yeah. We will always root for whoever is playing England. We have a close affinity with the Italians. We were really happy to see them win. Joel (3m 13s): You said you liked the shootout? Dee (3m 15s): Yeah. Joel (3m 15s): I can't stand the shootout. Dee (3m 17s): It's exciting. Joel (3m 19s): Do you like it, Chad? I feel like it's a European thing. Chad (3m 21s): No, I love it. I think, I think it's awesome. I hate anything that ends in a tie number one. Number two, you just played, you know, two halves and then you had to, you know, shortened halves. I mean, it's like, get this thing over with. Joel (3m 37s): Can I give my solution and you guys can tell me? Chad (3m 39s): No, you just want them to play till they die. Joel (3m 43s): I haven't, I have a new one. I have a new, and that was my initial thing. I've got a new one now. I'm compromising. I think the shootout should be replaced with 15 minutes of no goalies and just let the score run out, make it like basketball with feet and see what happens. Dee (4m 1s): But like how five-year-olds play soccer. Joel (4m 3s): Come on. That's not awful. It's not awful. Chad (4m 6s): That literally is awful. So Lieven. I've got, got to hear from you because Belgium and Italy, that was a hell of a match. Did you watch that match number one and then did you watch the final? Lieven (4m 18s): I don't like soccer anymore. I don't talk about it from now on. I will only talk Tour de France from now on some Belgium guy whose name I forgot won the ride. Chad (4m 32s): Oh, Jesus was England's path too easy. I mean, really Denmark was their hardest opponent in the entire tournament. Italy got beaten up by Belgium and Spain and it just seems like they were more ready in that final. Lieven (4m 49s): Hmm. I don't like soccer anymore. Did I mention? Today. Chad (4m 55s): Moving on. Okay. So, so here's a question for you then Lieven. Is this going to be the worst Olympics ever or what? Joel (5m 2s): What's Belgium's best chance at a gold medal? Lieven (5m 6s): That's actually a good question. We used to have some decent swimmers, but that's way behind us now. I think judo. How do you call it? Chad (5m 15s): Judo. Yeah. Judo. Joel (5m 16s): If only brewing beer was a competition, you guys would win the goal every time. Lieven (5m 21s): We would take the gold. Chad (5m 22s): Like cheating. That's like cheating robots. You Dee what's your favorite Olympic sport? Dee (5m 27s): My favorite Olympic sport. I like the track games. This is how much I'm into sports. Track games, the running I like running. Yeah. I did go. I lived in London in 2012, so I went for the Paralympics and watch some of the field and track and it was super cool. Yeah. I had been considering maybe making a trip to Tokyo to catch some of the Olympics, but never got around to booking it and evidently I wouldn't have made it anyhow. Chad (5m 58s): Yeah, no. Dee (5m 59s): Some future Olympics. Joel (6m 0s): Isn't skateboarding the first time it's going to be featured in the Olympics. Lieven (6m 5s): Tony Hawk will still be winning. Joel (6m 8s): He's a little up there in age. I don't know if you can do some of the things he used to. Chad (6m 13s): Mid fifties. Yeah. He's Mid fifties. Lieven (6m 15s): He's mid-fifties. Yeah, but he's still Cool. He was my hero when I was young. Chad (6m 20s): Oh yeah. He's pretty, pretty amazing. What's your favorite one? Joel. What's your favorite sport in the Olympics? Joel (6m 25s): I tend to be a person guy. So if Michael Phelps is swimming, I liked the swimming best. You know, if we have a track stud, I don't know a track is usually pretty good too. Shit. I go with the flow, man. If gymnastics is hot, great. I mean, basketball's kind of boring cause we usually run over everybody. I'll go with, I'll go with track and field as well. Chad (6m 48s): Okay. Yeah. I don't think we're going to run over everybody this year in basketball, by the way. Have you seen how we've been playing? Joel (6m 54s): Yeah, we are. Chad (6m 55s): I'm going to just say sprinting, whether it's in the pool or on the track. I the fastest in the world. I love watching that. So that's, that's what I'm going to go with. Sprinting. Joel (7m 6s): Does Ireland have a basketball team? Dee do you know? Dee (7m 9s): Basketball is really popular here. Joel (7m 10s): Do they have a team In the Olympics? Dee (7m 12s): I mean, I guess so? I'm pretty sure. Yeah. It's big here. It's a big school sports here, much more so than in the UK. It's been big since the eighties. Joel (7m 22s): I'm going to keep my eye on the Irish basketball team. Dee (7m 25s): We are in not a patch on the Serbians. We're not a very tall nation. Lieven (7m 31s): For the first time e-sports will be an official part of the Olympics. Digital competitive gaming. Joel (7m 37s): Oh, maybe that's what's making its introduction this year. E-gaming. Lieven (7m 43s): Yeah. Yeah. But it's official part. Yeah. Chad (7m 45s): You don't have to go to Tokyo for that too. Yeah. I mean, you could do that online anywhere. Dee (7m 50s): Maybe they'll all be e-sports after this year. Joel (7m 53s): The amount of money in that shit is insane. Lieven (7m 56s): Yeah. Good. You're going to sponsor some teams so. Joel (7m 59s): Going bigger is VR. Chad (8m 3s): Have to fit it into every fucking show. Don't ya? Joel (8m 6s): I do. I do. Chad (8m 7s): Okay. So big shout out. I'm going to throw a shout out to the Rec Fest crew. They actually had Rec Fest this week in Dreamland, not in London. It was like on the outskirts of London. So a big, big shout out to them. And I've got a question for, for Lieven. This week Lieven we saw that Google came out with some new guidelines for Google for Jobs. Did you see those? Lieven (8m 33s): Hardly? I was on holiday. I wasn't Crete. Chad (8m 36s): That's right. Lieven (8m 39s): I saw something passing by and I thought, damn, I have to look into this. Once I finished swimming and then I forgot about it. Joel (8m 47s): And the guy was served on having a flood for God's sakes. Give him a break. Chad (8m 51s): What's the difference between Americans and Europeans? He actually enjoys his fucking vacations. Good job. Good job. I love that. Joel (8m 58s): Speaking of that, let me give a shout out to you for giving a shit about global warming slash climate change. I get in trouble when I say global warming. In light of the floods. In light of our Western part of the country, still toasting and burning through crazy ass temperatures. Europe is a shining beacon of a country and continent, a series of countries and a continent that mostly gives a shit about climate change. And I'm curious from our, from our European guests, what they think of when they look at America and climate change, do they think like we don't give a shit? Do they think we do care? Doing something? I'm curious about a European perspective on climate change and what we're doing about it? Dee (9m 39s): I think it's interesting that you perceive that Europeans care or that Europe as a block cares. I think it's varying degrees. I think most governments don't and haven't cared anywhere near as much as they should. I mean, certainly here in Ireland and I lived in the UK for years. It's never been as much of a voting issue as it should be, which then implies the public. Maybe really don't care as much as they should. I don't know. I think a lot of European governments are like governments everywhere else. They give it lip service. They do the minimum that they need to do, but they're just not aggressive enough. Joel (10m 21s): When you see the US you think, oh, they're just like us. They're just, they don't care like we don't. Dee (10m 26s): Don't see a huge Gulf between the U S and Europe. And I think in the U S like in most European countries, there are definitely some European countries like Northern European countries, Scandinavian countries, where I think the general public care a lot more, they take on more individual responsibility, but I think it's isolated to a relatively small number of countries and the rest of the European countries are probably pretty much like the US. Lieven (10m 51s): There is kind of changed. I can talk about us. I guess you are a great pretenders. And, but yeah, and Europe at the same feeling about Europe, but now it's changing. Governments actually are doing something like in 2025, you'll have to have an electric car in Belgium. So if you don't have an electric car, you won't be able to put it away from our taxes, our what's it called in English. It's a cost. And if it's not an electric one, you won't be able to bring it in as a cost anymore. So suddenly all those companies will have to change to electric cars. And almost everyone has a company car here. So this will cost a lot of money and we don't have the resources to get everyone the electricity they need I feel. Joel (11m 34s): Wait a minute. Everyone there has a company car? Say more about that. Lieven (11m 37s): Yeah, almost everyone here. Joel (11m 40s): Wait woah, woah, woah. Lieven (11m 43s): You don't have in the US? Joel (11m 44s): We do, but I would never say most people drive a company car. Lieven (11m 49s): But okay. Not most people probably if you're um. Joel (11m 52s): If you're a knowledge worker, you have a company car? Lieven (11m 54s): Definitely. Joel (11m 55s): Really? Lieven (11m 56s): White collar, you'll have a company car. If you're a blue collar, you'll sometimes have a company car. Joel (12m 3s): This is the most revulatory thing that we'll be selling this podcast. Everyone in Europe has a company car. Chad (12m 8s): I love it! Dee (12m 9s): Not the case under the UK. No, definitely not. We're all on our bikes. Joel (12m 16s): Because you're conscious about the environment. We're driving cars as big as the island of Ireland in our state. Should we get the topics? Chad (12m 28s): Topics! Joel (12m 31s): All right. This is for our guests. Remote working tech startup Boundless has raised 2.5 million euros in state funding announced, I think last week, the company lets employers hire workers from abroad while being fully and in compliance with all tax employment and regulatory laws. Boundless is funding comes as some large companies begin allowing workers to live abroad. Last month Facebook said that a portion of its Irish staff could live in the UK and seven other EU countries from next year elsewhere. Companies are complaining about the difficulty of getting staff because many potential workers returned to their home countries during the pandemic. Sounds like the right company at the right time luckily we have co-founder Dee Coakley on the show to explain further. Joel (13m 18s): Dee tell us more. Dee (13m 20s): Yeah. So I founded Boundless two years ago. I started to working on the idea about two and a half years ago. I had been a COO with B2B SAAS companies for many years. And I had dealt with this challenge of workers requesting moves overseas or discovering talent, people that were based in other countries. And I have been through the excruciating task of getting set up for employment and payroll in a total of eight different countries. And it was a nightmare. It was a complete pain in the ass. It doesn't make any sense. Every other COO I talked to was doing the same thing. Dee (14m 2s): Everyone was tearing their hair out and having arguments with their CTOs about how long it was taking. And I thought, okay, there has to be a better way of doing this, and that's how Boundless came about. , Chad (14m 13s): So I got to say, this is coming off of news last week, that another startup that helps firms, employe people in different countries, remote, they actually received $150 million in funding, and that sent them to unicorn status. So not only are you seeing validation from the market in giving you seed funding, but you're also seeing the prospect of other platforms becoming unicorns. What does that actually say to you other than we're in the right slot? What do you have to do to amplify and become something the size of a Remote? Dee (14m 55s): So we and Remote started at the same time. I know your Job and Marcelo the founders of Remote. We started around the same time. So they also have been going for about two years. So our recently founded company in terms of having achieved unicorn status, I think it is just indicative of the absolute, the enormous size of this market. It's a trillion dollar market, and it's growing at a crazy pace. And it's everything from companies, having these requests for people to move to other countries, people having upped on mass and moved back to home countries and also companies looking to broaden the net when they're hiring the pace of growth is huge, but it's going to continue growing. Dee (15m 42s): So there is definitely enough room for a number of companies in this space. I think that the future is bright. And I think international employment and borderless employment is really fast becoming the norm it's it's table stakes now for any company, with knowledge workers that wants to hire the best people in the world, Chad (16m 3s): So Liven, House of HR is in how many countries in Europe. I mean, this is something that you guys have to deal with all the time. And I would assume you're expanding out, give us a little insight. What do you think about platforms like Remote and Boundless? Lieven (16m 17s): I think timing is perfect. So we are in 11 countries. We just don't have an office in Italy. So we used to be in 10 countries and I still don't like Italy, but we do have an office there, but the timing is perfect. And we just did a big survey and the results were remarkable. We asked 1000 people in Belgium, 1000 in Netherlands, and a few thousand in Germany about why would you change jobs? What would convince you to apply at a different company? And 16% of workers is willing to change jobs if it would allow them to work remote. Now at 16%, doesn't seem a lot. But if you ask the same question three years ago, it was like 50% was doing it for the money 46%, for something else. Lieven (16m 57s): Remote was just not an issue. And now suddenly it's 16%. So companies have to be aware of it if you want to hire skill, you have to enable people to work remote. And then I think Boundless can be a great player. So I guess those people who invest it's 2.5 million in it, bet it right. Joel (17m 16s): As you mentioned, it's being driven by companies as well as people, but I'm curious your take on it. Is there a percentage breakdown of that? Because I would think it would be mostly people wanting to live either back at home or wanting to move to another country versus a company who would want to move people to a different headquarters or different, different place. Like, do you have a sense of, is this mostly a company driven phenomenon or is it the job seeker, the employee side? Dee (17m 43s): That has completely changed in the last 10 months or so. So when we founded Boundless, the customers that we were talking to were customers that had hired in other countries. So or they were considering hiring, considering their expansion plans often, you know, that we weren't seeing customers who had individuals who had requested a move elsewhere. As a, I was saying that was my inspiration for Boundless. That was a challenge that I had dealt with at my last company. So it was happening a lot before the pandemic, but now I would say probably 80% of the customers that we talk to, they're dealing with a combination of things, but the pain point that they're feeling most acutely right now are these requests for moves to other countries and companies that have anything over a few hundred employees they have people coming and saying, they're moving every week. Dee (18m 41s): People aren't asking anymore. You know, earlier in the pandemic, people will comments and put in a request or say, how does this sound? What do you think? Now, particularly younger team members are coming and saying, so I'm moving back to Spain, I'm leaving on this date. I'm keeping my job. Joel (19m 0s): What does this do for immigration? Do you think in the longterm? Because part of it I'm hearing, I want to go back home. So I don't want to work in a foreign country. I want to go back to where I'm from. Whereas I think as an American, we think maybe like, hell, I'm going to go to Australia and work. I'm going to go to Brussels or whatever. Like, what's your take on immigration long-term and how this trend affects how people move countries. Do they move back or they move to new places? Dee (19m 23s): So this has been a really hot topic of discussion. It was a big story in the media in Ireland two weeks ago when Facebook made that announcement because Facebook had their European headquarters here in Dublin. So those people that were being facilitated to move to those seven countries, they were moving, they were to be moving out of Dublin. So the media was in a frenzy and the public were saying, oh my God, you know, all of these well-paid workers are all just going to leave on mass. They're all going to run out of Dublin, we're going to have an empty city. What are we going to do? Everyone ringing their hands. But we see a lot of flow into Dublin, as well as out of Dublin. There are always people that will want to live here. Dee (20m 3s): There are people that end up in relationships that mean they want to move and be with partners in the country. There's just a lot of movement right now. We're seeing a lot of Americans, we've seen Americans moving to Ireland, a lot to Portugal, a lot to Germany, a lot of tech people moving to Berlin. But there's just a huge amount of movement and upheaval and I think right now, it is impossible to predict where this will all end up when the dust settles. Chad (20m 33s): So Dee I'm going to pivot here real quick, because you are the CEO, you have a female CTO, got to give a shout out to Andrea Wade who actually made this connection for us. Joel (20m 47s): Such connector. Yeah. The ex CEO Chad (20m 49s): Of opening.io who was acquired by iCIMS. It seems like Ireland is flush with female in the tech space. Is that the case? Dee (20m 59s): Yeah. You know, you said this to me the other day and I was thinking, is it? And then I had a realization. I lived in London for 12 years and I used to go to lots of tech events there. And when I moved back to Dublin seven years ago, the first couple of months, when I'd go to events, I kept saying to people, wow, there are loads of women here. And everyone in Dublin was like, what, what are you talking about? Because obviously women are still in the minority very much in the minority. But yeah, I was struck, the tech was more female in Ireland or in Dublin than it had been in London. For sure. Yeah, there are a lot of women running successful tech companies here. The last company I was with McHugh, she's the CEO of Actionista an interactive video tech company selling to a lot of us TV broadcasters. Dee (21m 47s): There is Patricia Scanlan with Soapbox Labs, Ashlyn Tara, with tons of HR and HR tech company. Yeah. It's nowhere near good enough, right. Nowhere near good enough. And it is incredibly challenging for women to raise investment in Ireland as it is everywhere in the world. Raising venture funding is difficult. I think we're probably marginally better than a lot of other countries. And I can't tell you why that is. I don't know. Lieven (22m 13s): Do you think it's more difficult for a female to get funding than for a man? Dee (22m 17s): Lieven? I assume you're joking when you asked me that. If you, if you see my face, when you asked me that question. Lieven (22m 27s): I'm serious. Dee (22m 28s): Women get about anywhere between kind of one and 2% of venture funding anywhere in the world. They start companies at a rate of, I think it's about 30 to 35% of companies founded are founded by women, but they will only secure 2% of venture funding. Oh yeah. In the last couple of years where a venture has exploded and rounds are larger and there is more money being raised than there ever has been historically, the proportion that's going to women has actually decreased slightly in the last two years, which is really depressing. Lieven (23m 5s): So it is true? I always thought it was to have some kind of urban legend put into the market by women, but it's true? The founder of Accent Jobs, one of our companies, Conny Vandendriessche, she's the biggest shareholder now of House of HR. And she has launched in funding called We are Jane and it's by women for women. And they have quite a big amount of money just to invest in other women. Joel (23m 30s): There you go Dee. Chad (23m 32s): Boundless! Yes. Lieven (23m 34s): Big experience and a big network within HR and HR tech. So, Joel (23m 38s): And we're gonna, we're gonna do our part here Dee thanks to coming on the show. If someone wants to know more about Boundless, where would you send them? Dee (23m 46s): To www.boundlesshq.com? We will answer all of your international employment questions. Joel (23m 55s): Oh, I like that. SFX (23m 56s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel (23m 58s): I'm a little hungry. How about you guys? All right. Hungary's in the news. Chad (24m 2s): So bad. Joel (24m 2s): Yeah. I know. Sorry. Sorry. We've this is an ongoing topic that will continue, but Hungary will allow temporary workers in from non EU states to alleviate a labor shortage and help the economy recover the foreign minister said last week. The new rules allow agencies to bring in temp workers from countries other then Hungary's non EU neighbors rules for workers from Ukraine and Serbia were eased back in 2017. Hungary's economy has apparently fared better than expected in the first quarter of this year, despite coronavirus lockdown measures, European countries seem to be in a battle for cheaper foreign workers. Guys, how does this thing unfold? Chad (24m 44s): That's a good question. It's interesting that, and I don't know what the Hungarian immigration laws are, but they seem to be tighter than most of the rest of Europe is, is that Dee? Lieven you guys have any insights on that? Lieven (25m 1s): They are not known for their friendliness towards immigrants. They are pretty right-wing and they are anti Muslim in many statements. So they'll have problems, so they should work on their image, I guess. They're not the country people are running to when they are looking for a job to get a better life. Mostly people from those countries are coming to Western Europe. Joel (25m 21s): In the United States, we have our sort of context is, you know, when states want to grow their tax base, when they want people to move there, you know, they create friendlier tax environments, or like for one example is you see people from California moving to Texas and Florida because of the taxation, maybe there's better growth opportunities, et cetera. To me, from what I've seen in the few shows that we've done here is that the countries in Europe seem to be in a similar state where, you know, they have things that are unique to them as countries. And when I read this, I thought, well, Hungary is kind of like nothing to lose. So we're gonna like throw legislation at that makes it more open for immigration, whereas a place like, I don't know, France or Germany, maybe not so much. Joel (26m 6s): So from your perspective, guys, do you see a similar competitiveness with countries as we do with states here? Dee (26m 14s): Yeah, I think so. And I think there's everything to play for now, particularly with remote work and availability of remote jobs, companies are making and are going to make decisions around local tax systems. I mean, if you, if you are an employer and you employ someone in Denmark, you're a statutory employer or taxes are about 1.2, 5%, somewhere like France or Portugal, you're looking at closer to 30%, its a massive difference. And I think the market varies hugely, right? So if you're talking about on scales work, where people are on low incomes, they're making their decisions based on different things versus knowledge workers on higher salaries. Dee (27m 2s): A lot of countries that the digital nomad visa is the, a lot of the countries that have offered digital nomad visas, they see, or they have a special tax rate that goes along with that visa. And I think countries are going to start to get more competitive about this and countries are going to start to market themselves in a very different way. And I've seen it. I've seen it with the US where states will give people cash incentives to move into the state. We could start to see that kind of thing much more in Europe. It's already competitive, but I think how governments handle that competition and take advantage of us is going to change. Chad (27m 42s): It seems like so being in being an Ireland, you guys are gaming, the system left and right when it comes to taxes. The big companies over there are slashing taxes, do you think that there's going to be a global standard, that's going to be pressed so that there can't be this gaming of the system when it comes to actual taxes, because knowing that those taxes pay for infrastructure, the long term, it's bad for the country. Dee (28m 12s): So corporate tax and individual tax, kind of the mechanics of how they work in terms of how governments can pull lever is, and the impact that has for the country. They're just so different. So corporate tax is a global issue by its very nature. So Ireland is a really good example of this, you know, Ireland says, corporate tax at 12.5% was hoping to keep its head down that nobody would notice. But of course it's a global issue. Of course, the US government have a vested interest in what Ireland is charging to, you know, once the US companies started to move in, it was a US issue. Dee (28m 54s): It is different with individual employment taxes. And of course we know that corporate tax paying, of course, despite the Irish government, trying to sit it out, of course, we're headed towards standardization and on this 15% standard minimum it's gonna come. Joel (29m 11s): And is Ireland afraid of that future? Dee (29m 14s): Absolutely. Yeah. Joel (29m 16s): Cause it does impact the individuals if Google and Intel and everybody takes their ball and goes home. Right? Dee (29m 21s): Absolutely. It has a huge impact here. Yeah. It will, very, very much so, but I think the average Irish person feels pretty strongly that we need to do the right thing and international relations are so hugely important to us. My personal view is the Irish government are not doing the right thing by sitting this one out. I think they need to play ball and, and get involved and get aligned with everyone else. But with the individual taxes, our employee employment taxes are held so dearly by each country and different much more so outside the US different cultures take their employment rights and their tax systems. Dee (30m 6s): They view them as this cultural identity thing. And I don't think we'll see internationalization or any kind of globalization there any time in the next 30, 40 years. Joel (30m 17s): What countries are the big winners and who are the losers in this immigration strategy or phenomenon? Dee (30m 24s): I don't know. Lieven what do you think? Lieven (30m 26s): Historically it's happening all over again? It's constantly the movement from the east to the west and okay. Ireland is extremely west. Joel (30m 35s): In scale when we're talking about Iceland after this so we're going way west. Lieven (30m 39s): Then we're going to the North. To got back to Hungary the average salary is pretty low compared to the Western European countries. So we had a brain drain and then skeleton workers was drained from those countries to Western Europe. And now they have to do something because they just don't have any wor`kers anymore. So they're getting them from, as you said, Ukraine and to White Russia, et cetera. So they have to open their borders to those people. But point is, they don't really like it. They're extremely nationalistic and they don't like opening their borders and they aren't as politically correct as the other countries are. They just say, we don't want them, but now they have to want them because they need them. Joel (31m 17s): Are any countries in Europe, immigrant friendly? Lieven (31m 19s): Yeah. Most are I feel, yeah, of course. Joel (31m 22s): Why go to Hungary when I can go to France or Germany? Right. Lieven (31m 27s): Indeed. And that's how it was problem, exact? Dee (31m 30s): You get access. So if you're coming from Russia or from Ukraine, maybe Hungary is going to give you a visa and give you access, but you might not have access to Europe. . Joel (31m 40s): Gotcha. Well, moving on from Hungary to Iceland, like I mentioned, by the way, I can't wait to visit Iceland Sunday. They're testing a four day work week to great success. Two large trials were conducted between 2015 and 2019 among public sector employees, about 2,500 people in total, which is roughly 1%. I think of the workforce. These folks were 35 to 36 hours per week with no reduction in pay. Researchers saw worker wellbeing increased dramatically across a range of indicators from perceived stress and burnout to health and work-life balance. Anyone surprised by this or have thoughts? Chad (32m 19s): Is this thing, a pipe dream? That's the big question. Joel (32m 22s): It's Xanadu. Iceland, by the way, you know, Unilever in New Zealand, following a change in working habits, as a result of COVID announced in December, it would trial a four day work week at full play. And listeners may remember that back in 2019 Microsoft trialed a four day work week in Japan and said compared to the same period, the previous year quote productivity measured by sales per employee went up by almost 40%. So are we looking at a four day workweek in the future everybody? Dee (32m 55s): So I have a question about Microsoft in Japan. And I do think we're looking at a four day work week in the future and, yeah, I absolutely think we will head that way. Yes, Microsoft. I have, they not rolled this out elsewhere if they saw such stellar results? Seems like they run this trial and then came to a halt. Chad (33m 15s): We did have this thing called the pandemic that happened right after that. So I don't know. I would assume that they would continue to the testing, but there, there was this big wrench in the global machine called COVID that I think really messed some things up. Joel (33m 33s): Do you think if workers had to choose between a four day work week or working from home five days a week, which would they choose? Chad (33m 39s): I don't know that that has to be a black or white answer. I mean, you could do both. Joel (33m 44s): We talked in the show about companies wanting people to come back to HQ. Pronouncing a four day workweek would help, help do that. Lieven (33m 51s): It's an interesting question. Chad (33m 53s): I don't know that it would, I would rather have my freedom every single day of the week than I would getting a day back. Joel (34m 1s): Yeah. Ooh. It's drama. I can feel it. Chad (34m 4s): There's drama. Joel (34m 5s): Ding, ding, ding employees versus employer. I assume this wave will probably happen in Europe first. Cause it ain't happening in America anytime soon. Dee (34m 14s): Yeah. I couldn't imagine US culture and US employer culture of being very, very resistant to this. I mean, I feel it's an inevitability, you know, we've been moving more towards automation for many years now. People are able to, a lot of individuals have a lot of autonomy now in their work. If you're a knowledge worker and more and more environments are flexible work environments where you choose when quite often where you get your work done, there are plenty of people out there. I mean, there are people on my team where I have no idea. I have no method or way of measuring how many hours they work. I just look at their output. I'm happy. Everyone's got a great output. Dee (34m 55s): They're doing high quality work. No doubt. Some of them are perhaps more efficient than others, or maybe they're not doing a full, I mean, you know, it's a 40 hour week is standards in Ireland, would be standard in a lot of Europe. A lot of them possibly are not are, you know, they may not be doing that. I'm an output focused manager. I want to know what can you do if you, I want to hire the people that are smart enough, that they can get more efficient and get it done in a shorter period of time. Yeah. Joel (35m 27s): So Lieven, has this been a topic that's come up at House of HR? Lieven (35m 31s): From time to time. Joel (35m 32s): And what happens? Lieven (35m 34s): I'm not supposed to talk about this now. Joel (35m 38s): We don't, we don't talk about that four day work week topic. Lieven (35m 41s): It's coming. Definitely it's coming, but there are some issues, I think. Let's just imagine you're a big corporate company like Microsoft, you can arrange it, no problem. And you can make sure everyone is doing his job in four days and you have automation processes and you're working more efficiently than you did before. So you can manage it. But what let's say, education, schools, those kids go to school five days a week. And you can tell those teachers from all the other school work four days, but your are teacher will have to stay five days, ask those children to only come for four days because they will learn 20% less, I guess. So it's difficult. It will depend on the industry you're working in. Lieven (36m 23s): And as a miss we'll have problems where corporate companies probably wont to have problems. So I think it will be hard to get it arranged. Joel (36m 32s): Yeah. Lieven (36m 33s): It's an influence from the Nordics and Denmark, Sweden, Finland, probably they are thinking about it and they are, they will probably roll it out like Iceland, but it's kind of a running that it was Iceland because Iceland went bankrupt in 2007. Now they're launching a four day workweek, I think European Union, will scratch it's hair again. Chad (36m 54s): So roughly 86% of Iceland's entire working population is now working those hours. And for the most part, what we've been able to see from a productivity standpoint is that rest actually helps with productivity. And I say this in, from my years of being an infantry drill Sergeant in the military, we had to give our trainees rest so that they would be productive the next day. Right. They would actually have good output. Is this not the same thing also for schooling and everything else? Are we just trying to do 40 hours a week? Chad (37m 34s): Just because that was a standard set by Henry Ford back in, was it 1918 or some shit like that? Lieven (37m 40s): It's interesting to us. Why do children come five days a week to school? Because their parents have to work five to Joel (37m 47s): Somebody has to babysit those brats. Lieven (37m 49s): And maybe you should just offer them two hours of sports a day instead of a one hour a week, which is in most countries, the case, how much sport do you have in the states? Chad (37m 58s): How much time do we spend? Like practicing sports? Yeah. Lieven (38m 3s): Within the school assistant we have, are you having mathematics? You have French. You have Dutch intelligent Chad (38m 8s): Ah, gym. Lieven (38m 9s): Yes. Gym. Okay. Yeah. Yep, yep. I that's going to be an hour and not every kid has to take it, which you can probably see by the American America's obesity number. Joel (38m 20s): We used to have it every day, baby. When America was bad-ass every day. Lieven (38m 23s): You should had have made it a great again. In Germany, it was two hours a day. Chad (38m 32s): Yeah, that's not a bad thing. I have a friend that lives Costa Rica, his kids go to school right across from the beach and they actually, a few days a week, they go surfing. Right. It's a part of, I mean, and to have that kind of experience, to have that kind of experience and then, you know, go the latter part of the day and doing your math and your English or whatever, it might be Spanish or what have you, I mean, we just have to rethink how we do work and how we educate. Joel (39m 2s): Well, it sounds like if I'm an American company and I want to hire someone from Iceland, I guess I can only work them four days a week right? Dee (39m 9s): I mean, you know, if you hire someone from France, they have the right to disconnect. So they, they can say that they don't want to be contacted in the evenings or at weekends, it's looking like we may get something, some similar legislation brought in, in Ireland. There's been a bit of a consultation around it recently. So yeah. I mean, these are the challenges of having an international workforce, but again, if that Icelandic worker can produce the same outpost as your worker in California, probably on a far lower salary, if they're on Icelandic pay rates. Joel (39m 43s): If I'm a company in America, do I want, do I want to have that conversation with my American employees as to why Sven gets to work only four days a week and everybody else that's to work five, like I don't see a lot of American companies jumping at the chance to have that conversation. Dee (39m 58s): I do. I think we're going to see a bit of a landslide. It's going to take a few years, you know, maybe it's going to be four or five years and it's going to start in the tech space. And I think we will see a bit of a landslide where it will become there'll be a, it will be used as a carrot on a stick to attract the very best people. Chad (40m 19s): Talk about carrots on sticks and then France shows Google the stick. Joel (40m 25s): Yeah. This has been a fun story. And we've talked about Australia, smacking down Google for not paying media entities. So Google has been fined nearly $593 million. That's about 500 Euro, 500 million euros after Frances competition authority found that the company violated orders to negotiate pay deals with new subscribers. The regulator said the American tech giant breached a 2020 order that the company negotiate, quote "good faith licensing deals with French news agencies and publishers, the fine, the largest ever by Francis competition. Watchdog Philip comes amid a standing debate over tax obligations to publishers. Joel (41m 10s): So it was this fine, fine? Lieven (41m 13s): Kind of getting a problem with this kind of alternative taxing. I mean, it's big tech, so you can tax them whatever you want to do on pay because they have great accountants, but then you give them a fine and they'll have to pay. So this is just an alternative taxing and you won't lose any votes. If you're a government by taxing the big tech companies or by fining them, everyone will say, huh, good for them. I'm not sure if it's that fair. And it was wondering where's the money is going to, so they are using the media companies, which are screwed by Google, according to those media companies. And they are using them to fine Google 500 million euros, but then the money should go to those media companies as a compensation. And now it's just a fine so it goes into the pocket of France. Joel (41m 55s): Okay? So it's a tax if they pay the country or whatever organization does that. But if they start paying the newspapers and the media outlets in France, then it's a big win for French media companies, correct? Chad (42m 9s): Let's put in context what this is. Okay. First off, this is a nudge by the French. Joel (42m 15s): The biggest, the biggest ever nudge Chad (42m 17s): $500 million is a pittance for Google. I don't know if you know or not, but they actually made $181 billion dollars last year. Joel (42m 25s): But it's a million dollars every day they don't pay. Chad (42m 28s): This is a nudge by the French government to be able to do what they were supposed to do in the first place was get a deal done. So there's still money that's that's on the table for these news organizations and if France puts that money in their pocket and maybe they fund their roads and, or a watchdog arm to ensure that this shit doesn't happen. Maybe that's a part of it. I don't know. But you've got to see that in context, this is a nudge. They'll continue to nudge them. Like you said, Joel, every single day, but there is money on the table. Joel (43m 3s): If you're Google, you just pay the fine and fuck it. Chad (43m 6s): You can't just pay the fine. You've got to go. And you've got it. You've got to negotiate. Joel (43m 11s): Google's either going to pay the government of France or they're going to pay the media entities outright. Chad (43m 15s): They're going to do both. Dee (43m 16s): Over what timeframe I wonder? I mean, they are going to do everything that they can to draw this out. And I understand the fine is, is accumulating at a rate of a million a day. But in terms of the, when looking at paying the publishing companies, they will draw out those negotiations around what those payments should be and how it will be structured and how the infrastructure will work. That could be drawn out for years. Chad (43m 42s): It could. Lieven (43m 44s): And I think France gets away with it and they make 500 million the other countries will. Joel (43m 49s): Hell yeah. Lieven (43m 50s): And it's true as well we need some money too. And then it's adding up, I mean, 10 countries crushing 500 million makes 5 billion. Chad (43m 59s): Yeah. Well, and what that'll do, and hopefully that'll get them to do is actually get Google to start to come to the table faster and just get this taken care of. Lieven (44m 9s): But do you think Google is wrong in this case? I'm not sure. Yeah. Chad (44m 13s): Yeah, they're using other people's content and they are a lifestyle platform because of everybody else's platform, everybody else's content. So why do they both get a quid pro quo office to some extent, but you have to take a look at all the failing news outlets because Google is taking all that content and they're republishing it. Joel (44m 35s): Yeah. I mean, ultimately journalism and truth has had a big, you know, it's been, it has been trending down for the last 20 years since Google's sort of been on the scene. And I, for me, like, I think, I think it's a big win for journalism. If we can get payments into, to media outlets to actually pay journalists, to do work. I subscribe to the New York Times and I find that their advertising is really interesting. Their advertising is not by a subscription. Their advertising is help support journalism or help support thoughtful journalism. And I think that that's something that the world has been missing in our political environment over the last, you know, decade or so. So for me, like it's a win, it's a win for journalism and hopefully the news outlets hire more journalists as a result of more money from Google. Joel (45m 20s): I do think, however, like, you know, when I was in journalism school freshman year, that my first professor said, what do you think is the most read section of the newspaper? For those of us who remember newspapers and the answer was the classified section. It's the most, it was the most popular and also the, probably the biggest money generator, depending on the newspaper and Google. I think it's entertaining that while we talk about more money into journalism or media, Google is putting more resources into job postings, which is the classified side. So while they may be giving money to the media side, they'll also be probably taking more out from the classified side and jobs is just a component of that. Lieven (45m 59s): But that's economy, that's business. Joel (46m 1s): That's business, Baby. And that's from our Belgian. Lieven (46m 4s): I feel those newspaper companies could easily block Google and keep the company for himself, but then they wouldn't get the, the visitors to Google. So they want the visitors, but they don't want Google to use the content. Have to choose. Joel (46m 19s): The challenge is more and more people aren't going to websites. Chad (46m 23s): Right. Joel (46m 23s): They're just staying on Google and getting the news from there. That's kind of a problem. Chad (46m 28s): Same thing with Facebook. Lieven (46m 30s): Yeah true. Joel (46m 31s): And with like, with jobs, I think a component is like, all these, all these job boards are complaining about traffic, partly because no one has to go to their site anymore. They can look at the job directly on Google. That's where it really hurts because no, one's going to the site where they're seeing their banner ads where they're seeing their, Hey, subscribe to our newspaper. Most newspapers in my opinion, if you visit them online, particularly on mobile, you can't even use them there with the amount of pop-ups and op unders and ads. Like, it's just, it's just not worth the trouble and that needs to be fixed. And part of that is how they monetize those sites. Lieven (47m 3s): As you just mentioned, New York Times for qualitative journalism, people want to pay for Joel (47m 12s): Quality, sure. Sure. Not everyone's the New York Times. Dee (47m 15s): I think Joel, you know, like you said, the importance of quality journalism. I, I mean, I subscribe to a couple of publications where I'm not actually a fan of the publication. I don't really like their style of journalism, but I think they do important work. So I pay the subscription and I don't Joel (47m 32s): Really? So it's like charity. Dee (47m 34s): Yeah. But I think, you know, in a similar vein, it is the job of government, or it should be the job of government now to protect quality journalism and the truth. And if finding large corporations is something that can feed into ensuring that impartial journalism can survive. I think that's, you know, politicians and government are doing a great job there. If that's something they can contribute to? Joel (48m 1s): Dee the philanthropist, next thing you know, she'll be flying, she'll be flying to space. So they're going to space. She'll be working on making a great startup. I'd like to thank Dee for coming on the show and Lieven on glad you're safe from the floods. And you're back off for vacation and ready to get back to work my man. Everybody, thanks for listening. We'll be back in a couple of weeks, Dee thanks for joining the show. Everybody else. Chad and Joel (48m 30s): We out. 7 (49m 26s): 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 pandemic has royally remixed employment branding for a lot of companies. What used to be a nice-to-have is now a must-have, no matter where you are in the world. That's why we brought in Kim Werensteijn, Employer Brand extraordinaire from the Netherlands. It's a must-listen for furloughed, future, and currently practicing Employer Brand pros. This podcast is brought to you by the power of Sovren parsing and matching. AI so human, you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Sovren (1s): 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" 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. r. INTRO (1m 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 (1m 21s): Aw. Yeah. That's the bitchy on the left hand side. What's up everybody? It's Joel CheesCman. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman is always joined by my co-host and arms Chad Sowash and today we are honored to welcome Kim Werensteijn founder at Werkimago. If I said that correctly, Chad (1m 45s): That was good. Joel (1m 47s): Calling in from Spain, but you're Dutch folk. Kim (1m 52s): Yes, I would say Dutchy. Chad (1m 53s): Dutchy on the left hand side, which also means a Doobie. Right? So, I mean, that means marijuana on the left hand side. Kim (2m 3s): Well, and I'm sure that it's a lot there. Yeah. Chad (2m 7s): Well now that's that's coffee, right? You go to a coffee shop. Joel (2m 9s): I'm sure our fans have no idea what that is. So Kim, tell us about yourself. Kim (2m 16s): Great. Well, you pronounce it a bit German and because it's Dutch, but it's hard. It's really hard to pronounce of course. But my name is Kim Werensteijn from Werkimago. So we have a really strong, "r" Joel (2m 31s): And that's a company, not a town in the Netherlands. Kim (2m 36s): So it's actually in English translate it's the "Working Image." Yes. And I'm a learning and coaching recruiters, especially in the SMB so the small to medium businesses to implement yeah, employer branding and recruitment marketing in their companies. Joel (2m 55s): And you're historically sort of a sourcer. Right? You got a lot of sourcing experience? Kim (2m 60s): I worked as well as a sourcer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Joel (3m 2s): Yeah. So how'd you make the jump from that to employment brand. That's a jump most people don't make. Kim (3m 8s): Yeah. Well, I work now for 10 years in recruitment. I've seen the RPO, the corporate sites and as well, the, how do you say like the agencies? And since I'm actually working remote in Spain, I do some sourcing with it as well, but my main company is learning the recruiters, how to do it. And it actually became because in the Netherlands, a lot of trainers are a bit talking, always in strategies and theories and all kinds of fancy words regarding employee branding. Well, we can do that more easily. Kim (3m 47s): So an Everett's recruiter understands this topic as well. So that's why I started my company. Chad (3m 54s): What you're talking about is generally more on a tactical level as opposed to strategic, or do you also do strategic consulting? Where do you actually live in the world of employer brand? Kim (4m 10s): Well, I think the bigger your company is the more strategic you go. That being said, of course, when you're a smaller company, you can also work strategic. But what we see a lot in the Netherlands with small-medium businesses is that sometimes a recruiter is just alone and doesn't have that much boot yet. And even then you can do some employer branding activities. So if you're looking to me, I can go two way. But if you're looking to most of the clients within the SMBs? They are in the middle, I think so they are technical, but as well, doing the work themselves, the operational work. Joel (4m 53s): Gotcha. How do you yourself define employer brand? Kim (4m 57s): Oh, and that's always a nice one because you can go several ways, but employer branding, where to start? Because in the middle of, I don't know how it is in the USA, but a lot of people confuse it as well with recruitment marketing. So employer branding is more the part who you are as an employer, you, I guess, you know, in being in the USA as well, like the EVP. So, your values, which values do you have? What kind of culture? What you're standing for, those kinds of things. And I always say recruiting marketing is more making your employer brand visible. Kim (5m 37s): And so how you make your employer brand feasible? Yeah. In the Netherlands, like a lot of people were not that familiar are always saying, okay, employer branding, I want to do employer branding. And then I'm asking, what do you want to do with employer branding? And they, they describe recruitment marketing, for example. Chad (5m 54s): You're talking to recruiters, you're also, I would assume helping them develop a personal brand as well, because that individual who does represent the brand, but that individual really needs to have kind of like they're their own brand per se, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's working with candidates or what have you, having their own podcasts, those types of things. Do you talk to recruiters about creating their own personal brand underneath the umbrella of the corporate brand? Kim (6m 24s): Yeah, of course it goes hand in hand, for that to matter. So we always hits that topic as well, but I think as well, a lot of recruiters always want to do everything by themselves. Chad (6m 38s): Why? Kim (6m 39s): Yeah. Why? I don't know. I think recruiters are like doing from marketing until people's skills, until administrative thousand and the position of a recruiter is of course, very broad. So I think a lot of recruiters think, okay, I'm going to do this and where I also learn them a lot. Okay. Ask as well, the employers who are in a certain position add two to do, describe for example, or to write a blog or an article or whatever about their job instead of the recruiter is going to write about the job of an account manager. I just name an example. Joel (7m 18s): You started your company in 2019, your consulting practice? So a year after you started at this little thing called the pandemic hit and we're slowly crawling out of it. So I'm just curious aside from the great timing that you had and when you started the business, talk about what EB looked like in 2019, what you saw in the pandemic, obviously we saw a lot of people, employment brand managers being laid off. Employment brand became less important. And then, what sort of your take as we come out of the pandemic, is it going to be as strong as it was before? Is it going to be stronger? Are companies going to move away from it or embrace it, as we come out of the pandemic. Kim (7m 59s): Well, I think especially in sometime in some specific markets, it's hotter than ever because I've noticed, the more scared people are, scarce, not scared. They're more as well scared actually. Yeah. By them. And the more people or employers tend to once to do something with employer branding, of course they feel a lot of pain for not filling in the vacancies. So, but employer branding of course is not a short-term strategy, it's a longer term, but that's what I see a lot. Kim (8m 39s): And if you're looking to the periods before COVID, if you're looking in the recruiters market, it was in the Netherlands really, really hot topic. So there weren't enough recruiters as well like the temporary positions of recruitment, for freelancers, there weren't enough. Then of course, in March 2020 COVID came and all those recruiters were left off and they left companies and they were unemployed for a long period. But starting from September on until now, it's a race again. But now again, it's before COVID, it's like everywhere are vacancies for recruiters, temporary and permanent. Kim (9m 22s): So it's again, really. Yeah. Going crazy again for recruiters. And, I think it's as well because the different markets are becoming more and more scarce. Joel (9m 36s): So are you lumping employment brand folks with the recruiters that are being hired? Are they hiring employment brand folks in equal numbers? Kim (9m 43s): Mmm. No. I don't think so. Because a lot of, especially small-medium companies don't have those positions within their company so the recruiter just need to do it. Chad (9m 53s): Do you work directly with individual recruiters to be able to help them build their personal brands? Are you just working generally with small to medium size businesses and helping them build brands along with their recruiters at the same time? Are you engaging the SMBs small-medium sized businesses? Are you doing both? Kim (10m 14s): Most of them with the individual recruiters. So the recruiters within the SMBs, I help them and coach them to develop the employer brand and then the recruitment marketing. And of course, a lot of time companies ask us, well, oh, maybe you can help with this, or with the landing spaces for the career sites or something like that. So then I say, okay, we'll help you as well with this. Chad (10m 37s): So on the SMB side, do many of these organizations have any marketing capacity whatsoever? Do they have anyone that's in a marketing role? Do they do anything on the marketing side of the house versus what we're talking about on the employer brand side? Kim (10m 53s): Yeah. Yeah. Most of them have an own marketeer or sometimes there's also like an HT who does it, but most of the companies have a known marketer. Yeah. Or several actually. Joel (11m 5s): Curious about sort of strategies and tactics. What how much do you review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed reviews come into play when you're consulting with a company, when you define employment brand? I was when I defined it, I think of it as what people say about you, is your brand. So what people say on review sites is really important. Is that a focus for you when you're helping a company? Or what sort of your take on the importance of employer brand site or review sites and how you should, how you should manage. Kim (11m 38s): Yeah. Well, actually the funny thing is that review sites they aren't there, but they're not that big, I think, as in the USA. So they are really, I guess, rising, of course you have Glassdoor. Indeed is more like a platform where you can post your vacancies and it doesn't really say something about your company performance. Joel (12m 1s): Canoe is fairly big in Europe for example. Kim (12m 4s): I never heard of it. How do you say can-no? Chad (12m 7s): I guess not. I think Australia, maybe Australia, it could be Australia. Kim (12m 12s): Yeah. But the thing is that it's actually funny that you say, because a lot of other parts of the world think Europe is like one, but like in Europe, the Netherlands is completely different from Germany and it's completely different then from Spain and Joel (12m 29s): Whoever does it is irrelevant. Are you saying you don't have review websites or it's not a thing in Europe at all? Kim (12m 35s): We have them. And of course they are used, but it's not that big, I think, as in the USA. So you see it in the Netherlands, actually, a lot of times people are working on their employer brand from internally. So what are the employees saying? And of course as well, what are applicants saying for example, but Glassdoor and Indeed, and like the reviews of those. I think they, a lot of companies look a bit to it, but it's not that it's that thing that is your employer brand, what people are seeing there. Joel (13m 8s): That's fascinating. Okay. Chad (13m 10s): How hard is it being in Europe? Obviously, there are so many different languages, so many different cultures. How hard is it to actually establish a brand and employer brand a personal brand? Because I would think being able to try to reach all these types of groups of not just countries, but people that would be incredibly hard compared to over here in the big globule USA. Kim (13m 36s): Yeah. I think from one side, yes. But the other one is that a lot of Dutch companies are only recruiting within the Netherlands, so they don't have anything to do with the other countries. Chad (13m 48s): Why is that? I mean, remote obviously works. Kim (13m 52s): Yeah. I just wanted to say like, since COVID, that I am as well, working remote from Spain for the Dutch markets. But since that that's something that's COVID as well, maybe it's an advantage of COVID that more and more companies were forced to work remote and saw the advantages of it. I think if you look in the Netherlands, the Netherlands is quite international so hardly everybody speaks English. So when there are international companies, they just, will to everything in English, but a lot of companies are still wanting Dutch speaking persons. So they just have everything in Dutch and the companies who are very internationally orientated and don't have a really good employer brand. Kim (14m 40s): For example, if you have your vacancies in English, I don't know hard numbers, but, but you will get less applicants if you're writing your vacancy in English, instead of writing it in Dutch. So I always say to people, if you want somebody who speaks Dutch, you need to make the vacancy in Dutch. Joel (14m 58s): Let's get to the marketing pole that you mentioned. Talk about that. Kim (15m 3s): Jen and I had like a month ago a call and then we said like, okay, where does employer branding actually belongs? And I thought, okay, it's funny to do like a little poll on LinkedIn in, within my network. And I asked the question like employer branding and recruitment marketing, where does it belong? And actually, well, 44% said it belongs to recruitment. So it's actually quite funny, 28% said with marketing, 14% said HR and 13% said different. And then I said, well, put your comments below. Kim (15m 43s): And most of those comments were like, it doesn't belong with one department. It belongs with three. So marketing recruitment and like communication. Chad (15m 54s): I think it's interesting that HR is even in the conversation because HR are they're paper pushers, they're compliance, they're policy, to be able to say that they have anything to do with your marketing or branding is probably the worst decision in the world, number one. Number two, to not say that one organization has accountability for it, screws the whole pooch, because you don't know who to look to when your brand is all fucked up. Right? So it's like, and again, this is a very European, I think answer, is, "oh, we all do it together. "That's bullshit. There has to be somebody who's accountable for that. Chad (16m 35s): Right? I mean, and again, that's, I think more of an American thing to say, it's like, who do I point to when I want to get shit fixed? Kim (16m 41s): I have to say that all the people who said, like it's divided through several departments, I asked them like, okay, but who's the final person responsible for it? And then a lot of people said it should be then recruitment. The opinions were of course, as well be divided. And I think that a lot of people said HR as well, because within the SMBs, you have a lot of persons who do HR and recruitment. Well, I think we can have a separate podcast about that because it's of course different skills. But so you also have within the smaller companies, just one person responsible for HR and recruitment. Joel (17m 20s): I'm gonna let you out on this, on your website. You talk a little bit about candidate experience and why that's important to the employment brand messaging. So talk about advice you give clients in terms of the candidate experience, because those tend to be very cold and corporate activities when they are really great opportunities to get your brand across. I think a lot of companies are missing that opportunity. Kim (17m 44s): What, what I see a lot, if it's talking about employer branding vacancies or recruiting marketing, is that we tend to have a high level of what we want as a company. The what's in it for the candidates is often forgotten. So I always say to companies who do not have the luxury of a lot of applications. I always say, put less requirements in your vacancy. Not that you need to put them overboard, but let the people first apply. And if you'll have, for example, 10 applicants, then you can either, you have an option to choose from. Kim (18m 26s): But if you're already putting 10 requirements, for example, you don't have even people who will apply because they think they can't succeed that level of requirements. So this is a very practical example, but as well, you see in the Netherlands, you still see a lot of people if you're talking about candidate experience, who let the people, the candidates, well just rest for one week and then they come back and then the candidate has already another offer. And what I also always try to give them is also look at your website. Like if you're, for example, having a picture and people are looking at you, then you have less like conversion then if people are looking to the apply button. Joel (19m 13s): You say no pictures? Kim (19m 15s): So a big picture to make it more personally and as well, pictures from real people, not from models. But if you, there are like a kind of smart thing, sometimes a color of an apply button can already be of influence if somebody will hit the apply button or not. So I'm always looking a bit further with my clients. What can you do on your career website as well to make it more low key that people will actually apply? For example, I now made a button with apply or ask your questions through WhatsApp. Actually very simple, but people tend to hit more the button, ask your question through WhatsApp then to hit the button apply because then in once it's really official. Kim (19m 57s): a Chad (19m 57s): Yeah. Well, that being said, as we're talking about candidate experience, you're talking about WhatsApp. What about conversational AI/chat bots? How are you? Are you seeing more companies using those for a better candidate experience? Are you not? What are you seeing with companies that you're talking to? Kim (20m 16s): Well, I think if you look in the Netherlands, we have one big company who does this and they win all kind of prices and stuff like that. So, and because they do it very well, actually I think. Joel (20m 29s): What kind of prizes? New car! Chad (20m 33s): Money. Kim (20m 34s): Yes. They have a lot of news value for the average company. I think more and more companies are implementing these systems. But that being said, if you don't, if you're a smaller company, you don't have much budget, but you see it's more common and people are, employers are implementing these suffer more and more. Chad (20m 55s): Kim it, is wonderful to be able to talk to you, especially for us to be able to better understand. Generally we talk about the bigger companies, not as much the SMBs, so you helping us and enlightening us on that side of the house and also across the pond. So we appreciate you coming on. It's Kim Werensteijn everybody Joel (21m 16s): Dankenstein Kim. Chad (21m 19s): Kim, if people want to listen to the podcast, remember everybody it's in Dutch. So you have to listen to Dutch. If they want to listen to the podcast, they want to connect with you. Where would you send them? Kim (21m 31s): Well, I have to say to be honest, a lot of things with what I do are really in Dutch because that is my main target audience. So, but if they want to connect, they can connect me on Instagram. My Instagram account is werkimago, I'll really dark and as well on LinkedIn. So I would, I will say again in Dutch, my name because Joel, you're always saying right? So my name is Kim Werensteijn. Oh yeah. So not international, but anyhow, so, and I'm also connected with you guys, so maybe they can look in your friends and search for Kim and they will find me. Chad (22m 14s): Which means we out. We out. Outro (22m 17s): 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 (23m 1s): 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.

Who goes camping in the hot sticky mess of July? Joel Cheesman, that's who. No worries, we have a smooth operator filing in for the Master of Cheese this week. Crazy and The King Podcast co-host, Executive Director of Disability Solutions, all-around badass, and my wife Julie Sowash joins as we tackle questions like: Is Indeed the following Monster off a cliff? Is Doximity showing Dice how to evolve? Will the pandemic really drive any real change? Is Allyn Bailey right about "The Great Awakening"? Who is happy robots are taking the shitty jobs? and does weed make you faster? It's the craziest market we will ever experience - so stop, listen, and participate :) Don't forget to visit our friends over at Sovren, Jobvite, and JobAdX. They are the wind beneath our... well... you get the idea. 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 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. Chad (32s): I'm your host, Chad, the "Great awakening" Sowash, accompanied this week by the talented and lovely. Julie (41s): Julie "I have a super hot husband" Sowash. Chad (44s): Oh, you love me so much. And all this week show the economy is adding jobs, but women are still not having it. Indeed follows right in Monster's footsteps. Wait, is that a niche LinkedIn in your pocket? Are you just happy to see me and Joey Chestnut pounds a record number of wieners down his throat. Oh, did I mention robots? Yes. There's robots. SFX (1m 10s): Shall we play a game? Chad (1m 12s): We'll be right back. JOB AD X PROMO (1m 14s): 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. Chad (2m 4s): Welcome back to the show. Is this your third appearance on the show? Julie (2m 8s): It Is my third appearance on the show. First time guest hosting. Chad (2m 12s): First time guest hosting, the stress has gotta be overwhelming. Julie (2m 16s): I really didn't sleep last night. I mean, I was super worried. I called Joel and I said, please come and do this podcast. I'm kidding. Chad (2m 23s): Yeah, I know you're kidding. So do me a favor, give the listeners a little background on you. Why are you even on this podcast? Julie (2m 30s): Well, besides being married to you and upstairs from you right now, I am the executive director of Disability Solutions. We are basically a niche IPO for people with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. We work with 50 plus companies across the US and Canada, and we've helped them hire more than 3000 people with disabilities train, nearly 6,000 people leaders and build inclusive hiring processes and cultures. Chad (2m 57s): Wow. Julie (2m 58s): Yeah, not bad. Right? I also am lucky enough to lead our parent companies, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging efforts. Chad (3m 7s): Nice. Julie (3m 8s): And last but not least, I am the co-host of the Crazy and the King podcast also on the Evergreen Network with my good friend, Torn Ellis., Chad (3m 17s): Right? She's legit. There's there's no question there. One of the things I love about this woman, not just because she's a hot blonde, but because she actually drives outcomes, hiring outcomes, retention, identification. Into organizations, DEI efforts, their hiring of individuals with disabilities, which cross all sections of human beings. Doesn't matter what color, doesn't matter what religion, doesn't matter what gender. One of the reasons why I love her is because she does amazing work. So my first shout out is to Joel Cheesman and his family. Chad (3m 57s): They went camping this week, Julie. Julie (4m 1s): That's so bad. That's so gross. Chad (4m 4s): So it's July and they went south for a camping trip. Hot, sticky, three kids, camping in tents, not even, not even glamping. Right. I could see glamping possibly, but he's probably, I don't know, I'd say probably into his second handle of vodka right about now. So shout out, shout out to Joel. Would you like to go camping sometime soon, babe? Julie (4m 33s): No, no. I would never ever like to sleep on the ground and I definitely would not like to do it with my children. Chad (4m 39s): And just for all of those out there, I, after being 16 years in the infantry, the army infantry and sleeping on the fucking ground, guess what? This guy, never going camping again. Have a nice day. My first shout outs beyond Joel and his wonderful family is to Nicole Adamson over at chewy.com. She is a huge fan. And I want to thank her for listening and also sharing the show. Thanks, Nicole. You got to shout out there Julie? Julie (5m 10s): Yep. So on Crazy and the King, we call them name drops. So I'm going to name drop 1 billion people across the world who are celebrating disability pride month, which started July 1st. Most people don't know, but here we are, Happy Pride. Chad (5m 26s): So this is pride for individuals with this disability. So pride month is just rocking on? Julie (5m 32s): Yes, right into it. Chad (5m 33s): Got to love it. So quick question. Tell me what you thought of our pride, our LGBTQ+ for Dummies podcast that we did last month, we did five of them. What'd you think? Julie (5m 45s): I absolutely loved it. I named dropped it twice on Crazy and the King. I liked it so much. And I shared it internally with my entire parent company, the non-profit Ability Beyond. And it got rave reviews internally, too. That was fantastic. Chad (5m 59s): Yeah. Good. Big, big shout out to Michelle Raymond and the people over at My G Work for allowing a dumb white dude, a dumb white straight CIS gender dude to ask the uncomfortable questions that everybody wants to ask, but they're afraid to. I asked them, check out those podcasts. Next, a shout out goes to James Maley from Ireland. You would think that would be O'Malley but no, it's James Maley from Ireland. He loves our new European show. And why wouldn't you? We've got Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze who's our third wheel on the podcast. And we also have a guest host that we're starting to rotate in every other week. Chad (6m 43s): So if you haven't checked out the European ChadSheese podcast do so. And my last shout out is to James Phillips over at sense. So this poor dude, he was a closet listener of the Chad and Cheese podcast when he was working over at Career Builder. And I'm sure you know, why we, Career Builder was flaming left and right with that dumpster fire. And we had fun with it. Go figure, but now he can let his Chad and Cheese listener freak flag fly. Let it fly. James, let it fly, baby. So you got one, you got any left? Julie (7m 23s): Yep. So one more name Naomi Osaka, who is on the cover of Time Magazine today, continuing her stand for it's okay to not be okay. And taking care of her mental health and just being a badass. Chad (7m 39s): Yeah. She's definitely a bad ass. She's 23 years old and she said, you know what? I'm not feeling it. So I'm going to peace out for a minute and you can all fuck off if you don't like it. I love that. That is, that is some shit that we should have seen years ago, right? Years ago, I'm going to stick with sports and I cannot believe that Joel is missing this one because this is his opportunity to talk about his idol Joey Chestnut! Joey Chestnut slammed down 76 hot dogs during Nathan's hot dog eating contest. Can you believe that shit? Julie (8m 18s): That is so gross. Can you imagine A) eating a hot dog and B) eating 76 of them? Chad (8m 24s): That has to be a gastrointestinal fucking nightmare. I can't imagine how that wrecks his body for like days and days to come. So sports eating, I'm not really sure is a sport, but Hey, Cheeseman's not here. We're doing it for him. So we've been talking about you, FIFA Euro 2020, and you and I have been watching it. We've been enjoying it. What are your predictions? England just beat Denmark yesterday. I mean, Denmark, you got to love them. They were underdogs. They had a hell of a fight in them. They actually scored on England. Nobody else has in the entire tournament. Who are you picking between Italy and England? Julie (9m 5s): So my teams are in Portugal and France. They're obviously out. So I needed a backup team, a Crazy and the King listener, Matt Stubbs has been giving me hell all week for not rooting for England. So I'm going England just for Stubs. Chad (9m 21s): So I got to say Italy had a much harder draw. They were in a harder group. England was in a, it probably one of the easiest groups. Italy had to play Austria, Belgium, the number one in the world and they beat them. Spain! They showed how tired they were against Spain. So Italy is beaten up. I'm going to be rooting for Italy, but I believe England coming through the easiest group, the easiest draw, and this is a fucking home game for them, kids. England is going to bring it home. I can't wait to see it. I love the underdog and I love me some Italy. So good luck to both teams. Chad (10m 2s): So you and I kind of had on this next sports story, had kind of a disagreement that Shikari Richardson, fastest woman in the world this year is out of the Tokyo Olympics for weed. And I posted on Facebook. I didn't know that weed makes you faster, right? I didn't know that weed makes you faster. As a matter of fact, I thought probably slow her down some, but you know, what's the story of you? Julie (10m 27s): Yeah. So Shikari Richardson, fastest woman in the world did all of her qualifications at University of Oregon this last couple of weeks, and then got her drug test positive hit got a 30 day suspension. It ends before the Olympics yesterday. It was announced that the US Olympic team still left her off the roster. Yes. Chad (10m 51s): Not for PDs, for weed. So why the fuck is weed banned? Why I don't understand this at all. This feels like a reefer madness, 1936 moment, right? Does it not? A bunch of white dudes who are saying, no, you can't be taking that. I mean, this is back in before, the forties for God's sakes. We've been demonizing this drug and to be quite Frank, these athletes rip their bodies apart every single fucking day. And to be in weed actually helps in many cases. Right? So why is this a banned substance? Julie (11m 30s): So here's the thing, right? Like, you know, I have no problem with weed, get high everyday if you want. Enjoy your weekends, go on with your life. But for fuck's sake, she was this close to the Olympics. She just had to have a 30 day clean test. Right. And so I think it's bullshit. I think that weed should not be a banned substance. I think that we should be able to take it off of a schedule one drug, decriminalize, it, legalize it, what the hell ever. But right now in the United States, marijuana is illegal. And she had to know, like why even take the chance? You've worked your entire life for this moment. Julie (12m 13s): And we all wanted to see you cause you're badass. So yeah. Chad (12m 16s): Yeah, she tweeted, I'm sorry. I am human. I have to say that she has handled this publicly better than I would have there. There's no question. And she was also for our listeners out there. She was also battling the news that her biological mother had died. You know, she went to the weed. So I totally get that. Can't wait to see her back. The world is not just about the Olympics, but she'll be back at the next Olympics too. She's young. Julie (12m 46s): She will, she will. And she'll be amazing. Chad (12m 48s): That's right. And everybody don't forget to Chad and Cheese loves to give out free shit. So go to Chadcheese.com/free for the winning of free stuff. What kind of free stuff, Chad? Well, we have Chad and Cheese t-shirts by emissary.ai. Cool custom logo that the listeners actually picked out. You can get one of those free, but you got to register. Free beer delivered to your door, sponsored by those crazy kids over at Adzuna and free bourbon by Sovren the best parsing matching tech in the business. Chad (13m 29s): So again, t-shirts, beer, bourbon, all free stuff from your buddies over here at Chad and Cheese. Are you ready for the news Juul? Julie (13m 39s): So ready Babe. Chad (13m 42s): OK, TOPICS! Here we go. Oh my God, Indeed. Okay. So there's an article on Yahoo finance and this is actually a Canadian article. Okay. And this is something we've kind of touched on before, but I thought it, it was time to actually dig into this. So the articles title was, "Is Indeed is ready to help companies ramp up with new Indeed hiring platform," close quote, Indeed announced the launch of the Indeed Hiring Platform, a new solution that allows employers to manage the hiring process from posting through interview directly on Indeed with no additional software. Chad (14m 29s): Yes, there are additional fees, but no additional software. Three steps, kids post your job. Screen and schedule. And the third one, interview. This to me is not what I would have expected from a market leader. First and foremost, it's two to three years of linked. It's really a feature, not a platform. They're actually trying to say, this is something big and it's not. Right? Not to mention. They rolled this out, I think it was like three months ago in the U S to no fanfare whatsoever. And they are not hitting, from my understanding, from my internal sources, many sources that Indeed this thing is going over, like a lead fucking balloon. Chad (15m 12s): What do you think? Julie (15m 13s): So I work for a nonprofit. We're a, you know, an SMB, we're a midsize company. For me I'm looking at it saying we have 150 open essential roles, right now, and our existing ATS is clunky and a terrible experience. If I can get $150 in or 150 bodies in the door faster by using Indeed with absolutely no wait time and no integration, like why is that a bad thing? Chad (15m 40s): Yeah. Well, and I think you hit the nail on the head there. This is a strike against ZipRecruiter because this is more focused to the SMB market. This is not an Enterprise product. It's not even a product to be quite Frank. It is a feature for an SMB. Here's my biggest problem. This is expected. The market leader should be moving the needle on their product. They should be evolving their product and they shouldn't be charging for it. They should be pressing the rest of the industry. We'll talk about the economics here in a minute, but overall, I'll give you a great example, back in the day when Monster bought Trovix, this is like back in '08, '09 Trovix was the best matching software out there. Chad (16m 26s): Monster bought it. Boom. I thought this was going to be big. What Monster did is they created what they called a six sense search. And instead of evolving their search and pressing the market forward and providing this to all of their clients, as an evolved innovation in their platform, they charged for it. Guess what happened? Julie (16m 48s): What happened? Chad (16m 48s): Have you ever heard a sixth sense search before? Julie (16m 50s): I have not. Chad (16m 51s): Yeah, because it went over like a fucking lead balloon. You know why? Because they charged for it. They weren't smart as the market leader, they thought they had to monetize every single fucking thing and then guess what happened? Since they didn't innovate and they didn't press the market they got snuck up on, by Indeed. And I think this to me, and this is why I wanted to talk about this. First off is Indeed is not being Indeed. They, do not have the same kind of focus. They don't have the same type of strategy they had back in the olden days when they were kicking ass and taking names. They still are from a revenue standpoint, but they're not from an innovation standpoint. I believe this is a huge problem with leadership. Chad (17m 36s): I think they need to scrub the board when it comes to leaders and they need kind of like, remember when Steve Jobs came back and he just totally, I mean, they had like hundreds of products. He erased that shit. He said, we're going to focus. We're going to do this shit. Right. And we're going to be the best at what we do. Indeed's not that anymore. I think that is a leadership and a vision issue and they need to get rid of their C-suite entirely. What do you think? Julie (18m 6s): So I guess we always talk about, keep it simple stupid. Do what you're good at. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Is that what you're getting at is that Indeed should stick to being a job board or that they should be pushing all of these new integrated solutions as one standalone solution or product for the SMBs that are coming to use it. Chad (18m 30s): What Indeed did right out of the gate is they got users on the crack, right? They, it was like, oh, look at all this free traffic. Remember that? Everybody got free traffic. It was organic traffic. Oh yeah. If you want to pay for it, we can definitely boost you and so on and so forth. They're not doing that. They're not getting people hooked on the process. They're not making this a baked in process methodology. It's not a platform. Again, this whole thing is an it's maybe screening plus? No matter, no matter. They shouldn't be charging for something like this. And from an economic standpoint, if you think about it, they could actually go in with this, with this platform, start to provide it as added value for all of these SMBs. Chad (19m 17s): If they really want to help? Provide it as added value to these SMBs, instead of an SMB posting one job, maybe they post five, extrapolate that out, right. They start to own the market. And then as they start to strangle their competitors, what does, what did old Indeed do at that time? Then they started charging differently, right? This is what I'm saying. Leadership in Indeed today, they do not have, let's go to a Rocky term. They don't have the eye of the tiger. They are that fat dude who thought he was going to win, got in the ring and got fucking punched out. Chad (19m 57s): So I think they are complacent. And the problem, and the reason why they're complacent is because they have silver spoon leaders in position. They need to get back in startup mode. They need hunger in that place and they need a no bullshit attitude. I don't think that it should be mean and aggressive and broke culture. I just think they need to have focus and they don't have it. Julie (20m 21s): Short-term thinking that's really what we're hearing. Short-term thinking. Not always thinking that our competitors are one step behind us. Chad (20m 28s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's what happened to Monster. They were on top of it. They were on top of the mountain. I was there, they were on top of the mountain. I left and I actually watched them fall off the mountain because of these exact types of hubris. They need to run with their eyes wide open instead of being drunk on market power because they have so much market power right now. It's ridiculous. The problem is that's when you get knocked off the top of the fucking mountain. Now, what I do want to talk about who I think is actually pressing innovation is a company called Doximity. They are what people would call the LinkedIn for doctors. Chad (21m 11s): They just went public and they're worth about $10 billion. Doximity exploded on the public markets last month with an IPO that saw shared values of the physician social networking startup double in 24 hours. Since launch Doximity has 1.8 million medical professionals in the US, including 80% plus of physicians on its platform. While building out the user base the startup also created a secure way for doctors to share information with patients and other doctors. They're creating useful tools and really a community where docs have to come back on a daily basis. Chad (21m 57s): Now, this is how they're like LinkedIn. Doximity has a two pronged approach. First prong ads, not too fond of this, but it creates a lot of cash. Drug makers market treatments to a very niche audience to doctors, go figure, while health systems promote content to doctors and number two, recruiting. Hospitals and healthcare facilities use it to fill open positions. Doximity sales hit 200 million last year. So my question is we just talked about Indeed not being innovative whatsoever, right? This to me is what I call innovative in a niche space. Chad (22m 40s): What do you think, do you think this is the evolution of a niche job board? Julie (22m 44s): I think I'm still struggling a little bit to understand exactly where Doximity plays, right? So they have hospitals solutions, telehealth solutions, talent solutions, and life science solutions. So a doc uses it every single day for telehealth services. And then we get as an added bonus, job advertising. So that part is a hundred percent, I get like we're using town serve or we're using telehealth. That's a fantastic way to capture that niche audience, by being integrated into something that they use potentially every single day. However, how much of talent solutions is actually a core part of their business versus tele-health and hospital solutions and life sciences? Julie (23m 30s): It again, they keep it simple, stupid theory. It just seems like a lot of stuff. And to have how much of their evaluation is actually based on talent solutions, versus what we know is going to be a huge market in telehealth as we move forward. Chad (23m 46s): Yeah. I think their valuations bullshit don't get me wrong. I think everything is over-valuated at this point, not to mention they're not the number one destination for job search traffic in that niche or anything like that, but here's, stick with me here for a second. Let's take Dice as an example, right? So what Doximity is doing is they are, they've created a community and resources within that community that they use on a daily basis. They have become, stick with me here, a lifestyle platform for docs and medical professionals, right? So let's pivot over to Dice real quick. Chad (24m 25s): Dice has failed dramatically because why? Because they have not served their community. How could they have served their community? Now, this is different than Doximity, but they could have served the tech community with the ability to have open source coding, to be able to have creditations, to be able to have communities where you could have FAQ's around different systems, updates, those types of things that would have been, are you listening, Art? You dumb shit. That could have been the place where the community had to go every single fucking day. And then guess what? They also have a careers area. Chad (25m 8s): The thing is here, the brilliance of this is the Google lifestyle platform. We use Google every day because it's a part of, it's interwoven in everything that we do. I have a Google home on our countertop. We use it all the time, you hate it, but you love it at the same time. I have a droid phone, right? I use Chrome, et cetera, et cetera. So what's a part of my lifestyle. Doximity is a part of a docs daily journey and how they connect with patients, how they connect with other physicians, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So that, that's my thought is that we need to create, the Dices of the world where they have gone wrong is they have tried to be that one place where all tech people go for just jobs and what they needed to be was a get hub, right? Chad (26m 3s): What they needed to be was a coders, like a CyberCoders. They needed to add Hacker Rank types of tech into their community, so that whether you're looking for a job or not, you are on Dice. But guess what? When you need a job, you know, we're going to fucking go. Right? Julie (26m 22s): Dice or Doximity. Chad (26m 24s): Exactly. So my question to you, because disability solutions has a job site. You have other services that are around that job site? Do you think your community and being able to evolve could actually benefit from, you know, something like this? Not exactly Doximity but something like this that is focused on resources for the community itself? Julie (26m 51s): Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, when we look at talent acquisition and how we get the most number of people to work that we can, we start at the beginning, how does a person learn about a job? And so advertising and job boards in my opinion, are critically important. They're never going to go away, but how do I create a system where one, I can help those job seekers get as prepared as possible to rock that interview, to get that job, to understand how to apply? How can I get our 7,000 community-based organizations that we work with every day to understand and understand how to bridge the gap? I want to be the first thing they think of when they know they have people that need to get to work. Julie (27m 36s): And so we haven't built it in that tech way that you're talking about, but we have built credibility within our community as a go-to. Chad (27m 46s): You have human networks that actually do a lot of that. Julie (27m 49s): Yes. Chad (27m 50s): Yes. Julie (27m 50s): Yes we do. And we hear every single day. And that was a business decision that we made to spend time and invest in our community because we knew, and we know that they are the most valuable asset that we have at Disability Solutions, the job seekers, our brand and the community of, or the community-based organizations that help people get to work every single day. Without them I don't have a job. And so we have to build around just learning about the job and applying it to it and making sure our communities are ready to go. Chad (28m 23s): Yeah. Tech can't always be the answer for every single community. I appreciate that. We'll be right back. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (28m 30s): 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 (29m 14s): 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 (29m 31s): Okay. So before we get into the heavy job stuff, our listeners love to hear about what we're watching on streaming services. What's your favorite throw something? Julie (29m 42s): Well, I restarted Schitt's Creek for, I don't know, probably the sixth time. Still cry like a baby. Chad (29m 47s): I know. I know, but my, my super hot show guilty pleasure embarrassed to say it right now is Lucifer. Julie (29m 53s): Yes. Chad (29m 54s): And I got in trouble because you were upstairs watching Lucifer. One of the main characters died or something like that. You are actually having an ugly cry. I think I was down watching UEFA, you know, Euro 2020. I didn't hear you. And you're like, how did you not hear me? I was having a breakdown. Julie (30m 12s): It was an audible, physical, pained cry, and you did not come to my aid. Chad (30m 19s): You hear that Ladies guilty pleasure, watch Lucifer for everybody. That's out there. If you haven't watched a Bosch on Amazon. Oh my God, watch Bosch. We also just finished the first season of the Nevers or at least the first mini season on HBO Max. And I have to say, I'm sad, but it's kind of bittersweet, but Lovecraft Country, which we both loved. Second season is not coming out. I am happy because I would rather have no season as opposed to a shitty season. You're not having though? Julie (30m 53s): No, I think there is an incredible amount of content that HP Lovecraft left behind for the author and showrunner of Lovecraft country and all black cast. HBO's first, all black cast had amazing reviews, amazing watcher-ship. I love it. Right. I think there's going to be some blow back for HBO from the black community and allies. And I think there should be, it was a damn good show, Chad (31m 19s): Maybe a spinoff, who knows? Okay. So let's, let's jump into jobs. The US economy added 850,000 jobs in June. At this pace business insider calculates "the U S economy is now on track to recover all jobs lost to the pandemic in just seven months. June's growth follows a gain of 583,000 jobs in May and marks the strongest one month jump since August, it was also the sixth straight month of job gains." Do you think we're actually going we're on pace. Do you think we'll actually hit seven months? Chad (31m 60s): You think it's going to take longer? Because we have a labor shortage is going on. I mean, there's a lot of shit right now. Julie (32m 5s): When I look at the numbers, those are really the vast majority were hospitality, jobs, hotel, entertainment, restaurants, and bars. I don't know that that's a sign of a true recovery. Obviously it means people are out there spending again, they're doing those things, but those jobs are, there are too many of them to feel like that could actually be the recovery. We need to see other sectors, professional jobs, non-essential workers getting back and growing in their wages. Right? So we can't just go back to how it was before. It has to be growth and just filling restaurant jobs is not going to cut it. Chad (32m 39s): Great, pointing that out. It was bulk hospitality, no question. So we also know that there have been 2 million plus women who were out of the labor force, leisure and hospitality positions impacted 1.4 million women with jobs coming back. Will women actually rejoin the labor force? Julie (33m 1s): Yeah, so actually 3 million women have dropped out since the beginning of the pandemic. We still have 2 million women who have not rejoined the labor force. And we're seeing participation in the labor force by women still continue to drop, and there has to be infrastructure. And there has to be flexibility to be able to bring women back to the office. And companies also need to be looking at re-looking at their benefits packages for women, whether it's the doula services that Walmart just put into place for part-time and full-time associates or parental leave, maternity leave, work from home, flexibility. Julie (33m 41s): I think that it is a shame that companies are already pushing us back to the other extreme of get your butt in the seat that is not going to get women who have a choice back into the office. Now, the thing that's most important to remember too, is that black women, women with disabilities and women in low wage jobs were the most affected women. And so there's that balance, right? We're starting to see the economy opened back up. So some of those jobs are going to, some of women are going to go back into those jobs, but those that have the choice don't necessarily want to go back to work, or they want to find new jobs where they can use different skills and grow in their career. Julie (34m 21s): So I think they're going to take their time and look at re-skilling or look at applying to more when they're ready, because they just don't want to go back to the same endless hopeless place of work that they were at before. Chad (34m 34s): This rolls right into an NPR story about the great resignation, right? So here's an excerpt from that NPR story "As pandemic life recedes in the US people are leaving their jobs in search of more money, more flexibility, and more happiness. Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued and how they spend their time." We only get one life on this fucking rock people it's leading to a dramatic increase in resignations, a record, 4 million people quit their jobs in April alone, according to the labor department. Actually posted this out on LinkedIn and got an amazing quote from Lynn Bailey, who you and I both love, super smart. Chad (35m 20s): She said, "I think this great awakening and power shift from employers to talent is the story of our generation." The question for me is, do you think this will actually endure? It seems like yes, wages are rising. We have ,can the opportunity of autonomy rising. We have all these things that are rising, but without any guardrails in place, what makes any of us think that this shit's not just going to snap back to where it was before? Julie (35m 52s): It's going to be, there's going to be some short term pain, even with half of the governors in the United States, in mostly Republican states, shutting off early unemployment or enhanced unemployment, excuse me, early, we're still not seeing an increase in applications. I'm still not seeing an increase in positions filled. So that tells me we are at a breaking point where the American worker has and is fed up with living to make other people rich and to make other people have the life that they want. And that we're standing kind of firm on that. I think that a lot of employers are really going to hammer down. There's going to be continued attrition as they try to force people back into the places that they were before to be, you know, to kind of have that corporate overlord over you. Julie (36m 42s): And then we're going to come to a middle, right? So we're going to have, I think, quite a bit of short-term pain for both employer and labor market. Chad (36m 49s): Is middle good enough? Julie (36m 50s): No. Chad (36m 51s): I mean, to me, middle's not good enough. It's been 50 fucking years where we've been given the shaft, the middle-class and lower wage earners have been given the shaft. We're not a country that makes shit anymore. We just consume stuff. We have changed dramatically in the last 50 years as a country. The question is without guard rails, is any of this going to stick? Julie (37m 16s): I think that we will come to a middle. Part of it's going to stick employers who are not short-term thinkers, who don't have chicken shit C-suites that can manage people when they're not sitting right in front of them will benefit and they will grow. And there will be adaptation to some form of flexible work schedule. But the American worker is going to have to put their stake in the ground and collectively continue to do what we're doing right now and saying, I am not working for poverty wages any longer, and I'm not working a thousand hours a week to keep the lights on and food on the table. It shouldn't be expected of any American that that should be the requirement. Julie (37m 58s): And over and over, we're hearing the C-suite, we're hearing Wall Street, tell us that the cog just needs to get back in the wheel and suck it up and continue to make money for the man. Fuck that. No. Chad (38m 10s): Yeah. Work has to accommodate life, not the other way around. So after months of waiting for workers to rejoin the labor force, some businesses have had it. They're going to robots. And I think it's interesting because we've been talking about this for years now. McDonald's with their order touchscreens, you walk in, you've got the order, touchscreens, QR codes for menus, Flippy, the hamburger maker, voice recognition drive-throughs, touchscreens on your tables. When you go in, you can actually order and you can pay there as well as play games. Robot food delivery, We did Pizza Hut talking about the delivery robots on the road and Starbucks, Panera and Cracker Barrel are going to a mobile app. Chad (38m 58s): So instead of having a waiter, you've got that mobile app. And you know, next thing you know, you're off and away. It's I find that one interesting because Cracker Barrel better have a great Jitterbug mobile app. SFX (39m 10s): Buzzer. Chad (39m 11s): But anyway, I shouldn't, we have been moving in this direction years ago because these are jobs that fucking people shouldn't be doing anyway. We should be, we should have jobs that are available that actually provide somebody with purpose. That's what America's lost. We've lost purpose. Julie (39m 28s): Yes. And, and the biggest issue is that we have failed to prepare non-college graduates to go into skilled labor or even administrative labor. The fact that companies think you need a degree to be an executive assistant or something like that is ridiculous. Chad (39m 48s): Or a plumber yes. Julie (39m 49s): Or a plumber. Right. We all need plumbers and Chad (39m 53s): oh God yeah we do. Julie (39m 54s): So we've had an entire generation, maybe two that have been left behind to work at these manual labor jobs, especially after, you know, globalization and automation in the auto industry as a country, we haven't prepared our workers to do that or to move into skilled positions. So we've become basically a service driven economy, right? That's why we're seeing that the jobs in entertainment and hospitality, and really that's not sustainable for our economic infrastructure or the continuity of, of our country, because we're going to have a doc shortage. We're going to have a skilled labor shortage. Julie (40m 34s): We're going to have a shortage and neither government nor company seem interested in investing in the American worker. They're interested in keeping wages low and asking for more visas where countries are doing a good job of educating and preparing our workforce. Chad (40m 51s): And corporate welfare. And also just so that, you know, there's not going to be a robot plumber. Okay. Let's just go over that real quick kids. Okay. Well, we have a listener question that is specific specific for Julie. We'll be right back. Summer-to-Evolve Jobvite PROMO (41m 8s): Last year, Summer-to-Evolve saw us bring together some of the biggest names in talent acquisition presenting, exciting content to help us learn and grow in these evolving times. This year, we're back to do it all again, taking our eight weeks of virtual sessions on tour for the Summer-to-Evolve road trip presented by Jobvite, virtually visiting locations around the world. We're excited to share more talent acquisition tips, tricks, and best practices with you. Visit the summertoevolve.com to learn more. Chad (41m 37s): Okay. So this listener question came to Joel and I, and it's actually about D and I, which you are a much more of an expert than Joel or I, right. So I was going to have you answer this via, like a video recording that we would insert, but Joel is camping. You're on the show. Fuck. Let's do this. Julie (41m 59s): Hit me. Chad (42m 1s): Here's the question. What do you think the best first step is for organizations looking to build a more inclusive and diverse environment when you're essentially starting from scratch? Would it be to work with a consultant who is part of a marginalized community and specializes in DE&I, and if so, are there any consultants that you'd recommend? Julie (42m 25s): Absolutely fantastic question. Like it was literally written by me. It wasn't. Chad (42m 29s): It was not. Julie (42m 30s): It was not, the answer is yes, you need to work with an expert. You cannot bandaid DEI. If you want it to be an integral part of your business and just like any business driven activity, it needs an expert and it needs a strategy. And so that is critical. Chad (42m 49s): Isn't that the biggest issue that we're seeing from companies is that they are throwing this at HR and people who are not, and it's not their fault. It's not HR's fault. It's not talent acquisitions' fault. They are not experts in this. I remember in building military hiring programs, myself, I would talk to companies and they were like, oh yeah, we've got a veteran over there who's in charge of that. I'm like, okay, do they have any experience in this? Well, they were a veteran. Well, that doesn't mean they know how many people do, you know, actually say, oh yeah, we've got the individual with a disability over there. They're building our program. Julie (43m 22s): I mean, it's just a continuation of tokenism, when it's approached that way. Chad (43m 26s): It's not fair. Julie (43m 27s): And the reason that DEI programs fail is because they don't have investments and resource and expertise coming from the C-suite. That's not HRS fault. That's not talent acquisition's fault. That sits directly in the CEOs office period, end of story. So who's great at it. I'll start with Torin Ellis, my good friend and pod partner. He is a DEI B generalist expert, building strategy and, and programs for amazing companies and TA vendors. Kim Jones is (been on your show) on fire. One of the most brilliant strategists that I've seen on the street. I learn from her every single time she posts. Julie (44m 6s): And of course, if you're thinking disability, which you should be, because if you're not, you're not diverse and veterans with disabilities call Julie Sowash. Call Disability Solutions. We can help you do that too. Yeah. Chad (44m 18s): And I think that being in this work, right, just from my standpoint, working with veterans for years, being in a portion of it, understanding that when people are looking at DE&I, they're not looking at individuals with disabilities because they're not the D right? and they don't actually see that as diversity. I didn't understand until obviously you had put it in front of me that, you know, this is a humongous population of people that cross every cross section of who people are gay, straight, you know, LGBTQ community. Chad (44m 58s): It doesn't matter what gender you are. Doesn't matter what color you are. Doesn't matter what religion you are. If somebody does want to get a hold of you, talk to you a little bit more about this, or maybe even listen to Crazy and the King. Where can they find you? Julie (45m 10s): You can find me on LinkedIn, Julie Sowash, S-O-W-A-S-H. You can find our website at disabilitytalent.org, and you can check out Crazy and the Ling at crazyandtheking.com. Chad (45m 23s): That's awesome. Cheesman, I hope you're not too sticky, buddy, but this is a pretty good show. Thanks for joining me, Babe. Julie (45m 30s): Thanks for having me, Babe. Chad (45m 31s): Excellent. We out. OUTRO (46m 27s): 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. 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.

A new chatbot... Errrrrr.... "conversational AI: contender is coming to America and the rest of the world soon. They're called Predictive Hire and they have an army of PhDs that says their tech is better than yours. CEO Barb Hyman can explain and has no problem staring down the barrel of our Firing Squad rapid-fire questions. Does Predictive Hire come out unscathed? Are run into the guns? Ya gotta listen to find out :) Firing Squad is powered by Pandologic's programmatic revolution! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. 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 CHROs 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 (36s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and 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): Yeah, the only thing standing between me and happy hour is this firing squad. What's up everybody. This is firing squad and you're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am Joel Cheeseman is always joined by my partner in crime, Chad Sowash and today our sucker is Predictive Hire. We welcome Barb Hyman from down under. She is the CEO Barb. Good day, mate. Barb (1m 26s): Good day. Joel (1m 26s): How's it going? Barb (1m 27s): Hi guys. Joel (1m 29s): So before we get into the company, tell us a little bit about you. Barb (1m 34s): So I'm the CEO and founder of Predictive Hire. I'm probably the least likely person to be leading this company as an AI company because I'm female, for one. And I am neither a data scientist nor an engineer, but I care a lot about the experience that people have when they're applying for a job. So that's me. I live in Australia, in Melbourne. I'm currently in day one of 14 days, quarantine. Yeah, I know, not fun. And I'm a mom of three kids as well. Joel (2m 6s): The wrong person, because you're a woman. We may have to get into that Chad and the Q and A, but until then, tell her, tell her what she's won. Chad (2m 14s): Well, Barb, you will have two minutes to pitch Predictive Hire. At the end of two minutes, you will hear the bell then Joel and I will hit you up with rapid fire Q and A and if your answers are starting to ramble or do you just get plain boring, Joel is going to hit you with the crickets. That's the signal to tighten up your game at the end of Q and A, you will receive one of these three grades from both Joel and myself. Big applause. Pile that shrimp up on the bar-bee and open some champagne because you have a winner. Oh, Joel (2m 49s): Open the Fosters baby, open the Fosters. Chad (2m 52s): Oh, that's golf club golf clap. Lay off all that shrimp pop a Fosters and get your ass off to work. The firing squad. That's not a knife. Seriously. Get back to the whiteboard. This isn't working. Joel (3m 7s): Gonna need a bigger boat. Barb are you ready to pitch the Firing Squad? Barb (3m 10s): Yeah. I just want a bit of what you guys have to raw me out, share it later. Joel (3m 16s): Listeners should know it's about six in the morning for Barb. So this is a little bit much for her, but she's a trooper and she's going to handle it. You have two minutes to pitch Barb. Are you ready? Barb (3m 26s): I'm ready. Joel (3m 27s): In three, two. Barb (3m 30s): Imagine for a moment that you're a store manager of a large national retail chain. You have 500 open positions. You get about 8,000 applicants a day, and you'd love to interview every one of them because you know that the people you hire, are your brand. So you sit down and you interview all of them. You let them share their story of who they are in their voice. You give them about 20 to 25 minutes and it feels really friendly and familiar cause it's just a chat and you don't go to them. You know, unlike recruitment you give every one of them personalized learning, which makes him feel amazing. It makes him feel heard, dignified and smarter because you're going to let down about 7,500, right? Barb (4m 11s): If you do the math, because you can only hire a few and you care a lot about the experience that everyone has, because they're all customers in your store. That's what we do, we make that possible. Where conversational AI, that's built for humans and backed by science. We call it Phai, PHAI. Predictive high AI. It understands you, it doesn't rush you. You don't need to do your hair and makeup for PHAI and PHAI is also blind. Doesn't know your race, age, or gender agenda. So it means that when you bring in those 500 people, they really truly represent the diversity of the community that you serve. That's pretty powerful. Joel (4m 49s): And where can they find out more Barb? Barb (4m 51s): Go to predictivehire.com. Joel (4m 54s): We'll end that right there. Okay. I'm going to start the questioning Barb. And I usually start with sort of a branding question usually revolving around your name, but your name makes a lot of sense to me. What's hard for me to get is the, the robot's name PHAI. So, so forgive, forgive the pun, but why PHAI. Barb (5m 14s): So part of what really has informed the whole product is the idea that everyone's given a fair go. You know, that's that mission. It's a great Aussi slogan. And that means that we don't really care that you're male or white or whatever your age is and we want it to have a chat bot with a name that was really, you know, neutral. It really gender agnostic. And actually our head data scientists came up with that. So that's how we came up with the name. We didn't want it to be a female like Alexa or Siri. Cause that just seemed too obvious. We wanted it to be something that represented us, but that also talked to our mission. Joel (5m 48s): So it's not a cute acronym or something. It's P H I or P H A I correct. That's right. Chad (5m 54s): Predictive Hire AI. Joel (5m 56s): Oh, it is an acronym. Okay. Barb (5m 58s): Part of what we're trying to do is be really authentic and honest and we don't pretend that it's a human. So when you give it a human name, you're kind of, we feel representing that this is something that it's not. You know, it is a robot, so to speak it is a machine, it is AI on the other end. And so we want to be honest about it and not give it a name that suggests it's a person. Joel (6m 19s): No job seeker confusion about PHAI. What is that? They get it, that it's the name of the robot. Barb (6m 25s): Some companies put their own name on it. You know, there are quite a few businesses now that really have built in chat as a vehicle to engage with their staff and they might have their own name. So they're welcome to apply that name, you know, part of our product is that the whole experience, right? Joel (6m 41s): Gotcha. Say no more Predictive Hire AI, P.H.A.I. Got it. Chad boom. Chad (6m 46s): There you go. I'd say it's a little later in the day for Joel. So he hasn't obviously taken his nap. So is this a high volume play, mainly? Barb (6m 56s): So it definitely is. You know, I think a couple of things that make it high volume, which is, you know, when you're bringing AI into your organization, it's a lot of change for the recruitment team for the organization. And so we find the bigger, the problem, you know, the easier it is for organizations to embrace it. So we tend to work with businesses recruiting at scale because they get the most payback, but you can use it in other roles as well. Because part of what the solution delivers is not just efficiency because we think it's much more important to also be really human. Is, you know, it just helps bring data and intelligence to every recruitment decisions. So whether you use it for engineers or for frontline retail staff, you know, it works in the same way. Chad (7m 40s): So when it comes down to a company actually buying into Predictive Hire, generally, what's their number one priority that you are filling right out of the gate? Barb (7m 50s): Absolutely recruitment efficiency. How do I get to the right talent fast? You know, you get to time to offer in less than 24 hours. And if you've got 500 open roles or any open roles now, because it's such a candidate first market, you got to move fast. So speed. Chad (8m 6s): Okay. So what about setup for that company? Because not everybody has the same questions. They don't have obviously the same assessment processes. I mean, do you come with canned assessments and canned questions that you just roll out automatically? Or is there usually a lead time? Weeks, months to be able to get it set up so that it can learn and then deploy? Barb (8m 28s): Yeah, no, look, it's actually a less than 24 hour set up, in theory. What we find though is usually there's an integration which might take a few weeks and the customer always wants to customize it. You know, they always want to bring in their voice. We're able to reflect their values and their culture in the questions. So there's usually a period of us collaborating with them to really amplify those aspects of the experience. But, you know, in theory, you can go live tomorrow. Joel (8m 54s): Talk about the job seeker interaction with, with P.H.AI. Is it, I go to the website and it's a little bubble in the bottom. Is it a text messaging as well? Is it like sort of mobile? Platform based? Does a recruiter send a link to a candidate and then they click it and then start the process of chatting? Is it, is it available on other messaging platforms? Like WhatsApp or others? Talk about that. Barb (9m 21s): Yeah. So it's simply a link that can get included in inserted in any sourcing channels so Snapchat, WhatsApp, et cetera. But usually what happens is we're working with really big companies who have a legacy system, like a Workday or a Success Factors. And so you apply for a job in the normal way, but pretty quickly you get to the point in that experience where it says, Hey, now we want to give you a first interview. We don't call it an assessment because it's like an interview. So everyone gets a chance at the job. And so they click on that and they start the conversation. And it's five questions, you know, that's really the key IP or an invention is that it's super quick. And within about 10 to 20 minutes of finishing, they get this feedback profile, which is really phenomenal in recruitment because, you know, there's a big difference between a normal chat bot that an engineer can code in a week versus conversational AI that's based on science where you really understand the person's real language. Barb (10m 16s): And we give that feedback back to the candidate. So it's pretty quick and simple, and it means no CVs, no phone screens. So from a recruiter perspective, it gives back just a huge amount of time to them. Joel (10m 29s): So let's talk about sort of global domination. Are you guys are based in Australia. Are you available in other countries? Which ones, if not, what countries are you hoping to grow into or are you just Australian or APAC company? Talk about the globe. Barb (10m 49s): Yeah. Yeah. So, round about, every 42 seconds to be precise someone around the world in one of 47 countries is having a chat with P.H.A.I. And our clients are global. Obviously we're, most of our team is based here, but we've also got a sizable team in the UK. We've got a team in the Philippines and some people in China as well. And you know, the one we obviously want to pursue global domination, you know, going into the US, is incredibly exciting for us. We've just got one client there at the moment, and we're looking to expand that, but the only constraint to our tech is it's English only, you know, AI is pretty sophisticated. Barb (11m 29s): You can't slap on Google translate and then, you know, provide the service. So we'll be in Spanish and French and Italian and German late next year. But for now we're in any English countries, English speaking countries. Joel (11m 42s): Gotch ya. Gotch ya. So in America, there's a lot of a lot of chatbots. It's very competitive. What's your differentiator? Barb (11m 48s): So, you know, I think the market is really confused about chat bot versus conversational AI. And, you know, the difference simply I say is, it's the difference between 2d and 3d, you know, a chat bot. If you engage with most of the chat bots out there, in fact, all of them, they don't give you anything back. You know, they're really just automating a process and it's very transactional. They're pretty crude and simplistic. They use keyword matching. They're not based on any kind of science, like natural language processing, which is what we have. So to be truthful, the only other technology that's similar to ours, but it's not really applied in this space is IBM Watson. Which was built through understanding people through language and then predicting whether or not they had a certain set of traits to be successful in a role. Barb (12m 36s): And so right now we're the only one that has something similar. It was built in a really different way. And so that's fundamentally the difference. It's truly a science-based experience. And you know, it's also very much a machine learning product and maybe I'll stop there and see what questions you ask. But I think there's also a fair bit of confusion around AI and a lot of puffery around AI versus something that's truly a learning technology. Chad (13m 1s): You said something earlier that I want to dive into, you said, it's really an interview it's not an assessment. Well, I mean, the assessments overall, personality assessments or what have you, they are different than an interview because of obviously the algorithm that tests, it goes against that. So is it an interview or is it an assessment? like a personality assessment? Barb (13m 24s): Yeah, look, it's designed as an interview. It simulates the best in class of what a good interview looks like, which is it's a structured set of questions where people are measured against a performance rubric. What we're discovering through the language is soft skills and communication skills and features like your propensity to be a job hopper, which is a kind of a formal term in IO world. And, you know, my view is it's exactly the same as an interview when you're interviewing me, you're assessing and judging me, you're listening to my responses to see whether I'm really driven, whether I'm really resilient, whatever it is that you're looking for. But you know, the problem is that you bring all of your biases, right? Barb (14m 5s): Like we're all imbued with biases and that's where a machine that's blind can really discover you know, what I would say is undiscovered talent. And that's the beauty of using technology to do your interviews for you. Chad (14m 18s): Okay. So a job hopper, let's say 2, 3, 4 years ago, that would have been a problem, but that's standard for today, right? So how does a company actually keep, like yours, actually keep up with changes in the market because you're actually using past behavior. And as we just saw over the last year, well, there's little the same than it was a year plus ago, 18 months ago. Right. So how does an algorithm that is trained on past behavior keep up with the world of today? Barb (14m 51s): Because it's not, it's not based on historical data. That is a key difference between us and every other AI solution. You know, if you're using, I won't mention any names, a lot of other AI solutions, they survey your employee group, you know, the whole Amazon story, which I'm sure you're familiar with, where you're using CVs from people that were hired. We don't use historical data to define the profile. What we have that's really unique to us is this incredible data set of words. It's about 300 million words. Now it's doubling every six months. And the signs of being able to discover your profile, as in your personality, your communication fluency from words comes from that data set. It does not come from tracking whether or not you were hired and whether or not you were successful in the job. Barb (15m 36s): That's how we start. And we start with, they're called rule-based models. As we get data from your company about who was hired and who left in any other truly objective performance data, we do retrain our models pretty much like the whole Netflix, you know, Amazon experience, but we don't start with a bias dataset. We don't start with historical data. And that's a really key point of difference in terms of minimizing bias and avoiding all those issues that you mentioned. Chad (16m 5s): But you're using an algorithm to score and really predict whether an individual is going to do well in that position or not. Barb (16m 14s): Yeah. But you, as the company, you get to set the profile. Chad (16m 16s): Right? Yeah. I totally get that. But me as a company, I'm biased because I'm a human being, right. So that all in itself is like, we're actually training bias into the system. And I know that computers are blind, but in most cases they have problems with different cohorts, like individuals with disabilities, right. Because they don't test the same. They don't think the same. So how do you deal with something like that? Barb (16m 41s): You have to, you know, start with the assumption that when you're talking with a client and they say, look, we want people who are, you know, highly driven, high humility, we want them to have a growth mindset that, you know, that's not a biased formula. It would be pretty malevolent for a company to come and say, we want this profile, you know, we want assholes, who don't care about people and don't work well with teams. It just doesn't happen like that. Chad (17m 5s): Have you worked with American companies yet Barb? I mean, seriously, those are profiles. SFX (17m 14s): Oh hell no. Barb (17m 14s): And then in terms of the, you know, does this work for a wide range of groups? Again, I'd say that's where we're really different. Which is the difference between you and I and a machine is that you can't figure out our biases, right? Because they're invisible and they're unconscious. But when you look at data, you can actually test against people who identify as neuro-diverse, you know, different ethnic groups, different genders. And so you're able to actually see whether there's bias and then retrain the model to minimize that bias. So one of the things that our product gives you is that you can see real time, whether there's any bias in the machine recommendations on race and gender, which is, you know, a transparency, right. And that's what clients want is they want to see transparently, what's really going on here. Barb (17m 57s): How can I trust this technology? So, you know, there are some things we've done in making available our science. We're the only company in this space to publish our science, because we think all science is falsifiable and you deserve to challenge it and take a look at it. You know, we're the only company that tests broadly against all different protected groups. So, it's a huge responsibility we have to do the right thing. And we're fully transparent on how tech performs and obviously the customer gets access to that real-time, as well, and the reporting. Joel (18m 30s): As a big fan of the show, Barb. Barb (18m 33s): Yeah, that's me! How did you know that? Joel (18m 36s): I know that you've listened to a lot of the news stories lately about chatbots getting acquired. Pretty almost all of them have been acquired. Now that's good news to some people, but I look at it as look, these companies got a lot of money, the next round of news should not be acquiring. And certainly not without terms disclosed, it should be about a new round of funding and these chatbots becoming huge businesses and sort of the next wave of hiring. Does that news discourage you? Do you see that and feel like, well, they got it wrong and we're going to get it right. How do you look at the news of all the acquisitions going on right now? Barb (19m 16s): Yeah. Look, I think that the interest in conversational AI and using that as a medium to connect with people and understand people, you know, candidates employees is incredibly encouraging because it's a very human, normal thing to do, you know. To put on hair and makeup and do a video interview or to play a game, to me is not a thing that I'm going to do every day, but having a chat or texting my mates and my family is really normal. And so I think that whole raft of acquisitions is a reflection of that's the future. And when you think about distributed work, you know, Salesforce buying Slack, Microsoft teams, et cetera, that's how employees connect as well. Right? Barb (19m 56s): You know, it's all about that asynchronous communication. So we have a vision to go way beyond recruitment as a chat interface to help employees really navigate the workplace, as well as what we're doing right now in recruitment. Joel (20m 10s): Just so you're expanding outside of recruitment. And it looks like according to Crunchbase, you guys have raised about $4.3 million. Barb (20m 19s): Is that US dollars? Yeah. Chad (20m 22s): US is 3.2 Joel (20m 24s): Okay. So 3.2, is that number correct? Barb (20m 26s): It's a bit more than that. We're about to go and do a, a big round of funding. Well, when I say big, that's obviously my ambition in the second half of this year to really support our growth and it may and into the U S so yeah, looking forward to that, and we're only a team of 35 right now, but an incredibly committed team. So we're expecting to about double in size over the next year. Joel (20m 47s): We hope that we are on your PR list, when you announced that new round of funding. Barb (20m 54s): Absolutely. Joel (20m 54s): In addition to growing into the U S and maybe getting out of recruitment, what are some other things that we should be looking for in the future for Predictive Hire is video in the future, for example? Barb (21m 5s): Yeah. Look, we're not big fans of video because we feel like it, you know, there's a real risk of bias, in that. And we don't think the technology particularly the AI is at the point where you can comfortably say it's inclusive and not potentially biased against certain groups. So that's not where we're headed, where we're wanting to move is really around the onboarding space. So if you think about hiring at scale, you know, at our largest customer hires 40,000 people a year, right. And how do you make them all? And there are 15 years old to, you know, 70 years old, how do you help them navigate that workplace in a way where, you know, it really helps them understand what they need to do, how to have conversations. Barb (21m 46s): So that's kind of the space that we want to move into to have P.H.A.I as your own personalized coach. And, you know, we're looking at that in the education space as well for students. So we see the, you know, the chat and the understanding that the chat has about people as being really the core uniqueness to our take. Chad (22m 7s): Let's talk about integrations in a system, because obviously we don't want recruiters or hiring managers jumping from platform to platform, not to mention adoption is incredibly low when they have to get out of their core platforms. So what kind of integrations do you have and which ones do you have planned for the coming year? Barb (22m 26s): Yeah. Yeah. So look, we have an open API and we've done about 10 integrations so far. So into all the, at least the main ones that I know of, like Workday and Success Factors, Page Up and so on. So part of our funding is actually to accelerate that. It's a native experience within the system, and I completely agree it needs to all be seamless for the recruiter to make it really frictionless for them. So as we get our funding, we'll just start to integrate with all the main players. And we do all the work for the clients so it's only a couple of hours on their side that we need from them, mostly around designing the user journey for the candidate to make sure that that's really truncated and really simple, but the technical integration, our team does, we call them our team of integration warriors, they're pretty amazing. Barb (23m 10s): It's about four weeks for us to do an integration. Joel (23m 14s): What kind of a CEO are you, Barb? Are you a visionary? Are you a product person? Are you sort of the face of the company and the hustler? Where would you categorize yourself as a CEO? Barb (23m 25s): That's a great question. Look, I think I have to play that all of those roles, to be honest in different times, you know, I have a very strong product vision, you know, I don't come as I said, from the technical background and, you know, the combination of myself and Buddhi, my co-founder who was the principal data scientist at Culture Amp is. You know, I'm the sort of human of how do we make sure that the experience for people is really human and really Canada first, I think there's a lot of Turkey talk about Canada first, but there's a lot of bullshit about that as well. And, you know, we really put that first before the technology. So, you know, it has to work. There has to be science, but fundamentally people need to trust it and I, I guess I'm the visionary around, how do we bring that to life? Chad (24m 12s): Nice. Nice. So you, you don't have a large staff, which is great. I mean, you're lean and mean, how are you guys hitting the market? How are you actually getting into business development? Partnerships? How are you getting that revenue up? What's your primary focus? Barb (24m 29s): Yeah. So look, we have a sales team who are awesome. And, you know, to be honest, a lot of our leads come from our customers. So some of our customers like, you know, Quantis is a fantastic business in Ireland called Woody's. That's just referring us to most of the Irish market and, you know, they are generating most of our leads, which is fantastic. So that's one way in which we go to market. The other is, we work with all the big RPO. So Ranstad globally is a big strategic partner of ours. All of the RPOs we're in discussion with, and, you know, they desperately need to bring technology into their stack, which is not just about solving efficiency for them, but also addressing the inclusion challenge. Barb (25m 10s): You know, I think organizations are desperate now for something to really fix bias and fix diversity. So we're seeing a lot of interest from the RPOs in using our technology. So those are the two ways in which we go to market direct and by RPO channel, Joel (25m 26s): All this stuff sounds really, really expensive Barb. What can I expect to pay for Predictive Hire? Barb (25m 33s): Yeah. So that's a great question. You know, look in terms of a range it's we typically price based on hires. Cause we think that's the metric that really matters. And we want as many candidates to go through this and experience it as possible because it's such an amazing experience. So depending on the scale of business and how many different countries were helping you with, you're probably paying anywhere from 20 bucks, a hire to a few hundred dollars a hire. So that's broadly the range for our pricing. We also have, I think that's something quite unique to us, we have a change management team because a big part of this is the, how do you bring the team along, right. And how do you get your recruiters to trust this? Barb (26m 14s): How do we build AI literacy internally? So we put a lot of effort into that change support, and all of that gets included in that incredibly cost-effective pricing that I've just shared. Joel (26m 25s): Well, thank you for the transparency, because most of the startups we interview are a little bit dancy around the pricing. So we thank you for that. And holy cow, it's the bell. Barb, are you ready to face the firing squad? Barb (26m 42s): I'm, yeah. I'm crossing my hands, my fingers and toes waiting. Yeah, go for it. Joel (26m 48s): Chad have at it. Chad (26m 51s): Okay. Barb. I'd like you to know, I don't believe in magic, fortune tellers or predictive technology, but I do believe in anti ghosting magic, your ability to scale, efficiency. I believe in giving recruiters and hiring managers, time back and cutting out all of the bullshit tasks and support and superfluous processes out of their day. I love ease of use for candidates and also for recruiters and staff. And I believe hitting the RPOs is just smart as you can get, which means I do believe in Predictive Hire. Chad (27m 36s): That's a big one applause for me! Barb (27m 40s): Wow. Thank you. Joel (27m 42s): Don't get too excited. It's my turn. It's my turn now. Look, we've had a lot of chatbots on this show, excuse me, conversational AI solutions on this show. And I don't think that I have given any of them, anything other than a big applause. This might be the first or it might not. I love everything you said. I am, to me, it's a mystery that a lot of these chat bots are being acquired for, I guess, a cheap price because they're not announcing the acquisition costs, but I think a lot of it is maybe people were early into the game. Maybe the tech wasn't right. Maybe I think the founders didn't quite get the market. Joel (28m 24s): I think that you're probably coming in at a really great time. I like the science. I love the PhD's on your team that you have listed. The one thing that I would, that I'm a little concerned about is the getting out of, getting into different segments of chatting. I think that if you have an eye faced toward America, you're going to have more than enough work ahead of you to get things right on the recruitment side, that getting a little bit distracted, maybe by onboarding or enterprise teams, whatever marketing, I don't know exactly what is in store, but I would, I would caution you against getting unfocused in terms of recruitment and the employment side. Joel (29m 14s): But I think that you're probably smart enough to focus. I love the fact that you're going to be announcing a new round of funding soon. I think you need to build up that team, build up that marketing and sales to tackle America and the rest of the world. I'm rooting for you. I think you can do it big applause for me. Chad (29m 33s): Holy cow! Put the shrimp on the bar-bee. Pop the corks baby. It's time. Joel (29m 37s): How do you feel Barb? Barb (29m 38s): Wow. I just was waiting for my moment. Thank you so much! Joel (29m 42s): What better way to start your day in Australia at six am? Barb (29m 50s): You sound like my board, that's very astute advice. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Very grateful. Joel (29m 56s): Great. Congratulations to you and keep us in the loop while you Barb. Chad Another firing squad in the books. Joel and Chad (30m 5s): We out. Firing Squad OUTRO (30m 13s): 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.

We wish there was a way to automate these ridiculous podcast episode descriptions, but until then, we'll have to be content with talking about recruitment automation. Most notably this week: Two automated scheduling startups got (additional) funding. Another big data solution made it to unicorn status. Stimulus checks aren't the problem The US Chamber isn't letting a good crisis go to waste. and TikTok ends the week with industry folks lining up to give the social media app an unwarranted tongue bath. As always, your favorite podcast is powered by Jobvite, Sovren, 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 (30s): Oh yeah. Coming at you from the home office in beautiful majestic Cleveland, Ohio, what's up boys and girls? It's your favorite podcast AKA the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host Joel "mistake on the lake" Cheeseman. And this is Chad (46s): Chad "I'm sounding silky smooth" Sowash. Joel (49s): Well Indeed on this week's show more funding flows into startups, maybe the extra unemployment wasn't the problem? And TED talk is here to save all our asses. Thank God. No thank God. JobAdX (1m 2s): 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. JobAdX (1m 48s): That's J O B adx.com/get-started-today. Joel (1m 53s): Cleveland's beautiful. This time of year, isn't it? Oh Chad (1m 56s): My God. It was hot as fuck yesterday today. Jesus, what the hell? Luckily we do have the, the, the breeze off the lake. That was, that was nice, but damn it was hot. Joel (2m 6s): A little humidity that might've been due to the giant storm that was coming through and disrupted our baseball game that was not played, which makes me very sad. But we had a good time with our friends. So why are we in Cleveland Chad? Chad (2m 21s): We're in Cleveland to visit with our friends over here at Evergreen. Evergreen podcast and we're building out the HR channel with a bunch of podcasts. You all know and love, you know, the Matt Alders, you know, the Crazy and the Kings, Jim Strouds and we got more podcasts coming, adding to the channel. So we're Joel (2m 43s): How many podcasts there are and employment who knew there was so much fricking content. Oh, well, let's get to shout outs. So I'll start with just Cleveland hospitality. The city has treated us very well. Similarly to Chicago last week, and a shout out to all the folks at Evergreen and especially super chef Michael Simon. We had some Cleveland barbecue. Yeah. It's actually a thing. If you're in Cleveland, head to fourth street. Yep. And check out Mabel's barbecue. Chad (3m 13s): It's delish. Joel (3m 15s): Order the ribs beer Chad (3m 16s): Great beer on tap. Oh, it was amazing. It was amazing. And as a matter of fact, Steven you should take Faith there for her birthday. Take her to take her to Cleveland. Happy 29th birthday Faith. That that's something that makes sure that the Steven does. Okay? Mabels. Joel (3m 33s): Oh, I can feel the love now. Walks by the lake, head to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Chad (3m 40s): Yeah. That'd be a nice trip. Joel (3m 42s): Go see the Christmas Story House, that's a highlight for me. Shout out to Axios. I don't know if you saw this in the news, but the web property that you probably know for simple brief news, it's also thoughtful is going local. They're coming to a local market near you and they're bringing job boards with them. Chad (3m 60s): Hello? Joel (4m 0s): Yes. Job boards are back in the Axios network. Not exactly sure how this will work? The it's spotty. It's spot in best the exact roll out of this, but we'll be watching. Yeah. Everyone thinks just slap a job board on it and it's going to be boats and hoes and champagne and cocaine. We'll see Axios. We'll see. Chad (4m 23s): Gotcha. You can't just put a ring on it, baby. You just can't put a ring on it. Shout out to European show. Number two. That's right. Kids, Joel and Lievin and myself were actually joined my Adam Gordon. That's right the mad Scott himself. And he was mad because Scotland was kicked out of the tournament. Not to mention also really pissed off that England beat Germany. Two-nil. Yeah, that was, that was not a great day for Adam Joel (4m 51s): My ancestry DNA profile says I should be rooting for England. So I guess I'm semi glad that they won. Surprised that France lost. I had been watching the final 16, which is pretty interesting. That was a shocker, I guess. Chad (5m 5s): So Mbappe, who was like the world cup, he was like the star for France. Right. And he just could not find his groove. He had plenty of shots on goal. He missed that last penalty shots. You know, they went into extra, extra innings. I guess you could say missed the penalty shot. I mean, that kid right now, he's gotta be on suicide watch. Joel (5m 26s): How do you feel about the penalty shot? Are you for it, against it? Do you say, Hey, just let him, let him play until they die. Do you like you like you like the shootout? Chad (5m 33s): Yeah. I do like shootout. I, I think that, that adds some excitement not to mention they've already played what, you know, at that point they'd they'd played like three hours. Joel (5m 41s): Yeah. Chad (5m 42s): So it was like, fuck man. So yeah, no, I dig it. Yeah. Joel (5m 45s): I think I'm a sudden death kind of guy. I like, just play until you're dead. Somebody is going to score at some point. So anyway, so what do we got? We got England. We got Switzerland? Chad (5m 59s): Belgium. Joel (5m 59s): Belgium. Chad (5m 60s): Italy. Belgium and Italy are actually playing. Joel (6m 3s): You're in Italy. You're a fan of Italy. You think they could a surprise a lot of people. Chad (6m 6s): They're young. They are incredibly talented. Belgium is obviously their number one team in the world, but I think Italy has a chance, but whoever comes out of it, they don't have to play France. So the left side of the bracket just got easier, Joel (6m 22s): Young and talented. You kind of described our show in describing Italy's soccer team. Shout out to a free shit. We're at the end of the month, we're going to name a winner for some free whiskey and beer here soon. Chad (6m 35s): Mayonaise. Joel (6m 35s): If you haven't headed to Chadcheese.com/free, we got t-shirts by Emissary. We got beer by Adzuna and we got whiskey by our friends at Sovren. So if you haven't done that yet, go out and do it. Chad (6m 49s): Cheese.com/free. Not to mention, also reach out to us on social media, LinkedIn, Twitter, hashtag Chadcheese. We enjoy hearing the feedback, stories and whatever you guys got to say. So like it, hate it. That's awesome. Just hit us on the socials. Joel (7m 6s): Yup. Yup. You mentioned Faith who celebrated a birthday recently? We got some other birthdays coming up. China Gorman. Oh, we're good money on Vegas. Vegas has opened up. So maybe she'll do it up there out on the strip. Also our buddy and fan of the show, Josh Akers celebrates a birthday July 2nd. Chad (7m 25s): He's gonna be 60 isn't here? Joel (7m 29s): So I don't know if we should be talking. I don't know. I don't know. Young and talented only goes so far. Chad (7m 35s): Oh, let me go ahead, ahead and pivot over to a shout out to Amazon. No shit, Cheeseman. I'm shouting out to Amazon who acquired Art 19, a podcast distribution and monetization platform. Last week we talked about Spotify, Facebook, Apple going hard into podcasts. I mean, this is the medium right here, baby. And now, you know, it is because Amazon is getting into this shit. Joel (8m 2s): Sorry. You were shouting out to Amazon? Did I dream that? I had a little bit to drink last night. I'm not sure what the hell is going on. This must be, yeah, this is the hangover. Shout out. Chad (8m 14s): I might have to ask Dave or engineer to get me a bucket. I had way too much to drink. Joel (8m 18s): If you go home and there's an Amazon box at your door, be, be very careful. Be very careful. Chad (8m 23s): Have my neighbor open it. Joel (8m 25s): Let's get into some topics. Shall we, oh man, holy shit. The money is flowing. Damn like the whiskey last night. All right. So we'll start with the high dollar beneficiary of some money. So Canada based HR software startup Vizier. Did I say that right? I think so has raised 125 million in series E funding bringing total funding to 216 million and valuing the company at unicorn alert $1 billion. That's B B B billion. Goldman Sachs asset management led the round and was joined by investors, including Sorenson Capital, Foundation Capital, Summit Partners, blah, blah, blah, found in 2010. Joel (9m 11s): The company has built a big data engine to ingest ingest. Yes, this is the company's language, not mine and analyze information from disparate human resources and related applications to develop more accurate profiles of people and departments. Chad (9m 27s): Messy. Joel (9m 28s): Places like Workday. They plug their shit in and get the data useful when considering, remuneration, promotions and wider hiring budgets. The solution that Vizier provides is a big data engine, again, that has built a, that can connect with a variety of platforms. Actually, I just talked about that. So what do you think about Vizier, Chad? I assume you'll edit that last part out more big data. Remember we talked about Apna who did something very similar everyone's into the data. Chad (9m 57s): So this is a messy, messy business, but making sense of the data from multiple systems, it's something that is not easy. And obviously they need a shit ton of cash to be able to make it happen. And this is, this is a workforce data management play, but they're also spinning this into business analytics. So I think it's much smarter to go at the business side of the house than just focused on HR. It's all business. It's what we can do to retain better production, better output who needs to, you know, hit the bricks and then also on the talent side. So I think these guys, the way that they're looking at this platform, isn't what we're used to because everybody tries to focus heavily just on the HR piece and with taking this much money, there's no way in hell an applicant tracking system or any of those platforms are going to buy them. Chad (10m 52s): Right. They need, they needed behemoths fucking system buying them, or they just need to integrate with everybody. So yeah, this is, I think this is an interesting, an interesting platform. It's all analytics, the SAP or Oracle by them. Joel (11m 8s): Yeah. A lot of this trend is the work from home thing, like big brother, AKA, your employer wants to keep tabs on you. And this is a way to do that. And if they can track your work and what you're doing and success rates, then it makes their job a lot easier. If they're not breathing down your neck all the time with you in the office. I do love the fact that they're branching out into other other industries. I think all they need to do now is slap on Amazon's automated firing software and they don't even need an HR department. It'll just handle everything for it. Chad (11m 43s): Yeah. I don't know if you know or not, but that didn't work very well for Amazon? They do have more than 12 million employee histories across 75 countries loaded into the platform. So the thing for me is I wonder how much money they're actually spending in on the cybersecurity side of the house? Because a lot of the data, like if you're in an applicant tracking system, you're not getting social, right? For the most part, you're not getting, you're not getting data that is really sensitive. This is going to be sensitive data. They're going to add all these different streams, so they need to lock this down pretty hard. Overall though, it's a big fucking payday for them. Joel (12m 23s): Big data payday if you will. Chad (12m 25s): Yes. Joel (12m 25s): All right. Scheduling, who knew, who knew? So Good Time firing squad alum, you said it was our second firing squad. We were going down memory lane last night. Okay. Is firing squad Good Time added 9.5 million to its series a funding bringing the total round to 16.7 million. I'm guessing they had to hit some milestones before they got the rest of the money. The San Fran based company intends to use the funds to accelerate the innovation for its hiring slash candidate experience solutions and go to market growth in a wide range of industries, talent acquisition teams at Zoom, Instacart, and Dropbox among others use Good Time to reach savings and hiring expenditures. Joel (13m 9s): The company was founded in 2016. Automated scheduling? It sounds like a feature to me, but maybe this is a fucking product? Chad (13m 16s): Yeah, no, this is a feature. This is not a product. The thing that I can't understand is how they are jamming DEI into this. You're seeing diversity, equity, and inclusion on everything much like you saw AI, like two or three years back., Joel (13m 30s): It's on their PR? Chad (13m 31s): Yes It's on their PR, it's on their website and it's like, scheduling will help you with your DEI. Where's the fucking correlation here? So again, I think there's a lot of reaching going on, but this is a lot of money for a scheduling tool. Joel (13m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. And they don't reveal much in terms of it being anything beyond scheduling. I know that this is an incredible challenge for companies, but if I'm Good Time and sell this shit now, because this feature is being built into every chat bot, a lot, ATS is CRMs. They're closing in on the point where nobody wants it because they can build it themselves. Chad (14m 14s): They might've just taken too much money. They might've just priced themselves out of actually getting acquired because they took more money. And because they are a feature, they're not, this is not a platform. Joel (14m 23s): Yup. Yup. You know, they say most companies don't die because they have too little money. They die because they have too much money. Chad (14m 31s): Yes. Joel (14m 32s): Good Time we'll be watching. Well, there's another scheduling software out of San Francisco. Oh my God. Prelude maker of hiring software raises 1.2 million in seed funding so they're like Good Time five years ago. Fuel Capital Jack Altman, Sam Altman, and Elad, Gil invested, formerly known as Interview Schedule. The company looks to make scheduling job interviews a little easier. Founded in 2017, the company has now raised 2.4 million to date according to founder and CEO Will Loffor. The company decided to rebrand because it hopes to do more than just scheduling. At least they've got a clue on that. And the company is looking to grow the platform to handle everything from initial email, outreach to a candidate, to the actual hiring process. Joel (15m 21s): Yeah. Chad (15m 22s): So a quote from the prelude CEO, he said there is no tool in the market, he sees, that specifically targets the scheduling and logistics issues, recruiters and candidates face. Does he have his eyes closed? I mean, this is baked into a lot of platforms already. Joel (15m 43s): Yep. Chad (15m 43s): We just talked about Good Time, right? I mean, how can you say this? There's no tool like this in the market. It's actually this young. I mean, it's not like he's got a real verbose toolset. Joel (15m 57s): Yeah. He needs to get really comfortable with the word niche or niche. However you want to say it, they need to go big time into healthcare or industrials or you name it. They need to be really good at a certain vertical. And I think about our buddy at Apple Chat, Adam, who started as a really broad vision and now just as healthcare and apparently does a really good business, just doing that. So if I were advising Prelude, which I'm not, I would say, I would say, go niche, boys and girls. Sovren (16m 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" Joel (17m 34s): How's your hangover doing? Chad (17m 36s): I need more water. Joel (17m 37s): Yeah. Chad (17m 38s): Dave do we have an IV? Is there an IV around? Joel (17m 40s): There's not enough water in Lake Erie? Yeah, I'll go. I'll grab that IV for you. Thank you. We have a third. We have a, I lied. That's good. I, it we're a professional podcast now. Well, Chad and we've been talking a lot about state benefits and seven states we talked about cutoff federal funding. Chad (17m 59s): The red states? Joel (17m 59s): I mean the Republican states, the red states. Yes. A lot of those states thinking that, well, if we just cut off the extra money, all these lazy asses, we'll get back to work and we can go back to the way things were. Well, the New York Times did an article that caught my attention that goes into sort of a progress report, I guess, of how this is going. So they focused on Missouri, a Missouri scrap federal pay to the unemployed saying it kept people out of the labor market. But so far workers still seem to be choosy. Workforce Development officials said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants since the government's announcement, which ended a $300 weekly supplement to other state benefits. Joel (18m 43s): And the online job site Indeed found that in states that have abandoned the federal benefits clicks on job postings were below the national average. Chad (18m 52s): What?! Joel (18m 52s): Why businesses are having such trouble hiring when 9.3 million people were unemployed in May is a puzzle that has generated lots of speculation, but little hard evidence. Chad, you've done your own little evidence, right? What have you found in this quagmire dilemma? Chad (19m 10s): Yeah, I think it's fairly simple kids that it's not a bunch of lazy asses on the couch, not wanting to do something right. It is a people who want paid more, or they don't want to go back to the same shitty job. And we've seen news reports of individuals during this year re-skilling, going into different industries, not wanting to do restaurant stuff anymore, not wanting to do what they were doing before and getting paid less. So, you know, I think this is going to be again, red alert, red alert, raise your fucking wages. Look at our wages or the past 50 years, we have not seen the uptick that we were promised by trickle down economics. Chad (19m 54s): We've got to do something to be able to pay these people a living wage. Yeah. Joel (19m 58s): Yeah. I think you touched on that piece, but I still think childcare issues are still a thing with a lot of people. I think there's still fear of COVID and what that can do. And I think that's the year has made people step back and really analyze what do I, what do I want to do with the rest of my life? And really think about that. I wouldn't be surprised if we've seen an uptick in applications to college. MBA programs. Maybe up-skilling with trades? I also think that for the first time in maybe our lifetime labor has the upper hand and I think in some way they realize that we're in demand now. We're actually in a position of strength. I don't think there's a cumulative labor secret labor union of everyone in this, but I think they do think, wow, I'm in control. Joel (20m 44s): I can take a little time. I can get that job when I want it. Make sure it's the right job. Salaries keep going up every, every week I'm learning about a new employer, raising minimum wage. I can quit and you know, by the way, I can drive an Uber or gig for that extra $300 a week possibly and still be okay. So the dynamics here are really, really interesting. Again, New York Times pointed out that it's still very early to make any sort of concrete, you know, explanation to any of this. But it is a fascinating story that we keep talking about every week. And it will only get more curious or curiouser for however. The U S chamber seems to think that they have maybe some answers. Joel (21m 25s): Announced this week, the US Chamber of Commerce will lead an initiative aimed at both industries and the government to address quote "a deepening worker shortage crisis" end quote. Through the initiative named America Works, that's clever and has probably never been used before. The chamber says it will push for policy changes at the federal and state levels to remove barriers, to work, including increasing the number of visas available to immigrants, improving federal investment in job training programs and expanding access to affordable childcare. It will also work hard to scale employer side solutions, including its own training programs. Sound Pretty good to me Chad Chad (22m 3s): Yeah, what's going to happen here is, the chamber, who's a lobby group for corporate America, right? Is a they're going to go out and they're going to try to get money from the taxpayers to re-skill all of these individuals. So it's corporate welfare is what it is. So the US chamber, who's very good at this. Very good at this. They want your money, your tax money. So they want us, you and I to pay for this re-skilling as opposed to the motherfuckers who are actually making the goddamn products, the goddamn money and the ones who were getting 30 million a year, right? The CEO's who were bloated. And they have crazy ass wages and salaries but yet their lobby group, the fucking US chamber go figure they that's what they're spinning into. Chad (22m 54s): All this other stuff is just, it's all fluff, right? Well, we've got our own training, whatever you're going to try to get money from the government to pay for this asshole. Joel (23m 2s): Never let a good crisis go to waste. And just as I mentioned, that labor is in the catbird seat for the first time in terms of negotiation, the chamber is looking at this and saying, Hey, there's an opportunity here for us to get a little cabbage, a little cheese. And yeah, it sounds really good though. A lot of politicians, a lot of people like to talk about all this shit that they're spitting. So I wouldn't be surprised if, if they get what they're looking for, you know, reminds me of, remember the whole meme stock, Game Stop thing. And everyone's like, oh, this is power to the people. This is the little guy. And then it came out later like, well, a lot of institutions were sort of gaming the system as well with the retail investors. Joel (23m 44s): And this feels like the chamber taking advantage of a macro economic trend and getting a little bit of theirs. Chad (23m 51s): It's easy. It's easy actually to go on news programs and actually say, this is what the people need. We need to re-skill, there's a skills gap. And, and, and again, we talked to Suresh over at Columbia, right? Yeah. And he talks about, you know, there is no skills gap. You know what you need to do? You need to pay people more. So the people are there, you just got to pay for it. Joel (24m 12s): So you're saying the U S chamber, won't say this? Chad (24m 15s): No fucking way. I need another. They'll just take more money out of our pocket, which is they're really good at, Joel (24m 21s): Can I get some more water over here, please? Chad (24m 25s): One thing that I think is going to be nice. Is as we transition into this new hybrid, whatever the hell they call these days is this third workplace. Have you heard of this thing? Joel (24m 39s): I have heard of it. And you shared a story on the newsfeed. It's quite intriguing, how human beings are adapting to the new world and the things that they're doing. What did you see in that? Chad (24m 50s): Yeah, so people aren't working from the office. They're not working from home either. They're working from everywhere. Dave, Joel (24m 59s): Dave actually came our soundboard guy came in to get my Shaker Yeti for more water, I'll take more water. Chad (25m 7s): I love that guy. Joel (25m 10s): Thank you, Dave, go back to the soundboarding. Chad (25m 13s): We are getting spoiled! Joel (25m 14s): Dave needs a new workplace too! Chad (25m 20s): But I'll give you a great example. So we're talking about not working from the office, not working from home. My brother-in-law right now is working out of his RV. Him and his wife are actually going across country. They're working out of their RV, right? You have these companies like Work Chew that we talked about several months ago, where you can actually put an app on your phone and you can see what different hotels, what restaurants have workspaces that are set aside. And then they have discounts for food and free coffee and all that other fun stuff. So, you know, we're all sick and tired of being at home and working from home. Totally get that. Chad (25m 60s): Everybody's like, oh, I need to get out! The office isn't the answer, for everybody. So I think this is pretty fucking cool. I, myself love getting out, going downtown in Columbus and doing work just in different, different areas. This is what this is. Joel (26m 15s): Sure. I think it all leads to sort of the customized work, work environments and the company losing control over what that looks like and the companies I think that can adapt too. Yeah, go on your RV tour. As long as your work is done and we can access you. And thankfully with 5g and technology and you know, Elan, Elan's going to plug us all in here soon with his satellite network. Our ability to do work at any time, all around the world is going to be something will happen. I think that companies are struggling with this, but I think that the trend seems to be, if you don't allow for flexibility and giving what people want, they're going to go where they can get what they want. Joel (26m 57s): And there was a story today on CNBC. I think if you'd seen it or not, but apparently Apple who we've talked about their three day workweek, I think it's Tuesday through Thursday, you're in the office regardless, or regardless of what your schedule is, is they're holding firm on that. They're not budging on that. And workers apparently are leaving. They're leaving or losing some talent because of that. So there's going to be room for technology to manage this. We're talking about already talking about companies that are tracking data, and you're, you know, how efficient you are in your job now. So technology is probably going to win this battle and the employer isn't, as long as the employer can keep tabs on you while you're pimping around the U S or wherever in an RV. Joel (27m 42s): Yeah. They're going to retain you as an employee. And I think that retention issue is what's really gonna come to the forefront because companies realize how expensive it is and costly on so many levels. It is to lose someone and they don't want to do that. Recruiting is hard, enough. Retention is hard enough. This may help solve some of those issues. And if you're not on board, you're going to get run over. Chad (28m 2s): Yeah. We start treating our employees like adults and saying, Hey, you have meetings that you have to be at. You have projects that you have to get completed. You have different phases of what you need. I mean, there's just so many things that we need to do as good leaders to be able to say, do it your way, get it done. You don't have to do it from here. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. And, and for us to actually have to have a pandemic to realize this, all these jobs that we could never do from home. Oh, you can never do that from home. Oh, magically overnight became, oh, wait a minute. Chad (28m 43s): This shit can be done from home. Yeah. Joel (28m 45s): Yeah. I think, you know, we talk about the pandemic as an accelerant. I think these trends would have happened. Eventually. They just got cut, you know, from 10 to 20 years to one year and people are a little bit shocked over that. And we're trying to figure out what exactly it is. But I think that that would have been a trend that would have evolved regardless of the pandemic. It just happened a lot quicker. We're creatures of habit, Chad. We go in the office, we'd go home. We'd go back in the office. We go home. Chad (29m 9s): That's it. That's not a life to live though. Right? Joel (29m 12s): It takes a real comet to come in and change that habit. And that comet came in in the form of a little bitty virus. Chad (29m 19s): Yeah. A little bitty virus. Joel (29m 21s): And speaking of little bitty viruses, let's talk about Tik TOK after the break. Chad (29m 26s): Last Jobvite (29m 26s): Last year, Summer-to-Evolve saw us bring together some of the biggest names in talent acquisition presenting, exciting content to help us learn and grow in these evolving times. This year, we're back to do it all again, taking our eight weeks of virtual sessions on tour for the Summer-to-Evolve road trip presented by Jobvite, virtually visiting locations around the world. We're excited to share more talent acquisition tips, tricks, and best practices with you. Visit the summertoevolve.com to learn more. Chad (29m 56s): TikTok? Joel (29m 56s): Dude, I really had hoped this would not be a thing, but it is becoming a thing. Is TikTokK, the key to recruiting gen Z. That rolls off the tongue, nicely, the movement for TikTok being the next employment juggernaut is gaining steam. In a story from Benefit News, that's a hard hitting organization, some industry folks sounded off in favor of TikTok, being a major player in the recruitment game, higher view CEO, Kevin Parker said, quote "for this new generation of digital native workers, which spends around six hours a day on social media. It makes perfect sense for employers to take that a step further by meeting them on their social media platforms" Joel (30m 41s): end quote, and our buddy job.com Aaron Stewart said, quote for gen Zers uploading a video resume will feel natural. There's so much more that as humans, we read out of visible videos than we do from some words written on a piece of paper or within a PDF of a resume, end quote. So Chad, are you picking up what our industry peers are dropping? Chad (31m 5s): We have to go where the people are, right? And it's the right demo for some of these, you've got to ask the question, does this blur the lines between personal and professional? I think it does. And I think we're already there. And I think we're moving past that. Right? And as we look at these, we just talked about hybrid working hybrid, working from home, working from anywhere. I think we start to focus on our personal and our professional being one and the same. They just flow. That's more fluid and not so hard cut like the 1950s. Do I think that this is something that's going to work? I don't overall, I don't think big companies will do it because the, the bias that automatically it will happen out of this. Chad (31m 51s): They also need to focus on if this is going to be a part of their stack, especially for, for these, these younger, the younger generation, they're going to have to have a much faster application process. It's gotta be a simple stack. I mean, there's just, there's just so much that they've got to think about, and these are videos. So are they going to, are they going to transcribe the videos that they have the texts so that they can match against? I mean, there's just so many things to think about in using this technology because you want to be able to scale. And if I get 300 to myself, if I get 300 TikTok videos, I can't watch all that shit. Chad (32m 31s): Nope. Right. So it's like, how do you scale something like this? So yeah, I totally get it. I think for recruitment marketing, it might be really cool. And we've talked about that before, but I just, I don't see this happening cause I don't see the ability to scale. Joel (32m 45s): Yeah. I tend to default on my age when I read stories like this and I look at historical perspectives and you and I remember in the two thousands, there was a real effort to visualize the resume. And you probably remember visual CV where you could make fancy headers and put pictures in and put logos in of the company that you work for and Gimbal videos and all that shit. Yeah. And that failed primarily because recruiters weren't used to seeing these digital resumes, they wanted to print them off or like, look at resumes as we know them right now, content. And then the parsers came in and the machines came in to say, well, this parcel, you know, this technology we'll look at a resume, make a key keyword searchable. Joel (33m 33s): It'll look for the terms, it'll match it to the jobs. And that is become a very important, you got prescreening as an element in this, which is really hard to do in terms of visualized, particularly video resumes. So this, the trend, the history is not real, real kind to these sort of innovations. And if putting pictures and images on a digital page was a little too much for the industry to handle, think about what videos short form videos are going to be for the industry. You mentioned transcription. I think that has to happen. You have to, if somebody is literally kind of say their resume on video, which I can't imagine any kid doing, or a young person doing, you gotta transcribe it. Joel (34m 15s): You got to match it to jobs and what's going on. And then you got the whole piece of, look, if I get 300 applications via video, I'm going, am I going to watch these videos? Am I just going to look at the transcription of the videos? And I don't care about the videos until there's. I mean, there's so many questions and hurdles to this being a thing that my 50 year old crotchety cobwebby ass just cannot get my head around the world. As I know it, embracing TikTok as a recruitment tool. I agree with you as a branding tool. It's great and innovative companies, progressive companies will understand that they'll put ads on, there'll be videos of their workers doing shit to show a branding message and what it's like. Joel (34m 58s): And like, oh, if you're interested in like doing this kind of work, click here to go to our ATS and be bored to sleep and not apply, have to apply like everybody else. But as an, as a marketing branding tool, I totally get that in Snapchat and Instagram. All of them I think are important to do that in video is a key component of that. But man, I cannot bridge the gap between apply to a job and social media, short form videos, having fun and a TikToking. Chad (35m 28s): It's just not practical. Either Is this fucking headache I have. Joel (35m 32s): And get off my lawn. We out. Chad (35m 35s): We out. OUTRO (36m 29s): 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 European market is poppin' hotter than a dinner date between Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin. This episode, the boys invite the angriest Scot they know in Adam Gordon to come on the show and share a few thoughts. It helps counter Lieven's more laid-back, collegiate demeanor as they discuss topics ranging from Adevinta's latest acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group, making it a Top 3 classifieds player, to talking about growing pay inequality throughout the continent to opining about the current state of Swiss sex workers. And if that wasn't hot enough... soccer, er, football. Or is it futbol? Such a complex place Europe is. Enjoy! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Europe Intro (5s): Some podcasts, do it for the fun. Some do it for the fame, Chad and Cheese they do it for global effin domination. That's why bringing America to its knees was just the beginning. Now they have their eyes set on conquering Europe and they've drafted industry veteran Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze of Belgium to help them navigate the old country and bring HR's most dangerous podcast across the pond to trash-talk like never before. Not safe for work in any language. The Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. Joel (38s): Oh yeah. Guten tag, my Kinder. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast Does Europe. I'm your cohost Joel "I'll never be Royals" Cheeseman. Chad (49s): And I'm Chad, "show me some of that football" Sowash Joel (53s): On this episode, a major global reshuffle in online classifieds, wage inequality is a problem in all kinds of languages and Swiss sex workers. Still the world's oldest profession, you know, in case this whole podcast thing doesn't work out. SFX (1m 10s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel (1m 13s): Show number two, boys, how are we doing? Chad (1m 15s): You've forgot Lieven. Joel (1m 16s): I know Lieven. Lieven, forgot, Lieven. Lieven (1m 20s): I shouldn't be forgetting myself. Joel (1m 23s): Pretend you're the Germans invaded Poland in the future. That's how you got to work with us Americans. You gotta be bold. Chad (1m 29s): Probably. Probably not a good idea. So let's go ahead. Let's, jump into football right out of that. We invoked Adam Gordon's name a few times last week. So we have a special guest host, Adam Gordon on the show. SFX (1m 43s): Welcome to all things Scottish our slogan is if it's not Scottish it's crap! Joel (1m 48s): Is Adam still there? Adam (1m 49s): Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Chad (1m 54s): Yeah, I bet you are. So the Scots and Walsh are out. Are you going to be rooting for England against Germany or is it anybody but England? Adam (2m 4s): Yeah, we've got a well-known acronym in Scotland, A.B.E. Anyone But England, I was really delighted with England's draw in the next round against Germany. Joel (2m 17s): Can they beat Germany? Adam (2m 18s): Because Germany always wins. Chad (2m 20s): No way. Adam (2m 20s): Germany always wins the weight on penalties and after like 300 minutes of play generally will still win. Joel (2m 27s): So I've done a little bit of homework, Adam, just a little bit. It looks like England's record in this tournament is better than Germany, but as Germany to spin in a tougher division, is that why you're predicting or Germany? Adam (2m 38s): I don't know. I mean, I don't, I'm surprised that England's record in this tournament's better than Germany's is. I don't think England's ever won it and I'm pretty sure Germany has won it. I really enjoyed 1996. I was at the game. It was the semifinal and it was England against Germany. And my dad and I were both there in our kilts. Unbelievable. The English fans didn't really appreciate us being there. Joel (3m 5s): What the hell does that look like? Lederhosen and a kilt? Wow! Adam (3m 10s): Probably a mix that should never happen. Joel (3m 12s): Lieven has a whole closet full of Lederhosen. Chad (3m 16s): You also have to realize that Germany was in the hardest group in this, in, in getting out of getting out of the groups. Joel (3m 25s): Yeah, that's what I meant. So they play five games, right? Something like that. Chad (3m 28s): Well, they, had to get through France, Portugal, and Hungary themselves. Now they're actually on the easy side of the bracket. If they get through England, the Netherlands have already done dropped off. Joel (3m 40s): If Lieven's a little quiet it's because he's hung over from the upset of Portugal. Lieven (3m 44s): Slight hangover, I told you. Joel (3m 47s): Is Belgium like a favorite now? Lieven (3m 49s): Yeah, Chad (3m 49s): They were a favorite before, Belgium was actually ranked above Portugal in this one. So. Lieven (3m 55s): Belgians ranked number one in the world. Number one football team in the world. And to me, Belgium is the second favorite, I think France is probably the favorite. Chad (4m 2s): What about Italy? Italy is looking pretty tough. They didn't look great the other day, but they're looking pretty tough. Adam (4m 8s): They're a dark horse. They're a young team and they've got, they've definitely got a chance. So it'd be an upset. It'd be a surprise if they won. It would be very cool! Lieven (4m 18s): When play against Saturday. Is it Monday? Chad (4m 20s): Yeah. It's soon. It is very soon. I mean, and again, Belgium got screwed in the upper left-hand quad. It's going to be like a slaughter house. Whoever gets out of that, will have France to deal with in, the semi's. Right? That's ridiculous. How were the teams actually picked? Because that didn't look like a fair draw at all. Adam (4m 41s): No it's out of a hat. They put all the, they put all the teams into like a big bowl and then they have a big ceremony with like hundreds of people getting prompts, sandwiches and coffee cups of tea and their suits and ties. And then they get a model or a pop star or somebody who fills out the names and that, yeah. You're right. Sorry. Yeah. Joel, when you said that, you know, England's got a better result in this tournament. That's because England had the easiest possible group. Alpha Scott. They had Scotland. Yeah. They had the Czech Republic, Croatia and Croatia. Pretty good. Czech Republic actually did very well. The other night beating the Netherlands. Lieven (5m 18s): Exactly. They killed the Netherlands yesterday. Chad (5m 20s): Well the red card didn't hurt. Right? When you get a red card and get a dude booted. Yeah. That's that that's gonna, that's gonna help out a little bit, but what about Hungary, man? They had 67,000 plus attendees in the stadium. You've got the Delta variant, like running mad from what I hear throughout Europe, is this gonna continue to happen? I mean, everybody who came in had to have a COVID passport, I guess. And they had to beat, they had to demonstrate that they had their shot. But do you see full stadiums continuing during this tournament? Lieven (5m 57s): Yesterday, they weren't full that much as I saw, they were empty, sometimes. Adam (6m 2s): Different countries, different rules, different rules in different countries. We're all in different phases of coming out of this or, Joel (6m 8s): Or, yeah. They're like, they're like states. I think Americans just think Europe is one big unified place. Cause you call it the Europe unification or the EU. So yeah. Lieven (6m 18s): Yeah. That was really, really looking forward to it. Russia versus Ukraine, two countries on the verge of war. Adam (6m 24s): Where are they playing? Are they playing in Crimea? Chad (6m 26s): Playing in Crimea? Yeah. That's a good idea. Joel (6m 29s): Yeah. Did you guys have any, did you guys care about the Biden/Putin meeting or was that sort of a yawner? Lieven (6m 35s): Oh, we watched this. Joel (6m 36s): And did Biden perform as a Europe had hoped he would. Lieven (6m 39s): He doesn't insult Putin this time, so we were a bit disappointed. He wasn't insane. He was a killer and et cetera. So yeah, Joel (6m 47s): He also didn't give him a tongue bath like our last president did. Chad (6m 52s): He gave him more than a tongue bath. Adam (6m 55s): But it would have been so much fun though. Cute. And it just guy, a wrestling match and said, right. Okay. You, you and me, you guys go and like full wrestling over. Chad (7m 4s): Come on man. Surprised he actually came to the press conference with a shirt on, to be quite Frank. I thought he would have come in on a horse. Yeah. With no shirt on, you know. Joel (7m 19s): He looks. So put out for that meeting. Like he was so mad to be there. Chad (7m 23s): He was because he generally doesn't have to answer questions from press, unless they're, I mean, if they're his press and you know, they're going to ask the questions that he allows asked. Joel (7m 33s): Speaking of not happy, I got a lot of flack for my Beamery commentary about there recent fundraising. Chad (7m 40s): What kind of flack? Joel (7m 42s): Well, I was kind of negative on the company and Adam in particular was quick to tell me that I sucked and he's a huge fan. Adam (7m 52s): I'm not sure I've said anything other than I completely agree with all of it, that you said. The only thing is, I mean, I don't think they're going to be losers, which is what I think you said. I don't think that, absolutely. Sure, they're not going to be as a CRM because the world does not need recruitment CRM as a category of technology. So, you know, you've got applicant tracking systems that are building their own folders effectively. So you don't need a CRM if you've got an iCIMS or if you've got a Smart Recruiters, you just don't need a CRM. Where it's still adding loads of value, I guess, is if you've got to work are a success factors, but both of those have either built or are in the process of building the same type of functionality. Adam (8m 34s): But what Beamery has to be using is not what it was or what it is today. Joel (8m 39s): So I think when you raise that amount of money, you know, as from my perspective, you know, bells go off and say, look, when you raise that much money, you either have to go and you have to go IPO, or you have to sell your, the number of buyers that can gobble you up becomes much smaller. So, I guess my perception or critique of a company changes when they raise that much money, do you, as a European Lieven and Adam, both, when you see a company raise that much money, do you guys think the same thing? Like, oh, they have to have a liquidation of intercut you get bought by a very few number of companies, or do you think something different? Lieven (9m 14s): Oh, it depends. Chad (9m 15s): Depends on what? Lieven (9m 15s): I guess depends on what the type of company, and their ambitions, what they plan to achieve. Chad (9m 20s): So take a look at Beamery and you, I mean, House of HR, you guys have done four acquisitions this year, so take a look at Beamery and give us kind of like your honest assessment on, you know, your thoughts around that space, being CRM, moving to ATS, what are your thoughts on it? Lieven (9m 38s): They claim to be a talent operating system, and it sounds a bit like a disc operating system, but less eighties, but when Microsoft launched it back, then they ended up pretty well. So I think choosing the name, right? I guess talent operating system does sound cool. I've been trying to figure out what they're up to, but I have no idea. Adam (9m 57s): I want to know what talent operating system is. Does it operate the talent? So it actually controls the people. The individuals is that what talent operating system is? Lieven (10m 8s): A fancy name for like a full service agency, something like that I feel. Adam (10m 12s): To me, It's a terrible, terrible name to call any type of technology is that it operates the talent. I don't know who came up with that, but they need fired. Chad (10m 21s): Well, if you take it, take a look at Eightfold who came out with the tip, talent intelligence platform world, right? And then you've got Phenoms candidate experience, and then you've got Beamery with this operating system thing. They're all trying to come up with new names, or new ways not to say applicant tracking system. Adam (10m 41s): Whomever came up with a tip. Whoever came up with that, they also need fired. There is an established talent intelligence is an established process within recruitment, which, and they do not do talent intelligence. So that was the wrong description again. The toss and the tip both needs tossed into the tip. Joel (10m 59s): Toss in the tip. Lieven (11m 2s): I tend to agree with Adam, if you say Talent operating, it's like it's too harsh. You can nurture talent, but to operate talent does sound a bit fancy, almost. Chad (11m 14s): Tell me what you think about the convergence though, because we have now all of these quote, unquote CRMs and or matching platforms or whatever they are. They are taking a shitload of cash, which means they have to broaden out and they have to converge on the applicant tracking system. What are your thoughts around that? Lieven (11m 29s): Exactly. So it's like a very red ocean. I mean, I was a veteran company, launched an ATS system last week, a free one just to enable our clients to post our jobs better. So there are so many layers on the markets. And if you want to make a difference, you'll have to come up with something great. And then 138 million might help, but I'm not sure how they are going to do it. Adam (11m 54s): There's a third option. So you said that you said they either get bought by somebody, but at the end of the number of companies that buy them, do it starts to become smaller because of the amount of money they've raised, or they go for an IPO. The IPO option is something that they might do, but there's a third option, which is, they just become a walking zombie. That's very, very possible. If they've got game-changing ideas that they're going to spend that $130 million on, they've got a brilliant chance of being a huge player, you know, a big, big market player within recruitment technology. If they're out of ideas, they're a zombie, they're becoming a zombie like slowly. Chad (12m 31s): Well, everybody has ideas. It's all about prioritizing. And then being able to execute on them without getting too, too wide. And when you start taking money like this, you have investors coming in and pressing you to be able to do things that are on the fringe of quote-unquote vision. Right? So how do you stay disciplined to do what you need to be that expert in that one space, as opposed to be really shitty at everything else? Adam (13m 0s): Well, with $130 million, you don't. You have to go broad. You have to, the convergence that you've been talking about past the app, but they have to take in take over the applicant tracking system area because you know, the one doesn't, the world does not need recruitment CRM, all the ATS's are building it. Even Workday is building it, which is really interesting as well, because what, they obviously invested a lot of money into Beamery. So, I mean, the supposition was that they were going to acquire Beamery at some point, which they haven't done. And they're literally going to probably 138 million. Now they can still buy it, but thought they had done it, , rather than somebody else investing. Chad (13m 38s): You would have thought so. Right? Well, what do you think Lieven? Lieven (13m 40s): It's just too easy today to get money. There's so much money in the markets. And sometimes I feel those investors are actually looking for someone who they can spend it on. Our own company, for example, when the whole COVID experience started our management dots, eh, we're going to get all the cash we can just to make sure. And we ended up referring that million. And now we have a big fund to do some acquisitions because maybe we just saved the bit on the expenses. And when we got some credits, so now we are on the lookout as well. And as you mentioned, we did four M and A's this year, plenty more to come. It's just the perfect day today to get money and to buy companies. Lieven (14m 24s): But I'm not sure how long it will last. And as you say, with companies getting that much money too easily, if you become a zombie company, it's easy to get paid for a few years before the investors, get to know it. Joel (14m 37s): And speaking of a lot of money. Chad (14m 40s): TOPICS! Joel (14m 43s): Big news apparently out of Europe, out of Adevinta. And I'm apparently saying that correctly because our European guests told me so. The Oslo-based marketplace, operator last week announced it has completed a $9.2 billion cash and stock acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group. The biggest deal in the history of classifieds, everybody. The transaction has created a company with annual revenue of around 1.6 billion euros. That's based on 2019 results. Adevinta now becomes a whole new company that almost doubles in size. Here are a few of the other highlights. This deal catapults Adevinta from number 11 in classified revenue globally to number three, thereafter, Recruit Holdings are buddies who own Indeed and Glassdoor and fiftyeight.com. Joel (15m 33s): I believe out of China, this also based on 2019. It establishes a near dominant classifieds company across Western Europe with the leading horizontals in each of the big five economies. It also ends any ambition process, which we've been talking about, making a lot of acquisitions lately. Any ambition they have to become a major player in Europe and a truly global operator across both emerging and developed markets. And it also ends Axel Springer's ambitions to become the European leader in classifieds and brings a new level of competition to its home territory in Germany. So, yeah, it sounds like a pretty good, pretty big deal. What are the Europeans on the show? Adam (16m 14s): It's great for European companies that they're buying American businesses because normally it happens the other way around people, what some people, especially in America, but people don't realize is Europe has twice the population of the USA in half of the land space. So it's a very, very complex territory. And so as a result and because there's so many different languages and things like that. As a result, there's so many business opportunities here you can, that you could, you know, you can target different countries. You can target different professional interests, personal interests, there's all sorts of ways of slicing it up and then you can slice it up a bit more so, the opportunities are probably bigger than they are in the USA for a few different reasons. Adam (16m 56s): Adevinta is a company that I know a little bit about because they, one of my customers, generally people have not heard of them because they're better known by their brands and in the UK, they're not very well known because I think their main brands are in Spain and France and Germany and other places so they don't really have an awful lot of presence in the UK. Joel (17m 14s): What are some of their bigger, more well-known brands in the, in the continent and particularly job search ones in particular? Are there any that stand out? Lieven (17m 21s): Info jobs in Spain, that is the one I know. And another one is in the Netherlands, but that's mostly just classifieds, but it's really a fragmented. I think jobs is just a rather small part of what they're doing. Joel (17m 36s): So on the US side, it was eBay classifieds anything that you guys thought about when you advertised or looked at competitors? Lieven (17m 44s): Not me. Adam (17m 46s): No, no. Here either no Joel (17m 49s): Impacts Canada on our side with Kijiji, which is a huge cost of flights online there in Canada. But I guess Kijiji, wasn't a thing over in Europe? Adam (17m 59s): No, no time. Chad (18m 1s): They have a very diversified portfolio. I mean, if you take a look at it across geographies, verticals, notably Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Canada, Brazil, I mean really didn't have anything at all in the US. This is a big impact. The big question is, do they start reaching out into the job space at all? Or is that not even relevant to them because they're more into selling other things Joel (18m 27s): Personally, I think it has to be, I mean, classifieds online, whether it be, you know, whatever industry jobs is going to be a component of that. And I think that when you look at, you know, Recruit Holdings is in that list of the top three, I think it would be in Adevinta's best interest is to start getting into recruitment. And I wouldn't be surprised from our perspective that with the new money and sort of, you know, gravitas that this company will command is that if, you know, they don't maybe go gobble up a Beamery or an Eightfold or make a big impact or big acquisition, maybe a ZipRecruiter to really sort of stake their claim in the employment sector. Chad (19m 7s): Is that where Axel Springer starts to really hedge and they start to gain more market because they focus on the job side of the house where it seems like Adventa is a kind of, they have a blind spot right now? Adam (19m 21s): Is Recruit Holdings number one, did you say in the world for classifieds and Recruit Holdings, do they only do recruitment? Joel (19m 28s): It's based on classified revenue? So, yeah. Recruit Holdings is number ones too. Obviously jobs is their number one. I don't even know if they're in anything else, but in revenue, that's the list. Lieven (19m 39s): Adevinta and Glassdoor are the companies you can compare to this one, than, they might be big, but it's, in my opinion, something different. You can't compare Indeed with, let's say Infer Jobs in Spain. Joel (19m 52s): But does Adevinta sort of make some big moves now with the enhanced revenue to make a big move in recruitment? I mean, is there anyone in Europe that you guys would say, wow, if they bought them, that would be a huge deal? Adam (20m 5s): Yeah. If they bought Axel Springer. Step and then total jobs and all that, but again, it's very like probably a bit, unlike the USA, it is much more country focused. So the, the biggest, like outside of Indeed the biggest job boards in the UK are not anywhere else. Like read is I think probably number one after indeed. And then I know there is nowhere else. It's only in the UK to full jobs. I'm pretty sure it's the biggest in tech and I'm pretty sure it's nowhere else inside the UK and it'll be the same. We're Levin is and yeah, Lieven (20m 43s): It's really a very fragmented and there are many local players who are dominant just in their own region and you have a few global players, like Indeed, for example, but not that many. Adam (20m 52s): I mean, StepStone, for example, must be number one, the number, number one, European like job board, but I'm pretty sure it's not in the UK. It is certainly not one that any of my customers use regularly. Lieven (21m 5s): And young people just don't know StepStone anymore. It's not as bad as with Monster, but one out of two has never heard about StepStone, graduating now. So it's also old school. Chad (21m 14s): Wow. That that's, that's big. So 50% of the people that are actually graduating don't know StepStone, is that what I just heard? Lieven (21m 21s): But I can only speak for the Belgium market in this. I'm going to do more research on the surrounding countries, but I can see why it would be different than the Netherlands or Germany, but, Germany may be. Yeah, it's our biggest market. So they're advertising a lot, but to young people graduating now, they never heard about StepStone here because they don't advertise anymore. It's just too expensive. Joel (21m 43s): So Adevinta's move would be to gobble up a bunch of smaller fish is what you're saying. Lieven (21m 48s): It's what they already for our brands. So come buy a few more and act local. Adam (21m 54s): It depends if they think recruitment is a strategic opportunity for them. Chad (21m 58s): Because there's money there. Adam (21m 60s): Yeah. But a lot of media businesses think it's so fickle and it's such a, it changes, it changes too much. It's non predictable. It's not easy to control. It's completely linked to economies which are out of their control. So it kinda kind of depends whether or not it's a strategic, you know, priority. Lieven (22m 19s): I agree like recruitment is difficult because you have no, no loyal candidates. People are looking for a job. They find a job and they hope never to be having to look for a job again. So when you're a newspaper and you can convince someone to become a reader, then you can have them for years. And if they reached the classifieds for the cars, et cetera, they can buy several cars and whatever. But with jobs it's difficult, you constantly have to focus on new potential candidates, new clients. So, it's really expensive to keep advertising Adam (22m 53s): Investors. I mean, talking to, for my own knowledge of talking to like VC firms, I probably one and two VC firms I've spoken to, but investing in my company over the last couple of years, I've said, yeah, recruitment is just of no interest to us. It's of no interest to, and I've asked them why and they've often said, it's because it's unpredictable, it's too fragmented. It's difficult to predict what's going to happen with it. Chad (23m 16s): That's why you diversify. Right. I mean, that's what it's all about. And then you take a look at like at Adevinta's their portfolio. It's incredibly diversified. So my question is, are we looking in the wrong space? Are these organizations really looking long-term to challenge Google, to have all the classified information instead of like Levin said, you know, we're not always looking for jobs. Adam (23m 39s): That's right. Chad (23m 40s): But all with all the other classified information, this could become closer to a lifestyle platform then just going over to Indeed for jobs. Right. So do you think this could be perspectively a play to be able to gain Google share? Adam (23m 54s): Again, as a board, as a boardroom, that's a boardroom question, but given the amount of money that's going into it, there's a definitely a strategy which is around data. Joel (24m 4s): I mean, Chad, we've talked about, you know, talent.com, which is now, you know, a top 10, if not, top five now trafficked job search engine. And I know Jubal is a player globally as well. I can certainly see Adevinta looking at Recruit Holdings, strategy of getting, you know, sort of a job search platform that's growing and already has a ton of traffic that is probably affordable for them and making a move like that. Lieven (24m 30s): Maybe we should just talk to them. Joel (24m 31s): Well hat takes work Lieven, come on, man. Lieven (24m 35s): But it's interesting to see where they came from. They used to be part of Shipstats, which was a major, and still is a major newspaper publisher in the Nordics. I think Norway I'm sure. And when I was writing for a Belgium newspaper company 20 years ago, and I worked for job ads, which is still is the biggest job site, the local job site, we looked at Ship Stats and they were the most innovative people back then. And they launched Adventa and they let it go someday or better apparently did it. Well, you have to reckon those were the days when people and newspaper companies were still thinking, no one is ever going to read a newspaper on a screen, but they believed in it. Lieven (25m 16s): And they launched all those platforms and the end, they were totally right. Joel (25m 20s): We'll go talk to Adevinta when they fly us to Oslo. How's that, how's that sound? Chad (25m 24s): I'm in for that. Joel (25m 25s): I'm in for that. All right. Let's get into some wage inequality issues there in the UK. You remember last show, we talked about the UK having issues with workers, primarily from an immigration perspective. And now Germany is a, in the news big time. So a lack of staff across Europe is hampering the reopening plans of hotels, restaurants, and bars, which threatens to hold back an unexpected economic rebound as vaccinations accelerate, and COVID-19 restrictions are eased further. Some managers in the sector say they may raise wages to attract workers. What a concept? What are you guys seeing in terms of broader European pay inequality and staffing issues across the continent? Adam (26m 7s): Well, the UK is a bit, a bit different to most of mainland Europe in that we opted out of being part of something that was actually really successful for us. And, Tim Martin. I really like this. Tim Martin, who's the founder and CEO of a big pop company in the UK called Wetherspoons. He was one of the, sort of a big voices advocating that the UK should leave the European Union. And now he's one of the big voices advocating to changing the immigration laws so that we can get more people from the EU coming into the UK to work in his bars, a bit of a bit of an irony there. But our challenge definitely is in the UK that we don't have as many really talented and brilliant people coming from the EU as we did. Chad (26m 54s): So in, I mean, in the U S we have, obviously we have this big issue that we don't have pay transparency. And thus, it it's really hard to focus on pay equity if you don't know where the problems are at. Right. So I was actually on, on Twitter this weekend and a business leader from Europe actually tweeted, I don't advertise a salary. I think it's limiting until, you know, the candidates, what they value and how the job might be shaped to their strengths and purpose. Now, right out of the gate, this, I thought the guy was from the U S to be quite Frank, because that's how we've engineered inequity for years. Chad (27m 39s): I was surprised to see this come out of Europe. And there's also a new proposal by the European commission on transparency. Now that I would assume is not going to encompass the UK now that the UK is doing the Brexit. But what about Europe overall? Is there a movement to transparency in some, in some countries? Is it mandated? How does, how does it work and how do you guys deal with that? How do you navigate all that? Lieven (28m 9s): It's weird that you say, because we always look at the US as an example of equity. Chad (28m 14s): We suck. Lieven (28m 15s): And it's weird too, because if you look at Glassdoor or Indeed, or the other sites, whenever there is mentioned wage or a, how you call it a fork with a less, from this salary to that one. Chad (28m 27s): Yeah. Lieven (28m 27s): Always in the U S we don't do it in Europe, we're starting to do it now. And one of our companies is actually pushing it because people would like to have it published everywhere, but in most European countries, you will never see a salary in a job advertisement. So it's hush, hush, people don't talk about salary, which is easy for HR, of course. Chad (28m 48s): You're seeing that on Glassdoor though. And Glassdoor actually artificially injects salary range into most of those jobs that was not put on the actual job description by the company. Lieven (28m 59s): Yeah. We actually started filling in those ranges because of Google for jobs and because of, yeah, so they did a good thing. Joel (29m 8s): That strikes me as strange because I think most Americans consider Europe very progressive. And over-regulated probably in the fact that there's never been legislation created to require salaries or salary ranges on jobs is kind of surprising to me. Lieven (29m 24s): There is a minimum wage, and that's a very good thing, but there's not a maximum one. Joel (29m 29s): Yeah. Lieven (29m 30s): That's a good thing too. Joel (29m 31s): And Adam, it sounds like the UK issue is more about, we don't want to pay people more. We just want to get more people that will take less into the country. Whereas maybe the mainland Europe, is more, they might have to raise salaries because they already have the immigrants. Am I right about that or no? Adam (29m 47s): The UK has got some problems, as I think everybody knows, and one of those problems to my mind is that it's becoming more like the USA when it comes to aspects of employment. And so that person, I'm not surprised that that was somebody in the UK who said, look, I don't want to advertise my salary because I want to see what the people are bringing and then I'll decide what I want to pay them based on who's bringing what. That would be a, probably a small company view of what to do. So I would be surprised if that person was not running a small business. And so, you know, they're looking at those kinds of details on a hire by hire basis, rather than having set policies. Adam (30m 28s): They probably don't have any policies in that company. I do think in general, and I'm not taking this upper level in terms of the subject, but, we in the UK are taking capitalism a little bit too far. And we've got scenario where the richer are richer than ever and the poor are poorer than ever. Chad (30m 45s): Join the club. Adam (30m 47s): That's not acceptable. And it's becoming, yeah, exactly. It's becoming very like the USA. And I don't like that. I like the way that things happen in certain parts of Europe, in Scandinavia and places like that, where, you know, there are better protections for people, there's less inequality. I think some countries like Denmark take it a bit far, Germany and France have taken a bit far in terms of their employment kind of employment rights. You can't really fire people, stuff like that. I think in the Netherlands is a little bit like that as well, but I am slightly concerned about the UK becoming too, too much like the USA when it comes to capitalism, although where I live in Scotland. They don't really want the majority of people don't really want that kind of ideology. Chad (31m 30s): What about unions? And I mean, because I know that here in the U S where we we've been busting unions for decades now, Belgium from a report that I read actually, 50% of the employees are in unions. Finland's like 74% Sweden 70%, but overall the EU average is 23%. So what do you think that has to do collective bargaining ensuring, you know, obviously equity, do you think that has a large impact as well? And has the UK also been busting unions? Adam (32m 7s): Unions have been getting eroded in the UK for a long time. There are going to think like the power of the use to, and one piece of evidence of that is that the, the unions control the labor party, which was for a long time, the number two political party in the UK. And I don't know what it number is just now, but you know, they're getting the votes from anybody really, but I personally support credit unions, and I think they ensure that companies treat people, right. Joel (32m 40s): So one of the big issues here in the states is sort of, you know, federal funds have been going into unemployment benefits for awhile where they typically don't, it's typically a state benefit. And a lot of the critique of not being able to fill jobs has been linked to, well, the fed just keeps spending money on people why would they want to go to work? So quite a few states in the country, seven recently, mostly red or conservative states have cut off the sort of federal funding for that hoping that, that would send people back to work. I think it's still a little too early on exactly how that's going to play out. Joel (33m 21s): But do you guys see in Europe, a big initiative to cut off unemployment funds that were linked to COVID what's the situation there? And do people think that cutting off more federal funding will lead to more people coming into the workforce? Adam (33m 36s): Well arguably unemployment benefits are generous in the UK. You've got parts of the UK where you've got 3, 4, 5 generations of unemployed, people that have never worked, and they're going to college in order to just to tick the right boxes so that they can continue to not work. Chad (33m 53s): How much do you guys give them a month in the UK? There's no fucking way an American can live off the shit that we get? Well, how much do you guys get? Adam (34m 2s): This is the thing I've been listening to your show the last few weeks. And I've been listening to this problem with getting people working in the U S because the unemployment benefits to do with COVID and I'm thinking, well, yeah, I mean, that's just like the status quo in the UK. You don't, you can earn as much for doing nothing as you can in most service jobs, you know, most service jobs are construction jobs or, you know, those types of roles. Joel (34m 27s): So what's the incentive to work? Adam (34m 28s): Pride, I guess, But also national insurance contributions. You, you get, you get national insurance contributions when you work and that contributes to your state pension and things like that. So there are, I mean, there are some benefits, but to working over not working, but it's not a terribly difficult life to not work. Lieven (34m 48s): You can't speak for the whole of Europe, but because it's really different and there are several legislations on the country. But just to give you an example, and I have to be very careful about what I'm going to tell you now, because unions and the temping industry are not the best friends. So I need to watch my language. Chad (35m 8s): Yeah. They're I mean, they're big in Belgium. I mean, the unions are? Lieven (35m 11s): Yeah, I'm good. Just one example, which I think I can tell. You know unemployment. How do you call it wages if you're an employee, okay. They are paid by the unions and they get a small percentage of every paid wage to just to be able to work. And the unions get some of the money. So they actually get better the more people are unemployed, that's something nobody's realizing, but the more people are unemployed, the better for those unions. So they protect their people and they don't activate them. If you're unemployed, if you don't want to work, they're not going to tell you, you should work because you're able to work and you're not getting money for doing nothing forever, they actually get richer the more people are unemployed. Lieven (35m 58s): And that's a terrible system in my opinion. Joel (36m 0s): Who is the toughest country, on people who don't work in Europe? Lieven (36m 4s): I think the toughest that I know of probably maybe, yeah. And on the Eastern European countries that are the softest I guess a France for example is they're going to strike it's. Something gets learned at school, I think. It depends. Did you in the US all the the yellow coats. It was like an activists, Chad (36m 30s): In France. Joel (36m 31s): Everyone in America thinks French don't work, but I don't, I don't know if they would think that the UK is, as Adam has portrayed it. I think that they probably think it's a little tougher in the UK. They already have written off France. And when we say socialism, it's usually connected to France in some way, if not Europe as a whole, Lieven (36m 50s): They kind of invented it. Adam (36m 55s): By the way, what I said about the UK, I don't want to say there's like masses of people who don't want to work. I mean, there are, if you don't want to work, it's not, if you don't want to work, you don't probably have to. But I think a lot of people who are unemployed they're unemployed because they can't work because they've got health issues or something like that. There are enough jobs for there's enough jobs for everybody. That's for sure. Chad (37m 16s): Plenty of jobs in Switzerland. Joel (37m 20s): Unless you're a sex worker. Apparently Chad, so our, our next story here. So Switzerland's highest court last week, rejected foreign sex workers, access to compensation for pay due to the Corona virus pandemic. I've said it so much in the last year, I can't even pronounce it anymore. Saying temporary workers were ineligible for short time work payouts due to their short stay. The court denied a request by an unidentified sex club operator in the Northeastern Canton of Thurgau, saying that maybe correctly, who's 30 workers were put out of work from March 17th until June 5th last year, when the club closed due to government measures to contain COVID. Joel (38m 3s): Because the workers were permitted to work in Switzerland for only four months, under the rules, allowing people from the European Union, Iceland, Lichtenstein, and Norway to work in Switzerland for a short time, the court determined they were ineligible for compensation. Ultimately the court said sex workers did not fit the criteria of employment. Guys aren't sex workers people too? Chad (38m 25s): Is that just a transient job? Because it seems like only immigrants are coming in to do it. Joel (38m 33s): No, let's ask Adam and leaving about sex workers and how transient it is. Guys do do women and sex workers just coming to town for a few months and then leave. Is that the status quo? Chad (38m 45s): The Swiss way? Adam (38m 46s): My question about this article is the focus on sex workers, just clickbait, because surely applies to anybody who's basically working on a short term visa or something like that. I mean, they're also only, you know, if I'm, if I'm what can in, there's a lot of different jobs, if I'm where there's only a short amount of time that they're actually going to be in the country. So I think for me, the focus of the sex workers is just to put it onto podcasts and stuff like that. But as far as I'm aware, Joel (39m 15s): What are you saying Adam? Adam (39m 16s): Sex workers prefer to like build up a clientele, you know, where they are and so a bit of like, long-term sort of, you know, working is the right thing to do, unless they're taking this or Tim Ferris kind of attempt to traveling the world and having sex for money. Joel (39m 39s): From an American point of view. I mean, this, these are not like legal jobs. So there is no sort of government benefits for being a sex worker, because if you're doing it, if it's not in places in Nevada, it's illegal. So there is, there are no benefits. So I think that's why there's some level of shock to read this story as an American is that wow, sex workers actually have these rights and in Europe, apparently they do. It's just a matter of they weren't here long enough. Adam (40m 6s): Yeah. I mean it's not an actual job in the UK. It's not like a, I'll rephrase that. It's not a job. You don't get your national insurance payments for being a sex worker in the UK. You know, your contributions aren't part of that. It's not an official job. It definitely is in some countries, but. Lieven (40m 22s): In Belgium and the Netherlands, it is? Adam (40m 24s): Yeah. Chad (40m 25s): Yeah. So that's what I was going to ask Belgium, Netherlands? Joel (40m 28s): And Switzerland. Lieven (40m 30s): Germany as well. Switzerland probably too, yeah. But I thought the problem with the Swiss government was they just didn't consider it work probably because of the high fun factor. Joel (40m 41s): Is it legal? Is it legal in Switzerland? Lieven (40m 43s): I guess so I'm not sure. Chad (40m 44s): It said that there's no real employment contract between the club operator and the sex workers. It seems as if there was a contract much like we have contractors and quote unquote statements of work, which the sex workers decide themselves on what services they're going to provide. If they had a contract, it sounds like this would be, this would be null and void, that they would actually have an opportunity to gain some of these entitlements? Lieven (41m 13s): The problem is it's illegal to exploit people. So the job where you own a bar and you put people to work, that's illegal. But sex working on is okay. But maybe it's not okay, but it's not illegal. Adam (41m 27s): I mean, could you imagine what the contract says in terms of like services you'd have to, you'd have to have a proper under contract. I think you need a job description so that you can make the contract to that. So that in the case of unfulfilling your, you know, fulfilling your duties, what do they exactly involve? Joel (41m 44s): Were these jobs posted on Adeventa? Adam (41m 47s): Probably. Lieven (41m 49s): Yeah probably. Those are the advertorials read most. SFX (41m 55s): Oh, Hell no. Chad (41m 56s): You're thinking of Penthouse forum. Lieven (41m 58s): Those are the things people actually look at first when looking at those little advertorials. Adam (42m 3s): The only problem I have with this whole industry is the exploitation aspects of it. Because of course it leads to human trafficking and people doing things. Joel (42m 11s): Slavery. Adam (42m 12s): Slavery, and all that kind of thing. I mean, if somebody's underage, if also, I guess the health aspect keeping up, but because if they're doing it in order to pay for some sort of substances, which they shouldn't be taking either there's aspects of that, which are bad, but other than that, there's nothing wrong with that industry. Yeah. Chad (42m 29s): So I guess, Joel, it seems fairly simple Adam and Lieven and we're all on board. All we need now are real employment contracts for sex workers and we should be good. Adam (42m 43s): I have given them I'd have given them the COVID payments. No problem. That's fine. Joel (42m 47s): Is that, is that all you would have given them Adam, Adam? Adam (42m 49s): Yes. Yes. SFX (42m 50s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel (42m 54s): What a large, strange, complicated continent Europe is. Adam (42m 57s): It is weird. I mean, it definitely is weird. 44 years living in it. And I still think is weird. Absolutely. Joel (43m 4s): And with that. Chad and Joel (43m 6s): We out. OUTRO (44m 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.

This week has a little bit of everything. First, it's a heavyweight fight between Amazon and Walmart for which one's a soulless pit of human misery and which one is an employee-friendly innovator. After digging through the carnage, the boys dive into a little Buy-or-Sell, featuring Candidate.co, Apna, and eqtble (dare you to type that into autocorrect and see what happens). After that, take a mental trip to Colorado and hear why some employers don't want remote workers that hail from The Highest State. What, you greedy bastards want more? How about some podcast industry chatter and the "Waffle House Challenge." What the hell's the "Waffle House Challenge"? You gotta listen. As always, the podcast is powered by Sovren, Jobvite, and JobAdx. 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. An Indiana woman became the first person sentenced in the Washington Capitol riot. Another proud Hoosier moment. What's up kids? It's HR's most dangerous podcast AKA the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host Joel "never convicted" Cheeseman. Chad (39s): This is Chad "I'll take another waffle" Sowash. Joel (43s): And on this week's show a tale of two mega corporations. We don't need no Coloradan remote workers and a little more buy or sell. Little known fact Rocky Mountain High took John Denver nine months to write. Life really ain't nothing but a funny, funny riddle. And yes, we even have waffles on the griddle this week. Chad (1m 3s): Yes! SOVREN (1m 4s): 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 (1m 48s): 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 (2m 4s): Chicago Backslide, baby live in that full VAX live. Joel (2m 10s): Tiptoeing into travel in the Honda civic, heading to Chicago. That's how we roll baby. So big shout out to team Shaker. Jeez. They know how to treat a guy Chad (2m 22s): Joe. Now 70 years Shaker, 70 years old. And I didn't, I didn't think Joe looked that old. He doesn't. Joel (2m 30s): He is a sexy man. He is John Jr. Chad (2m 33s): Not a day over 65, I'd say. Yeah. Joel (2m 37s): So a shout out to the, the Cleveland Indians who beat up on the poor Cubbies and regularly won me a little cash and lightened up Joe Shaker a little bit. I was, I was happy about that. Chad (2m 49s): Yeah. We were able to see some friends got John Graham Keegan was there Chris Pickle. We even, we saw our favorite millennial had breakfast with Kyle. SFX (3m 0s): Oh hell now. Yeah, Joel (3m 3s): Kyle's a good kid. He wore his version of Ohio State backing attire, which was cool. Chad (3m 8s): Pretty, pretty pathetic, pretty pathetic. But what wasn't pathetic was the 1914 club. It was almost like this speak easy somewhat of a cool-ass dungeon, where you go get all the food and drinks, high class food and drinks that you want. And then just go out the exit and there your seats are right on the field Wrigley. Joel (3m 35s): Yeah. No one should ever take you and me to an all you can eat and drink facility. That's just a, that's a bad, that's a bad sign, but we had a good, good time. I have to say. Chad (3m 45s): Next week. Joel (3m 46s): Next week is C town, baby. Cleveland! Chad (3m 51s): Cleveland Indians baseball all with all our Evergreen peeps. So looking forward, they just bought a new building in Cleveland. An Old Radio One building so they are stepping on up and we're actually going to record out of their studios next week. So I'm pretty stoked. Joel (4m 10s): That's what happens when you partner with HR's most dangerous podcast, you like invest in real estate and become a mogul. It's kinda, kinda nice. Do we know who the Indians are playing? Chad (4m 19s): Not off the top of my head. Joel (4m 20s): All right. We'll find out and fill everybody in next week on how the game went. Any more shout outs from the industry there at shaker in Chicago or Cleveland. Oh yeah. Chad (4m 29s): Going to have dinner with the AMS peops, so the Alexander Mann's Solutions peeps, they actually have, I guess their US Homebase is out of Cleveland and going to have some, some dinner and drinks with, with them. So looking forward to seeing them Joel (4m 47s): Very nice shout out to Pando and Workday who were Cody Award Winners for Business Technology. Pando was a recognized for Vertical Industry Award for Best Human Capital or Talent Management Solution. That sounds really impressive. So a shout out to Pando. Chad (5m 4s): Sounds sexy. It sounds sexy. Joel (5m 6s): Yeah, very nice. Chad (5m 7s): A big shout out to two super intelligent, super bad-ass female founders, Athena Karp, CEO of Hired Score and Frida Polli CEO of Pymetrics both have been on the show by the way, who have combined their platforms from a hard skill and soft skill deliverable standpoint. This to me is how vendors should be working together, master where you are instead of trying to be all things to everybody, get deep integrations and bigger deliverables through these types of partnerships that will provide broader revenue opportunities so this is the way to do it and go figure two super awesome women are knockin' it out of the park! Joel (5m 54s): And don't forget our favorite third wheel Tyler Weeks. Who's working Athena now. Chad (5m 58s): Love me some Tyler. Joel (6m 0s): Tyler he is, he's a great kid. Shout out to dice and ZipRecruiter stocks. They're having a pretty good week. So ZipRecruiter had a few, quite a few actually upgrades and initiations that were positive. Raymond James analyst rated zip, a strong buy with a $36 price target this week. It's still kind of bouncing around that $22 to $24 price range. But Raymond James is pretty optimistic and DICE stock that's the ticker D H X is spiking on news that the company is spending $12 million on Buybacks. Joel (6m 40s): As of this recording, they're up about 10% on the day. Chad (6m 44s): Yeah. Nothing like artificially inflating your own shit. I mean, come on. Joel (6m 49s): There's no innovation buyback shit. Chad (6m 52s): Exactly. That's like we, we suck. So we're going to artificially inflate the market for a few days. Fuck that. Something that does matter. Not being Dice is again it's pride month. And I want to give a big shout out to Raiders' defensive End Carl Nassib who comes out of the NFL corporate closet as gay. And I can't imagine in a quote unquote, "very testosterone oriented sport," how hard that's gotta be. Joel (7m 23s): Lot of courage to do that. So big, big applause for him. This is kind of a downer after that one, but shout out to QR codes. Yes. The once left for dead technology is back. A recent drum UGov survey revealed that 45% of US consumers who have used a marketing or advertising related QR code, 75% plan to use the media more often and 59%, believe it will become a permanent part of their future phone use. There's a silver lining to the pandemic. It's QR codes are back, baby. Chad (7m 58s): Yeah. If you're going to any restaurant or bar nowadays, don't even think about asking for our menu. Look for the QR code. Fairly simple. It's a rebirth go figure. Big shout out to Kevin Carrillo and the Cannabinoid podcast. That's right. I think I said that right Cannabinoid. He actually had me on a couple of weeks ago. It dropped today. So look for it. We talked about cannabis usage during COVID and then returning to work, rewriting employer protocols, alcohol versus weed, kind of the double standard that happens there. And a lot of that, a lot of the weed work oriented conversation that companies are having now, if they're not, they need to be having very soon. Joel (8m 46s): Yep. I challenge you to say Cannabinoid podcast really fast 10 times while you're high and see if you don't laugh really. Chad (8m 53s): I just took a gummy so no. Joel (8m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, you'll need it to get through this week's episode. Chad (8m 59s): Don't forget again, it is pride month. Check out LGBTQ plus for dummies. We're actually dropping knowledge with our guest host, who she's actually doing all the work, Michelle Raymond from My G Work. And we're talking about things like what does LGBTQ plus even mean? What's the history? Why does it exist? The hell is this pronouns thing. A lot of things that many people are afraid to ask because they don't want to look like it. It's well, guess what? I don't mind looking like an idiot. I'm asking, she's answering. You should enjoy it. Joel (9m 36s): Love it. Shout out to American Airlines who canceled hundreds of flights this week due in part to work or shortages like everyone else they're struggling to fill customer service jobs as well as bring back furloughed pilots. They're busy reaching out to people who took leaves or buyouts to help cover demand. Enjoy the friendly skies if you're flying, because prices are up and flights are getting canceled. Chad (9m 60s): Buy now, buy now. 6 (10m 2s): Welcome to all things Scottish, our slogan is if it's not Scottish it's crap! Joel (10m 6s): Shout out to Adam Gordon who's Scotland is out of whatever tournament we usually talk about on this show happening in Europe at the present time. Sorry, Adam, that's a bummer, dude. You can always watch the NBA playoffs on some internet connection in Edinburgh near you. Chad (10m 22s): That being said this coming week episode two of our European podcast. First week went unbelievably well! I didn't think we'd have such a good turnout and a great, great content. Joel (10m 39s): Our surprise, our surprise guest is bound to tank, this next show for sure. For sure. Speaking of not, not tanking, make sure you got your free shit signed up folks towards the end of the month here we're about to select a new winner for whiskey and beer. So you gotta head out to Chadcheese.com/free. If you like shirts sponsored by Emissary, Beer sponsored by Adzuna and whiskey sponsored by our BFFs over at Sovren get out there and sign up. Last for me is birthday's coming up this week. We got Carrie Corbyn, Shannon Pritchett and Stacy Zappar of the industry celebrating birthdays this week so Happy Birthday ladies Chad (11m 23s): All looking amazingly well for 25. Joel (11m 27s): I mean, seriously. I was going to say, be care for where you're going with this statement. Chad (11m 32s): With these ladies. You kidding me. Joel (11m 34s): And that we had some pods this week, don't miss our firing squad with Canvas, the new Canvas. Don't call it go canvas.io. And you already mentioned the LGBTQ for dummies. Chad (11m 47s): Topics! Joel (11m 50s): We're starting out with Amazon. Are you sure? This is okay. You might too fired up for the rest of the show, but fuck it. All right. Let's start with Walmart then. And we'll ease into. Chad (11m 59s): Hit Amazon first, Amazon on Amazon first! Joel (12m 2s): You want Amazon first? Okay. Let's start it hot. Okay. So a scathing eight month investigation by the New York Times has painted a pretty negative picture of Amazon. Shocking, right? Here's some highlights from the report. A conscious decision to encourage turnover and limit upward mobility among hourly warehouse workers, people feeling constantly monitored, a reported 150%. I'll repeat that 150% turnover each year, a general animosity toward unions and here's the big one, Chad, Jeff Bezos thinks that people are essentially inherently lazy. Side note, you also have Jeff Bezos recently saying in his final shareholder letter as CEO, that he wants Amazon to become quote "Earth's best employer." Joel (12m 50s): Sounds like they have a long way to go. And it sounds like Jeff is going to just go into space and never come back. Chad (12m 56s): Bullshit. I mean, seriously, is anyone surprised by this report? Amazon doesn't give a single shit. They need to scale and they don't care how many humans it actually breaks. This is literally the embodiment of Jeff Bezos and his philosophy of life so that the hiring practice and process is robotic. It is totally inhuman. Amazon doesn't place human connection, obviously as a priority whatsoever. Time on task is something that we learned during this report is a methodology that they use to monitor what they say. Chad (13m 37s): They're monitoring the downtime of machines, not the workers, which I call total bullshit on because the monitoring is on the person. If you wanted to monitor the fucking machines, you put the monitor on the goddamn machine and leave systems where people would go on leave and they would get fired? If you had, and there was actually a practice, if you had one bad day, you could be a superstar. If you had one bad day, you're fired. I mean, all of this is predicated on the technology that Amazon used to monitor the workers, hire workers, fire workers, put workers on leave, all the way through. Chad (14m 20s): And it is just a jumbled fucking tech stack mess. Joel (14m 24s): Yes. I don't know if there's ever been a company in my life with such disparate polls in terms of who they are. On one hand, they're this evil Bond villain led employer soul crushing organization. And on the other side, they're like this great company that gives, delivers my shit on time. They pay more than most everyone else. They give bonuses for coming to work. They give you extra money for COVID shots. I mean, they're trying to dance the fence and play damage control, I guess, by doing all these good things that are also, I guess, good for business. Now they have corrected some of these things. You mentioned the one, one offense firing, which is really pretty fucked up. Joel (15m 8s): 364 days of the year I was fucking A-plus and that one F day I got fired, some of those things are fortunately being changed, but God does Jeff Bezos just look like a Bond villain and going to space does not help. This is like Moonraker. I don't know what the fuck is going on. Chad (15m 26s): All I got to say is 150% turnover. You can try to wallpaper all the other fun, "Oh, this is all the good that we do." Your company from a work standpoint is shit. You have to pay those people $18 an hour to start because they're not going to last because you're fucking breaking them. It just overall it to me, you put tech in place to be able to help your employees become more efficient, to be able to help your customers, et cetera, et cetera, not to fucking break them. Joel (15m 59s): Well, let's talk about Walmart. Let's get, let's get sunny people. A Walmart is launching me at Walmart, a workplace app that allows its workers to clock in, schedule shifts, request time off connect, to and communicate with other workers, locate merchandise and troubleshoot daily tasks. The app was built in-house by Walmart global tech. That sounds fancy and applies technologies like machine learning, augmented reality, camera, vision, and AI. There's that our favorite word, to tackle problems, the app also includes ask Sam a voice activated personal assistant that answers a variety of questions like merchandise locations. As part of the rollout, Walmart says it will provide Samsung Galaxy smartphones to more than 740,000 workers. Joel (16m 47s): God like we need more Android people, anyway, so they can access the app. Workers can also use the phone as their personal device if they choose to. Damn Walmart coming up strong with the devices and the tech. Now Chad (17m 1s): Again, I've got to say again, we're just focusing on tech so I don't want to get on like wages and all, all that other fun stuff. But they have 1.6 million US workers and they are trying to give them technology to help them do their job better, to do it easier. I don't know how many times I go into a store and I'm like, Hey, you know, where is, you know, where's the toilet paper? Whatever it is, right, I'm looking for something. And that person is got to like, maybe ask two or three other people, or maybe they know. Right. But overall, if I can just ask Sam on my phone, I'm like, oh yeah, it's over it, you know, aisle 15. All of that makes it not just better on the consumer, the person spending money, but also better on the employee who doesn't have to look like an idiot because they don't know where the toilet paper is. Chad (17m 50s): Right. Not to mention the AR piece of it, which I think is awesome. I love the augmented reality opportunity to point your phone at a barcode on a box and know what's in the box. So if you're stocking shelves or what have you, you can easily get through the warehouse or back room of Walmart. So again, it's all about understanding what exactly is happening with the workers and trying to help them through it. And again, I mean, you're going to make them happier. So you're not going to have hopefully 150% turnover and happy employees and the faces of customers is a good thing. Joel (18m 33s): Yeah. You know, we talk a lot about the augmented recruiter. This is sort of the augmented retail employee, and this is, this is a good on so many, so many levels. I mean, as a worker, you can get answers quickly. I love the communication with other workers. I don't know if that's a social media aspect or some sort of connecting with, with your, your coworkers. I think that's great, but you know, I have a little story. We like to go to Home Depot. And if you've ever been to a Home Depot, you know, it's kind of like an abyss of hell. If you don't know exactly where, what you're looking for is, and the last time I was there, you know, I asked an employee, Hey, do you know where the, whatever the hell plump, I dunno, toilet seats or whatever are? Joel (19m 13s): And he said, he's like, hold on. He pulled out his phone. And he went to a website, he went to homedepot.com or some internal website looked it up and then found what, you know, what aisle it was. But to me, it seems like, why would you not have like a quick app that he could just boot up? Chad (19m 29s): It could be Ask Homie. Joel (19m 30s): Why not have an inhouse app, where he could find the answer. Yeah. And how many times have you gone to, Ask Homie yeah that's good, trademark that anyway. And how many times have you been to Home Depot or Walgreen's or something? And you're like, do you know where such and such is? And they go, ah, hold on. Hey Bob, do you know where the such and such is? No. Hey Julie, do you know where this such? So like this is going to make happier customers, happy employees, because they can get answers really quickly. I do have a little bit of a big brother, red red flag that goes up on this in terms of being able to monitor. but that probably happens already. The robots that we talked about at Walmart were recent landing booted out of the store, which is, you know, a strike for automation. But this augmented employee seems to be where the world is going. Joel (20m 12s): So hats off to Walmart for taking the lead on this stuff. And we'll just have to wait for Ask Homie to come around before we can go back into Home Depot, comfortably. Chad (20m 23s): Buy or sell? Joel (20m 26s): We haven't played this in a while. I've missed it. All right. So we have three companies. You know how this works, we'll go through each one, give you a little, a little something, something on what they do. Chad and I will give a little review and we'll either buy or sell the company. You ready? Chad (20m 40s): Do it. Joel (20m 41s): Word? So candidate.co the company announced a $4 million seed funding round recently. The Seattle-based companies business works to allow people to refer those and their networks for jobs and receive between $2,400 and $6,000 for a successful matches. For companies, candidate.co says, it enables them to build a network of refers outside of their employees and alumni. Chad, another referral company. You buying this one or are selling it? Chad (21m 13s): What's new about this? Do we know? Because I mean, it sounds like crowdsourcing referrals, but it also sounds like a good opportunity for a side hustle for a lot of recruiters that are out there. But why does a company need it when they can leverage their own employees? And we know that employee referrals are one of the top, if not the top points of actually finding new candidates, new talent, new hires. So to me, why would a company pay for this? And I don't think they would, which is why I'm going to sell. SFX (21m 47s): Oh, hell no. Joel (21m 49s): All right, that's a strong sell from Chad. Sowash okay. I have two issues with this company. Number one is historically this business is a disaster. It's a total dud and you and I are old enough to remember H3. Chad (22m 5s): Yes. Joel (22m 6s): Which at the time was like revolutionary. Chad (22m 8s): Revolutionary. Joel (22m 8s): And I literally got a $5,000 check back in 2006 for placing a recruiter at I don't even remember the company, but I was like, holy shit, this thing actually works. I got a check in the mail from these guys. Well, the company faded and, Han's their CEO who came from Monster, I believe before age three, I've had a few conversations with him in regards to why did it fail? And with any thought, you know, social media may be people, people being able to share it would help this model and people could just click on links and apply to jobs. Well, nobody's sharing jobs, sort of voluntarily, on social media and historically this business fails, period. Joel (22m 53s): So from that perspective, they have a huge mountain to climb. The other issue I have with this thing is referral businesses are increasingly and for referral programs as well are, are, are coming under increasing scrutiny around diversity. And the thought of simply like, well, if I'm referring my friends who more than likely look like me are kind of are kind of like me then where's diversity coming from in your referral program? So referral programs are really struggling to find how do we integrate diversity into our referral programs? How do we create incentives to increase diversity? And there's an entire page on candidate.co's website about diversity. Joel (23m 35s): And really, really, I guess I would say reaching to sort of say that it's a diversity play. So, so for those two reasons like this one going to sell candidate.co If they can change 20 years of history, good on them, but I'm not, I'm not buying it. Next, we got Apnah Atma has announced a $70 million series B round, which brings the total raise two $90 million and values the startup at $570 million. The founder is an Apple alum and its mission is helping millions of blue and gray collared workers in India to up-skill, find communities and land jobs. On the app users connect to each other and help with leads and share tips to improve at their jobs. Joel (24m 19s): The app also offers people the opportunity to upscale themselves, practice with their interview performance and become eligible for even more jobs. The startup has amassed over 10 million users and just last month, it facilitated more than 15 million job interviews. Apnah, buy or sell. Chad (24m 37s): I'm automatically in love with this company because my favorite Indian restaurant is named app. No coincidence. I think not anyway, India's population is nearly 1.4 billion people on this app sounds to me kind of like Jobcase India edition with the community. Plus they are also building skilling modules, job based skilling in enabling peer-to-peer learning via its vertical communities. So the problem is that only 32% of India's population has a smartphone, which is probably a good thing for Apna's ability to deliver in scale right now. Chad (25m 18s): Cause that's a lot of fucking people. So overall that's going to grow penetration, smartphone, penetration is going to grow. It's a buy for me. Joel (25m 28s): Apna's a buy. I think, yeah, you sort of highlighted the fact that this thing has nowhere to go, but up and when I look at the globe right now, in terms of where the opportunity is around our industry, India is one of those that just screams, we're ready for innovation, we're ready for, you know, connection and upscaling and educating and getting folks jobs. And if as you, as you see more and more companies exit or look at, you know, how do we exit China and how do we exit, you know, some of these countries that whether by tariffs or politics are getting out India is this like shining beacon, a democracy, a billion people. Joel (26m 12s): Well-educated in many, many ways, companies flocking to this country. It only makes sense that employment and getting people, jobs is going to happen in a big way. And it looks like Apna is definitely doing all the things that they need to do. So I think it's, it's not only a good opportunity and a good company and what they're doing, but man, they're going to help a lot of people and India just make life better and, you know, improve their lives. And that's always a good thing if we can bring up the rest of civilization. So for me, this is a big, sexy, big, sexy buy. Chad (26m 50s): Also makes me hungry. It makes sense. Joel (26m 53s): Oh, Apna yeah. I think it's from, I think it said this story was Slumdog Millionaire. It's a reference to Slumdog Millionaire anyway. Good movie. If you haven't seen it. All right. Our third company is Eqtble or I think equitable is probably what it's supposed to be. It's spelled E Q T B L E. The Y Combinator company announced this week it has raised 2.7 million in seed funding. The company wants to give HR teams the same kind of detailed analytics, that product sales and marketing departments have had for a long time, with the goal of creating more engaged and inclusive workplaces. Their HR analytics platform can collect data from more than 100 sources, such as Workday and deliver insights and visualization about four main areas: talent, recruitment, workforce engagement, and compensation. Joel (27m 42s): One of the things the platform can help employers do Is identify why top candidates are declining offers such as identifying that your interview process is way too long relative to the competition. Eqtble. Chad, buy or sell? Chad (27m 57s): Hey Pat, can I buy a vowel? So, I mean, at most companies they're right. Workforce data is scattered across TA platforms, HR platforms. I mean, engagement platforms, benefits, employee surveys. I mean, there's just so much shit, but that's obstacle number one. Trying to get all of those systems, the data out of all of those systems, and it's a huge obstacle, unless they jump into bed with a company like ADP right out of the gate. Obstacle number two, why are people leaving? I'd be focusing on internal mobility before even thinking about this crazy mess. So I think this is a platform, not really a solution. Chad (28m 40s): It's a platform looking for a problem. I sell it. SFX (28m 43s): Oh hell, no. Joel (28m 45s): That's a sell for Mr. Sowash. Okay. I, again, I'm going to go back to the theme of augmented recruiters and arming them with intelligence and tools to be better recruiters versus automating everything. We talk about Terminator versus Robocop and how the world is doing a little bit less Terminator now, and a little bit more Robocop. So to me, augmentation is hot. And data is at the heart of sort of arming recruiters and companies to be better at what they're doing. And if you can take all that data and visualize it, it becomes, I think, a very appealing product to employers, just seeing fancy charts and graphs makes people think they're looking at a magic trick and they really, really enjoy that. Joel (29m 34s): And if the data is relevant and they can make that a sensical to employers. And I do think there is a, there is a component, If not that, that there will be not only recruitment, but also engagement and, you know, onboarding and helping all of those processes. So keep in mind, this is a seed round. This is a young company. I think they're going to figure this shit out for me, Eqtble, applause, is a buy. All right. So we've got two agreements and one, not so much. We'll be right back. Summer-to-Evolve Jobvite PROMO (30m 7s): Last year, Summer-to-Evolve saw us bring together some of the biggest names in talent acquisition presenting, exciting content to help us learn and grow in these evolving times. This year, we're back to do it all again, taking our eight weeks of virtual sessions on tour for the Summer-to-Evolve road trip presented by Jobvite, virtually visiting locations around the world. We're excited to share more talent acquisition tips, tricks, and best practices with you. Visit the summertoevolve.com to learn more. Joel (30m 36s): All right, Chad, who'd you rather Rocky Mountain High or Country Roads. Chad (30m 41s): They're the same damn song. Joel (30m 45s): Try telling that to someone in West Virginia and Colorado. But anyway, I've got to go Country Roads for obvious reasons. Yeah. Chad (30m 51s): Same song, different states. Joel (30m 56s): And same haircut. Yeah. All right. So Colorado is in the news this week. Remote workers need not apply. After new state law that requires employers to disclose salaries for open positions, some are advertising jobs available anywhere in the US but Colorado. The rules aim is to narrow gender wage gaps and provide greater pay transparency for employees. Colorado has offered guidance that stipulates employers need to include salary ranges for remote roles that will be performed entirely outside the state or for remote jobs posted by a company that doesn't have any employees in Colorado. However, salary information would have to be posted for remote roles if a company has any presence in the state. Joel (31m 41s): Some companies such as alcohol delivery Drizzly have gotten around the mandate by offering two separate job postings, one targeting remote workers in Colorado, and another aiming to reach potential workers in all of the other states. As far as I can tell the range can be pretty broad, so the pushback is a little bit odd to me, Chad, what do you think? Chad (32m 2s): I'm going to reiterate what you said earlier. The rule's aim is to narrow gender wage gaps and provide greater pay transparency for employees. This is another instance where the quote/unquote "invisible hand" of the market is showing that it's not fair. At all. Corporate America doesn't want to be transparent about what they are paying workers. It's just that simple, right? So what do they have to hide? The answer is wage practices, that are inequitable, and that's the big key here. So this is where DC needs to step in and say, this is not in the public good, right? Chad (32m 43s): This is not for the public good. And they regulate these assholes. What these companies are looking to do is they're looking to actually send a message to all the other states to not do this shit. That's exactly what's happening right now. Joel (32m 59s): Yeah, to me, this is an extension of the ongoing fight between states and companies and you know, how they want to treat people as employees. And you forgot the Uber, Lyft, et cetera example in California. You've got Kroger, you know, taking their ball and going home in Southern California, and now you have sort of like, okay, Colorado, you're going to require this. We're not going to do it and see what your voters think, see what your people think that are working remotely. Yep. So yeah, this, this ongoing struggle, this is just another round. In my opinion, I think that, you know, it's much easier to fight a battle within like a local area, with Kroger leaving than it is an Intel. Joel (33m 40s): Like remote includes everyone in a country. So to me, this is going to be a really hard thing for Colorado to fight. Now, we've seen, I mean, we've seen websites posted about, Hey, we're going to shine a light on the companies that are against this policy and not showing, you know, salary ranges and hourly wages, that may have some impact, but I doubt much. I just don't see where this is a good thing for either side at the end of the day. I'm having a hard time getting an official opinion on this ruling, not from my personal opinion, but from an agnostic viewpoint, I don't know who wins this. Joel (34m 24s): I think it's just a stalemate and Coloradan workers that are remote are just going to have to have to take it. Chad (34m 31s): If other states pick this up, the states will win. If the federal government, DC picks this up, the government will win. If they fall back and nobody gets behind Colorado on this, they will fail. Just that simple. Joel (34m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was, you remember Uber threatening to pull out of California, you know, for a while, which we all knew was, you know, saber rattling at best total bullshit. Chad (34m 54s): Yeah, let's talk about companies that are fighting for us. And when, I mean us, I mean, podcasters. Joel (35m 7s): Yeah. I forget this Colorado political equality, equity issue. Let's talk about podcasting. So all the big boys are getting into this thing and making pretty big moves, , Spotify, and Facebook in particular, let's talk about Facebook for a second. Facebook is letting select us residents use its live audio rooms, which is not technically podcasting, but it is audio. This is a feature that echoes Twitter, Clubhouse and Discord to host events for as many as 50 speakers. They will do that for you. Users can purchase stars, which I think is a little bit interesting and unique. They can purchase stars to earn front row seats that hosts can recognize and live streamers will get a portion of the proceeds. Chad (35m 54s): It's like a concert! Joel (35m 54s): So they've created a way to monetize your live shows, which is interesting. On the podcast side, Facebook is planning to start rolling out its podcast product. Next week details are choppy, but the company said in an email quote, "Facebook will be the place where people can enjoy, discuss and share the podcast they love with each other" end quote. Uniquely pod-casters can decide whether to enable what they're calling clips, which Facebook says will be created by listeners and lasts up to one minute in length. Chad, what do we think about Facebook's push into audio? Chad (36m 29s): What we've seen out of Facebook thus far is been God, just shitty overall when it comes to launching things outside of their wheelhouse. Will they be able to do podcasts? Right? I don't think so unless they put a lot of money into it, they are going to enable RSS feeds. That's easy. I mean, that's not a big deal. Doing these user generated clips, that's fairly easy, that's already, you know, shit, that's out there. They're going to put it in its own tab, big deal. Now people have to find it right. Joel (37m 2s): Another tab on Facebook, right? Chad (37m 3s): Yeah. Exactly. So, but if you do use their platform to publish, which we do not, if you do use their platform, they will have the ability to actually go in, chop it up and use some of your snippets for promotion, which is not a bad thing. And that's exactly what Spotify is doing with the buy of pods. So this is an article out of Tech Crunch. They're amping discovery of relevant content, which is driving consumption. And that's exactly what we try to do from a strategic standpoint is we have close to 700 episodes. Many of those episodes that are maybe years old are still incredibly relevant to many people. Chad (37m 46s): So how do you, how do you make them more discoverable? And Spotify is doing that with this new purchase of Pods. Joel (37m 55s): Yeah. For those who remember downloading music online before streaming became the thing you got to, you got to listen to 15 seconds of a song to find out if you wanted to download it or not if it was a new song and podcasts have yet to really have something like that. And podcasts are sometimes hour plus in length, and it's hard to get a sampling of that. And pods is trying to figure that, that process out. So yeah. Spotify making another big move. Real quick on Facebook. I think, I think a lot of this, particularly in Facebook, is about monetization. And I think a lot of the popular podcast is obviously driving people and companies and platforms thinking about how do we put this show on our site and monetize it, whether it be through ads or subscriptions or Hey, the star thing, maybe there's some way that you can make, make people fans of your podcast, episodes. Chad (38m 52s): Patreon or something. Joel (38m 52s): Yeah. Patreon kind of stuff. All by the way, Apple unveiled its plan recently for podcasts subscription service that would allow listeners to unlock additional benefits, like ad-free listening early access to episodes and the ability to support a favorite creator. So you have three really big companies trying to monetize and figure out how do we make a buck off of this, hot trend called podcasting. So as podcasters, we're obviously watching this as someone listening to the podcast, it's probably at least somewhat interesting to you. I'd have to imagine that we will be on Facebook. There's no reason to not be, but how much, how much traffic and downloads and listeners we get from Facebook will be interesting to see. Joel (39m 35s): I'm not betting a whole bunch. Chad (39m 37s): This is all a consumption play in a time onsite, play time on app, play for Facebook, right? If you, if you're listening to a podcast on Spotify, how long are you going to stay on there? And how many podcasts are you going to listen to, especially with this new consumption kind of scheme, to get you to get hooked on more podcasts. So Facebook's looking for the same kind of thing. Yes. There's a monetary piece of this. No question, but eyes in time in the app on the site keeps you off Google, et cetera, et cetera. So I think Spotify overall is leading in this category. Apple, they have the lion's share. Spotify is trying to chunk away at that. Chad (40m 18s): And you know, we'll see if it works. I don't, I don't see Facebook as a big player. Joel (40m 23s): How do you feel about the purchasing of stars and getting front row seats to live audio events? Do you like that or, no? Chad (40m 30s): I think it's cool, but as we start to open back up, I'm just going to go to a concert. I want to see the Foo Fighters live. I don't want to see them on Facebook. I mean, it is kind of cool, but if I can get it for free, yeah. I'll probably watch it now. I'll, you know, cast it to my TV or something like that, but I'm not going to pay for it. Joel (40m 48s): Yeah. I think it can be pretty interesting, obviously creating ways that people can get a VIP experience. I think Clubhouse is going to mirror this and they're probably already developing it and Facebook found out and just developed it quicker. But the ability to say like, Hey, if I'm going to listen to, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk or someone famous, I want to purchase a ticket for a VIP where I can have a private discussion with him with 10 other people. Chad (41m 13s): All about the big names. Joel (41m 15s): After the show or yeah. I mean the big names will be able to benefit from that. Yeah. That's to me, that's kind of interesting. I'll be interested to see how that, how that unfolds. Chad (41m 24s): I think because of the rapid pace of development on this side of the house, Clubhouse is dead. Joel (41m 31s): Clubhouse needs a sugar daddy, for sure. They need a sugar. Daddy. I don't know who that is at this point, but they need a sugar. It ain't us, but yeah, they need a sugar daddy, speaking of sugar daddies. JOB AD X PROMO (41m 43s): 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 join us@jobadx.com. JOB AD X PROMO (42m 26s): JobAdX, the best ad tool, providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Chad (42m 32s): So we both play fantasy football. Joel (42m 36s): Love fantasy football. Chad (42m 37s): I have never heard of this challenge, this waffle house challenge in my life. Have you heard of this waffle house challenge? Joel (42m 45s): I have not. So let me, let me set the plate if you will set the table. A man who finished last in his fantasy football league had to spend 24 hours at a Waffle House restaurant. For every waffle he ate his sentence was reduced by one hour. Lee Sanderlin 25 years old, spent 15 hours in a Waffle House, all streamed on Twitter for a total of if your math is good enough, you know that that equals nine waffles that he consumed. Sanderlin tweeted things like quote, "Please, somebody launched me into the sun" end quote. And quote, "full of waffles, but devoid of life" end quote, it took him several hours to finish just his seventh waffle. Joel (43m 31s): This quote Waffle House challenge is apparently a big thing with fantasy football fans, although we have never heard of it. How long till Waffle House creates something more official? I guess we'll have to wait, exiting the Mississippi Waffle House at 7:00 AM. Sanderlin tweeted quote "This was horrible. And I recommend no one ever do this" end quote. Better luck next season and don't go with Carson Wentz this season. Chad (43m 60s): Two things. This is marketing genius for Waffle House. NFL season's coming up, they should be pushing this left and right. And number two, I would never do this because it would ruin waffles for me the rest of my life. And I love waffles. Joel (44m 20s): Yup. I'm waiting for the Waffle House, like a sports bar edition. Seriously, they're gonna have games playing and like come in at, at 12, stay till midnight, which on the coast would be about the end of football for that day. And you could have people just eating all day at your restaurant and have Waffle House challenges. Chad (44m 40s): You and I need to do a Waffle House episode, where we're there, like at two o'clock in the morning, having eggs, smattered, splattered, and whatever, right? Joel (44m 51s): And you can sponsor this trip by contacting us chadcheese.com today. And with that another episode in the books, Chad. Chad and Joel (45m 2s): We out, we out 6 (45m 4s): All things Scottish. Our slogan is if it's not Scottish it's crap!, OUTRO (45m 33s): 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.

Welcome to LGBTQ+ for Dummies -- BONUS EDITION -- HR and Talent Acquisition pros won't want to miss this listener question! It's PRIDE month and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ+ community. And as a straight white male, I thought it fitting that I'd ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert Michelle Raymond from myGwork, a LinkedIn-like platform for the LGBTQ+ community, who will be droppin' the knowledge. Listen and Learn! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. LGBTQ+ INTRO (0s): Welcome to LGBTQ plus for Dummies part three. It's Pride month, and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ plus community. And as a straight white dude, I thought it might be fitting that I would ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert, Michelle Raymond from MyGWork, a LinkedIn like platform for the LGBTQ plus community. She will be dropping the knowledge. Let's do this. Chad (42s): Hey Michelle, thanks for joining us again. How's this month been after the current LGBTQ plus for Dummies. Have you get gotten any feedback? What's been going on? Michelle (53s): It's gotten some amazing feedback. I'm very pleased at how far these podcasts have reached. I've had members of the community, obviously come back and say, Hey, thank you for sharing this information. But I think the thing I'm most pleased and happy to hear is from those who learned something from these podcasts. So thank you for having me back. Chad (1m 14s): No, no, I love it. And this mini series has been so incredibly popular that we actually have a bonus question from a listener. So are you, are you ready to take the question? Michelle (1m 26s): I would love to. Chad (1m 27s): Okay. This one's from Jarvis over at Outmatch. Here we go. Jarvis (1m 31s): Hi Chad and Michelle! It's Jarvis from Outmatch. First, just want to say, thank you guys so much for putting together this much needed mini-series. One topic that I'd love to hear your thoughts on is what truly inclusive insurance benefits look like? I read a really interesting article about how some employers may be unaware that their benefits can exclude certain populations. So the example that they highlighted was infertility treatments, because the way infertility is defined for heterosexual couples, they can typically be diagnosed after one year of trying to get pregnant through regular intercourse that does not result in a pregnancy, but that actually can preclude LGBTQ plus members or single parents by choice. Jarvis (2m 14s): And they explained that a really supportive benefit doesn't have a preclusion criteria that requires a diagnosis of infertility. So I just love to hear thoughts on what inclusive benefits should look like. And if you have any other examples where employers may not be aware that their existing benefits are exclusionary. Thanks. Chad (2m 34s): Wow. Okay. So this is, this is not a basic question, we're probably going to have to dig into this, right? Michelle (2m 41s): Yeah. Let's, let's unpack it one by one. Chad (2m 43s): Okay. Okay. Let's do it. Michelle (2m 44s): Thank you, Jarvis for that question. It's a great one. I'm going to try to unpack it the best I can, but thank you again for asking the tough questions. So I think probably the first place we should start is talking about why benefits are important in the first place. And I know in the US on average, benefits can account for approximately 30% of an employee's overall compensation package. So making sure that this valuable bundle of benefits extends to your entire workforce, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity is critical. Michelle (3m 25s): And when benefits are denied the cost to LGBTQ plus workers and their families can be profound. Chad (3m 32s): So tell me what inclusionary looks like first. Michelle (3m 35s): Ooh. Okay. So there's a couple things that come to mind. One of them, of course, our healthcare benefits that are extended to include domestic partners, as well as the children of a domestic partner. So regardless of biological or adoptive status, that's, you know, one I can think of immediately in the event and the unfortunate events that either a basic partner passes and that employee is requesting bereavement, a healthcare plan that explicitly covers medically necessary health services for transgender people. And with that, I'm talking mental health care benefits, hormone therapy, even short or long-term disability benefits due to a gender affirmation surgery, for example. Michelle (4m 24s): And here's the key benefits that do not charge transgender employees, a higher premium for said coverage. Chad (4m 32s): Ah, good point. Wow. Yeah. Michelle (4m 33s): Those are two that definitely come to mind immediately. And if, I guess we'll take this one step further, I'm speaking to what Jarvis asked and her question is, family services. So adoption assistance, foster care, reproductive technology assistance as Jarvis was, you know, referring to in the article that she read and even parental leave that extends to men, CIS, or trans, parents who have adopted or even came to be parents through surrogacy, for example, or an event that I, a lesbian woman have a child via my partner. And so these are all types of examples of inclusionary healthcare benefits that I have come across. Chad (5m 16s): Okay. Okay. What about exclusionary? Where do we go from there? Michelle (5m 20s): Now, the good news is that in recent years, the healthcare industry has made pretty progressive strides to include members of the trans community, as I mentioned earlier. But one more I have found that is really interesting, and employers may not know that they're being exclusionary. So one, I'm going to recommend every employer out there to take a look at their health care plans and make sure, okay, is the language up to date? Are we being inclusive because this does require a review every once in a while. But here's one that's super interesting, and there are many healthcare plans that have sex specific care. Okay. So let me give you an example. Michelle (6m 0s): I was born a female. I have female reproductive organs. Chad (6m 6s): Right. Michelle (6m 6s): I identify as a woman and I express myself as a woman. Okay. Chad (6m 11s): Okay. Michelle (6m 11s): If I went to a doctor or before I went to the doctor, if I called up my healthcare provider and I said, Hey, would you cover the cost of a prostate exam? What do you think they would say? Chad (6m 23s): No. Michelle (6m 24s): Right. Why? Because the prostate is not part of the female anatomy. Okay. It makes sense. Chad (6m 31s): Right. Michelle (6m 31s): But flip the script. I was born a female. I was assigned that gender at birth. I have female reproductive system, but I identify and express myself as a male. So therefore I'm a transgender male and I've even gone through the legal process of getting my gender updated on my birth certificate and on my legal documents. Okay. So by law, I'm a male. And imagine, I'm a male, and unfortunately I get cervical cancer that requires a hysterectomy would a healthcare plan provide the cost of coverage for a male to get a hysterectomy. Chad (7m 10s): No. Yeah. And so, yeah, again, so I have we seen strides, on the insurance side of the house to be able to actually catch up with this or no. Michelle (7m 22s): Not all. Chad (7m 22s): OK. Michelle (7m 22s): And that's why taking a look at sex specific care that's written into your benefit plans is something to really take an extra look at these days because we have transgender men, transgender women who may still carry the sex organs of the opposite sex in which they identify with. Even though legally on paper, they're identified as a male, they may still have female reproductive organs that require, you know, even pre-checks. It doesn't have to be responsive, it can be preventative checks, like getting a prostate exam, like I mentioned earlier. Chad (7m 60s): Yeah. Wow. That is amazing. Anything else to share within Jarvis's question? Because again, that was pretty complex. Michelle (8m 5s): It is pretty complex. I think just, you know, the, the one thing that all employers can do is just always take a fresh look at the benefits that are being offered. Listen to employees, some of these things you don't have to think about until they actually come to fruition. And so keep an open mind and, and be ready to make a change where necessary. Because as I mentioned before, not extending your benefits to the entire workforce can have a really detrimental effect, especially on LGBT people and their families. Chad (8m 33s): Agreed. Yes, definitely be open-minded and learn. It's one of the reasons why we're doing this series is because again, people have problems asking the uncomfortable questions, but these uncomfortable questions are necessary in life as human beings and ensuring that your employees are taken care of. That's what we care about overall. Excellent. Again, this is Michelle Raymond from My G Work. Michelle, you so much for joining us for this series and for this bonus episode, thank you Jarvis for sending in that, that question. Everyone out there listening, remember this is out there a whole series that is focused on LGBTQ plus for dummies on Chadcheese.com. Chad (9m 20s): We've also created a special Spotify playlist called LGBTQ plus for dummies. Just search for it on Spotify or check us out wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks again, Michelle. You rock. Thank you so much. I hope to see you again soon. You got it. We out.

Welcome to LGBTQ+ for Dummies -- Part 4 -- Do new DEI initiatives make it easier for LGBTQ+ community to get hired? It's PRIDE month and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ+ community. And as a straight white male, I thought it fitting that I'd ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert Michelle Raymond from myGwork, a LinkedIn-like platform for the LGBTQ+ community, who will be droppin' the knowledge. Listen and Learn! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. SOVREN (1s): Sovren is known for providing the world's best and most accurate parsing products. And now based on that technology come Sovren's artificial intelligence. matching and scoring software. In fractions of a second receive match results that provide candidate scored by fit to job. And just as importantly, the jumps fit to the candidate make faster and better placements. 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. LGBTQ+ INTRO (42s): Welcome to LGBTQ plus for Dummies part three. It's Pride month, and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ plus community. And as a straight white dude, I thought it might be fitting that I would ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert, Michelle Raymond from My G Work, a LinkedIn like platform for the LGBTQ plus community. She will be dropping the knowledge. Let's do this. Chad (1m 26s): Thanks for joining us again, Michelle, let's jump into question number four. This one comes from Raelynn in Tupelo, Mississippi. Raelynn writes in a heightened diversity equity and inclusion environment are LGBTQ plus more likely to be hired than regular old straights like me? Michelle (1m 48s): Well, I think it's a great question. And the short answer is no. So let's break it down just a little bit. There's a thing called the closet, which I'm sure you're aware of where LGBT people come out, but there's also a thing called the corporate closet. And so this is a real thing. We're talking more than half of LGBTQ plus individuals who are out in their day to day life choose to go back in the closet when it comes through the workplace. Chad (2m 13s): Wow. Michelle (2m 13s): So you ask yourself why? well, number one, hiring. Gay job applicants are 40% less likely to be interviewed. Okay. So one that's a barrier. Two imagine you do get hired and now you're in talks about salary. Gay men and gay applicants earn 10 to 32% less than heterosexual male colleagues with similar qualifications. Now keep in mind, there's still a gender pay gap. So at being a lesbian and a woman to that matrix and you're earning even less. And then the last thing is of course, depending on where you are in the world, employees can be legally fired for being LGBTQ. So I know that's not the case in the US but we're talking over a hundred countries around the world where you can be fired just for being, and loving someone, whoever you want. Chad (2m 59s): Wow. So would you think that social media background checks that we're starting to see more of today actually impact that issue even more because we know more about each other socially because of social media than we did before. Do you think those meet those background checks and also friending people that you work with actually impacts those numbers? Michelle (3m 23s): I think so. That's my personal opinion, but I've talked to many hiring managers in my line of work, and some of them have actually recognized that doing those types of checks have caused bias in their hiring decisions. And so I've seen actually the reverse effect happening people are looking less and less and less into your social or your digital fingerprint, because they would just want to know if you're a good fit for the job and remove any sort of unconscious bias that they may be harboring and not even be aware of. Chad (3m 51s): That's amazing. Well, once again, Michelle Raymond from My G Work, Michelle, I want to give you a huge thank you for once again, to be there and to answer those questions for us. Again, Michelle Raymond from My G Work, thank you so much for joining us and being a part of this on Pride month. Michelle (4m 9s): Thank you so much. Happy Pride Month everyone! And if you have a question, don't be afraid to ask there's members of the community, including myself that have questions on a daily basis. So this is a learning activity. So thank you for having me to share some, you know, maybe some insights with you that might be new. Chad (4m 24s): We out. Michelle (4m 25s): Thank you. I appreciate it. 1 (4m 50s): Thank you to Michelle and the crew over at My G Work for participating in LGBTQ plus for Dummies, a pride special podcast series from the Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. Check us out@chadcheese.com and subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

He's the Prince of Programmatic. Well,.. A Prince... Rob Prince. On this episode, we dive into programmatic and all things UK with our good buddy Rob Prince, VP of sales at TalentNexus. Coming out of COVID, employers are hungrier than ever to leverage the latest in job distribution tech to fill these hard-to-fill positions and a ton of other topics and opinions around IndeedIQ, Broadbean, Sir Richard Collins, Pando IQ, chatbots, Madeline Laurano's programmatic research, Stepstone buying Appcast, a little VONQ, and where does LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter and Google for Jobs stand in the UK? While the US is usually 5 years ahead of the Europeans, Rob is always good at making us feel behind the times. He'll probably do the same for you, if you'd only listen to this NEXXT exclusive. 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. Cheerio and pip pip. What's up everybody. This is Joel Cheeseman of the Chad and Cheese podcast as always. I'm joined by my favorite person in the world Chad Sowash and today we are super excited to welcome Rob Prince back to the show. Rob is VP of Sales now at Talent Nexus. Rob dropped some English sexy on our ass. Rob (48s): Always a pleasure chaps, thanks for having me. Joel (53s): Oh, the pleasure is all ours. Chad (55s): A little bit more background for, for our listeners who don't know Rob, and if you don't know, Rob, you should know, Rob. Rob gives a little more background on you. Just the sexy parts. Go ahead. Walks in the beach. Joel (1m 7s): Sexy people Rob (1m 10s): So the sexist part is the recruitment advertising part. Chad (1m 14s): So where's the buzzer? Rob (1m 20s): Yeah. Yeah. So I'm VP sales at Talent Nexus. So we're a programmatic recruitment advertising agency. So we, when did we last see each other? Like two, is approaching two years ago now, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we've done the whole of COVID since you were over here, when you checked out the European recruitment marketing scene. So yeah, catch me up since then, I guess. I mean, what's happened everything that related to COVID has happened. So that's, that's all done a full circle and we're now in a completely different kind of market. And programmatic is finally getting somewhere in the UK, which is lovely. Chad (1m 59s): Well talk about that. The, the adoption in the UK, I mean, here in the U S adoption is slow, no matter what HR talent acquisition, it doesn't matter. But what we have seen is all of these companies now who desperately need talent in their front doors or working remote or whatever the hell, they can't find them. So instead of just going to Indeed like idiots and spending a shit ton of cash, they're not finding enough there. So, they're remembering that somebody knocked on their door to talk about programmatic and they're starting to do it. So we're seeing, I mean, some, some big spikes in adoption for programmatic on this side of the pond. Chad (2m 40s): What are you seeing in England, UK, Europe overall? Rob (2m 43s): Yeah, definitely a big uptick. So we, I mean, for context, we've had the busiest month in May that we've kind of ever had, that's partly because programmatic is getting adopted more and it is partly because just suddenly pretty much every industry is open for business now here. So a lot of companies are hiring again, where they weren't before. So a combination of those two things means that, there's just a lot of money flying around in advertising at the moment. Chad (3m 10s): That you can't spend? Rob (3m 11s): Which you can't spend. I mean, because competition is way up candidate availability is way down. Yeah. I mean, to get, to give you an idea, I spoke to a care organization the other morning, and in the afternoon I spoke to a hospitality organization and both of them were convinced that the other sector was stealing all their candidates. And So I think what's happening is there's just less candidates available at the moment. It's yeah, it's mad. I mean, there's suddenly a real lack of candidates, which I think, I mean, I think recruitment and HR people might get that, but a lot of senior management, the impression I'm getting is genuinely baffled that there aren't candidates queuing out the door for jobs. Chad (3m 47s): Yeah. There's always gotta be a bad guy though. Right? It's like the guy across the street, the government, somebody screwing me. Right? But it has nothing to do with the perspective wages or this shitty job that they don't want to come back to or anything like that. Right? Rob (4m 1s): Yeah and it's also like, there's a very social aspects, I think. Because now no, so here we've got like pubs are open again, you can go to the gym, you can go on holiday within the UK, at least, whereas before people were in lockdown and still looking, because frankly there wasn't a huge amount else that they could do. Like on people's personal list of priorities, making a life-changing decision, like moving job is probably quite low down for the first time in awhile. So yeah. Combine that with the economic factor that the programmatic bit of it, the way that job boards are now structured. Yeah. We're in for a weird few months, that's for sure. Joel (4m 35s): On the, on the Talent Nexus side of things, for those who don't know sort of what is your guys' focus and it has that changed at all? And then I'd like to know the sort of the breakdown for me is you have like your knowledge-based workers and then you have your sort of essential, hourly seasonal folks and wondering what your perception is on your previous comments, on how those two groups are separate if at all? Rob (4m 57s): Sure. So, so in terms of Talent Nexus is focus. Long-term, it's the same as every programmatic agency, which is we want to do world-class programmatic advertising for recruiters, that we want to kind of set the standard in what's possible. For us, realistically in Europe, one of the biggest priorities is blending duration based advertising and performance-based advertising. There's a massive split at the moment. I don't know if it's exactly the same in the US certainly in Europe, you kind of have to manage your job board credits and your performance media completely separately. What we're working on at the moment is bringing those two things together, so you can accurately measure a 30 day posting on Total Jobs versus a 50 pounds spend on Indeed. Rob (5m 40s): For example, in the short term, kind of forget about all of that and, think that our goal is basically making programmatic as accessible to as many people as possible to fix what is a very, very direct hiring Indeed at the moment. So we're focusing a lot on people who are using Indeed for the first time or a certainly like rapidly increasing their spending on Indeed, because as we know, but a lot of recruiters don't, if the way Indeed is built as a performance platform, it's kind of built for your average organization, which works in most cases, but pretty much always means that you're missing out on kind of 40 to 50% of performance. Rob (6m 20s): Because when you use an off the shelf version of performance, it's built for the average user, right? And no organization actually is the average user. So guiding people through that, making sure that they're not wasting budget, make sure they're getting the best possible ROI is really important at the moment where people have got really punchy hiring goals. The last thing they can be doing is kind of wasting money and using inefficient methods to get candidates. Chad (6m 45s): Yeah. So when you talk about Indeed real quick now, do you have to use an entirely separate platform with Indeed IQ to be able to manage that, which makes it more of a pain in the ass for clients, or is everything, can you do that out of a single platform today? Rob (7m 1s): Yeah. That's a great question. There's basically three levels that you can use at the moment. You could, you can basically apply the correct principles to the way that Indeed is natively set up. So by that, I mean actually using campaigns, splitting out your budget manually, making sure that, you know, whether it's by location or seniority or job type you're breaking your roles out and managing your budget. That'd be like part A. Some organizations find that using, like the Indeed IQ version, can add a layer of, it's not so much functionality as accessibility. Like it visualizes the data in a nicer way, gives you just sort of prettier reports. Rob (7m 43s): And then if he wants to truly optimize a campaign. So if you want to do what we do, which is get an extra kind of 40-50% of improvement from a campaign, that's where you want to put your feed of jobs through someone like us, and then send it on to Indeed, because there's a layer of functionality that indigenous doesn't support yet, that would be, you know, breaking performance down by a job by job basis. So like really, really granular splitting out budgets, splitting out objectives, knowing that you might want, say 10 applications for your junior exec role, but you might want five applications for your senior engineer role, but knowing that there can be much more expensive, much more, you know, much harder to find or whatever. So, yeah, there's a few levels. Rob (8m 23s): The trick is picking the one that's right, and actually matches what you're trying to achieve. So there's no point going super complex if actually there's, you know, an easy 30% of savings to be made just by doing the basics. Right. Joel (8m 33s): So, Indeed acquired Click IQ from your neck of the woods, correct? Rob (8m 37s): Sure. Joel (8m 37s): In order to create Indeed IQ curious, what in your neck of the woods, what was the impression of Click IQ? Were they a superior product? Has the transition over to Indeed been kind of a cluster fuck? Or has it been smooth? What's your take from where you sit? Chad (8m 51s): And shout out to Richard Collins. Joel (8m 53s): Sir Richard, in his Maserati listening now. Rob (8m 58s): You say my neck of the woods, he lives literally sort of two or three minutes down the road from my brother. So we're, really incubating recruitment marketing talent in our neck of the woods. So what was the impression? So there's definitely a lot of skepticism around like Indeed buying Click IQ. What, one of the things that Click IQ used to push was that, where Indeed doesn't perform, we've got access to all these other channels, right? So regardless of exactly what split they were giving you, the sales message was there are these other channels available. Now once Indeed owns that platform, I think it's fair enough that like some eyebrows were raised over to exactly how that would work? Rob (9m 42s): So that's the first bit, I guess, it hasn't been received fantastically in that sense, because I think if people were using Click IQ because they wanted third party intervention, then they've lost that because it's now first party intervention. That said, I know loads of organizations that bought Click IQ and have stuck with Indeed IQ. I also know plenty of organizations that we've started managing since being on Indeed IQ, because as I said, like, they're just different things. Click IQ and Indeed IQ are like out the box functional ways to kind of boost your reporting, add some pretty basic, but effective rules and sort of methodologies to your advertising. Rob (10m 22s): That's not quite the same as like a fully managed programmatic agency. And I say that you've mystically, they're massively different. Like they couldn't be further apart. Joel (10m 31s): I'm hearing, there might be some conflict of interests that were thought of when a Click IQ was consumed by Indeed. Is that fair to say? Chad (10m 38s): Well, and then it's also steps down with Outcast. I mean, there's gotta be those conversations, right? Joel (10m 45s): How do these programmatic solutions remain neutral or can they? Rob (10m 49s): I can't speak for other programmatic agencies. I mean, the way we do it, is we remain completely transparent. So it's not about, we can't change the way the industry works as one organization yet. Right. We can't say, oh, well actually we think that the way commissions should be paid as X, Y, and Z, because we just get frozen out. So instead what we do is we just remain completely transparent throughout the whole process. So our clients know, for example, that the reason our service feels quite cheap is because we also get a kickback for every pound that we put through Indeed. But that's also traveled the other performance marketing job boards. Right. Right. So where if you are Indeed, then it becomes a bit more complicated, right? Rob (11m 33s): Because you need to convince your clients that this better functionality where you can also advertise on other job boards is probably right to the bottom of the priority list. It is the way it is. Right? As you say, with StepStone and Outcast, everyone knew, I mean, StepStone knew there were, there were no secrets. Right. Everyone knew that that would impact impartiality. I think we even spoke that that happened, I think, was it the day before the last time I was on the podcast? That was when you were in London? Chad (12m 1s): Yeah. It happened. I actually, I think it happened the day that we sat down at the pub because I actually saw Richard at Recfest shook his hand. And I'm like, when are you going to get acquired? And he just kind of smiled at me. And then the next day it was like, yeah, I couldn't tell you dude, but yeah, here's the press release. Rob (12m 22s): Yeah. So that was the big secret that no one wanted to tell you? Chad (12m 26s): Yeah. Yeah. Joel (12m 27s): So also in the news we had last week or a couple weeks ago, pandoLogic announcing the acquisition of Wade and Wendy, which is a chat bot. So pandoLogic being a programmatic solution, buying a chat bot. Does that make sense to you or are you able to put those pieces together? Cause I'm having a hard time doing it. Rob (12m 43s): Yeah, I have absolutely no idea why they did that. So we run some research kind of throughout COVID to track what employers and what staffing firms were prioritizing and looking at which we called imaginatively, we called the pulse survey cause were trying to keep our finger on the pulse. So we, and from that, there was a few bits that came out around like in-house recruiters, massively prioritizing candidate experience, that was like their top priority. And now if you take a finding like that and work backwards, then I could say, well, maybe if you want to grow the appeal of programmatic, there may be stop bolting on things which improve candidate experience. Rob (13m 25s): Right. And one of those things would be if you were taking applications and then screening them or improving the quality via some kind of chat bot tech, then maybe that means you're all front of the pack. Maybe. Chad (13m 37s): Yeah. The problem was with that happened, that actually started to happen a couple of years ago and Indeed put the brakes on it. And anybody who started to do that on the front end to filter out, they cut them off. Because when SmashFly they cut SmashFly off from gathering data, Uncommon was doing it from a matching standpoint. So it's like, that was something organizations wanted to do. Right. But it was cut off. I wonder if Pandos going to try to try to jump the innovation shark here? Yeah. Rob (14m 7s): Yeah. I mean, my, my pushback in the first place would be, in my experience, It's pretty rare that people have got programmatics so right that they need to start worrying about ad-ons. I mean, the, the amount of organizations that are trying to put a lot of money into job ads, having not written job descriptions properly, like there's, it's kind of been my issue with it, like chat bot growth generally I can see why it's relevant flight your footsie one, one fifties. And you know, that was a combination of footsie, one hundreds and fifty-two 50 doesn't matter big organizations. I can see why it'd be relevant for your biggest organization who are already putting millions into the candidate experience. Rob (14m 48s): But for your average recruiter, certainly Europe and I wonder if it's the same in the US to a certain extent, I would just put like tagging chatbots onto programmatic so low down on the list of things to worry about. I was surprised when I heard on your guys' pod, that, that had happened. Nexxt PROMO (15m 12s): 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 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 PROMO (15m 56s): 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 Chad (16m 33s): So let's spin a real quick over to Madeline Laurano's research, which I know you guys got a kick out of over in the UK, right? Talking about programmatic, talking about usage growth, those types of things. But I think most of her research was a US based. Was that something that you guys could actually use as a hammer to go back and say, Hey, this is working in the US, it can work here and help you guys from a marketing and adoption standpoint. Rob (17m 4s): I think one of the reasons we were so pleased to see it was that it echoed a lot of the things that we have hopefully, and, you know, optimistically been talking about for awhile. So when, so for example, I remember one of the points she made was that I think it was like 90% of organizations that adopt programmatic don't go back or not even don't go back, but are increasing their investment in programmatic. Now that's awesome to see because we, so we make points like that all the time about our own clients, you know, we can proudly say that we simply don't lose clients for any reason other than like their recruitment needs changes or they get bought by another company. Rob (17m 45s): You know, we've lost a couple like that, but in terms of does programmatic work or not, we don't lose clients like that. But obviously if I say that to you , you know, you're the salesperson, I get it. When you've got an industry wide piece of research where everyone's saying the same thing, regardless of provider, regardless of exactly how they've used it, that the programmatic as a methodology really works. That's really exciting because it's that okay. So now how do we differentiate ourselves within this field of good suppliers rather than how do we convince the market that programmatic as a theory is useful? You know? Chad (18m 21s): Yeah. So does that help crowbar some of those individuals, those companies off of antique tech, like Broad Bean, because I mean, it's like everybody's jumped on to the, you know, again, back in the day, it was so easy. It bolted onto your applicant tracking system. It just worked now, that was kind of like a dumbed down version, obviously, of what can happen today with performance and targeting and those types of things. I would imagine that's probably the hardest obstacle for you guys at this point. Isn't it just to get people off of riding the horse and to get into the Ferrari? Rob (18m 58s): Yes. Although, funnily enough, we, so I'm trying to think exactly when it was now, probably about six months ago, we launched a kind of industry first integration with Broadbean. So they're there like frontline recruiters could alongside using Total Job CV library, et cetera. They could use Talent Nexus as like a dropdown option. And the reason we did that, well, there's two reasons we did that. One was so we could get quality information back from Broadbean, but as important as anything was like the user experience of how programmatic's viewed. So for all the, while it was this kind of separate, super high tech, very intimidating different thing. It's quite difficult to get people on board, you need some really forward thinking clients to make that happen, which we, you know, we were lucky enough to get a few of, but we could feel that there was this massive barrier between us and like mass market appeal. Rob (19m 49s): Since going onto Broadbean the growth has been fantastic. Like seeing people view programmatic as this way of getting more from Indeed and their competitors, rather than this completely separate way of working, it has been really exciting. And it it's led to this huge growth in this big, big adoption that only would have happened if a major player, like a Broadbean or, you know, interlogic, melon, whoever you guys use. And that was actually kind of the key to it. It turns out having Broadbean recognized the opportunity and the, like, that's where the market's going. That was actually the key to unlocking a load of a load of kind of new opportunities. Chad (20m 25s): It would have been smarter if they did five years ago. But yeah, no, that's a great, better, late than never. Dipshits. Joel (20m 31s): So, if that's the case, then what you're saying is most programmatic solutions are having a hard time, I guess, with the value proposition or helping companies understand why they're so important? Am I hearing that, or do you think that the market is catching up the why of programmatic, or is there still a lot of marketing and messaging to do before people really get it? Rob (20m 55s): I mean, I can only speak for the UK really. I mean, I can speak for some of Europe, you know, I'm not going to speak for the whole of Europe, the UK try and do that too much, and it never works. So within the people I speak to, there are a huge amount of people using Indeed, who don't truly understand how Indeed works. Now for programmatic to make sense as a proposition Joel (21m 15s): Indeed, or Indeed IQ? Rob (21m 17s): Just Indeed. So, they will have kind of bought into the idea that it's the biggest job board, so they need to be using it. They'll have been told how much budget, you know, Indeed will have told them how much budget to spend. They'll have tried doing that and then they'll see where they get applications or not. Now, the weird thing that then happens is I'll talk to them about some of the problems that are almost built into a standard, you know, like a completely average Indeed account. By definition, that's going to lead to some challenges like your budget's not going to be evenly split across your roles. For example. Now, the fact that I can say something as simple as that, and the vast majority of people will have recognized the problem, but not realize that it's something they could fix, that's where we're starting from. Rob (22m 1s): And that's why like programmatic, yes, we, we need to do a lot more, you know, as an industry in terms of explaining exactly what that is, how it works, why it's valuable, et cetera, it's actually, you know, there's education that needs to happen a step before that, which is, well, how does paper performance work and what the implications using that approach as opposed to a traditional model, which I think is one of the things that the aptitude research spoke to, which there's an awful lot of misconceptions. Joel (22m 29s): Should I, do you remember what Chris foreman said was the percentage of companies that were using programmatic? It was really high, which struck me as a little bit odd. It was like over 60%, wasn't it? Chad (22m 39s): And that was in the U S I think it was, I think it was mainly US based. Joel (22m 42s): Yeah. Where would you put it in the UK? Rob? Rob (22m 45s): I think when we've talked about this before, because we've used that, of course you stat a lot, the like the US ahead of US and they're up to like 60% now. I would guess that we're at about 20 to 25 of companies of a certain size. I don't know exactly where we'd cut that off, but that certainly doesn't include, you know, SMEs and the smaller players, but, within the top kind of, you know, those big advertisers on the job boards, I'd say about 25% of them are starting to use programmatic. Joel (23m 15s): So all companies would be singing low single digits. Oh Rob (23m 18s): Yeah, yeah. Of all companies it would be tiny. Chad (23m 20s): Well it's awesome to hear the integration with Broadbean because again, to be able to hook up a VA to a horse and buggy is always, always wonderful to watch. But prediction from you knowing that Dom has left, the CEO of Broadbean has left. I mean, CareerBuilder's been selling things off left and right. Broadbean's, really the crown jewel has been for awhile, but really the crown jewel, what is your prediction on who will buy Broadbean? Rob (23m 51s): Oh, Joel (23m 53s): The answer is the Chad and Cheese podcast. Just kidding. Rob (23m 60s): I think the list of organizations that could buy Broadbean and do anything, by could, I don't mean just with the money to do it, but I mean, are in a market position to buy it and then make it more valuable, is a very, very limited list. I think. I don't know which names have you thrown around? Chad (24m 19s): If you think about it, StepStone has a shit ton of cash. They're looking for a portfolio, right? I mean, it's, those are the types of organizations that they really don't need the tech as much. Right. They have the tech. VONC. I think they're out of Voncs range from, from a buying standpoint, because Apollo is not going to go clearance rack on this. If somebody else had it, I think Vonc quote have already, already chewed them up. But I think, you know, somebody like a, a StepStone or maybe a U S player who wants to be able to have a better footprint outside of the U S we have a halfway as good, you know, halfways, decent footprint here with Broadbean, but, and then also has a compliance product, which is very big. Chad (25m 1s): If you want to push from the UK into the US in this segment, you have to have a compliance product. So it's anybody I think, with a lot of cash because the Apollo's not coming off of that sheet. Rob (25m 13s): Yeah. There's a few organizations in the UK that would be similar in the portfolio sense, but I just don't think they're, I mean, without knowing the, you know, the figures off the top of my head, they just don't feel big enough to be able to take Broadbean, which I would say like, that's the crown jewel already in the existing portfolio to have adopt that in something else, you've gotta be pretty big. Right. And the opportunity I think is too. So what Broadbean we're already doing with, with, with some success is they've got their Broadbean boost product, which is bringing a kind of self service programmatic element into the platform. And then they've got the integration with us, which is all about if you've got a monthly budget to spend, if you want to do programmatic, long-term rather than just to fill a specific vacancy, then that's how they're using us. Rob (25m 58s): So they've kind of got both options, for who needs it. Now that really opens up an awful lot for the market to them, to Broadbean well and to their clients actually. But I mean, the whole point is it kind of opens up that whole part of the market. It gets rid of the perception that there is kind of old school way of doing things because you get access to the new way of doing things, but it's also very familiar and comfortable, right? People, most recruiters who've sort of moved around a few agencies or a few employers on their way up through the ranks. We'll have used Broadbean at some point. And it's very difficult to quantify how valuable that is from like a brand and sort of consumer loyalty perspective. Chad (26m 38s): It's comfortable, it's comfortable. Rob (26m 39s): It's because a lot of users, right. A lot of users. Chad (26m 42s): Joel prediction please? Joel (26m 43s): Oh, for Broadbean. Yeah. And so my prediction is that they're not going to sell it. I believe that Apollo's recent acquisition of Yahoo, AOL, Tech Crunch, and a bunch of media properties means that they're going to plug career builders, jobs and all these sites, which is going to include Broadbean as some sort of distribution tool. So I don't see them selling, I see them leveraging the new properties that they've acquired. Chad (27m 7s): Gonna use the horse and buggy as the ammplifier, okay. Gotcha. Rob (27m 10s): I didn't realize that was an option. I'm a hundred percent going with Joel. I don't think so. Joel (27m 14s): There you go. Smart man. So Rob, I'm going to let you out on this one. I'm just curious, your British perspective on three companies and you can make your answers pretty quick. But my questions are, what's your perspective on Google for Jobs as you see it in the UK and Europe, LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter, which I know may have no relevance whatsoever, but they're going public here today in the U S and I'm just curious if there, if you're hearing any rumblings about ZipRecruiter coming to Europe, so Google for Jobs, LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter? Go. Rob (27m 49s): Cool. Google for Jobs was launched to a huge amount of fanfare. And I remember a couple of conferences where it was all people could think about. They were convinced it was going to break recruitment as we know it. And as far as I'm aware, it's been at least a year since anyone that I spoke to was talking about it as if it was particularly disrupting the way they worked very small amounts of traffic. Most of which wasn't a very good quality. It was just a different way that Google search results works rather than this like groundbreaking new product is my impression, so far. LinkedIn is considered absolutely essential by every single staffing firm that I speak to and the vast majority of in-house recruiters. There's a huge amount of frustration about the way they work, but they have a complete monopoly on that style of sourcing in the UK, which is probably why they're allowed to have a slightly frustrated reputation. Rob (28m 41s): Is it recruits? I've always marveled. Since I started listening to you guys, the, I remember when you first dropped the fact about them being, was it like the biggest sponsor of podcast advertising in the US or something mad? Joel (28m 53s): Yeah, yeah. Rob (28m 55s): Yeah. I was like, I heard that. I was like, wow, that is significantly bigger in the US than it is in the UK. They are. So Zip Recruiter fall into like tier two of aggregates in the UK? So Indeed everyone knows. And then if you're, if you're in recruitment, you probably know Zip Recruiter as a Adzunatalent.com, maybe Job Repeat, Job Gate, people like that. Like they're very much tier two. There's like no one would suggest, I don't think even Zip would, would suggest that they're sort of attacking position one. So yeah, I guess, I guess the way it goes is they get enormous in the states. They do their thing, and then they just need a huge amount of investment in the UK. Rob (29m 35s): I mean, their team over here is pretty small. Chad (29m 37s): They'd buy Broadbean. Rob (29m 43s): That's the one we missed. Yeah. So Zip by Broadbean. Chad (29m 48s): Thanks, Rob Prince, everyone from Talent Nexus, Charlie. Good. Rob, if someone wants to learn more about you, I don't know, maybe even connect with you on LinkedIn or something like that, where would you send them? Rob (30m 3s): Yeah. So if they wanted to connect with me on LinkedIn, I would definitely send them to LinkedIn, where they find Me as Rob Prince Talent Nexus. Talentnexus.com is the hub of all the good stuff that we offer, which is mostly free. So if you want like an Indeed audit or an overview of how programmatic would work for you, that's all on there. Yeah. I mean, I'm easy to find and we're more than happy to help with how people are getting set up and what their plans are, especially at the moment. Chad (30m 32s): Rob Prince, everybody. Joel (30m 33s): Thanks, Rob. Rob (30m 33s): Appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me chaps. Appreciate it. Joel and Chad (30m 37s): We out. OUTRO (30m 35s): 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 (31m 20s): 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.

Some podcasters do it for the fun. Chad & Cheese? Global domination. That's why we've set our sites on Europe after conquering America and have enlisted the help of some locals to make sense of the Old Country. In this episode, the first-ever from the new 'Does Europe' show, the boys discuss gig platform Malt, it's newest round of funding, the labor crunch and ongoing work-from-home issues plaguing European employers and workers. Then they throw-in some Facebook bullsh!t for good measure. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. INTRO (5s): Some podcasts, do it for the fun. Some do it for the fame. Chad and Cheese they do it for global effin domination. That's why it's bringing America to its knees was just the beginning. Now they have their eyes set on conquering Europe and they've drafted industry veteran Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze of Belgium to help them navigate the old country and bring HR most dangerous podcast across the pond to trash-talk like never before non-safe for work in any language. The Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. Joel (40s): And that's how you do an intro boys and girls. You are listening to the first ever episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman. Chad (53s): I'm Chad "he had a heart attack!" Sowash Joel (57s): And on this episode Lieven , you're supposed to say, this Lieven Van whatever. Lieven (1m 2s): Okay. I'm going to say myself, because if you do it, I'm Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze Joel (1m 7s): Right? And on this episode, how do you say gig and French? So that's why I can't get a decent fish and chips anymore. And Facebook doesn't care about your old world privacy laws. Sending a whole continent back to the dark ages this is the Chad and Cheese podcast does Europe. It's gotta be better than Disneyland Paris. Right? Lieven (1m 28s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel (1m 31s): So excited! Europe. Let's do this Chad. Chad (1m 33s): Show number one and we're going to get, and we're going to give the people what they want. Goddammit. They don't want us to talk about NFL football. So my first shout out goes to UAEFA 2020. Joel (1m 47s): This is a soccer free podcast. We cannot say soccer on this show. Football. So this is a big deal, right? Yeah. I like the world cup. This feels like, I don't know, world cup, JV or light. I don't, I don't quite understand what's going on with this tournament. Lieven (2m 2s): That's sort of the countries actually knowing how to play football. Okay. You have argued. Well, I could argue for Argentina. Chad (2m 9s): Brazil? Lieven (2m 10s): But US shouldn't be part of any tournament, I guess. Joel (2m 15s): So it's like world cup with just European countries. And it's like a primer for the world cup, which is next year, right? Is that next year of the world cup? Lieven (2m 24s): Yeah, maybe it is normally it's two a year. The okay. You're being tournament and then there's the world cup and then it's Euro each two years, but now we lost a year. So maybe it's next year. It could be Joel (2m 33s): Okay. I know England won or what else is going on? What are the updates? Chad (2m 38s): Here's here's the big update. Christian Eriksen of Denmark. His fucking heart stopped. Kid's 29 years old heart stopped on the fucking field. Joel (2m 48s): I did see that. Chad (2m 49s): Yeah. One of his teammates actually came over, started doing CPR on him. They had to use fucking defibrillator paddles. I mean, Denmark. They were a heavy favorite over Finland. And obviously that outcome didn't work. But I mean, this, I mean just took over all of the new streams and it was, it was ridiculous. Joel (3m 10s): Did the dude live? Chad (3m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. He lived luckily, he's 29 in good shape. And they had, you know, they had defibrillator paddles there, but Denmark had 22 shots on goal. Finland had one! And Finland won the match one-nil. Lieven (3m 29s): Efficiency. Yeah. Joel (3m 30s): I guess it's a win for socialized medicine that they saved the guy. America would have, I guess, thrown him into a grave and said a nice knowing you. Chad (3m 39s): I don't know. He's the guy has money. Joel (3m 41s): Where's your insurance card? Where's your insurance card? No. All right. Sorry. Lieven (3m 46s): I saw have sponsors will be happy. A lot of attention. Joel (3m 50s): Sponsors what a European thing to say. The sponsors will be happy that it got so much attention. Chad (3m 55s): I have to say that probably not the greatest day since Adam Gordon is always wanting us to talk about football and Scotland just got fucking trounced! Two-nil by the Czech Republic. Joel (4m 11s): My man let his whole company off today. I think to watch the game. That was. Chad (4m 16s): No, that's the England game on Friday. That's the one that really matters. Joel (4m 23s): Who's favored to win this thing? Who's favored to win? Who's the best? Chad (4m 28s): Belgium and Italy really kicked ass and took names, but Lieven I mean, who are you putting your chips on? Lieven (4m 34s): Do you know who is actually number one at this point in world ranking of the national teams as Belgium. Belgium is number one, this is weird, but it is. So if we are ever going to win a big tournament, it will be this time. And we are always humble and applied, et cetera. But now I feel we might actually have a chance with this team. Joel (4m 52s): Where's Scotland in the rankings? Scotsman (4m 55s): Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is if it's no Scottish it's crap! Joel (5m 1s): Are they, are they gonna, are they gonna, are they gonna compete in this thing or what? No. Chad (5m 6s): Lieven said he, he didn't even know Czech Republic had a football team! Joel (5m 11s): Adam Gordon is on suicide watch as we speak so we shouldn't be too mean. He was really offended. We did a show recently Lieven, I don't know if you heard, but it's one of our UK friends said that HR tech in Europe is about five years behind America, too, which we talked about on that podcast, well Adam chimed in and said that was bullshit. And that in some cases, Europe is ahead of America in terms of HR technology. Where do you stand on Europe versus the U S in terms of where we are with HR tech? Lieven (5m 42s): Years ago, I would have agreed. 10 years ago we did have something of a lag, but now we don't anymore. Joel (5m 48s): So you say equal? Lieven (5m 49s): Probably, and I think we shouldn't watch Asia and not the US Joel (5m 55s): Did you say Asia? Not the US. 6 (5m 57s): Oh, hell no. Lieven (5m 60s): No. I guess, yeah. The middle east, maybe Israel for example, is doing great. They are innovative. We used to look up at US for a HR tech, but I don't think big innovations are coming from US at this point, but I could be wrong of course. Joel (6m 15s): We're going to come together on this show and figure that all out. Just like the G7 meeting that's going on over in Europe. I'm sure you guys miss Trump pushing away everybody to get in front of the line and in front of the picture, the cameras. Lieven (6m 26s): Right? We have Joe Biden now in Belgium. He's in Brussels today. Joel (6m 29s): Yeah. What's the mood there, in Brussels with our new president visiting? Lieven (6m 34s): Everyone agrees. It's improvment. Yes! Chad (6m 37s): That's not saying much. I mean seriously. Lieven (6m 40s): No, but okay. He's he's far too old to be of any use, but he's your president. So we should be all right. Chad (6m 48s): Get off the age-ism already. Jesus Christ Lieven Lieven (6m 51s): No of course he's experienced. Joel (6m 53s): You're a continent of old people and museums like really you're bringing up ageism. Lieven (6m 60s): No, you're right. We are the old continent, right? Joel (7m 2s): The old world is a bunch of ages who knew? Chad (7m 6s): Are ou kidding me? They're all bias. Somebody who's not biased though, is a Djokovic who beat Tsitsipas in the French open to win his second career grand slam. So that was pretty fricking amazing. That was an awesome match. Djokovich was down two sets was pretty much getting his ass handed to him, but he's a machine and came back and won the next three sets, knocked him out. So a big props to Djokovic on that. That dude is a machine. I thought back in the day, McEnroe, Connors, Borg, Becker, those guys were like machines. Chad (7m 52s): Lendl right? Not even close to this dude. Joel (7m 56s): I mean, if, if, if we're going back in time, Chad, with, with our, our generation, I mean, that was sort of my first taste of what Europe was! Growing up like Wimbledon, was it like the first thing I saw sporting in Europe, I think. Bjorn Borg was this like Nordic God with long blonde hair taken on this scrappy, you know, New York, New York McEnroe. So, and, even on the women's side as well. So Europe, my first taste of Europe was really through, I think, tennis day still today. It's the epicenter of all things, tennis in those days. Chad (8m 31s): Steffi Graf just fucking annihilated people, man. She just killed people. Now her and Agassi have kids. I want to see what's going to happen with them. Joel (8m 42s): Yeah. Let's bring them the mullet back. The Agassi mullet. That's when I want to see these kids with some long ass mullets playing tennis. Chad (8m 49s): None of those guys, really, they weren't as Federer and Djokovich these two are just, I mean, they've just blown everybody out of the water. And again, there are no Americans to be seen, at all on the men's side. On the women's side, we got plenty, but nothing on the men's side, Joel (9m 12s): Which is a little surprising. Speaking of a football, European football, if we can't say soccer, I'm not sure what I'm going to call it. A football. Yeah. Americans are lagging in quite a few sporting areas. Tennis being another one. Lieven (9m 26s): Yeah. You did have two sisters. Joel (9m 28s): The Williams sisters. They're not too shabby. You mentioned two grand slams. What? Serena have like seven? Lieven (9m 35s): We lost Anna Kournikova. I stopped watching the moment she stopped playing. Joel (9m 40s): I can't imagine why. I can't imagine why. Lieven (9m 43s): Do you know the biggest Belgium tennis players like Kim Clijsters, for example? Chad (9m 48s): Oh yeah. Kim Clijsters. Yeah, she was Anna Kournikova before Anna Kournikova. Lieven (9m 54s): Whatever. I'm not going to talk tennis. Find myself useful. And I was going to talk about HR tech. So. Joel (10m 1s): Let's do that. All right. Chad (10m 4s): Topics! Joel (10m 4s): Topics. So let's start with Malt. The marketplace for freelance developer services has raised 97 million in a series C led by Goldman Sachs and Euro Zio. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly? Reportedly at a now $489 million valuation. The Parisian, that's Paris for those Americans listening, the Parisian firm plans to use the funding to fuel expansion across Europe and to the U S. It claims 250,000 registered freelancers and 30,000 businesses using its service. So let's talk gig economy from a European perspective, Lieven. Do you know Malt? Are you using it? Joel (10m 45s): What's your take on the whole freelancer nation over there Europe? Lieven (10m 49s): I do not Malt. We never used it. I can't say have, but I do know it. And I checked their website. The moment I heard about the raising of the 97 million, it's about 80 million in euros. We talk euros, this as a European show. I'm not sure at them, they're focused on data, scientists, developers, designers, et cetera. And that's perfect. I guess those are the profiles who you'll be able to place, but I feel their approach is just like a digital version of an original, basic temping agency. They put some profiles online and then as a recruiter, you can say, I have a project I'm going to propose it to one of those profiles, but basically they don't do much more than what LinkedIn is doing. And then I feel those kinds of companies will have a problem the moment LinkedIn is going to launch their workplace, or what's this going to be called, in November? Lieven (11m 37s): Because LinkedIn has 750 million users. And of course not, all of them are freelancers, but 750 million and Malt claims they have about 250,000 users, which is a lot, of course, it's lots. And, they only launched in France and in Germany and in Spain, I feel, yep, but it's still only 250,000. So if companies like LinkedIn are going to launch something similar, it's just easier to use a big player. I think. Joel (12m 5s): I'm surprised you didn't say Upwork or Fiverr in your comments. Are they established in Europe and used well or not? Lieven (12m 13s): Yes. And they are a different approach. I feel Fiverr. Or for example, I kind of love Fiverr. They offer something totally different. They sell projects that don't sell people, they sell projects. And if you are a designer, you can say, I'm going to build your logo for $5. And that's where Fiverr comes from and the name Fiverr. But that's, was a great approach. It was something new to us refreshing, but I feel in this case, that's just core websites offering people. And those people charge an hour. And our daily rate, sorry, not an hourly rate, a daily rate, about 500 euros for a developer, something like that. And that's the same thing that's been happening for ages, but I've never used them so maybe they are extremely efficient. Lieven (12m 55s): I dunno it could be, but they should have a reason for existence. If they don't find something new, they probably be forgotten within a few years. Chad (13m 4s): What I'm hearing is if you have the same people, pretty much categorically that LinkedIn does, you might as well just go ahead and just cut bait now. Instead of like Fiverr, cause Fiverr is more on the lower end for the most part, they do a couple of things. Yeah. Yeah. They're trying to, but they still have this race to the bottom kind of methodology where people don't get paid shit to do anything. So I don't see LinkedIn going that way. I see Fiverr's still's being, you know, kind of like the bottom feeder of the group. What should companies do? I mean, you guys actually have a remote platform or actually a gig platform yourself. Chad (13m 45s): What are you guys doing differently to wall off against and create moats against LinkedIn? Lieven (13m 52s): Just for one second, going back to Malt. And I was thinking they launch in countries and it's normal, we are European. We think in countries, but Fiverr launched globally. They started in Israel, I think. But a few years later they were in San Francisco and Germany and everywhere. But it's basically, it's just a global concept. It's a website and you can answer it or you can sell your projects. And the projects are made by someone in Pakistan or India or whatever, but you don't really care, you just get your project delivered. And here they sell people, which is okay, it's great. But then if you want to make it succeed, you have to do something different than the big players like LinkedIn will do. We also have some, some digital platforms within our group and I will launch them ourself. Lieven (14m 37s): He didn't buy them and some are actually getting really successful, but building them ourselves, we have to launch them gradually. We have to launch them, starting in Belgium and to Netherlands and down France and Germany, et cetera, just pulling up. And sometimes I feel, I'm not sure how Fiverr did it, but they launched like globally at once. Joel (14m 55s): Yeah. Chad (14m 56s): That's because there was a huge gap. I mean, that was, and they did it. How many years ago to the Fiverr launch? I mean, being, being, they weren't first to market, but they were pretty early to market. What about the companies like Adeco who are not building, they are buying? They bought Vettery and then they bought hire.com. What about that segment? Because again, you kind of have this, we see what's working or we see what's on the clearance rack. Let's go buy that and try to use that in our space. Lieven (15m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. It's a problem and it's an advantage. Randstad they are a huge, they have about a $28 million, a billion dollar revenue so they can buy, I guess, basically whatever they want. And sometimes I feel it's like killing their innovation spirits because they're so big. Whenever some youngster comes up with a great idea, he has to ask his boss and his boss says, that's a good idea, talk with that one. And he's going to talk to someone else. And after talking to a lot of people and our company has done it. So I feel the moment you get too big, you are going to kill your innovational spirit. So those companies they buy and they look in the markets and whoever has proven to be successful can be bought. If you pay enough, you'll buy them like Vettery. Lieven (16m 7s): I don't know whether they got paid a hundred million. I don't know. What I do know is around that, for example, Randstad buying in 2015 Monster, for example, Monster bought, 327 million euros, if I'm correctly, 2015. And at that time I taught what does Randstad that know that I don't, why do they pay so much for something dated, and apparently they didn't know anything. They're just paid a lot for a business, which has been losing money ever since, I believe, but that's a problem. You never get fired for hiring IBM. They say, and it's true. If you buy a company which has been proven to be successful, they can't blame you if it goes broke afterwards. Lieven (16m 50s): But I think you should buy a company whenever it's going to start growing or you have to launch it yourself. And that's something, we are a $2 billion company instead of $28 billion so there still is a big gap, but we have the leverage to launch our own projects and to fund them well and to have them promote it. But we still do it ourself. We have a do-it-yourself spirit and sometimes it pays off. We launch a lot of projects, which never will be huge. But from time to time, we have a great, great something. And for example, I was talking about Monster. Monster was a one set as a project from TMP worldwide. Lieven (17m 31s): And then it outgrew the mother company. Chad (17m 33s): Yeah. Lieven (17m 34s): Randstad bought it too late. And that's the whole thing. You have to buy it at the right time, which is obvious. Or you have to launch it yourself and sell it at the right time. And so we, it, I'm going to give you an example. Last week we launched a company in France, NowJobs, it was already existing a few years in Belgium. We launched it in the Netherlands, now, also in France. And it's a platform, totally smartphone-based to match people, looking for a job right now, students, for example, who say, I want to go out tonight. I need a job right now because I don't have any money left. That is the whole point. So where can I wash some dishes at what restaurant in my region? Or you can just check the jobs which become vacant now and you apply and everything is arranged automatically, but mostly back in the days when students worked at some small restaurants, it was just too much of a hassle for the restaurant owner if you want to hire someone for one day to replace your bartender, who was ill, you just don't fill in the paper. Lieven (18m 36s): You don't even know how to do it. Right now the app relaunched, everything was done automatically. So those people are glanced to pay their taxes. They don't care about paying taxes. They just don't want to hassle. Chad (18m 47s): I mean, it's totally on demand talent is what you're saying, you don't have to go through all the back office bullshit administration. Lieven (18m 53s): Exactly. And that's the whole point. You have to offer some convenience and that's, in my opinion, what a successful labor platform should offer, is convenience. It has to be easy to use. It has to be sure as a worker, you have to be sure you'll get your money. And then they offer something different. But not just the matchmaking which every company has been doing for years, then it's just translating all business into a new way of explaining it, I guess. Joel (19m 22s): Let me, yeah ask a question. You mentioned the rollout of this product. And I think that Americans don't have a real sense of how you guys sort of prioritize where you grow as a company. In the U S obviously you can be in the US and you, conquer you're in multiple states, right? But if you're growing a company, you know, our route is usually, well, you got to be in New York, you gotta be in San Francisco. Then we're going to go to Chicago, like big cities. To me, it would seem logical if you were launching in Europe, like, okay, well, UK is huge. Germany's huge. But the rollouts tend to be, you know, we're in Belgium and then we're in France. And then we went to Spain, like, what is, what is typically the rollout for companies in Europe in contrast to what the U S sort of sees as a normal rollout plan? Lieven (20m 7s): Huh? I think it depends on where you launch from. For example, if you are a French company and you are Paris based, it's probably easy for you to go to Belgium, to the Belgium markets and to Luxembourg, because of the same languages. Joel (20m 21s): Language-based okay. Lieven (20m 22s): Yeah. Language is sometimes it's a problem. I mean, we have 27 countries within the European Union with 25 official languages. And if you're an American company and you're launch in Europe, it's perfectly okay to launch your English websites because you're American. But if we would launch a project in Belgium and we do not do it in Dutch and French, then people would be offended. So it's the same thing, if you launch in Denmark or in Scandinavia or wherever and Finland, you have to use the language of the country you are launching. And language, it's still a different thing. Joel (20m 56s): Spring boarding off of that, part of the Malt capital raise is to come to America. What are your thoughts on that? The success rate isn't very high. You mentioned Randstad buying Monster. That seems to be the only route that works. If you were giving Malt advice on coming to America, what advice would you give them? Lieven (21m 14s): Hm. Talk to you guys, I guess. Surrounded by specialists in all the markets, because it's, it's all, it sounds nice. And we're going to buy an office in a Silicon Valley and we're going to launch a bakery and then we'll take the American market. And it's huge, but it's a different markets. You have to work with local people, knowing the local legislation, the local way of work, even the local language. And we all speak English, but we don't speak it as well as you do. And it's a different kind of English. You learned it at school and you speak sometimes your business language which is different. So you have to work with local people I feel, in most cases. SFX (21m 51s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Joel (21m 54s): Let's talk about the talent crunch going on, and I guess all over the world, but certainly in Europe as well. So this is a story out of the UK. So as the UK economy emerges from the effects of the pandemic, various sectors are reporting shortages of staff. The lockdown easing has prompted employers to start recruiting. UK job vacancies have hit their highest level since the start of the pandemic. Yet puzzlingly the latest employment figures show one in 20 people who want a job can't find one. Hospitality, for example, is struggling to find staff. And there is a shortage of lorry drivers, which I guess are truck drivers? In the words of Kate Nichols, chief executive of Trade Body at UK Hospitality, the sector has quote the wrong workers in the wrong place at the wrong time. Joel (22m 41s): So what's going on with the talent crunch in Europe? Lieven (22m 45s): And by talent crunch. You mean what we call war for talent? Is it the same thing? Chad (22m 49s): Pretty much. Lieven (22m 50s): Okay. Okay. So for those not American listeners today, talent crunch is something like. Chad (22m 56s): Well, it's funny because you guys are about five years behind us in terms, we stopped using that about five years ago. Lieven (23m 5s): Okay. So maybe in that case, you are five years behind, but of course we only use our own languages. So we don't speak about talents, whatever. Okay. And your Cape, my joke of course has a different problem today. That's the, Brexits, let's say you're a truck driver or a lottery driver as they call it in the UK? Then you have to say, you've come from Poland. Because most truck drivers are from the east European countries, they still are. And then suddenly there was Brexit. So you have to leave the country or you didn't have to leave the country, but you have to fill in so many documents. You might as well think, okay, I'm going to work in Germany, France, or Italy or wherever because everyone is looking for truck drivers. Lieven (23m 49s): So I think those fancy talent crush thing is getting bigger in the UK and in the rest of Europe because of the combination of COVID and Brexit. Joel (23m 59s): Well, it sounds like immigration is a huge part of the shortfall and you and I have talked about it sort of offline, and it sounds like that's affecting a lot of European countries with COVID and, you know, borders, closing what countries in Europe are going to come out best in terms of immigration and where immigrants going to move to, to sort of fill in these voids of a job openings? Lieven (24m 22s): People move from the east to the west, because basically in the west, people still make more money. Even though in central European countries, it's almost the same as in Western Europe, but definitely five years ago, you could make more money in Belgium than in Poland, for example. So people who are skilled, skilled workers were hired in Poland and in Romania and et cetera. And they were brought to Belgium where they got a contract from a Belgian or a Dutch company. And they worked for a Dutch or French or German companies. And that's okay, there's no problem because for those people, it was a good thing, they made more money, they saved a bit and then they went home, in some cases or they stayed whatever. Lieven (25m 7s): But of course the problem was just moving because those people in Poland are losing their skilled workers and they had to search for new skilled workers. So they had to look even more to the east. And migration, it's not a thing from the past that will always stay, but I feel in the U S you have one legislation. And I think, I might be wrong, but there's not a big difference in salary between the north and the south. I guess maybe if you work in New York or in Silicon Valley, you'll make more for the same jobs, but basically it's about the same thing. But in Europe, it isn't the case. And definitely in Eastern Europe, which used to be, before the fall of the Soviet Union, it's a totally different way of working. Joel (25m 52s): So it's more about, it's more about money than it is border sort of openness. Like you mentioned the U S and once you're in the U S you can go to any state pretty easily, and each state competes, you know, on various levels. But I think there's the impression that in Europe, you know, there's a border on every country, but you're saying it's, anyone can go pretty much anywhere. It's just a matter of money and where they want to get the most. Lieven (26m 12s): And within the European Union It is, of course, if you have Shanghai, I'm not sure if you know the deal, the Shanghai agreement. Joel (26m 19s): So the UK is proper fucked for their immigration policy is what you're saying? Chad (26m 23s): Or royally, fucked. Lieven (26m 27s): I think they really are fucked. I'm sure the Scottish guy, you were talking about Adam what's his name, had a good reason to vote for the Brexit. If you did so I'm sure. Scotsman (26m 38s): Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is if it's no Scottish it's crap! Joel (26m 43s): So how much do you, how much? So in the U S obviously we talk a lot about unemployment benefits and a lot of, you know, COVID and healthcare childcare. It sounds like from some of the articles, I read that furloughs workers being furloughed and staying home was still an issue? That ends in September. What are your thoughts on sort of the furloughs ending and how that will impact people going back to work? Scotsman (27m 3s): And what's the furlough. Joel (27m 4s): So for others, when you're paid to stop work, like you go home, you know, you're furloughed, so you can go home and you're still paid by the government in this case. Lieven (27m 12s): No, of course. Well, we have people making a career out of it. For example, turnkey generation furloughs, how do you say it's? Our social security is dead goods that some people can make the most out of it, which is a problem. Yeah. Once again, I love our social security. We need it, and that's a good thing, but in some cases, people take advantage from it and they shouldn't. Chad (27m 36s): Well let's transition over into remote workers real quick, because, you know, obviously there's a huge shift in all these jobs that we were told for years that you could never do from home. And guess what COVID came and everybody could magically do them from home. And now they don't want to go back to the office. Is anyone surprised? And how big of an issue is this going to be for Europe? Are companies going to force people back into the office or are they going to focus on more hybrid and autonomy? Lieven (28m 12s): Well, I can't speak for the whole of Europe here and I can't speak for every company, but my impression is that's companies, as well as employees are discovering the benefits. Because for example, there's a major telecom company in Belgium, and they announced they're going to close down half of their offices because it turned out people could actually work from home. And they liked working from home and they were as productive as before. So they're just are going to stop renting all those offices, which is a good thing for both parties. So I think in many cases, people will, it will be hybrids. It's a cliche, but people will work a few days from home and a few days at the office. They'll be at the office when needed. Lieven (28m 52s): They work from home home when possible. I, for myself, used to have a commute of four hours a day, which is totally ridiculous. Chad (29m 1s): Wow! Lieven (29m 3s): Yeah. And it was the only moment when I was able to listen to your podcast so I don't do it anymore. I made the most out of it. I was sitting in my car, listening to Chad and Cheese, and I learned a lot really along the routes, but I'm positive about it. It's going to be good thing. Joel (29m 22s): It's definitely going to have a European flavor, right? So the right to disconnect is now a thing and in the news as well. So the pandemic has left workers, especially burnt out. So addressing the problem has never been more critical. Ireland is trying to do just that with what they're calling the right to disconnect legislation. As of April 7th, Irish workers have the right to not routinely perform work outside normal working hours, will not be penalized for refusing to attend to work matters out of hours and they'll have a duty to respect another person's right to disconnect. This is unfathomable, found unfathomable in America. Joel (30m 5s): What's up with right to disconnect? Are we into this? Lieven (30m 8s): I think it's obvious. You're right to disconnect. The moment you step into your car. Let's I don't see the difference really before COVID If you were at the office, you were connected and then you left the office, you got your car, we drove home, and then you were disconnected. And now you just start working from home and during office hours, you're connected. And after office hours, you'll just stop being connected. And if you're swimming, well you won't answer your phone. Joel (30m 35s): What a European mentality. That would not fly here. Lieven (30m 39s): They're talking about the four days a week working week, and then we'll get there. In Belgium people are asking for it as well. Yeah. So I guess not being connected as a, yeah, Joel (30m 51s): Certainly first appeared in France in 2016, Italy in '17 in Spain in '18. So this is a concept that's definitely taking hold of the continent. Chad (31m 0s): Trying to stay in the normal context of office hours is kind of like where we have the issue because many individuals work better at different times. And the kids come home, maybe the kids come home, you know, like at three, 3:00 PM. I don't want to take any email at that time. I want to take them after six. Right. As long as I'm getting my project done and I'm doing my work, I should, you shouldn't have to tell me what time to get it done, unless I have to obviously be on the zoom call. So I think it's the autonomy and the flexibility that is the issue here. Joel (31m 35s): It's also your, your level of level, whatever your title is, right? Like, I'm sure, you know, if you're a manager or developer, you know, you're not going to be expected to answer a text or a message at nine o'clock at night. Whereas if you're an SVP or a President, I think you're expected to be there in most cases. I mean, I've been on vacation and been hit up in the past and expected to answer and have a conversation. Lieven (31m 59s): I'm going on holidays, the fourth of July, and I will bring my laptop, of course. And if someone needs me, I will, they will be able to reach me. But it's normal. I mean, if you're very ambitious, you work hard and your work more than you strictly shoot, just to make a difference. We have other people working less hard, and that is the basis of your career. I guess I always tell my students, it's the first five years, which will make the difference when you have to work much harder. And then you stick out of the crowds and you'll get recognized and you'll be promoted probably and then you'll grow. I still remember an interview with a top manager from a big bank. And they asked him, you are the CEO of a major bank or financial institution. Lieven (32m 42s): You'll probably be work day and night. He said, no, I don't hell no. I used to work day and night when I was just graduating. But no, I'm the CEO no one tells me what to do whatever is right. And I'm sure they have many meetings, probably, if there is a big problem, they have to be there and they take responsibility. Joel (33m 1s): It's really hard to tell your boss, I'm not going to answer you because I am practicing my right to disconnect. Lieven (33m 9s): You don't have to call it the right to disconnect. It's just nonsense. If your boss is an asshole, he's going to call you each five times at 11 o'clock in the night. Change bosses. But my boss, for example, I think she's been my boss now for five years, she may be called me five times in those five years after let's say 8:00 and there was really a problem. It's not more and I know if she calls, I will answer because it will be important. But she won't call when it's not necessary. And it's a matter of respect. You just respect your colleagues, your employees, your boss, whatever you don't, you don't call them. Joel (33m 46s): That's the difference Europeans have a respect for each other. Americans not so much. Chad (33m 51s): Question is will Europeans respect Facebook's new watch. That's the Question. 5 (33m 57s): Europe has a bunch of countries in it. Chad (33m 59s): Facebook is trying their damnedest to get into the hardware game again. Remember the Facebook phone? Lieven (34m 5s): Yeah. Chad (34m 6s): Me neither. Joel (34m 7s): Do you remember the HTC Facebook button where you just pushed a button and you got on, right. Chad (34m 12s): It was so fucking bad. Joel (34m 13s): And portal. Who's got a portal in their house? Chad (34m 16s): Oh, this looks cool. I mean, if you're into Fortnight, Celibacy and Cheeto dust, it looks off awesome. Wearables with cameras? Joel (34m 23s): And Vertigo apparently is a thing with Oculus. Chad (34m 27s): That's a spyware catastrophe waiting to happen. Lieven (34m 29s): Exactly. Why would you need a watch with a camera on it's? I mean, it's looking for trouble. Chad (34m 35s): To take selfies. Lieven (34m 36s): You've got your iPhone with two or three cameras on it already. So whenever someone is doing something stupid, you'll be able to film it. No worries. Why do you need a watch? Chad (34m 45s): Face book is doing everything they can to get into hardware because they're afraid. I mean, th they don't own quote unquote, the hardware side of the house, right? So anybody can do whatever they want to their app whenever they need whenever they want to. Right? Right. Joel (34m 58s): Apple is an existential threat, as well as Google with Android to Facebook. And I think that we're seeing that in two ways. One is the percentage of money that Apple takes from apps. And the other is Apple saying, you know what, if you don't want to be tracked by an app, then you can, you can deny that in our phone. And let's be honest that Facebook exists because they can track your behavior and what you do online. If they can't do that, their ability to make money is challenged to say the least. So they are trying desperately to get into hardware. They'd much rather you wear the Facebook watch and be able to take pictures and upload directly to Instagram. Joel (35m 41s): Then you use an iPhone. Yeah. That's just the battle they're fighting. Lieven (35m 44s): If that's the case, then they are probably right. And I will never, ever allow such a watch in my home. Joel (35m 52s): Why wouldn't they call it the Instagram phone? Because at least that's a relatively cool brand, as opposed to Facebook, which nobody younger than 20 wants to be a part of. Lieven (36m 1s): True maybe. Chad (36m 2s): I still think you can see through that pretty easily. Not to mention, I mean, Instagram doesn't quite have, the traction that Facebook has had, but overall, I think anything coming out of Facebook right now is toxic. It doesn't matter what it is. It is toxic. Other than again, if you like playing Fortnite, Celibacy and Cheeto dust, you want an Oculus? Right. So other than that, I think you're good. Joel (36m 28s): Facebook and privacy in Europe is a huge deal though. I mean, we talk about in the U S but I don't think we act particularly from a government standpoint as you guys do. I mean, it's a huge issue there. Lieven (36m 37s): Yeah, you still don't have a GDPR in the U S. Chad (36m 40s): We do not. Lieven (36m 41s): None at all. Nothing at all. Joel (36m 42s): Probably never will. Lieven (36m 44s): Okay. And that's the way it was actually executed. It was terrible. I mean, GDPR it's a terrible law in my opinion. And, and it's made many consultants, very rich and it's deadened and the least influenced the amount of spam I get. So people are now constantly having to push the button. I consent to accept cookies or bla bla bla, and yet they do so nothing's changed, but at least the government's rights to make those big companies behave. And I was having a conversation with my boss to see, oh, how's a big picture about probably privacy will be a luxury. You have to pay for privacy. And it's already the case. If you want to accept commercials done, Spotify is free. Lieven (37m 28s): If you don't want commercials, you have to pay. So it's not only about accepting commercials, it's about not selling your own data. So if you want to keep your own data to yourself, you'll have to pay. You'll have to buy a brand like an iPhone, which will block it. And maybe the Facebook watch will be cheaper and they will constantly follow you around and weave stuff like TikTok on it. I think it's terrible. It's possible. Chad (37m 51s): You still have to trust the company. And that is just, that's a bridge too far. And we're in a paradox right now, unfortunately, because we have a bunch of politicians who don't even know how to spell AI, let alone what the fuck it does. Right? So overall, overall, we are screwed because we know that the, we can't trust the organizations, we can't trust Facebook to actually manage itself, to be able to regulate itself. We can't trust them. There's no fucking way I will ever trust them to do that. But I can't also think of Louis Goldberg or whatever the fuck that dude's name is here in our edge of the world who even know how to spell AI. Chad (38m 37s): I mean, that's kind of like the paradoxical situation that we're in right now and it sucks. Joel (38m 40s): And it's as a general idea, how do you guys feel about wearables? I mean, smart glasses, ear phones, watches, does anything work? It feels like the ear thing could, will be a thing. Like, you know, we'll be talking to a virtual girlfriends, like Joaquin Phoenix in the movie, Her. I mean, VR, AR ears, eyes, wrists. Does it, does any of it work for you guys or not? I don't have a watch. I use headphones, of course. I don't have smart glasses. Lieven (39m 7s): I do have an apple watch and I never use it, never, because the bloody thing keeps telling me stuff I don't want to know. And it it's intrusive and it's basically it's ugly, but I bought it because of the hype one day but it was it about those wearables, like Google glasses, maybe, in specific surroundings, if you're a mechanic and you're looking at a difficult machine, or you can use glasses to see the manual why not? There's a case. Chad (39m 37s): Schematics. Lieven (39m 38s): Yeah. But just in my home, watching the wall, from Google glasses, seeing something, nobody else can see. Why should I? Joel (39m 45s): So it sounds like until we get our Elon Musk brain chip, all these wearables are going to fail. Lieven (39m 51s): I'll do guys feel about the Elon Musk, I mean in Europe we think he should be our president, but yeah. Chad (39m 58s): Yeah. That is a one crazy motherfucker. Joel (40m 2s): President of Europe. That sounds about right. Chad (40m 4s): You know, if you guys actually had him as a, you know, like president of the EU or something like that, you guys could actually catch up to those three to five years you're behind. Joel (40m 15s): I think Facebook wristwatches will be a thing before Europe becomes unified. And with that, the first one is in the books. Chad, Lieven thanks for joining us. Chad, Joel and Lieven (40m 26s): We out OUTRO (41m 22s): 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.

Cage match time! On this week's podcast, Eightfold AI and Beamery play dueling valuations, following some massive funding rounds. King Kong vs. Godzilla ain't got nothin' on our industry. We even throw startup Gloat into the mix, as they count the investment dollars and look to take on the parade of platform wannabes. Plus, Houston, we have a problem, Toobin is back in ya' face (eww) and it (still) ain't easy on a stripper. Enjoy another Sovren, Jobvite, and JobAdx powered episode. 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 (20s): Oh yeah. Free Jeffrey Toobin! Free Jeffrey Toobin! What's up boys and girls? It's your favorite podcast? The Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your cohost, Joel "is this thing on" Cheeseman. And this Chad (36s): Is Chad, "just the tip Sowash. Joel (38s): And on this week's show, it's an Eightfold versus Beamery cage match. Houston. We have a problem and signing bonuses for strippers. And did I mention Jeffrey Toobin? Chad (51s): Yes. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (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" SOVREN PARSER PROMO (1m 36s): 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): Oh dude. Belgium just tied it up. Denmark one, Belgium one. Very nice. Joel (1m 57s): So you're paying way more attention to this football thing than I am. I'm dealing with a sick four-year-old. So what round is this? Is this something important to move on to another round? Chad (2m 9s): It's kind of almost like Round Robin to some extent, right? You're in groups. You got to get out of the groups and Belgium and Denmark are in the same group they're playing today. Portugal is a strong group. Shit. They've got Hungary. Not incredibly amazing, but they also have France in Germany. So yeah, there's a lot, a lot of good football happening. Joel (2m 33s): So it's world cup for Europe? Chad (2m 35s): Yeah. Yeah. Joel (2m 36s): Did I mention a sick four-year-old that I mentioned I'm on about two hours sleep and yeah, forgive me if I'm not as cohesive on this show as I typically am, but I'm gonna do my best to power through this because dammit, the energy is palpable with how you're coming through with the football excitement. Chad (2m 56s): I got to say other football, the NFL names Diaggio as the first official spirit sponsor for NFL football. So dude, can you imagine how much Bullet and Johnny Walker would actually cost at an NFL game? Not to mention Philly fans, not just drinking beer, but taking shots. I mean, come on. Joel (3m 19s): I'm thinking, just give a two liters of a Bullet out at Philly games. I think that'd be a good, a good choice in the glass containers. Only in the glass containers. Chad (3m 28s): So bad. Joel (3m 29s): Remember when glass bottles used to be sold at games until Cleveland decided to screw that one up? Chad (3m 37s): Yes. Yeah, they are great projectiles. Joel (3m 40s): Yeah. So I'm a Holmes and Brady on a Madden this season. That sounds like a double whammy of a curse sadness to me. Chad (3m 48s): Yeah. Makes it look good for Justin Fields, Joel (3m 52s): Which we're going to Chicago. That's a nice little segue there. We're going to not a public event, but we're gonna go hang out with Joe Shaker and the gang. Little Abby Cheeseman action with skill scout. They're doing some sort of video that they want to send, which scares me a little bit. But I guess, I guess we'll see where that goes. I guess we'll see where that goes. But looking forward to that, Cleveland plays Chicago at Wrigley Field. I'm excited about that for sure. Chad (4m 18s): I'm excited! Joel (4m 19s): I'm going Cleveland a six to two. What, who? I don't know who's pitching, but I'm going to go with that. Chad (4m 25s): We've got that and then the next week. So I've got to spend like four hours in the car with you there and back. Then the next week we're going to Cleveland and we're going to see the Cleveland Indians there as well. We're going to visit our friends at Evergreen podcasts. We're actually next that week in two weeks, we're going to be recording in the podcast studios at Evergreen. So pretty stoked to see Joel in Chicago and our friend Michael in the crew in Cleveland, you Joel (4m 59s): Get the Michael Text Czar Chad (5m 0s): The Text Czar. Joel (5m 1s): The Text Czar yes. I'm going to be real nice to my wife this weekend to hopefully make sure we get the minivan to Chicago. That's the only way to go, baby. The battle buggy, holds at least four kegs. Just so you know, Chad (5m 16s): The last thing we want to do is take a Julie's sports car, right? Joel (5m 19s): By the way, father's day is this weekend, right? Are you a happy, happy father's day? Chad (5m 25s): I'm happy. Joel (5m 25s): That's a shout out. I assume that's a worldwide holiday. I don't know. But in the U S if you're a father Happy Father's Day. And if you haven't called your dad, make sure you do that on Sunday. Are you, are you guys going to do anything special? Chad (5m 37s): Father's Day's the worst holiday ever. Yeah. It's pretty bad. Nobody cares about Dad. Everybody cares about mom. I mean, seriously, I'll get a chance to be out in the yard and like mow the lawn or something like that. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe I'll cook some, some, some vegan broths. I don't know. But other than that, I'll just enjoy the weekend. Yeah. Joel (5m 58s): I want to say I've saw something that Mother's Day is like the number two or three most celebrated holiday after like, you know, it's like Jesus, and then mom, that's kind of like, and dad is somewhere after like the Easter Bunny and or the Leprechaun. I don't know which one. So yeah, we like Chris Rock says, dad's get the big piece of chicken, that's about it in terms of our lives. No one gives a shit anyway, Happy Father's day, everybody happy Chad (6m 25s): Father's day. And also this weekend, it is Juneteenth. So happy June 10th, everybody. That is the celebration of emancipation of enslaved African-Americans in the Confederate states and is commemorated the anniversary of June 19th, 1865. Joel (6m 44s): Yeah, it was Galveston. Right? And it was texted Galveston in Texas. The final, the final slaves that realized that they're afraid of it was two years after the proclamation was signed because Chad (6m 54s): We had to have union soldiers actually get down there to enforce it. Right. And they had to go all the way to Galveston. Joel (7m 1s): If only Twitter had existed back in 1865, they showed their shit mass celebrations. Exactly. Also this weekend, shout out eight states are ending, you know, the federal unemployment benefit programs. Those states include Alabama, Idaho, our very own Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire. If you're seeing red, you're not alone. North Dakota, West Virginia. And why oming happy no more federal assistance day, everybody on Saturday, if you live in those states, remember Chad (7m 34s): Who the politicians are in office today that are cutting that off so that you can ensure not to vote for those sorry, sons of bitches, Joel (7m 45s): By the way, they were like, how many didn't vote for Juneteenth? It was like six or something. Yeah. Like 14, 14. Yeah. 14 Republicans. Yeah. So none from our state. I was surprised. I was kind of thinking that was probably going to happen, but none from Indiana, a very conservative state. If you don't, if you don't know, Chad (8m 3s): Shout out to our friends, Lynn Bailey and Tyler Weeks for coming out to having dinner and drinks with Julia and I, and actually her team while we were in Portland, we had a great time. Had had some great Italian food, went to this dive bar. It was amazing. I dunno, we stayed up till at least one or something like that. As a matter of fact, drank so much. I actually had the flake out on Lance Hahn. The next day. I couldn't do lunch with him because I just couldn't do any more beer fucking Joel (8m 34s): Out. You flaked on Lance. Oh man. That's, that's rough. As if, as if not being a Portland trailblazer fan. Isn't enough. He's got to have you stand him up. So, so who brought the, who brought the edibles? Was that Ty or a Lynn? I'm not saying Chad (8m 55s): Doesn't matter in Portland. You can bring whatever the fuck you want. Yeah. Joel (8m 59s): I think I can guess. I can guess who brought it, shout out to Deandra. Her friends call her D apparently pits. She is this month's beer drop winner. Yes we am. And we're very excited for her. She, she hates indeed. I don't know if that has come across in past, past, past, but we're going to put some beer in her and get on a zoom call and see if she'll just go apeshit on indeed and give us some scoop. So D happy for you. Again, beer drop is sponsored by our buddies at Adzuna. And by the way, if you haven't signed up to get some free shit from us, what is wrong with you? Joel (9m 41s): Where you're not hugged enough as a child, you got to hit up Chadcheese.com/free. We got free. T-shirts from Emissary. We got beer. Like I mentioned from Adzuna and we got whiskey from our friends at Sovren. If you like any, or all of those three things, you got to head out to Chadcheese.com/free and sign up. Chad (9m 59s): Plus we're doing a, a bourbon tasting with Wilcox tonight, right? Yeah. Yup. Yup. So not only do you get free beer liquor, or t-shirts delivered to your front door by FedEx or UPS or however the come, but we actually get a chance to sit down and have a tasting. So do that. Joel (10m 21s): We're throwing in scotch this month. We kinda threw in an Adam Gordon curve ball. Nice this month. So yeah, it's, it's not it's whiskey without the E, which he was quick to correct me on that. So if, if you're in, if you wanted to know scotch is whiskey without the everything else has the kids or you just spell it bourbon and you're good. Chad (10m 42s): Yeah. Cause Pete takes all the E out of it. A big shout out to Australia's TApod kids. That's right. Lauren and Craig are hitting their hundredth episode and they had us on for a chat. So congratulations to them. A hundred episodes. That's a, that's a lot of episodes, Joel (11m 3s): Still in diapers at a hundred episodes. What are we up to? What are we up to seven? What? Chad (11m 8s): We're approaching 700. Joel (11m 10s): Yeah. Lost count somewhere in 2018. I lost Count of all those. Chad (11m 16s): You counted? Yeah, Joel (11m 17s): Exactly. Shout out for me to young people. Yeah. I said it. So in a recent poll, almost 60% of white collar staff aged 21 to 30 0 1 weren't those the days said that quote, working in a modern collegiate office environment has become more important to them over the past year. This is a, from Bloomberg, which cited a sharp corporation survey, believing we're from home has in some way, hobbled their careers, the majority favor, at least a hybrid work model, post pandemic. So young people get your ass back in the office, get hustle and climb that ladder I'm rooting for you. Chad (11m 59s): Yeah. While I sit my ass at home, you should be in the office, a big shout out to a monster. And they're roaring comeback. Did you see this in Forbes? Oh my God. Oh no. Wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. It was a, it was actually a Scott guts puff piece. I just saw that. So it was funny. I saw this article. I can't remember who sent it to us. Somebody who sent it to us, somebody sent it to us and I read it and I was like, what the fuck is? This is this like 10 years ago? I, I actually reached out to author Jack Kelly, who is the CEO of we cruder to ask if this was a paid piece, he didn't get back to me. Chad (12m 40s): I can't imagine that a guy with Kelly's experience a guy's been in the industry for a very long time, but the guy with his experience and background in this space would be so out of touch. I mean, he, he, he had to get paid Joel (12m 54s): For this, or he's got like an impending partnership or they want to buy his car. I don't know what's going on. Like the, so when, so the title of the article monster, one of the first job boards plans, a roaring comeback under a new CEO with a focus on the fast growing generation Z. So let's dissect this for a second. They do not have a new CEO. That's the first thing that I thought, oh, the Scott guts has gone. No, he's in his third or fourth year of being CEO. So new it's very 19. I think. Yeah. New is very, I think it's before that anyway, he's definitely not new. And then that they're focusing on the fast growing generation, Z generation Z thinks monster is an energy drink. Joel (13m 40s): So to think that you're going to focus on them and get them to come to monster.com to find work is, is a little bit, a little bit disillusioned, I guess, would be the best for it. A little bit of a stupidity. I don't know it's this was a great article by Forbes. Thanks 5 (13m 60s): Topics! Joel (14m 3s): So Beamery kids. This one hit our hit our inboxes this morning. So there's a new all-in-one contender entering the ring kids. Talent operating system. Beamery just raised $138 million. According to tech crunch sources that gives them a valuation of around 800 million. I can, I can feel that unicorn horn growing right, as I tell this story, London-based Beamery plans to use the money, to continue building out more technology, as well as growing its business, which has been expanding quickly and saw a 337% revenue growth year over year in Q4 leading the round by way of its teachers innovation platform is the Ontario teacher's pension fund, which you might remember, Chad was part of the Apollo acquisition of CareerBuilder. Joel (14m 56s): These guys love them some, some workforce technology CEO, and co-founder told tech crunch, quote, HR hates having different systems and everything becomes easier when things are inter op, when things sorry, when things inter operate well. This guy is smarter than me. Prior to this, Beamery had raised a total of 300 or $35 million since launching in 2014. This is according to Crunchbase. According to LinkedIn, the company employs about 200 people. Listeners will remember Phenom a competitor was valued at $1.3 billion back in April after raising a hundred million dollar D round with a total funding for Phenom of $161 million. Joel (15m 41s): So the all-in-one platform battle wages on Chad, your thoughts? Chad (15m 46s): The Pandemic has forced companies to adopt tech much faster, and we're seeing a very frothy market because of it. Although after SmashFly was acquired in 2019, late 2019, I think companies like Beamery are asking themselves today, how have we not been acquired? And how are we not a part of a larger ecosystem? Companies like Beamery and Phenom people are in a very precarious situation as they take on more funding, their price tag becomes inflated and their suitors dwindle, which means, what? Joel (16m 22s): It means the froth is getting a little bit crazy at this point in time. Chad (16m 28s): So they have to use words like operating system for a recruitment and talent graph. I mean, these are all ways for Beamery to not say applicant tracking system, but that's where they're headed. That's where they have to go especially since they've taken this kind of cash. I think they've got one path after taking this type of cash. Joel (16m 49s): Yeah. I mean, this, this race to the top was really started, I think. And I think everything over the last, how many years has been started by Microsoft paying $26 billion for LinkedIn. That sort of was the first domino to fall. And then you had Google get in with Hire and what they're doing. And then everybody thought, holy shit, this whole workforce thing is it there's something there. So money started flooding in and it started with the ATS is, which was reasonable. Right? You had the Jobvites and the iCIMs, et cetera. And now all these, geez, I don't know, they were sort of layers on the ATS, mostly CRM, mostly, you know, mobile technology, whatever started coming in and it's sorta like, okay, are we going to be a feature to the ATS and be acquired? Joel (17m 35s): Well, no, that doesn't seem like that's going to be a thing. We can't really just stagnate as a feature on top of the ATS right now. So we've either got to roll the dice and become a platform and compete with these guys. We're going to have to like, just be where we are and investment capital. Usually doesn't like to sit where it is. So all these companies are like, let's roll the dice, write a big ass check to become an all-in-one platform. And this just seems like every month it's like a new site that I don't think any of us would have ever thought would be an all-in-one platform five years ago when they started out are now going to be vying for this space. Joel (18m 15s): And it's just like, there are going to be some big winners and they're going to be some mad losers in this space. I don't, I tend to lean Beamery on the loser space, you know, well, well-wishes for them. One of my favorite people as Alison Holbrooke is, is in their marketing team. And I certainly, we like them and they like us. They've sent a shit, but Beamery, doesn't really strike me on the tip of my tongue is like, holy shit. Yeah, they're gonna, they're gonna rule the world, but Hey, I could certainly be wrong. There is just so much fricking money coming into this space. There's gonna be some, some big losers when all is said and done. Chad (18m 54s): Yeah. Even more money with Eightfold. What do you think about them? Joel (18m 58s): Yeah. So Eightfold. Geez, this one dropped on Friday after we recorded the weekly show. So mountain based or mountain view based Eightfold AI, this was late last week announced that it arrays 220 million hold my beer Beamery series Z round at a valuation of 2.1 billion. You remember ZipRecruiter was valued at about 2.5 billion. Total funding raise today for Eightfold is more than 410 million with more than 350 of that million coming in the last several months. In a release, the company said "funds will be used to continue the rapid growth and development of Eightfold's tech stack." For those not familiar with the company that launched just five years ago, Eightfold uses deep learning and AI to help companies find, recruit, and retain workers, which is a pretty recognizable story. Joel (19m 48s): Founder and chief executive Ashutosh Garg said in that same release quote, "current HR systems were designed to address issues from a previous era and they have failed to keep pace with the changing nature of work and the workforce." End quote. The company said it has amassed clients in over a hundred countries and offers its platform in over a dozen languages. According to LinkedIn, they employ a little over 300 people. This was really big news late last week. Chad (20m 15s): Back in October, they took 125 million. And I pretty much said the emperor has no clothes and I'm still there. I believe startups like Eightfold need to be more disciplined and focused on becoming a master at something rather than mediocre, or really shitty at everything. When this type of cash is infused into an organization, the pressure to become everything to everyone soon becomes the vision. And what's what's Eightfold's current slogan? Joel (20m 46s): I do not know Chad, what their current slogan? Chad (20m 48s): The right career for everyone in the world. Jesus, fuckin. Joel (20m 54s): 7 billion people come to Eightfold. Chad (20m 57s): So again, everything to everyone, right? Side notes, side notes. I know first. So I have a better slogan. Eightfold calls their platform, a talent intelligence platform, marketing. Get ready to take notes here. Kids Eightfold gives your talent pipeline, just the tip. Talent intelligence platform by Eightfold. 6 (21m 18s): Oh,Hell no. Oh, Hell no. Chad (21m 24s): Let's talk a little bit about Eightfold. Do you think they're not an old company? It's like 2016. They were founded Joel (21m 30s): Yeah. Five years. Chad (21m 31s): They were really focused on matching. And then they took the 125 million. And again, they, boom went to, we're going to be all things to everyone. What do you think about that? That's quick. We have individuals who really leadership wise, they're not from this market. Do you buy into this because you didn't, Beamery? Joel (21m 49s): There's a lot more heat around Eightfold. It's it's the newer kid on the block, so to speak. I've not talked to anyone on the employer side that says, I use Eightfold and it's amazing. And it's the best thing since sliced bread. Now I will say that a good buddy of mine. This is a shout out to my boy, Kevin Burgess, who I've known forever. I just took a job at Eightfold and seems really optimistic and excited about the opportunity. But I just think, man, these companies have nowhere to go, but IPO or they have to sell to, I don't know, one of the big four or five companies in our space and just the options are really limited. I just, man, we'll see what happens. It's it's a hell of a lot of fun, but these valuations and what these guys are getting is morphing the shit that we saw back in, you know, the.com heyday. Chad (22m 37s): Yeah. Joel (22m 38s): Headhunter, and these guys go in public. I mean, it's just, it's probably not gonna end well, everybody, it's probably not going to end very well. And by the way, not to jump ahead, but I mean, we got some rumors, rumors that came through from pretty reliable sources. I mean, Smart Recruiters is apparently going to announce another a hundred, $150 million raise really soon. So the amount of money is insane. iCIMS has to go public soon to sort of make some sense of all this stuff, because I don't think ZipRecruiter's IPO had any sort of positivity of where this thing is going. We need someone in, we need someone in the tech and we could argue Zip is tech, but I think publicly or perceptually, it's still a job site. Joel (23m 21s): You know, let's get another Workday style company out there and see what happens. But I don't think this is going to end well for a lot of companies. Chad (23m 27s): Na, I mean, not to mention, we are blatantly seeing a convergence in the market toward ATS, Beamery phenom Eightfold and many other players in the market. You know who you are, they must hit the ATS head on. So what does that mean for ATS vendors? I mean, you have several Trojan horses in your city right now. They're integrated into your city and now guess what they're going to be competitors. So this is why the ATS is for the most part are slow to partner and become deeply integrated because of the Trojan horse factor. Yeah, there's a convergence. Chad (24m 8s): I don't care. If you call an ATS, you can call it a, an experience platform. You can call it an operating system. You can call it the tip. I don't care. Overall. They are all going to be converging in the same area. And that's where winners and losers happens, kids. Joel (24m 24s): Yeah. And by the way, my guess is there's going to be a whole new wave of these companies that include, you know, the seek outs and the paradoxes and a few of those higher tool, maybe that want to be a platform as well. And don't want to just be a feature that's, that's integrated into these platforms. So, you know, I think there's a whole other round of, of big money coming to some of those folks. And it's going to, it's just going to get frothier and more competitive and more fun to talk about if you have a podcast, but that's, that's what I foresee in the next 12 months too. Yeah. You'll Chad (24m 56s): See. Some of those very smart organizations who have been hyper-focused, they will be acquired by the companies that are getting all this fucking money. And if Eightfold believes they can build this all themselves, man, they are fuck. They're going to kill themselves the scale that they need to be able to, to reach and not to mention as broad as they say, they're going, they're going to have to do some acquisitions and smart companies who have focused and become a master in those areas. They're they're ripe for the pickup. Joel (25m 28s): Yeah, it'll be interesting. I mean, we've talked about, jeez, almost all the chat bots are off the board now, and most of which terms of the deal were not disclosed, which is never a great thing for acquisitions. So we'll see, you know, I'd be interested to see if, if the seek outs the higher tools that like, if those guys start going off the board, you know, we've talked about Zuora in the past, that has raised a decent amount of money. We'll see what happens with them. It's been an interesting year and it's gonna continue to be an interesting year and we'll be, we'll be happy to talk about it. Chad (26m 1s): Is that a unicorn in your pants? Are you just happy to see me? Joel (26m 7s): I'm a little horny, but we'll save that for the end of the podcast. Let's 7 (26m 10s): Take a quick break. Jobvite - Summer to Evolve Promo (26m 11s): Last year, Summer-to-Evolve saw us bring together some of the biggest names in talent acquisition presenting, exciting content to help us learn and grow in these evolving times. This year, we're back to do it all again, taking our eight weeks of virtual sessions on tour for the Summer-to-Evolve road trip presented by Jobvite, virtually visiting locations around the world. We're excited to share more talent acquisition tips, tricks, and best practices with you. Visit the summertoevolve.com to learn more. Joel (26m 39s): And don't forget all the folks that got money from work from home and remote mental health and all that good stuff. It's going to be an interesting year for sure. Chad (26m 47s): Frothy. Joel (26m 49s): Frothy. So speaking of froth. Let's talk about gloat and we won't gloat about it. So a $57 million series, gee, that seems like a low amount of money. Now a series C funding round was announced today by Gloat, the money will go toward accelerating product innovation and market expansion. This brings the total raise to $91.6 million. Let's just call it 92 million for the New York city based company that was founded in 2015, Tech Crunch speculates the valuation for the company lies it right around $400 million. Gloat builds itself as an AI powered, like everyone else, software offering that enables companies to connect their own employees with new opportunities within their own organization. Joel (27m 37s): The company says internal job boards typically have atrocious engagement. And they're hoping to change that. According to LinkedIn, the company employs around 175 people. So Chad, are you ready to gloat? Chad (27m 50s): It's hilarious. Every, every fucking segment wants to throw AI in there. And I, I want all you startups that are out there to, to listen to me just for a second. When you are going into pitch meetings for funding, use AI all over the place. For everything else, stop it. You look like a fucking idiot. AI is a commodity. Okay. Anyway, during our interview with Lynn Bailey, a couple of weeks ago, it's called Panic, Truth and Fire listened to it. She said, everyone is talking about internal mobility and nobody is doing it. That means Gloat could come in pretty much come in and make it easier for companies to retain, promote, and even provide much better transparency of the talent that already exists in your organization. Chad (28m 38s): So I think this is great for Gloat. I think that unfortunately will talent acquisition pay for it. And where does it actually lie? Is it HR? Because we're talking about employees and talent acquisition generally is looking for all that new talent that's outside the organization. So that's also another issue. But will TA pay for it? Will HR pay for it? We all know that it's necessary, but the question is, will they pay for it? Do they think it's important? And will an applicant tracking system actually look to acquire you after taking this kind of cash if they feel like they could build it themselves. Chad (29m 21s): And I've seen so many applicant tracking systems build lame ass internal mobility, quote, unquote platforms or features or whatever it is. So the big question is, is internal mobility important enough in the market. And also with, with partners, big core systems? Joel (29m 40s): I had a nostalgic moment. I read this, remember crowded and those, those fun early podcasts with them and reinvigorating your ATS and getting them excited about current jobs at the company. We both agreed it was a great idea. The execution, maybe not so much, but I think we both agree that companies spend too much money to get fresh blood and new new bodies into the machine. When they already have, you know, more than likely a competent talent that's already in the database, that they just let sit there and get crusty and grow cobwebs. And this is a trend, I think that we both agree with needs to happen. Joel (30m 22s): Companies need to be better about farming, harvesting, or farming, you know, their current database, getting them energized, getting your current employees energized around new opportunities at your company and growing people on the farm instead of going out and hunting for new new folks. So the trend I think I certainly agree with, and I think we both agree with whether or not Gloat is the company to do it. You know, that is left to be said. I do think that this company, as well as the other two that we talked about at the opening of the show portends very badly for job boards and particularly ZipRecruiter who we've talked about very recently, because the whole trend around, we want to use our own job site to generate people. Joel (31m 5s): And we want to have our own tools to source folks. And now, you know what we want to have our own technology that, that leverages our own people to mobilize them into new opportunities. All of that is bad news for ZipRecruiter and Indeed, and anyone else who's in the job posting business longterm. So the trend I'm down with, I think if you're a job site, you're not real happy about this trend of like the, the company page and the company being the centerpiece of all recruiting, but that's where things are going. And I kind of saw it. I'm sure you did too back. Even when you know, the first ATSs is existed to say like, look, if you can control the company website, you kind of win. Joel (31m 46s): To be an intermediate that just serves traffic to them, like that's going to be a commodity someday. I think search engine helped help spur that. So yeah, Gloat, I don't know a ton about them, but I think the trend is something to look forward, look toward. And I think companies are gonna look for ways to, to take their current data employees and make them their new employees and new positions. So I'd be a buyer if we were playing by yourself. Chad (32m 10s): Yeah I just, I think they're on the expensive side of something that everybody says they need, but they're not currently doing. So the question is, will people spend money? Now, there's also a very big diversity equity and inclusion play here because if you are losing people of color and females, because they have these issues of internal mobility and they're actually leaving because they're not seeing any opportunity for them. They're not seeing any projects. They're not seeing any growth, there's no career path. How will they ever stay in your organization to make it to leadership? Right. And that was one of the things that we talked to Vanessa this week. Yeah. She was talking about obviously swapping spit back and forth, where you have a females that you're just pretty much poaching from other organizations into executive ranks. Chad (33m 2s): That's not good from a longterm strategy. Internal mobility is that long-term strategy. And which also has to be coupled with great outreach and diverse outreach. So, I'm behind this a hundred percent. I just think that it's upon Gloat to really focus heavily on getting this into used into the market and getting acquired. Joel (33m 24s): Oh yeah. That'll be interesting too, because otherwise it's the next platform, everybody it's next all-in-one platform. Well, we had some news out of Houston that got your attention. What's going on in H town. Chad (33m 36s): That's right US district court, judge Lynn Hughes ruled against Jennifer Bridges and about 116 of her fellow Houston Methodist co-workers, that's right, a hospital who sued to block the COVID 19 vaccinations. Requirement. Houston Methodist hospital moved to dismiss the case. Remember the US equal employment opportunity commission released guidelines that actually said employers can mandate the vaccine. So what's happening here is the hospital who takes care of people. They want to ensure that their employees, are covered from a COVID standpoint so that when they are actually dealing with their customers or dealing with their patients, that they're good. Chad (34m 25s): Right. But Jennifer Bridges and her coworkers claim that COVID 19 vaccines are experimental and dangerous and Gaslight much. And that it would be wrongful to be terminated for refusing to get vaccinated. Well, I tell you what, you're going to get vaccinated, Jennifer, or you're going to get fired. Only in America, are we lucky enough to have ample vaccine? The rest of the world is begging for it and shit like this happens? Joel (34m 56s): Yeah. It's a very American thing and that the rest of the world must be puking over as they read it. I feel like this is the new stop, the steel activities that these folks need something else to do. So now it stop the vaccine. And by the way, I think you met you, you, you sorta touched on this, but so the judge admonished Bridge's analogy in her defense that her threat of termination in this case was quote like, like quote, forced, forced medical experimentation during the Holocaust. So to throw in like the Holocaust. Chad (35m 30s): That tells you. Joel (35m 31s): In this defense. Yeah. It's just, it's so it's so bizarre. And the, the judge slapped the wrist for that. But then the judge also said, quote, it is a choice made to keep staff patients and their families safer, which is really where this is a hospital dealing with this issue. The judge added Bridges can freely choose to accept or refuse a COVID vaccine. However, if she refuses, she will simply need to work somewhere else. Chad (35m 58s): It's choice. Joel (35m 58s): Amen to that. Oh yeah. So this is, this is going to be a thing. And I think we're, you know, we're headed toward, you know, I think there'll be voluntary passports. I think airlines and and businesses will accept them and maybe turn away people that don't have them. Chad (36m 16s): Yeah. Joel (36m 17s): If they don't, I don't see the government mandating these passports, but companies will voluntarily do them. So at my kid's school, this is a real microcosm of this whole issue. But my kid's daycare has been really vigilant about taking temperatures when you come in, cleaning hands mask, the kids wear a mask all day. The parents wear masks going in and the teachers wear masks all day. So as we're, as we're, you know, getting lessening those, those restrictions, we as parents have to come in with our vaccination cards in order to come in without masks and doing the temp, oh, well, they'll still do temperature checks. Those may be a thing that we just have to live with going forward, but we won't have to wear masks going forward. Joel (37m 0s): If we have the validation card, if you don't have the card, you got to still wear the mask. So I see that kind of going where businesses in the future and Indiana is a really red state that probably won't go that far here, but you're going to have to show proof of vaccination and in life. And that's just kinda how it's going to be. If you want to do the things you used to do. Chad (37m 19s): I think it's important for employers to educate first, right? Why is this important? But also understand employers have to mitigate risk after over 600,000 deaths just here in the U S alone. And it's incredibly prudent to mandate the shot for individuals working in offices, stores and traveling to see clients. I mean, seriously, if I was a leader in an organization and I had my team that had to go out on site or they had to be customer facing, it would have to be mandated. I mean, because think of the risk associated with that. Chad (37m 60s): Again, what's the right thing to do? What's the most responsible thing to do. And when somebody says, it's my freedom of choice to do that. Well, it's also your freedom to find a job somewhere else. Joel (38m 11s): Well, Chad, I'm glad you said responsibility and maturity. Well, maybe you didn't say maturity, but the next two stories are going to get you excited about personal responsibility. Chad (38m 22s): 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. Chad (39m 2s): That's join us@jobadx.com. JobAdX, the best ad tool, providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Okay. Quick question, Joel. Joel (39m 15s): Yeah. Chad (39m 16s): What is the punishment for jerking off during a zoom call? Joel (39m 20s): Six months penalties and then back on the air, baby, is that the right answer or is there a joke? I don't know about it. Chad (39m 24s): Seven and a half months. That's exactly right. Tubin is back! yeah. Joel (39m 29s): How's that taste cancel culture. Just when he thought he had been yanked off CNN for good Jeffrey Toobin is back on TV. You like that? Although no word. If he'll be appearing on zoom, anytime soon. It's hard to fathom that CNN let Toobin our new favorite verb come back. But here we are Donald Trump Jr. Chimed in on Twitter. You'll appreciate this saying quote. "Imagine any other network putting Jeffrey Toobin back on air after being caught, masturbating on a corporate zoom call?" Yeah, me neither, but CNN is totally good with it. I guess their prospects for talent are as bad as their ratings. Chad, are you ready to put Toobin back into your life? Chad (40m 10s): I am not. I just can't. It's hard to believe that there are no legal experts that are out there. They could have hired that wasn't Jeffrey Toobin. I mean, how does this look from an employer? CNN? How does this look for them to the rest of the world? I just can't believe seven and a half months, but yeah, I it's hard, man. I don't get it? Joel (40m 32s): Yeah. I try to put myself in any, any CEO's shoes if this had happened. And granted, he had no track record, there was no trend or history of him, you know, behaving badly. But if you're a CEO of a company, I don't care what size it is. If this happens? Like I can't let you back in the ran the deal. Like I, I gotta fire you. Like, I wish you luck. And I understand and forgive you, but I can't let you back into our organization. So the fact that he came back to CNN, as opposed to, I don't know, a cheddar TV or some other like low level newscast to sorta work his way up was sort of surprising. Joel (41m 15s): And so, so my wife, my wife is left leaning. That's probably no surprise if you listen to the show and she loves CNN, like she loves her some CNN. And I asked her, I said, are you okay with Jeffrey Toobin coming back on air? And she was pretty forgiving about it and accepting. And I said, now, if he had been on Fox and done that and come back, do you think that you would feel the same? And of course she said, yes, I would. But I kind of suspect, she might not felt the same if Bill O'Riley had whacked off on zoom and then came back. And I also throw in like, speaking of O'Reilly, it wasn't like Toubin was this cash money machine for CNN? Joel (41m 56s): It wasn't like Howard Stern or Hannity, like, oh, he probably means nothing to the bottom line of CNN. So to let him come back and piss off a whole bunch of demographics of people in the process was a little bit risky. So I agree with you, man. I'm totally shocked that he's back at all, let alone, after eight months, seven months, I didn't think he'd ever be back on CNN. I thought I'd see him on like 20/20 randomly or you know, some other news thing, but yeah, it's fucked up. Chad (42m 28s): I got nothing. Joel (42m 29s): Well, let's talk about strippers. Chad (42m 31s): Okay, Joel (42m 31s): Dude. What's the tally on number of times, strippers have made it into our show, by the way? Anyway, their back, according to local news, Fox ate New Orleans Larry Flint's hustler club is experienced. Experiencing what they say is a quote national exotic dancer shortage end quote, like any business facing difficulties, filling positions. The club is offering signing bonuses. The club is offering up to a thousand dollars signing bonus to any new or returning entertainer "entertainers in quotes there. The dancer shortage is also hitting Las Vegas. One of our favorite cities and little darling strip club recently posted a sign on the strip that read quote, stripper shortage. Joel (43m 17s): Now accepting ugly girls in quote, new Orleans and Vegas. Their loss is only fans gain, I guess. What do you make of this national tragedy? Well, Chad (43m 28s): First off the whole ugly girls thing that would make it. I think it should make any female just say, fuck you. They should. I mean, it's like close your goddamn doors out. Joel (43m 39s): All right. That's a good thing. That's not their audience. Chad (43m 43s): No, it is their audience. They're trying to attract strippers. Right? So therefore if I'm a female and I see that I'm going to be like, what the fuck? Yeah. It gives you an idea of what management is like. And I wouldn't want to work for, for, for an asshole. And that's obviously who would be, but I love, I love how this story states quote, meanwhile, some slipped through the cracks. Some strippers slipped through the cracks and either left the industry to retool their skills in another industry, or have been collecting Biden checks, unwilling to go back to work. So let me translate this for all. For all of you out there who don't speak idiot, speak some women reassessed their lives and their skill sets. Chad (44m 28s): And they found new careers while others are going to wait as long as they fucking can before allowing some old man to fucking slobber all over them. Joel (44m 40s): Yeah. W we should underscore, I think this was the dread report, which tends to be a right leaning sort of risque publication for those, those who know it. But yeah, my thing was like, yeah, w they're all on only fans. I mean the growth of that, although I guess we have talked about the challenges of not everyone is making a thousand dollars a day on only fans, but clearly, clearly I think the pandemic has made a lot of people sort of push pause on their life and think about what do I want to do and where am I going and what changes should I make? And I I'm guessing a lot of women and I guess, you know, maybe men too have, have asked themselves, like, is stripping what I want to do. Joel (45m 21s): And they've, they've gone into a different direction if they're educating themselves or taking different track. That's, that's more, I don't know, serving of humanity than, than good on them. Yeah. Chad (45m 33s): And if they want to go online and they don't have to smell or deal with a bunch of stinky old men and still make cash welcome to 2021, you've Joel (45m 47s): Painted a very dark image of strip clubs. They have great buffets. My friend, they have great buffets and chicken wings and we out, we out 5 (45m 59s): 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. 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 (46m 43s): And while you're added visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese is so weird. We out.

Time to turn the snark up to eleven, people. Four years in the making, industry icon - or at least iconic in millennial terms - Matt Charney sits down with the boys for a chat about his latest role at SmartRecruiters, his take on the hottest HR tech vendors at the moment, and his distaste for most-things-SHRM. Resistance is futile. Turn it up! Snarky pod powered by Nexxt, you need better response rates? Of course you do, so contact Nexxt to received better-targeted candidates who respond! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. 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. Wait... who is integrated with Smart Recruiters? Joel (23s): Oh yeah. Matt Charney, Unchained, everybody. You listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by Chad Sowash. And today we are so lucky to finally have Matt Charney, industry icon as a guest on the show. He's got a new job, which we'll get to in a second, but Matt, four years in the making you're finally on the show. What are your thoughts? And for those who don't know you, what should they know about you? Chad (56s): Welcome to 1950s radio. Go ahead. Matt (59s): Thank you. Thank you. I would actually put it in the forties when they were serializing everything, cause they actually a TV now. Right? Okay. So my name is Matt Charney. The last name is Charney if you are in recruiting, you should be able to Google and find out a bunch of information about me, but I am a long time listener, first time caller is it were. But I have been working in this space for a long time. I have blogged snarkily, maybe a little bit too much for over 10 years now. And my major areas of interest are Joel (1m 34s): What's the cease and desist letter count up to now? Matt (1m 36s): Oh My goodness. Are we including LinkedIn? Joel (1m 38s): Sure. Chad (1m 39s): Of course. Matt (1m 40s): Hundreds and hundreds. Chad (1m 44s): There you go. Matt (1m 47s): I have, I've kept a lot of product councils, very busy in my time, which is cool because one of the things that I'm really, really like passionate about is making sure that good recruiters have good products and don't buy things like eharmony. So Chad (2m 1s): The eharmony for jobs or the Tinder for jobs, which we've evolved into. Joel (2m 7s): Soon to be Bumble for jobs. I think the, are we Bumble for jobs now? Chad (2m 12s): How about Grindr? Joel (2m 13s): Grinder for jobs Matt (2m 16s): Grinder for jobs is what you're no longer allowed to do in the entertainment industry. Joel (2m 21s): So Matt, you got a new job, man. Tell us about it. Matt (2m 24s): I do. So I have the very official sounding title of Director of Product and Industry Marketing for Smart Recruiters. Joel (2m 35s): That is sexy as hell. Matt (2m 37s): It is. Chad (2m 38s): I like that. I'll put that on a t-shirt. Matt (2m 41s): Make it an appearance. No, so, and if you want it on a t-shirt, I'm sure I can make that happen. So essentially, you know what I've done for, God longer than I care to admit, so let's say at least 10 years now is covering the industry from all different sides, whether that is from working with startups to help, you know, accelerate their revenue and valuation, to working with big professional services organization, to define text backs, to overseeing partnerships and also covering news and other stuff. So I really, for a really long time resisted giving up my product neutrality, which is why I joined Allegiance, right? Matt (3m 24s): Because they don't have necessarily a whole lot of skin or at the time, in the product game. But I realized in being vendor agnostic that certain vendors kicked a lot more ass than the others. And so one company that I've been working with largely throughout my entire career is Smart Recruiters. And I think I first tried to get a job there when I was still at Recruiting Daily. And they were like, no, no, our customers are going to leave en mass? So, you know, it's been a company evolve for a long time. I'm really, you know, from a product perspective, nothing in an HR tech is really that sexy, right? But when it comes down to it, it's about people and mentality. And I think that the combination of challenger brand status, so a willingness to shake things up, the fact that, you know, they have really been a pretty big advocate from both the grassroots and, you know, cutting checks perspective for a lot of the different events and programs. Matt (4m 21s): And then also the trust that they gave in me both as an, you know, as somebody who's done some project work for them. And then just, you know, on the scene, for example, while I was getting yelled at, by my old employers, for things that I tweeted, Smart Recruiters gave me their Twitter access says, come do a live tweet, our, user conference under your account, or Hey, would you like to be on a diversity panel with our new chief diversity officer and three of our biggest customers. So I think that their willingness to let me play in boundaries, the most companies would probably find to be antithetical to their go to market strategy was definitely really attractive. Matt (5m 1s): And I think at this point they're a big enough company where I'm not going to have to be doing everything, but at the same time, early stage enough where I can definitely make an impact on both the products and how that product is shaped by the market. Chad (5m 19s): Are you doing much writing these days? Matt (5m 21s): I am. And you're not going to see, you're not going to see a lot of it quite yet, but I am starting to build the pipeline again. So I have 102 posts that are sitting, waiting to be published. And the question is where. Chad (5m 37s): How do you do 102 posts and not, they don't turn stale on you? Matt (5m 42s): No evergreen contents the, you know, I actually think ... Joel (5m 45s): He wrote them 8 years ago. Matt (5m 47s): I did. Joel (5m 49s): That seems to be boring though, because it's so broad. If you can't like zone in on something that's happening right now. So you don't, you don't see that timeliness important. Matt (5m 58s): Like, so what's the oddest topics. Like if you're going to tell me, probably you'll add to this list. Candidate experience, the gift that keeps on giving except to candidate, right? Like nothing has changed DNI, a big imperative. Let's talk about that to the exclusivity. Chad (6m 16s): Now it's DEI. So now all your D and I say, you're going to have to go back and do a fucking, a word switch. Matt (6m 23s): It's actually DEIB plus. Now that's a good point. Yeah. You know, either way, that's a find and replace tips Joel (6m 30s): How to get the most out of your job description, Matt (6m 33s): Functionally, that conversation, the solutions and the things that people are covering haven't changed. I benefit somewhat from both the status of this industry. And fortunately, since Joel Cheeseman stopped putting out written content, from being in a position where most of it's quite stale, so it becomes more tone and style than substance. Although really a lot of what I write about that never gets attached to the industry is aligned towards consumer technology trends. And so people think I'm brilliant. Then when five years later, you know, it enters into the HR, the HR scene. Joel (7m 9s): So the bar is pretty low. Matt (7m 11s): The bar, the bar is pretty low and generally outsourced yeah. Chad (7m 14s): Being in an industry that moves at a snail's pace, I understand where you're coming from. Yes. Matt (7m 19s): Yeah, exactly. You know, I think as long as Taleo still has a overwhelming amount of market where I can continue to find, rip and replace old stuff, Joel (7m 30s): You were great at Rec Fest in London last year, every everyone, including Chad and myself, was talking about innovation and new, new, shiny objects. I go to your session. And it's all about how awesome Career Builder and Dice and Craigslist still are. I'm thinking Dammit. He's right. Like people are still stuck in that time. Matt (7m 53s): Your feedback from that session, if I recall was, I don't think job postings are an accurately indicator of where the economy is going. So ha ha ha. Joel (8m 3s): Take that Cheeseman. I don't think that was my feedback as I remember. Chad (8m 7s): Yeah. Cause that seems way too smart to be Cheeseman. Joel (8m 9s): I'd had a few drinks by that point. So, talking about events and that was actually, I mean, shit that's that's well, over a year ago we have a, an event that's supposed to be coming up this year. LRP is doing, you know, a live event in Vegas. Was it September, August or something like that? Are people going to go back to events this year? Are they going to have, or will they have budget to do so? I think, I think the vendors will they're hungry. They're thirsty.wwww Matt (8m 39s): Yeah. They want to sit behind that trade show booth and scan badges. Right? So I, to answer that question, I long if, you know, looked at from a marketing perspective, what the ROI of these trade shows is from a vendor perspective. And I'm not sure that even prior to COVID a huge business case could be made for the impact that it makes versus the dollar amount of resources that go into it. Now I was never going to bite the hand that fed me because I got to travel all around the world and not really work and speak to big audiences. And that was really fun. But you know, when you look at sort of really any agenda, I I'm guilty of being this. Matt (9m 23s): You have a lot of the same people talking about a lot of the same stuff. It may or may not align with the audience, but when you look at it from like, what's, what's the purpose, okay. It's sometimes can be good for brand awareness and category creation, which is a big, fancy way of saying owning share voice. But when you talk about the major spend there, which is like a trade show or an expo or sponsored content or whatever, you're basically talking about like at a splay at which could not be less productive if you look at it than anything else. So if I'm in a booth, I'm waiting for people to maybe walk by, maybe show interest and then maybe qualify them enough to scan their badge. Matt (10m 4s): And to me, what is the purpose of spending that money when I can do the exact same thing, but targeted and digitally. So I really have long questioned why people go to trade shows? And the answer that I came to is it's not the content itself, it's the ability to - one get out of the office- something I think we all desperately need right now. So maybe there will be a little bit of an early ramp up there, but more importantly it's the stuff that happens as you guys know around the individual sessions, the interactions you have in the hallway, the people you meet when you're outside having smoke breaks or cocktails or whatever, and it's really building on relationships, you wouldn't have had otherwise. Matt (10m 45s): So until that goes back at scale, I don't see the events are going to ramp up anytime soon. You're and I, you know, I'm sure you're seeing this too, a bigger shift from these broad kind of global everyone come events to much more localized events. And I do think that that actually is what we're going to start seeing a lot more of. Highly targeted, smaller, smaller attendance and content, that's much more focused on that audience and building a network as opposed to selling a messenger product. Chad (11m 20s): Have you seen Miami here lately? The streets full of crazy people and yeah, I think you're a hundred percent wrong. I think as soon as we get a chance to get the fuck out, people are going to say, yes, I need a reason to go to Vegas or I need a reason to go here. Yeah. We'l will there be more hybridization happening with local and also online? Yeah, I think there will be, but I, dude, I think that we are so ready as human beings to go to Miami and just get freaking crazy. It's it's gonna happen. It's going to happen. Matt (11m 54s): But yeah, absolutely. At the very end, you know, as I alluded to at the very first part of it, I think that, you know, my question is how sustainable is that when your resources are strapped, professional developments being cut and you're trying to justify days off work when that's being heavily scrutinized. Right. So I think that, yes, you're probably right. Timeline-wise, there's a lot of economic questions and what still needs to be answered. Chad (12m 22s): Joel calls it, the roaring twenties are coming. Joel (12m 24s): It isn't, I'm not the only one I'd love to take credit for that. But no, I did not go with that. I mean, I agree that I think the vendors have money, you know, budgets to spend, they're going to go back. I think the people like us who are quote unquote thought leaders or influencers, we'll definitely go back. The question is the attendees, you know, they're going to reevaluate did we really get anything out of that? That we can't get off that we can't get from a virtual virtual conference or even video library or education somewhere. And I think they're going to ask hard questions as to whether or not they should keep doing it. Local ones are obviously easier from a budgetary standpoint. I don't, I just don't know. You know, I know Recruiting Daily has been trying for a while to do local stuff. Joel (13m 5s): I know John Sumser tried, you know, local stuff for awhile and they all, they all seem to fade away. So I don't know the, you know, the viability of that business model versus the, we have a huge conference twice a year that everybody comes to Vegas or San Diego or wherever. I think it's hard to scale locally. Matt (13m 23s): It is. But, you know, seeing some, probably our next conversation, SHRM they're local. They're local chapters have always done a really good job of organizing that. I think your distinction is, is it an event company that's producing it to make money? Or is it something like a local user group for a specific software? Those are very, very different strategies in my opinion. And let's face it like LRP is always going to bring in like a bunch of attendees because the attendees are vendors looking for partnerships. Yeah. Chad (13m 54s): Let's talk about tech real quick and adoption, because again, we do move at a snail's pace in this environment, but yet you went to a tech vendor, number one. Number two, I think scalability and adoption have increased dramatically just in the last shit, nine to 12 months around the pandemic. Do you think that continuing at the same pace, do you think it was adopted any fast? What's the outlook? Matt (14m 22s): So if we're talking about like recruitment technology, I think that you've had a lot of companies being able to take a step back away from a prior to release site called it's quiet, defined. So, oh crap. We have this RFP check a box build for that. And really more looking at capability gaps, being much more strategic about partnerships because you have this whole subset of companies that are like, oh, we integrate with this and this and this. And it's like, if they have an open API and a developer center, so you don't really integrate with them, but cool you get to splash a logo up there. But what I think has really accelerated has been more towards things like collaborative hiring, structured scorecards, virtual interviews, and just consolidating the hiring process as much as possible so that not only is it virtually enabled, but more importantly, the total cost of ownership is being driven down. Matt (15m 18s): So what you're seeing is, and this is one of the reasons I joined a tech company, frankly, where I did in the value chain. You're seeing really good numbers and growth around platforms. And then you're seeing a huge amount of failures and a consolidation or devaluation, if you look at debt financing, among the point solution vendors who oftentimes will either be built into a company's roadmap and then there's no need for that native solution, or just companies are saying, Hey, you know, we're cutting down on the amount of spend that we have externally, so we're going to go for the core capabilities as opposed to the flash. And I think nowhere will you see that more in like a recruitment marketing, which is essentially gone from a inbound sourcing function to a PR function for a lot of organizations that have flat or decreasing headcount. Chad (16m 9s): So where do you see a company like HireVue, which is just a large ass point solution and they have a shit ton of funding, where do you see them going other than toward becoming an applicant tracking system. Joel (16m 19s): Or LEO purchases. Matt (16m 21s): Wow. You had to go with HireVue, didn't you? Okay. So first off I would have to go find some golden plates and then transcribe them based off what the angel Moroni told me to do. Second off, I would have to figure out the difference between AI powered, facial intelligence recognition and acting. Right? Chad (16m 43s): But they're not doing the facial stuff anymore, are they? So all that tech is down the fucking drain. Matt (16m 48s): Yeah. Yes. And why aren't they doing it? Because they did not lose an employment rights lawsuit. They lost a civil rights lawsuit for that product. So you can have all the cash in the world and they do thanks to the elders of Zion, not my Zion but the other one. You have a company that is, as far as I can tell, had complete run of the market by being one of the earliest enterprise video interviewing, you know, solutions out there. And you have a company that seems to me to be largely trying to find a direction, take all that back. And it tells me this, well, video interviewing is not a category where you should have been invested in the first place. Matt (17m 32s): And as we saw when everyone was had to overnight move to like, oh shoot, we have zoom, oh, we have Microsoft team. We have the it's like, okay, well, there are a lot of cheaper low price options out there. Is this something we could do ourselves or something we need? So while they can continue to redefine themselves, their core capabilities, I think have always been this aligns with the market. And you're certainly seen that pivot as again, companies start to look at consumer grade technologies and say, Hey, why the hell not? Chad (18m 2s): So they're fucked is what I'm hearing? Okay. Matt (18m 4s): No, no. They're not, they get their own planet once they die. So. Joel (18m 10s): Wow. Wow. So you're talking about technology and the world is opening back up. Where, are you seeing in terms of head count for recruiting teams as we start to hire more, are they going to bring more human beings on or are they going to use more technology and bypass the humans? Matt (18m 28s): I don't think it's actually an either or so what my data shows, and this is limited to the access that I have, namely surveys. We've seen about one third of recruiters in the United States lose their job over the past year. I don't think that is unexpected. Given what we saw like 2008, 2009, what we did see then is like every company is like, oh, hiring is picking back up, crap, we have to hire a bunch of recruiters and sources of marketers. So what I think you've actually seen over the past couple of years, call me out if you think I'm wrong is that companies have been investing fairly heavily in things like recruitment process automation, not AI, but you know, RPA, consolidated tech stacks, and sort of ways to take back office processes and really remove that from the overall workflow. Matt (19m 18s): So I think you were kind of left with two groups. One of these groups has already sort of implemented a lot of the corps tech or have a good system that that's really configured for them so they're not spending all day dis-positioning resumes, manually posting job descriptions and all that stuff. And those people, I think actually have job security and haven't lost their jobs, those are, these are the two thirds. So when you have people who've implemented a lot of either automation solutions or built processes that are real efficient and effective. What they've have largely done is been able to pivot to things that are generally out of recruiting's scope since head counts went flat or down. And that's things like internal mobility, up-skilling, hypo identification, and a lot of cases, obviously DNI is coming into this. Matt (20m 4s): And so you're really starting to see a blending of what used to be more traditional HCM with TA, but with the angle of being a much more strategic. I think that the word, the tech likes uses trusted advisor, as opposed to somebody sitting a centralized service, you know, slating candidates and manually some of the hiring managers Joel (20m 25s): As opposed to distrusted advisors. Matt (20m 28s): Well, there are quite a lot of those they generally work for a third party staffing firms. And then the people who were order-takers or who, you know, were spending, gosh knows how much to send templated LinkedIn messages, like, I came across your profile, I think you'd be great for CyberCoders position. They weren't going to be long for this world, whether or not a pandemic happened. And so what you're seeing is sort of a natural flush out between those who do, and those who process requisitions. Joel (21m 2s): Darwinism basically is what you're saying, Matt (21m 4s): Survival of the fittest, but with Androids, right? Nexxt PROMO (21m 14s): 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 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 PROMO (21m 58s): 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 Chad (22m 35s): You would actually, I think you tweeted out something about our buddy, Johnny Taylor, over at SHRM joining iCIMS. Matt (22m 44s): Mr. Johhny Taylor. Chad (22m 46s): That's an interesting marriage. Shall we say? What do you think iCIMS was looking for through that type of was a board position? Matt (22m 57s): Yeah, he's a member of the new member of the board of directors. Chad (22m 60s): Why? Matt (23m 0s): Good question. So obviously I think that this is a company that is very traditional and east coast. I don't, you guys have been to their headquarters in Bell Labs where cell phones were invented, but no longer work. I'm sure. You know, I'm sure that you took a beautiful trolley tour of Red Bank, New Jersey, and you know, they're owned by private equity. So I see this as being very much aligned towards making an upmarket play so that they can say, oh, we're not a startup anymore. We're enterprise ready. And not only that we'll see how the conflict of interests work, but Johnny C. Matt (23m 44s): Taylor brings two things, one a giant organization of people who generally don't buy recruiting technology in the first place. So I'm unclear of that alignment. They rubber stamp it, but more importantly, I think for them, he brings quite a few political connections that the three people on this call might not love, but like it or not, he is the go-to HR and jobs expert for such fine people, as you know, the Republican National Committee and USA Today. Chad (24m 18s): Yeah. So we can expect like a Trump visit to Bell Labs sometime soon. Is that what I'm hearing? Matt (24m 23s): Yeah. Or, you know, another recruiting conference at Mar-a-Lago, which I think could happen at some point. Joel (24m 29s): Or near Miami where the party is everybody, are you, are you bullish or bearish on SHRM ? I'm a little concerned. Matt (24m 36s): I don't know why SHRM still exists. Other than the fact that most of their membership hasn't died yet. Joel (24m 41s): They're local conferences, according to you. Matt (24m 43s): They're local conferences are, again, those are volunteer run. They're not affiliated with the national organization. And they kind of, you know, have a little bit of autonomy for how they run. When I look up to the national organization, they are set up as a nonprofit, which is, which is really funny if you look at how much their board of directors get paid and about how much revenue they clear in an average year. But they're set up as a lobbying organization, they do a scam job of that. And if you ever ask them for they'll have a portal that says, okay, here's what's going on on their website as able to members. But if you ask, well, what's your stance on this? Or what are you telling members as an example around, you know, increase in minimum wage, they say almost unilaterally, SHRM does not have an opinion on this and we advise our members to do nothing. Matt (25m 32s): So what you have is the shell of a lobbying body with pretty decent beltway access, but at the same time, trying to serve a really disparate amount of members. And so I honestly think that SHRM is going to basically become irrelevant sooner rather than later, because as you know, there's a whole new generation that has been coming up and a lot of challengers, both on the conference side, as well as the, you know, professional organization side that have been a little bit more relevant. And so I see SHRM continuing to have all of the Karens gathered to get real drunk and watch Toby Keith, or Hall and Oates, which is one of the better, better conferences I went to which is also a little on the nose, probably with the manager stuff. Matt (26m 24s): But I think you, you know, you have to go back to the Hank Jackson days when, when SHRM chose a CFO, as opposed to someone in HR to really understand what they're about. And that is about making as much money as possible to reinvest in their various entities. Obviously it's a non-profit, and essentially have vertical control over our industry. I wish more people realized that they also set HR curriculums and schools that offer HR degrees build to their competencies. Joel (26m 57s): It's the funell baby. Matt (26m 59s): If we're talking about monopolies, it is a monopolistic way for them to essentially codify HR and build a dependency. The question is, is it the best thing for the profession? And if you've ever been to a SHRM event in the last three years, you know, they're still talking about getting a seat at the table. And that tells me that, that seat has already disappeared. Chad (27m 21s): That seat doesn't exist because they come up with stupid metrics that nobody can fucking understand. Overall, though, we're just talking about like the SHRM of the world. Certifications have been almost like their life's blood, the individual membership certifications. Do you see that going away? I can't imagine that most people in HR have an HR degree in the first place. So it does that. Yeah, there is a pipeline there is that really that big of a pipeline. Matt (27m 48s): There are HR VPS and certainly a lot do, because, you know, if you look at SHRM young professionals, the organization I was involved in when I was eligible and essentially, yeah. You know, you have quite a lot of those programs and a bunch of very unimaginative, let's say 18 to 25 year olds. Like, what do you want to do when you grow up? Oh, be a human resources business partner. Well, it was at that point in time, like you're not going to change all that much, but you know, I think that when it comes to certifications, they've already made their move, which was them and HRC and I shared a building at HRC. I had a very thorough and a long-lasting certification program in which they were certifying SHRM , which by the way, I think is important to have as a third party entity to credential your own professional organization. Matt (28m 38s): Obviously they essentially said, Hey, screw you, we're offering our new certification. And it's not even a traditional certification. It is, is competency based. And if you look at the competencies, it's things like business communication, right? So my thought is, if you're a competent person, you probably don't need SHRM . And if you're relying on SHRM to tell you what competencies are, God help you. Joel (29m 4s): In 2005, Jerry Crispin told me I should join SHRM because I marketed a product at the time and I still do, but to HR and I never joined and I don't think it impacted my business in any way whatsoever. And my guess is he's probably not telling people now that they need to join SHRM as a participant in the community. Matt (29m 25s): No, no, but he will definitely make an appearance at every SHRM conference. He can procure a bottle of red wine. Joel (29m 31s): Love, Jerry. Love Jerry. So I want to pivot to tech for a second. You mentioned marketplaces, and we talk about that a lot on the show of how every ATS wants to be the one, the one ATS to them all, what's your take on marketplaces? Who's doing it right? Who's who's doing it wrong? why is Bullhorn still charging to be in their marketplace? Like what, what's your, what's your take on that? Especially now that you're on the inside. Matt (29m 54s): So, you know, one of the big attractions for me and then here's me selling my product, I actually would think Smart Recruiter has done a phenomenal job on marketplace because they've, that was a big motivation for me joining, to be honest with you, because I play with so many different vendors and have for so long Smart Recruiters, obviously they have over 600 marketplace integrators and they're really generally companies that I like. So, and they do a lot of co-marketing with them as well, which I think is important. So I think that, that plus the open API that we have so people can build on the instance that that was a big attractor for me. They also, you know, let me judge it at bunch of their startup competitions. Matt (30m 37s): So the fact that they're actually fostering innovation in house and helping some of these companies grow is pretty, I think exciting for me as, is the factor on a global scale. Why is Bullhorn doing anything? You'd have to ask Art Pappas, kudos to them for staying relevant to this conversation. But you know, I think that the company is otherwise you were doing core marketplaces, right? And this is why I say, look at consumer technology. Look at companies like Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, the companies that have the most ability to integrate with the most amount of products within their core workflows are going to win. I don't know if ultimately that's going to be an HR solution, which generally sends to us either a software or platform level or more likely an infrastructure level, which is going to then kick it more towards a consumer and enterprise tech. Joel (31m 31s): So I'm glad you brought up Amazon, who's been under a lot of criticism lately for, you know, seeing what sells in the marketplace and then making their own private label products. Matt (31m 41s): Yeah, the LinkedIn approach. Joel (31m 42s): Do you think the platforms are smart enough to like, make those decisions about, okay, who should we buy? What should we build? Or is it just at this point? We just need a platform because everyone else has one? Matt (31m 53s): I think that really depends on the sophistication of the platform and capability gaps. I don't think there are a whole lot of cases I can think of where Corp dev is necessarily at the steering wheel when it comes to the M and A. Just because you're talking largely about VC backed companies and or PE. And so, you know, in the case of a Jobvite, you know, you have K one coming in, slapping together, four different technologies and saying, here's the platform. So I don't know how many companies are positioned to essentially say here's our M and A strategy, here's our work chest and let's start doing due diligence. Matt (32m 34s): The one company right now that I think there is an exception to that, is our good friends at Recruits. Chad (32m 42s): Ok, so talking about Recruit and Indeed it seems, seems like Indeed's throwing a lot of shit at the wall, which, I mean, you've got a lot of money, you got a lot of money, so, okay, go at it. But it doesn't seem like they are doing business like Indeed does business in that being a Trojan horse version. What do you think? What have you seen and what do you think is interesting, from what they're doing or is there anything at all? Matt (33m 9s): So what's really interesting to me actually, is this, Recruit is such a big conglomerate. They actually control about 98% of all HR or recruiting transactions in the Japanese market, which is like the third world, the third largest world economy. In fact, they had a insider trading scandal, which took down an entire Japanese administration. So they're basically like the accuser of this industry, right? Like that scene in kill bill, where everyone's fighting with knives, that's their Corp dev team. Right. But when you, when you look at a breakdown of like Indeed's revenue versus Recruits, they make up a significant, significant part of it without violating an NBA or being overly speculative. Matt (33m 58s): I think indeed as an, a whole lot of trouble because of the fact that they don't in my mind have a great answer for what happens when Google shuts them out of their ecosystem. They're very heavily reliant on, you know, on cookies beaconing, and then you know, that system. So once that goes away, I am very, very curious to know what their product is. I can tell you that in addition to their like third iteration of the staffing business, they are spending more money than probably Conde Nast right now on creating content. Joel (34m 38s): Do you're saying you didn't like their Super Bowl ad? Matt (34m 43s): It was perfect for them. So it was their brand promise. It was like mediocre, forgettable, and, you know, maybe effective, but you know, happy to measure it. Joel (34m 54s): I felt good for about eight seconds. I felt warm and fuzzy for about eight seconds. Matt (34m 58s): Yeah, you know, and I think it's really funny because I don't know that anyone has ever gotten deal alert and like, yes, I have a job! Because I don't think the product actually does that. But yeah, no, I think that's a good symbol of a company that is spending to figure out what works, as opposed to doubling down on some core capabilities that they're going to need to figure out in order to overcome for the 80 to 90% of their traffic. That into Google, who's about to shut them. Joel (35m 29s): What should they do with Glassdoor? Matt (35m 33s): What should they do? Well, they're integrating them a little bit more than they have in the past. Only because Glassdoor, as it turns out, employer reviews weren't generating a huge amount of traffic for them. And it ended up not fulfilling the holes in search or core product capabilities, but I think they're looking for, and additionally, you have a lot of alternate like, more niche alternatives to Glassdoor, like in her site is an example. I could probably name, name a few more if I had my computer open. Right. Joel (36m 4s): Fairygodboss yeah. Matt (36m 5s): And then, you know, so I think that all reviews of being alike, their generalized approach has proven a, not to work. Two, there's a huge amount of distrust on the buyer side. That that's a legacy issue. And I don't know that it's been fully engineered into their product for whatever reason. So I can't necessarily go in and buy amalgamated package of these two things. I'm buying a separate Glassdoor and a separate D contract, or at least the last time, six months ago I tried to do so. So I think that they have a very active Corp dev team right now asking who do we buy to try to fix this problem very quickly, like MacGyver it. Matt (36m 45s): And then you have a product team saying, oh, Chad (36m 48s): But what about Facebook and Google? Do you think they're going to get this jobs thing right at all? Or are they just going to keep fucking around with it? And just, it's going to continue to sputter and Indeed's going to stay where they're at. Matt (36m 59s): Well, so Facebook, I do not see getting into the job game, because they can't target, right. They've already lost that federal lawsuit. So they can't target job seekers as a specific category if they're advertising. Chad (37m 16s): Not well, they can target. Matt (37m 17s): No, they legally cannot target. Chad (37m 20s): Well, the current product which you can do is you can actually pick it's like it's, it's like setting up a pretty much a job search agent, right? So it's, it's the old version in Facebook. So you can pick stupid. It's horrible. Just put it that way, but it's still there. Matt (37m 36s): And so it's open graph, but God knows where that happened. And that was really awesome. But I think Facebook largely when you look at their jobs to have that capabilities, I'm going to guess not being that connected, that their approach is going to be just disintermediating job applications for, you know, fractional sense on a quick, because what they're doing is they're just largely redirecting using connectors to corporate career sites. And I think that'll continue. I don't see them probably ever hosting jobs that aren't just kind of like one-off gigs that would fit more in the marketplace. I do see them indexing a lot of job listings, but other than Facebook native apply capabilities, which is just Facebook connect, which is getting shut down all over the place. Matt (38m 20s): I don't see them making a huge move into that space. Watch me be proven wrong by a big announcement in two weeks. Google is really interesting. So obviously, you know, Google hire came and it went and Google jobs, similarly was sun-setted as a revenue source. But if you type in any sort of variation in jobs at Google, you're still getting the exact same product, which tells me that they're building a giant dataset to essentially own all of their onsite job advertising, because why else would you be collecting this data and dis-intermediating it? If that is no longer a product you plan on selling. Matt (39m 0s): And you've already said that you are making a switch, so you can't target individual users. I think that Google is going to end up winning this battle because guess what? Once all of their data points are in there. And once they switched their algorithms to prevent a tracking and D duplication, which puts Indeed at a great deal of trouble, that's going to be the only source that is indexing all of these different job sites. I think they have a little ways to go in terms of building their, you know, building their, the way that they integrate with like corporate applicant tracking systems in order to display jobs. Matt (39m 44s): So I think they have maybe half of all the available jobs on the internet right now, but I can tell you with certainty that they are working aggressively to fill in those gaps, particularly when it comes to integrating with direct employers. Joel (40m 0s): Interesting. So I'm going to throw in LinkedIn here. We talked about them this past week about being more of an aggregator. Obviously we're seeing companies like Seek Out being better people search engines and collecting more interesting data and also being quite a bit more cost effective, like where, where does LinkedIn fit in this? And if you, if you ran the company, what would you do differently? Matt (40m 22s): If I ran LinkedIn, I would be on an island somewhere with Reid Hoffman, sipping daiquiris, or collecting my Microsoft stock. So here's, it's interesting because I just see LinkedIn as being a targeted ad product. So they built this brilliant sort of publisher business where, you know, oh my God, I have 715,000 people who viewed this post. That's like, that's statistically, can't be true. I think people have gotten into the habit of publishing all of this content on LinkedIn. So, you know, it used to be like, I'd have a personal WordPress site. I contribute to another media site. Now everyone's just posting original content on LinkedIn that targeted ads based can be sold around. Matt (41m 6s): So Microsoft is when I say Microsoft, LinkedIn is essentially empowering their community to validate themselves professionally, by giving them free content they can target advertising. Which is not a bad move. Because when you look at, you know, this is going to shock you, but the top 10 most visited websites in the world, four or five of them are owned by Microsoft. So once you kind of triangulate all those that you have a really powerful ad network that could potentially emerge as a competitor to Google. Joel (41m 34s): You've been well-known as a social media, I don't know, contributor over the years. Right? Matt (41m 40s): I would say troll. Joel (41m 43s): On the social media side, either from a, a user of social media or a recruitment tool that, that excites you, if anything, Matt (41m 51s): Well, if I was the Chinese government, my answer would be much different. Chad (41m 54s): Light dance bitch. Matt (41m 56s): Yeah, exactly. Or a clubhouse for having the exact same problems. Yeah. And then Snapchat is, the funny fallacy there is, oh, my data disappears as soon as post does, which is why they're worth billions of dollars. Here's the TLDR. If you look at source of hire statistics, I've always, and most of these largely actually include LinkedIn as outside of the recruiter product, which on a fairly effective. Social media in the 12 years, we've been saying, this is going to be the next great thing for recruiting has never, ever been more than three and a half percent of all hires. Matt (42m 34s): So what's the network that's out there, that, it doesn't matter to me because I just don't think that unless it is an individualized one-on-one communication between like a recruiter and talent, which is Twitter is still a great platform for that, particularly for recruiting tech. It doesn't matter because if I have a choice between like, you know, watching somebody, skateboard to Mick Fleetwood Dreams while drinkin' a cranberry juice, or I have a choice to see somebody talk about how YouTube can be a million dollar earner at my recruiting firm, like I'm not gonna watch that content. And it doesn't historically convert very well at all. Matt (43m 16s): And we can say, now I hope, with great certainty, it does not lead to hires. Joel (43m 21s): Matt Charney everybody! Chad (43m 22s): That's right, people! Head of Industry and Product Marketing and some of them sexy ass title he came up with. Matt, thanks for, thanks for joining us, man. We appreciate it. Matt (43m 32s): I appreciate talking to both of you. Joel (43m 34s): And for those of us who don't know matter already follow him, where would they go? Matt (43m 38s): Smartrecruiters.com of course, no at Matt Charney on Twitter. And if you want to read some of the really old content that is going to be new again, as a sneak preview, Mattcharney.com, formerly one of WordPress', top 20 business blogs in the world. Back when that matters Joel (44m 0s): All, yeah, you got to come back Matt at some point and we got to see you soon face to face, but until then Joel & Chad (44m 9s): We out. Matt (44m 9s): Word. OUTRO (44m 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.

Forget about Canvas being a text recruiting solution. The new Canvas (no relation) is all about creating a diversity recruitment platform to reignite the employment landscape and bring DEI to the masses. Good thing for them, Firing Squad loves shooting down startups with big dreams. So can this Canvas eclipse the achievements of the old Canvas? Gotta listen to find out. Firing Squad is exclusively sponsored by PandoLogic. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. 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 CHROs 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 (35s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and 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 (59s): What's up everybody? It's your favorite podcast and your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my favorite person, at least for the next 30 minutes, Chad Sowash and holy shit, we haven't done one of these in a while. This is firing squad, right? Yeah, firing squad. And today we are pleased to welcome Canvas to the show and welcome C E O. We'll get to that in a second. And CEO, Ben Herman, Ben. Welcome to firing squad. Ben (1m 30s): Thanks for having me guys. I'm excited to be here. Joel (1m 33s): You sound really excited. Are you scared at all? You're so cool. And laid back. Chad (1m 37s): We've already found out that we're Ben's emotional fluffers for the day. So it's time to get this bad boy rolling Joel (1m 47s): Mornings with Chad and Cheese. Yes. Ben has given us a new multi-million dollar startup idea. Tell him what he's won, Chad. Chad (1m 54s): Well Ben, you will have two minutes to pitch Jumpstart. Oh fuck no Canvas. At the end of two minutes, you will hear that bell. Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start rambling or you just get fucking boring, you're going to hear the crickets. At the end of Q and A, you will receive either big applause, start shopping for that private jet, baby. Golf clap, okay, maybe just to use Cessna or last but not least, firing squad. Chad (2m 37s): That means you're pretty much in a holy rowboat man. You got to start this shit from ground zero. Any questions? Joel (2m 44s): That'll give you a big wheel from his seventies collection in the garage, if you get the big guns, are you ready to go? Ben (2m 51s): No questions. I'm ready. Joel (2m 53s): In three, two. Ding, ding, ding. Ben (2m 57s): So I'm Ben CEO of Canvas. Spent 10 years recruiting started at the age of 17 and became fascinated by people companies and the whole hiring process. After that decade, having two daughters, I decided that was a lot of smoke and mirrors and this industry and most of the platforms didn't work. So I wanted to create a platform that ultimately helped people of all backgrounds find different opportunities and ready what I found and what I discovered was it was really an accessibility problem. Nothing more than that. And so we started with early and career talent creates a solution, has helped companies like Lyft, Pinterest, Airbnb, Twitch, et cetera, hire more underrepresented groups across the board. Ben (3m 47s): Had huge access and recently expanded this company to now take on more business, more experienced talent, and more companies. Joel (3m 55s): Where can they find out more about your company, Ben? Ben (3m 57s): Canvas.com. All right. Get them Chad. Chad (4m 1s): Okay. Ben. So getting a little bit into your history and past, as we take a look at tech today, it's incredibly important to understand that tech for the most part is a commodity and generally the leader is who you bet on. And you're that guy. So what gives a high school dropout the edge over all those Harvard MBA founders that are out there today? Ben (4m 25s): Well, I'm sure some would say there is no edge over them, but I would say I disagree. I think it's real life experience has been lived and I don't believe that you can get that in education. And so I committed my whole life to recruiting, as I said, since I was 17 and I worked with the most elite quant funds in the world who hired the most sought after talent and saw many, many different things from inexclusivity to promises that were never kept, to bias processes and to ultimately racism and favoritism that really affected my life. Ben (5m 6s): And so I have a real motive behind me to change the world for the positive. Chad (5m 11s): Over the years of being in recruiting, you've obviously used tech a lot. What made you think that you could actually take in industry the diversity equity inclusion industry? One, that really has been a smokescreen for the most part and actually make it into something that is quantifiable and something that moves the needle. Ben (5m 32s): Yeah, that's a great question. First of all, I would agree with you is, as I say, a lot of smoke and mirrors. I think you have to have the data and you have to have self-reported data. I don't believe that AI and NLP is the future, meaning predictive ethnicity and gender based off of someone's name or photo. We take a color, brave approach, not color blind approach to recruiting and how we go about that is, it's companies working together to complete the diversity data gaps. And if we bring all of that data into one place, every company and every candidate will be more successful. Joel (6m 11s): I speak for both of us when I say when, the word Canvas, raised a $20 million or 20 million across our desk, we both did a double-take because there's a Canvas that's near and dear to our heart that you could find at gocanvas.io that was acquired by Jobvite a few years ago. One, props for the canvas.com acquisition. I want to know how that went down. The original name was jumpstart.me. Why did you go to Canvas? Like just, what's the story of moving from Jumpstart to Canvas the domain acquisition? Why'd you land on Canvas? Just tell us, tell me about that story. Ben (6m 51s): Yeah, there's a lot to that, that the, the short and sweet, so I don't hear some tweets is that Jumpstart doesn't mean never really had the level of trust, authenticity and magnitude of the vision that we had for the company. And we realized that it didn't kind of allow us to expand our horizons and we felt pretty restrained by the domain. So we wanted a big, more relatable brand and we believe that everyone's painting their own picture. Everyone's telling their own story. And I had great access to the domain through a mutual friend. Ben (7m 35s): And so, you know, for, it was a brand that could represent us very, very well. Joel (7m 39s): Oh, so say more about, you had great access to the domain. What does that mean? Was it being used? If it was by whom and how did that go down? Ben (7m 49s): Canvas.com's never been used, it's always been parked. My, you know, my friend introduced me to someone who, you know, is really well-respected when it comes to domains. I've really geeked out over domains since the nineties and held many myself, and sold them. And so connected with this guy and we hit it off and spent the last year talking about how we could make something work and already great dough that made it worthwhile. Joel (8m 21s): Yeah. What was the price tag on that? Ben (8m 22s): I can't disclose that. Joel (8m 27s): All right. So you announced in may a $20 million series B raise, what will the money be used for? What was the necessity to go out and raise more money? Talk about that. Ben (8m 40s): Yeah, the money is really going to be leveraged for us, expanding to help everyone from all backgrounds and all years of experience. As I say, we started in early career, helping students find internships and new grad opportunities, and now this is about helping everyone. And so that means, you know, a lot from a marketing perspective, sales perspective, and then also from our kind of, you know, engineering product and design efforts, Joel (9m 9s): Are you international to a high degree now or will that be part of the growth strategy? Ben (9m 13s): Not right now, but that's something that we're looking at for the near future Chad (9m 16s): Getting candidates and even employees to self ID is rough. They just don't do it because there's nothing in it for them. So why should hiring companies believe Canvas can drive better self ID? Ben (9m 32s): You're creating the universal profile for a candidates career. So we're taking data, from every fragmented place, meaning an ATS and bringing that to one place, which is Canvas, allowing candidates to own control and represent that data, how they want. And so that is a big enough incentive for the candidate somewhere having, you know, completion rates above 80% on this data, compared to 10 to 15% from an ATS application. Chad (10m 6s): Okay. Help me understand here. Canvas seems like an experience in efficiency layer for only diverse candidates, or do you become the experience layer for all candidates? Ben (10m 19s): It's for all candidates? I think it depends on, you know, how we define diverse, right? Diverse means something probably different to every person, which is great, but to us as a company and to me as an individual, it means everyone is we all have unique stories, different backgrounds, and I believe that we should be able to really represent ourselves for our true self versus just our experiences. Chad (10m 46s): So it sounds like if I'm a company, I need a programmatic solution, I need a CRM, I need an RMP. Now I need a DRP, a DERP. And all of that layered over top of my ATS. Is that correct? Or do you guys take over for RMP, CRMs? Where can a DRP actually fit in that I can remove and perspectively find money to buy you? Ben (11m 12s): We definitely sat on top of the ATS and I would say that we've built one of the most sophisticated universal integrations for all ATSs. For me, I just don't really believe that the future is in, you know, a CRM. We can obviously hold install all historical communication and records and relationships between candidates. But I think the way that CRM has has evolved is just about how do we spam candidates over a period of time to hope that one day they'll respond. And I don't believe that that's the future of recruiting and I don't believe that that's helped the industry today. Ben (11m 54s): And I think it's a large problem like that we face, is because candidates are spam by companies, hundreds of times over the course of many years. And so we're more about giving accessibility, giving great to signal, better data to enable companies to actually be speaking to candidates who are more interested in that organization versus going out to try and attract people who aren't necessarily interested. Chad (12m 19s): Talk about your integration strategy, getting into the ATSs is where is that? And what is it on the roadmap? Ben (12m 26s): At least integrated with Greenhouse, Lever, and then we became official partners of Workday, Jobvite and others. I spent so long working with ATSs and was largely the person who would work internally for companies to, to onboard and integrate these ATSs. And so I know all the data that's held and all of the data, you know, that's available through different APIs. And, I believe that our integration is the best out there, in terms of what we can do in read and write, given us and giving companies the ability to know a lot more than they know today. Joel (13m 7s): How many integrations do you have and how many left do you have to do? Ben (13m 11s): Currently we have done five, but the way that we've built this system, we expect to onboard probably 15 to 20 more within the next 12 months. Joel (13m 22s): Do you consider yourself a product or a feature? Ben (13m 25s): A product. Chad (13m 26s): You just talked about spamming candidates, right? And that's something that we do. We ask them to apply, they apply, go into a black hole and then we ask them to apply again. But, what's the difference between doing that or creating a talent community and this is from your website invite potential candidates to exclusive and curated private communities, or reach the entire talent network on Canvas with a public community. I mean, who curates the relevant content and ensures the community doesn't stagnate? I mean, this seems still like it's on the shoulders of the company or is Canvas actually doing that as a service for the client. Ben (14m 9s): When you think about talent communities, it's somewhat a newer concept. I look at recruiting, in like three different phases, which is super relevant to this question. The first phase is like, I'm not necessarily looking, but I'm kind of like open to learning more about what's out there, right? And so it's like an exploration phase. The next is like, I'm actively wanting to leave my job, therefore I'm interviewing. And then the third one is like I'm negotiating and I'm about to resign and take like a new job offer. And I think throughout those phases, you need, you need different services as a candidate and as a company. For us, we think about, you know, how do you engage with talent? Ben (14m 49s): How do you source talent? And how do you understand the talent? And everything is underpinned, with diversity data. And so when you think about the talent communities, engagement is important. And so that's given even candidates to candidacy the ability to understand more about industries, understand more about the process, or just in general learn like what they may or may not like. Whether it's between, you know, them or it's between companies and candidates then it's more for them to actually ask questions to the recruiters and usually these questions will be asked, you know, a hundred times over email and you'll have to answer those a hundred times over email or ignore the candidates, which usually is what happens. Ben (15m 31s): And so we want to create, you know, a place where people can get that questions answered and it's more scalable in communication times. And so that's really where the talent communities comes in. And then in terms of like applying, well, I think you're talking about like inbound applicants versus outbound sourcing. And I think that's like a really whole different conversation and is pretty interesting, especially for us. Chad (15m 59s): A couple of different things. The talent community has been around since like around 2004. This is not something that's new. Now, the way that you might be pulling this off the process might be different and it might be new, but Avature started in 2004 as pretty much a CRM slash kind of like talent community. But overall, you know, what's the difference from a communication standpoint? How can your platform communicate better and more consistently with things that are relevant to the candidate versus, you know, just throwing press releases at them. Who does that? Ben (16m 32s): I would say it's more of a newer concept concept in terms of how we see them operating and how they've been leveraged more recently in the form of communication, asynchronously, like slack and other platforms. And so we want to create the place where it's more interactive, right? Where candidates can get answers to questions from other candidates, and also connect with other candidates to learn more whilst also given recruiters or hiring managers or whoever the ability to either help or give more information and data to candidates throughout the process to be more successful. Ben (17m 15s): And that information is stored and made, you know, accessible to everyone throughout the process Chad (17m 21s): Real quick question, though, are you back in the day, companies had forums, where job-seekers could pretty much chat with each other, somewhat like you're talking about now and they turned into shit shows. How can you guys actually, and I don't know, this is on you, it's more on the company. Does a company want to have something like that that allows that kind of communication and the perspective banter back and forth, because if they have a bad experience and they're going into a black hole and they're not getting hired, how do you turn that into something that is more positive than negative? Ben (17m 53s): Yeah. Well, I think that's a great question. And I think if more candidates are there saying, yeah, I haven't heard back for X amount of time, then in general, they'll know of the X amount of time, it means it's like a no. But for us, that's not going to enable us to, to really win on an industry at scale. It's more about how do we give companies the ability to really do that process more effectively and efficiently as we talk about inbound applicants. And that's really like a core core part of our platform, the talent communities are still very much something that we're building working on and taking feedback and then not fully built out. Ben (18m 35s): But I think we've seen great engagement because we have great data that companies want to utilize them in, in different ways. And I think as I'm sure you would agree, recruiting is different for every single company. And that's what fascinates me. And so there's no one strategy that's universal for every company. And so honestly we see the companies use them in different ways, whether that's for an event that they're doing and putting everyone into a community, whether that's for, you know, a specific job or technical area, it's really different for, for different companies. Joel (19m 9s): Thank Chad for taking us down memory lane and talking about forums on career sites. That was a fun month. Wasn't it? Who are your competitors? Ben? Who are you? Who do you think of, or who do you run into from a sales perspective, the most? Ben (19m 20s): Yeah. I don't really like the word competitors because I think that we're all passionate about the industry and we're all trying to create change and I think the world's a better place when we work together, not against each other. And honestly, I think we're all doing things. Joel (19m 37s): All right. You're in cricket territory with that one. Okay. What's the greatest threat to your business? Ben (19m 42s): The greatest threat is probably hiring great talent to scale the company and people believe in an understanding in our vision because it's different. Joel (19m 54s): I want to dig in a little bit with your shared shared candidate product, dig into that a little bit. We've had companies, startups come on and talk about, you know, shared databases and shared candidates. And it sounds very kumbaya and sorta like you're a competitor answer, but I wanna hear it from you. Why it's a, maybe it's an idea that whose time has come. I've always thought it ridiculous to think that companies would share candidates, but you have data that might disprove that. What do you guys see? Ben (20m 23s): I would definitely disagree because we have data to say otherwise we have people that applied to Airbnb, never heard back and got jobs at Pinterest. And we know that data because we know when they get hired and when they get interviewed. I think it's pretty straightforward that if you have good enough companies, you create, you know, a good enough reason for them to share. And it's like a pay to play it, right? If you want to see who applied to Stripe. Well, you know, if you're Uber, you're probably more likely to then, you know, share your talent. And so we allow them to control and customize all of that within there and within that ATS integration. Ben (21m 4s): And so it's on the candidate and it's on the company to say after X amount of time, the candidate has the ability to show that profile to other companies with that the candidates ultimately hold the power to say yes, I would like to show my profile to other companies in the ecosystem or I wouldn't. But I think that, you know, when companies are receiving the amount of volume that they are, and then some other companies are receiving no volume, and those candidates are going totally ignored. Why not give them an opportunity elsewhere that they might really be passionate about and really interested in, and I experienced this as a recruiter firsthand, and I would share talent with recruiters, as I know, and vice versa. Ben (21m 45s): And this happens today in private slack community. So why shouldn't it happen at scale? Chad (21m 52s): Talk to me about your partnership strategy in this, as you said, we have two, it might be kumbaya, but it is a good strategy. You have to work together, but you can't work with everyone. You have to find the right partners who are the right partners for Canvas? Ben (22m 9s): The right partners are people, yeah, I would say who, aren't just talking the talk, but willing to walk the walk and so that means it's less word vomit and more in that actions around building a more inclusive workplace. Chad (22m 22s): What specific type of tech or company would you be looking for? Staffing companies? Would you be looking for more ATSs? Be more specific. Ben (22m 30s): Yeah, tech, finance companies from startups of a hundred people to big fortune 500 companies that we work with as well. Chad (22m 42s): Okay. Okay. So those are mainly clients. Who are you looking to create integrations with? Are you working with more diverse job sites? Who are you actually working with to drive more of a value proposition for your platform? Ben (22m 58s): Oh yeah, sure. So, we work with a lot of different nonprofits, diverse organizations. And so one of our official partners is the tech area. We work with Afro tech. We work with Anita Borg in addition to that, where we're looking to partner and work with every ATS out there. And we literally just agreed a partnership with Smart Recruiters yesterday. So it ranges from, ATS is to nonprofits, to diverse organizations. But we're really interested in helping and working with companies, who want to give more accessibility to talent. Joel (23m 33s): If we were to have a beer a year from now, what new tech would you be talking about over a beer with me? Ben (23m 41s): Within our platform? Or in general? Joel (23m 43s): We're talking about you, Ben, this is all about you, baby. What a new, new fancy shit would you be talking about that's going on at Canvas? Ben (23m 49s): We would be utilizing data to give greater signal to companies, to recruiters, to make better decisions that have never been utilized before. In addition to that, I think that we would have the smartest and most innovative recommendation system out there for the structured self-reported data that we're collecting. Joel (24m 10s): What kind of CEO do you consider yourself? Like, are you a product guy? Are you a vision guy? Are you an operational guy? What kind of CEO do you think you are? Ben (24m 18s): Definitely not operational. I have great people to help me with that. More visionary and definitely a very product design centric CEO. I love design and love innovating with, you know, the UI and UX of a product. Joel (24m 33s): And what's the vision of the company? I mean, you've raised a $32 million or somewhere around there? Is it, will there be another raise in 12 to 18 months? What what's sort of the vision there in terms of fundraising? Ben (24m 47s): I actually officially raised in September, but announced now. So it was raised last year. We have been in conversations with different VCs recently and have a lot of interest. And we plan to go out at the end of the year, and raise off of trebling our revenue again in 2021, as we did in 2020. Chad (25m 10s): Talking to a client, what's the number one advantage of adding Canvas into my recruitment stack? what can I take away just about on day one, the number one advantage? Ben (25m 22s): We breathe life into your ATS and give you data that you've never had before, enabling you to automate, filter and find more diverse talent than ever. Chad (25m 34s): And what is that going to cost me? Ben (25m 36s): Depends on the size of the company, how many people are going to be leveraging the platform. Chad (25m 42s): So is it seats based? Ben (25m 43s): It is seats based, correct. Chad (25m 44s): Okay. Seats based and are there other integration prices to be able to integrate into different job boards and things like that? Can I actually do job distribution through you guys and have candidates come directly through is our pricing for that? Ben (26m 1s): Yeah. There's pricing for like, should I say free call products, which is engaged source and understand engage is events and talent communities, sources, the inbound source, and shared talent pool. And then on the stand is, is ready, the analytics. And so it depends what you want to leverage and what you want access to. And that's largely how the price of the seat is worked out. Joel (26m 24s): Ding, ding, ding. All right Ben that's the bell. Are you ready to face the firing squad? Ben (26m 31s): I'm ready. Joel (26m 33s): You're so laid back, man. I want to be in a company meeting with you, like getting fired up and getting the troops, get the troops mobilized. So I'm always a big believer in I'd much rather be an average surfer on a great wave than a great surfer on a shitty wave. And I think that there's no question in my mind that you were on a good wave. I think in terms of the firing squad, I'm still a little bit up in the air in terms of how good a surfer you are or how good the company is. I think that the amount of money you've raised, the sort of clientele that you have leveraging the platform is obviously, incredibly solid, solid case by you. Joel (27m 18s): I don't know if I'm sold on the whole sharing candidates? Maybe it's just my age. I turned 50 this year so maybe I'm just an old, old codger and don't get the whole sharing of data thing, but I'll take your word to some degree that that's that's effective. But I think your main tool, the thing that people use you for is the diversity play. I love the tracking, the analytics that you have at the company. I think the brains behind that is incredibly impactful. I think that you're building a product that will be engaged and welcomed by a global audience of employers. I think that, you know, we all agree. Joel (27m 60s): I think that the diversity inclusion, equity and quality isn't going anywhere and in particularly for a younger generation, that is what they expect out of their employers, aside from the data that tells us that that's how businesses should be run. So that's where the wave is going. And I think that you're going to benefit from that greatly. So for those reasons from me Canvas, although I'm going to have a hard time letting go of the original Canvas, canvas.com gets a rousing applause from me. Chad? Chad (28m 33s): Very nice, Very nice. First and foremost, Ben congrats on the new funding and the new brand because I guarantee you, your sales and marketing staff would probably kiss you on the mouth. If you were actually in the office, jumpstart.me was pretty easy, but Canvas one word, two syllable brand and better yet scoring the canvas.com domain, dude, that's a fucking jackpot, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here. This won't be an easy road. We've seen many accomplished CEOs with multiple exits get eaten alive by an industry that is slow to adopt. Chad (29m 15s): And about five years behind the real-world tech curve, diversity over the years has been nothing more than what our friend, John Graham likes to call a compliance based activity for the last 60 years and 60 years. That's, not centered on hiring outcomes if it was we'd be there already or even to move the needle. I mean, because again, all of that work and all of that, all of that money, hasn't moved the needle, as we all wish it would the shared database. I love and to be quite Frank, I remember years ago actually saying that when I was creating veteran hiring programs, if we had a shared veterans database, I bet companies would do it. Chad (30m 4s): This is a different form of diversity, a larger form of diversity. And I buy it. All of this seems somewhat kind of like you're riding a wave and there's a lot that you have to do to be able to make sure that you carry diversity, equity and inclusion to the force, that it can be the thing I think that I appreciate the most about this is the enriched data and analytics, because showing where you are falling down and rising above is exactly what we need a platform to do to ensure that we create a greater business case for diversity. Chad (30m 50s): I am behind you a hundred percent, but you've got such a long way to go. It's a golf clap for me, sir. Joel (30m 60s): Not too shabby. Ben, how do you feel? Ben (31m 2s): I appreciate both of your perspectives and I agree. It's a difficult challenge to overcome. No, one's already done it, but I believe that we will do it and we will ultimately make the world more equitable. I'm excited for it. Joel (31m 17s): Let everyone know once again, that domain that they can find more about Canvas. Ben (31m 22s): You can learn and find more on Canvas @ canvas.com. Joel (31m 27s): Chad? Joel and Chad (31m 29s): We out. Joel (31m 31s): 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.

Welcome to LGBTQ+ for Dummies -- Part 3 -- What is an ally and can they attend PRIDE events? It's PRIDE month and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ+ community. And as a straight white male, I thought it fitting that I'd ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert Michelle Raymond from myGwork, a LinkedIn-like platform for the LGBTQ+ community, who will be droppin' the knowledge. Listen and Learn! 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. LGBTQ+ INTRO (1m 1s): Welcome to LGBTQ plus for Dummies part three. It's Pride month, and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ plus community. And as a straight white dude, I thought it might be fitting that I would ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert, Michelle Raymond from My G Work, a LinkedIn like platform for the LGBTQ plus community. She will be dropping the knowledge. Let's do this. Chad (1m 41s): Thanks for joining us again, Michelle. Now let's jump into question number three. This one comes from David in Bridgeport, Connecticut. David writes what's an ally and can they attend Pride events? Michelle (1m 57s): David, yes! The answer is yes, but let me break it down just a little bit. So I think sometimes people have a hard time understanding the word allyship. So here's a couple of examples of allyship that may be recognizable to you. So one could be support for veterans, advocating for women's rights to vote, flexible working and especially in times of COVID, I mean, come on, but also just supporting someone's mental health and wellbeing. These are all examples of allyship. So when we break down that word, I mean, just recognize that all of these causes have benefited and advanced because of active allyship, but also in addition to the efforts of those that were impacted by the actual agenda. So, you know, who can be an ally? The answer is simple, anyone can be an ally, okay. Michelle (2m 40s): And this can be for many different groups of people, but specifically when we're talking about the LGBTQ+ community, it doesn't matter if you're heterosexual, cisgender, a member of the community, you are someone that supports the unique needs and struggles of the people from within the LGBTQ plus community. So when comes to Pride in showing up a couple things to note here. Yes, you're invited, but there are other people who are not like me who feel otherwise. So if you do come across someone who thinks that, you know, for example, you don't belong well, just respect where they're coming from, it may be a place that you're not familiar with, but in my mind, and I think the minds of many, you are a welcome presence because I understand that gay rights and where we are today, yes, they've made waves in the last 50 some years, but at the same time, there's still a lot of issues that need to be addressed. Michelle (3m 32s): And so to have a strong ally support system is crucial for the LGBT community. And that's why, in my opinion, I would be very happy to have members that identify as ally at my events. Chad (3m 44s): I'd say, as a straight white male with my wife in tow, I've never felt so comfortable in being in a part of those parades, those events, being an ally. I think for myself, it means being able to be there for those people that you support. And they really not just enjoy you being there, but they appreciate that. So again, Michelle, thank you so much for coming in, dropping some knowledge on us. Michelle (4m 14s): Thank you. I appreciate it. Chad (4m 15s): And don't forget, this is only one of many of these LGBTQ plus for Dummies. Look for more episodes. We out. LGBTQ+ OUTRO (4m 48s): Thank you to Michelle and the crew over at My G Work for participating in LGBTQ plus for Dummies, a pride special podcast series from the Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. Check us out@chadcheese.com and subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

It's a Stack-quisition! Wait that sounds familiar... Stack the steal! Dollar bills, ya'll! Developer community Stack Overflow, one of the 50 most popular websites in the world, was acquired this week for a juicy $1.8 billion, an absolute steal by Github standards. What else? - Lowe's has a drive-thru hiring strategy? - The boys play a little Buy-or-Sell, w/ 1) Pyn 2) Filtered.ai and 3) WorkRise - discuss the ongoing nightmare that is labor shortages, - vaccine mandates ...and chase it all with a little change in weed testing at Amazon. Turns out potheads can organize warehouse merchandise too. It's another shot of aural goodness, powered by Jobvite, Sovren, and JobAdx. 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 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 yeah, dude. I would've just let the bear mall my pets, sorry, peepers. Hey kids. It's Joel "AARP" Cheesman. Chad (32s): And this is Chad "did you read my blog?" Sowash. Joel (36s): On this week show the Stack-quisition, buy or sell, and the number one listened to album at the Amazon warehouse this week, Dr. Dre's The Chronic. Just say no kids. We'll be right back after this smoke break. 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" Sovren (1m 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. Joel (1m 55s): It's pronounced Louisville kids, Louisville. Chad (1m 58s): Loui-ville Joel (1m 59s): Louisville. Chad (2m 0s): So great story. Coming from North Central Ohio, 1995, I plant my ass here in Columbus, Indiana. We're all Midwesterners for God's sakes. I'm just a state over, I go on a sales call and actually say, yeah, I'm going to Louisville. This weekend. Guy looked at me and he's like, you're not from around here are you. It's pronounced Lowville. Joel (2m 24s): So yeah, let's beat this dead horse. We had a birthday recently and we were in Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky for our birthday and had a great time. My liver still hates me, but other than that, it was a great, great couple of days. Chad (2m 39s): Big shout out to your wife, Christine for planning, Boozefest, by the way, it was our half century birthdays. And after a week of drinking MicheLadas on the beach in Costa Rica. I come home to a long weekend of bourbon and Louisville, I love my life. Joel (2m 58s): Yeah, how's the detox going this week? Is it going pretty good? Chad (3m 2s): Oh, I think my liver has definitely was stood the onslaught. So I think I'm good. Joel (3m 7s): Nice, Nice little recommendation. If you go there, check out the Peerless Distillery kind of off the beaten path. It's not old Forester, one of the big guys, but it was, it was quite a nice experience. And also if you can make it to the Brown hotel and get yourself a Hot Brown, if you know, you know, very tasty. Chad (3m 26s): Yeah, I'm not allowed back there. So we've got a special segment that, that we want to go ahead and, and start listeners. If you have a shout out that you want to send us, go ahead and record it and send it to us via email and who knows it might make it on Chad and Cheese Shout Outs. Joel (3m 44s): Would that be email via Chadcheese.com or just our personal email. Chad (3m 49s): Reach out to us on chadcheese.com. We'll make the connection and it'll happen. Don't worry about it. Joel (3m 53s): I think we can all also take questions in addition to shout outs! Chad (3m 57s): We could! Joel (3m 57s): Or just, or just you guys suck, fuck off. Yeah. Let's open it to all kinds of audible opportunities, Chad (4m 4s): Whatever you want to say to us. Shout outs to your buddies. We suck. You love us. You want beer, whatever it is. Go ahead and do it. Joel (4m 13s): All rightm here we go. Without any further ado, our first send in Shout Out. Listener (4m 18s): Massive Shout out to Wouter Goedhart, who recently stepped down as the CEO of programmatic advertising giant Vong to pursue our dreams. He's pursuing one of those dreams cycling with one of his mates from Paris to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, enjoying the local wines, the scenery and his bike. One way to start your intermediary retirement, man. Joel (4m 41s): We're so international. Chad (4m 43s): I don't think Voss pronounced that name, right? 4 (4m 46s): No, Oh, hell no. Chad (4m 50s): Shout out to Steven Rothberg as well for all the Zip Recruiter, stock updates. Really appreciate that, Steve. Yeah, Joel (4m 58s): That thing is taken off. Oh, taking off! It it'll be 25 bucks a share by the end of this podcast. Yeah. Shout out to speaking of Louisville estate near nearby West Virginia, shout out to them, they looked at Ohio's million dollar giveaway and said, hold my beer West Virginia will give away firearms as a reward for residents who have received a vaccine. This is part of a Father's Day lottery that also includes trucks, scholarships, and $1 million in prizes. You'd go West Virginia! Chad (5m 32s): Idiots Just, all I got to say, I'm going to follow that up with message from 2008, they want their marketing plan back. That's right. Trump and his blog is dead. 4 (5m 43s): Oh hell, no. Joel (5m 48s): Isn't this fuck stick just do a podcast. Just put a mic in front of them and go Chad (5m 52s): No! no ideas. No ideas, no ideas. Joel (5m 57s): But yeah I love the excuse that it was only an intermediate strategy, which lasted a month. Yeah. Right. Total bullshit it, which is the social media platform is coming. So I can't, I can't wait for this thing to come, but yeah, hasta la vista to Trump's blog. And what was it from the desk of DonaldJTrump.com or something? Chad (6m 17s): I have no clue because nobody read it. So yeah. Joel (6m 20s): We'll shout out from West Virginia rednecks to my favorite redneck ad in the UK, Matt that-British-guy Alder celebrating a birthday this week. Matt, get crazy buddy. Chad (6m 33s): Happy Birthday! Yeah, that's right. Shout out to people PeopleHum for including our three clicks, two apps, one higher podcast episode in their latest newsletter. Yeah. Appreciate that. That's if you, if you haven't checked it out, it's fairly simple. Go to Chadcheese.com or anywhere you listen to podcasts. It's pretty simple. Joel (6m 56s): Shout Out to coach Mike Krzyzewski after Bobby Knight, the best coach in college basketball history in my opinion, 74 years old, 30 some seasons. And he's calling it quits. Five titles. I think 12 final fours over 1200 victories. A couple of gold medals in there, I think. The dude done good. Mama's proud. Coach K shout out to you, man. Chad (7m 21s): A staple in basketball. No question. Joel (7m 24s): By the way. I hope I look that good at 74. Good God that guy's got a good plastic surgeon or a great workout regimen. I don't know which one. Chad (7m 32s): Who cares? Guy looks good! So shout out to Lowe's who was hosting a drive through hiring event for call center employees. You can apply early and drive up for on the spot interviews in your car. This is how bad it's getting kids. They're trying to hire 400 positions for the call center. Big question is I wonder if any of those positions are work from home? Joel (7m 59s): Yeah, and I don't think it was in the news, but I think they all got a Wendy's breakfast sandwich for showing up. 4 (8m 7s): Oh, hell no. Joel (8m 10s): A shout out to free shit. Let's just talk about that real quick guys. If you love whiskey, if you love tri-blend t-shirts and you love whiskey, what are you do? You got to head to Chadcheese.com/free. We got t-shirts sponsored by Emissary. We got beer sponsored by its AdZuna. And we got whiskey powered by our friends at Sovren. No charge. Shows up at your doorstep, not delivered by us, but delivered by somebody. What could be better? And then if you're game, we'll do a zoom tasting and have a little chat and talk shop. I mean, it's a hell of a deal for free! Chad (8m 46s): Two bottles of bourbon or beer and maybe a t-shirt and time with Chad, and Cheese, I mean, who the fuck doesn't want that? It doesn't get any sexier baby. Joel (8m 58s): And speaking of sexy, Matt Charney was on the show recently. Goddamn. If you haven't heard that episode, I actually got some texts from people that I don't usually get texts from saying great interview with Charney. So you got to check that out, folks! Chad (9m 13s): Got to check that out. Also have to check out the Lynn Bailey podcast interview. She melts our brains, dude. She is incredibly smart and I think we might get her and Tyler Weeks on the program and just, allow them to melt everybody's fucking brains. But yes. Joel (9m 35s): I'll bring the edibles. I'll bring the edibles. It'll be Banff redox. Chad (9m 42s): Here we go. Nice. And last but not least for me. Hey kids. It's Pride month. That's right. And we are dropping a special series of podcasts called, are you ready? It will be LGBTQ plus for dummies every Monday in June to celebrate pride, Joel and I thought, you know who better to ask uncomfortable questions about LGBTQ plus than a couple of white straight cisgender males. Joel (10m 9s): This feels like a trap. This feels like a trap. Chad (10m 12s): It possibly could be thanks to Michelle Raymond and my G work for helping creating the mini podcasts that answer those uncomfortable questions about the LGBTQ plus community. So look for those every Monday in June. Joel (10m 27s): Soon to be canceled near you. Okay. Chad (10m 34s): Topics! Joel (10m 35s): The stack-quisition. Okay. That was good. That was good. That was good process. I assume I'm pronouncing that correctly. A global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world announced on Thursday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Stack Overflow, a knowledge sharing platform for the global community of developers and technologists for approximately $1.8 billion. Couple of highlights here: Stack is one of the 50 most popular websites in the world. It was founded in 2008. The company has expanded to include Stack Overflow for Teams and knowledge and collaborations solution for enterprise. Joel (11m 18s): Over 85% of its learning focus community visit the platform every week to access more than 52 million questions and answers, Chad (11m 27s): They what? Joel (11m 27s): Will now reach 90% of the fortune 100 across its corporate learning companies, including Stack Overflow, Skill Soft, Udemy, and Code Academy. New York based Stack Overflow had previously raised $153 million. So the investors are pretty happy at a 10X acquisition. Microsoft, as you remember acquired GitHub, I'd call it a Stack Overflow competitor for around 8 billion in 2018. If you're curious, Hacker Rank has raised 42.9 million. A little reminder here as well. Stack Overflow has a jobs section, unlike GitHub, which currently only has 3000 job postings. Joel (12m 13s): Sounds like an opportunity to me, Chad, your thoughts? Chad (12m 17s): Opportunities everywhere kids. This is a highly engaged community. Did you not get that over 85% of the community visit the platform every fucking week. This is a lifestyle platform, kids. Stack Overflow is a model or shit, the model for our space. This is where companies like Dice had an upper hand and they didn't execute. This is where Monster had the upper hand and they didn't execute. This is the killer app! Becoming a lifestyle platform, a community is the killer app. So all of you job boards that are out there, all of you jobs sites or anything that have to do with careers whatsoever, take notes, look at what Stack is doing, because remember, how did LinkedIn start as a network, as a community, and then guess what happened? Chad (13m 11s): It turned into what it is today. This is how you get engagement. And that's exactly what you want in what you do. Joel (13m 18s): Absolute steal for 1.8 billion. Now, these guys only talked about the education piece, which I'm sure they know a lot more about, than, than we do, but you, you throw in Code Academy, Udemy, Skillsoft, and this thing's a juggernaut for corporate education and upscaling. So that alone makes this a steal. You throw in the job search component, only 3000 jobs. That's nothing for the tech community. I mean, if they just have a dedicated force to like start selling this thing as a job component, it's an absolute steal. And you mentioned LinkedIn at 26 billion, you got GitHub for 8 billion and Stack Overflow was next in line. Joel (14m 6s): I think Hacker Rank is probably pretty happy about this. You know, they gotta be next up. But yeah, these, these communities, these education focused, community focused platforms that have a lot of really skilled people visit them on a regular basis, are super important. And the teams aspect is incredibly huge. So you get, you can imagine big engineering teams where the same questions are asked over and over. So you sort of automate and clear that you get engagement and collaboration on assignments and build outs for development. I mean, this is a huge deal. I'm I'm really surprised it didn't go to, I don't know, an employment related or some sort of HR tech focused company. Joel (14m 49s): The fact that went to an online education firm is pretty interesting. But yeah, total steal, the Stack acquisition gets a big, big round of applause for me. Chad (14m 59s): Well, think about this. All of the individuals who are actually in the community who are participating and they're providing answers to all the questions that are out there, you can get an engagement score, right? If you can see what that individual's engagement score is and also take a look at the quality of responses. Right, not just responses but code so on and so forth. Dude, this is proof in the fucking pudding. It's not, to me, this is not about jobs. This is about going out there and matching your job against this. This is the evolution of jobs in a system. Chad (15m 39s): You have a wreck, push it into the system It automatically floats individuals to the top. You check out all of what they've done and you've got proof right there, right? So I think overall I love and I agree, I agree, a hundred percent,` a fucking steel! Joel (15m 60s): By the way, we didn't even talk about a marketplace where they can rake in some more bucks. Chad (16m 4s): Yes! Joel (16m 4s): So anyway, so that's obviously huge buy from us. And we were getting a little nostalgic this weekend that we haven't played buy or sell in a while. So here we go. Are you ready? A little buy or sell. Okay. Number one in buy or sell, so we have three companies as usual. Number one is Pyn or Pyn. I don't know you choose P-Y-N. Let's go with PYN. Okay. I'm going to call this MailChimp for corporate communications. So the Australian based HR tech startup has raised $8 million in US seed funding around led by Silicon Valley, VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, who apparently is funding everything these days. Joel (16m 47s): They got some help with the fundraising from Excel and Ryan Sanders, who was the co-founder of Bamboo HR and Scott Farquhar co-founder and co CEO. Did I say that wrong? Chad (17m 1s): I don't know. Joel (17m 4s): Okay. Co-founder and co CEO at, at LaSeon found in 2019, Pyn improves relationships between companies and their employees and guides communication throughout the employee life cycle based on user's data. Pyn provides more targeted messages when communicating internally, they bring personalization to Pyn by tracking information in existing systems that companies already used such as Workday, Bamboo HR, Salesforce, etcetera. That means company-wide emails can be relevant to everyone and only go to those who want them. You can track how many people have opened the emails and how successful you were in hitting the mark. Joel (17m 45s): MailChimp for corporate communications, Chad buy or sell? Chad (17m 49s): Andreessen Horowitz is on a fucking roll dude, not to mention, talk about BambooHR and Atlassian. This is fucking crazy and let's face it. Communications to employees suck. Meaning the experience sucks. Communication is everything in the workplace. Pyn CEO ran HR at Atlassian and Squarespace. Dude's got he's got experience. Pyn's co-founder John Williams started Culture Amp, which is an employee engagement platform in 2011. He has experience in this. Messaging overall, to be quite Frank is commoditized, leadership and connections rule the day, which is why this is a big fucking buy for me. Chad (18m 38s): Create needed point solutions that core systems do not want to build, work inside the system instead of trying to be the system. This just makes sense. This is a huge buy for me. Joel (18m 52s): Okay. All right. I'm going to be on the other side of that trade, my friend. It sounds really great on paper. It sounds really good to the tech community. A few things in my mind go against MailChimp for internal communications. Number one is it's not a must have. Slack works pretty well. Teams worked pretty well. The days of sort of mass emailing to departments and all employees is sort of antiquated in and of itself. I think existing tools can kind of serve the purpose. This thing does not impact the bottom line from a recruitment perspective. I'm not sure who they're going to sell this to if not HR. I mean, I don't think marketing is going to take it on. Joel (19m 33s): I don't know what other line of business will. HR doesn't understand marketing shit. They barely understand like resume emailed to people for job alerts. They let the ATS handle that. So like employing them to figure out an automated email, personalized email tool just doesn't bring like, it's going to be a big one for me. So Pyn, sorry. 4 (20m 2s): Oh, hell no. Joel (20m 4s): It's a hell sell from me. All right. Let's go to filter.ai. And I hope you can explain this one. Okay. So Boston based companies raised 7 million in a seed round. The company says it helps humanize hiring. Okay. I spent a good 10 minutes with this fucking site and I I'm still not sure what it does. So trying to understand what they do and I guess it's a combination of like pre-screening and testing. There's some gamification in there. They use all these things to filter out the best candidates. They obviously throw in some DEI shit and unbiased hiring, but God damn, the site is confusing. Joel (20m 45s): Can you explain it to me? Yeah. Chad (20m 47s): Okay. So they, they want to be a part of your experience and ensuring that you are getting the right people into your organization. And these are tech positions, right? So this is kind of like a mini Stack Overflow with fraud protection. I think it's smart that they got funding because bootstrapping is great, but it's slow as fuck. And today speed is the key. Unfortunately for Filter, this space is growing. The CEO looks like a smart dude, but that's not enough in today's game. I hope the filter crew can find momentum, but I can't find a reason. And I tried to find a reason to buy on this one. Chad (21m 30s): And there was no reason this is a big sell. Female Voice (21m 34s): oh hell no. Joel (21m 36s): Dude, if I can't figure, if I who've been in the industry for 20 years, can't figure out what the fuck you're doing after 10 minutes on the site. Dude, Susie HR has no chance. All right, let's go to Work Rise, which has built a workforce management platform for the skilled trades announced this week that it has raised 300 million in a series E with the latest financing work rise has now raised more than $750 million. You may know the Austin based company better by its former name. RigUp. The company changed his name earlier this year to reflect the new emphasis on industries other than just oil and gas after well, energy kind of took a hit last year. Joel (22m 21s): I don't know if you heard the news since then Work Rise has broadened its reach to include wind solar, commercial construction, and defense industries. In a nutshell, it connects skilled laborers with infrastructure and energy companies, looking to staff and manage projects. Work Rise's online platform matches workers with over 500 companies and its network, manages payroll and benefits, and provides access to training. Last year, Work Rise placed more than 4,500 workers or nearly a third of all its workers placed in 2020 in renewable energy jobs. Chad Work Rise, the artist formerly known as Rig Up by herself. Chad (23m 4s): Did you hear that? It was Rig Up moving all their eggs out of one basket. That's right, kids, diversify or die. And Joel forgot. I don't know if you said this or not $2.9 billion valuation. Work Rise is smartly spreading out and evolving. I like that. And expansion into wind, solar, construction, defense, the steps are kind of manual though. You have human review on the resumes after they're uploaded, then matching. I don't know if that's something that also happens on the human side or if they actually have tech for that. And then training all three of those steps seem incredibly manual, which means from a scale standpoint, that's going to be hard to be able to increase margins, but with $300 million and a lot of tech that's out there that could help them do this. Chad (23m 58s): I love the trade segment. There's no question in those areas, wind, solar, construction, defense, oil, and gas. I think this is a big win, but they're going to have to get their shit together and get tech involved so that they can scale, increase margins and make that money, baby. This is a buy! Joel (24m 23s): Well, you know, you know, I love a good wave and an average surfer on a good wave can be a hell of a surfer. And so in addition to everything that you just said, can you say federal government infrastructure bill? Yes you can. Which means a whole lot of money is going to this shit. And it's no, it's no surprise that they changed their focus to put in solar shit and renewable energy because there's a Democrat in the white house and they want some of that cash. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll talk labor shortages. Jobvite (24m 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 (25m 39s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Chad (25m 44s): Dude, Ted Lasso is fucking legit. Two days binged it. It was probably the feel good happiest kind of, if you just want to feel good, enjoy some time in front of the TV with the family this, well, maybe not in front of the family, but in with your wife, this was a great fucking show. Joel (26m 8s): Yeah. And a surprise hit. I would say no one, no one really saw it coming. Chad (26m 13s): Jason Sudeikis was amazing. Joel (26m 15s): Yeah. And by the way, Jason, Sudeikis accepting, was it the Emmy? What was it for that show? Anyway, a dude was high as a kite, was not expecting to win. So I think he was as surprised as everyone else that this thing was a hit show. And I'm glad that you're embracing the Apple by the way. That's a nice, nice change for you. Must've got it free for Julie's new Apple watch or something. Chad (26m 40s): We did. We did. And I, I love Jason Sudeikis. I love sports. We had it for free. I'm like, oh, let's check it out. After the first episode. Shit, five minutes into the first episode I was hooked. Joel (26m 52s): Yeah. There's an Oasis joke in the first five minutes, which pretty much made it for me by the way, Mare of Easttown, the finale. Have you seen it? Did you? Chad (27m 1s): I have not. sh, sh... Yes. We'll have can't wait. That's a great show. That's a great channel. That's a great show. Labor shortages? Joel (27m 13s): So I have a something I wanted to say. I thought about this on my, my morning walk today, I was trying to get a clever way to say. So Coach K, we just gave a shout out to, and growing up in the eighties, what I think about it when I think about Coach K is Dean Smith, the coach at North Carolina. So if you know, college basketball, you know, these guys had epic battles in the eighties and nineties and Dean Smith had this strategy called the four corners. Again, I'm dating myself, but the four corners was before the shot clock. And basically you put a player in each corner of the court and then one guy dribbled around and then pass it to somebody else in the corner. Chad (27m 53s): And then it was horrible. Joel (27m 54s): It was horrible. Like 10 minutes of basketball, you could just watch running, running out the clock. So the shot clock came around anyway. So I'm thinking about that. And then I'm thinking, is there a parallel with that in the current state of the labor shortage? And I got to thinking that, you know, some companies that are in the apex predator category can give raises, can do $15 an hour, can do thousand dollar bonuses can do a hundred dollar, you know, payments for vaccines. But most companies are just barely keeping their head above water, right? Like to think about a pay increase means they're out of business. They're not profitable. And then once that happens, then everyone goes to their competing restaurant or small business. Joel (28m 35s): So to me, like all these, all these businesses that aren't able to give big raises are like running out the clock, hoping that government funding runs out or people finally get like Amazon hires enough people. And there's something that forces these folks back to the old ways of $2 and 13 cents an hour, and hoping that, you know, tips and whatever, get them through successfully. What I hope, what I think they're hoping doesn't happen is the shot clock runs out on them and shit's fucked up. I don't know if that's a good metaphor for what's going on, but it's the best I got today. Chad (29m 14s): Yeah. I think what we're seeing here is two classes of issues. You'll have what I'd like to call the trades and then the office workers issues, right? So two different issues with the same end result, there's a labor shortage. So the trades we see with Brexit and we also see with Trump's old America first policy is that farming, hospitality, trucking. I mean, a lot of this has to do with immigration and individuals who were doing those jobs before whoever got the fuck out or, you know, they they're just not allowed into the country. Right. We did have migration and such seasonal migration. So you see that. You also see countries like Australia who were trying to lure more of those individuals their way. Chad (30m 1s): And it's not just Australia, but the state of Queensland just launched a work in paradise campaign that offers 820 pounds in cash plus subsidized travel to lure workers to the tourism sector in Australia. So, I mean, there's all of these different pieces that are being moved all over the place. And I don't think it's just immigration. I don't think it's just wages. I don't think it's just, you know, it is all of these things in a perfect storm of COVID and I hate to say it, but overall we have not evolved how we do business in many of these industries. Chad (30m 45s): So we haven't been able to increase margins because we're still doing business like it's the fucking thirties, right? So I think there are some restaurants, some hospitality, some of these organizations who are able to do better because they innovated because they did things differently. And I think that is something that we really, this was a shakeup and I'm not really sure that giving money to those companies who are not evolving is the right idea. Joel (31m 16s): Yeah. So a little context here, the chamber of commerce put out a report. So a record 8.1 million job openings were vacant in March up from 600,000 in February with around 1.4 workers available per job, half the average over the past two decades, according to the chamber of commerce, a quote, "lack of available workers" end quote is cited by 90% of state and local chambers of commerce as preventing economic growth. While the chamber CEO and president Suzanne Clark stated quote, the worker shortage is real. No shit. And it's getting worse by the day. The report suggest removing barriers that prevent people from entering the workforce. Joel (32m 0s): We've talked about these, the STEMI's, the childcare issues, the COVID fears, the shift to Amazon warehouses also getting individuals the skills they need for open positions and in enacting sensible immigration policies were at the heart of solutions that the chamber of commerce recommended. You mentioned the UK wanting some European immigrants to come serve beer is an issue. How's that Brexit going. And by the way, here comes the big Exodus. A May survey of a thousand us adults show that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren't flexible about remote work. This is a generalized generational issue among millennials and gen Z that figure was 49%. Joel (32m 44s): This was a survey done by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg news. And also you remember that police dogs, the robotic kind can't even stay employed in New York. So nobody is having fun right now. Chad (32m 59s): The second part, the first one was the trade kind of workers, farmers, hospitality, so on and so forth. Then you have the office workers, and this is more a matter of control versus autonomy. And there is a survey by Flexjobs where they surveyed over 2000 workers: 84% didn't want to commute. 75% said they saw cost savings during COVID, a little over obviously quarter said that COVID exposure was an issue. So that, that wasn't even the biggest issue. You're gonna love this Jimi Hendrix. I shit you not. That's the guy's name. Jimi Hendrix, a 30 year old software software developer in the Netherlands quit his job in December as the web application company he worked for was gearing up to bring employees back to the office. Chad (33m 51s): He's like, fuck that. Then let's go ahead and look at the other side of this coin, the executives. PWC surveyed 133 executives in late 2020, 29% and this is all around company culture, right? 29% said that they need their people in the office at least three days a week to sustain company culture. 21% said five days a week, 18% said four days a week. Now tied for only 5% was one to three days a month, one day a week, or no office is necessary to maintain company culture. Chad (34m 33s): And I think what we're seeing here is, and again, this might be a shot clock, kind of a metaphor is that the context of this specific conversation culture has become the new word for control. And whenever you're talking about work from home and an executive says, well, what about our company culture? Well, that just means you want control. You don't trust that individual, even though they're producing and you believe they have to be at a desk from nine to five. That's control, right? It's not culture again, there's so many different dynamics here, but it is, it is a more than an interesting topic because we can't get the people and yet we're still telling them, wait a minute, you have to come in to work. Joel (35m 22s): By the way I have to ask is Jimme Hendrix of the Netherlands spelled J I M I or is it the J I M M Y kind? Chad (35m 29s): J I M M E. Joel (35m 32s): Okay. Chad (35m 33s): Yeah. Joel (35m 33s): Jamie, Diamond's not picking up anything you're dropping by the way. I think, I think going back, going back to Louisville and our birthday Fiesta, I think we saw a lot of this firsthand. We did, we saw a lack of service, literally the first morning that we were there, we met up for brunch. The restaurant couldn't open on time. It was 40 minutes later than it was supposed to because they couldn't staff the restaurant fast enough or with enough people. And, we saw that throughout the whole time we were there. Like, so yeah, to me, you know, a lot of, a lot of business owners are willing to have tables unfilled in hopes that they can run out the clock and that people will come back to work as normal and they can go back to business as usual, but I'm not so sure. Joel (36m 23s): And I don't think you are either that they're going to be able to go back to business as usual. Chad (36m 27s): Yeah. We, again, we're trying to do business like it's the 19 fucking 50s, even though during COVID, we saw that our people performed and they performed at home with kids on Zoom learning, with changing baby diapers, all this shit, right? Imagine how productive they could be if they didn't have all of that noise going on and the kids were actually in school or they're in daycare or what have you, right? So I think once again, we are overrun with control and thinking that, that is the answer, as opposed to the real answer in this case, not for everybody, but for many is autonomy. Joel (37m 10s): Well, have you been watching any of the NBA playoffs? Chad? Chad (37m 13s): I have not. Joel (37m 14s): So if you were to watch any of the playoffs, you would, you would probably be a little surprised at the sold out games at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Well, apparently to get into the games, you have to have your vaccine card, to have been tested, or, you know, you have to have some qualifications to get in. But as far as I can tell, there's a whole lot of people enjoying a basketball game and not even realizing that COVID is going on while I was in LA, you still have cardboard cutouts, but this leads me to the next story of vaccine mandates by companies. So the Federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission has updated its guidance to say it is legal for employers to offer incentives to workers to get vaccinated. Joel (38m 1s): The guidance states employers must keep vaccination information confidential and clarifies that employers can legally require new recruits and those reentering the workplace to be vaccinated, but must allow exemptions based on religion or disability. Meanwhile, you have Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on a collision course with the cruise industry over a law he signed banning vaccine passports. My vaccination is laminated and in my Velcro wallet, how about you, Chad, you ready to go to a game? Chad (38m 37s): Dude, I'm ready. I'm ready to go do shit! Vaccinated. Good to go! For for companies, you know, they are most are, are not requiring this. Rather. They are trying to encourage the vaccine. Remember we actually talked to Seth fight from Charter Communications and Spectrum where they said, Hey, we're encouraging it. We want our people back in the office, but we want them to be safe. And they had like seven different areas where you could go be vaccinated by the company, right? So I think companies are doing whatever they can to be able to encourage it instead of mandating it. Now, I love when, you know, you have like, again, Madison Square Garden or anywhere where you're getting spiffed or you're actually allowed to come in, because you can demonstrate that you have been vaccinated. Chad (39m 32s): I'm a big proponent of the, you know, the whole passport thing. And if you do have an accommodation, then that should be on the passport as well. Joel (39m 40s): Yeah. I understand the politics of this and, you know, taking a stand for freedom and not having to verify that you're vaccinated plays really well on Fox News, but I'm constantly just a little confused by this. I mean, you need a license to drive a car. You need to go through security to get into an airport. Why there's such a stink around showing proof of vaccination in order to do things like go to a professional basketball game is a little bit odd to me. I got to think at some point it's going to come to a court. I don't know if it go to the Supreme Court or not, but there seems to be precedent for this, that you can require something in terms of, you know, the health and human services of the civilization and the community that you can do this. Joel (40m 29s): I think DeSantis is all about running for president. And that's why he's going on making laws, which are going to be laughed out of court, according to people that know what they're talking about. So to me, there's gonna be a lot of politics around this, but I think ultimately if it goes to court, they're going to say that companies can require employees, specifically, ones that are in, or that are public facing or customer facing have to be vaccinated in order to go to work. That seems pretty logical to me and not out of bounds whatsoever. No. Chad (41m 0s): We talked about Delta last week saying that they are only going to hire new employees. They're only going to hire those who can prove that they're vaccinated. Joel (41m 8s): And by the way, you can't stop other countries denying you entry on the airplane, so that makes total sense that you should have that if you want to travel internationally. By the way, most of Europe is going to be opening up or is already open to US travel. Chad (41m 22s): So here we come baby! JobAdX (41m 24s): 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 join us@jobadx.com. JobAdX (42m 8s): JobAdX, the best ad tool, providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Joel (42m 14s): Just say no. Chad. So probably from the desk of Chad's BFF himself, Jeff Bezos, quote, in the past like many employers, we've disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use, however, given where state laws are moving across the US we've changed course, we will no longer include marijuana in our comprehensive drug screening program for any positions, not regulated by the department of transportation and will instead treat it as the same as alcohol. We will continue to do impairment checks on the job and we'll test for all drugs and alcohol after any incident. And because we know that this issue is bigger than Amazon, our public policy team will be actively supporting the Marijuana Opportunity Re-investment and Expungement act of 2021, which is federal legislation that would legalize marijuana at the federal level, expunge criminal records and invest in impacted communities. Joel (43m 11s): We hope that other employers will join us and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law. Translation, "we're going to make a shit ton of money off drone delivered pot brownies in the future." Chad smoke up buddy. Chad (43m 27s): So why now is the question? Why do you think they're doing this right now? Joel (43m 32s): They need peeps. Chad (43m 33s): They need people. That's what it is. It's like, we're, we're kicking all of these people to the curb who tested positive for marijuana, and we need them to work in our warehouses. That's the only fucking reason they're doing this. And the pot brownies. Joel (43m 51s): You're such a cynic, man, they're going to get by behind the legislation. They're encouraging other employers to do the same. Chad (43m 57s): Well, you can see again, a wave. You can see where the waves heading, right? Joel (44m 1s): Yep. Chad (44m 2s): And now that I think we all probably understand that reefer madness was a fucking sham. Can we all just be smart enough? Ban the box, ban the reefer testing, ban all these things that don't make any fucking sense anymore and just get the fuck on with our lives. Joel (44m 21s): Just chill the fuck out everybody. 4 (44m 23s): Hell no. Joel and Chad (44m 24s): We out. OUTRO (44m 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. 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 (45m 10s): 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.

Welcome to LGBTQ+ for Dummies -- Part 2 -- PRONOUNS! It's PRIDE month and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ+ community. And as a straight white male, I thought it fitting that I'd ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert Michelle Raymond from myGwork, a LinkedIn-like platform for the LGBTQ+ community, who will be droppin' the knowledge. Listen and Learn! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (1s): 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. LGBTQ+ INTRO (29s): Welcome to LGBTQ plus for Dummies part two. It's Pride month, and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ plus community. And as a straight white dude, I thought it might be fitting that I would ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert, Michelle Raymond from My G Work, a LinkedIn like platform for the LGBTQ plus community will be dropping the knowledge. LGBTQ+ INTRO (1m 13s): Let's do this. Chad (1m 20s): Okay. Thanks for joining us again, Michelle, let's jump right into question number two. This one comes from Jesse in Provo, Utah. Jesse writes. Why is everyone using pronouns all of a sudden? Michelle (1m 34s): Jesse, great question. So when someone asks you to use their pronouns, basically what they're just asking for you to do, is to respect their identity. And so we've talked up until this point about gender expression and gender identity. And so the way that someone can express themselves is through pronouns. And so if they ask you to use their pronouns, it's just a sign of respect, and it's also addressing that you hear them. And if you choose to use the wrong pronoun, which people often do, what this says is it can lead a person to feeling disrespected, it can lead to dysphoria, exclusion and alienation, so when we talk about pronouns, that's something as simple as calling someone went by, he, him, his, she, her, hers, or they, them, theirs. Chad (2m 16s): Gotcha. Okay. So I have a cheat code. I want to share with you. And I want, I want to know what you think about it. Are you ready? Michelle (2m 22s): I'm ready to go for it. Chad (2m 23s): So my cheat code for the whole pronoun thing is just use the person's name, if you're talking about the person instead of having to use, he, she or they. Use the person's name, Michelle, I was talking about Michelle. People don't mind hearing their own name and not to mention if they hear you talking about them and using their name, once again, it shows respect not to mention for dumb white dudes like myself and Joel, sometimes it's a little confusing. So I look for cheat codes like this, because the last thing I want to do is disrespect someone just because I don't understand and/or I feel uncomfortable. Michelle (3m 0s): Yes. I think this is a great initiative. I also have some other tips in case you don't want to say Michelle, Michelle, Michelle, Michelle, every other sentence. So I think that is a great tip to start with. And then some other ones just to think about are, of course, you know, if you are someone that has a pronoun that you want to be addressed by first, offer that up to whoever you're speaking to. So I can say my name is X and my pronouns are Y Z example. But in your case, when you're asking someone, you can just say something as simple as what language do you prefer people to use? Just as they ask, or you can even mirror that person. So for example, if I'm using a term to talk about myself, you can adopt that term when speaking with me. Take up the social clue and know maybe that's the way that I like to be referred to. Michelle (3m 43s): The other thing is to be strong for the people that want to be referred at a certain way, just say, please refer to me as X. And you can also let people know if you're not being referred by the correct pronoun just say, look, when you refer to me as X, it makes me feel Y, so please use Z in the future. Chad (3m 60s): Gotcha. Well, that's awesome. Again, thanks Michelle for joining us again. This is Michelle Raymond from My G Work. Thank you so much. And don't forget, we have more of these LGBTQ plus for Dummies. Look for them. This is only part two. Michelle (4m 16s): Thank you so much. Chad (4m 18s): We out. LGBTQ+ OUTRO (4m 18s): Thank you to Michelle and the crew over at My G Work for participating in LGBTQ plus for Dummies, a pride special podcast series from the Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. Check us out@chadcheese.com and subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

A 1970s' Johnny Paycheck song captures the feeling of today's job market. Take This Job and Shove It! Yes, even with an unprecedented number of unfilled jobs and quitting on the rise, will we be able to find balance people desperately need? Change is hard, and Chad & Cheese are dropping a nightly recording over beers and bourbon to workout all this post-pandemic drama. SAP treats employees like adults, while Apple's controlled WFH "culture" strategy starts a mutiny. Don't worry kids, if culture as a control device doesn't work employers are also trying to cook up cybersecurity as a way to force you back in the office. Is it legit or just more bullshit? We also throw in some new funding and a good ol' fashioned Superpower Dust-Up for good measure. It's the end of the world as we know it, and Chad & Cheese feel fine. As always, your favorite podcast is powered by Sovren, Jobvite, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. INTRO (7s): 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 (27s): Oh yeah. You heard it here. First. Everybody, Jeff Bezos is going to space and Chad Sowash is carrying his bags. What's up kids. It's your favorite podcast? This is Joel "the moon is made out of cheese-man" Cheeseman, Chad (43s): And I'm Chad "drinking in Portland" Sowash. Joel (46s): On this week. Show, take this job and shove it, cyber-security is the new control and an ice cream shop in Pittsburgh says, hold my cookies and cream. 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" Sovren (1m 41s): 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 56s): I love the evening shows. There's a whole different vibe. I'm enjoying a nice bourbon on the rocks. How about you? Chad (2m 8s): That's a Cascade Lakes Pineapple IPA, baby. Joel (2m 14s): You got some mood lighting going on, right? Is that right? Well, Parlin. Chad (2m 18s): Yeah, you've got to have the mood in Portland, Joel (2m 21s): Baby. So dude, you are the globetrotter man. You were in Costa Rica. You're in Louisville, which isn't quite much of a stretch, but now you're in Portland. Yeah. Then we're going to Chicago. The road trip begins. The summer of love starts Chicago. And then Cleveland are on. We're starting slow. We're starting slow. Yeah. Chicago and Cleveland baby June. Yeah. So does this Portland have your favorite? Is that your favorite beer city? Chad (2m 46s): No. I mean, no Portland IPA, I love IPA's but they are more kind of like Portland has their own or Oregon has their own type of bitter type of IPA's. I love the Midwest. IPA's I mean, they're more hazy. They're more dank, but I, I mean, hell I I'll I'll sit here and drink all day. I love it. But I, anybody who's coming to Portland, I've got to give you some tips. You want to stay in the Pearl district. Number one, number two, don't rent a car because parking is a fucking mess in this goddamn town. And it's expensive as shit. Wonder around on a lime scooter, eat, drink, be merry and last but not least beer. Chad (3m 27s): Just do it. Joel (3m 27s): Surprisingly, I've never been to Portland. So your tips will come in handy one day. I'm sure. Chad (3m 32s): Yeah. Now it's it's I'll tell you, you come here. We've been, we've both been to Austin. Austin is weird. They have this kind of hippie vibe, but they are not even close to what a hippie really is. This place Oregon is where hippies live, the fake hippies are in Austin. Joel (3m 52s): Yeah. By the way, if you haven't seen the Portlandia video about the dream of the nineties is still alive video. It's fantastic. Took me down memory lane because I remember the nineties. Chad (4m 4s): I did probably not much. Joel (4m 7s): Before smartphones. Chad (4m 9s): Faxes, copiers. Joel (4m 11s): Wonderful, naive, innocent time. The nineties. Chad (4m 16s): Well, it was some shout outs here in Portland. I actually had coffee this morning with my man, Matt Miller from 1220. I was like, Hey, you want to meet like at a Pete's coffee or something like that? He's like aww, not that shit. He's a coffee snob. He's like meet me at Sisters and we'll do some coffee. So we did that tomorrow. I'm going to have dinner with our favorite person in the world, Lynn Bailey. Gonna reach out to Tyler, see if he can join us, Tyler Weeks. But yeah. Gonna get a chance to see a Lynn so pretty, pretty stoked about that. Joel (4m 47s): Very Nice. Very nice. I got a shout out for John Malore. John Malore was the CEO and founder president at Work in Sports. Now no one will know this site probably, but this dude's been around for a long time. That site launched in 2000 out of Phoenix. And he's been to every TA tech, I H E W S every conference. So Work in Sports, acquired by iHire a few months ago actually, but it became official, recently, John, this shot of bourbons for you buddy. Chad (5m 17s): Way to go, John. That's awesome. Big shout out to Matt O'Donnell. So you know how Spotify provides, well, they kind of pull together your listening habits. It's kind of freaky, but they pulled together, then they present you with like this really cool visual. You've seen those, right? Joel (5m 33s): Yeah. Yeah. Chad (5m 34s): Anyway, Matt, O'Dell loyal listener and Pappy's winner, by the way, he tweeted one of those personal visual Spotify creates about your listening habits. And it says, quote, "playing the Chad and Cheese podcast in the morning is pretty much the most you thing ever." I teared up a little when I saw that. Joel (5m 60s): Very nice. Right, that's really great marketing because you can share that list on social, right? Like I've seen that before. Yeah. That's fucking great marketing way to go. Spotify, shout out to you. Well, I got a shout out for Michael Cox. He is our monthly whiskey winner and people are taking this to heart, when we said, send us your audio files with shout outs and comments. So Michael has some words for us here on the show. Chad (6m 27s): Oh ok! Michael Cox (6m 28s): Chad and Cheese, Michael Cox here wanted to say, first of all, love the show. Second of all, you guys send t-shirts out your clothing me. I got a t-shirt for my birthday last year. Now you're getting me drunk you're sending me a nice little bottle in the mail. I cannot say thank you enough! Much appreciated! Have a good one. Take care. Joel (6m 49s): Holy shit. Feel the love. Chad (6m 52s): Again tearing up. Just tearing up on this show. Can't do it. Joel (6m 57s): So I got to say, if you haven't taken us up on chadcheese.com/free, it's a real thing, people. People are actually getting drunk. They're getting dressed because of us. If you haven't signed up, we got shirts from Emissary. We got whiskey from Sovren and we got beer from Adzuna. What are you waiting for? chadcheese.com/free. Chad (7m 18s): Amazing. Shout out to Sir Richard Collins for the comments and insights on LinkedIn around the, who would or could acquire Broadbean. This was all started by our newest interview with Rob Prince about the programmatic space. Check it out. Prince of Programmatic on Chadcheese.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Joel (7m 42s): That's right. And don't forget Matt Charney interview with them and thank you to hung Lee for adding us to his newsletter, but he's right. Matt does not do a lot of interviews. And if he's going to do one, he should do it with us, Chad, Cheese and Charney. I mean, I feel, I feel a vibe there. You gotta, you got to check it out if you haven't listened yet. Chad (8m 0s): It was snarkalicious. Joel (8m 1s): That's for sure. It was snarkalicious, hazy, hazy. Snarkilicious. Chad (8m 6s): Hazy, crazy. So it is June it's Pride month, which means a Chad and cheese had to put out LGBTQ plus for dummies because we're dummies with special guest, host, and expert Michelle Raymond from My G Work. This is Pride month, obviously. And instead of creating rainbow logos, whichever everybody seems to do, instead of just doing that, you know, for us, Chad and Cheese is about education, it's about understanding and it's about seriously just giving a shit about the community. So we thought we'd take some time. We put together this limited series and every Monday in June, check out the feed LGBTQ plus for dummies, we did part one last Monday you can go find it. Chad (8m 55s): next Monday with part two, et cetera. Joel (8m 58s): Very nice. So shout out to our friends at Jobvite, sponsors of the show. I was on their Summer to Evolve webinar series, they let me kick off kick off the, the Summer of Love. I guess if you will. I was on with Michael Wright at group M who I think is fair to say he's a fan of the show. Also Pete Lampson, the new CEO over there, so a shout out to Jobvite. That was a lot of fun. I think your wife is on an upcoming one and Hung Lee to name drops for Hung Lee today, that's a good fan. So he's on the next webinar. So basically I feel like the warmup with the warm-up act for Hung Lee. So that's, that's nice. Or the fluffer for hon, maybe that's more appropriate for our favorite. Chad (9m 42s): Dude. Yeah. So I wake up this morning and my wife is on a, some type of event and it was for Harvard University. Like what the fuck? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like, thanks babe. Thanks. Yeah, I know. You're the smart one in the family. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for that. Joel (10m 3s): Oh yeah. Shout out Steven Rothberg, who has our second audio shout out. Chad (10m 8s): I love these. Joel (10m 9s): Of the week. Yeah. Keep these coming. Send them to Chad or me. If you've got questions, comments or shout outs here, Steve. Steve (10m 15s): Hey, a shout out to Jeff Dickey Chasen's better known as the Job Board Doctor. This is Steven Rothberg with College Recruiter. Jeff has been helping a sick relative recover from an illness. And so basically playing a real doctor for that relative. We're all thinking about you and pulling for your relative and just wishing you guys all the best for a very speedy and very complete recovery. Our best Jeff. Joel (10m 47s): The Doctor, I love him. Dude, survived a heart attack a couple of years ago. You remember that? And now he's healing other people it's like, yeah, fucking medicine woman. Chad (10m 57s): I think we actually brought him back. They put the earbuds and he was, yeah, I think he listened to Chad and Cheese. It was like clear! Chad and Cheese. Joel (11m 6s): Hide Your kids. Lock the door. Chad (11m 8s): He's back he's back! Yeah, no, I got, I got to give it to he's. He's one of the best people in our industry. Just more human than human. So Job Board Doctor, we love you man. Last but not least for me. We got a pimp, the new Chad and Cheese European edition, which is going to be coming out next Wednesday kids. That's right. You've all been asking for it. We've been listening. We just wanted to make sure we did this shit right. And so next week we're going to try to do it right. We'll see how it goes. But we we've got Levin coming on from House of HR. So we actually have an embedded European with our dumb American asses. Joel (11m 50s): 20 Years experience. We've found our equivalent in Belgium. Chad (11m 55s): So I'm excited about it. How about you? Joel (11m 58s): Oh dude. I'm pumped. Like we love Europe. Europe loves us. Yes. It just makes sense that we should have a show dedicated to all the cool shit that's going down in Europe because all the cool shit is going down in Europe and I'm just excited to learn more. I think this will be more of a show about us asking questions and sort of shutting up and learning more about the continent than it will be about us. You know, just spewing trash, trash talking. Chad (12m 23s): Yeah. That's doubtful. That's very doubtful. Joel (12m 25s): Yeah. I'm excited. I mean, it's a complicated continent, a lot of countries and cultures, and I'm excited about that. Chad (12m 32s): Yeah. That's just gonna happen every other Wednesday. So we're going to have a bi-monthly and again, depending on, you know, how much news comes in from that area, who knows, it might actually blow up to a weekly show, might take on a life of its own, who the hell knows, but we're going to get it done. Joel (12m 50s): And how much fun did we have making the intro for that show? If you don't listen to anything else, just listen to the intro. It's pretty dope. Chad (12m 56s): It's not Christopher Walken or Morgan Freeman, but it's pretty damn good. Joel (13m 1s): Yeah. And it's not Winston Churchill either. But anyway, my last shout out Nancy from Philly, I did my best to pronounce her last name, Beresovoy. She's celebrating a birthday this week loves the show. Nancy. It looks like she's with a new company in Informatica. I didn't know that she moved. So shout out to her man. How about have a Happy, Happy Birthday? And with that Topics! Jobs unfilled. Chad (13m 31s): Oh my God. Joel (13m 32s): Holy shit. Job openings in April surge to a record high of 9.3 million, this is according to the U S labor department. This is an increase of 1 million from the record setting numbers in March, the leisure and hospitality sector rose 32.7% during the month, almost 4 million people, 4 million people quit their jobs in April as well. That's nearly double the number of people who quit one year earlier, nearly half of America, small businesses can't find workers. This is according to the national Federation of Independent Business. The seasonally adjusted 48% reporting unfilled job openings is a record high in April, nearly one third of people handing in their notice were retail workers who made up 116,000 of the 324,000 people who quit jobs that month is according to a recent job openings and labor turnover survey retailers are reluctant. Joel (14m 26s): Here's the key folks. Retailers are reluctant to raise wages and erode their margins and are losing workers to employers who pay more. Chad it's it's anarchy, but, but your favorite company, Kroger is holding a hiring event on Thursday, which may be the day after people listen to this to fill 10,000 jobs. The event will offer virtual and in store interviews for prospective staff and it's retail, e-commerce, pharmacy, manufacturing, and logistical operations. The company has an average national wage, you'll enjoy this, of more than $15.50 cents per hour. Why are you giving them a hard time? Kroger added its benefits to include a tuition reimbursement program, mental health counseling, and discounts on groceries, electronics, and streaming services. Joel (15m 15s): We're not done. Chad, a new survey from our friends at Jobcase said 93% of unemployed workers are currently not making more money with the COVID-19 relief package than they were prior to the pandemic. We've been fooled. This debunks, the rhetoric around unemployment benefits, being a disincentive for workers to reenter the workforce. The new survey found that a majority of unemployed workers are eager to get back to work. 59% are currently looking to return to full-time and 26% have been looking for work for over a year. But the biggest obstacle to finding work right now is perceived job availability in their area and COVID-19 remains a big concern. Joel (15m 56s): According to co-founder and CEO, Fred Goff job seekers are eager to join employers who demonstrate commitment to their workers by providing living wages, upskilling opportunities and career growth potential. He said, quote, "employers can not only attract great talent today, but they can hire for long-term retention. They simply need to step up and value workers as much as they do shareholders." It's that easy! Ooh, you gotta be loving some of this shit. Chad (16m 23s): Fred Goff is fucking gangster. I love that dude, man. He is so fucking smart. Joel (16m 29s): He's so nice. Chad (16m 29s): He's so nice, but he's so, so smart. And also in that survey, unemployed workers rank pay as their top consideration in selecting a job 41%. Right? So, pay, I'm going to say that once again, pay and then, you know, to go back to Kroger, I mean, fuck Kroger, they're a bad actor. You said they, they average, I love this. We average $15 an hour. Set a goddamn line in the sand, don't start this bullshit averaging stuff. They're a bad actor with the CEO that makes $22 million a year and closed down several locations because the essential workers, you know, the people actually doing the hard manual work. Chad (17m 14s): Labor or the ones who are actually the face of Kroger in the stores face to face with the local community. You know them during the pandemic. Yeah. They closed several locations in California and Washington because those locations wanted to extend the $4 per hour hero pay. Yes, a guy making $22 million a year makes the executive decision to close locations because of $4 an hour for essential worker. So Kroger's lining up all this bullshit to try to make themselves look good in PR, easily enough to say, fuck you Kroger. Now back to the, the reason why the market looks the way that it does is Jobcase actually demonstrates 41% of their looking at pay. Chad (18m 2s): And for all of these companies who are saying, look, we're going to wait this out and we're just going to wait until they have to come back. Which means what exactly are we telling Americans? What we're telling them, shut up and work your shitty job with its shitty wage. If you take a look at how we're treating people today, and then we talk about the whole loyalty factor, which doesn't exist in corporate America today. Back in the day when we had unions that actually focused on ensuring there was a pension, there was longevity, that there was retention that is literally 180 degrees of where we are today and yet, and yet we wonder why we're having a problem. Chad (18m 47s): People aren't loyal to you. They don't give a fuck about your brand. Joel (18m 49s): Yeah. You know, the, the world is changing. I know that's a cliche, but in times where the world changes, there's a huge contingent that doesn't like that change and wants things to stay the same. And I think you're seeing that in mass with a lot of, well, the majority of employers, I think it's a little bit of like, we want to stay rich and keep the money up top. And there's a little bit of, if we pay more, we're going to be in trouble. And those people have to come to grips with the fact that maybe they have a bad business that can't pay people, a solid wage. I think as this thing continues to unfold, it becomes clear to me that, that things aren't going to change and go back to the way they were. Joel (19m 29s): Things are going to change in the way that it's just going to happen. And that wages are going up. Prices are also going up, there's going to be inflation. You're going to pay more for those chicken nuggets. You're going to pay for more, more for that dry cleaning and that carwash. And that's just the way that it is. And that's the way, that's the way the world's going. Otherwise. What's, I mean, what's, you know, what's, what's the alternative? Empty restaurants because you want to continue, you know, selling quesadillas for less, instead of adding a couple of dollars to the price tag, like I get that you don't want to, you don't want your quesadillas to be $2 more than the quesadillas maker down the street. But ultimately everyone's coming up to $2. Joel (20m 10s): It's just a matter of time. Chad (20m 11s): Also we have to, we have to focus on the margins and the profits that corporate America is actually made of the last 50 years who saw an amazing growth. So the profits are there to be able to say that margins are eroding is total bullshit. They're not eroding. What's eroding is the American dream. Joel (20m 31s): Yeah. I mean, by the way, you know, going back in time, I think it was, you know, Ford who said, you know, I need to pay my workers enough that they can buy my cars. And so it's like the logic around that as well. If you're paying these folks more, we know by historical standards that the money is going to go back into the system. So this thing might actually work for everyone's benefit. If more people are making more money and more money is coming back into the system and around we go, that's probably a good thing. And being fearful of that is probably we're finding a negative thing. Chad (21m 6s): Yeah, what we've seen the last 50 years, the money has been going to the top and it's actually going into wealth strategies. Right? Which does not go back into the market, buying jeans, buying chicken nuggets, buying any of that stuff. If it would have trickled down, which it never did, if it would have trickled down so that, the middle class and the low wage workers would have seen a boost in wages, those dollars would have gone directly back into the market and it would have juiced the market. So what we're doing is we're playing this whole game of propaganda, which we'll talk about more in this podcast, to be able to design a narrative, to engineer a narrative, to say why they can't pay for people to actually have a wage where they can live on. Chad (21m 52s): Their families can live on. It's totally bullshit. Joel (21m 54s): There's a great article, I think it was in ProPublica. Chad (21m 56s): Oh, God dude. Joel (21m 57s): Did you see that about the it's basically, I mean, it's a strategy, right? I mean, rich people, basically their money, you know, their, their wealth is tied in, you know, the value of stock and they borrow money against that stock and then paying off the debt isn't taxed in the same way that income is or dividends are, and they can actually pay it after they die. So it's literally like make the money, borrow it and then die and then the debt gets paid off. And that obviously is a loophole that will have to be addressed. And I think also with, I think also in the news this week was sort of a baseline of corporate taxation and the G20 is going to go, you know, a ways of helping to create a quality around the world and create, you know, the Googles of the world and Apples, you know, cant just drop anchor in Ireland and you know, not pay taxes. Chad (22m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, that being said, I mean, we're talking about mainly middle to lower wage workers now, and those are the individuals who are face-to-face. What about the work from home side of the house, right? What do we see with Apple this week? Joel (23m 1s): Some big stories out of that. So there's a battle on, the lower income end, and there's a battle on the higher income end. So in a new survey, roughly half of workers said they would turn down a job, offer that mandated full-time in the office work. Apple came out as well this week, employees are being asked to return to the office three days a week, starting in early September. Most employees will be asked to come into the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays with the option of working remotely on Wednesdays and Friday. So this is a new casual Friday, I guess, in an email to workers CEO, Tim Cook said "there has been something essential missing from this past year, each other. Joel (23m 44s): Video conference calling has narrowed the distance between us to be sure, but there are things it simply cannot replicate" end quote Apple's stance on remote work while getting more relaxed is still conservative compared to the other tech giants. In May, Google announced that 20% of its workforce would be able to work from home permanently. Mark Zuckerberg has said that remote work is the future and told Facebook employees, they can all work from home forever so as long as they get their manager's approval. A Forbes article said quote, "the entire concept of work as altered as a result of the pandemic. If senior leaders be at Apple or elsewhere, don't wake up to the seismic shift employees will walk out the door to an organization and go to an organization that gets it." Joel (24m 33s): We also heard from SAP this week, another mega corporation after regular surveys of its workers, SAP announced employees will be able to work from home, at the office or remotely and will be able to set flexible schedules. SAP will redesign its offices to make more space for teamwork and collaboration. An internal survey revealed 94% of employees said they plan to take advantage of the flexibility. Chad (24m 57s): Duh. Joel (24m 57s): I wanna talk to the 6% that said no. And 49% said they plan to work in the office one or two days per week. President Jill Popelka said in a release quote, "people will need to decide what works best for their schedules, what they are comfortable with, how often they need to be in the office and how to align with their teams. In short SAP treats employees like adults." So Chad, are you down with Apple or SAP? Yeah, you know, me. Chad (25m 28s): SAP actually asked their employees, where Apple's like, fuck you, we're going to do what we want. I love this from the Apple message, it was employees also have the chance to work remotely for up to two weeks a year, to be close to family and loved ones, for change of scenery, manage unexpected travel, or a different reasons, all their own. Oh yeah, managers need to approve remote work requests. I mean, wow, up to two whole weeks, a year! Apple employees are sounding off with, motherfucker, I worked remotely with kids doing school via zoom, dogs barking, FedEx showing up at my door every five fucking minutes while driving your productivity through the roof. Chad (26m 13s): Tim Cook is giving his employees the real, fuck you, I'm the boss. Get back into the office. And that isn't working the way he liked because now Apple is starting the mutiny. Joel (26m 27s): Yeah. It sounds, it's sort of like tale of two strategies. On the side of Apple, I see in my mind a conference room with a whole lot of white dudes saying, Okay, here's our new policy, we'll give the workers bread and circuses in the form of two per week working flexibly and they're just going to take it. And unfortunately, a lot of them aren't, and they're revolting against that. And then you have SAP, which apparently has been surveying their employees since COVID happened. And they've been checking on them regularly about their mental health and their home life and how can we help and how can we better serve you? And then when they asked, okay, what do you want to be the policy around working from home or not? Joel (27m 12s): Employees answered and the company said, okay, we're going to give you what you want. And you know, one of these policies is sort of, you know, stuck in the past and hoping to, again, hold onto that past, and the way things were. And the other is embracing the future and work in a whole new way, and treating people like adults. And that's really positive. I'm surprised by Apple, just from the fact that they play in the Silicon Valley and that's where, you know, they compete against those guys, Google, Facebook, et cetera, on a really high scale. So you would think that market forces or necessity would make them say work from home forever if Facebook is doing it, we are too. Joel (27m 54s): If Twitter's doing it we are too. So what happens will be interesting. I think that tight rope we need to learn to walk is how do we keep culture and grow culture and still work from home. I think that if we figure that out, we've done our job, but we're, I think we're a long way from that. Chad (28m 15s): First off Apple, it's funny. You give Apple a lot of credit. They also have slave labor in China. Isn't that right? Yeah. Yeah. Joel (28m 21s): That's a different podcast Chad, that's a different podcast. Chad (28m 24s): Yeah. It's the same company, same company, right? So they were trying to walk the line between slave labor and allowing remote. But, but this, in itself, I think also you talk about culture. Culture is the new, pretty much dog whistle for control, where somebody is like, oh, we can't get the culture, right. Well, if you can't get the culture, right, you could not, you should not be a fucking manager. You should not be a fucking CEO. You should not be in leadership because today is not 19 fucking 50, asshole. We need to do business differently. We need to evolve. We need change. We've already demonstrated that production, productivity and efficiency happens when we allow autonomy. Now, the second part of that is we're seeing that cyber security is now going to be a dog whistle for the exact same fucking thing. Joel (29m 12s): Yeah. We both found this really fascinating. And we had, obviously the gas pipeline recently go down from a malware attack or ransomware attack, and a news story from the Wall Street Journal came out this week. That could, I guess, derail the whole work from home party. You said it, if culture is the new control, cybersecurity may be the new prison. The hybrid workplace that's being adopted by growing number of companies could prove to be a quote "Cybersecurity nightmare" says the Wall Street Journal "with employees, toggling between office and remote setups and their devices moving in and out of company networks. Company IT security staff are being stretched thin." Joel (29m 54s): Companies are more Chad (29m 54s): Stop, stop, stop. This is all fucking propaganda and bullshit. Okay. The colonial pipeline was breached. Why? Joel (30m 3s): Well, a few reasons. Chad (30m 5s): No, because there wasn't a two-step verification because IT, and because their systems were not actually up to snuff. That's not a remote employee issue. We talk about going between throttling, between being in the office or being at home, it's called VPN kids. We've had it for fucking years, you know, to be able to create an environment in which we are safe, right? And there was actually a survey that showed the percentage of global IT decision-makers who believe employees have increased their company's risk of security breached by 83%, letting others use their work devices. Chad (30m 47s): It's fairly simple. You put a standard operating procedure in place that says no. And if you do, and we should find out that you did, there will be ramifications. 88% downloading software, not approved by it, lock the fucking machine down IT, if you can't do your job and do that, then you're fucking worthless. And then last but not least 88% using personal devices for work. Once again, standard operating procedure. You put that in place, you put rules in place and they have to abide by the rules. If you see that they're not coming into the VPN. Well, first off, if they're on, if you're on a personal, your personal system, you should not be able to access that VPN. Chad (31m 27s): Again, it's all standard operating procedure. And these, IT decision-makers are fucking either shitty at their job, or they're just designing a fucking narrative that they can fix, but they don't want to. So fuck them. Joel (31m 44s): I just wanted a chance to talk about the rumored ransomware attack on CareerBuilder. That's all I want. We'll be right back. Jobvite (31m 51s): Last year, Summer-to-Evolve saw us bring together some of the biggest names in talent acquisition presenting, exciting content to help us learn and grow in these evolving times. This year, we're back to do it all again, taking our eight weeks of virtual sessions on tour for the Summer-to-Evolve road trip presented by Jobvite, virtually visiting locations around the world. We're excited to share more talent acquisition tips, tricks, and best practices with you. Visit the summertoevolve.com to learn more. Joel (32m 21s): So we talk about chatbots a lot on the show, Chad. Chad (32m 25s): We do. We do. Joel (32m 25s): But we maybe didn't think about it in this way. So Whatfix a company I've never heard of just raised $90 million in funding led by SoftBank. Yeah. That SoftBank the one that funded, WeWork to the tune of 4 billion or whatever. So Whatfix's total fund count now stands at 139.8 million. The company claims that its valuation is increased by as much as three times in the past 15 months. The latest investment buys the company at about 600 million significantly higher than 150 million that it was valued during its previous funding round, a year ago. What do they do? They provide enterprise chat bots to help with everything from onboarding to remote training, to performance support, for instance, they integrate with Workday. Joel (33m 9s): So if someone has a question about pay schedules or vacation time, a bot can answer questions instead of a human being. So what happens first, Chad is Whatfix get into recruiting or does Paradox jump into Whatfix's backyard? Chad (33m 23s): Yeah. Well, I mean, it depends on how much more money Paradox takes. They'll have spread out if they take more money. I think, you know, for the most part with Whatfix there is the standard FAQ, which, you know, any dumb bot can do it's an FAQ hierarchy type of a thing. But what they're actually doing, is they're actually in place to kind of like train over shitty integrations. I was watching a video of one of their clients on the site, and he automatically drops moving to Salesforce and the adoption of a new platform for their sales team. Now in doing this before and being through shitty integrations and the sales team, not being a part of the design methodology and it all being fucked up for months before they actually get it fixed there is a huge market for this. Joel (34m 14s): Obviously. Chad (34m 15s): Yeah, there's, there's no question. Not just for sales, but customer service and all the way through, because much like the, IT decision-makers that we just talked about, all of these other decision makers who were, are actually making decisions on platforms, and then also helping in the quote/unquote "design methodologies of implementation and usage" none of them are doing their job. They're just total shit, which is why this is a platform that is necessary. It shouldn't be, but guess what? It is. Joel (34m 48s): Yeah. It's actually an incredibly fascinating company. Chad (34m 51s): Yeah, it is. Joel (34m 53s): They've taken Clippy Microsoft's little helper from the nineties and sort of brought it into a current day, but you're right. Being able to integrate, obviously integrations are huge. All these companies are integrating their shit with Salesforce, with Slack, with Workday, and to be able to understand all those integrations and what you do, there's a need for this shit. I think it's really fascinating and good on them. I think you'll see more competition around here, but if we were playing buy or sell, I think this would be a buy for both of us. Chad (35m 25s): Yeah, no question. Again, we're talking about shitty management, shitty integrations. We see it all the time and in our space. Oh my God. Joel (35m 34s): And according to surveys, even if they do know how to do their job, they're going to leave after, you know, the pandemic clears out anyway. So you need to have bots educating everybody. Well, speaking of educating everybody, we've got a good old fashion, super power face off here this week, Chad. So China versus the US. Chad (35m 53s): Ding, ding, ding. Joel (35m 54s): A new piece of legislation, countering China's growing economic influence has passed the U S Senate this week led in part by Indiana's own Todd Young. I know your wife voted for him. It was with bipartisan support. Yeah. Bi-partisan what the hell is that? That's when both parties agree on something, which we haven't seen in a while, the bill would invest more than 250 billion into America's manufacturing, technology, research, and development, even after the bill we will still be quite a bit behind in China's R and D. But Hey, it's a start. My perspective on this is it's a repeat from Russia going to space before us. The government realized, holy shit, we need to educate people in science and engineering and all those good things and money float into the educational system to get people learned on those skills and the same thing, history repeats itself. Joel (36m 45s): But now it's with China. A lot of the money will go into 5G, all the good stuff for the future. I'm for this, I assume you are as well Chad. Any commentary on this? Chad (36m 56s): America always needs a bad guy. Instead of seeing China or Russia as the bad guy, how about we look at the American lawmakers who created the situation in the first place? China, they didn't make the fucking policy. So yes, it's bipartisan because it's against China and we need to mend a lot of shit. Most of it called infrastructure. And just a really quick beyond R and D, we talk about how we need better infrastructure. Obviously we have failing bridges, roads, so on and so forth, but also we had 2 million of our smartest Americans, women leave the workforce in 2020, which is one of the reasons why childcare needs to be a part of a new thought process of infrastructure, right? Chad (37m 44s): So we, as an Americans, again, need to get out of the 1950s mindset. We need to take a look at R and D. We need to take a look at all of these different areas, but we have to understand that China's playing the long game. We are playing the two to four year game. Joel (37m 59s): Yeah. The next, the next election. Yes. And I think there are issues around immigration and visas and work visas and all that good stuff. I mean, there's a reason why Canada is the new Silicon Valley, at least that's what my wife feed on Facebook says. But yeah, we have a long way to go, but yeah, it's a step in the right direction. Let's take a quick break and talk a little ice cream. 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Chad (39m 10s): I hope they serve righteous gelato. Joel (39m 12s): Or maybe some bourbon cream, cream bourbon. Oh, oh my God. Chad (39m 16s): Righteous Gelato has a bourbon flavor. It is delicious. Joel (39m 23s): Come on now. See you get these shipments. And I don't. So that's just rubbin' it in my face. So anyway, all right, Chad, you don't have to be Amazon or Walmart or Target to pay workers a competitive wage! Case in point Klavon's, I'm guessing Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor in Pittsburgh. tell us how to pronounce that received more than a thousand apps after raising their minimum wage to $15 an hour. As you can imagine, a lot of those people got turned down, so the owner is helping those who won't be scooping some Rocky Road ice cream find that work! Posting on social media he has said that they have screened applicants ready to work for restaurants and other businesses that are struggling to hire staff. Joel (40m 7s): Here's the kicker. And you'll love this. He won't pass on resumes to just anyone saying, quote, "the rule I have with all these businesses that are reaching out and trying to hire these people. You have to say upfront the wages you're paying and that it's comparable with what we are hiring for. If you're trying to get someone at $2.25 an hour or something like that, we aren't going to help you" end quote. And I'm obviously about three drams into this podcast. So I apologize if I'm ramming, but I say, boom! And he also added take that leap of faith, increase your wages, and you'll see the benefit from it. We have so far in think they will too. I love small towns, small business America. Chad (40m 49s): Yeah, well, we say it over and over every week that we have to think of different ways, even as small businesses to evolve and be more efficient and to be able to ensure that our people are treated fairly, which means they are making a living wage, that they're getting the benefits, right? That we're actually feeding our community. That's the thing that matters most. And to actually see a small organization first and foremost, take the plunge. They definitely need to do. If you take a look at wages in this area in Pittsburgh versus the rest of the state, they definitely need to do that. Chad (41m 29s): But also they are holding other companies feet to the in saying, look, if you want to hire these individuals, we have given them our promise. That matters. And this is where loyalty comes from. How many people do you think are going to eat ice cream at that fucking place from now until they die because of this decision and because of the connections they make the perspectively get a job somewhere else. Joel (41m 55s): And what do you think turnover is going to be at this ice cream shop? Pretty close to zero until school starts again, or whatever these folks are doing. I mean, we hear so much about, you know, we have jobs to fill. We can't hire anybody. No, one's applying to jobs. No, one's, you know, like you, we hear this all the time and I go, you know, I try to like, just keep my finger on the pulse. And I drive around and it's like, I go, you know, past, I'm not eating there. I know what you're thinking. And blah, drive past Arby's or Taco Bell or whatever. And it's like, you know, they're paying $10 an hour and you know, like you just need to pay people a decent minimum wage and magic happens. Yeah. It's really that simple. Holy shit. We just solved America's employment woes over bourbon and beer! Chad (42m 38s): Every single week! Joel (42m 39s): Saving the world one podcast at a time, Chad and Cheese. Chad and Joel (42m 44s): We out, we out. OUTRO (42m 46s): 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 (43m 30s): 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.

Think your company has an inclusive work culture? Might be time to reevaluate. Maybe. The boys sit down for a chat with Kanarys cofounder and COO Star Carter in hopes of getting to the heart of the matter. Want more? We cover law firm tokenism, venture capital racism, and aspirational diversity goals (THIS DOESN'T FLOW QUITE RIGHT). It's a great discussion around inclusion, fundraising, and entrepreneurship. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Joel (0s): Has it, has the change in the White House made you more optimistic or changed any of your views on the future? Star (6s): Yeah, it's definitely made me more optimistic. Chad (10s): There's an old white guy in the White House. I don't know if you knew that, but there's an old white guy in the White House. INTRO (15s): 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 (34s): Oh yeah. Chad is tan, rested, and ready to podcast. What's up everybody? This is Joel Cheeseman. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast as always, I am joined by my loyal cohost, Chad Sowash and today we are honored to welcome the coolest name in the history of names on this podcast. Chad (55s): No question Joel (56s): Star Carter Co-founder and CEO of Kanarys, graduate of Harvard law and a resident of Dallas, Star, welcome to the show. Star (1m 6s): Thank you. Thanks for having me today. Joel (1m 8s): What else should our audience know about you? That I forgot to cover there. Star (1m 12s): Oh, well you got all the high points. Joel (1m 15s): Cowboys fan? Star (1m 18s): Cowboy's fan. Joel (1m 19s): A mother of two? Star (1m 21s): Mother of two, five and seven, seven years old. Joel (1m 24s): Anything else we like to go deep on this show? Star (1m 29s): Okay. Let's get deep! Spent about 12 years in the law firm life, so did private equity work and negotiating and drafting agreements. And that's where I really got into diversity equity and inclusion while I was there. Chad (1m 42s): Can we get into that real quick? Cause that doesn't make any sense to me, private equity, diversity and inclusion, and you know, as well as I do it is hard for females let alone black females or even any person of color to get funded in the first place. So how do those, how was there a divergence there? Star (2m 1s): You're right. Private equity is a peer almost a hundred percent white boy industry. What happened though is when you're in the law firm, when you're one of very few as African-American female, just like so many of us do, you get a tasked to do diversity, equity, and inclusion, right? You're the black female. You're one of few, Hey, I want you to join the recruiting committee, the women's committee, the diversity committee, and you really are tapped to do that stuff as one of few. So that's how I got interested in it and really learned about it when I was in the law firms space. Joel (2m 34s): That doesn't sound like an honor? Chad (2m 37s): Volun-told right. Star (2m 38s): Yeah. It's hard. It's not an honor per se, especially because you still have your expectations of your full kind of billable, right? As a lawyer, you have to bill time and they don't give any kind of leniency in that, but you're at the same time expected to do all this committee work, all this CEI work that you don't get any kind of credit for. Chad (2m 57s): Well, that's kind of like a corporate America and their employee resource groups where they want to be able to create these different segments to provide community per se. But there's generally no additional pay that goes to those individuals, more of an added task and/or job or role on top of what they already have to get done. Star (3m 21s): Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, ERG is a whole other topic. I think ERG is, can be done smart, right? If you actually have executive sponsorship and it gives the leaders of the ERG face-time in front of leadership, they would nevertheless ever be in front of it makes a lot of sense, right. For your professional advancement? If you could set it up in the right way. But if it's just really just a group, a support group, I agree with you. I think it can be set up in a way that doesn't really have any kind of value add. Chad (3m 48s): Yeah. Let's dig, let's dig into your background one more time. So law you're kind of volun-told to be a part of these committees and whatnot. And then you're a co-founder of a tech organization. How did tech get thrown in here and how did you guys actually move toward technology in the space of DEI? Star (4m 8s): Yeah, no great question. So yeah, most of my background's in law and what we saw as co-founders we, a lot of the time while I was in the law firm, my experience various inequities, like so many of us do. I hit the pinnacle of those inequities when I came up for partnership in the law firm and I was told that I needed to wait a year because I had taken too many maternity days, and that number was two, T-W-O. Chad (4m 36s): Wow! Star (4m 37s): Yeah, I was, I know I was actually told that. Which of course upset me. And I ended up leaving shortly thereafter. And as I talked with my co-founders about their various experience, we got together and we said, you know what, something's gotta be done here. How do we close this gap? Because what we saw was an equity is being experienced, executive leadership, having no idea of what was going on in the field, right by most of the employees working at a specific company. How do we close that gap in communication, so that executive leadership actually has a sense of the lived experiences? And they can make DEI decisions based on the best information available. Star (5m 18s): And that's where we got into the task. How do we share those lived experiences in a way where folks don't have to worry about negative career ramifications. Joel (5m 27s): So tell us about Kanarys your company. On the tech side, what's your specialty? What kind of, what's the demographic of a client who uses you? What do they use you for? If I knew nothing about Kanarys, what would you tell me about? Star (5m 42s): Yeah. Yeah. So Kanarys we're black founded company. We start with the data analytics. So we do that through various assessments. We do that through an employer assessment where we're really understanding where is a company partner on their journey by looking at their systems, their policies, the procedures, asking specific questions about their hiring processes. Are, do you disclose pay bans? Are you asking applicants respect to their salary history, questions like that to really understand where they are in their DEI journey? Do they have paid maternity leave, things like that. And then we're also doing assessments from the perception of an employee understanding those lived experience. So asking them questions about, are they familiar with DEI initiatives? Star (6m 27s): Have they ever experienced anti-discrimination? Do they feel like they belong? Do they feel like they can go to their immediate manager if something were to happen and questions like that? And so we take all that information, we analyze that and we go from the analytics all the way through an insights report that really lays out those key findings and turn that into a recommendation plan. So we start with the data analytics, we go all the way through to recommendations, and then we help with strategy implementation of those recommendations. Joel (7m 0s): It sounds like a bit of a high-touch and high-tech business. Would that be correct? Star (7m 4s): Yeah. It's a mix of that. You know, when we first started to do that, you learn so much when you're entrepreneur, it was really a focus on the tech, right? Let's do these assessments. But what we found really quickly is that our company partners like, okay, great, this is such great information. What's next? What do we do now? These folks have to kind of look at you, like help us. And so then we ended up morphing into a mix, a mix of that strategy implementation and helping from a consulting services standpoint, but having that data analytics be front and center, so that strategy is specifically informed. Joel (7m 37s): So let's talk about raising money. I'm curious in the process as a whole, did you get seed when you started the company, did you sort of become profitable and then look to raise? You've raised a total of $4.6 million, which is incredibly impressive for anyone, but I assume that there are certain challenges that you faced or hurdles as a woman of color. And if so, feel free to talk about that. Star (8m 0s): Yeah. So we started off with what they call the pre-seed round, right? Friends and family. And of course in the African-American community, a lot that a lot of times is an issue in itself because we don't have family and friends with a lot of wealth, right? just given the history of this country. What we were able to do is raise 1.6 million through various angel investors. Of course, we got to the point where we moved to the seed round. And that's when we started talking to VCs specifically. And that was the dirty in itself. I mean, we talked to so many investors, I remember talking to one investor specifically that kind of looked at us and said, what inequities, it's a meritocracy, there's I don't even know what you're talking about. Star (8m 45s): You don't need this kind of thing in the workplace. And I will say from that point, we said, okay, it's very important. We aligned with investors that understand the social impact nature, of what we're trying to do. And what you also come to find when you're a black female founder is questions you ask, they differ greatly. What we found through the research and having to prepare is that when you are a female specifically, black females, specifically as well, you're asking more questions that are prevention, right? Tell me about security, what are the risks? What are some things that can go wrong with your business? And when you are a male, you tend to get these promotion oriented questions. Star (9m 26s): Questions like how much do you think you've could earn and all of the questions around the maximum amount of success you can have? Chad (9m 35s): Right. Star (9m 35s): And so what happens is you ask the preventative a prevention question, it gets a prevention answer, when you ask a promotion oriented question, it begets a promotion answer. And so we had to really learn how, how do we spin this, prevention-oriented question into a promotion answer. Chad (9m 54s): Gotcha. xxxswhat's the biggest point of advice you would provide to any female out there who wants to start a company? Would it be just that, or would there be something even bigger that you would focus on right out of the way? Star (10m 5s): I would definitely say you got to have tenacity. You're going to hear a lot of no's, especially as a female, we just don't, especially when you're doing fundraising, we just do not raise the funds specifically out of the whole entire VC industry. I mentioned before with black females, it's even more paltry, you're looking at 0.06% down from 2.3% for females, for VC funding. So you better get you say you're a no, and you better get used to being tenacious because otherwise you just put your head between your legs and, you know, quit what you're trying to do and it's really easy to be discouraged. Chad (10m 40s): Right? Okay. Well, you talk about data and the platform in, you know, that's in recruiting. I mean, we really run heavy on analytics, but the biggest problem in the DEI segments or the underrepresented segment is that most underrepresented populations, don't self identify, which is a huge problem within itself. But overall, if you don't have the data, how do you identify the problem? And then how do you fix a problem that you can't identify? Star (11m 10s): Yeah, no, I completely agree. And it's funny because we talked to some companies who would say, Oh, we have data, right? And they might do something like an employee engagement survey where they asked maybe one to three specific questions. At Kanarys we really focus to your point on the intersectionality, but how do you actually gather that information on demographics? So part of what we do is utilizing the information that they have gathered through their HRS system. So a lot of companies, for instance, already gather information on gender or on ethnicity, and that's kind of the bulk of it, right? And so what we do is help our company partners with quality, like self ID campaign, where we are asking various, maybe we're asking about sexual orientation or religion or something. Star (11m 59s): A lot of what we do is consultative. So we'll say, what are you missing demographic wise from your workforce? Do you have a focus that you want to focus on? And so for instance, we just rolled out kind of this quality self ID campaign, where our specific company partner wanted to focus in no information on sexual orientation and religion. And so we were able to identify for them what their workforce looks like in those two very specific demographics that they did not have information for. And/or we'll fill a little bit more on the kind of missing ethnicity, but do your whole point, intersectionality is so important. And so when you have the static, so all the companies we work with had a lot of data, but they do not break it up by intersectionality. They have no idea how things differ between your black employees, your Asian employees, your LGBT employees, et cetera. Chad (12m 46s): Do you have any business cases behind that? If not, that sounds like a beautiful one to start on right now. Star (12m 55s): Yeah, yeah, no, we, I think it becomes really clear for our company partners specifically to see how do you measure equity and inclusion? These are like the very nebulous concepts of DEI. And so we worked really closely with a product advisory council, DEI professionals, and I've been doing this their entire career, a pollster who is in the business of asking questions to measure nebulous concepts. How do you measure those equity inclusion? And then when you're asking those questions, how does an overlay look when you're looking at specific intersectionality, demographics compared to your entire workforce. And it's been amazing to uncover for some of our company partners. Okay. It looks like overall from your employee workforce, you're doing great in X, Y, and Z, right? Star (13m 38s): But when we actually break this down to your, you know, your Hispanics or your, your black population or whatever population is fill in the blank, there is a statistically significant difference in how these demographics in your workforce perceive these various aspects of equity and inclusion differently than your entire workforce. And there is something about that, and this is what we bring to the front and center, as far as the data goes intersectionality, to make it very clear, here's where we're finding key findings. And so as we talk about DEI initiatives and policies and things to implement, we got to think very clearly how this may differ between these various demographics based on the data we've collected from. Nexxt PROMO (14m 23s): 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 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 and sometimes we'll even parse the resumes of the opted in people to target certifications. Nexxt PROMO (15m 7s): 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 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 44s): I feel like so much of our industry is fickle. There are certain things that become hot, whether it be in the zeitgeists of just the world at large, or whether it's a tech shiny object that that companies gravitate toward. When I think about that, I think about a threat to businesses like yours. And is there a threat that diversity and inclusion loses its sort of focus and that that's a serious threat to your business? Like, do you think about the, I guess just the overall trends of diversity inclusion or do you, do you feel like it's something that is going to be a long-term practice by companies? And if it's going to be a long-term practice, what is going to be the selling point to make sure that, that remains something that is in the future for the longterm? Star (16m 30s): Yeah, no, it's a good question. I mean, DEI has been around for a while now, right? The concept, but it's been so stagnant, right. Even though it's been around, we've been talking about it for 20 plus years. I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to turn around and it'd be 2040 and we're still talking about how come he hasn't moved the needle since, you know, the early 1990s, when a lot of companies were first really focusing on DNI? I think what we see now, is, I think it's a change in times, right? We have what I've always coined the racial pandemic, the ruthless Margaret, George Floyd? Star (17m 10s): All the happenings from beyond. What we're seeing, I think is much more of your employee base, coming to leaders and demanding better, demanding more, they feel more empowered to ask those tough questions about DEI? What's going on? What are we doing, CEO, as a company toward DEI? And I think that's really kind of perpetuated this movement to putting your foot on the gas, for DEI. The focus on DEI specifically now, why, because our employees are demanding it. So for a lot of those companies that maybe, you know, kind of just thought it was the nice to have, it was maybe a business imperative, but it wasn't a priority. Star (17m 52s): It, what we've seen through Kanarys is a lot of these companies and not all, there's always exceptions, but a lot of these companies are now saying, you know what? This is absolutely a business priority for us. We got to put the DEI up front and center. And I think in order for that to be a longterm trend, we have to keep our foot on the gas and we have to keep demanding and empowering, especially our underrepresented employees to ask those tough questions and demand more from their leadership. Chad (18m 18s): I'm going to throw you a softball question. How, how do you feel about aspirational diversity goals? Star (18m 24s): Is this a softball question? So, okay. Half the racial diversity goals are, okay. Right? However, I think it's really important. Companies have historically focused on diversity, right? You have three black employees, two of them leave, Oh crap, let's replace the two. So we keep our numbers where they are. So as we talk with our company, partners, we always emphasize diversity is important, right? And probably the easiest things to measure, especially with specific demographics that you can outwardly see. But the, what I think a lot of companies forget about or have not focused on historically is the retention side of it. Star (19m 5s): So you spend all that money for your talent acquisition. You got folks there. And a lot of companies have problems with that, which is a whole other topic, but we can get into just not even claiming they can't find that versus individuals to hire, but let's pretend for a moment that companies can find them. Their attention goes out and off the wayside, right? Like we get them here and then there's no focus that's intentional on how do we keep these underrepresented employees here? How do we make sure they feel like they belong? Especially when they're one of very few. And that was my issue at the law firms. I worked at, there weren't very many of us. And so there were several times I didn't feel like I belong. Star (19m 47s): And part of that is your, you know, what we've seen as his biases have crept into systems, policies, and procedures. There's a reason why, when you talk to these companies, they say we have great diversity which is why the goals part I'm like, eh, it's okay, but you have to focus on retention part. But when you break down the diversity from the entry level, all the way to the top, I'm talking about the top, top, not just leadership, but the board, there is a steep drop-off! And it is a terrible thing when you see all the diversity at the entry level, and as you move up the corporate ladder, it just completely completely disappears. Chad (20m 22s): Okay. I'm going to give you my cynic view. Cause, I don't believe that the people in power, let's just say old white dudes want to give up the power at all. Rather, they create aspirational goals through billions of dollars with a B at training and then make excuses for not hiring, not having hiring outcomes and/or promoting underrepresented populations through the ranks, driving a wage equality. And the list goes on and on. So in short, we haven't made progress because the people in power don't want to give it up. Star (20m 54s): Can we change that? I agree. I mean, there's companies that very much so align what you're saying. And at least at Kanarys, when we are partnering with companies, we want to partner with companies that have executive buy-in and actually want to change the system with DEI, but you're absolutely right. There are so many companies in which I don't think there's a true desire for DEI. It's more like a check the box initiative. Let's make sure we have these things for our marketing materials. Let's make sure we can at least proclaim that we're doing something. But when it really, when you pull that back that curtain, that from that look into the organization specifically, you really see nothing. You see these steep drop drop-offs, you're seeing the issues that I mentioned earlier. Star (21m 35s): And I think the change that it's going to be a long haul, but I at least am positive about the fact that we are with respect to wanting to really have change. Yeah. Joel (21m 51s): And, you know, Star, when I look at questions like this or any question really in life, I say, follow the money. And when you first started talking about the investment community, and when I think about, you know, how can we really change the direction on some of this stuff? It seems like the root of this is where the money is going and where investment is being, you know, sort of put to.... Do you, were you seeing any changes in the, the VC world as you were trying to raise money? Do you see the VC world changing? Do you see more people of color and diversity starting venture capital firms and putting money into organizations like yours? Star (22m 28s): We are definitely seeing a change. There's been a lot more commitments as a part of the entire racial justice movement. And that's inclusive in the BC world. We're seeing a lot more VC firms commit more to getting more people of color within their VC ranks. Right? Cause a lot of times you see the VCs and there's no people of color that are part of that specific VC. We're seeing that we're seeing more be started by people of color. We're seeing more commitments, whether it's majority white or a black or a person of color started more commitments to investing in and founders of color. So it has been changing. And I think we'll continue to see more and more initiatives like this come about. Star (23m 13s): I'm just hoping that we see much more of it in the longterm. It's not just a short-term thing, especially why racial justice right now is the focus. What I would hate to see is that some of these things are, so short-term this time five years ago, everyone's off the racial justice discussions and onto the next subject matter. But I do think we're seeing trends. Joel (23m 34s): Yeah. Has it changed in the white house made you more optimistic or changed any of your views on the future? Star (23m 40s): Yeah, it's definitely made me more optimistic. Chad (23m 44s): There's an old white guy in the White House. I don't know if you knew that Joel, but there's an old white guy in the White House. Star (23m 49s): It's definitely made me more optimistic. We'll see if those changes carry through. I, you know, I think we've already seen a lot more progress from the previous man to the current man. You know, even with our VP being a woman of color, there's definitely more progress that we've seen. Joel (24m 8s): Yeah Chad. Not all white guys are the same. Chad (24m 11s): Thank God. Star (24m 13s): They're both older white guys with differing views and class Chad (24m 18s): Some of the recruiting industry's biggest issues start with bloated requirements carried by the job posting itself. Are you guys analyzing job requirements to help stop the bias from jump street at all? Star (24m 30s): Yeah, so we currently don't have that goal to our software, but it's actually on our roadmap because what we're seeing a lot of questions about from our prospects is can you help us with job descriptions? We're getting that, we're getting those questions and they increase a lot. And I think that as we look at our roadmap, we really want to make that be one of our core offerings to make sure that we have that built into our software so we can help companies with their job descriptions and making sure they're not using words that may automatically turn off a female, make sure they're not listing 50 qualifications cause we know women feel like they haven't checked every single one before they apply. So it's on our roadmap, it's not there now, but we definitely want to get there because we're getting more inquiries about that from our prospects. Chad (25m 17s): So what do you see is the fastest route to parody? One what one big step would provide the biggest impact for every company that's listening right now? What could they do? Star (25m 29s): I think what they could do for parody is, it's really about the professional development. I think where we run into trouble, especially with people of color or other underrepresented employees, if there's a lack of sponsorship and by sponsor mentorship is there usually they're just good mentors in place, but sponsorship the people that are the ones that put their neck on the line, have the power to pull you through and get you promoted through an organization. And I feel like that is a huge part of what's missing in these organizations, especially for underrepresented. I think part of that, it's just leadership tends to be yeah, white, older males and those white, older males tend to gravitate for people that remind them of themselves. Star (26m 12s): And so the underrepresented employees there, fall through the cracks. And so I think if they're going to be intentionality specifically geared towards sponsorship, we could start seeing some changes faster than not. But that's just not just one thing. I know there's a number of things companies really need to do to try to start fixing this, these major issues when it comes to parity. Chad (26m 36s): The go hard line on this last question, if we mandated and say the federal government mandated transparency around workforce composition and also pay equity and actually to be able to demonstrate who's getting paid, what doesn't have to be by person obviously, but by aggregate, how do you think that would actually impact the industry? Do you think it would be for the positive or do you think that would actually negatively impact what you're trying to do at Kanarys? Star (27m 4s): I think transparency equates to accountability. And I think the problem with D&I is that we don't have enough transparency. I think people, companies are nervous about their numbers about DEI, I really don't want to bring it out into the front of the center. So I think if we have mandates where companies had to be more transparent about their D&I initiatives or their numbers, I think we would all of a sudden see a sense of additional accountability. And I think that's what's needed for these companies to really say, Oh crap. Yeah, everyone's looking at this, we've got to do something and it's very apparent that we are falling behind our industry competitors. And so we've got to do something to get back in front of the group of folks and we're on top again. Star (27m 48s): So I would be a proponent of more transparency. I know from a company standpoint, it can be very scary, but I think that accountability and transparency is absolutely what needs to happen in order for companies to all jump on this bandwagon. Really funding the needle for DEI. Chad (28m 6s): Rip off the bandaid, do it. Joel (28m 9s): Last one for me over/under - nine wins for the Cowboys, this coming season? Star (28m 14s): Oh gosh. That's a good question. I always go into the season really optimistic only to be utterly really disappointed, but it ... Joel (28m 27s): Sounds like an under to me, Chad. Chad (28m 30s): Yeah. Star (28m 31s): Don't want to answer without a direct answer. We'll see. I'm hoping to be optimistic this year and be pleased by the end of the season. We'll see. Joel (28m 40s): Star Carter, everybody. Chad (28m 42s): That's right! Joel (28m 43s): Co-founder CEO of Kanarys. Star for those who want to know more about you or Kanarys. Where should they go? Star (28m 49s): Yeah. Check out Kanarys.com and it's spelled a little funky. K A N A R Y s.com. And then we're of course, across all the social media channels @KanarysInc. Joel (29m 1s): And don't mess with Texas. Star (29m 3s): Don't mess with me. Joel and Chad (29m 6s): We out. OUTRO (29m 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.

Job descriptions used to be so easy. Five lines in the local newspaper and done. Then the Internet came along and gave us unlimited white space, leading to a serious lack of quality ever since. No, copying and pasting from Craigslist does not stellar job postings, so here comes JobDescriptions.ai to try and solve a really big problem, helping automate listings and optimize them in the process. Can founder Oras Al Kubaisi tame the fury of Firing Squad and elicit a rousing applause? Gotta listen, as always, to find out on this PandoLogic exclusive. Join The REVOLUTION! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. 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 CHROs 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 (36s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESEMAN are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and 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 yeah. Chad has scheduled another Monday firing squad, which means I'm already pissed off. What's up everybody I am Joel Cheeseman. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am joined as always by my cohost, Chad Sowash. Chad (1m 11s): Here! Joel (1m 11s): And this is firing squad. Chad (1m 15s): God. Joel (1m 16s): And on today's episode, we have founder Oras Al-Kubaisi. Yeah, I pronounced that sounded pretty sure he is founder of job description.ai. Oras, welcome to the show. Oras (1m 32s): Thank you guys. Thank you for having me. Joel (1m 33s): So give us, give us a quick little Twitter bio and we'll get to the company stuff a little later, but I wanted people to get a flavor for you as a person. Oras (1m 43s): Thank you JobDescription.AI is a service to create. Joel (1m 47s): Not the company Oras, you, who are you? Oras (1m 51s): Okay. My name is Oras and I am a software engineer with more than 15 years of experience. Chad (1m 57s): Ah, Joel (1m 58s): Do you have a hobby? Do you have a sports team or anything? Chad (2m 1s): Long walks on the beaches? Oras (2m 6s): I love cycling. I've been cycling for about 6 years. Joel (2m 9s): All right. That's something that's every night Chad, tell him what he's won. Chad (2m 13s): Well, Oras. You will have two minutes to pitch jobdescription.ai. 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 Fuckin' boring, Joel's going to hit you with the crickets, that's your signal to move along and tighten things up. At the end of Q and A, you will receive either a big applause. That's right. Get ready or eyes. You'll be swimming in cash. Very, very soon. Joel (2m 44s): Bring the Brinks truck, baby. Boats and hoes. Chad (2m 47s): Golf clap. Batten down the hatches because this is going to be a long ride. Or last but never a firing squad. Sorry, but it's not happening, my friend. Pack up your AI and get the fuck outta here. That's firing squad. Are you ready? Oras (3m 7s): I am. Joel (3m 10s): Well, you sound ready! All right. In three, two, one Oras (3m 16s): JobDescription.AI is an AI based service to create gender neutral, engaging and SEO optimized job descriptions in a few clicks. That's basically it. Joel (3m 29s): And they can find out more where? Oras (3m 33s): On JobDescription.AI Joel (3m 35s): And that's it. Okay. You got about, you have about a minute 20 left. Do you want to use it or no? Oras (3m 41s): Yes I will. So basically in my last job, I was designing a data platform for an enterprise in London and part of my job, I had to hire my team. So I interviewed more than 25 candidates in less than two months in order to hire a team of five. During these interviews, I started thinking it must be really hard for startups to acquire the top talent. At this point, I started thinking of creating an ATS for startups that will automate the hiring process, especially the beginning part before having the human to human interaction, which is the creating job descriptions, parsing CVS, and creating CRM, providing interview questions for the interviewer in order to help in contacting the interview and avoid the mistakes in interviews as well as providing feedback and having a structure for the interview. Oras (4m 35s): As you can imagine, creating something like this would take a very long time. So I started thinking of breaking down the components of this ATS, starting from the job description I have applied for open AI in order to use the GPT three, to create job descriptions and created the service. I was quite lucky to find a jobdescription.ai ready. So I created the platform, launched on product hunt. And I was fascinated by those spawns from companies telling me that this is a problem, even for big enterprises, not just startups. Based on the response, three days later, I left my job and start focusing on jobdescription.ai full-time. Chad (5m 16s): There it is. Joel (5m 17s): Is that it? Are you done? Oras (5m 18s): I am done. Chad (5m 19s): That's it. And tell them where they can find out more again, just for good measure. Oras (5m 24s): Okay. And you can find more information on JobDescription.AI Joel (5m 29s): All right. Get him Chad. Oras (5m 31s): Excellent. So quick, quick question Oras, what was your experience with HR and what kind of interaction did you have with HR and talent acquisition in recruiting to really understand their problems, their woes? Was it just from the outside or did you actually get into it? It's mainly from the outside to be honest, but the feedback that I've got, mainly about how to make the job description, more engaging, how to write something that will attract the talent because people will judge you the company based on the job description and the advertisement. If it has no real requirements, if it is just saying like, come and join us, it is a very exciting company, without telling the candidate what the excitement part is, they are going to lose the candidate. Oras (6m 23s): They are going to impact the brand image because they are not direct to the point when they attract people to come and work with them. Chad (6m 31s): Gotcha. So how long have you actually been in the recruitment industry? Oras (6m 35s): It's been eight weeks right now. Joel (6m 37s): A grizzled vet is what he is at this point. So we're on a podcast. I want you to sort of visualize the product because to me, it, to me, it reminded me a lot of if you've ever posted something on Upwork where they sort of, you know, fill in the blanks and you check things that are part of the job description, but talk about the process. And I want to get into a little bit of how the unbiased component of the product comes in during that sort of click and fill in what a job description is. Can you sort of visualize that for us? Oras (7m 10s): Sure. So I, you start by entering the job title and then in one click, you will get the suggestions of the job requirements. If you want to go more specific, there is an optional field to list the specific skills that you're looking for. And the AI will learn based on these skills, what you exactly want and the candidates, you will start getting all these options, click to select the irrelevant ones. And then another click to create the role summary. Joel (7m 36s): How does unbiased, come into that? Like give us an example of how you would, I dunno, what, what gender comment or statement would come in that you would correct or, or make sure that that a job was unbiased. Help me understand that. Oras (7m 50s): Okay. So the algorithm itself will detect the gender coded words in the job description based on the selection. And it will give you a real time meter to show you the gender bias, and it will highlight the words that you need to change in order to make it gender neutral. And there's another meter to tell you if the job description is SEO optimized for search engines, and that is based on the length of the job description, based on the key phrase, which is the title, and it will check five criteria for the SEO and give you the final results of it. Chad (8m 23s): Okay. Is this open source AI that anybody can tap into? Or how did you, how did you actually get the source? Did you develop it yourself? Oras (8m 32s): So open AI is available in beta right now. So you have to apply and give the reason for the access and what are you going to build after that? If you get an access, you start developing the, what they call the prompt. So the prompt engineering is to give the context to the AI in order to get the optimum results. Chad (8m 52s): Okay. So have you done this before? Really what is your or practical knowledge in the application of gender neutral language, and also taking that to the next step to apply in actual job descriptions? Because again, you can plug into anything, but if you don't have the practical knowledge in executing on many of these steps, it's going to be hard to see the forest for the trees. Oras (9m 18s): I totally agree with you. But the feedback that I had is the current job descriptions and job description AI are 90% accurate for the SMB domain. So, you know, that domain, when you have developers, project managers, product managers, and that kind of domain, the accuracy is around 90%. When you go more specific, it will be less. But then when you go more specific, you need to give more specific details to the algorithm in order to get to that requirement. Joel (9m 46s): Let's talk about SEO, which you sort of touched on there. We've had companies on like Jobiac and Get Optimal. I know you're early to the industry, hopefully, you know who those guys are, and there's also Tech Studio who's been around for a really long time. And it's sort of a premium product. You mentioned five parameters, I guess, for the SEO piece. Like, what are those, are we optimizing for Google for Jobs and Indeed, and vertical job search engines like those? Or are we optimizing for general search? Talk about what you're doing on the SEO side? Oras (10m 21s): Okay. So the SEO is mainly optimizing for Google, so it will be Google jobs and the search on Google. Joel (10m 28s): The Google for jobs component, the job search engine on Google, or just Google organic results. Oras (10m 33s): Google organic results. Okay. Joel (10m 36s): Why wouldn't you be optimizing for Google for jobs and Indeed and those kinds of sites? Oras (10m 41s): So for, for Google jobs, it should, but I just don't want to promise something that I haven't measured yet. Joel (10m 47s): Okay. All right. Keep going. Oras (10m 50s): And for Indeed it will be really hard because Indeed is a quite large site and there is the premium features where you can get your job to the top by paying extra and the search engine I'm not sure if I can optimize the result based on the SEO itself only. Joel (11m 6s): not with that attitude you're not. Chad (11m 9s): Yeah. So yeah, what you're saying, what Joel is saying is you're actually telling the truth as opposed to what most vendors do. Joel (11m 15s): What are the five criteria? I him to go through that first. Oras (11m 19s): Sure. So that is the title, the length of the title. How many words do you have in the title? And then if the title is appearing in the top of the job description? If the title is, and the key phrase is appearing in the role summary, which will be the first sentence after reading the title and the lens of the job description. Joel (11m 38s): Okay. Chad (11m 39s): So Joel, I still love that you call Jobiak, Jobiak It's like, you're going into the old testament. Joel (11m 46s): He's from England. That's how they say it over there. Chad (11m 48s): Well, the old Testament, I think it is. Okay. So who are your competitors in this space? Oras (11m 55s): So that's a Textile, Tap Recruit and there are other companies doing, doing the same thing and the gender neutral and text analysis. The difference that I'm making here to differentiate myself from the others is I am taking a different truth for making each subscription available to many companies. So I am actually contacting job boards in order to offer it as a plugin. So and recruitment companies and offering ATS integration. Based on that the algorithm will be available to much more larger audience than the premium ones. Chad (12m 34s): So tell me about the job board integration. Why did you go down that route? Oras (12m 40s): Because people are going to job boards in order to post their jobs. If they, instead of doing a copy paste, which is something they got from a template or somewhere else, or it's a job that they have created long time ago, they can go to the job board and within a few clicks, they get their own optimized job description for the job. Chad (12m 58s): Okay. What about recruitment advertising agencies or programmatic vendors? Are you partnering with them at all to be able to provide them with this type of tech? Oras (13m 8s): So my first client is a recruitment agency in London and based on the feedback, I am going to make some integrations with the ATSs available to recruitment agencies. My plan is to create seamless experience for recruitment agencies. I would like to have the integration, just like what I offer in the platform. It's a few clicks from inside the ATS rather than going to a different platform. Chad (13m 32s): Is that going to be your focus, the staffing side of the house, or is that just where you started? Oras (13m 38s): That's where I started. Joel (13m 39s): Do you, are you considering distribution as part of the, the features that you have? So I create the job in your platform and then, Hey, I want to automatically distribute it to programmatically, to job sites and elsewhere. Is that part of your roadmap? Oras (13m 56s): For now it's not. And the main reason behind this, if I am going to offer the ATS integration, most of the ATS will have this built-in so there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Joel (14m 7s): What's sort of the marketing rollout plan. I know you're in London. I think you mentioned your first customer was in London. Are you going to focus geographically? Are you reaching out to people all over? Is this a global product? What's your sort of plan to roll this out? Oras (14m 23s): I'm reaching globally. So one of the job boards that I have a meeting with next week is in the US. Joel (14m 29s): Your product is very self-serve, but I have to get a demo to use it. So explain that to me. Why I can't just go on giving my credit card and make, start making jobs and posting them. Why do I have to get a demo on your service? Chad (14m 44s): Well, that being said, Joel, it's not self-serve so why isn't it Self-serve? Joel (14m 49s): It looks self-serve on the video. Chad (14m 51s): It looks like it, but it's not. Joel (14m 53s): Well, then that's my question as well. Like when will this be self-serve and where can I start using it on my own? Or is that never going to be part of the solution? Oras (15m 2s): I'm actually so happy that you asked the question. When I launched the product, it was open for anyone to sign up and use it and pay to use it basically. But I've noticed that people will just sign up, try it for once, like one click and they will close the platform. So they weren't using it. They were just trying to see what's going on behind the scene. And that's the reason I have closed it and created the demo link. Joel (15m 27s): So what you're seeing is the prospect of competitors coming in and trying to actually rate your platform against them? There's possibly, or do you believe this might actually be the prospect of paying customers coming in and just not seeing what they like right out of the gate. Oras (15m 43s): Actually the prospects who signed up, they contacted me to have a demo with the whole team in order to answer their questions. So even the ones who are going to pay for it, they requested a demo. They just didn't go and try it and then pay for it. Okay. Chad (15m 59s): Okay. So what I'm seeing here is first off I got a preface with, is, are you looking for this to be your full time only gig? Or is this a side hustle for you? Oras (16m 10s): It is full-time for now. Okay. Okay. But there will be some improvements in the future. Gotcha. Chad (16m 15s): Gotcha. On the pricing. What I'm seeing is that I can pay for one month, a $99.99. So a hundred bucks, I can do that. And then I can have my, one of my interns like jam 20 job postings through the system. So you're setting a point of value of $5 per job. Is that going, is that an early bird price or is it always going to be that cheap? Oras (16m 41s): That's definitely an early bird price. And I am considering that this will be quite scalable. So the whole thing is based on API. When we go to job boards, like the smallest job board will have at least one, 1000 jobs a day. Joel (16m 57s): You're not from this industry. And most I'd say 90% of the firing squad participants have had some sort of experience. You're your developer by trade what's sales strategy wise and getting to know, you know, the industry and the buyer does that worry you, are you confident that you can sort of penetrate that market? Talk about that. Convince me that you know your audience. Oras (17m 24s): Well, then within eight weeks, I've been learning a lot about the industry. And only two weeks ago, I had a business coach who is a recruiter by trade and he is running his second recruitment company to help me navigate the industry and helped me with the pricing strategy as well. So I am, I am not alone here. And I've been like following you guys, I'm following the leaders in the industry to learn more. Joel (17m 54s): Well then you know everything. You should have just started with that. I listened to Chad and Cheese. Okay. Oras (18m 0s): I do actually like one, one of the conferences that I went to was because of you guys. And it was so helpful and learned a lot and met a lot of great people. Joel (18m 10s): There you go. There you go. So you're a product guy. You mentioned product hunt. Talk about raising money. Is this something that you want to do? Have you gotten any sort of seed, a seed round? Are you looking to go big with the money raise? Are you looking to bootstrap this thing? Oras (18m 26s): It is not going to be bootstrapped. So I have applied to Y Combinator last week. And if I got accepted, there is a bigger plan in order to have in-house machine learning instead of using corporate AI. So this was, this will be more tailored to job descriptions rather than being a general AI. And there will be some changes to the product in terms of the design and the pre-feasibility, of course, I am planning to hire salespeople. Chad (18m 52s): Excellent. Well, that being said, sales, what are your primary methods to drive market penetration, drive revenue, those types of things. What, where where's your focus going to be? Oras (19m 4s): My main focus will be the job boards and followed by ATS integrations. So I have my account now in Greenhouse and SAP success factors. And there is another ATS that I am going to apply this week. Once I integrate with these big platforms, I think it will be easier to attract more companies. Joel (19m 24s): I want to go back to the optimization part again, I know that you're obviously young, but as a company, but are there any results that you have on the SEO side, any success stories that you can talk about and it isn't with the current, your current client, maybe it's some testing that you've done in the past or experience that you've had with the product by testing it? Oras (19m 46s): For the moment I don't have this data. I wouldn't lie about it. So this data, hopefully it will be available in a few months and then I can provide all the details. Okay. Joel (19m 57s): All right, man. You know what the bell means? It means it's time to face the firing squad. Are you ready? Oras (20m 3s): I am. Chad (20m 7s): All right. All right. Our us dude, I love the simplicity. I love the API integration. Love the job board integration. I lovethe SEO optimized jobs overall, and the Chrome extension is a very nice touch. I love the idea of generating gender neutral, and let's just say better job descriptions because the job descriptions that are out there today are total shit, right? So we need something to make it easier for us to be able to find that job description utopia. Joel, nailed it. I think from a knowledge standpoint, in the space, you are definitely going to have to double down in understanding this space better. Chad (20m 53s): We've seen so many organizations come in, startups who have amazing experience and success outside of recruitment and marketing and sales and many different aspects of business, but they've never been an HR talent acquisition or recruitment, and they have landed very hard. So it is incredibly important that you understand adoption in this space is incredibly slow. I love everything that you're doing to make adoption much quicker, much faster. My biggest issue with this is one thing is that it's too cheap, $5 per job description. Chad (21m 33s): Won't scale. This business hell, $20 you can quadruple that $20 per job description. Joel (21m 40s): So greedy Chad (21m 40s): won't scale this business, guy's gotta live, man, not too much. He's got to scale up. He's got to get developers and all this other fun stuff, but you'll do, you'll be eating Kraft mac and cheese and top ramen till you die. If you continue on this road of too cheap tech. So in the crazy part is that, this is not the cheapest level, right? I'm not talking about your customized level, which could actually be cheaper. So overall, I think there are many things that you need to do. You're on the right path from the standpoint of simplicity. I love that, but there are many aspects of this industry, especially from a monetization standpoint. Adoption networks that you are going to have to shore up very, very quickly, which is the reason why I'm giving you a golf clap. Chad (22m 31s): Love what you're doing, man, but there's a lot of work left and you know that, but I'm just not sure that you know exactly where the work is at. Joel (22m 41s): Yeah. Keep on keeping on. I agree with what Chad said. I think it's very hard to, to grade companies like yours that started eight weeks ago. Fantastic, you have a customer, obviously that's a big, big hurdle to get over. Job descriptions have forever been a pain in the ass for recruiters and employers. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say at least 90% copy and paste either old jobs or go to the web and find someone that's posted a job for whatever and copy and paste it and kind of put their own spin on it. There really hasn't been a company that's had the balls to sort of take on job descriptions and make it automated or simplified. Joel (23m 28s): And just the fact that you're sort of taking on that that 800 pound gorilla is pretty impressive. I think it's a huge, huge challenge to take on. I think that, but you're on the right track. Like people are going to be open to talking to someone about how do I make job descriptions, better, easier, more automated, you know, that anyone can do it, I think is on the right track. I think SEO is on the right track. I think you need to focus more on the job description and making it more of a Jobiak, did I say that right, Chad, competitor, where you're optimizing for Google for Jobs and Indeed? And anyone who's aggregating postings. And as you listened to the show, you know, that LinkedIn is looking at more like an aggregator more and more so helping people understand how do I optimize for vertical search, I think is going to be important. Joel (24m 18s): You're obviously a product guy. So I think you're going to continue to build out products. I love the integration strategy that you're talking about. And I think that's on the right track and something that is more advanced than most people who are brand new to the industry. The fact that you're sort of already understanding that is, is great. You're not a, I mean, you're a young guy, but you're not so young that this is your first thing. It looks like you've been developing stuff almost for 20 years, based on your LinkedIn profile. So I think you've, you've got enough chops to know how to design, how to create features, how to look at the market and what people want. I think the challenges that you're going to have are look, it's going to be a competitive space the ability to probably automate job postings. Joel (25m 2s): You look at, you know, Textio that we mentioned, Get Optimal, you know, chat bots and not even having job descriptions at some point where we just source candidates based on requirements. So you have technology as a challenge. You have obviously competitors are there and you have the entrenched way of just copy and pasting what we've already done or stuff that other people have done. And I think that that's going to make being a big company, a super challenge. If you were just sort of a bootstrap niche company or had that kind of vision, I think that would be much more attainable and appeal to a much more limited number of companies, but you're going to go big. So I think that you've definitely got your work cut out for you. Joel (25m 44s): So I'm going to go with a golf clap as well. I think that you're on the right track. Keep on keeping on, you know, keep us, I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now you haven't raised, you know, 6 million in series A and you're, on your way to bigger and better things. But I think you have a few more hurdles to clear before you would get an applause from me, but definitely not the guns man. You're on the right track. Chad (26m 10s): Yeah. That's great. I'm happy. I survived. Joel (26m 14s): You survived, man. And it's almost happy hour in London, I think you can go have a drink, probably. Oras (26m 20s): I will. Chad (26m 22s): Excellent. All right, man. Chad, this was fun. Yeah, that'd be Monday. Chad and Joel (26m 27s): We out. Firing Squad Outro (26m 28s): 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.

Welcome to LGBTQ+ for Dummies -- Part 1 -- What does LGBTQ+ mean and why was it created? It's PRIDE month and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ+ community. And as a straight white male, I thought it fitting that I'd ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. To answer these questions we have special guest expert Michelle Raymond from myGwork, a LinkedIn-like platform for the LGBTQ+ community, who will be droppin' the knowledge. Listen and Learn! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. SOVREN (2s): 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 (46s): 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 3s): Welcome to LGBTQ for Dummies Part One. It's Pride month and we're celebrating and learning more about the LGBTQ community. And as a straight white male, I thought it'd be fitting that I'd ask the uncomfortable questions many of us are afraid to ask. What does LGBTQ plus even mean? And why was it created? What's with all of these pronouns? And a much more. I'll be asking the hard and uncomfortable questions and our special expert guest, Michelle Raymond from My G Work, a LinkedIn like platform for the LGBT community will be dropping the knowledge. Let's do this. Chad (1m 50s): Thanks for joining us, Michelle, let's jump into question number one. This one comes from Frank in DeMoines, Iowa. Frank writes, what does LGBTQ plus mean? Michelle (2m 2s): It's a great question and I'm glad we're starting there. So essentially this has been termed the alphabet, the gay alphabet, if you will. But I think, I think it's probably best to start with a little history lesson, which is LGBTQIA+ wasn't used until very recently. The first use of the word homosexual wasn't even created until the late 1800s, we're talking 1889. Chad (2m 25s): Wow! Michelle (2m 26s): And that was because up until, yeah, I know, up until that point, basically the way that people were referring to the LGBT community was with really derogative terms, like bugger, Molly, sodomites, abominable. Okay? So this term was actually created by an ally to the community to take away the negative connotation when expressing, you know you're speaking about someone from the LGBT community. Flash forward, many years later, we're talking 1900s, at this point, gay was replaced, you know, replaces homosexual. In 1970s that became gay and lesbian. That's with the feminist movement and the eighties LGB came to replace the terms to reference the broader community. Michelle (3m 8s): And then the '90s similar criticisms were brought forth by the trans community. So that's how we arrived to LGBT. But I'm just going to answer your question now and break it down one by one. And I hope this helps give a little bit of explanation. So essentially lesbian is L, G gay, B bisexual, trans, which can also be an umbrella term for different trans communities, Intersex is for I, Q can be queer and/or questioning and A can be asexual and/or ally, depending on who you ask. And there's this plus sign, which is very helpful and which is meant to cover anyone who's not included in the acronym that I just laid out. Chad (3m 51s): Okay, so I am a straight white cis-gender male. Why so many labels for a specific person like myself? And what about non-binary and what is cis-gender anyway? Michelle (4m 5s): That's a really good question. So first let's break it down to language. Chad (4m 8s): Okay. Michelle (4m 9s): So language can have very important social functions. Chad (4m 12s): Yes. Michelle (4m 12s): It fosters feelings of group identity, even personal identity. It can be extremely powerful. It can be an aid that tools and building new relationships, expressing value systems or even experiences. So, first of all, the reason why someone may choose to label themselves as lesbian or queer or CIS or non-binary, it has a lot of meaning behind it. And so basically when we're talking about biological sex versus sexual orientation versus gender expression, the easiest way to explain it is like this. So cisgender is anyone who feels this personal sense of identity to the gender that corresponds with what they were assigned at birth. So if on your birth certificate, it says male, and you identify as male, you would be considered cis-gender because the way that you identify is the same as the assignment that you were given at the time of birth. Michelle (5m 2s): Gender identity is internal, so if you want to really have a cheat sheet to understand the difference between gender identity and expression, think about it identity as inside. It's how you feel deeply about your sense of gender. It doesn't necessarily mean you need to express yourself physically or outwardly. It doesn't mean that you have to identify with male or female. You know, maybe the way that you identify doesn't fit neatly into one of those two choices. And so with expression, that's how you express yourself through your name, through your pronouns, through your clothing, haircuts, you know, even characteristics. And so this is a little cheat sheet that can help you with understanding the three different things which are biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression. Chad (5m 46s): Excellent. Again, this is Michelle Raymond from My G Work. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. And we have a whole series on this LGBTQ plus for Dummies, so this is just part one. Look for part two, three, and four, because they're coming. Thanks, Michelle. Michelle (6m 3s): Thank you. Chad (6m 3s): We out. LGBQT OUTRO (6m 4s): Thank you to Michelle and the crew over at My G Work for participating in LGBTQ plus for Dummies, a pride special podcast series from the Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast.

ZipRecruiter? More Like Dip-Recruiter The boys both turn 50-years-old this week, which means a lot of mature, grown-up, and responsible commentary on the world of work. Ha! Just kidding, they talk trash about the ZipRecruiter IPO, - Delta mandates the vaccine for new hires - Amazon buying MGM - BrightHire raising money - Jumpstart gets cash and rebrands as Canvas - The world losing its collective mind over WFH ...and weed in the workplace. PLUS Chad needs Whew! Buckle-up, this is one long-winded, meandering piece of industry goodness. As always, your favorite podcast is powered 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 (12s): PHide 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 (32s): Oh yeah. You down with AARP? You know me? Hey kids. It's Joel "spiraling toward a permanent dirt nap" Cheeseman. Chad (44s): I'm Chad, "it's my birthday and I'll drink if I want to" Sowash. Joel (48s): And on this week, show ZipRecruiter more like dip recruiter. Am I right? Well, the real canvas, please stand up and pot James Bond and Chad's favorite Jeff Bezos. Hold tight, we'll be right back with what will probably be our last breath. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (1m 9s): 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 (1m 53s): 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 10s): Happy birthday, bitch. 50 man. How's that feel? Ah, Chad (2m 17s): Feels like 40. Yeah, I'm just, I'm not one for numbers. It's funny because Katrina Collier, she continues to like talk about only so many days until, you know, we're 50 and we were born on the same day and I'm like, would you stop the fucking countdown for God's sakes? She's like, no, no final countdown. Yeah. Joel (2m 40s): So for those that don't know you and I were born in the same year, a day apart. So as people are listening to this on Friday, the 28th, that will be my birthday. We're recording this on the 27th, which is your birthday. So happy birthday to both of us. This is the birthday show, I guess and remember you're sandwiching in a celebration. You were in Costa Rica for like eight days. And then you're joining me in Louisville, Kentucky, the Costa Rica of Kentucky to drink bourbon and probably forget what the hell we did in Louisville. So Costa Rica, what was that like? Joel (3m 20s): You met up with some industry folks like give me the Costa Rica synopsis. Yeah. Chad (3m 25s): So thanks. And my beautiful wife, Julie, for taking me to Costa Rica. Yeah. That was a beautiful, sexy Costa Rican trip. And, and no question major thanks to Ethan Bloomfield and his amazing wife, Veronica for having us down to their beautiful casa with a pool, beaches, mountain, top sunset, watching restaurants and the Sora Costa Rica. If you don't know, Ethan, go back. I think as a few months, and we actually did an interview with him. Guy's been in the industry for a very long time, probably one of the biggest sales minds and hustlers in this space. So the guy's awesome. And then, so we had a great time in Nosara, right? Chad (4m 7s): It was, it was fun because we took the back roads. And when you say back roads in Costa Rica, they're not paved, they're all dirt roads. You're actually taking a four by four through rivers. I mean, it was, it was a really good time. Got down there, enjoyed it. He's got an amazing house, a couple of horses goat. I mean, it's just fucking crazy. And then we met up with Nick Livingston of Hone It and his beautiful wife Kerryn and his baby girls. And they showed us around Tamarindo, which is a beach town. And we spent most of the week eating amazing seafood, which I know you love, bar hopping, walking on the beach, lying by the pool and having at least one shot of Chile guano at every place we visited. Chad (4m 56s): So it was a good time, man. They just, if you get a chance to go to Costa Rica, flying to Liberia, rent a car, it's an hour away. You're on the beach in Tamarindo. Just fucking crazy. Joel (5m 9s): No, these, these two guys live there and they're happy there? Like, they're good. Yeah. Chad (5m 14s): Fucking outstanding, dude. And once you see how you can live in Costa Rica, I mean, and there's a, there's a big variance in, in degrees for how Ethan owns his own home, has like a farm and horses has a stable across the street. I mean, it is so amazing! And then Nick and his family have lived there, actually, I think I'll year longer in Tamarindo, pretty much on the beach. A little bit different, they've bounced around Tamarindo and renting places, but they're getting ready to build. So both, I mean, both families just love it there and I don't see them leaving anytime soon. Joel (5m 53s): So is there a pretty heavy ex-pat influence in Costa Rica? I mean, most, I assume a lot of things are in English anyway, but do you get a sense of like, oh, there's a lot of Americans here or does it still have that feel of central America? Chad (6m 6s): Well, it Still has the Central America feel, there's no getting away from that, which is awesome. But definitely no Nosara, I would say there's a great ex-pat community there, even though it's more, I would say rural versus Tamarindo, Tamarindo has a large ex-pat community and I mean, it's just, you can't get away from being in Central America and you don't want to, I mean, the sunsets that we saw there. Took pictures of you follow me on Instagram you're probably sick of it. Joel (6m 33s): Yeah, we all saw the pictures Asshole. Chad (6m 36s): But they were just too amazing not to share. Joel (6m 40s): Like your first pictures had a bunch of love, likes, and then by the, you know, 800 sunset that you shared, it was like no likes. Cause we were all pissed off at you for rubbing it in our face. And what's up with this swing. Is there just a random swing on a tree that people can swing on? Chad (6m 56s): So that is on the top of a mountain and you were literally swinging out if you would remember when your kids at the playground and you would like swing as far as high as you could and you would jump off. Joel (7m 7s): Sure. Chad (7m 7s): If you did that, you would find yourself rolling down the side of a mountain. I mean, it was like not a cliff per se, but it was almost that. And we were at a restaurant on the top of a mountain in Nosara and watching the sunset and just getting ready to go have a nice, easy relaxing seafood dinner. It was really cool. Okay. Joel (7m 32s): So now those that know you pretty well know that you'll, you'll be leaving the US at some point, or at least that's still the plan. I know we haven't connected in a while, but it, it looks like it's down to Costa Rica or Portugal. And I asked you as you were gone. So, is Costa Rica now in the catbird seat for relocation, and at the time you said, well, ask me after a month in Portugal, this was at the beginning of your trip. Post-trip are you still sort of, is it still up in the air? Is Costa Rica in the poll position right now? Chad (8m 5s): I think, I think what Julia and I have have finally come to understand is that we want to live everywhere, right? So we want to be able to take a few years in Portugal, a few, maybe a year, maybe 18 months in Croatia, and then being able to do the same thing in Costa Rica. And if you follow all of those areas that I just mentioned, the cost of living there is pretty amazing, right? So we're not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Joel (8m 36s): Right. Chad (8m 37s): But it's one of those things where, you know, you'll get one of these on this big blue orb. So shit just, you know, go out the way you want to go out. That's how we want to go out. Joel (8m 46s): So as long as you can physically and financially do it, you're just going to globe hop. Chad (8m 51s): Yep. Joel (8m 51s): Okay. And with the beauty of Airbnb and a few other places you can do that, I endorse that plan. So. Chad (8m 58s): I dig it. Joel (8m 58s): So which will be first Costa Rica? Chad (9m 1s): Probably a Portugal, more than likely still the heavy favorite, but we want to go over and spend probably about a month to figure out where on the Southern coast and the Algarve we want to plant for who knows how long, but we also want to spend a month in Croatia as well. So we'll see. Joel (9m 22s): Well, you, my friends suck because I have a four year old and I'm landlocked where I am for quite a while. Chad (9m 27s): Dude, they have international schools, they have international schools. Joel (9m 31s): That is true. And my wife is a professor gets to go on a, you know, I don't know, learning trips and you know, she goes and teaches places. So I'll get to travel hopefully. But I mean, not like your jet setting life of I'm in Monaco this month and next month I'm going to New Zealand and you know, whatever. So anyway, you suck, but Happy Birthday, nonetheless. Chad (9m 53s): Happy Birthday to you man. Joel (9m 54s): We'll have a good time in Louisville, I'm sure, even if it's not Costa Rica. So shout outs for me, for sure. You mentioned Katrina Collier, but it's her birthday as well. So Happy Birthday to her. Chad (10m 8s): Love her. Joel (10m 9s): The robot hater that she is. And, and I saw this as I was looking up anyone on my birthday, which there aren't really any, but I saw that Hung Lee's birthday, friend of the show is on June 2nd. So fairly early happy birthday to our favorite porn star Hun Lee. Chad (10m 28s): Shout out to Tyco Von Possen over at VONC for sending me some Glenlivet and Julie, some van Gogh vodka. Thanks, man. Really appreciate the birthday Vonc love, you know what? Joel (10m 42s): I Caught the VONC Love in college. I think we established that shot. Other than that. Yeah, I got, I got a different kind of shot for the bunk back in college, shout out to LinkedIn. Who's apparently listening to the show. They launched LinkedIn Boost this week. So if you have a company page and you're putting posts on your feed, just like Facebook used to do, you can push a boost button and without much headache, you can boost your posts to people that are like your followers, or you can target it pretty easily. So I'm glad that LinkedIn is making advertising on LinkedIn a little easier because it really sucks, historically. Chad (11m 24s): Big shout out to David Nicola who loves the Christopher Walken out trail. That's right, buddy, where we've actually been talking about doing some other celebrity outros. So keep listening, my friend, keep listening, Joel (11m 37s): Shout out to Harry and Charlie, we mentioned this on last week's podcast. So Charlie bit me, the popular YouTube video from, I don't know, 2007, the video went out for NFT as the original one was auctioned off. They for a blistering $760,000. Chad (11m 57s): Jesus. Joel (11m 58s): Which isn't quite what, you know, 29 million for a cyberpunk or whatever it was. But Hey, $760, will buy a lot of beer. So shout out to Harry and Charlie, I hope that finger is healed. And if not, you've got $760,000 for a new one. Chad (12m 12s): Jesus, Shout out to Seek Out that's right, Anup Gupta winner of Death Match. Also winner of Geek Wire's startup of the year. Great job guys. Joel (12m 24s): Well-deserved, well-deserved. Shout out to Vimeo, speaking of videos on YouTube, people may not even know Vimeo, but they were a upstart in the video sharing landscape a long time ago, and then YouTube stole pretty much all their thunder. Anyway, they went public this week, which is not necessarily noteworthy, but the fact that they have a diverse woman as their CEO, Anjali Sud. I'm probably not saying that correctly, but anyway, shout out to her and shout out to them. It's a big one to have another female in the C-suite on Wall Street. Chad (12m 55s): Shout out to an Illinois McDonald's who are so desperate for staff that they are giving away iPhones to new recruits if they stay for six months, all right. Way to go, McDonald's and then my last shout out is to Delta Airlines, my airline of choice. Thank you. They say mullet hair anti-vaxxers need not apply. Currently. 60% of Delta employees, roughly 74,000 employees are already vaccinated. And to help maintain that vaccination trajectory, Delta will mandate that those joining the company be vaccinated, unless you have an accommodation. Chad (13m 37s): I love seeing companies stand firm on this. Especially companies like Delta, where we could be transferring the virus obviously to other countries. So good job on Delta. Joel (13m 48s): Yup. And you, you know what I love to see? Whiskey, beer, and t-shirts in my mailbox. So if you love free shit, we say it every week, you got to go to Chadcheese.com/free. We've got t-shirts from Emissary. We've got beer sponsored by AdZuna and our favorite whiskey powered by Sovren. Yes, with that Happy Birthday Bitch! All right. So you were out last week, but you've, you've got, you've got to vent a little bit about this whole chat bot feeding frenzy that went on. To set the table for you, pandoLogic acquired Wade and Wendy StepStone acquired Mya, I don't know what else do you want me to go into it? Joel (14m 33s): You can listen to the archives if you want to know my opinion, but Chad, what you got? Chad (14m 39s): It was funny because, and I don't know how you feel about it now, but it was almost kind of like, you know, you were somewhat confused. Why the hell Panda would buy Wade and Wendy? Are you still there? Or have you come out of that a little bit? Joel (14m 51s): I mean, I get it. Chad (14m 52s): Personally, I think this is a gangster move between the two, I mean, pando buys Wade and Wendy StepStone buys Maya. We'll go into that here in a minute, but I think the pando buy is a gangster move because employers suck at experience. And now at the very top of the funnel, not only are you targeting candidates better with programmatic, but now you're providing a better experience. Plus you can feed the conversation into the machine, learning beast and digest, even more signals to help better target candidates moving forward. So this to me is definitely an experience play no question, but it's a much larger data play for pando. Chad (15m 37s): And I think this is where StepStone could perspectively be getting it wrong. So StepStone buys Maya. And I think that this is an elementary kind of like step forward for Total Jobs, which is a job board that nobody knows here in the US right. But that's it. It's really just an evolutionary play for a job board. Oh, okay, cool. I would be more interested if they bought Maya and integrated it into AppCast, which I'm sure Chris Foreman would love to, but now pando can take more data, more signals. They can actually take all the data that they will be getting out of this chat bot, apply it to better targeting and they might actually jump ahead of AppCast because they'll have better signals in the programmatic space. Joel (16m 27s): So I agree with all that. And I think just, I think the technology is going to be something that most sites have to have much, like, I think text recruiting, although that hasn't quite integrated like I thought it would. For most companies, but you know, the, the thing that I found was terms not disclosed on both of these deals. I would have loved to have seen what kind of numbers these companies went for. You'll know that Maya raised 52 million, Wade and Wendy had raised 11.5 million. Whereas AppCast was a big deal at 75 million and something else, it was basically like a hundred million dollar deal. It looks like these, these weren't as big or else they would have announced that. So I was kinda down on the space for a little bit, and then I got an email from an agency who said that there'll be announcing a chat bot who they could not name, although the list is pretty short, we could probably come up with it. Joel (17m 20s): They were soon going to be announcing a new round of $15 million in capital. I'm going to go with Zuora on that one. Aida, if it's you, congratulations, preliminarily, if not, we'll get the announcement and talk about who it is. Might be a Happy Recruiter over in Europe. Who knows? They were a sponsor for a short time on the show. So, yeah, I think it's smart for both of them and something that a lot of companies should have. I just would've liked to have seen those companies announce a new round of funding because their evaluations went up because I think we were both really bullish on the chat bot technology, but it looks like it's a tougher industry than we thought. Chad (17m 56s): I think the big difference here is one's going to be used strategically, the other one's going to use more tactically. Right? And you're talking about used pretty much on an island on a job board of total jobs, versus being able to perspectively build a much larger weapon in pando for programmatic, for a global, for global use. And I know from AppCast standpoint and from StepStone being able to start to invade the US through AppCast and that I think myself that would have made a hell of a lot more sense, but again, not every chat bot is the same and maybe Maya just a wouldn't have been the right fit for being able to feed the right information into AppCast? Chad (18m 38s): Who knows, who knows? Joel (18m 40s): I think the consensus is that a paradox is the apex predator of the chat bot world. We'll have to see? Chad (18m 46s): They definitely are now. There's no question. Joel (18m 48s): Yeah, they definitely are now. I was surprised you mentioned the European growth in the part of the press of StepStone was like, we're going to launch this in Germany and we're going to launch it in Britain, the UK, I was kind of surprised that they didn't, maybe it was a strategic thing, but not tout more of an in to the American market with the purchase of Maya who has a fairly strong awareness in the US as well as some customers that they could start leveraging for StepStone but that might've been more strategic than anything else. They're coming. Folks, they're coming to America. Chad (19m 20s): They are coming in Joel (19m 21s): Neil Diamond style. Chad (19m 22s): They need properties though. So I still believe that StepStone will need a property to gobble up like a Monster, which I think is ripe for the taking on the clearance rack versus CareerBuilder, who Apollo's not going to take clearance rack cash that's for sure. Joel (19m 39s): Yeah. Yeah. I would be surprised if there weren't some conversations with our buddy Scott Guts about a Monster. Chad (19m 46s): And also I gotta throw this over at Ron Stodd. Ron Stodd had money from the Ron Stodd innovation fund in Wade and Wendy. Right? And I thought, I really thought that they were going to gobble up Wade and Wendy to be able to provide more efficiencies for all of their clients on the RPO side of the house. But then that shit just felt flat. So yeah. If you need a pill for that Ron Stodd. Yeah. Joel (20m 11s): No doubt. No doubt. All right. Well the big news, all right, ZipRecruiter finally went public on the New York stocks stock exchange on Wednesday under the ticker Zip, that sexy and entered the market at around $20 a share, which it went and below at one point, and then creeped back up to a little over $21 a share where it's a sort of hovering at the moment. ZipRecruiter management thinks the stock is worth around $25 a share, which will give the company a $3.3 billion valuation. It seems like things have settled at a roughly $2.8 billion valuation. Joel (20m 52s): Some headlines really touted the spike in price one Barron's headline read, quote, "ZipRecruiter stock surges on debut," end quote. And so Chad, after the Glassdoor head fake pre pandemic IPO, are you ready to buy some Zip? Chad (21m 8s): I have to give it to you. You called this about three years ago, right? Joel (21m 12s): And every year, since then. Chad (21m 14s): Zip's going IPO, I've got to say setting this up Zip is far in a way, the best brand in our space, period. They have the best brand. I, and I've also said on the show many times, I also believe Zip is a better, more evolved platform than Indeed. This is what Indeed should have become, right. Instead, Indeed, regressed into the early two thousands job board that it is today where Zip is more of a relevant delivery system of talent. So that the difference in their tech and models are stunning. Right? The big difference I think that we have to also elephant in the room is revenues. Chad (21m 58s): Indeed is obviously still killing it, but I'd buy there's no question you buy it now, buy it. Now, buy it fast because you have to remember, there's a lot of jobs that are going to be needed to fill. This is the time, right? So maybe early next year, take your buyout and sell all your stock. Joel (22m 19s): So this is when we say Chad and I are not financial experts or advisors, and don't take stock tips from us. Don't call us or tweet at us. Or sue us for God's sake. Chad (22m 29s): That'd be dumb. Joel (22m 31s): All right. So I have three takeaways from the ZipRecruiter IPO. I'm not nearly as bullish as you are. So my first take is, you know, this was not a disaster, but it also, wasn't a major firework show either. And I think that's indicative of the market we're in now in terms of you being a job site. And, I'll talk about brand for a second. And I think number three, but anyway, so this wasn't a disaster. You know, one of my takeaways was, you know, if Glassdoor sold for 1.5 billion a couple of years ago when I think investors. So I think investors are struggling with putting a $3 billion valuation on ZipRecruiter. And I think that sorta came out in the IPO. Joel (23m 12s): There's also significant competition. You mentioned Indeed killing it. And they are. So they have a lot of challenges in terms of finding growth. Although the economy is growing. I think they're going to have a nice 12 to 24 months to do that. They're also dealing with, we mentioned people coming to America. So whereas in ZipRecruiter is going to have to grow internationally where established players are. They're also going to have to, you know, manage the beachhead here in the U is you have players like Vonc and StepStone sort of knocking, knocking at the door. So, you know, it was sort of a meh 1st day. My second takeaway was that it was just sort of meh. So the Stock Twitch, was StockTwits, which is a pretty popular site where people talk about stocks and people can follow stocks. Joel (23m 56s): Now this is not a scientific commentary, but it was very telling that a name like ZipRecruiter, which is a brand name, people have seen the ads, they've heard the ads. They know, they know the name. There are out there. There are only about 400 people following ZipRecruiter at the end of yesterday, which is less than actually are following Dice. Chad (24m 14s): Wow. Joel (24m 14s): Which I thought was interesting people, people like Roadblocks and Slack and some of the more recent names have tens of thousands of followers. So I thought that was sort of telling of the market just saying like, eh, a job board. Okay, great. I think people would rather invest in Roadblocks or Snowflake or Snap or even Bitcoin. I think a job site IPO in the nineties, it was cool. It was.com. It was, you know, where the, where the world was going. There was no social media, there was no AI and all this other shit. So today I just don't think it's that exciting. Number three is I think this goes back to your point of tech, is that I think they're, I think they're losing the narrative that they're not a job board. Joel (24m 55s): I mean, they want to grab the quote "marketplace matchmaker", which was a quote that I had said in many interviews, but I'm not so sure the market is buying it until they're viewed as a tech company, they're gonna have a hard time capturing the interest of today's investor. So all these ads that people know of, you know, the bar owner with the flags of colleges in the background saying, Hey, I posted a job on ZipRecruiter. And I had, you know, the woman that was hired walks in, like everyone knows these ads, right? They need to, they need a marketing campaign to get people thinking of them as, you know, Workday or LinkedIn or a tech. Because as long as they're in this job board posting thing, I think it's going to be really hard for them to break out of that. Joel (25m 39s): So those are my three takeaways from Zip. I would, I would not buy. A that, not that I give advice. It might be a hold at this point. I think it probably hovers around the twenties for awhile. Maybe gets up to 30 if the economy really fires up and they have some good, some good quarterly earnings report, but it was exciting to see an IPO. And I think bigger picture is like, is, is this going to spur, you know, talent.com, who's rumored to be going public, or iCIMS, who's been who's been rumored to go public. Does this motivate them to do it quicker? I don't think it scared them, but I don't think it was awesome. I don't think it was, oh shit, we got to do it today. Kind of thing. Chad (26m 18s): I think iCIMS is going there. No matter what. Joel (26m 20s): Yeah. iCIMS is more in that Workday bubble then ZipRecruiter is like post jobs. Post jobs Isn't getting anybody excited on Wall Street. Yeah. Chad (26m 30s): They've got to be seen as, instead of a board, which is really a single dimension into more of a multi-dimensional type of platform. That's what people want to see, the tech the platform, instead of just like Trump's social media platform that turned into a blog. Joel (26m 50s): Yeah. Marketplace, marketplace matchmaker. That's kind of sexy, like push the hell out of that and show how it works, you know, like magic to match people to jobs and I think you got something. So we'll definitely be watching their progress in the months and years to come. So more in the news Jumpstart is now Canvas. Yes, Canvas. Diversity recruitment platform or DRP, I guess that'll be something I'll have to give to used to. I guess Jumpstart has rebranded as the new Canvas. Now listeners will know Canvas as a text recruiting solution. So Canvas was a bit of a strange rebrand from that perspective, although the brand Canvas that we know is more or less dead, the URL gocanvas.io now goes to job Jobvite. Joel (27m 35s): On a high note, the new Canvas actually owns canvas.com. Chad (27m 41s): Yeah. Having $20 million come in that doesn't hurt. Joel (27m 44s): It wasn't cheap, but you know, it was, is probably where that, so in addition to the rebrand, the company also announced 20 million in new funding led by Lachy Group and Sequoia Capital with participation from Four Rivers Capital. Prominent customers include Airbnb, Bloomberg, Coinbase, Lyft, Pinterest, Plaid, Roadblocks, Audible, and Stripe. Canvas intends to use the new funding, to expand the platform into other industries and verticals beyond technology and address the recruiting process for later stages of people's careers. The company currently has 70 employees and expects to have a hundred by the end of 21, the company was founded in 2017 and has raised a total of 32.7 million, according to Crunchbase. Joel (28m 26s): Chad DRPs. That's your lane, thoughts? Chad (28m 31s): Yeah. Obviously Jumpstart, now Canvas is they're trying to hit that DEI nail right on the fucking head, which, which, which I love. And generally I do not like additions or categories into our space because generally it just doesn't make any fucking sense. People are making things up. But in this case, the diversity recruiting platform, we don't have many of those. Now everybody wants to say that they can help, but companies like Oleo and possibly Verseeda are ones who really could fit in this niche. And there are so many companies who really focusing or they're focusing on DEI now I think that this is to me is a very welcomed category. Chad (29m 14s): Now, one word of warning for listeners and leaders who want to become more diverse, a tool and or platform by itself can not make your company diverse. And I say that from experience in building hiring platforms and programs more over watching Julie and disability solutions, the industry leader up close and personal actually help enterprise brands hire thousands of diverse individuals from, a talent pool. This is something that can help incredibly amplify your ability to target and hire diverse talent. But tech is never a silver bullet. Chad (29m 56s): So as we hear this from company after company platform, after platform, everybody's at adding DEI, this is one that I think is different. Don't get me wrong again with Oleo and VERCIDA, but overall, if your team is not ready, if your company's not ready to do business in a different way, no tech has gone to help. Yeah. Joel (30m 17s): What struck me was their client list. I mean, if you can tout Airbnb, Bloomberg Coinbase, Lyft, Pinterest, Plaid, Roadblocks, Audible, and Stripe, you're obviously doing something right. And I think for me, we sort of remember the anniversary of, of George Floyd and what happened last year. You know, I think some of us, some people thought, you know, the energy around DEI would subside that some, this would sort of be, you know, issued is your Trump out of office that this would sort of fade. And I don't, I don't think that it has, we've seen continuing engagement with the community and more money that goes into sort of curing this, this problem. And I think there's a generation, you know, behind us, that's really, really gonna push this initiative. Joel (31m 1s): And I think it's incredibly healthy. So, and, you know, in light of remembering George Floyd, I think it's fair to say that this is a movement that has taken hold and that companies that are supporting this initiative and companies like this that are getting on board. That it's hard to deny that this is where things are going and that companies that are providing solutions around DEI are going to be successful as long as they can provide what they're saying and deliver on what they promise. Chad (31m 30s): Well, and remember, we were hearing companies, I, we were just talking about, iCIMS talk about how they want to move to more DEI. To be quite Frank, I don't think they're ready, but this organization I think is, because they're built for it, right? It's, there's a difference in adapting and being built for it. Because remember, most people do not self identify during the application process. Most veterans, don't self identify most individuals with disabilities, race, gender, you, you, you're not getting the full picture of who's actually applying for a job. Although Oleo has done a great job in cracking that self ID issue, I believe Canvas has as well. Chad (32m 10s): And I believe Canvas is actually taking it a step further in being able to create an ecosystem where you can be found as well. So there are these great pieces of tech that are out there that want to say that they are quote unquote diversity enabled, or what have you. Right. But they weren't built for that. These types of platforms are actually built for it. So there's a big difference. Joel (32m 35s): Yeah. It's, it's not quite apples to apples, but it was sort of like, you know, jobs to web being SEO friendly. And then everyone else saying like, oh, we got SEO too. We did that shit too. But it was, it was in their DNA. And I think the companies that have the DNI in their DNA are going to be the ultimate winners in this wave. Nice. Jobvite PROMO (32m 54s): 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 (33m 34s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Joel (33m 39s): So you're not bingeing anything now, I assume? Chad (33m 42s): Just the Mare of Easttown. Yeah, yeah. Doing that. We started rewatching Modern Family again, because it's gotta be one of the funniest sitcoms ever. And I love it. So yeah. I mean that kind of stuff, waiting for new stuff to pop out on HBO Max and Netflix. We did watch Army of the Dead. Did you watch that? Joel (34m 2s): No, I haven't seen that yet. Okay. Definitely going to. Chad (34m 5s): Yeah. I think it would be a great dad and Cole, just you two. It is very violent, but I think that'd be awesome. Joel (34m 14s): Nice. We're watching, are you are watching Atypical? Chad (34m 18s): oh no. Joel (34m 19s): Okay. It's about a kid with Asperger's or anyway, it's good. I think it's on Netflix. Atypical. If you're looking for something. So more to the news. So listeners may remember this company Bright Hire and its CEO, Daddy Chestnut on firing squad. Check it out in the archives, if you haven't at Chadcheese.com, I won't ruin the episode, but we both were pretty okay with the company. So in the news this week, Bright Hire based in New York has raised 12.5 million in funding. Index ventures led the round with participation from next play ventures, which is led by LinkedIn chairman and former CEO. Jeff Wiener, interestingly and previous investors include Flybridge Capital and Ground Up Ventures. Joel (35m 4s): As well as HR experts, Laszlo Bock, and Rosanna Dorothy. Founded in 2019. Bright Hire had previously raised 3 million over two funding rounds, Bright Hires, technology records interviews, transcribes them and analyzes them with the goal of informing more equitable hiring decisions. With the new funding the company says it will invest in new tech integrations to meet users where they already work, which we obviously applaud and double down on how the technology can better, provide more equitable hiring with best practices. Interestingly, Bright Hire data revealed that when men interview women Bright Hire found that they, one take up 13% more of the total top time in the interviews. Joel (35m 45s): Two Speak 30% more words, overall. Three, have more have conversations that are 9% less interactive and four run with 6% longer monologues. Yes. Men suck. So Chad, we have another DEI play. You in? Chad (36m 2s): I think this is definitely more than DEI and Teddy and team have massive experience and connections in this space, which is something that you and I love to see because we see so many people from the outside coming in thinking that can change the world and then they take a dump, right? So just to mention of Laszlo Bock, Rosanna Dorothy, Jeff Wiener, I mean that doesn't even do them justice because those are some fucking amazing names, but Teddy and team have a much deeper connection with this space than most. So I see Bright Hire as more of an evolved version of HireVue. Chad (36m 43s): It's synchronous and asynchronous allowing a human to do the interview, have the discussion transcribed the video taped. To say that it's diversity, I don't believe because a lot of that has to do with training, right? It's just a tool. This is one of those where this is not built for diversity. This is built for efficiencies. This is built for better process methodologies, this is what we should be using tech for, but this is not a diversity play. Joel (37m 11s): Will according to their news release. Chad (37m 13s): Everybody's trying to spin, yeah, I love it. Don't get me wrong. I love it. I think it's great. If you listen to the firing squad that we did with Teddy. Joel (37m 22s): Don't ruin the episode. Make them listen to it, but these guys are definitely ones to watch. Congrats to them on one, the, I don't know the bench of talent and brainpower that they've collected with folks and what they have. So yeah, we'll be watching Teddy Chestnut, not related to Joey Chestnut, the famous speed eater. Chad (37m 43s): Or Mark Chestnut, not the country star. Joel (37m 45s): Mark Chestnut, there you go. Okay. Not related to any of those famous Chestnuts. He's blazing his own path of fame, Teddy Chestnut, and speaking of burning your own path. So remote working and pot in the news. So following a mad dash for employees to adapt to working remotely could the future of work be even more complicated? Many companies are trying to adapt to the new hybrid working world. Some are ruling out work from home on Mondays or Fridays while others are concerned about offices being too crowded on Thursdays. Meanwhile, recruiters say they're having difficulty finding workers who are willing to work five days in the office. Other workers are complaining about vague work from home policies or pandemic era work promises that have not been held. Joel (38m 32s): A CEO of Washington Media wrote an opinion piece this week, that business leaders had a strong incentive to change the status of staffers who are rarely in the office from full-time to contract or meanwhile job postings that offer quote "remote work have skyrocketed over the past year," according to an analysis from LinkedIn's economic graph team, as of May 20th, the percentages of paid remote job postings on LinkedIn grew 457% from the year earlier, the media and communications industry holds the highest percentage followed by software and IT. Overall 9.7% of listings across all industries now involve remote work up from barely 2% a year earlier. Joel (39m 16s): So Chad, what do you make of all this work from home chaos? Chad (39m 19s): Yeah. There's so many mixed messages we're seeing from the market, from employers, and then we're seeing all of these companies who don't want to pick between, you know, work from home, hybrid, I even saw an article this week around don't allow your employees to choose when they work from home. It's like, it's again, we talk about control versus autonomy, right? And the smartest thing here is to be able to provide autonomy. If you have employees who deserve the autonomy, the ones who are actually producing and they're doing their thing, provide them the autonomy to do what they're doing. Chad (40m 1s): The company who actually said, I think the, Washingtonian media, who said that they're looking at, you know, the prospect of changing full-time employees to contractors, that to me says nothing more than I hate my fucking employees. And, here's the thing employers out there listening today, step back, take a breath, a deep breath and realize that you are not in control here. This is something that you share with that individual. And when you try to be in control, so damn much, what you do is you push them away, which is probably why you're losing great talent and why we've heard that huge percentages of people are already looking at getting the fuck out as it is. Chad (40m 52s): So if you can't understand that your greatest asset is the talent in your organization, you want it. You will, you think your software is the greatest asset. No. Who actually fucking creates that, maintains it, obviously builds new features, so on and so forth, it's not the fucking software. It's the people, the people we have to understand is the heart to every single organization, not the fucking widget that you're putting out there, not your fucking stockholders, not your board, the people who are actually doing the fucking work, focus on them, understand that you treat them like humans and provide more autonomy and allow less control. Joel (41m 34s): Yeah. So, I've already referenced since we're turning 50, this week Back to the Future, I'm going to reference Ghostbusters. So there's a great scene in Ghostbusters where the scientists are locked up, the Ghostbusters are locked up and they play with the mayor to let them go. And Dr. Venkman says basically that the city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. And then the mayor says, what do you mean? And then Dr. Ackroyd's character says what he means is old Testament shit, brimstone coming down from the sky rivers, boiling, shit like that. Right. And then of course Murray's character comes in and says human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. Joel (42m 18s): So this feels like, man, this feels like that scene in the movie where nobody knows what the fuck is going on, advisors or whatever saying they think they know what's going on. When we first started this work from home thing, everyone was like work from home forever. Right? Twitter came out all these tech companies and it was like, you know what, get your ass back in the office. So then we had, you know, unions and organizations rise up and say like, you know what? We don't want to just come back to work or we don't want to have to petition, you organization about when we should work from home or how we should be able to work from home. And they don't necessarily want like, oh, we'll get Monday and Fridays off like Friday casual day. Joel (42m 59s): Right? So you have this force of the company that have these leases and they want control and they want the power and they want, you know, granted they want creativity in the office and they want all the good things that come with that. But then you have the workers who are like, you know what, that year at home, that was kinda nice. You know, being able to do what I want, eat from home, make a steak on the grill, whatever. So now it's cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. And I don't think how, I don't know how this is going to how this is going to play out. I guess every company is going to have their own thing. Companies with knowledge workers will be different than those with like, you know, warehouse workers and how that pans out. But this is indicative all the different sides of this story of how fucked up this issue is. Joel (43m 45s): And, I don't think we're anywhere near coming to some sort of settlement or standard with what work from home looks like. Chad (43m 52s): Yeah. Joel (43m 53s): So as a result Chad, it's no surprise that workers are getting high to take a little edge off from all this ruckus. The number of American workers testing positive for marijuana continues to rise according to the Wall Street Journal, about 2.7% of the roughly 7 million drug tests that go on with a company called Quest Diagnostics that were performed for employers in 2020 were positive for marijuana compared to 2.5 in 2019 and 2% in 2016 drug test, while less prevalent than in previous decades thanks to a shifting legal backdrop and changing cultural attitudes are still standard in some industries for new hires. Joel (44m 35s): However employers say removing marijuana testing is one way to quote more easily recruit workers. You think? In 2021. So Chad, you ready to toke up? Yeah. I'm surprised it's as low as 2.7% like that's a news story. Chad (44m 51s): Yeah, that's fucking crazy. But I mean, seriously message to employers stop testing for marijuana. I mean, it's fairly simple. If you're not doing a BAC test for alcohol, when somebody is coming through the door, don't be dumb. Just stop testing for marijuana. There's no reason for it, right? If somebody comes in the door and they smell like alcohol, what are you gonna do? You're gonna send them fuck home. Right? If somebody comes in, they smell like they've been token up. What are you going to do? It, send them to a fricking beanbag chair, give them some Cheetos about an hour and then send them off to work. They'll be fine, Jesus! Joel (45m 26s): By the way, just like we don't give financial advice, we also don't give legal advice. So please, don't create your background check policy based on this podcast. I'm sure anyone who's hiring teachers, bus drivers, truck drivers, don't listen to us. If the lawyers tell you that background check for a shit like that, then... Chad (45m 45s): Fucking fucking attorneys. Man, that's, that's one of the biggest issues we have in the workplace today JOB AD X PROMO (45m 54s): 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 (46m 37s): JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Chad (46m 45s): So real quick, you were talking about atypical earlier, as well as a series that just came out I think with season two, that Julia and I love called Special. And if you haven't watched it, Joel, you and Christine? You and Christine watch it. It's about a young gay dude who has cerebral palsy and it is one of the funniest fucking sick. I mean, it's hilarious. You will die laughing. Joel (47m 16s): Nice, by the way, Atypical is autism not Asperger's. So when it gets on the spectrum, because I've got to see Julie this weekend and if I fuck up the wrong, you know, you know what I'm talking about? I don't want to get canceled, but if I piss off Julie, it's going to be a bad week. I don't want to get it's autism. Everybody watch Atypical for autism. Chad (47m 38s): Atypical or Special, do them both. Yes. Joel (47m 41s): Now we'll either of these be on our next new story. Amazon buys, there you go, MGM, the lion dude. This is gangster move dude, by your boy, Jeff. Chad (47m 55s): Yeah, I gotta say man, on his way out, he's definitely doing, he has a gangster move. We're talking about 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows. Now this in itself, I don't think it was a full response because the content wars are on. There's no question. Netflix is winning that right now, but Amazon had to do this because AT&T who's trying to catch up as well announced that Warner media would be spun off and combined with Discovery. The deal brings together a bunch of different brands like Warner Brothers, Discovery channel, HBO, CNN, HGTV. It's about to heat up. Joel (48m 35s): Oh, it's red hot baby. So, so the, the crowning jewel of this deal was a James Bond, but also included Rocky, the Handmaid's Tale, Robocops, one of our show favorite, Legally Blonde and the epics TV Network. Chad (48m 53s): Wow! Joel (48m 54s): 8.4, $8.5 billion is a lot of cabbage. Yeah. The world seems to be coming down to who owns your attention. Yes. And nothing gets attention like great content that you and I binge on on a regular basis. If companies can leverage content for a monthly recurring revenue and can talent and continue selling you shit via their platforms, then it's it's winner take all. You know, Disney, Apple, Amazon are just three that in addition to content, they sell you shit, right? They sell you hardware. They sell you packages, you know, shit that comes to your door. They sell you trips to Orlando and they all gain in two ways of, yeah, you're paying monthly revenue, but now you're also buying their shit. And it's fun to watch Apple originals and how much Apple shit gets into these shows. Joel (49m 38s): If Amazon can raise pricing, for example, on their 200 million prime subscribers, another let's call it 20 to 25% over the next decade. Then this was a deal that costs them nothing, because they're going to make that money on recurring revenue, just from people using Prime. I think you mentioned Netflix being in the pole position. And I think that you're right, but I think it's getting to a point where too many of these companies like peacock and a few others, it's like they're bringing a pea shooter to a Howitzer fight. And Netflix, I think, has to make a move like by Roku or by the rails in some degree to make their position solid. Because these companies that own the world, let's be honest, are making some really big buys to take aim at Netflix. Joel (50m 22s): So I think they have to make a big move at some point, but they're definitely in the discussion as well. But it's very interesting to watch. It's sad that that all these services were built on saving money and I'm paying like two X. What I used to pay for Direct TV. It's like such a racket, but yeah, we all pay. Chad (50m 43s): This into context real quick. So 4,000 films, 17,000 TV shows less than 8.5 billion. And how much did Microsoft pay for LinkedIn? Joel (50m 59s): $26.2 billion. Chad (50m 60s): Think about that. All that content, less than 9 billion, LinkedIn, more than double MGM and the catalog. Joel (51m 8s): And would you rather have James Bond or Jeff Weiner? Chad and Joel (51m 15s): We Out. OUTRO (52m 8s): 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 week's episode reads like an alternative to the movie Boogie Nights. We're talkin' Mya, Wade & Wendy, strippers and exploding vaginas. Oh, and we even have a European standing in for Chad, who's basking in the Costa Rica sunshine. A-hole! To stick it to him, we discuss Amazon and checks from the government in his absence. Let's get funky! As always, Sovren, JobAdx and Jobvite are bringing the kink. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Joel (1s): Cheesy does it here. Chad is in beautiful Costa Rica this week, which means you get me a guest host and a finished product that resembles a Grateful Dead bootleg more than it does the silky smooth production quality you're used to. Hey, whatever. It's not like we're solving world peace up in here. INTRO (23s): 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. are Joel (44s): Oh yeah! Because cheese pizzas are the best pizzas. Anyway. Hey kids, it's Joel "pole dancer" Cheeseman. Leavin (54s): I'm gonna Leavin, you'll never pronounce my name correctly. Joel (58s): True that on this week show StepStone and the Maya munchies, startups hope to dethrone, LinkedIn and stripping ain't easy. Sit tight. We're building bridges across the Atlantic this week INTRO accident... (1m 13s): Hide your kids, lock the doors you're listening to, SOVREN PARSER PROMO (1m 15s): 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 (1m 59s): 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 21s): Welcome to the show. Leavin (2m 23s): Hi Joel. Thanks for having me. Joel (2m 25s): So say your last name again for everybody Leavin (2m 28s): Von Neuenheuser . Joel (2m 30s): Von Bismarck what? Well just call you leave, leavin' Las Vegas. Leavin (2m 37s): It's almost the same thing, I guess. Joel (2m 38s): Nice, nice. So thanks for guest co-hosting with me today in Chad's absence, we've already pushed a soundbite that we weren't supposed to, or at least I have. So we've got our mistake out of the way, which means it's going to be a silky smooth show, the rest of the way. So for our listeners and that's a hundred percent, pretty much, don't know who you are. Give us your Twitter bio. Leavin (3m 2s): Okay. Twitter, meaning fast? Joel (3m 4s): Short. Leavin (3m 4s): Okay. Sure. I am I'm Chief Digital Arts Heads of HR and in the U S you probably don't know and most people in Europe, I guess don't know either, but we're a staffing company, temping company, specialized in recruitment and engineering solutions and specialized staffing. We're active in 10 European countries. And we have about $2 billion of revenue. So we're not small, but we are not as big as adequate around start yet. We are on our way. We are growing fast and I'm chief digital meaning responsible for digital innovation, either commitments, those kinds of things. Leavin (3m 46s): And I've been in the business for about 20 years, I guess, now? I started at a local newspaper, a local, I mean, Belgium and Belgium newspaper. I launched the job ads, which the website for the job bird for the newspaper. I've worked for US people for some other companies, but always within recruitment and digital. Joel (4m 9s): Okay, well, let's cut to the important stuff. Your favorite Belgian beer is what? Leavin (4m 14s): It's a Tapas to beer brewed by the monks in West . Exclusive but my mom happens to be a old friend of the , Chief monk , and I just have to drive to West and they fill my car with beer. Joel (4m 34s): Is that the one where they only have like a few distribution days a year and you have to like be there at the right time or know the right people. Is that the same monastery? Leavin (4m 44s): That is the one. Joel (4m 45s): Wow. So for our listeners, Leavin, I think saw me speak in the mid two thousands and reached out to me a couple of years ago when we could still travel and said, Hey, do you want to come to our annual conference and do a little talk about whatever you want? And I said, sure, why not? Went out to a middle, middle aged city, some Renaissance, whatever alcove in Belgium. Leavin fed me beers showed me a good time and I can tell you he's, you know, in his 20 years experience, the dude is super sharp in this industry. He knows Europe as good as anybody that I've ever talked to. Joel (5m 25s): And for those reasons, a little teaser here, everybody, you're going to hear a lot more from Leavin in the future. I'll just Leavin, it at that, if you know what I'm saying. So Leavin fan of the show, you know, we got to do shout outs. So I'm gonna let you do the first one, my friend. Leavin (5m 41s): Okay. Then one, just one big shout out to my boss. who finally got COVID. She's been avoiding it for two years now, but she finally got covered and I wish her all the best. Joel (5m 56s): So in Europe is finally got COVID a badge of honor. I don't understand why that's a shout out? Leavin (6m 1s): Well, no, but she's evading it for almost two years and now it's caught up with her. So we feel sorry for her, and we hope she's getting better fast because I miss her. Joel (6m 13s): Well, if she's listening to her best employee on this sad excuse for a podcast she's not doing very well at the moment. Anyway, so how has COVID how's it going? How's the vaccination going in Europe? Leavin (6m 26s): Oh, it depends on what country you're in. Belgium is going slow. The other countries, some are doing great. The Nordics are pretty advanced, I guess, Ireland as well, UK, probably too. But in Belgium, they've been talking a lot about what vaccine are we going to give? And then they were all sold out so we had to wait. Joel (6m 47s): Well, thankfully, a lot of countries are opening up to travel, which makes Chad and I very happy. So hopefully we'll be able to have some of that Belgian brew, face-to-face at some point in the fall., Leavin (6m 60s): I'm expecting you on November the 18th of November to be precise. And Joel (7m 6s): Look at you! Throwing in the plugs. Yeah, seriously in the podcast. I like that. What was that date again? Leavin November what? Leavin (7m 15s): Number 18th. It's our day. And it's recruitment conference to Congress at which you spoke a few years ago in . Now it's an Austin's it's at the sea and we're going to do it a hybrid, so if COVID stops bothering us, you'll be there present. I will be there anyway, but you will be there live and otherwise it will be virtual. Sorry Joel (7m 38s): It's hard to drink beer virtually as good as the stuff that comes out of Belgium. So anyway, hopefully we can get there in person. I've got a couple shout outs. Number one, I've got a shout out for Gwyneth Paltrow. I'm not sure she's got gotten COVID yet or not, but anyway, her company GOOP, which I've never bought anything from, is being sued. So a Texas man is suing Paltrow's company, over a $75 candle called you ready for this? The candle is called "this smells like my vagina." The Texas man said the candle exploded in his bedroom. Joel (8m 22s): This has to be a joke, right? Leavin (8m 25s): I hope it is. Not sure. Joel (8m 29s): I don't know what source of the candle that smells like Gwyneth vagina or getting sued because it exploded in your bedroom. Anyway. Shout out to Gwyneth. I hope that lawsuit pans out in your favor. My second shout out goes to Harry and Charlie. Leavin (8m 45s): Who? Joel (8m 45s): Who the fuck are Harry and Charlie, you might be asking? You've probably seen the YouTube video of Charlie bit me, where the two young English boys are playing a little slap and tickle. Charlie bites Harry, and the cute as hell quote, "Charlie, you bit me. That hurt, Charlie." You've seen this video right, Leavin? Leavin (9m 5s): I saw it. Joel (9m 7s): This thing's been viewed 800 million times, probably a billion since we've been talking about this news story. So anyway, the boys are grown up. This happened in 2007, so they're legal age now. And they are auctioning off the official or the original video of this Epic bite on the internet as an NFT. You can find out more at Charliebitme.com, which is actually starting in about two days. So by the time you listen to this podcast, you head on over to Charliebitme.com and you can make a play for that lovely video, with a nice NFT purchase, which will probably go for a hundred million plus, seeing how NFTs are going these days. Joel (9m 55s): My last little tidbit is, I got to talk about free shit. If you like bourbon, if you like awesome tri-blend t-shirts. If you like whiskey. We got it! You got to head out to Chadcheese.com/free. We've got shirts sponsored by Emissary. We've got whiskey sponsored by Sovren and we have beer sponsored by AdZuna. So if you haven't done that yet, kids get on out to chadcheese.com/free and sign up today. And with that, we got some news hot off the presses. Joel (10m 37s): This came across my desk this morning, actually. So pandoLogic, sponsor of the show has announced that they have acquired chatbot Wade and Wendy. So there'll be a shred on this that will probably go out before this weekly show so check the archives for this. But basically terms were not disclosed, which usually means it was cheaper than the investors would like to have announced. They're keeping all the employees at the company, there are currently 14, that will stay with the organization. Wade and Wendy brand will continue to live, but it will have a Pando company quote "under the logo," Joel (11m 19s): as it appears on websites and conferences and wherever, wherever else, you see the Wade and Wendy logo. The company was founded in 2015 and they had raised roughly, they had raised 11 and a half million dollars from a variety of investors, including Ron Stott innovation fund, which is from your neck of the woods, Leavin. Any comment about this impending feeding frenzy on chatbots? I assume they're all the rage in Europe just as they are here in America. Leavin (11m 49s): Yeah, we acquired our own. We have Dora at happy recruiter or at least we have a part in it. And we felt if we want to play with the big voice, we need a chatbot. We were right, because it actually works. We're doing our own recruitment through chatbots. We were reaching out to people on social media, trying to find those passive job seekers and the chatbot is doing the hard work it's getting in touch with people, it's asking the right questions, trying to make appointments. And then our recruiters can spend time on the things they are actually good in, making conversation with interested people. Joel (12m 26s): Yep. And I assume scheduling as part of that as well, which we hear is a real nice, nice feature of chatbots. That scheduling is a real pain in the ass. Leavin (12m 35s): Working 24 hours, seven days. So people can answer the questions when they want. Joel (12m 41s): No doubt. Now, did you acquire a Happy Recruiter used to be a sponsor for a minute. Did you acquire those guys? Leavin (12m 47s): Yeah, we have part of them. We were shareholder not to the whole thing. Joel (12m 53s): Okay. They were looking to grow in the U S, have they started expanding effectively? Leavin (12m 59s): In Europe they are. In the US, maybe, I know there are plans, but I should talk to them. I'm not sure about US. I do know about Europe. Joel (13m 10s): Well, obviously, if they were advertising on our show for a minute, they're looking to get into the US to some degree, because that is the bulk of our listeners. Leavin (13m 17s): So free advertising now. Joel (13m 19s): Yes so that is free advertising now they're in the U S now whether they like it or not, and I didn't know that you had acquired them so I didn't set you up for a freebie ad there, by the way. So, so the chatbot feeding frenzy continues. This was a shred out late last week, at StepStone, another company in your neck of the woods had acquired Maya, who was basically the pioneer, the OG of the recruiting chatbots. So this is Dusseldorf based StepStone acquired San Francisco based Maya, pioneer in the chat bots technology. The new technology will become part of Step Stone's, autonomous matching platform. Joel (14m 0s): That's trademarked. Based in machine learning, conversational AI will enable job seekers to find matching job opportunities, even without actively searching for them. The technology draws conclusions from talking to the candidate and then suggesting suitable jobs, via text message, WhatsApp or onsite chat. Total jobs, which is a big name in the UK will be the first Step Stone's job platforms to integrate its new autonomous matching technology powered by Maya. Step Stone's total jobs platform in Germany will integrate the technology after the UK later this year. Maya Systems was founded in 2012 and raised around $52 million. Joel (14m 43s): So the feeding frenzy continues. Interestingly, from this on May 10th, there was a news story on the internet that had been deleted. The archive was still available. There was some speculation by me as to why the story had been deleted. After I sort of published it and the shred, went out, Maya and StepStone, officially released the news. So there was some speculation as to why they wanted to keep it quiet and it could have just been timing, right? They were gonna, they were going to announce it anyway, but someone, someone jumped the gun. Interestingly, Axel Springer, who owns all these companies also owns App Cast, which could be the reason why they wanted to keep it quiet. Joel (15m 32s): You'll remember that after they acquired App Cast, there was another feeding frenzy in the programmatic universe specifically Indeed acquired Click IQ and has since launched their own little programmatic solution called Indeed IQ. Do you expect more and more chatbots to be bought up? And do you, are you suspicious at all that the terms of these deals aren't being disclosed? Because I think the assumption was that these would be pretty big deals, as in a hundred million plus, and it looks like they're going for a little less than maybe, people like me thought they would. What are your thoughts? Leavin (16m 14s): Huh? Can't say anything intelligent about the amounts. Actually have no clue, but I'm sure does traditional job boards they need to do something. And for example, StepStone, they've been there for 20 years, I guess, more, even more? And when I started working, StepStone was the number one job board in Europe. And if you needed a job, you went to StepStone. But now I just did a survey with my students at Entrepreneur University. I also am a part-time teacher and a guest lecturer. And she did, from our subscription on the subjects, how are young people finding their first jobs and how are companies reaching out to young people to starters? Leavin (16m 59s): And so it's really interesting. We did a big survey on what channels are those people using? And we asked them what job boards do you know? And we actually feed them the name, We said do you know Monster? Do you know StepStone? Do you know a big one in Belgium, Job Ads et cetera? And StepStone, two out of three people never heard of it. They just, it didn't ring a bell. Monster, even three out of four, meaning those companies haven't been advertising enough and the new generation just doesn't know it. They've never been looking for a job so why would they know a company hiring or an intermediary in hiring people? So I guess for step one, they need to do something. Leavin (17m 39s): And they used to be a job board. They still are with a paper credit's business model, which is in my opinion, outdated. And you have to pay per click and pay per lead even. So paper credit is old school. And they have a CV database, which is also outdated because you have now LinkedIn with the best CV database in the world, I guess. It's self-sustainable. so they need to do something. And if they want to reach out to passive job seekers, I guess the chatbots are the way to go. Joel (18m 12s): So, so, so basically, your thesis is that these old school job boards, these old creaky cobweb ridden job boards are trying to be with the cool kids by buying up the chatbots and hoping that that will reinvigorate their connection with younger folks, who obviously are messaging and chatting 24 hours a day. Leavin (18m 33s): Joel (18m 34s): Curious how Indeed fared in your survey. Were they part of the data-set? Leavin (18m 41s): Yeah. And the name didn't ring a bell at all. They were, but it's been two years so probably now they're getting bigger, but in those days they weren't very known, but people found them through Google, I guess. And they just didn't realize it was Indeed they were clicking on. And now the name is the brand is getting more recognition and nice to know Indeed is making lots of commercials in Belgium and the surrounding countries because they want to stretch us, stretch it as long as they can, I guess. Joel (19m 14s): Yeah. Because they have to. Leavin (19m 16s): They have to. Joel (19m 17s): How about Glass Door? Were they on the survey? Leavin (19m 20s): No, not at all because at that point I probably hardly knew to myself. Joel (19m 25s): Yeah. Leavin (19m 25s): Glassdoor, isn't really a thing here. And now it is because Google for jobs was launched and they have an agreement. And, Glassdoor is mentioned constantly with the salary survey or the benchmark, or how do you call it? But people are getting to know it now, but it's going slow. Joel (19m 42s): So, so that leads us, that segues into our next story. This is how we re roll on this show. So Indeed, Glassdoor's parent company recruit holdings came out with fourth quarter revenue growth this past quarter that was boosted by the likes of Glassdoor and Indeed. So Japanese staffing firm Recruit Holdings reported revenue this week for the fourth quarter, ended 31st of March of five point $61 billion. Good God, that's a lot of money. This was an increase of 4% when compared to the same period last year, the group's HR technology business, which includes Indeed and Glassdoor drove growth during the quarter, the revenue increase in HR technology was primarily driven by increased demand for sponsored job advertising. Joel (20m 31s): For the fiscal year, approximately 75% of HR technology revenue was derived from business clients in the US. That's kind of interesting US is driving a lot of the revenue here. So by the 26th of March jobs postings on Indeed in the U S were 13.5% above those from February 1st, 2020. The company's guidance is for growth of between 40 and 50%, damm, for its HR technology division again, including Indeed and Glassdoor. Also Recruit Holdings announced this week, a little bit of a sidebar here that it aims to have women in half of its senior executive roles within 10 years. Joel (21m 15s): So it looks like you'll be seeing a lot more of Indeed and Glassdoor, when you look at this 50, 40% growth. And the fact that 75% of that looks like it's coming from the US. A lot of room for growth, what kind of odds do you give them to make any kind of, you know, significant traction over in Europe? Leavin (21m 34s): Hm. They are growing fast, I guess, and they're gaining ground, but I don't like the way Indeed is working today. And I feel, and I'm still a believer Google for Jobs is going to solve its little growing pains and they'll be bigger to become better and they will play Indeed out of the markets. But that's my opinion. We had our issues with Indeed and they deliver us lots of traffic and it works, but it's not always easy. I feel they, when I, when I'm teaching, actually I teach E-recruitment. Leavin (22m 17s): I used to tell my students Indeed is the job board of the future, while I don't do that anymore, that I don't feel there are the job board of the future. They used to be the job board of the future and now they have to reinvent themselves. And I feel they are constantly on the lookout for something new. And they started virtual fairs, et cetera, and new businesses. And they're constantly changing positions, but we don't really know what they are going to do. I have no idea. Joel (22m 44s): Well, it's interesting your take on a Glassdoor being a zero until their pay, pay information started showing up on Google for jobs. I assume their Glassdoor jobs are on Google for jobs as well, whereas people, so now people can find them there. I I'm guessing I haven't heard anything about Indeed adding their jobs to Google for jobs over in Europe for a while. I know that they were testing, I think in France for a bit of time. Are you seeing anything on your end, in terms of more Indeed content showing up on Google for jobs or driving more traffic through Google for jobs, or are they still sort of absent and just running, advertising? Leavin (23m 25s): Their absent, but just in the organic search, we can still find them. They are still on top, but not Google for jobs the top of the top. So I guess they must feel it. Joel (23m 36s): Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Well, speaking of on top and hoping to stay on top, a lot of companies, startups have their eye on LinkedIn and dethroning those guys. So Upstream, a Miami-based professional networking platform raised 2.75 million in seed money this week, bringing their total raise to 3.25 million in order to take on LinkedIn. Unlike LinkedIn Upstream focuses on generating meaningful, meaningful connections between its members. And one way they go about it is by hosting digital events that start with a speaker followed by a breakout match session that are five minutes each. Joel (24m 19s): A Tech Crunch rider called it LinkedIn meets Clubhouse meets Hop In, said, Alex Taub co-founder and CEO of Upstream quote" You don't go to LinkedIn to meet people. You don't hang out and spend meaningful time there." end quote. Another LinkedIn want to be called Hardy is another notable newcomer who's making some waves and I've personally gotten some invites in my inbox. So Leavin, I drank the Kool-Aid from LinkedIn regularly, but where are your thoughts on LinkedIn's blossoming competition? You give them a shot or not so much? Leavin (24m 58s): I do actually, because LinkedIn has been struggling and I'm reading on LinkedIn, well, I've been following them since they launched, I guess, and, we've been working with them and I've visited their conferences worldwide and I've been working with LinkedIn daily. So I think I know them. And they've been struggling with finding people who could deliver content, which was good enough because today the content on LinkedIn mostly is people shouting out to other people and saying meaningless stuff like a good leader is the one who's a whatever. So HR nonsense, in my opinion. Joel (25m 35s): Yup. Leavin (25m 35s): All just soft kinds of stuff and they tried launching LinkedIn articles to get people to write essays, but it never worked. People use it as a career marketing technique to launch their vacancies on the articles. They have no LinkedIn live and you can live stream on LinkedIn and it's works, but if you see the number of people looking at it's always a low. Just so one of our big competitors launching in a while, I was on the stream launching, well, they have 200 people watching the stream. Sorry about a feel they should be talking to you they would have more or listeners. Joel (26m 18s): Yeah. Leavin (26m 19s): So I think it's a good thing that LinkedIn gets a decent competitor. I hope it will be a decent competitor, it's a good thing, will make them less arrogant, which today, in my opinion, sometimes they are. And maybe , what you said, something in between LinkedIn and what were the other two, you mentioned? Joel (26m 42s): Clubhouse and HopIn, which is sort of a virtual event. Leavin (26m 48s): I really don't like Clubhouse myself, but I guess some people do. And HopIn is a virtual fair, so if they can mix those three, why not? Joel (26m 58s): I think you've moved my needle a little bit. I mean, I think what you said in terms of arrogance, hubris is a good word that I like to use a lot. I mean, look, they're pretty satisfied with what's going on. I think they have 750 million users, you know, heading fast 800 and a billion here. At some point they still have the network effects of that's where people are. Particularly old people like me. So, you know, when I got the invite to Hardy, the comment I had internally was like, why in the hell am I going to fill out another like profile? When I already have one on LinkedIn, I already have thousands of followers and connections and I get traction there. Joel (27m 43s): Like, there's no reason for someone my age to move off of LinkedIn. However, there's a whole new generation and you mentioned teaching students. There's a new crop of people every year that are looking for ways to connect professionally. And I think like, you know, those people are going to look for other homes besides LinkedIn. I think a lot of them will set up shop in LinkedIn because they feel like that's where the companies are. And that's where, you know, I can get traction in my career, but I think they'll have another foot in other places. I know like a Bumble, Bumble here in the U S in particular, is a popular dating site, which apparently is getting traction with sort of friend relationships and potentially business relationships. Joel (28m 29s): So there's going to be an audience that gravitates somewhere other than LinkedIn and you know, why not? And I think LinkedIn has become a little stale. I think they're trying to throw things like stories and video and live stuff, you know, at the market. But I mean, stories, for example, I mean, stories are the lifeblood of Instagram and Snapchat, and I see very little traction for stories on LinkedIn. So I think you're onto something and saying like, Hey, they're kind of satisfied. They're making a lot of money and they're going to make a lot of money with the job. You know, jobs heating up but longer term, you know, competition is good. Joel (29m 11s): And I think younger people will be looking for an alternative to LinkedIn, just like they look for an alternative to Facebook and Instagram and others. So, nice take on that. Let's, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about free money, which is something you Europeans know a lot about. Jobvite PROMO (29m 32s): 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 (30m 12s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Joel (30m 17s): So I feel a little guilty talking about Amazon with Chad not here, cause it's his favorite topic of all the topics I think we have, but we've been dealing with in the US a big problem with people not wanting to go work. And there are a lot of theories around this, whether it's, they're getting government checks, unemployment checks and stimulus checks to live. And then they're just sort of, you know, gigging, driving Uber and Doordash cars and whatnot, gigging on the side. Issues of mothers having to stay home, because I think 50% of schools are still closed, which is a real travesty in this country. Joel (30m 59s): As well as, you know, other things, but companies and now governments are trying to do all that they can to get people off the couch and back into work. So news out this week, Amazon plans to add 75,000 workers in the US and Canada in a hiring spree that could ultimately bring its total US workforce to over 1 million people. The retailer said the new positions will pay an average of $17 per hour. They recently moved it up to from 15. The minimum wage here in the US is well, it's nothing to write home about. Anyway, they also said that they would offer a thousand dollars signing bonuses, with an extra $100 going to new hires who are fully vaccinated. Joel (31m 47s): Additionally States like Connecticut and Montana are giving out free money for people to accept job offers and get back to work instead of laying low collecting unemployment benefits. Also in the news this week, Bank of America announced that they will be paying a $25 minimum wage by 2025. And that they will also only do business with companies who had a minimum wage of at least $15. Now Leavin, as a citizen of the EU, I suppose these sorts of cash incentives are no big deal, right? Europeans are used to money for nothing. Leavin (32m 28s): Yes, the moment we are born, we start receiving money. Joel (32m 34s): So who, why, why work at all in Europe or does nobody really work in Europe? Leavin (32m 38s): Passion, we love working. Joel (32m 41s): Are the service industry companies finding it hard to get people back to work? Is Covid the underlying challenge in Europe at this point, like what's, keeping distribution centers hard to find work? Are governments finding that they have to incentivize folks to get back to work. Like what's the situation over in Europe right now. Leavin (33m 6s): In most countries, it really is a problem. We struggled to find the right people. And as you sense, you get money just to keep you alive for doing nothing. But if the difference is too small for just staying at home, not working and then for working at a minimum wage, if that's different as too small, why would you work? And as you said that you can do some gigs on the sideline without I guess, paying much taxes, or if you pay any taxes at all. But that is a problem. And in Europe, the problem basically is the taxes you pay as a working citizen. Labor is taxed a lot. Leavin (33m 46s): The companies pay a lot, but the tax, how do you call it? The weights? The tax weight is huge much higher in the US, I guess. And that's a problem. So then that's all income is just too low compared to what you get for not working and employment wages. Joel (34m 4s): Yep. Now when the pandemic hit, I think the US had a much different perspective on how to tackle the Commonwealth. Our strategy was basically loan money to companies to then furlough or keep them, keep employees on the payroll, and then hopes that, okay, when we can go back to work, you still have those employees. And then the money that you borrowed from the government or underwritten by the government, you'd be able to pay back with no interest. Or sometimes they were sort of free loans, depending on a variety of circumstances. Whereas Europe basically said, we're just going to pay the people. Joel (34m 48s): We're going to send money to people. It's not, I mean, they're going to be furloughed. They're going to be sent home. Did, do you find that that was a stronger strategy to just pay folks as opposed to give money to companies? Or would you have rather had more corporate help or welfare? Leavin (35m 6s): Hmm. During this pandemic, most governments did both. People were given money, but the companies also. I mean in Belgium and you've been there, we have lots of pubs and cafes. And they had really hard time because they have been closed for over a year and we just kept them alive and the government was paying them. And I believe it was for just a single person, but it was 3000 Euros they got just to close. For those very old pubs, which you sometimes still have in those little villages in Belgium, where there is a lady, eighty years old serving three beers a day to the neighbor, but she still works, she actually, I guess, made more money than before. Leavin (35m 54s): So in some, some cases, it was, in my opinion, a waste of money on some pubs shouldn't probably have been kept alive, but in our cases it was God's gifts that the government kept all those restaurants and pubs alive. And so it's not that we didn't do anything, we did, but it costs so much money. And sometimes I think shouldn't, they just have been investing in more hospitals and kept everyone working, where possible, instead of closing everything down and I'm paying to keep it alive. Joel (36m 28s): Yeah. Now I know in the U S I think the last number I saw was around a hundred thousand restaurants had closed across the US. Are you seeing a lot of pubs, restaurants, maybe historically relevant? Have, are they gone? Are they going under in Europe? Are they just sort of closed? And they'll be opening up as soon as the world opens up? Leavin (36m 51s): We have less companies going broke than before because of the government's money they are giving. So those companies, stores, restaurants have been opening last week on the terraces in Belgium, for example. Joel (37m 6s): Gotcha. Leavin (37m 6s): We can now have dinner on a terrace but it's been raining for 10 days, so we don't, but we could, and most of the restaurants are going to be opening soon. Joel (37m 18s): Interesting. So Microsoft, our next new story, Microsoft did a survey this past week that they titled the next great disruption is hybrid work. Are we ready? Quote, so this was an extensive survey, a study that they did. You can check it out at microsoft.com or just search a Next Great Disruption, Microsoft survey or whatever on Google. So this was a really long study. A couple things really stood out to me from the research that Microsoft did. So according to the study, they found that 41% of employees have considered not just changing jobs, but moving to a new career post pandemic. Joel (38m 3s): The key to switching careers lies not in necessarily going back to school, but developing lifelong skills that transfer across career fields noted Marnie Baker Stein from Western Governor's University. She said, quote, "the transferability of skills from one industry to another is a big part of what's skilling and re-skilling, and up-skilling are all about" the second thing that got my attention was that if you, if you're basically middle middle-aged and male, you did pretty well and if you weren't part of group, you didn't do very well. So business leaders surveyed were more likely to be millennials or gen X male information workers, and farther along in their careers. Joel (38m 46s): In contrast gen Z women, frontline workers, and those new to their careers reported struggling the most over the past year and workers feel disconnected. 37% of the global workforce says their companies are asking too much of them at a time like this. And they had metrics around a percentage of time that increased for email, for chats, for video conferencing, for everything had really increased significantly over the past year. So those were two things that got my attention. It looks like a lot of your people are going to be gone at post pandemic. And also a lot of people are hurting. Joel (39m 28s): And I think that the increase in investment money that we're seeing in companies that are focused on mental health and helping people get through struggling times at home with, you know, screaming kids, barking dogs, other other things that they have to do is really important. What, from the survey caught your eye Leavin? Leavin (39m 51s): The 40%. 40% of the global workforce is thinking about leaving their employer. That's a lot. Joel (39m 59s): Yeah. Leavin (40m 0s): I'm pretty excited about it because those people need career guidance and we can offer it. We can get them from one company and place them in another and make a small profit on it, which is our business. So I'm okay with that. But the hybrid model is something companies will have to get used to. And I'm going to give a small example. I saw a vacancy last week and which was mentioned, you can choose between a company car or an installed home office. And they explained what an installed home office was. And it's really sounded installed. And it's a nice evolution that you can choose between having to commute and you get a car for your commute, but you can also get a nice home office with a design chair, ergonomics and the perfect screens and decent camera and a good soundboard, et cetera. Leavin (40m 57s): So it's something companies will have to get used to. Joel (41m 2s): Yeah. I saw something similar. I think it was, would you rather have a 30 grand more a year in salary or be able to work from home whenever you want? And the majority of people chose working from home versus a 30 grand more to their paycheck, which was pretty interesting, right? Leavin (41m 20s): Yeah. But it all depends on how much you make. If you make 200,000 a year, then I would skip the turkey, I guess, to be able to work from home. But if you only make 40 or 50, then the 30 would be, Joel (41m 30s): Yeah, it's very subjective, right? Like 30 grand in New York City is the same as 30 grand in Toledo, Ohio, or, you know, a small city. So it's very subjective. But the point is, I think you're right in saying that, look, folks want to work from home. They want flexibility to do one or the other or whenever they want. And, companies that don't offer that are definitely going to struggle. And we, saw that as well with Google recently where their union pretty much forced Google's executives hand in saying, you know, help our childcare come to work, create stipends for them to get, you know, get here and give us more flexibility. Because it sounded like for a second, all these companies that had had initially said like, Hey, work from home forever, changed their tune and said, okay, we're going back to work. Joel (42m 16s): And I think some industries certainly will. It looks like banking and finance is going to be back in the office. But for a lot of people, they prefer to work from home. But we also do have to address the fact that people have mental challenges when they work from home, they don't have the human to human contact that they normally would in the office. There's less moments of serendipity or creativity. When you just sit at home and work from home, you're more efficient in most cases, but you're also lonelier and have challenges around that. So I think we have to get through those to make work from home successful. Joel (42m 56s): And I think that hopefully, hopefully we'll get there. Now, one job that's really hard to do from home is stripping. And we'll talk about that right after the break, JOB AD X PROMO (43m 8s): 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 join us@jobadx.com. JOB AD X PROMO (43m 51s): JobAdX, the best ad tool, providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Joel (43m 59s): So stripin ain't easy Leavin. So strippers are back on the job, but Covid rules are hurting their pay. Revenue in the industry is estimated to have decreased 17.4% throughout 2020. So this is from Fox business news when California stripper Brittany 26, walked into San Francisco's reopened Gold Club after a year, she was welcomed with medical masks and too few patrons. An hour of that four hour shift was spent just waiting for customers and she earned $150, less than a third of what she would have made pre-pandemic said, Brittany, which is not her real name by the way, quote "It's just not fun any more" Joel (44m 47s): end quote. The story went on to say that revenue in the industry is estimated to have decreased 17.4% throughout last year, and is forecast to fall another 1.5% this year. This who could fled to state those who could flee, flee to States with lax pandemic roles like Texas and Florida. I know what you're saying, they can just go to Only Fans and make money there. Right? Well, think again, April Hayes also not her real name turned to online work, when the clubs closed, she made $400 in her first month on the content sharing site, Only Fans far less than the over $700 she would have made on one night stripping. Joel (45m 37s): So Leavin what's a stripper to do? Go work for Amazon, I guess. Leavin (45m 43s): Probably and she might get a hiring fee, but I don't see the problem. I mean, the stripper can leave the mask on and make a song about it or you can leave your mask on, but people don't really come for her charming smiles, I guess so if they leave their mask on and you're not allowed to touch them, I was taught by a bouncer. Joel (46m 5s): Not in the US. Leavin (46m 8s): But it's pretty safe, I guess, watching a strip show. So I'm not sure why people stop coming? Joel (46m 15s): Yeah. So, leave it to us to talk about this issue throughout the pandemic. So we've talked about car washes that became strip clubs, and you would just drive through or drive ins with strippers and then, you know, pay them little buckets of tips and whatnot. And so now that they're back to work, they're serious, they're obviously dealing with more challenges. I was surprised to hear the Only Fans commentary because I've always thought or heard that all these, all these women, young women that want to get naked are going to Only Fans and making millions by stripping online. And that's really nice because you don't have to deal with smelly men, grabby men, smokey, you know, bars and nasty, you know, locations. Joel (46m 58s): So this story sort of put that on its head. Like you can't just go to the internet and make money like you could in a strip club. So for the strippers sake, I hope that the men get back in there and start tipping as they should. I would have to think that once the world gets vaccinated and comfortable, that young people and everyone is vaccinated, that that people are going to flock to strip clubs once they think it's safe. So strippers keep the faith, stay strong, the men will be back with money in hand to make life a lot better for you. So Leavin as this tradition on this show, when it's over, we give this the listeners a we out. Leavin (47m 48s): Can I say we out? Cool, I always wanted to. Joel (47m 50s): Whatever language you want, man. Leavin (47m 52s): We out. We out. 6 (48m 48s): 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. 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.

Allyn Bailey first joined us on a stage in Canada at The Gathering as Intel's Talent Acquisition Transformation Manager. She blew us away. Since then, she got promoted and has since moved on, so we thought it might be a good time to have her back on the show. We chat about the advancements in technology and tools, the increased demands from organizations dealing with new workforce needs, the current state of recruitment marketing, and TA in a big company vs. an SMB. Get comfy for this one, and soak in the smarts during this Sovren powered pod. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Allyn (1s): Stop trying to retrofit old ways of gathering data about individuals into new systems and tools, and start thinking differently about how you collect the data and manage the data and what data it is that you're looking for. Chad (15s): Amen sister. Allyn (16s): And that's what I think recruitment marketing can play the biggest role. INTRO (19s): 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 (39s): Oh yeah, we're back. What's up everybody. This is Joel Cheeseman. You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am joined as always by my cohost, Chad Sowash. Chad (50s): Hello! Joel (50s): And today where we honored to welcome Allyn Bailey Global Talent Leader to this show, you may have remembered her from our chat in Banff when we could actually travel and go places Allyn how have you been since Canada? Allyn (1m 7s): I've been awesome. Can you believe Canada was literally a year ago. That was the last excursion away from my house. Chad (1m 13s): Yeah. Joel (1m 14s): Thank God we had that, otherwise, no travel in 2000 or 2020. Chad (1m 19s): Something to look forward to that's for damn sure. Joel (1m 22s): You're in Oregon, correct? Allyn (1m 23s): Yeah, I'm in Oregon. Joel (1m 24s): It's kind of a shit show like most other places. Allyn (1m 27s): Exactly. It was a shit show. I mean, I think it's, I'm happy 2020 is over. I think we're finally getting into 2021, so we're getting past the hangover and into something that looks like it's going to be a bit, so yeah, I mean, I think it was the year where everybody had it. Wasn't fun, but we're out the other side. I think. Chad (1m 47s): Things have changed a tad since our last conversation. This whole COVID thing took over. We've all been in our homes. All of these positions that could never be done from home magically started being done from home. Joel (2m 3s): I want to know about all the positions you've done at home. Okay. Chad (2m 7s): Or do you, or do you? Anyway, so Lynn being at Intel, how much of a change was that for you? Was it as big of a train wreck for your organization as it was for the rest of the world? Or did you guys pretty much have this shit all figured out because you were remote and hybrid and all that other fun stuff beforehand? Allyn (2m 28s): So we weren't, we're a very office based culture. We really were, I have worked from home for the last 10 years and I was always an anomaly. Right? I would show up into the office for meetings and people thought I was from one of the other sites because they thought I was traveling in. I just went with that for years. I'm like, Oh yeah, it's great to see you. Great, I was able to fly in. It looks good and then drive home 10 minutes to my house. But we adjusted quickly. I don't really remember it feeling painful. I think we had, as most companies, we had some IT issues early on. They got resolved within the first couple of weeks and everybody got into a rhythm and, now we're moving into the post COVID era. Allyn (3m 10s): And I think it's, there will be classes or pieces within our business operations that we'll want to go back into the office. But for the most part, I think particularly in the people space and in the TA space, we'll, mostly be working what we're calling hybrid, which basically means from our house. And if they make us come in for a meeting, we'll go. Joel (3m 31s): So Intel staying flexible on the work from home. Cause cause a lot of these big tech companies. Chad (3m 36s): They lied. Joel (3m 38s): They talked a good game early on, never going back. And now it's sort of like, you know what, we're paying these leases. Everybody gets your ass back to work. Not at Intel, huh? Allyn (3m 47s): Yeah, no, I think that, there will be, like I said, there will be regions or spaces or business groups, cause you know, we're very, we operate on a very business group by business group basis. A lot of decisions get made at that very kind of direct level. And so there will be some business groups that will tell everybody to get their butts back in the office because that's just the way their leaders choose to operate. I don't think it will last long because I feel be an overwhelming number of groups who will go for the hybrid option. And, we are offering an option in some spaces for business groups who want to go completely virtual. Chad (4m 20s): Well, let's talk about that real quick though, now, we're talking about leaders, right? Because I think you just hit the nail on the head. We have so many leaders that don't know how to lead unless you are sitting right in front of them. And I would have assumed that we would at least started to hone our management skills and hopefully provide a little bit more autonomy to our teams. But as Joel had said, it seems like it's still control over autonomy. And this is more, I think more management per manager than it is really company. What do we do about something like that? Chad (5m 1s): Do we have to like train managers to let go and start to learn how to be a leader outside of the office? Allyn (5m 8s): Yeah. I mean, I think, yes, we do need to do that, but I don't necessarily think it's a trainable thing. I think this is much more, I think personality and experience driven then it is a trainable skill. I mean, you can get a bunch of people in a room who all non-agree that it all sounds great on paper, you are made to remote. And then the minute they they're in that situation, their worst devils start to come out. Right. Their worst instincts start to happen. I mean, I tell you what, like I said, I've been working remote for 10 years. I want all these people to go back to the office because I was much more peaceful and I alone was working remote and nobody bothered me. Like all these people are now working remote and think they have to have a Zoom meeting for every small little conversation that we need to have. Allyn (5m 53s): Right? Like, I forgot how to use their, IMs right? It's like everything is, everything is a, is a face-to-face conversation. And Joel (6m 1s): U mentioned Zoom, what other tools were introduced, whether it be general business or recruiting wise that you either liked or didn't liked. And how many of those will you still be using once the world goes back to normal? Allyn (6m 15s): Yeah, you would think we introduced a lot, but we really didn't. That's one of our biggest challenges is that because we have such a bureaucracy around getting tools and systems in place across the enterprise and you just don't have the ability to bring something in and use it. We did do a large kind of larger migration from an Enterprise level over to Teams. And I think that you're seeing more uptick in usage of that. And, that's helped. We had issues even bringing Zoom on board, right? It wasn't necessarily the approved option. And it was the thing that our virtual event teams wanted to use for, you know, virtual college events or other hiring events. And that was challenging to get our, to get us in there and you say a lot of recruiters were getting their boot, like licenses up and going. Joel (6m 59s): What was Intel using before Zoom. Like that's that blows my mind. Where are you guys using video technology to talk? Allyn (7m 9s): No, no. Cause everybody, literally everybody was in their office or the Q and A, we were having a virtual face. We were having face to faces. People would talk on the phone on Skype. Right? But like video conferencing was not a thing. It is now, but it wasn't that, I mean, I think that's the biggest transition. We came into the modern age. Joel (7m 27s): Wow. Chad (7m 28s): You've been writing a lot about talent acquisition transformation. How has the transformation changed pre COVID to now? Because it seems like we're entirely different worlds and transformation means something much different than what it did two years ago. Allyn (7m 44s): Wow. You just hit like the existential question for me. Does it still exists? (Sexy music)Right. Oh my goodness. My therapy session to talk through this one. I here's my experience. I think that pre COVID, we were on a really strong trajectory for really advancing some, some pretty radical changes to the way in which we were doing things. It took us four or five years to get there. So there was this huge momentum behind it. I think the impact of COVID was panic. And panic created a real conservative behaviors, a lot of backsliding into, past behaviors and patterns, you know, where we were really transforming and trying to focus on the idea of quality and focus in on how we could create pipelines over time and really create value that way. Allyn (8m 35s): As COVID came into play, people got more panicked about what the future was going to hold. We had reductions like most companies did and most teams did the issues around cost and efficiency came back up to the top. So the transformation conversation has really turned into one that that says, can you take where you were going pre COVID, and the directions that we were heading and can we alter them and come up with a new path forward that is not overly indexed either for quality time or cost. Like it has a good balance. Chad (9m 10s): Did it like slam you through warp speed in some cases with regard to transformation, because many of these things, I'm sure technologies processes were on the table prior and COVID happened and it's like, shit, we gotta do this now. So it almost seems like at least some aspects were really slammed through the funnel warp speed? Allyn (9m 30s): I mean, some but some are also slammed shut immediately. Chad (9m 34s): Like what? Allyn (9m 34s): So I would say like, as we were going through massive technology improvements, we were in the process of bringing on AI technology to support our sourcers. And if you will, AI scoring and matching, right? That accelerated at speed and, we went much quicker into introducing that into our different regions because it was something we already purchased, we had the funds behind it and we knew that we were going to have less body resources. We had to supplement that with the technology. In other spaces where there were opportunities, for example, for us to go much faster on things like assessment or how do we go in and apply a video interviewing technology and places like that, we slammed shut, right? Allyn (10m 19s): And said, we can't absorb any change. And we can't move any faster on these things because we need to understand what tomorrow is. Big companies like, Intel, these big large enterprise companies are naturally change resistant. They just are. And any sort of abnormally in the environment makes everything go quiet. Fear reins the day, right? Not knowing what to predict and what's going to happen, makes all the pocketbooks shut down, all the resources shut down, and that's been a challenge. Now our company is also seeing a major shift over the last couple of months. We had a new CEO come in, a very different energy, start to happen in the company. Allyn (11m 1s): A big focus on how we're going to kind of help move that semi-conductor bandwidth forward for the country and I think that has meant more focus on how many people we're bringing in, how fast we can bring them in. And people are starting to dust off all the old plans and, starting to move them forward again. But it's been this long. It's been a good year before we've been able to start looking forward. Joel (11m 22s): I was going to say you paint a pretty dire picture for big co recruiting. Do you feel like that's unique to Intel? Like when you, when you hang out with your other big company buddies, is it the same story? And if so, how do you fix it and how are there not droves of people going to smaller, more agile businesses if that's the case? Allyn (11m 40s): So I think there are droves of people going to smaller, more agile businesses. We can talk about that, but I also think that I think it is the same case for many of the more traditional enterprise companies. On the flip side, I think there is a second class of company that is coming up, companies like the Cargill's out there. GM is doing this. I've been talking to several companies out there who are accelerating their desire to want to take on it, transforming their talent acquisition or their larger HR infrastructures. So I don't think it's a one size fits all, but I think that many of the companies that were in motion may have stopped. And those that were just on the beginnings of it or are realizing they have to make a change because what they're doing, isn't working are accelerating. Allyn (12m 27s): It's a really, it's a hodgepodge. It's hard to point and say, it's all the same everywhere. Joel (12m 32s): Yeah. I wouldn't exactly think of Cargill and GM is a, you know, poster children for innovation. So that was an interesting, a couple of brands you pulled out there, that's interesting? Allyn (12m 42s): Well, and I'll tell you from talking to them, the stuff they're getting ready to do in their TA space is going to revolutionize the world. I think that and we don't recognize them or see them out there because they're not talking about it that much yet. Joel (12m 52s): Say more, what are they doing? What's going on? Allyn (12m 55s): I think that Cargill is doing some really interesting, you've been driving transformation for a while, on their TA space. They're doing some really interesting stuff. And it's driven out of the regions, which is a very different approach. It's not necessarily a US led approach. They are doing some cool stuff, they're starting with technology innovation and redoing their process design stuff. I'm probably talking out of house and shouldn't be sharing all this, but I am anyway. Joel (13m 20s): Keep going. Allyn (13m 21s): That's what you get when you chat with me. And, I know that GM, you know, they have a new CEO as well. They're doing some pretty dramatic shifts as a company. And I think, TA they're seeing talent and TA is a big driver in that space. And I have rumor that they got some cool people landed over there really soon, to do some neat stuff. So, Chad (13m 41s): So tech, this is mainly driven by tech. And then they're finally starting to understand that you can't use your 1990s process methodologies and slam them into the tech. I mean, it sounds like really an implosion of everything that's going on and a rethinking of their whole shop? Allyn (14m 0s): Right. I think that's exactly what's happening. And I think what's happening in those sorts of companies. These sorts of solutions are getting accelerated because people sat back and said, you know, in the middle of COVID or right before, right in the middle of it, or afterwards said, listen, I need more technology because I need to be able to go quicker and faster. They started to put them into place and realize it's not a panacea. Right? You get the technology and you have to then think differently about how your entire business operates. Chad (14m 28s): Let me ask you a question on that, as we look to perspectively implode talent acquisition, does talent acquisition belong under HR, or should it be under something like marketing? Allyn (14m 40s): I believe talent acquisition should be under HR. Chad (14m 43s): OK. Allyn (14m 44s): I think that there is a marketing element. I think you can make a very strong case for the recruitment marketing element and it to be actually more marketing centered than recruiting centered. I'm coming more and more to that realization, even though I fought it for a long time. But I think the business of talent acquisition understanding talent, talent needs, understanding the workforce plan and being able to execute to land people in the right opportunities, that's an HR function. Now where it's not working well as an HR function is where companies are not realizing that it needs to be fully integrated into the way they think about their full talent management life cycle, right? Allyn (15m 27s): It's not just, you know, hire some people and throw some recruiters out there and manage the transaction of hiring. Those companies that have moved TA into the transactional spaces or kept them in the transactional spaces and not put TA at the table with learning and development with workforce planning, with succession planning are missing the opportunity to build a full talent strategy. Chad (15m 51s): Why is internal mobility finally on the table? It's like, it's been, non-existent, nobody's sure if TA owns it, if HR owns it, who owns it now, it seems like, kind of like DEI. Everybody's talking about internal mobility and trying to figure it out. I don't know how much faster they're going, but why is IM so big right now? Allyn (16m 14s): Well, I think people are talking about it, I don't know if anybody's doing anything about it. I think it's the new buzzword. I mean, I think that everybody realizes that they have an internal mobility challenge, that they have too many things coming at them like as tsunami. One, as the world starts to open up and people are feeling less afraid about where their next paycheck is coming from. They're looking back at last year and realizing whether they were happy or not happy with the way their life is going or way their work is going. And they're feeling much more open to looking at other places for jobs. And I think they're the internal mobility pushes partly a response to trying to solve that problem before, it hits everybody where they can't manage it. Allyn (16m 56s): And I think the other issue is that honestly, I think internal mobility, just like AI five or six years ago is like the new technology buzzword, all the tech firms and everybody that you're getting a demo from is talking about how everybody's talking about internal mobility and here's how you're going to solve it. And so everybody thinks it's a cool thing. They think everybody else has solved it. They think everybody else is doing it. And I have yet to talk to anybody who's got internal mobility working. It's important, we need to focus on it, but they're bigger, the biggest issues around internal mobility have to do with how your business operates. Are you willing to allow your talent to be free range talent inside your organization? Joel (17m 34s): It's commercial time. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (17m 36s): 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 (18m 20s): 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 (18m 36s): It's show time. Well, and again, that's a control versus autonomy conversation, which, if your organization is moving more toward autonomy, you're hoping to open up for more L and D and more vertical and horizontal moves, right? Allyn (18m 55s): Correct. You're hoping to, but again, that requires, it requires an individual manager or leader to make it safe for somebody to feel like they can look internally, it then of course requires you to have systems in place that allow finding a job or an opportunity internally, is easy. And it also means that you have to reduce our bias, that external is better. I think that's part of the challenge as well. I think I did a whole bunch of work this last year on executive mobility and looking at executive recruiting. And it is so much easier. We know in general, that is easier often to get hired for a job externally than it is internally. Allyn (19m 37s): But we find that as we start looking particularly at executive roles or more leadership roles, it's even harder to find something internally than a normal role. And part of the reason is that you have all your history and baggage associated with the company. And we have all of these guard rails around all the things that you have to prove or gates you have to pass in order for us to see you as relevant if you're internal. Whereas if you're external, we just assume you've done all those things. Chad (20m 3s): Yeah. Remember that time Joel ate all the jelly donuts. He's not getting a promotion. Allyn (20m 7s): Right? I mean, ha yeah, Chad (20m 10s): Allyn, I want to pivot back to something Chad said in regards to what belongs in marketing. And I was curious a little bit about employment brand. Did they belong in marketing, in your estimation or does anyone belong in marketing? They seem like the most obvious choice, but Allyn (20m 24s): I'm gonna tell you yes and. I think, yes, they do belong, they have marketing as their business. I'm really coming to a belief that employer brand is actually a fallacy. That if you have a good brand, then you should have a good employee, like it's all one thing. Chad (20m 40s): Join the dark side of Allyn. Joel (20m 41s): I know it's warm in our water. Chad (20m 44s): It's good over here. Allyn (20m 45s): I know. I can't believe I got there after all these years, but on the flip side, I will say that the one thing that marketing does not necessarily do well and that good recruitment marketing needs to do in order to support the talent acquisition space, is collect and manage data about candidates over time, right? The, one value add, I think recruitment marketing can provide to today's Talent Acquisition Suite is the ability through their relationship and their engagement with candidates and purposeful ways to get the most relevant and up-to-date information to get people, to spill the beans and tell us about themselves at the right team to the right time. And that data is so important for us to put into all these great technology systems we have in the place, right? Allyn (21m 31s): I mean, AI is fabulous, but it's only fabulous if you have like data and information, if you were working on the resume here, you're dead in the water. Chad (21m 38s): So being able to transition from that, we're hearing about all these algorithms. First off, we don't have the data to be able to crunch the algorithms. A lot of the clean data that is, and I point to job descriptions, which are shit. So how do we actually implement some of these great technologies if we don't have the clean data to actually get them to crunch on? Joel (22m 1s): Tell us, tell us a data story Allyn. I'm going to tuck myself in here for a second. Allyn (22m 7s): So I think we've got to get smarter about what data it is that we're actually looking at. So the biggest challenge I think we have today, and the reason why we think data is garbage, right? Is because the two primary sources of data that we use, are one job descriptions, which we just discussed are crap, right? Because what job description actually reflects a job? We know that that that's not the case, there's lots of reasons for that. The biggest one being that jobs are dynamic. I ask anybody right now to think about the job they're doing today and go back and look at the job description they applied to and see if it's anything like it, right? There are so many nuances and elements to a job that you just can't put on a piece of paper. Allyn (22m 51s): So that's the challenge. Two, the second piece of data that we use. And that everybody's like got all these great parsing engines that they're all, you know, everybody's screaming about how fabulous they are and putting them into the system, so this is the resume, right? But the resume is also a load of crap. Why? The resume is all self-reported data, so if your resume is really bad, it's because you wrote a bad resume. It's not because you haven't done stuff, right? And the second reason is that everybody formats it differently, uses it differently, and the last time somebody provided you a resume, it's the last visibility you have of who they are. So it's static again, and people are not static, they are dynamic. Allyn (23m 31s): They learn things, they have new experiences, et cetera. So I think the answer to this data problem is we've got to switch what data we're looking at. We have to start looking at, asking for data at different times, asking for it in different ways and collecting it in different ways? What if you use all the fabulous chatbots, right? And you have those chatbots actually pre-thinking and asking questions that relate specifically to the field you have in your systems and that they were going back and re-asking for that information at the right cadence. So it's updated and relevant. Stop trying to retrofit old ways of gathering data about individuals into new systems and tools, and start thinking differently about how you collect the data and manage the data and what data it is that you're looking for. Chad (24m 19s): Amen sister. Allyn (24m 21s): And that's where I think recruitment marketing can play the biggest role. Because how am I going to get somebody to give me new information on a regular basis, well, because I have engagement with them? And I give them something of value in return. Marketing knows how to do this. Come. You know, you want to participate in this webinar, fill out this little form, right? Instead we're still using talent forums as static forums to put people into a dead CRM database. Chad (24m 48s): Oh, my brain hurts. Joel (24m 50s): Allyn Bailey everybody. Thanks for joining us, Allyn. So for those who want to know more about you follow you, where should they go? Allyn (24m 59s): Bali. No. Chad (25m 2s): I'm coming. Allyn (25m 4s): I'm coming, more on that later. No, you can follow me on LinkedIn at Allyn Bailey or on the Twitter at @AllynBailey. And I also have like a little podcast thingy that I do with Tracy Parson, which is right now called the Recruitment Marketing Rebelcast. But we're spreading out cause like I just said, I think recruitment marketing is dying. So as the Talent Rebelcast and we put stuff out every once in a while, it's kind of interesting. Joel (25m 31s): What the fuck is a podcast? Allyn (25m 33s): I know. Chad (25m 34s): Dig it. Chad and Joel (25m 35s): We out. OUTRO (25m 36s): 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 (26m 21s): 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 an episode full of head scratchers and high fivers. Oh, and a unicorn! Handshake is now in the Billionaire Valuations Club... Really? Outmatch acquired Harver, which sets them up nicely for The Great Reopening, Glassdoor wannabe Blind raised a bunch of money ...and the post-pandemic segment: Google's labor union keeps kicking ass, Wendy's comes up short, and UBI isn't happening anytime soon. Another aural orgasm brought to you 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): 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 pipelines never get hacked on this podcast, baby. Welcome to Chad and Cheese boys and girls HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm Joel "no gas shortage here "Cheeseman. Chad (34s): and I'm Chad, "you murdered Muderder" Sowash! Joel (39s): On this week's episode, Handshake scores the ultimate hand job blind finds the light and Oh hell really TikTok Jobs is born. Just fucking shoot me. Now. 2 (54s): 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" 2 (1m 38s): 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 59s): Hey, so, so all of those individuals who didn't watch Elon Musk on SNL, okay. Joel, give us that. That's what the murder McDurder is from, but give what, what did you think about the performance? Did you watch the entire thing? Joel (2m 14s): I did watch the entire thing. I thought he came off more human than I probably expected. He came off a little funnier than expected. Now it wasn't, it was a great layup from a PR standpoint and that his mom showed up and he rolled with the Asperger's comment, which apparently was really impactful for a lot of families that have that issue in there. I think the best skits gets that he was in were the ones that sort of really leveraged his mythology or his life's work. So the one where he's a cowboy and they're like, let's just go in there, guns blaze. And he's like, wait a minute, hear me out here. We could dig a tunnel underneath and then so like they don't get it, that feels really pertinent to the world now. Joel (3m 1s): And then the, the Chad skit, which I'm sure you love where he's like, okay. Okay. And then blows up at the end, taking his helmet off. Like those were, those are really good moments. And then of course like the, the mayor of East town, which if you're not watching, it's almost worth getting HBO max, just to watch that show was fantastic. Also enjoyed the gen Z skit, which was sort of the first one I've seen where we make fun of gen Z. So they they're gonna have their moment of ridicule here, soon. Chad (3m 34s): I'd like to say I haven't watched an SNL all the way through for years, usually a weekend update, we eject, but we watched the entire thing and I didn't expect this from Elon Musk. He did anything. He dressed up as fucking Wario. I mean, he just, it was like he was in all these stupid outfits and costumes and doing all these stupid, stupid skits. And I could see a guy like him going, no, I'm not going to do that. I don't know if they threw anything at him that he just wouldn't do. And also NBC must have made some major bank because every fucking electric car company that's out there, other than Tesla bought ads during SNL. Joel (4m 19s): Yeah. It didn't work out as well for the, the crypto currency guys. But yeah, the EV companies had a good run of it for sure. Oh yeah. That was good. Is that third highest rank show after a Chappelle and Chris rock. So shit, I want, I want to see your boy Bezos on the show. That's next. Chad (4m 38s): No that would suck. I, you know who else is getting some pretty high ratings right now? I believe is a governor of Ohio Mike DeWine, who is starting a lottery for everyone who has received their first vaccine every Wednesday for five weeks, two winners are going to receive a million dollars. What does that say about Ohio? Does that say? Joel (5m 4s): What does it say about humanity that we have to give cash prizes to get vaccinated? Chad (5m 10s): And look at what's happening in India? Joel (5m 12s): Oh, for sure. For sure. Like, yeah, that's totally reprehensible. But like I'm all for the beer companies that are like free beer for getting vaccinated or even a little cash payments or gift cards to Target. But when you have to have a lottery for millions of dollars, Holy shit. It's the end of civilization. Chad (5m 34s): And then McDonald's is actually working with the Biden administration to drive vaccine awareness with a, we can do this campaign, sporting ads in times square on a McAfee coffee mugs. There's a TV buy that's coming out. My big question is why haven't we just figured out a Big Mac and Whopper vaccine dosage and just put it in those fucking burgers by now. I mean, we'd have most of America vaccinated by now. Joel (6m 4s): Yeah. Yeah. It's noble that McDonald's is doing this, but don't hold your breath for that obesity awareness campaign from McDonalds. Chad (6m 12s): Wait, wait, wait, wait better yet. If, if they both put out MAGA burgers and dosed them, it would be over. We wouldn't be like a hundred percent at this point. Joel (6m 25s): MAGA awareness at McDonald's. Chad (6m 27s): Oh fuck. Joel (6m 29s): Well, shout out to, and you're going to think this is a total hustle job, but we have, we have a beer drop winner. Chad (6m 36s): Ooh. Joel (6m 37s): This month it's Dan Cheeseman. No shit. Randomly picked. He's a ZipRecruiter guy. Chad (6m 45s): Really? Joel (6m 46s): He's head of their agency relations. Dan Cheesman out of Chicago is this month's beer drop winner sponsored by AdZuna. We'll be scheduling that Zoom tasting soon. It'll be a double cheese edition of zoom tasting. Gotta love it. We could get Abby Cheeseman on and really, really triple cheese that shit up good. Chad (7m 5s): There are too many fucking Cheesemans in this world. Let me tell ya. Joel (7m 8s): It's weird. Right? It's weird. Right? We got some Spotify data this month. You want to let people know what, what we discovered about our listeners from Spotify? Chad (7m 19s): So we've been doing a lot of work in Spotify, creating playlists, doing a lot of really cool shit. So you know, how is in the actual backend, looking at the analytics and our listeners, it actually on Spotify, you can see the aggregate of your followers, music tastes, and here are the top five. Joel (7m 38s): I would have guessed one, maybe. Chad (7m 40s): Top five. Joel (7m 43s): Is this one to five or five to one? Chad (7m 45s): Number five, Elton John. Joel (7m 47s): Number five. Chad (7m 48s): Elton John number five, Fleetwood Mac number four. I get that. I get that. Joel (7m 54s): Ok, ok. Chad (7m 54s): Number three. Drake. Okay. Joel (7m 57s): Yeah, now it gets weird. Chad (7m 60s): Number two, Taylor Swift and number one, kids. Drum roll please. Justin Bieber. Joel (8m 10s): Oh, come on. Where's the wham listeners? God damn it. Okay. So our listeners primarily listen to Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Drake, Fleetwood Mac, and Elton John. Let that sink in for a second. Chad (8m 28s): It's hard. It really is. Joel (8m 30s): It is hard. It is hard. We're huge in Canada, I guess, Bieber and Drake. Jesus. Well, I'm going to give a shout out to tigers who are having a moment now. I don't know if you've seen this, but there's a, there's a bad guy on the loose that, well, the, the bad guy has been apprehended, but his tiger is on the loose. I checked it this morning. And as of Thursday afternoon, they still haven't located this tiger, which is pretty fucking impressive for the tiger if can disappear in a major metropolitan area like Houston, but hey tiger king tigers on the loose tigers are still popular kids. And that makes me happy. Chad (9m 5s): Yeah. We have 5,000 tigers in captivity here in the United States. Joel (9m 11s): That we know of. Chad (9m 12s): Yeah. That we know of. And that's more than the 3,900 that are actually out running loose on Safari and whatnot throughout the rest of the world. It's like the redneck Riviera. That's all I got to say. Fuck. Yeah. Joel (9m 28s): Yeah. We talked about this on our zoom tasting with, by the way, I'll give a shout out to Jennifer Riley from New York and her husband, Kevin, we had a nice talk with them. She won the whiskey giveaway sponsored by Sovren on the show. Chad (9m 46s): Two bottles. Joel (9m 47s): We talked about this. We wondered if there were other countries where you can just like own a tiger or a lion. And we couldn't think of any. So here's a little, little help that we need from the community. If any other countries out there that, you know, have kids allow people to have tigers roaming in their backyard, let us know. Cause we're pretty sure America might be the only one. Chad (10m 5s): Fucking ridiculous. Oh, shout out to Chris Selah over a Great People, another leader making the Chad and Cheese required listening. Mandatory people. Joel (10m 17s): So you might've realized I had a little hard time remembering Jennifer Riley's name. So I want to give a shout out to Matt Alder, who I forgot last week I get Lou Adler and Matt Alder mixed up all the time. So I get a little confused there. So I called him the British guy, which I will forever now call him. Matt, sorry about that buddy, but the British guy I've called people a lot worse. Chad (10m 41s): Yes. Joel (10m 42s): He was very, very polite about it, which was nice. He was very British about it. Chad (10m 46s): He's an Evergreen Fellow. He's a part of the evergreen network with us. Joel (10m 50s): He's in the family. I forgot. Yeah. Chad (10m 53s): It's like Uncle George calling him, you know, the crazy uncle guy. But, that being said, apparently this communicator award that we won is a pretty big thing. Again, big, thanks to Evergreen and the, the team over at Evergreen and all the listeners giving us love on social media. Quick and fast list: Tracy Parsons, Debora Horowitz, Jamie Hornstein, Charlotte Overus. Aaron Stewart, Sean Horton, Shelley Careless-Whisper Billinghurst, Josh Zywein, Trent Cotton, Liz Scully, Manjuri Sinhih Christy Spilka, and Jasper Spannjart. Chad (11m 36s): Thanks so much that wasn't everybody. I couldn't get through them all. Thanks so much. Joel (11m 41s): What percent of those names do you think you said correctly now? 50/50? Chad (11m 46s): If I was lucky. Joel (11m 49s): I want to say a shout out/Sianora to Clubhouse. It was knowing you guys, if you haven't seen the number drop in terms of downloads and exodus of Clubhouse users, it's pretty impressive. I'm not going to put the nail in the coffin just yet, but the hammer and the nail are definitely out of the toolbox at this point. Chad (12m 10s): I have to say they just dropped the Android app and I downloaded it and I have attended a few sessions and I can now say, yeah, I don't fucking get it. Joel (12m 22s): And that is my opinion as well. Chad (12m 27s): What I do get though is we have an event and it's a pandologic events that we're hosting co-hosting and panel logic. They know how to throw a VIP event. They sent everybody, who's going to be on this event tonight, a spread of bourbon, we're doing a bourbon tasting and it's coming from Buffalo Trace. A Buffalo Trace employee's going to be on the line today and to go through some of that psychology and that kind of shit. But overall dude, we got Blanton's. We got Eagle Rare. We got Buffalo Trace. Chad (13m 9s): We got the White Dog. Joel (13m 12s): Is that that's just moonshine with a better label. Chad (13m 15s): Put the hair on your chest. And then the best thing for every single morning for your coffee, bourbon cream. I mean all of that, along with all the glass, the proper drinks. Joel (13m 26s): Yes. Yup, yup. Yup. The glass, the coaster. Jesus. If you're still sending out pins and calendars to people, Jesus, your way, your way out of bounds, man, you gotta, you gotta send good shit out to people. Chad (13m 43s): You're not in pando league. Joel (13m 46s): It's not a three package delivery. Just forget it. Just quit now. Yeah. So that's great. So you're on vacation next week. Why don't you gloat about that for a second for those of us who still are cooped up inside. Chad (14m 2s): It's time to live our fully vaxxed life, my friend, and obviously we're coming up on our birthday, our big Five-O Julie bought tickets to Costa Rica, baby. So we're going to be in Costa Rica for a week. Can't wait! Joel (14m 18s): And you're going to see some friends of the show while you're down there, allegedly. Chad (14m 22s): Yep. Yep. Nick from Hone It. Going to see Ethan he's been on. So Nick's actually been on firing squad. He did really well on that. You can check out, Hone It. And Ethan was on, Oh, I think late last year, early this year sometime. So yeah. Can't wait to see those guys. Joel (14m 38s): You do have a return ticket, right? This is a round trip vacation, correct? Just want to make sure I don't have to, you know, make scheduling changes to the podcas? Chad (14m 54s): Topics! Joel (14m 58s): All right. So you shredded this bad boy. Our buddies at Outmatch have acquired our buddies at Harver. What's up with that. Chad (15m 5s): So huge, thanks to all of our sources in Europe for providing amazing intel and insights. We actually dropped the news pretty much nearly a week before they planned, before Outmatch planned to drop the press release in itself. So all the props go to our fine friends and listeners over in Europe, keep the good stuff coming, we appreciate it. But since last September, Outmatch has acquired Launchpad, First Person, Checkster and now Harbor, can you dig into the press release a little? Joel (15m 39s): Yeah. So Harbor for those that don't know or don't remember, they basically help manage mass hiring for people. So that's their expertise and Outmatch is focused primarily on candidate experience. So if you, you know, if you combine mass hiring with a solid candidate experience should be a match made in heaven. So Harbor has raised around $25 million compared to Outmatches meager in comparison, $8 million. The combination is backed by existing Outmatch shareholders, including Rubicon, Technology Partners and Camden Partners, which is private equity. So similar to Jobvite, this definitely has the recipe of let's buy as much shit as we can to create one platform to rule them all. Joel (16m 26s): So we're watching a heavyweight match in the making with a lot of these companies. And I think it's fair to say that Outmatch is getting in the ring in a big way. Chad (16m 36s): Yeah, they're definitely in the ring. This is obviously filling core gaps with better technology than they already had. They're also growing their client portfolio and global footprint all through acquisition. So we've seen this with iCIMS as well with their acquisition of easier crew. Joel (16m 55s): For sure. Chad (16m 55s): They have 300 now, 300 global employees, 1300 combined customers and Harbor has big names like Peloton Teleperformance, McDonald's, Valvoline, KPMG, et cetera, et cetera. So Harbor actually raised, I think it was like 27 million euros, which is about 35 million USD. And my sources say that Harbor was actually prepping for a series C. So this wasn't, this was not a clearance rack sale. Harbor has been experiencing excellent growth just in the past couple of years, they have expanded their footprint in London and also New York, they're out of the Netherlands primarily. Chad (17m 41s): So this has been growth. And I think the combination between the two Outmatch already being a us organization and then Harbor being able to really focus, I think more on what they can do in Europe. It's a great concept to each other. Joel (17m 56s): Yeah. Listeners of our show will know that there's a bit of a hiring squeeze in these kinds of industries. And at some point the fed money is going to run out. The government checks are going to dry up. The Bitcoin millions are going to dry up as well, and people are going to go back to work. So having a technology to better manage the flow of candidates, as well as improve the experience that these folks have. It really feels like this deal is hitting at the right time. And these guys are gonna really, you know, hit the ground running with this partnership. So kudos to them for sure. And as a side note, yes, Harbor named us, this podcast, a 12 best recruiting podcasts to listen to in 2020. Joel (18m 40s): So good things happen to companies that suck up to us. I just want to add that to this new story, for sure. For sure. Yeah. Chad (18m 49s): We'll just use this as an isolated incident. Joel (18m 53s): Yeah. And we won't name the other 11 podcasts that they talked about in their show. So Handshake is also in the news. Jesus Christ, we just talked about them getting a bunch of money, but yeah. Unicorn alert, unicorn alert. We have a new billion dollar plus valuation company. So student focused recruitment site handshake has closed its second $80 million funding round in the last eight months. Listeners will remember that October was the last round. They now claim a valuation of $1.5 billion. The San Fran based startup has raised a total of 235.5 million since its founding in 2016. Joel (19m 35s): Handshake has more than doubled its revenue every year for the past three years and is nearing 100 million in annual revenue. The new funding Handshake says it will increase its footprint overseas. You remember the last round was all about virtual job fairs. Handshake says it has 18 million users, which is interesting because the total student population in the U S is around 20 million, so I'll let you do your own investigative research on that. They claim 1200 educational institutions and 550,000 enterprise clients. So Chad, are you ready for a Handshake job or are you looking for something a little more gratifying? Chad (20m 15s): I know hand jobs over here, kid. I want more than that. So from the Forbes article, it says "with the new funding Handshake hopes to create new features on Handshake that will help students and recent grads develop the skills they need to further their careers" end quote. Okay. So wasn't that what all of the college student debt was for in the first place? This is really weird first and foremost, to, to say that they have 18 million users. When I, I would like to say obviously 25% of that I would assume are maybe even a larger percent of a percentage of that actually falls off every year because they go into, they're leaving university, they're going into corporate America. Joel (21m 2s): There's a little claim of people still keep their email address and they still kind of keep touch. But it's a little, it's a little sketchy to say 18 million out of the 20 are you users. Chad (21m 12s): I have to say Handshake owns the college recruiting market for the university platform side of the house, especially around onsite event, scheduling virtual, virtual interviews, those types of things. But remember students can and will go anywhere and everywhere to search for jobs. And here's a quick quote from our friend, Steven Rothberg, over at college recruiter. Who's been doing this for a little while. Joel (21m 40s): He's been doing it for a minute. Chad (21m 41s): So quote, "They Handshake have almost no penetration after the day of graduation, but now say that they want into that. They can't succeed with that by leveraging career services as grads don't use career services," end quote. Again, Steven points out what pretty much they're not talking about at handshake, other than saying, we want to push forward into the post-grad side of the house, which again is an entirely different market that they, I don't think have a handle on. Joel (22m 14s): So we've dropped hand jobs, penetration and pushing in this new story and I'm going to drop another sexual innuendo and that's horniness. You know, I think part of this is investors are horny to go public. We're going to see ZipRecruiter go public. There's talk of a talent.com going public, which we covered on the show recently, why the hell not Handshake? So I think there's a lot of push from investors to get this company out into the public markets. And I think a lot of it is partly driven by there's still a lot of horniness by companies to grab these graduates sort of, off the tree. And I think that apparently Handshake has found some secret recipe to get companies really excited about the access that they have to college students. Joel (23m 0s): So something's working, this is a historically shitty business. There's no track record. You know, you mentioned Steve and doing this for a long time. We've had after college. That's also in the old school category. We have other companies that we've talked about, like Ripple Match. Recently companies just kind of come and go in this space, the ones that are long, long timers, you know, they're not big public billion dollar companies. They sort of find their niche and their groove and they get into it. So Handshake is going into uncharted territory. It'll be interesting to watch, but I'm not betting any money that they're going to come out on the other end, a winner in the long-term. Chad (23m 38s): Yeah, it's weird. I think the only company who had a hold on the market like handshake does today, job track back in the early two thousands before they were bought by Monster and Monster just fucked it all up with Monster Track and Monster Campus. So yeah, I think there is an opportunity here for organizations that we talk this about this and, and other shows about universities to be able to be more efficient. The problem with that is the efficiencies are going to lie within kicking career services to the curb, because this is a self-service platform instead of needing a full career services unit and/or department, you might just need a few people. Joel (24m 23s): Which is part of the challenge as well, right? You're you're working in an environment where tenure is a thing, right? Like where the status quo is embraced colleges don't want to get rid of their job placement and career hell plague. Nope, No, University wants to do that. So it's just a very hard balancing act of colleges and employers and keeping students engaged because they're always looking for the next big thing, which we'll get to in the end part of the show. But like, it's just a really hard business if they figure it out more power to 'em man, but the history is not in their favor. Chad (24m 59s): Yes. And I also think it's ripe for competition because I don't see, especially in what Handshake is doing with the universities, that there's really enough competition. So I think that it's right for competition in this space. Joel (25m 12s): Competition is good for business. Like the competition they might get from Jobvite. Jobvite PROMO (25m 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. Jobvite PROMO (25m 57s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. So what are you, what are you bingeing on these days? Chad, Chad (26m 5s): We are looking at was it the Mar of East town? That's what we we're looking to actually start. We just finished Jupiter's legacy, which was not amazing, but it was superheroes. So fuck it. We're going to watch it anyway. We binged through that in like, you know, the weekend. So there's just a ton of content that's out there. Winter Soldier, Falcon and Winter Soldier was amazing. So yeah. I mean, I'm just bouncing around for the most part. How about you? Joel (26m 37s): Yeah. Mayor of East Town, for sure. But that's sort of everyone's go-to now that everyone is watched the Queen's Gambit, I'll throw in one, that's a little bit off the radar. It's called White Gold. It's a Netflix show. It's like a 30 minute sort of sitcom takes place in the eighties. And it's about basically a bunch of English shysters that are selling windows to folks because apparently that was a thing in the eighties. If you lived in the UK or Europe, you had a lot of old windows and then there was an invention around plastic fiberglass windows. And, this comedy focuses on that phenomenon. I find it pretty funny and interesting so White Gold, kids if you're looking for a few laughs on Netflix? Chad (27m 22s): White Gold. Joel (27m 23s): Okay. So White Gold may be blinded by the light. So Blind is in the news, we've talked about them occasionally on the show. So the Berkeley, California based anonymized networking and employee chat site, that's a fancy way of saying Glassdoor want to be a raise 37 million in series C funding this week. Main street investor led the round and was joined by investors, including Cisco investments and pavilion capital. Total funding is around 62 million since its founding your member Glassdoor went for about 1.5 billion founded in 2013 when anonymous apps like Whisper, Secret and YikYak. Joel (28m 7s): That's one blast from the plast were all the rage. Most interestingly Blind is building what it calls quote "Talent by Blind" end quote, a platform for capturing hiring intentionality from its content and selling it to recruiters. The goal is to transfer people whose intentions might be to move off a big tech company to a startup environment. Blind says a couple of companies are currently using the Talent by Blind platform. Thoughts, Chad? Chad (28m 39s): So this is a somewhat anonymous platform, right? Joel (28m 43s): So you have to verify that you're with a company by sending an email to that company address, proving that you're at least with that company, Chad (28m 52s): They verify through company email? Joel (28m 54s): Yeah. It's like they say it's like a Reddit meets Glassdoor meets Slack kind of an experience. Chad (29m 0s): Feels like a scam to me because what you're doing is you're asking all of these individuals to come in in a pseudo anonymous kind of way. Cause you're not anonymous really. So in a pseudo anonymous kind of way, and you can have all of these great discussions and you can make these interactions. And then they also have this Talent by Blind thing that they're pulling together that you talked about where there's a hiring data play that's here. So this to me feels really scammy. Really Cambridge Analytica meets Facebook. It just doesn't feel right. Is there marketing to individuals? Joel (29m 41s): Yeah. Chad (29m 42s): About being pseudo anonymous and yet you're not really all of the signal data that you're pushing through that pipe every single day they're going to use on you period. So they're backing into building a LinkedIn kind of version by saying they're anonymous, but they're just bullshitting you. So I mean, looking at it from the outside, it's like, wow, this is really kind of cool. Then you dig into it and it's like, man, this is fu*ked, this is nasty. This is wow. I wouldn't want to have anything to do with this thing. Joel (30m 14s): Yeah. This is sort of a tale of two businesses for me. So on the negative side, I mean, this is a user base that doesn't seem to be able to get out of Silicon Valley. I mean, they've been around since 2013 and they're still sort of a niche Silicon Valley platform. Glassdoor and Indeed obviously, have escaped that niche and, and gone worldwide. I mean, eight years in a lot of people don't even know who Blind is, even in our industry, which may or may not be surprising moving out of anonymous chatter and getting into hiring solutions is probably the right move. But a lot of companies are bitter about Glassdoor and how they've been treated by Glassdoor. Joel (30m 53s): Like, so they'd rather not see another company rise from the anonymous review and comment, you know, platforms or universe. They'd probably rather see it die in the vine. You'll notice that TechCrunch who broke this story and talked about it failed to mention traffic numbers, which I think Blind probably doesn't want you to know because if it got compared to what Glassdoor and Indeed are getting, which is not apples to apples, but it would probably not paint a real favorable light. And on the other hand, on the pro side, you know, from what I'm seeing, even from, from data from Poach, that we're polling, there's a ton of engagement, at least in Silicon Valley and places on there, a fairly new review section. Joel (31m 36s): So if someone could dethrone a Glassdoor and Indeed, or at least maybe be a solid number three, I like Blind's chances over probably everyone else, including Fairy God Boss and Canoe and Comparatively. Chad (31m 49s): Yeah. Joel (31m 50s): They just need to figure out the marketing issues, making them friendly to companies, which good luck with that. So they have some huge challenges, but people, the kids do seem to like it and Glassdoor has an image problem in terms of looking old. And let's be honest since being, I mean, since being bought, like they're not exactly innovating over there, they're just kind of milking the profits and the traffic that they already have. So I mean, yeah, yeah. I like their chances if anybody's, but it's a really, really tough market that employers don't really, really like. Chad (32m 24s): It seems incredibly scammy also since they've already verified a person by their email, how do you know if that person has actually left the company or not? Joel (32m 36s): Yeah, it's challenging, right? Yeah. I don't know if they have temporarily. I don't think they have occasional reconfirming that they're with a company. It's also difficult because if you're verifying through a company address, then the company knows that you're getting verification emails from Blind, which does tip off the company that you're getting Blind emails and they can track where that email goes. So they can at least sort of funnel in if it's negative commentary about a company like who it could be. So semi-anonymous, semi in trouble. If you start talking shit too much. Yeah. Chad (33m 14s): Nice. I feel like I need to take a shower after talking about these fuckers. Let's move on to the next one. Joel (33m 20s): It may or may not help. I don't know. We got a lot of stuff going on. Chad (33m 24s): The question is, do we want to start with the jobs report, which was very paltry at 266,000 jobs? Chicago restaurants forced to pay $15 an hour, hear that forced to pay, which is exactly what the people getting paid by staying at home? Wendy's giving out free food coupons with every application or last but not least Google childcare workers who are pissed off because they're forced to go back to work without transportation? Pick your poison. Joel (33m 56s): Exactly. He's talking about a cornucopia of topics. Well, let's go with jobs report since that was kind of a week old story at this point. They were expecting a million new jobs created and last month and only 266,000 were created, which was horrible, horrible news. It seems like a combination of living off stemies and Bitcoin millions and gigging on the side in coordination with childcare issues, COVID fears. A lot of things are coming together to really kill the recovery from a supply side. A lot of States now are going to start killing the extra payments that they're getting from the feds in terms of unemployment. Joel (34m 38s): Those should start running out in June. The only comment I have on this, and I think it's a little bit outside of the box is this is a little bit of a UBI universal basic income experiment. And if this is what UBI is or isn't, it's going to be the perception of what UBI is going to bring the economy. And I think the bigger picture of what's going on with the economy right now means that UBI is not going to happen in our lifetime. I don't think any politician can seriously introduce a UBI after the last few months, I think they're going to get killed by getting called an economy killer. Joel (35m 20s): And they'll point to this moment as to why there shouldn't be an UBI initiative. Chad (35m 24s): Many people are seeing this as a vacation from a shitty fucking job that they don't want to run back to. And a shitty fucking job that had shitty fucking wages or both right. Could, could have been one, could have been the other, but they're not mutually exclusive. So overall, this is also showing here in the US, when you have restaurants who are saying, yeah, we're really forced to pay $15 an hour. Fuck, are you kidding me? I mean, you're forced to pay $30,000 a year. I want to go back to what I've said on earlier podcasts. If you cannot pay a living wage to the people who are actually providing the services, the products, whatever, right. Chad (36m 9s): Then you don't, you don't deserve to be in business, close up fucking shop. Okay. Joel (36m 14s): The companies that do care and in some cases can actually act accordingly are successful, are starting to move in that direction. I think interestingly, this past. Chad (36m 25s): They're being forced. Joel (36m 26s): Well market, market forces. Chad (36m 27s): I don't know if I would call it market force? Joel (36m 30s): I would, companies will pay, if they can't get people to serve food, they're going to have to pay them more money. But the point I wanted to bring up was I think Uber and Chipotle, I recently talked about, talked about quarterly reports and earnings. And Chipotle, which also recently increased minimum wage or entry-level salaries talked extensively on their call about, look, if you get in at Chipolte within three years, you'll, you know, you're on track in three years to be making six figures as a manager, store manager or something like that, which is real money. Chad (37m 4s): Tuition repayment. Yeah. Joel (37m 6s): That's relevant, to where I think both of us would like love to see the world go. The other thing was, was Uber talked about average payments, hourly payments for New York City. New York City is sort of a unique market, but New York City drivers of Uber were getting upwards of $38 per hour driving Uber. So some, some things are happening that are positive. I just wanted to point those out. We're a long way from, from being, you know, happy go lucky, but things are moving in the right direction in some cases. Chad (37m 36s): Those Uber numbers, for the most part, the, the right that like the Instacart, the Uber numbers, those are totally blown out bullshit for the most part, because they're not, they're not working eight hours making $38 an hour. Right. They might have three hours overall where they're sitting in their car for a certain amount of time. So, you know, again, numbers that they're pushing out there. I think for the most part they're, they're bogus, but I understand where you're coming from, but it's better than getting fucking free coupons for food. Joel (38m 6s): Yeah. Yeah. We've if, if McDonald's has given out $50 bills just to interview, I'm not sure Wendy's free breakfast sandwiches for an application is going to move the needle. But what are your thoughts? Chad (38m 19s): Yeah, I think Dave is rolling over in his fucking grave right now. Joel (38m 25s): Free breakfast sandwich with a job application. They couldn't even throw in like a double stack. It had to be a shitty breakfast sandwich anyway. Okay. So Google the workers who and take care of Google corporate employee' s children during the day are furious over being hit with additional transportation costs. As the company requires them to return to in-person work. Google has told it's 148 San Francisco Bay area children or childcare workers to return to the office starting Monday, despite the company shuttle services remaining shutdown, and many corporate employees being allowed to keep working remotely. This is according to a news story that featured Alphabet worker's union in a statement as a result, Google is forcing the childcare workers who a WVU for alphabet workers' union said earn an average of $20 per hour to find alternative ways to get to work. Joel (39m 18s): That could be costly, especially for many workers who live far from Google's campuses due to the high cost of living in the Bay area. The union is asking Google to provide a $1,500 monthly transportation stipend until the company shuttle services resume. As of Friday evening, the petition had gathered more than 250 signatures from workers at Google and other subsidiaries of the parent company. Alphabet. Seems like a fair request to meet Chad. If you're going to shut down the shuttle, at least at least give me a stipend for driving, you know, eight hours to Silicon Valley. Chad (39m 53s): But this is a knee jerk reaction of leadership, understanding that the only way that they can get people back into the office is to provide childcare. So they're thinking, okay, let's rush the childcare providers back to the office, but then they forgot that, you know, the childcare providers themselves so that the teachers so on and so forth, they have needs too. And the thing I thought interesting is that, you know, they earn on average $20 an hour in Silicon Valley where the living wage is $28 an hour. So not only are they working below the living wage, but they're also pretty much having to dig in their own pockets to come back to work because it's mandatory. Chad (40m 35s): So again, I think any company that's out there listening to this, learn from these organizations and their huge fuck ups, because that's what this is. I mean, we're talking about people who take care of your kids. Pretty important, pretty important, right? Joel (40m 52s): Have a good kind of a good retention tool for all the knowledge based workers. Chad (40m 56s): Keep them happy because you know, you, want happy people taking care of your kids, right? We need to think a lot of this through when we talk to Seth Feit from Spectrum, from Charter Communications about them returning to work. I mean, it's almost like they had this formulaic kind of, you know, way of making it happen. And they were really doing their best to think through all of these different steps. Companies have to do that. They can't just have these knee jerk reactions. Joel (41m 27s): By the way, are we ready to call the Alphabet workers union, the most influential union in America? Chad (41m 33s): It is. Joel (41m 34s): They're just about the best. Chad (41m 35s): Because it's just about the only union in America these days with any, with any chutzpah JOB AD X PROMO (41m 40s): 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. JOB AD X PROMO (42m 21s): That's joinus@jobadx.com. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Joel (42m 32s): Oh my God. Chad (42m 33s): Got to thank Daniel O'Neill for calling more attention to this story by the way on LinkedIn. Joel (42m 39s): Daniel had a little bit of a premature flex on this one now we'll we'll see. We'll see what happens. Okay. So my God, I can't believe I'm reading it. All right. So this is a report from Axios. They say that TikTok is testing a job service for gen Z. No, it's not the Onion, it's Axios. Okay, the pilot program is designed to help people find jobs on TikTok and connect with companies looking to find candidates. It's also meant to help brands use TikTok as a recruitment channel, the platform isn't a product that's integrated with TikTok itself. Chad (43m 13s): What? Joel (43m 13s): I think that's important, but rather a separate webpage accessible via the TikTok app where brands can post jobs, primarily entry-level listings. Users can post a TikTok video resume to the site rather than a traditional resume. TikTok will ask candidates to post their resume videos to their TikTok profiles if they wish to help publicize the new service. A Washington post article about gen Z is using TikTok to share career advice, inspired TikTok executives, to try to bolster their platform for job seekers. Where to begin Chad? Chad (43m 53s): Another knee jerk reaction from leadership to create something that is a ham fisted solution. It's a disconnected shit. It's not even integrated into their platform. It feels even more ham-fisted than Facebook for jobs or Google for jobs. There's no flex here. This is just a reaction that is a shitty reaction. Joel (44m 12s): Yeah. If TikTok was looking to become as uncool as possible, as quickly as possible this is a fantastic strategy. Historically, Chad (44m 21s): this shit doesn't work. Joel (44m 23s): I mean, remember when every employee, sorry. Remember when every company had to have like their own Facebook page for people to join and follow the company. Like nobody does anymore. I mean, remember when every employee was going to use Snapchat to recruit, you know, fast food employees, we talked about think McDonald's was doing that applications. Snaplications yeah. We, we touted that shit big time and they're gone. TikTok users. don't want to go to a separate section on TikTok to look for jobs. That's ridiculous. This is going to fade out. No employers are going to do it. Even if they scrape jobs, I just don't see people. I mean, how are you going to get the resumes that are in video format to the job postings that they're scraping them? Joel (45m 4s): Like, it's just this isn't going to work. It just, isn't going to work. Telling you 20 years of experience says, this is a shit show waiting to happen. Chad (45m 10s): Then that being said, I'm going to go get a beer and watch TikTok. Joel (45m 16s): And we'll enjoy bourbon in about four hours. Amen. And with that, Joel and Chad (45m 22s): We out. OUTRO (46m 14s): 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 Indeed looks like they've run out of spaghetti to throw at the wall, they did what this week? We're clearly not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy! This week's topics are confusing at best. Who's steering the ship at "The World's Largest Job Site."? Facebook Workplace makes us ask WTF? Uncomfortable white guys at Basecamp send a third of the staff running. Return to work confusion continues at big companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan. and we throw in Kroger drones and military dogs roaming the streets of NYC for good measure. We're talking end of days shit here people. As always, your favorite AWARD WINNING podcast is powered by JobAdx, Sovren, and Jobvite. 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 (20s): Oh yeah. It's not a blog. It's a social media platform everybody. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast earthlings. I'm your cohost Joel "still banned on Facebook" Cheeseman Chad (33s): and I'm Chad "bear down" Sowash Joel (36s): And on this week show Indeed perplexes, Facebook workplace flexes and Base Camp more like face plant am I right? Buckle up. Jobvite PROMO (48s): 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 (1m 28s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. . Chad (1m 34s): You still haven't seen Bridgerton? Joel (1m 36s): I have not. Have you watched Chad yet? Chad (1m 38s): I have not. Joel (1m 40s): Well, there you go. You watch Chad and I'll watch an episode of Bridgerton. Chad (1m 44s): I'm not watching Bridgeton Joel (1m 45s): Right after I watched Downton Abbey, I thought it was Downtown Abbey forever. And I saw a billboard in New York city and I was like, Oh God, Downtown Abbey's hot. My wife goes it's Downton Abbey. But yes, watch Chad dammit. It's funny. Chad (2m 3s): Yeah. So I want to start off right out of the gate saying I've, I've always liked the Chicago Bears because of Walter Payton, because of the Fridge. Because I mean, when we grew up right in April. Joel (2m 15s): And the Shuffle. Chad (2m 16s): Oh yeah. Super bowl shuffle. I mean, all those things, Jim McMahon wearing the sunglasses. I mean, Joel (2m 21s): Ditka. SNL skits. Chad (2m 23s): Ditka. Yeah, but I have to say that a big shout out right out of the gate to the Chicago Bears during the NFL draft are our boy Justin Fields. I love this kid. He fell down the ranks. He's like the, probably the number one or number two pick athlete wise pick wise throughout the entire draft. He fell to number 11 due to information coming out that he had, he has epilepsy. Now, now this kid has been QB one since high school. I'm talking about nationwide QB one. Joel (2m 59s): Well, technically One B after Trevor Lawrence, but okay. Chad (3m 3s): In high school, he was one in college, maybe two, one or two, right depending on the team? And he fell down 11 and he's never had problems, quote/unquote "problems" with the epilepsy because he takes his meds and he's stays on his regimen. So, I mean, this is, this is a big thing. The kid has a disability, right? But he is a monster six, three, 225 pounds. Has a rocket for a fucking arm. Good on the Chicago bears. I can't wait. Joel (3m 34s): Oh the Bears. And now you have Rogers wanting out of Green Bay. Like this is turning into a football show, but like Roger's in Green Bay. And there's speculation that the Browns are trying to trade for Rogers. Like, I'm very confused by all this. Chad (3m 49s): Well, I, as we talk about Cleveland, let's talk about evergreen podcasts who won 4 communicator awards. That's right. Evergreen podcast out of Cleveland, Ctown baby. And guess what? Guess what? Joel (4m 4s): What Chad? Chad (4m 5s): We the Chad and Cheese show actually won an award of excellence around an individual episode in the business class. And you're going to love this. The episode was CareerBuilder Smokescreen. CareerBuilder is the gift that keeps on fucking giving. Joel (4m 28s): Yeah. How apropos that our first real award involves CareerBuilder and ripping them a new one. We have a resi. That's just good fun. But this is, this is like a real shit. This is like an iHeart radio ad. This is like real legitimate industry shit. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. Do we win a cash reward for that or anything? Are we going to get a Rolls Royce, a gift from, from evergreen? Probably not. Chad (4m 52s): I'm sure they're going to hook us both up with Maseratis. Joel (4m 55s): Probably somebody who is getting something delivered is Jennifer Riley, our new, a whiskey recipient sponsored by Sovren. We sent out a bottle of whiskey. They get a Chad's choice and a Cheese's choice every month. Jennifer has gotten mine. I think yours is on the way. And we've scheduled a tasting with Robert Ruff of Sovren for next week. Chad (5m 18s): I messaged. I messaged her yesterday and said, congrats, you know? And she said, wait a minute. I have two bottles coming. Joel sent me one too. And I'm like, that's how we roll. Joel (5m 28s): That's how we roll baby two for, two for a shout out to Facebook for banning Trump. That's all I have to say about that. Or continuing the ban on Trump and the best headline of the week was I think it was vice. It said Donald Trump has launched his social media platform in quotes. And it's just a blog, which I thought was really, really funny. Chad (5m 51s): I think it was funny. He's he's been quoted in saying that press releases are more eloquent than tweets, but they're still full of shit and lies overall. But I mean, I think it's, it's hilarious. He loses this flame thrower being Twitter and Facebook and really social media. And you know, now he's writing shit on blogs. Joel (6m 14s): Donald Trump blogger. Love it. Love it. Shout out to our buddy, Matt Baxter at Wedge, they raised another round of funding. 1.6 million. Shout out to them. If you miss their firing squad episode, make sure you check that out. Chad (6m 30s): Yup. LinkedIn apparently has high Q in continued legal hell. Our judicial system is so fucked up. Whatever happened to speedy LinkedIn is just pretty much grinding. Hi, Q via time. And I'm sure attorney fees at this point. Joel (6m 47s): Chad, we have the best juror judicial system that money can buy. And I don't want to hear another word about it. Chad (6m 53s): If you've got the money, you got the best justice. That's exactly right. Joel (6m 58s): Just ask OJ. Chad (6m 59s): Shout out to listener Michelle Raymond from My G network. Have you heard of this platform? Joel (7m 5s): My G-spot what? Chad (7m 7s): Yeah, pretty close. Now it's called my G work, which it's it's a LinkedIn network. It's set up just like LinkedIn, but it is for the LGBTQ community and you it's obviously more anonymous, but we're thinking about having her on during pride month to do some educational interviews. We've got a couple of dumb white dudes here, and I think it'd be good to have her on and help us with pronouns and shit like that. Right. Joel (7m 37s): We're doing like a pride month series. What what's going on there? Chad (7m 41s): Yeah. Why not? I mean, did you just do a series with again, two dudes who really need educated? And I think there are many people that are out there today that have the same questions. It's like, I don't understand the pronouns. I don't get this. What are these acronyms? And et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's like, you know what, let's go ahead and have the conversations and have those hard conversations out in the open and have people, you know, to answer them and educate us. And hopefully again, some of our listeners will get educated too. Joel (8m 11s): Yeah. So by the way, goddammit. So Joe Lockwood shout out and apologies. Speaking of people who should be on our June series, if we're doing that. So sending shit to Europe is always a crap shoot anyway. So I sent Joe a t-shirt and who knows when I sent it? I could probably look at the postmark. It was probably six months ago. And the fucker came back this week. No, it had a rip in it. So he couldn't see the whole address. So I've got to go back to the whole drawing board and send it back to Joe. So Joe apologies if you're listening, but God damn it sending shit to Europe is like sending it to Mars. Like it's a total crap shoot takes forever. Joel (8m 53s): Anyway. So shout out to Joe, we'll get that shirt back in the mail ASAP and I'll drop another 30 bucks to send it to you. However much it fucking awesome. Chad (9m 1s): Yeah. I think the US postal system after that last fucking idiot that was in charge. I think we're still trying to rebuild it after that. Joel (9m 10s): When is Elon Musk's gonna fix the mail? God damn it. Chad (9m 13s): That's a good call. Joel (9m 13s): Screw this Martian mission shit. Fix the mail. Chad (9m 16s): Very good call. We also, also not an award, but we love lists. We're a sucker for lists. We made Fetcher's six must listen to podcasts for recruiters. Not too shabby. Joel (9m 31s): You read it. It's pretty spot on because we're, I think we're right above. What's his name? Brett guy. Matt Alder time. Chad (9m 40s): Matt Alder. Joel (9m 41s): So yeah, so we're above Alder and ours is like, they break shit and piss people off and, and machine gun start-ups and then his is like, it's a great list in over a cup of coffee or tea. And I'm like, wow, they kind of got that right. So way to go Fetcher. Very nice. And I'll get Alder right. Eventually. Chad (9m 60s): Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you will. Not so much free, free, free. I sound like that one commercial. We're talking about free t-shirts from Emissary. Free t-shirts from Emissary. Free beer from AdZuna. And free bourbon, that's two bottles of bourbon, from Sovren. And where do you go, Joel? Joel (10m 19s): You got to go to Chadcheese.com/free. Put in your info, for a chance to win all that shit. Folks. Chad (10m 27s): Love it. Love it. Topics? Topics! Joel (10m 34s): All right. What the fuck is going on in Indeed? You got some scoop. Chad (10m 39s): So yeah, I actually received several calls this week. Texts, DMS, all this other fun stuff. And it seems that Indeed's fucking shit up again. Does that surprise anyone? No, no. Joel (10m 50s): That's weird. Chad (10m 51s): During a time when hiring companies cannot get enough candidate traffic to their jobs, Indeed drops another hammer on gig employers. That for most of our listeners who are out there, who don't know, we are at the point where there's more budget out there for performance driven ads than can be spent because candidates are not clicking on the jobs. They're not applying, you know, the cost per application, the cost per click, those types of things. So the budgets are huge and they're not being spent. That's setting the table for on Monday, Indeed kicked gig like job postings from companies like Uber, Lyft, Door Dash, Instacart, and all of the other gig like listings off their general job search and over to gigs.Indeed.com and some hiring companies. Chad (11m 48s): Some of these companies actually saw a 90% drop in traffic and remember, they weren't getting the volume they needed in the first place. Demand is high. And you got to question the timing. I mean, making the switch, you got to question, but the timing on this, this is pretty fucked up. Joel (12m 9s): Yeah. So, a few things about this. I wanna underscore that you said these folks saw at 90% decrease in traffic, that's gonna really hurt the bottom line for them. The other thing I want to highlight that you said is that there's more budget now than can be spent. There's more budget than can be spent. Those are two serious like points to highlight. And those are maybe they're on podcasts in and of themselves. But when I, so you dropped this on, on us yesterday, I think. And it was sorta cryptic. So I've been trying to like kind of digest what's going on. And either Indeed is smarter than everyone else in the room, or they don't know what the fuck they're doing at all. Joel (12m 53s): And I don't know which way I'm leaning, other than they don't know what the hell they're doing because we've seen in the last year plus, they throw a ton of spaghetti at the wall. Chad (13m 2s): Yeah. Joel (13m 2s): They've shut shit down. They've opened up shit. They've renamed shit. They've done all kinds of crazy shit. And this is the latest of crazy shit that they've done, right? Uber, Lyft, Door Dash, these are some of the few like of the people that are spending tons of money and have money to spend it's these guys and to fuck them over makes no sense to me at all. Other than we can't provide them the click, so let's get them a more, less clicks. So where are they going to go there? Our competition while we've been busy buying up the competition, Google doesn't charge yet for traffic. So that's money that could be spent there that isn't, by the way, Google needs to do Google needs launch a pay-per-click solution, a stat because people have money to spend on them and will do that. Joel (13m 46s): So I'm a little confused by the whole thing. The phenomenon of nobody's looking, searching for jobs anymore. No one's clicking on jobs. No one's applying to jobs. And that goes back to what we talked about a few weeks ago and continues to be an issue with like, nobody wants to work. People want to buy Bitcoin and play, play, play X-Box and get government checks and stimis, that's going to run out eventually, but we also have some systemic issues, which we're also going to talk about on the show where warehouse workers and a lack of supply there. And what are we gonna do about that? It's a trillion dollar problem that we're looking down the barrel of. So we've got some real workforce issues in our country and Indeed is just, I guess, one side note with what's going on. Joel (14m 32s): But I just, I don't think they know what the hell they're doing over there. They're just throwing shit at the wall, hoping that it sticks. Chad (14m 38s): So Indeed is once again, crying user experience as the reason for this change, because they've been flooded with gig jobs. It's amazing. This makes Indeed's tech team look a bunch of fucking idiots, just inept. I mean, seriously, if you think about it, your search tech isn't basic enough to provide users with relevant content. Indeed is basically saying we have a shitty product and our tech team sucks with this whole change. I mean, I don't know how else anyone can see this. We're talking about providing relevant content. You're saying that you have too many jobs from this segment and it's like, what's pretty fucking simple. Chad (15m 22s): If you know how to do search, you should be able to filter in and filter out anything that's relevant or not relevant. So yes, the timing is horrible. This whole user experience angle is bullshit and yes, they do have shitty tech. We get that. But what is the play here? Do they see that the gig economy is growing so rapidly and not to mention with prop 22 and all this other crazy shit that they want to split things off to create two different types of sites so that they can try to monetize even more. I don't understand the play other than a long-term play. And this is just really shitty timing. Joel (16m 2s): You know, you bring out a really good point in regards to customization and in a world where, you know, Tik TOK knows exactly what I want to watch. And what you watch is totally different than what I watch. The job board classified industry has really dropped the ball on customization of search results. And for the most part, I'm guessing 60 to 70% of Indeed's users are logged in when they're using Indeed because they kind of force you to do it. They encourage you to do it. If you get job alerts, like they push you to become a member. And I'm sure a lot of, at least 50, 60, 70% are. Joel (16m 43s): So if you know, someone's logged in, you know, their search behavior, you know what they're clicking on, you know what they're looking at for long periods of time and you ultimately know what kind of jobs that they're looking for that they want. So they shouldn't actually even have to search after a certain period when they go to Indeed, you should know that when John DOE goes to Indeed and he's logged in, or she's logged in that, this is what they want to see. And you show that to them automatically. We are way far away from that in terms of job search and classifieds. But you great, you bring up a great point that if their tech is so good, they should know that this person never looks at Uber jobs. They never apply to Uber jobs. So we're not going to show them Uber jobs. Joel (17m 24s): We're gonna stop showing them Uber jobs and show them the jobs that they do want and that they do click on and apply to. And they haven't done that. And if anyone should be doing and it's Indeed. Chad (17m 32s): Yep. Now we've talked about how shitty their product has been from a search standpoint, in a delivery of content, right. In just emails, right? You subscribe to emails and you get a bunch of shit in your email, right. Joel (17m 47s): Glassdoor's just as bad. Glassdoor's worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drop the ball Chad (17m 51s): On one company who seems to have this down. And I don't know, maybe it's a privacy thing or not, is Facebook. Joel (17m 59s): Yeah. So, so Facebook workplace, God bless them. They just keep chugging on organically. So Facebook's enterprise platform Workplace, this is their Slack competitor, their teams competitor, claims 7 million paying subscribers. That's quite a bit of paying subscribers. This is up from 5 million in may of last year. It comes to the company, announces new features, including integrations with Microsoft 365 and Google calendar. By way of comparison and this is a little bit sobering, but Microsoft claims more than 145 million daily active users for teams and Slack past 12 million daily active users in September of 2019, which has been awhile but it's also the last time they reported that statistic. Chad (18m 44s): A representative told CNBC quote, you could take my mom and put her on Workplace and she would understand how to use it immediately, which is how they're sort of saying that they're different from the rest of the guys. Other new features include a new live Q and A experience and a number of new diversity features, including different skin tones for emoji and a feature that allows users to show their colleagues the correct way to pronounce their name, which I think is kind of cool. Your thoughts? I don't know how Enterprise businesses can trust Facebook. Joel (19m 18s): This is a, this is an SMB play for sure. Chad (19m 20s): No they call it Enterprise. Joel (19m 22s): Yeah, that's true Chad (19m 23s): They call it Enterprise. So I see this as an amazing SMB play. No question I agree with that, but they are pressing this Enterprise piece hard. So I see small businesses using the platform to gain local awareness and business, which I think Facebook has done really well on the locals side of the house. But I don't see how you use this as an Enterprise edition for big companies and they talk about Spotify and they do have some fairly big logos with some high employee count. From my standpoint, I want to do my social on Facebook, but if my businesses on Facebook too, can I ever really get away from it? Joel (20m 5s): Yeah, I'm shocked that they have 7 million paying subscribers, if they had had 7 million users that were using a free version of, I could believe that, but 7 million paying customers when you have Microsoft and you have Slack now on by Salesforce, you have two really competent players. So yeah, to me, this is simply small, small business play. How much of a slice they're going to get out of Enterprise? I don't know, but you know, that if Facebook continues to iterate and improve this product so they must believe in it. Or at least the overall vision. It is less than 1% of their revenue as a company. Joel (20m 46s): So it's not really moving the needle in any significant way. So I don't know if it's a bigger piece of where they're going. You know, if they're going to become more of a enterprise software competitor, are they going to have spreadsheets on Facebook and did PowerPoint on Facebook? I don't know, but it seems like it must be something, part of a bigger vision because they keep iterating and it's not a huge part and they have significant competition. That's fun to watch. Chad (21m 13s): And I think if they did stick with SMB, they could get a pretty big swath of those businesses. I mean, because again, you know, if mom can use it right, the owner who also has a Facebook account can use, you know, workplace. So I think there's a good transition there from an SMB standpoint, but as an enterprise and working for enterprise organizations before, there's no way in hell, I would think about trusting Facebook with any of my information at all. No fucking way. Joel (21m 46s): Yeah, I'd agree. But if you're a small business, you can post your jobs on Facebook. You can market on Facebook. Oh, you got your workforce chat going on on Facebook. That makes a lot of sense. But yeah, Enterprise, there must be a bigger picture. Zuckerberg you mad genius. Chad (22m 2s): Or they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall like Indeed. Joel (22m 8s): That could be the case. Let's take a break. SOVREN PARSER PROMO (22m 10s): 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 (22m 54s): 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 (23m 10s): Make up your mind, corporate America. Open or closed, which is it? Chad (23m 14s): Employees just want to know what the fuck is going on. Joel (23m 18s): That's right. That's right. So while tech firms such as Microsoft and Twitter have announced plans to allow employees to work from home permanently, Google has resisted going fully remote and employees said there's an increasing sense of frustration among a fraction of the work force. Some threatening to quit. As a result, Google is relaxing its remote work rules for it's roughly 140,000 employees. And also probably the strongest union in the world. Expanding options around how, where, and whether staff return to the office. CEO, Sundar Pichai outlined the new plans and a note to staff this week saying that from September, he expects about 6% of Google staff will work in the office a few days a week while 20 plus 20% will be able to relocate to other company sites in other cities. Joel (24m 6s): And the remaining 20% can apply to permanently work from home. Google's previous plan required all staff to come into the office three days a week, Google workers will be allowed to work for four weeks per year from a location other than their assigned office. Is this a fair compromise, or is Google going to have to give up a little more power? Chad (24m 27s): I think it's interesting that we know how productive our teams can be remote. Right? We know that. Joel (24m 35s): Yeah. By the way, Google's crushing it. Chad (24m 39s): And yet we're having problems with this. Right. And I just, you know, I said it, I said it already, employees want to know what the fuck is going on. The anxiety of working from home right out of the gate during COVID was hard, but then they got into a productive routine. And now that is being overshadowed by the anxiety of what work is going to look like within the next month or two months or three months, because these employers, they can't get their shit together. And I think it's just amazing that we demonstrate it. When I say we employees demonstrate just how much autonomy we can take and stay productive. Not everybody can, and it's not for everybody. Chad (25m 20s): I get it. But to be able to allow the autonomy in some cases, I think is incredibly smart. So Google is dancing and then we have Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. They're sticking to a hard and fast rule. We want everybody back in the office. Now, I'm not a big fan of that, although that cuts down on anxiety a lot. And if I don't like that idea as being employed by them, I know now I can start looking for another job. Joel (25m 50s): Yeah. And I think, kind of competition for talent is driving this. And when you look at Google employees, gee, they're kind of smart and they're kind of marketable. And they're also able to get a new job tomorrow if they want. So this 140,000 strong group of employees they have a lot of pull with what the company does. And so this sort of compromise that Sindar is forced to make, I think is, is driven by the power of the employees. Which is in contrast to what we're seeing with Amazon. But knowledge workers I think are on a road to being at home whenever they want, working however they wish otherwise they're gonna vote with their feet and go work for somebody else and companies are gonna have to deal with that. Joel (26m 34s): It's also, you know, tech companies were the first ones to have casual Friday. Remember when that was like a real progressive power move. So, so culturally they're sort of, they're sort of used to this progressive stance. Big banks, as you mentioned and I think other companies and industries are struggling with it. So Goldman Sachs has laid the groundwork for its return to the office. CEO, David Solomon, informed employees in the U S and the UK that they should be in a position to return to the office by June 14th and June 21st, respectively, this was reported by CNN. The move is the first for a major US bank. Meanwhile, Vanguard is planning a hybrid model for its staff and Citadel aims to have most of its us staff in offices by June 1st, JP Morgan Chase also recently announced plans to have half of its employees back in the office, by July. Joel (27m 26s): CEO, Jamie Diamond, your buddy, told the Wall Street Journal CEO council that he's quote done with zoom. So different cultures, you're going to have different results. Chad (27m 38s): Yeah. And I think that, I think the key word there is culture and that's what many companies are actually going to be citing to get control. Joel (27m 49s): Yeah. And they should, that's really the main argument they have to do it, culture. Chad (27m 54s): Well it's culture. But I think that is just really a hidden reason. It's more around control. Now, if you're looking at main, you know, mainly entry-level and they do need to learn the ropes and you need managers to be able to do that. You know, obviously there are some hybrids that you could work into, or it's a hundred percent at, you know, at the office that is going to be a culture scenario. But when you're talking about individuals who have been experienced in a productive role for even before COVID right, and they were able to push through that in Covid, I don't see the reasoning behind it by saying culture because you're taking choice away from the employee. Chad (28m 37s): Right. So overall, overall, I think it's going to be interesting to watch. And also for everybody who's out there who didn't listen to the interview with Seth Feit, who is a Global VP of Talent over at Charter Communications, not a small company, look for the Vaccinations, Wages and Hybrid Work Podcasts that we put out this week. That was, that was a great discussion. Joel (28m 60s): Yeah. Yeah. The answer to all of your questions, Chad is money. So culture is a culture. Sounds really great, but it's all about Holy shit, we spent how much on leases? Let's get people back to work. Chad (29m 11s): Yeah. But that's short term. I don't believe that at all, that sort of term. Joel (29m 15s): And you can renegotiate that. And I mean, some of these companies have bought real estate and so that's okay. Chad (29m 20s): Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, I mean what they spend on real estate? That's a fucking drop in the bucket for God's sakes and that they can, they can hardcore court, fucking press, full court press any real estate organization. Joel (29m 34s): Yeah. I think if you're moving up, if you're starting your career, you're looking to advance. There's really no replacement being there and having face time with your boss and the people who are going to promote you. So I'm just curious longterm, how this will play out in terms of the demographics of who goes in and who's at the office versus who isn't. Because my expectation is that people have kind of become comfortable, are going to be the ones that are at home and the ones that want to like work their way up are going to be the ones on the ground doing the work in the office. But time will tell. Chad (30m 10s): Yeah, I think, I think employers have to remember one thing is that you're dealing with humans and we have only one of these things. One only one of these lives on this blue earth. And if the US continues to play this, you know, live to work, instead of work to live scenario, they're going to be, they're going to be in the same issue that some of these companies are going to be faced with, with organizations like Base Camp people ejecting, because they can't talk about what they want to talk about, you know, in the office. Joel (30m 48s): Yeah. It's a great time to go poaching on Base Camp, right about now. So more than more than one third of base camps, 57 employees resigned after CEO Jason Freed announced that quote, "societal and political discussions" end quote would no longer be allowed on the company's internal chat forums. Behind the scenes Freed had been dealing with an employee reckoning over a longstanding company practice of maintaining a list of funny customer names some of which were Asian and African and origin. The internal discussion over that list had been oriented primarily around making Base Camp feel more inclusive to its employees and customers. But Freed and his co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson. Joel (31m 30s): Gee is that the whitest name you've ever heard? had been taken back by an employee post, which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially motivated violence and closed the thread. They also disbanded an internal committee of employees who had volunteered to work on issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion. So should political speech be allowed in the workplace or should employees just shut up and dribble? Chad (31m 57s): It's a pretty weak move by a tech company who, you know, if you're in and around Silicon Valley, everything's open. We want to hear what you have to say. You know, it's one of those things until we don't. And that's the thing is that you've had individuals over the years who are, or who are you know, of the LGBTQ of color or what have you, they've had to put up with this shit for years, for hundreds of years, right? And now you get a couple of white guys who are uncomfortable and they want to shut it down. My response to that is fuck you. The uncomfortableness of life is what we deal with everywhere. Chad (32m 38s): And if you cannot manage and lead these types of discussions and use those DEI, ERG, or what have you to be able to do the right thing through your employees and through your leadership, you shouldn't be in fucking control. Joel (32m 54s): Yeah. I think two things on this one is, you know, that there was a time in the world where, you know, you punched a clock and from nine to five, you were at work. And, the mentality of like, when you're at work, you work and when you go home, you do whatever the hell you want. Right. But when you're at work, you're working, you're not doing anything other than working. Well over the last 10, 15, 20 years work follows us everywhere and work based on, you know, technology or whatever it is, like work follows us everywhere. So to think that these issues aren't going to start bleeding into the workplace is just stupid because it's going to happen. Joel (33m 36s): So to me, it's like the world has changed. This is a dynamic that is going to be real for companies, whether big or small, and this is a small company, this is 60 people. This is something that you're going to have to grapple with. The other take on this is that you can't have it both ways. And you made a great point in terms of like, look, people, you know, diverse people have been taking it for a long time and just biting their tongue or not saying anything. And apparently, you know, the founders of this company, or at least one of the founders was really active with some really far right sharing of like Breitbart articles on these forums and talking about really conservative issues. So you can't, as a founder, you know, put out conservative ideas and opinions and not expect your workers to express opinions that are diverse to yours, that counter yours to come out. Joel (34m 29s): And it's actually a pretty healthy thing, but you can't have it both ways. You can't tell you can't tell workers, we're not talking about this. You can't shut off the commentary on their forums when you're actually doing that as well. So yeah. Times have changed and you can't have it both ways. And then your points are well taken as, as well. Chad (34m 50s): Agreed, agreed. And as we talk about punching the clock, we're having issues with factory workers in this country, which you, I would never think that we would be saying because we outsourced and all of these factories shut down. And now, and now we have a need for factory workers and factories are struggling to find skilled workers for specialized roles such as welders, machinists. I mean, the list goes on. So, you know, what the fuck's going on here. Yeah. Joel (35m 21s): Yeah. So let me set the table here. And I think we both have some, some interesting insights. So demand for goods is skyrocketing in the U S as the US economy reopens from the pandemic. But we have a big problem. Like you mentioned, American factories can't find enough people to do the work. US manufacturing to a 37 year high in March, but the industry has more than a half million job openings. Factories are struggling to find skilled workers for specialized roles, such as welders and machinists. Manufacturers are even having trouble hiring entry-level positions that do not even require any skills. As many as 2.1 million manufacturing jobs will be unfilled through 2030 according to a study published Tuesday by Deloitte and the manufacturing Institute. Joel (36m 6s): The report warns that worker shortage will hurt everyone or revenue. Production end could ultimately cost the US economy up to 1 trillion by 2030. Interestingly, a manufacturing executives say part of the problem is that many young Americans just don't want to work in factories in part, because of fears about robots taking over and jobs getting shipped overseas. A couple takes I have on this, you know, and age is a nice thing, in some ways, because we can look retrospectively on this, but you and I, being kids in the seventies, like manufacturing used to be a proud position. I mean, I can remember whether it be advertisements, the build America by America slogans that sort of brought pride. Joel (36m 49s): And like you said, things got off-shored over the years and that, hurt the image, I think of an honest, day's work, honest days pay. I think that immigration and not having immigrants or closing the border immigrants has been a huge mistake, strategically and economically. And immigration, we're talking about like 1% of the country, we're making such a big deal out of that, like 3 million or 4 million people that immigrate here legally every year. I think that the perspective of, I don't want to, I don't want to get a job in a factory or an industry because a robot's just going to take it in a few years is fascinating to me. And I also think that just the phenomenon of, if you're a blue collar worker, you're a loser. Joel (37m 34s): I'm not exactly sure when that happened, but it did. And I think that we have to dig ourselves out of that brand. I think we need to lift up trade schools and community college. I know, you know, pitching community college as free or paid for by the government is kind of interesting when you look at this issue and it, like, we need to teach people that it's okay, that you don't have to be a webmaster or a Tik TOK star to be accepted in this world. And that's a big challenge to overcome. Chad (38m 3s): Agreed and again, looking back when we were in school, we had vocational options in high school. My cousin went through, he was, he was an electrician, right? He was ready to be an electrician pop right out after high school, we had welders, construction and all of that, you could go the college prep route, which is what I did, or you can go the other route. And that was not something that you looked down on and the companies locally pipelined those workers right into their organizations. Right out of the gate, right? They were even pretty much like interning doing half days with many of those companies, they had a job before they even had a were out of high school. Chad (38m 48s): And so I think what we did in this country is we started forcing kids into thinking that college was the only way to go. And we're forcing them into debt and creating the academic industrial complex that we know today. But college isn't for everyone. I think overall, the factories themselves, they know where the problems lie and they need to fix them. They need to start working with local high schools, building programs here in Columbus, Indiana. We have a vocational high school still that connects because Cummins engine company. So we need to have those vocational programs, those tech schools, et cetera, et cetera. Chad (39m 32s): And we should be also modeling. And I say this a lot after the U S military. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, when you were in high school, remember when they would set up in the cafeteria and they were coming in and they were recruiting and they were letting, you know, what they had to offer. These are the same things that they should be doing, these companies should be doing. They should be working directly with the schools here, tech and also with the local community colleges. Joel (40m 2s): Yeah. And I think, you know, you mentioned pipelining both by the military and companies as well, but there, there was a day where pipelining happened within families and, you know, grandpa worked at the factory and dad worked at the factory and now I'm going to be funneled into the factory. And we had a situation in our country where, Oh, shit, I saw dad get laid off, or I saw grandpa, you know, lose his pension. And there's a whole generation of folks that are like, I'm not touching that profession with a 10 foot pole. And that still lives with us today. And it's unfortunate. Chad (40m 33s): And the union busting and all that shit that happened, bad memories. Joel (40m 38s): We'll be right back. JOB AD X PROMO (40m 39s): 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 (41m 22s): JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Joel (41m 31s): Oh yeah. Yeah. So one for the kids out there, if you haven't seen Gung-Ho a Ron Howard movie starring Michael Keaton, do yourself a favor based on our last topic and watch that, it's funny as well as sort of insightful in terms of where we've come with factory exact employment. So yeah. Chad's favorite grocery chain Kroger is testing drone delivery. Testing will begin this week near its Kroger marketplace store in Centerville, Ohio, between Cincinnati and Dayton. The flights will be managed by licensed pilots with Kroger's partner, Drone Express. Customer deliveries are scheduled to begin later this spring. And a second pilot is scheduled to launch this summer at a store in California where Kroger operates its Ralph's subsidiary. Joel (42m 16s): The testing comes after Kroger's e-commerce sales hit $10 billion last year, and the company begins ramping up its home delivery service aimed at doubling that figure by the end of 2023. So Chad, are you ready for drone delivered barbecue sauce to go with your autonomous Roadster pizza deliveries? Chad (42m 37s): Yeah. This is going to be interesting. I am not sure how the FAA actually works into this or what have you. We have an airport, a local airport here. So I think, I think it will be interesting on how it actually rolls out. If you take a look at, and we'll actually have this article on the website, you'll be able to read it. And you'll also be able to see a video of how Kroger currently has an Amazon. Like, you know, how their warehouse has a bunch of robots doing fulfillment. Kroger has that exact same thing, doing fulfillment for groceries. It is incredibly cool and weird at the same time. And they get all the groceries ready for actual truck delivery. Chad (43m 20s): So a human gets in the truck and they actually deliver, deliver the goods. But now they're talking about the actual, the actual drones, brilliant. At the end of the day, what we're looking at here is what we already see in Kroger's and Targets and retail all over the place, is the death of cashiers. With checking your own shit out, right? This is just going to start to take a lot of those positions now, you know, does that mean they, these individuals could perspectively move up into more technical positions? I don't know, but I guarantee you one thing that, sorry, motherfucker. The CEO of Kroger who earns $14 million a year is going to give himself a fucking pay bump. Joel (44m 5s): Yeah. It doesn't hurt that it e-commerce sales hit 10 billion last year. Speaking of talent crunch, I was really intrigued by this story because they're managed by licensed pilots? Chad (44m 18s): Drone pilots. Joel (44m 19s): So these aren't like pilot pilots. Chad (44m 21s): No. Joel (44m 22s): These drone pilots are different, so, okay. So there's going to be a whole profession guess coming up of people, piloting drones and that'll be a high-paid profession. So maybe all cashiers can just get licensed in drone flying and make a mint there? But yeah, I'm ready for my barbecue sauce to show up on my deck with a drone. I'm ready for that. Chad (44m 41s): Yeah. Julie does Instacart all the time, so I mean, we have groceries land at the front door, right? It's an actual human being doing it, but I mean, it's the same kind of scenario. It's just cutting the human out of the supply chain. Joel (44m 54s): Yeah. So we've got drones in the sky, delivering food and we have little Roadsters delivering a pizza from Domino's and other places. So you know what won't be in the streets? Security, the NYP have ended their contract worth $94,000 with robot, dog creator and our favorite tech company, Boston dynamics, after a fierce backlash over its use in New York City. A government spokesperson told ABC New York quote "it's creepy alienating and sends the wrong message to New Yorkers" end quotes. Chad (45m 30s): I see it as the militarization of robots. I mean, it's like the steady step. As we see our local police officers actually receive, like they have armored personnel carriers and shit like that. There's this militarization of our local police and something like this robo dog, it does nothing but press more of that sentiment. So I hope there are other applications for this dog cause I think it's the coolest fucking thing in the world. But yeah, I think it's a good idea to get rid of it. Joel (46m 3s): Yeah. So after you watch, Gung-ho watch Robocop in your eighties movie, movie-a-thon, but yeah, one of the, one of the takes on this, which I think we, we don't appreciate as, as white dudes is that for people of diverse, particularly black Americans, you know, the dog represents oppression and violence against, you know, their neighborhoods. So in the sixties you had German shepherds obviously at the hip with police controlling crowds. So that is a perspective that I don't think a lot of people thought of, when they said let's put robo dogs in the street next to policeman, but also think that this is, this is going to eventually be a thing. Joel (46m 45s): Now, whether it looks like a dog or it looks like four Wheeler, or it looks like whatever? Chad (46m 50s): A drone. Joel (46m 51s): Yeah. I mean, yeah. I don't know. But look, I just don't think it's going to be in the form of a dog. It'll be in the form of a poodle. Maybe, maybe that's less threatening? I don't know. Chad (47m 1s): If they did it as a Chihuahua, nothing, this wouldn't be an issue. This would not be an issue. Joel (47m 7s): Instead of one big dog it's like 10 little chihuahuas. Chad and Joel (47m 11s): We out OUTRO (47m 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. OUTRO (47m 57s): 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.

Chad is back from vacay, and it's a good thing because the news was droppin' like bombs this week. Jobvite gobbled-up JazzHR and NXTThing. Jobcase made its first acquisition. Ceridian acquired Ideal. ZipRecruiter filed to go public. LinkedIn is crushing the numbers. Biden is getting his executive order on and Jamie Dimon is giving out second chances. Enjoy this Sovren, Jobvite, and JobAdx powered episode. 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. He's back. Chad is tan, rested and ready everybody, be very afraid and welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost, Joel, "don't wake up Ted Cruz" Cheeseman Chad (34s): And I'm pastor Chad Sowash. Joel (36s): On this week's show Jobbite gets jazzy, ZipRecruiter gets Zippy and JP Morgan gets second chancey. We'll be right back after ransacking Giuliani's brownstone. Jobvite (50s): 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 (1m 30s): I'll send you the link. Cool. I'm going to finish watching this episode of Bridgerton. Joel (1m 36s): What's the website for your new marital services? Is that Chadmarries.com or something? Chad (1m 43s): Yeah. There's more stress going into marrying somebody than prepping for a podcast. Fuck that. Joel (1m 49s): So tell the listeners what the hell that was all about. Chad (1m 52s): Yes. I went to the Isle of Palms last week and actually married a couple of very dear friends. Went off online, and got a, I guess you could call it just an officiant's license, married them by the beach. It was amazing. We had a blast and I came home, this was amazing to a box of beer, Irish whiskey and gelato. We have the best listeners out there. Joel (2m 21s): So much for your diet. Chad (2m 23s): Yeah. So, so real quick, I gotta do this. Oh yeah. Starting to drink. I received a kick ass IPA and John beer from Victoria Conley in the Philadelphia area and yes I am so John right now. Thanks Victoria. And, shut up Ed. James and the team over at Righteous Gelato sent me a whole damn box of gelato. And for our listeners, this is literally the best fucking gelato that's out there. I can't get it locally. So everybody's like, you know, Hey, can I come over and get some gelato? And I'm like, no, stay the away from my Gelato. Joel (3m 1s): Did they deep freeze that from like Canadian glaciers to get it to you still cold? How did that work? Chad (3m 6s): Yeah. Dry ice. Joel. It's called technology. Joel (3m 11s): It's still not cheap, man. I bet your marriage license certificate costs less than that shit. Chad (3m 17s): I would say. I would say you got, you got the, you got the Red Breast Irish whiskey too, right? Joel (3m 23s): Yeah. There's no hate in that. No hate in that. I was from our buddy Oras Oras coolest name ever. Auras. Hi. Hi baby. My name is Oras Chad (3m 32s): From jobdescription.ai. That's yeah, Joel (3m 35s): Yeah, yeah. I'm not, I'm not hating on the Red Breast Irish whiskey. There was not the 21 or the 15. It was the 12th, but that's okay. I'll take the 12th. It goes down nicely. Well, are you excited about SNL on the Saturday featuring starring Elon Musk? Chad (3m 53s): Nothing like paying your way into SNL. I mean, come on. Joel (3m 56s): Well, that was the case Bezos would just be the guest every week. Chad (3m 59s): Yeah. He's spending all his money on HGH. Joel (4m 2s): Does Dogecoin go up after the a SNL episode? About 400? 800%? Something like that? Chad (4m 9s): It's been taking a fucking dive. So it better. Shout out to our friends in Indiana. Joel (4m 13s): Yes. Chad (4m 14s): Emplify, Fisher's based Indiana Emplify was acquired this week by 15 five for about 50 million buckeroonis. Emplify had raised 33 million. So it's not exactly the home run that the VC's probably imagined, but it still buys a lot of beer, that 15 million. Well, if they would've come on firing squad, they would have quintupled that fucking number. So since you didn't get back to us. Joel (4m 43s): Yes, they wouldn't return one email from any of us at this show. Yeah. Things could have, you could have had an extra zero on that 50 Emplify if you'd just come on Chad and Cheese. Chad (4m 52s): That's right. Because listeners like Morgan Woods who tweeted the Chad and Cheese is giving me life this morning. She was listening to our fear, loathing and ZipRecruiter podcast. Morgan you're making me tear up. I've been gone too long. Come back to that love. Ian Partington agrees with our reopening and vaccination points. Employees and employers have choices. Right? Appreciate that. Joel (5m 20s): Speaking of love, our boy Mason Wong at Lyft loves him some air tags. You got into quite a dialogue with him this week. What the hell was that about? Chad (5m 29s): It's funny. It's like Julie uses the tiles, the little tiles so that she doesn't lose her keys. So there's like an app and you just put a tile on your keys or put a tile on something you don't want to lose. And Mason said, Hey, we could put these on candidates when they come in to interview mic. Yeah. Okay. Joel (5m 50s): Or put it on my 80 year old father would be a better, better idea. But I don't know. There probably will be made around air tags that do involve some sort of an employment visitor thing, interview thing, I don't know. Chad (6m 5s): Check-in. But I don't, I don't know that you need that. I mean, if the person is connected through their mobile phone and they, they log into the app. Why I don't understand what the tags are for other than other security perspective needs, but that's not an, that's not a recruiting thing. That's more of a security thing. So I think it's more security, less recruiting. Joel (6m 25s): So you disagree with Mason, is that what you're saying? Chad (6m 27s): Yeah. I love Mason to death, but I think he's gone way through Star Trek on this one. Phasers on stunn, Mason, phasers on stun. Joel (6m 35s): And speaking of going too far, your buddy Conor McGregor, ultimate fighting machine sold his stake in proper 12 Irish whiskey smarter. You can have Red Breasts as well for a whopping 600 million, $600 million. Holy shit and it sucks! Chad (6m 58s): Proper 12 is proper shit. Just so everybody know. Scotsman (7m 1s): Welcome to All things Scottish. Our slogan is if it's not Scottish it's crap! Chad (7m 7s): And that stuff is crap. Much like this asshole's podcast we were on. What the fuck was that about? Joel (7m 14s): Wow, that was weird. Huh? That was weird. Chad (7m 18s): So after Pete Janssen's dropped a teaser video, a listener dropped a DM to me and said, and asked if Pete was the MyPillow guy? Joel (7m 30s): Like when an anti-vaxxer invaded my Facebook feed one weekend just randomly. And it just shit got weird really quickly, but where it didn't get weird was I, I did an interview last week with our buddy Craig Fisher about all kinds of stuff. But if you haven't checked that out, Craig Fisher's podcast, I don't even know what it's called, but it's awesome. Fish Dogs Live or something. I don't know. Chad (7m 55s): Rapid fire, shout outs, Martin Redstone tweeted a sunny UK pick. You don't see those too often. He was walking the dog in the park, listening to Chad and Cheese. Jarvis Carel showing off her new Chad and Cheese t-shirt while walking in the hood and listening to some Chad and Cheese, looking good. Jarvis and new listener, Andrea Petrocine, Petrocine said he just discovered the podcast connected with me immediately on LinkedIn. And obviously we're his kind of people. So appreciate y'all listening. We need more of that. And also free t-shirts, I don't know if you guys know this or not going to Chadcheese.com click on free and in the upper right-hand corner, you could possibly win t-shirts by Emissary. Chad (8m 45s): Beer by AdZuna. That's right. We deliver beer to your doorstep. Thanks to AdZuna. And then the coup de Gras bourbon. It's so sexy. It tastes so good going down. That's right. Win free bourbon. And a tasting session with us. Robert Ruff and just a good time. Joel (9m 9s): We need to highlight that we, you and I don't actually deliver the beer. Someone else delivers it. It, we're not that high, high brow here around here, but so the way you said it was a little bit like we're going to show up with beer, which would be cool. And Hey, if you write a check, it could happen. Chad (9m 25s): It could happen. It could happen. Anything else? Joel (9m 30s): How about some breaking moves for yo ass? Chad (9m 34s): OK, over here Joel, we've got breaking news. Ceridian will be acquiring ideal.com. What do you have on that? Joel (9m 44s): Alright. So Ceridian today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Ideal. You know, you know, Ceridian as a talent management system, they do about every fucking thing. Chad (9m 58s): Dinosaur. Joel (9m 58s): They're a little company anyway. So Ideal says they're a leading talent intelligence software provider they're based out of Toronto, Ontario. Beautiful, great white North. This acquisition is anticipated to optimize Ceridian's talent management offering. Once Ideal's capabilities are integrated into the day force platform, which is Ceridian's little product there. The acquisition is, is expected to close on April 30th, 2021. Chad (10m 26s): Quick one on this. Cause it just came in. I mean, Ideal is matching, screening, chat and everything Ceridian is not. Ceridian is anemic on the talent side of the house. So this is going to give them a product on the hiring side that really, you know, they don't have now. We'll need to dig in a little bit deeper on this, but it's, you know, it's smart. It doesn't really make them a player on the recruitment side of the house. I don't think, but it's a step. I just want to underscore that when we were going over LaRocks numbers and you and I debated where the money and where the energy is going to go, and I said, talent recruitment, and you said, fuck that it's going into human capital management. Joel (11m 9s): Oh yeah, it's still, well, maybe I'm on the right track. It's still capital management buying up a recruiting tool. We'll see more of that. I think you're smart. Chad (11m 18s): And then there was another buying spree happening on Jobvite side. That's right spot there, Jobvite. Joel (11m 26s): Full disclosure on the show, full disclosure. Chad (11m 29s): They did, they did some acquisition this week. This week was great, by Monday, we had our first three topics for the show, but I got to take the rest of the week off, which was nice. So Jobvite which all our listeners know and love. Select Jobvite's last big shopping spree, this one was also funded by K-1 Investment Management. JazzHR's Pete Lampson will serve as with our buddy Aman Brar joining the board of directors. Listeners will know Aman as founder of text recruiting solution Canvas, before getting acquired by Jobvite and becoming their CEO two years ago, Jobvite, JazzHR and NXTThing that's NXTThing RPO will continue to operate under their respective brands. Chad (12m 14s): Additional investment has been made to fund hiring all the companies. However, the money, the dollar, the price tag was not disclosed. Unlike the last time Jobvite rolled up Canvas Roll Point and Telemetry and announced that they had raised $200 million to do so. Terms are not disclosed on this one, which was, which was kind of interesting. So what's your first take, what's your hot take on this acquisition? Let's break this up into three segments, real quick. So we've got Aman leaving, JazzHR, and then NXTThing. So let's hit Aman leaving first. Okay. So I've had a bunch of people DM me, and they're making a big deal about Aman leaving as CEO. Chad (12m 55s): And I mean, let's face it, dude. The guy deserves a fucking breather. He was responsible for the integration of the original K-1 roll-up. Dan got the deal done and Aman did all the hard work and putting Canvas, Telemetry and Roll Point together. So, you know, I don't see this, isn't a big surprise to me. I actually got a call. I was on my way back from South Carolina. I got a call from Aman. We had a great conversation and he's like, he's just excited and happy to spend time with his family for once. Joel (13m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, there's obviously taking a break and going to Hawaii for a week and there's, you know, leaving the whole CEO seat and then going into the board of directors. So I imagine, you know, Amman didn't come from our space. You know, he started Canvas after being, I think at ChaCha and you know, some other place I'm forgetting, he started another company that was not in our space. So my guess is Dan Finnegan, who was the former CEO, he probably needed a break and said, Aman, can you, can you come on and integrate these technologies? Can you do some recruiting, do some acquisitions, roll some shit up, hire some folks. Joel (14m 8s): And then peace out after like two years, which is roughly about where we are with that. So I will bet that we won't see Aman after this gig in employment ever again, which is kind of sad. It'd be nice to see him back in here, but I don't think that we will, he'll probably advise for a year or so and step out. When I talked to them, Dan is pretty much gone and people will remember the resu-mater, which then became jazz.co, which then I guess was too hard for salespeople to pitch. So it became JazzHR. That was a great, that was a great story. The resume, we won't get into it on this one, but so, so Aman leaving. And then what were the other two little side and side discussions you wanted to have? Chad (14m 51s): JazzHR? I don't think it's sod. I think it's major, I think are both major, but JazzHR is definitely the big one you're looking at really an ecosystem for, from SMB to enterprise. So nobody's done this well, remember Taleo had business edition, iCIMS jumped into the SMB pool at one time and both tried applying their enterprise experience and tech to SMB and it didn't stick. Joel (15m 17s): Yeah. Chad (15m 17s): You already know jazz works in the SMB segment. You already know Jobvite works in the upper echelon of SMB and also enterprise together. I think that is actually a winning combination. What do you think? Joel (15m 31s): So the first big acquisition, when they rolled up Roll Point, Canvas and Telemetry, it was mostly a feature add on. Right. And so this was a little bit bigger. Chad (15m 44s): Like a lot bigger, I think! Joel (15m 46s): Yeah. I mean, this was like a, I don't know, this is like the beer company that buys up the wine company and then like the liquor company. It's like, whatever you want and wherever you are in your journey, we're going to be there for you. So, okay. Some of these small businesses, that Jazz services, they're going to become big businesses and they're going to move up to Jobvite. They're going to transition to the big stuff. Anyone that like, Oh, we're going to test the waters on this RPO thing. Okay. Oh, we got that shit too. So it's, it continues to be this one platform, one stop shop to roll them all. And this one is a big step forward. I was surprised I didn't mention the price tag after they had mentioned the 200 million last time. Joel (16m 28s): K-1 is obviously really serious about this shit. K-1, primarily invests in enterprise level software. So they see a much bigger play to move more people into that space, which was interesting. The one bit of criticism that I found interesting was that K-1 seems to have a lot of control bringing in us, basically a smaller CEO into a bigger entity and having him run that seems ripe for potential problems or challenges. And that K-1 is sort of pulling the strings on what's going on. Obviously neither one of us have insight on K-1's motivations, I would think of other than make money, but they seem to have a lot of control over what's going on there at Jobvite. Chad (17m 14s): I wouldn't dispute that, but I also think that this is a it's not like Pete doesn't have CEO experience. It's not like he doesn't, he hasn't grown an organization. So yeah, I don't think it's going to be him being the whipping boy overall, the next RPO piece, this is where many people are befuddled. I really see this as incredibly smart. Coming from just a short stint in RPO. We were always in the US the UK does things entirely different, but in US, we try to standardize a stack. So you can go in and have standard process methodologies automatically, right? And boom, boom, boom, not just have an outsourcing human component, but also an outsourced tech component. Chad (17m 59s): So this has been happening for years, just in reverse. Now we have a tech provider that says, Hey, look for all of our customers, we can automatically offer, especially in this landscape, when you know people we're not building to scale up, they will have RPO assets available to them quickly, whether it's in, in short engagements or bigger engagements, I guarantee you, this is one of the things that they saw from a gap in a market standpoint. I think it's smart. I'm not sure it'll, we'll see how it plays out, but I love this. Joel (18m 38s): Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be a challenge for sure. But if they pull it off, it'll be pretty genius. It'll be pretty genius. Chad (18m 45s): I dig it. Joel (18m 47s): Well, all they're missing is a gig platform. I guess they need to go buy a gig platform. Which is what I thought Jobcase had done. So you're on the golf course, doing whatever you were enjoying your life. And you send me a text that says, you said, Jobcase has just bought Upwork. And I'm like, how is that even possible? And then I looked it up online, like now is Upward. So spellcheck sometimes on the golf course. Chad (19m 15s): Spellcheck and beer kids. That's what happens. Yeah. Fred calls me on the golf course and he's like, Hey, like Joel (19m 21s): Deadly combination. Chad (19m 22s): Yeah. He's like, I'm supposed to be, you know, on vacation with my family right now, but I couldn't have this happen without giving you a call. And so we had just a quick conversation and yeah, I mean, buying Upward this for them to be quite frank, I think is just an add on. First and foremost, you're buying somewhat of a competitor. It has better distribution and matching. It's a way for Jobcase to help employers utilize those types of features without actually buying point solutions and integrating them into their ATS. So I see this as a cheat code for Jobcase to say, Hey, just use us. Chad (20m 4s): Instead of buying those point solutions, we will help you do all of the matching and all of the distribution and those types of things. So I think it's a great move from Jobcase's standpoint. Joel (20m 17s): Yeah. And it's a great way to add some clients. So this is Jobcase's first acquisition, since it launched. And the company is expected to increase its existing 110 million members and 20 million monthly active users by 30%. It will retain all team members of upward.net as part of the deal. And with the move Jobcase is touting itself as quote, "the third largest online career destination" end quote. Subtle, I don't know much about upward.net. It looks like it's been bootstrapped since the beginning. It's about a decade old. Joel (20m 57s): There's nothing in Crunchbase in terms of money that it's raised. It acquired Proven back in 2019, which I'm sure we talked about, but I don't remember 2019 very well. Which was done to expand its small business offering. Proven had raised $4.8 million, so clearly Upward has some money or access to money if they were buying a company that size. Chad (21m 19s): Here's the hard part and Fred knows this, their whole team knows, especially on the technical side, is the integration and transition, right? So the integration of upward tech and possible transition of Upward users toward Jobcase, that needs to be eloquent instead of what we've seen over the years of kind of like just ham-fisted, just slam it in approach. Right? So I think that's going to be the big key. Whoa, could this work, could it be amazing? Yes. Will it? Got to see how the execution happens? Joel (21m 52s): Interesting. It feels like a trend that these ten-year-old companies are getting, getting snagged up, snap swapped up. So I just may like the VC, the VC runways are ending for a lot of these companies. They're they're for sale. Clearance rack. Chad (22m 6s): Clearance rack or just go ahead and flop out that IPO. Joel (22m 12s): It's like, I'm tired of doing this. Can we sell this shit? Chad (22m 15s): What's that? What's that on the desk? Is that your IPO? Joel (22m 18s): Anyway, speaking of a ten-year old company who started in 2010, ah, ZipRecruiter. Chad (22m 24s): There it is. Joel (22m 26s): this is, I predicted this for like five years in a row. In case you missed it, after much prediction and speculation by yours, truly ZipRecruiter finally filed to go public through a direct listing on the NYSE, the LA based company that launched in 2010 and has raised over 200 million in venture capital. So it's looking to raise as much as 100 million in the public offering. Soon to be known on the street as ticker symbols, Zip the company reported net income of 86 million on revenue of 418 point 14 million for the year ended December 31st, 2020. They laid off a lot of people along the way. You might remember. They said goodbye to nearly 40% of their employees two weeks into the pandemic. Joel (23m 10s): The company said more than 2.8 million businesses and 110 million job seekers have used ZipRecruiter since it was founded. It's been a long time since a notable company in our space has gone public. Damn you Glassdoor and I'll watch with great interest and excitement as I'm sure you will too. What's your take? Chad (23m 26s): Yeah, I think the 40% was a part of it the necessary evolution they should have taken before the pandemic. Just they were using the pandemic as an excuse, and they also needed to lean out for something like this and I've got to, I've got to give it Ian he didn't have managers give the word. He actually did it himself. Right? So, but number one, they should have done it years ago to be able to focus on Enterprise. And then also number two, they needed to lean out too, to be able to target for IPO. I personally think that ZipRecruiter is the next evolution of what a job board or whatever we're gonna call it should be. Chad (24m 9s): They are a better version of Indeed. They really are. They post. Then they go ahead and they engage in programmatic and they have that whole matching component. Right? So post-match invite deliver programmatic. So overall I think ZipRecruiter is really the evolution of what a job board should be aspiring to be today. And if you remember, they have a very, I don't, I don't know how big it is now, but they have a big contingent of individuals in Israel who focus on AI because they know the job board model of old cannot work. And that's what they are not. Joel (24m 47s): Interesting. So you give a buy rating to ZipRecruiter. We don't, we don't give financial advice and we don't know what the stock's going to go public at price-wise but you're you're you sound bullish, bullish on that stock. Right? Chad (25m 0s): Right now we have a ton of individuals who are saying, look, I'm not going back to work for starvation wages. You can fuck off, but that money is going to run out and they're going to have to go back to work. Zip is going to spike. That's all there is to it. When all of that spikes guess what's going to happen. Yeah, there, they're going to get, I think they're going to get a good number myself. Now, do you hold this stock long-term maybe not? Joel (25m 24s): Yeah. So I think there are four major headwinds and I'll just sort of be brief about those. But I think that the job board label is going to be hard for it to shake on the street. Obviously it comes down to profits and growth, but the posting of jobs, history, I mean, it's an old business, right? Like why would you know, why would I invest in that when I can go invest in Snapchat or Tik Tok goes public or Airbnb or something sexy. So I think that'll be a headwind for it. Historically job boards don't do very well. Dice has not done very well in that space. So that'll be a headwind. I think, I think programmatic could work against it. The challenge with programmatic when it's your programmatic, is that it tends to lean toward your stuff and make you more profitable. Joel (26m 8s): I've heard from a few recruiters that talk about Indeed IQ, not being that great because it's all sort of geared toward making Indeed richer, whereas solutions like Appcast or Pando or Recruitology are more about getting you better ROI. So I think that's a potential challenge. And if enterprise clients are leaning more on app casts and some of the other established players, are they going to move their money over to a ZipRecruiter product? I think SMB recruitment is really challenged right now. I think gig platforms are taking a bite out of a lot of that stuff. You mentioned the not working, but if when they go back to work, are they going to, are they going to, who knows what's going to happen? I mean, McDonald's is offering 50 bucks for an interview and no one's going. Joel (26m 49s): So I don't know when that gets cleared up. It obviously has to, at some point when the money runs out, but I think that's going to be a challenge for them. And lastly, we've kind of learned that if you don't own the rails in our business, which is a commodity business, in many cases, you're just renting. And I feel, I feel really. So there are two things working against ZipRecruiter. Number one is I think, I think Google is a pain in the ass for job boards, period. And I think that eventually there's going to be a tax on from Google on these job sites to get traffic and that's going to cut into profits. And the other thing is advertising is a little tougher. I mean, there's more fragmentation there, more podcasts for them to advertise on. And which ones do you pick? Joel (27m 29s): There's with streaming where do I put my ads? Because they're in this churn business of, we create more ads which creates more traffic, which creates more business and it goes around and around. But if you stop the flow of money into advertising, we've seen that, that becomes really tough. So I hope they crush it. I hope they do incredibly well. And I hope a lot more companies go public because we can talk about them and it'll be really fun. But I like you, there may be a pop in terms of people saying, Hey, the employment is going to blow up, people are hiring but longer term. Do I think, you know, this is the next Microsoft? No. Chad (28m 3s): Yeah. Well, we will talk about on the other side of this next break, why you're wrong? Joel (28m 9s): I love it. SOVREN (28m 11s): 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. SOVREN (28m 55s): 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 (29m 11s): Oh, wait, shut out. Shaker's been blogging some awesome shit lately. If you're not Ooh, full disclosure, they're a sponsor and we love them and they did our website, but like I've been waiting for an agency to sort of be really transparent and insightful on some of this shit. And if you're, if you haven't checked out the Shaker blog I encourage you to do so. They revealed some site traffic data this week, job searches down 30 to 40% since January. Really interesting stuff. Chad (29m 41s): They're doing some awesome stuff. This is their 70th year, just so everybody knows their 70th anniversary. There no kid in this industry. So, you know, they've got some awesome stuff coming. I see some, some really cool stuff happening on the DEI front with John Graham as well. And before we get to LinkedIn, I have to say this John American pale ale is, it's really, it's really good. I'm not going to say it's it's, you know, delicious, but it's really good. And I think the best thing about the beer is Benjamin Franklin writing the Liberty bell on the can. Chad (30m 22s): That's pretty awesome. Joel (30m 23s): And he's got a cheese stick, I think, as he's swinging. How many more Philly references can you throw into a can? Chad (30m 30s): All he needs is a can of whiz on that thing. Yeah, that's good. Joel (30m 35s): Yeah. Our buddy Ed Z. I was, I was, he's a Poach client. So a little shout out to him. He's a Poach user. And I told him about the brand. He's like, yeah, that's pretty legit. That's pretty good shit. So if it gets Ed's approval, you know, it's good shit. So anyway, LinkedIn, so my Microsoft said Tuesday that LinkedIn marketing solutions has brought in more than 3 billion in revenue in the past 12 months outpacing the likes of Snap and Pinterest. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella said the unit's revenue was up over 60% year. Over year, last quarter, the company said growth in the unit was 53%. Joel (31m 15s): How? They pitched themselves as an anti-TikTok to advertisers and likely got a boost last year when a slew of advertisers boycotted Facebook, starting in the summer and tried other other marketing channels. E-marketer forecasts that LinkedIn will command 1.4% of US digital ad revenue share in 2021. Not a whole lot when you think about Facebook at 25ish and Google at 28ish and Amazon at 10%, but Hey, they're on the upswing by the way, Microsoft usually doesn't talk about LinkedIn and it's a quarterly call, so that was kind of interesting in and of itself. Yeah. Yeah. Chad (31m 51s): And this is the reason why I think Zip's going to do well. Yes. Marketing versus jobs, but overall it's the market, the market in itself. And I think this is a big wave and I think it's going to carry. And this in itself, I think is a solid industry indicator. So if you're a business and you didn't grow in late 2020, or early 2021 thus far, you should probably, you know, look at yourself in the mirror this morning and ask the question. Why? Because every company, I think that you and I have probably talked to, most of the innovative companies, ones have been around for a few years, they saw a hit in early 2020, go figure. Chad (32m 33s): But all of that came back hard in mid to late 2020. And it's doing just the same thing in 2021. So I think the wave is coming in. I don't think that, you know, it's hit it's Zenith yet. Yeah. Joel (32m 48s): You said came hard anyway. We've been pretty hard on LinkedIn, the last few episodes. Chad (32m 54s): Oh, I'm not done. Joel (32m 55s): So I'm thinking like, Holy shit, what if they got their advertising user-friendly and worth a shit? And what if their job postings like were worth a shit? LinkedIn would, it'd be scary. I mean, it'd be scary how profitable LinkedIn could be. They get this shit, right. Chad (33m 13s): So it, okay. So here's a rant from one of our listeners and this is just talking about exactly. They don't do much, right. But yet they're still making all this cash. Here's a rant from a listener. So LinkedIn can't figure out the actual city in closest proximity of a job, close to a military installation for employers to post jobs. LinkedIn is providing a spreadsheet, a spreadsheet for clients to fill out with zip codes. They have to find the client has to find the zip codes that are close to the military installation so that they can post jobs and try to fill those positions. Chad (33m 55s): I mean, this is the amateur hour bullshit that's happening. And yet, and yet they are still raking in the cash. Can you imagine if their algorithms were worth a shit, if their product was worth a shit because it's not. Joel (34m 11s): Yeah, it sucks. Yeah. And by the way, Slack attack alert, Microsoft teams now has like 145 million users on it. It's from like 110 or something. So speaking of socks, stocks, you might want to sell that Slack. Last thing again, we do not provide financial advice on this show. Do not come to us saying I bought this shit and it sucked and it's your fault 'cause we don't, we don't do that. Chad (34m 35s): And you can say it. Just so we can have beer, and you know, it's, it's fine. Joel (34m 42s): Yeah. And we're not delivering it to your door, unless you live in Fishers or Columbus, Indiana, maybe then. So wages, one of your, one of your favorite topics. Yeah. Speaking of rants, the pay comm CEO salary of $211 million, the number one highest paid me, forget Reed Hastings, forget like pay comm has. Anyway. Anyway, you want to rant about that or just a touch on it. Cause that's not the biggest, Chad (35m 15s): There's a list of CEOs and their pay. It's like top 20 CEOs and their pay or some shit like that. And it is ridiculous. This Monday, we're actually launching a, we're going to drop a podcast with Columbia professor, Suresh Naidu. And we talk about really wage wars and the history of minimum wage and those types of things. And the thing that stuck with me most was that, you know, there, the standard was about 30 times the CEO made 30 times that of an entry level worker. Today it's anywhere from 350 to 400 times. And I guarantee you that pay core motherfucker is like way beyond that. Joel (35m 59s): We'd be remiss to not mention professor Scott Galloway on the show for another week, but his podcast, he interviews Al Franken, Senator Al Franken, and they talk a lot about disparity and all that stuff. So if you're interested in this topic, go check out the Prof G podcast, Chad (36m 14s): And listen to our Monday podcast. Joel (36m 17s): Yeah. You just said that, but say it again. So, what's weird about this is CEO pay used to be tied to performance, and now it's tied to like stock and what is the stock do? So you had situation of like the pandemic, all these stock value evaluations went down and then like. Chad (36m 35s): It's ridiculous. Joel (36m 36s): And then they're paid on bringing it back. And like, it's just, the whole thing is broken and immoral if I could say that, but anyway, yeah, the disparity of the country is pretty fucked up. Chad (36m 50s): Biden's having to start to do is actually start this $15 minimum wage for federal contractors. And again, I want to point out that $15 an hour close to doubling what we currently have as a minimum wage is only around $30,000 a year before taxes. That is a pittance. It's like again, government has to push so that we can try to get people out of starvation wages into the prospect of maybe getting into living wages. Joel (37m 22s): I mean, I applaud this move because Congress couldn't get anything done. Like the a-holes they usually are. So he's signing an executive order or he signed an executive order on Tuesday requiring the $15 pay raise. This is sort of the sort of rolls in over time. But, you know, I think that it's a great example to say, look, if what I can do, I'm going to do. And then hopefully there's some case studies, some research done that this $15 on a federal contract level is good and helps incentivize Congress to get off their asses and figure something out. Chad (38m 0s): I don't see that happening, unfortunately. And you know, it's just, it's the sign of the times you have everybody going back to their homes and talking to their constituents and saying, Hey, I'm working for you and no, you're not. If that was the case, you would know what it actually costs to live here. It's interesting as we kind of like segue into Amazon, you know, these are, this is a company with money. Joel (38m 24s): Yes, it is. By the way, did you see the address last night? Chad (38m 29s): I saw the highlights. Yeah. Joel (38m 31s): What were your thoughts when you saw Kamala and Pelosi behind him? Chad (38m 34s): That, to me, my heart just dropped. I mean, cause I didn't even think about it until I saw it and I thought that's fucking awesome. Joel (38m 42s): It was, I thought about, I thought about all the, you know, the, the little girls are, you know, young, young women that have never just took for granted that it will never be that way or that, you know, the world will never skew that way and what they must have thought looking at that. And I thought it was amazing. I thought it was awesome. It was so cool. Anyway, your buddies at Amazon, your faves, your BFFs. So Amazon is giving about half a million of its workers, a pay raise. The e-commerce giant announced that it's bumping pay by between 50 cents and $3 an hour for over 500,000 of its US operations employees, which will go into effect mid-May positions that will be impacted span customer fulfillment, delivery, and many others. Joel (39m 31s): You're plotting this, right? Chad (39m 33s): Jeff Bezos spends more on HGH than that in a year. I mean, it's come on. So this is akin to throwing crumbs at peasants who are working in the fields. Jeff Bezos by himself is still worth more than all of that combined and his workers. Let's let's focus on how he actually makes this money. His workers are the ones delivering every day on the Amazon brand. Not him. He had an idea, okay. That idea's worth something. I totally appreciate it. Although the people who actually deliver on it, are the ones who are doing the hard work. Chad (40m 16s): They deserve the cash. So to be able to applaud somebody for paying his workers who were pissing in garbage cans, getting them out of possibly possibly starvation wage ranges into living wages can get good for him. That's fucking awesome. You piece of shit, raise him to fucking 30. Let's see that. Joel (40m 37s): How can you be so mean to the greatest entrepreneur of our generation? Good God. He employs a million over a million people anyway, Chad (40m 49s): Better backs money off their backs. Dude Joel (40m 52s): Has more fun penis fighting with E`lon over whose rocket can look more phallic as it goes in the air anyway. Okay. So yeah, we're running long. Let's take a quick break and we'll talk about second chances, which we're hoping some listeners give us after this episode. JOBADX (41m 10s): 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. JOB AD X PROMO (41m 59s): That's joinus@jobadx.com. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Joel (42m 5s): So JP Morgan Chase is expanding its second chance hiring initiative. What's that you ask? It offers employment opportunities to people with criminal records. The bank has hired 2100 employees through the initiative since it began in Chicago 18 months ago. And will now begin offering the program in Columbus, Ohio. I assume you're a fan of this. Chad (42m 26s): I am. Joel (42m 27s): Yup. Me too. Chad (42m 28s): I'm a big fan of it. Jamie Diamond actually said, giving more people a second chance allows businesses to step up and do their part to reduce recidivism, hire talented workers and strengthening the economy. The biggest issue that we see with individuals who were actually convicted and they come out is that they want to chance and they don't get it. And the only, the only option they have is to go back to what they knew before. In many cases they were doing what they did before. Not because that was something that was in their heart that they wanted to do. It was because they had to provide for their family. Right? And I think as Americans, that's one of the things that we have to do a much better job of is stop pointing at people and saying, you're wrong for doing those things and asking why. Chad (43m 18s): Right. And in this case, being able to hopefully, you know, keep those individuals in a good job, pay them well, right. Not starvation wages, but paying them a living wage plus, giving them the skills that they can take hopefully for a career, not just with JP Morgan, but maybe somewhere else next. that to me is that is gold. Joel (43m 40s): Yeah. And keep in mind. I think it was, I think it was JP Morgan that ban the box. They, they took that out of all their hiring initiatives. Chad (43m 50s): Which everybody should. Joel (43m 51s): As they should now obviously warm and fuzzy also feels good. But there's also some market dynamics here that I think make it necessary. So there are more than 70 to a hundred million Americans with criminal records. And this is a valuable, valuable pool of employees, as companies juggle labor, shortages and jockey for more diverse workforces. I talked about McDonald's last week offering 50 bucks just to have an interview. So you have, obviously people don't all want to work. We've talked about that, but you also have immigration stalled, whether that be Trump's policies or whether it be the pandemic, this demand's out of the box thinking when it comes to hiring people, if you want folks to flip burgers and do all the things that need to be done, market forces are going to make it so that you have to look at folks with criminal records and particularly with marijuana and decriminalization of that. Chad (44m 43s): Yeah. Joel (44m 43s): That's going to be a lot of people that really are not dangerous whatsoever. I also have think that the stories where we talk about monitoring employees and chips and cameras and everything else, I think, I think that is going to be a reaction to hiring more folks with criminal records. I think monitoring employees is going to be much more of a thing to help calm people's minds about who they're hiring and make sure that they're, that they're covered in case of legal liability and all that other, all that other crap. I think you're gonna, you're gonna see more monitoring of employees as a result. Chad (45m 18s): Yeah. And, and to finish on a very happy note because I was just on vacation and I'm not as salty right now. I, this, these are the types of programs that every single organization that's listening to this podcast right now, you need to investigate. Stop the bullshit of saying, well, we can't because right. Say we can because, and that's the biggest thing. From our standpoint in our communities, we had an entire industrial complex that was doing nothing but pushing individuals into the criminal system right into the correctional system. And that was wrong. How do we rectify that? Chad (45m 58s): You can either be the problem, a continuation of the problem, or be a part of the answer. And the only thing we're asking is that you be please a part of the answer. Joel and Chad (46m 12s): We out. 7 (46m 13s): I'm Marie from Scotland, the country, which brought you Alec. Tracy, thank you for listening to podcast with John and cheese. And they talked about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing and be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcast,

Let's face it, COVID times are nebulous at best. and with questions like: Should employers mandate the COVID vaccination? Will employers bump wages to stay competitive? and... What will "back to work" post-COVID even look like? Office? Remote? Hybrid? Luckily Seth Feit, Group VP of Talent at Spectrum / Charter Communications, stops by the pod to share details about all of these topics and how Spectrum is doing the hard work to get back to work. Enjoy this Sovren exclusive. 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 (1m 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. Yeah. Seth (1m 22s): Oh yeah! Friday, Friday, Friday is our recording day. Today. What's up, everybody. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your loyal cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my cohost Chad Sowash and today. What are we got? No, no, no, no. We got a treat today guys. It's Seth Feit. Did I say that right? Feit? Feet? I don't know. He's Group VP of Talent at Spectrum/Charter Communications. Seth. Welcome to your worst nightmare. Great to be here gentlemen. Oh, he's still here. Good. We didn't scare him away. So what do we need to know about you that I missed in the intro? Well, you did, you did butcher the last name, not a big deal. Seth (2m 3s): It's Feit, not Feet. Joel (2m 5s): Feit, not Feet, that's sexy. Seth (2m 7s): Yes Sir. Joel (2m 13s): Seth Feit. Chad (2m 14s): I want to hear about the AOL time that you had, you were Director of Talent Acquisition in '98 through 2000 at AOL. We're talking about dial up. I mean, tell us about that. How was that different than your role today? Joel (2m 32s): Just lost about a third of our listeners. Chad (2m 35s): Hey, I still have my AOL. I still have my AOL email address too, by the way. Do you use AOL instant messenger as well? Seth (2m 43s): Not AOL instant messenger, but still keep my, keep my AOL email for the glory days. Joel (2m 48s): You still have the phone number that you use to dial in to AOL. Seth (2m 51s): That was a great run for me. I mean, AOL was an interesting time. I joined back in 98. The company was doing real well back then. I mean, it was gearing up to eventually buy time Warner. And so I kind of lived through through that merger that, you know, was not the greatest merger in the history of mergers. That's for sure. But you know, AOL was an interesting time back then really, you know, to some extent the internet on training wheels, we were getting, everybody started on the internet. AOL was early into search early into commerce. You know, we were in Dulles, Virginia, not exactly a melting pot of where everybody wants to go work for technology, but we we were making the most of it back then. AOL was a very creative, great fun place to work. Seth (3m 33s): I thoroughly enjoyed it. We wound up, you know, the company I mentioned say we, I was a senior manager director level kind of promoted in the time I was there, but we bought, we bought Time Warner and that merger eventually wound up closing. And I moved over to the Time Warner entity, you know, later moved over to the cable side of the business cable business got bought. I mean, I've been at a version of this company. I really never left AOL, I'm 22 and a half years now at a version of this company. So, you know, Charter Communications bought Time Warner cable. And that's how I'm a part of now this Spectrum brand and the Charter company. So it's been a wild ride. Joel (4m 8s): Seth, can you paint a picture for the kids of what internet recruiting looked like in 1998? Seth (4m 13s): Yeah. I mean, since we were the internet, we were certainly using it a lot. Right. We were the way people were getting on. We had partnerships with some of the fellow dinosaurs, maybe like the monster.com. They weren't early partner of AOL's and that was Chad (4m 28s): Key word Monster. Seth (4m 30s): Absolutely. We partnered closely with them. It definitely, we benefited from the company partnership with Monster at the time, because we were of course using it for, you know, that online career center, original start for Monster that we had used that in my college recruiting days at my previous employer before I ever got AOL. And I was thrilled that AOL had a partnership with Monster. I mean, we were out there trying to find technology people that wanted to tinker on this new thing called the internet. And, you know, I was in a programmatic type of role that AOL was kind of split up between some business units. I was what was considered the corporate group. I oversaw recruitment technology, college recruiting kind of stuff. Seth (5m 10s): So I dabbled in a few of those types of things, did some MBA recruiting, but it was, it was definitely early days of internet, you know, and unfortunately, really what happened with AOL. If they'd maybe had made more investments in the search and commerce side, maybe it would still be a bigger, better company than it is today, but the folks that all work there, we have a strong bond together. We stay in touch there's people that I worked with 20, 22 years ago that we still stay in touch to this day and it was a definitely a great experience. Joel (5m 40s): The cult of AOL. Chad (5m 41s): I remember in 1999, we had an all hands meeting in Indianapolis at Monster. The big unveil was we just landed key word monster. That was a big thing in those days. Joel (5m 58s): Why would you not want the keyword jobs or was that already taken? Chad (6m 2s): That's no, it wasn't. It was all about the brand. That was it. You forget who Jeff Taylor was, right. He didn't care about jobs. He just wanted the Monster. Right. But, so talk about your role today as Group VP of Talent. That's a pretty big all encompassing role, right? Seth (6m 23s): And in a lot of ways, it's a broad responsibility, but we have a very distributed type of HR and recruiting and training type of model. So although I oversee sort of the strategic direction of where we go with our recruitment and learning training, leadership development, org effectiveness, performance management. So a lot of big picture things fall under me from an overall leadership standpoint, but a majority of those real functional responsibilities of getting that work done the actual recruiting, actual training, you know, 95% plus sits in the business unit. So I sort of gather the, we have councils that we've set up for the talent acquisition side and the learning side. Seth (7m 3s): So myself and my team, we get those groups together. We used to do in-person on a quarterly basis. In a COVID world we do more monthly WebEx kind of set ups. And, you know, we try to drive on this mission to attract, acquire, develop, and retain talent for the company, monitoring what's going on out there, making sure from a recruiting standpoint and a learning standpoint that our recruiting community and our learning community have the tools to be successful. And, you know, I'm fortunate that the company's doing well. We invest in those products where we're five years, post-merger now with Charter buying Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. And, you know, the company fr recruiting and transformation kind of standpoint is really started coming together. Seth (7m 47s): And the pandemic has been a spotlight for that. We had to really come together with that. And, you know, the talent function is trying to do the best we can to make sure we've got the best talent in our county. Joel (7m 57s): What's sort of your general take on minimum wage, the state of minimum wage in our country today? Seth (8m 2s): Well, I mean, you know, obviously there's a lot going on with the Biden administration and there they're looking at some things from a federal standpoint, we'll have to see where that goes. I think from a company standpoint, you know, we, 80% of our roles are probably considered frontline in nature. It's a, we're a cable operations company. So it's those technicians that are going into customer's homes, the maintenance techs that maintain the network and the plant, the call center reps that are handling either, either billing calls or technical calls. We have a huge sales organization. Then we have a bunch of business units that are aligned as well around some of our, you know, we have an advertising business and a fiber B2B kind of business, but, you know, so the minimum wage thing for us, like we knew we had to work on our, you know, 11, 12 bucks an hour is not going to cut it in New York City. Seth (8m 51s): It's not going to cut it in Columbia, South Carolina either. So, you know, we knew as a company we had to invest, fortunately, our senior leadership at Charter, they really wanted Charter employees to do a lot of things. So we didn't Time Warner cable had a decent amount of outsourced, you know, contractor for field operations installations. Maybe some more call centers, would have been outsourced then than not compared to what Charter had done. And so Charter came in, but post acquisition and really wanted to bring those jobs, you know, to the company and certainly onshore. And so as a part of that evolution as a company, we were just looking at what our wage practices are and we had decided a few years back that we were going to go with this $15 an hour minimum. Seth (9m 36s): And it was, you know, even at that time we thought pretty progressive. And it, we had some challenges internally around some salary compression and those kinds of things. And it took us a better part of a year, year and a half to iron those out. Chad (9m 48s): What year was that? Seth? Was that like 2016 or Seth (9m 51s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2016, '17, I guess. I don't know exactly, but sometime around then probably we announced it in '17, had it fully implemented in '18. We're always looking at it. It had always been on the radar, but then when the pandemic hit, you know, rather than, you know, throw $500 or a thousand dollars at each employee and some companies did that and I'm sure employees appreciated that we wanted to make a bigger long-term investment. And so we had this long-term vision of going to $20 an hour. So we figured this is the right time to announce that we're going to go to $18 an hour. So that's what we announced that last year, we just implemented it earlier this year. And so now we're at $18 an hour next year, we're going to be a $20 an hour minimum for these frontline roles. Seth (10m 34s): We believe it's going to be an eventual, competitive advantage for us. And we'll, we'll keep, and Joel (10m 39s): You hire people all over the country, I assume. Seth (10m 41s): We do. Yeah. We're 95,000 employees. We're in 41 States. We have call centers in just about each of those 41 States. It might be like 39. So it might not be every single one of the States we service, but in most States multiple centers, we've got different types of call centers. And, you know, these frontline areas, it's primarily that field technician. Joel (11m 3s): The question is so obviously 18 an hour in, you know, Bessemer, Alabama is not the same as $18 in, you know, New York City. Is $18, $18/20, just the floor and people in those higher level markets, higher tier markets, they get paid even more. How does that work? Seth (11m 22s): Well, I mean, it's all a little new to us as well as we launched this. I mean, certainly there's markets like New York City and LA that we service that are higher cost of labor, higher cost of living areas in some of our smaller markets, but it's really a baseline for us to start. There's not a ton of differentiation right now at those levels. We're trying to get people to that $18. And then next year, the twenty dollars and, you know, depending on the location, there's, there's going to be some, some variations of that. Of course we have progression type of plans. Like a call center rep starts off as a CSR customer service rep one, and then works their way through a progression to a two and a three, and there's know more salary and hourly rate, you know, availability on those. Seth (12m 6s): But, you know, as of now, we're still kind of early stages on a lot of this and getting to that aspirational $20 next year. So we're still kind of a wait and see for us. Chad (12m 15s): So are your customer service rep positions? Are those, are they currently, I would assume they're virtual. Are they going to stay that way? How do those positions work? Because that's an entirely different conversation if you're talking remote versus somebody who actually has to be local because they're servicing cable, right? Yeah. Seth (12m 35s): Yeah. Well, what's interesting, you know, probably what, 13 months ago we were paying almost zero calls from home as a company. We just did not have any at-home reps. I mean, we have a culture of our company, you know, those retail store reps that have to go to a store. The technicians that go to the customer's homes. I mean, we generally, you know, culturally, like people want people in the office, working together, collaborating that kind of thing. If it had been the plan, you know, as we brought jobs off shore and internal to the company, we wanted to have people together. That's sort of a company desire, kind of a cultural plan for the org. So obviously pandemic hits. We didn't even know half the things we were trying to figure out at the time, the social distancing, the face coverings, the personal protective equipment. Seth (13m 20s): I mean, we were scrambling like every other company, but we had to quickly shift to allow those work from home. And it was not, you know, that that call center rep doesn't have a laptop. It's not as easy for them to just, okay, I'm going to work from home today. They had to literally take their CPU units home and their headsets, which as we know earlier, when we were testing my mic, I don't have. We invested in the reps on those guys, not me, but, you know, so it, it was a huge transition to get social distancing in our offices, get, provide PPE, you know, get some percentage of our calls from home so we were able to spread out in our call centers. But, you know, for the most part, we never shut down a call center, any of our offices, and we are still taking calls from office. Seth (14m 3s): We have a bit of a hybrid right now. We were at our peak, it was probably maybe 25, 35% were in an office, you know, were in a call center and with the other balance being from home, and we're starting to shift that a little more, the other way, as we get a little more comfortable with our social distancing, we're getting, you know, people are getting vaccinated, we're still following CDC guidelines and have these strict requirements of, you know, face coverings when walking around in the public areas, that kind of thing. We try to use all those guidance that we have out there. So it's, it's interesting. We are still in an office and planning on getting more and more people back in the office. Joel (14m 40s): So the big thing now is vaccine requirements. Where are you guys landing on that one? Seth (14m 45s): Yeah, certainly a great topic internally, that's been highly debated at the highest levels of the company and where we've landed is we're not requiring, but encouraging and doing everything we can to educate people. Joel (14m 57s): Are you incentivizing? Am I getting a $25 certificate, gift card to Target? Chad (15m 2s): Chipolte? Joel (15m 3s): I loved Chipolte. Seth (15m 4s): No, not, not those kinds of incentives, other just education as best we can. And as you guys know, every state's been a little different, even counties are different in how they want to get to offer the vaccination. I mean, since we were this essential business from the beginning, you know, we're not, I'm not claiming we're frontline, you know, doctors, or maybe even the supermarket kind of people, but we are, you know, keeping your internet on while everyone everyone's working from home. It was pretty important. Chad (15m 27s): That's Essential. I mean, that's business. That's essential, so yeah. Seth (15m 32s): So we were, at least in most States we were considered that kind of one C opportunity to get our vaccinations. And it was complicated. I mean, it's still complicated by each state. We're still kind of looking at when and how we can get people vaccinated, but we're actually in this week getting our final plans together to do seven onsite vaccinations in what we call kind of mega sites, where we have, you know, a couple thousand employees and at least 500 to a thousand of our employees that have expressed interest in getting a vaccination and want to do that. Nice. Yeah. So we've got a third party partner that we work with on that. They're coming on site over the next couple of weeks, offer those. And, you know, we just, we want, we, we believe in science, we believe in herd immunity. Seth (16m 12s): We're trying to get our own employees behind that. And we know it's a very personal decision, but we look at it as we're all in this together and we wanna encourage educate and, you know, provide the opportunity. Joel (16m 24s): So one of the things we talk about a lot, is initially a lot of big companies were playing the work from home hybrid really, really waving that flag. And it seems like they're moving more toward, Oh, we're getting back to the headquarters. It sounds like that's, what's going to be happening at Charter. Or am I, am I reading that wrong? Seth (16m 43s): Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're, as I've said, we kind of never left. So we we've been at some kind of hybrid where we're rarely more than 50%. I don't think there's, I don't know if there's even a building we've been at over 50% occupancy just to keep social distancing and everything. And so we've sort of never left the office. So our return to office plans are more, how do we increase that? And we're just kind of monitoring, looking at those CDC guidelines and seeing what is, what's gonna make the most sense. But we're trying to, like, as an example, with my own talent team, we've been more on like an ABCD schedule in our cubes and with our office, people generally like myself, I've really been coming in for the most part, almost every work day. Most of my direct reports with offices are kind of following a similar plan. Seth (17m 26s): Maybe other folks at like the director manager level are coming in every other week and our queue people are coming in one week a month and working remote those other three. Joel (17m 35s): So for those of us who don't have a real job, ABCD means different time, different time windows? Seth (17m 41s): It's a week, like in A week, B week, C week, D week. So within a week being one, one, one week out another, but there's, there's also, we were company that has, depending on the leaders of that organization. And there's some nuances to how that plan works. Like I'm describing more of the plan for my Charlotte based team. In a place like St. Louis, where I've got some of my technical recruiters that sit with our IT organization, we try to mirror the IT orgs plan. So they might, they might be in two weeks and out two weeks, we try to have the recruiters come in the same kind of plans. There's also some caveats to it, but, and we're now looking at, but by the beginning of the summer timeframe, you know, probably mid to late June, we'll be more like a 50/50 kind of plan. Seth (18m 22s): Probably make an a B week or maybe an AB day and just start getting people back into the flow. And then by the fall fingers crossed, knock on wood, herd immunity, things are looking better. Variants are under control. CDC guidelines have shifted a little bit, you know, we're making plans to have more people in the office and, you know, want to benefit from that collaboration and have people be able to work together. Chad (18m 43s): What about autonomy? Because many employees feel like they've been more productive and even bottom lines and activity reports and productivity reports have demonstrated that they have been more productive at home. Is there going to be some type of hybrid autonomy kind of plan where you allow individuals let's say next year 2022. And I know, that's way off because there's still a lot of time, but are you talking about having discussions around providing more autonomy to individuals? Because that's a huge benefit. Seth (19m 17s): Yeah, we are. And what's fascinating about that is two years ago, the concept of a remote worker would have been like laughed at. Chad (19m 24s): Scary. Seth (19m 25s): Yeah. That would not have even come up. Now what it means for Charter's, probably not the way maybe all of our employees would like it at first. I don't think it's going to be, you are in a remote job and you never have to come in the office or you're in a 50/50 job. You know, we're, we'll look at a per job basis, but you're overseeing the talent organization. You know, I've got executive recruiters that do across the company work, I've got corporate and technical recruiters that hire for those groups and those jobs can be done from home. And I'm hoping, and we don't know for sure, but by 2022, I'm open there's, you know, hybrid that gives everybody the balance that they desire, and also gives them a chance to interact with their clients though, in the office. Right. We have our folks based in St. Seth (20m 5s): Louis, where IT is. In Denver, where our software technology network ops groups are. Like here in Charlotte, we've got, you know, some hybrid of some of our technology groups and all of our staff areas. So, you know, we like our recruiters to be in with their clients. So it's, I think I'll always be some type of tether to the center. I doubt we're going to hire fully remote jobs and, you know, we can hire Chad in Indianapolis to work for us. I don't, I don't see that as happening in 2022, maybe that's 2023 or 2024, but we're trying to be flexible. I know for me overseeing, you know, a pretty big function at my company, I want to be as flexible as I can and try to listen and hear our employees. And we celebrated some great success last year, and we did it working remote a lot. Seth (20m 47s): So we have to recognize that we were able to do it ourselves and we showed it can work and have to balance that with kind of the company culture and desire, you know? So. Joel (20m 56s): How are you from a recruiting standpoint? So the work from home phenomenon, I think is, has created a bit of an expectation, particularly with knowledge workers, that I should be able to work from home. So you mentioned a little, some pockets of technology workers, and that they're going to get back to the office, so are you fearful that that's going to create a hindrance to your recruiting ability to get those folks who are sort of have an expectation now of I can do my job from home so I'm going to work for a company that lets me do that, or are you rethinking your branding strategy to make that a positive for workers? Talk about that. Seth (21m 32s): Yeah, the quick answer is yes. I mean, I am personally concerned as the head of talent and the person in charge of our employment brand and the messages we put out there. And, you know, as you guys can tell from my passion, I mean, I really believe in my company, believe in the organization, believe in the products and services that we offer. I mean, I think we're a great place to work, but I think we have to be smart about what candidate and employee expectations are. And we have to monitor that closely. And that's one of the reasons I'm a little more optimistic about the fact that at least we're considering some of those more flexible options, and we're just going to have to monitor it along the way. I mean, this was already happening a couple of years ago, we have a bunch of technology, people in Denver, we were losing people to virtual opportunities that they were getting. Seth (22m 14s): Right? And there's more and more of them, obviously this pandemic sped all that up. And I think as people are still uncomfortable with the thought of going back into an office, they're probably been the height of that nervousness as we're still figuring out vaccinations. And what does this really mean? And what are variants? I mean, we're at a word a very dicey time right now, and we have to be smart about it ourselves. I know myself and my recruitment technology folks, we're monitoring our candidate flow and trying to keep a sense of the pulse of our candidates. And of course our employees as well. And we know there's some nervousness and we're, we still, as a company believe culturally that we are better in the office better together, and we'll keep down that path. Seth (22m 55s): But hopefully with some flexibility and not wanting it to impact our ability to attract and retain people. Chad (23m 2s): You mentioned employment brand. I also think this, this bridges over to consumer brand as well, when you start to talk about minimum wage is going from $15 to 18 to 20. I mean, that people understand that is their community that you service number one, and the people that actually work that are their neighbors. Right? So this to me, when you're making these types of decisions, do you work with marketing to be able to talk about more of a holistic rollout, because this doesn't just impact prospective candidates. This also impacts the opportunities for acquiring customers as well. Seth (23m 42s): Wow. Yeah, it's a great point. And I'd say yes, we definitely work with those groups. I mean, certainly a group like sales and marketing, they benefit from the wage increases as well. There's a lot of the sales roles are commissions, so they don't really fall under the same, you know, $18 an hour things since they've got the commission potential to make much more than that, but they, they benefit from it personally. At the highest leadership levels, they're certainly very well aware. We have a really good relationship with our external communication group, with our own employment brand, so we try to tie that together. I mean, you know, I feel like I'm almost taking credit for our $18, $20 an hour thing. I mean, this was much more 4 (24m 22s): Do it Seth. Do it. It Was mine. It was all mine. Seth (24m 24s): I was in a room one day and said, you know what? We should be paying $18/hour. Our CHRO Palmer Sean's been really pushing that, our head of compensation, you know, it goes all the way up to our CEO and our board. I mean, this is a big investment that the company has made, right. It doesn't when you were paying 11, 12 bucks an hour and went to 15 and 18 and 20, I mean, you're investing a lot more in your frontline employees and you had before. And, you know, we're fortunate that we're in a good and growing business, right? I mean, we had a very productive, good year in 2020, and now we're in the mobile business selling our Spectrum mobile product. So yeah, it's all connected. And, you know, one of the reasons, you know, in my intro there, when, Cheese was giving my intro, it's like Spectrum/Charter. Seth (25m 8s): You know, we aren't, the corporation is Charter, but the brand is Spectrum. And we made a specific employment branding decision to align with our friends and marketing around that because when we were post-merger, you know, taking the Time Warner Cable name and the Bright House name, and quite frankly, even the Charter name, and we switched that all to Spectrum and we wanted to ride that wave with our employment brand. So that, whole like Spectrum, Spectrum Careers it's really helped us kind of grow that brand. And then the community work that we do, and we are, we're a local business. Right. And we take full advantage of that. It, if you, you know, some of your points earlier, is it a disadvantage that we're not offering remote roles possibly, but is it an advantage that we are in these 41 States in all these local markets providing, you know, good paying jobs and career opportunities for people, yeah absolutely? Seth (25m 58s): You know that's what we have to focus on and make that the area of emphasis at those local levels and really drive those local economies. Joel (26m 8s): One of the counterpoints to the argument that government should raise the minimum wage and what that should be, and government should be more involved is that tHe invisible hand of the market is much more powerful than any sort of government regulation. Chad (26m 25s): Bullshit. Joel (26m 26s): I'm curious how much of this decision by you guys to raise the minimum wage or that your wage to $18 and then 20 was driven in part by Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc. Raising their own minimum wage to work at those companies at roughly $15 an hour. How much was this market forces? How much was it? Oh, we're just doing really great as a business and we're going to raise minimum. Seth (26m 51s): I mean, we really wanted to invest in our employees at those frontline levels. I mean, I think we knew that these were not competitive and in some cases, even, even living wages and, you know, when we went to the $15 an hour, I mean, it was a good start, obviously. Now we're at 18 going to 20, but we did some, we did some employee focus groups and we asked some employees, would you be willing to put your story on video? And I still remember like this emotional video of one of our technicians talking about with this pay increase, his wife can now take nursing school classes, get her nursing certificate and become a nurse and really help, you know, change the trajectory of their family. And it's like, ah, just almost brings a tear to your eye kind of emotion stuff like, wow, that's this great impact kind of stuff. Seth (27m 33s): So we've very much monitor the market. We try to be market competitive and we knew it, you know, $11, $12 an hour for a call center rep job you're not as competitive when you get up to $15, you're starting to get competitive at $18, you might be at the higher end of the market in some of the smaller markets out there. So, you know, it's very much with, you know, trying to invest in our employees to make sure they can be an active part of their communities and have success and grow their careers. And then I think there is a government angle in this. I mean, we have a government affairs group that works with our partners in DC and throughout all of our 41 States. We've got people in our local and state government affairs groups that work closely with our constituents there. Seth (28m 14s): And these are big topics for them too. I mean, they love seeing the investment that we're making. So it's, you know, I don't think that was ever the reason that we did it, but it's certainly a nice benefit of it. And it, it highlights that, you know, community and even government partnership in some ways of what we're doing, Joel (28m 29s): Don't be ashamed of capitalism, Seth don't be ashamed. Chad (28m 34s): Yeah. Just capitalism that needs more guard rails. That's Seth Feit everybody Group VP of Talent at Spectrum/Charter Communications. Seth, first and foremost, we've got to have you, or at least some members of your staff back to talk about some other topics, because we only got a few in. D&I, training, pipeline, and we know that you guys do a lot of that, but in the meantime, if somebody wants to connect with you or find out more about jobs at Spectrum, where would you send them? Seth (29m 4s): Jobs.Spectrum.com is our main site to go to definitely check it out. We're excited. We just invested in a new website, went live earlier, end of January, this year, we're excited about that so check it out and you know, I'm a very out there LinkedIn guy. So if anyone wants to connect with personnel, LinkedIn certainly look me up, Feit, not feet. And look at guys that it's a pleasure being on here with you a long time listener, first time caller. But it's been, it's been great talking with you guys. Chad (29m 36s): Love it, man. Joel (29m 37s): Nice. Chad (29m 38s): We appreciate it. And we want to have you back, but until then, Joel, another one in the books, my friend. Chad and Joel (29m 44s): We Out. OUTRO (30m 5s): 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.

How do you prepare for a crisis? A tragedy? How do you prepare your people? Remember your people are your brand, right? How do you ensure the people are getting the right message, that you are handling the spray of inaccuracies on social media and much more. Chad and Joel were lucky enough to again sit down with Cathy Tull, former CMO of Las Vegas, but this time on a more somber note to talk about preparing and handling a tragedy. A very inspiring story about the city, brand, and moreover the people of Las Vegas. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions' clients are changing the lives of people with disabilities, including veterans with service related disabilities. Joel: This Chad and Cheese Cult Brand podcast is supported by SmashFly, recruiting technology built for the talent life cycle, and big believers in building relationships with brands, not jobs. Let SmashFly help tell your story and keep relationships at the heart of your CRM. For more information, visit smashfly.com today. 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 and Cheese podcast. Chad: This Cult Brand podcast series was created to demonstrate that a brand at its very foundation is built of its people, and I can't think of a story that people, especially in marketing and branding, need to hear more. We're joining the discussion with Cathy Tull, who was the CMO of Los Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Cathy, you were in the center of something that happened that was devastating on October 1st of 2017, that rocked the U.S. and also a destination that people trusted. There was a mass shooting that happened in Vegas. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you really dealt with it? Cathy: You know what's interesting is that the event happened on a Sunday evening at a country music festival and the tragedy took 58 lives, but it really is just so unexpected. Vegas is known for entertainment and we're considered a very safe destination. And so to have this happen in your hometown is shocking. And I was actually in Italy at the time with some other people celebrating our, we had 50th birthday celebration, and I got a call ... It was in the morning in Italy and I got a call that said there had been a shooting and we weren't sure how bad it was. And so we talked about what we needed to do and bring the team together and started to pull people together to see what was going on, and the one thing that I look back on and think that time, one of the greatest things we did was we just started to pull the team together before we knew absolutely what was happening, because as you can imagine, it was complete chaos, in that people weren't sure whether there was one shooter or more than one shooter. Cathy: What was happening, there was a lot of things on the ground where people were running and showing up in other places, and so there was a moment in time where everyone knew something really bad was happening, but trying to pin down exactly what was happening took a bit of time. And so I think one of the things that we did that really helped us along the way was bring a unified crisis communication team together, which we had planned for ... Everyone has a crisis response manual. We had one that we had just happened to update the previous summer and so everyone knew who was supposed to be there. And I think one of the things you need to realize is you can plan for a crisis, but when it happens, not everyone is sitting where you think they're going to be sitting. Chad: Right. Cathy: So I was involved from Italy, some of my colleagues were in New York, there were some that were in Montana fly fishing. I mean, people were kind of spread to the winds when this all happened. And so bringing that team together and making sure that you have enough people you can count on really is what helped us be successful in the communications efforts. Chad: How did you find out about it? Did you get a call? Did you see something on the internet? Cathy: I got a call. So the head of the account team at the time called me, our agency, R&R Partners, the head of the account team there gave me a call and said there had been a shooting and they weren't sure how bad it was, but it was just coming through all social media, starting to be bombarded by something was happening. I talked to her a bit about what she knew. I said to her, okay, start getting the team together. And the plan had always been to have the team form at the agency, which is in a suburb of Las Vegas, knowing that if something ever happened, it would likely happen close to the strip, and our offices are close to the strip at the convention center, so the idea was to bring everyone together in a place that wouldn't be in the middle of anything that might be happening. Cathy: She started to assemble the team, I started to make phone calls to some people I knew. My sister was actually at the concert, so I called my niece first to see where they were and they were actually in a hallway at the Motel Six, hysterical. I hung up with her and told her to stay there until I called her back and I called a friend of mine who owns the ambulance company that was doing the standby service at the concert and I've known him for 30 years, and I called him and I said, how bad is it? And he said, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. At that point we knew that there really was a huge problem and so I called back to the team and by then they were all gathering and starting to assemble information and create this makeshift war room where we could monitor what was happening in real time and make sure that we were sharing recommended messaging and that we were trying to correct any misinformation and really get a handle on what was happening. Chad: Wow, that's huge. I mean, because you literally needed a war room to start to get proper information out to the people, right? Cathy: Yeah, at the end of the day, you think about everything's happening, you need to have as many people in the room at the same time as you can and then make sure that you're monitoring what people are saying, what's correct, you're running down information so that you're not repeating messages that are incorrect. It's really important that you know who you need on that team before you have the team and who are the people that, if I'm not there ... What I did for example, because I was in Italy, I could call in and be part of the conversation, but I also called somebody that I relied on, my number two and said, okay, I need you to go and physically be sitting there, so that we had physical bodies in the room and then we also had people that were calling in on the phone joining because they were not here at the time that this was all starting to happen. And so making sure that you have some depth in your crisis team, and I think that was one of the things that really served us well. Chad: Can you describe the room at all? Was this chaos? Was there someone in charge? What were some of the things that were most pressing in terms of what we should do and what sort of strategy we should formulate going forward? Cathy: So the room itself, it was a large conference room and so there's a big table and so everyone is able to sit around the table and there really was a lead, one of the point people, the head of the account team at the agency, really took the lead of making sure we had the right people there and we could start to logically walk through what happened, what we knew, what we didn't know, what we needed to know. We immediately pulled down all advertising. As you can imagine, all this is happening, you don't want, what happens here, stays here messaging to be out there. That evening we took down ... The agency took down all of the paid advertising and made sure that we just went dark for a bit, because it was important that we could control the message. And so those were really the very first steps, was trying to get our arms around what was happening, what was real, what wasn't real, and making sure that anything we could control as far as messaging, we were either pulling down if it was not appropriate to be running at that time or we were using those assets to push out information that we needed to help push out for the community. Chad: From from the standpoint of, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, how close did you work, or did you already have lines set up with the police department and with media and so on and so forth, to be able to once again control the message to ensure that the right information was actually getting out? Cathy: Yeah, we had developed very good relationships with both metropolitan police department and the local media. We've worked with the police department before, we had worked with the sheriff, and so we were well-positioned to make sure that we had open communication lines. And then we also were making sure that we were talking to our resort partners. It was really kind of a hub of communication to make sure that we could have messaging, we could send it out, we could talk to the resort partners and everyone could be on the same page with what we were doing. And I think that is one of the most important things is making sure that A) you're not surprised by messaging that's coming out from someone else and B) that you're coordinating as much as you can. The team really worked outside of some traditional roles to help coordinate some level of community response. Cathy: In the days following the shooting, there were opportunities for citizens to ... Residents of Las Vegas to come in and donate. People really wanted to be able to do something. The morning after the shooting, the line around the Red Cross was around the corner, because people didn't know what else to do other than to go give blood. And so then there was a space set up at the convention center where people could go donate items that people were going to need, families were going to need as they started to come in for their loved ones, and so there was an opportunity to really kind of manage that by working with the outside community. And those are relationships you have to have before the crisis hits. Joel: Cathy, was there any sort of strategy around social media? I'm sure that was just mass confusion in terms of externally people commenting and saying things about the city as well as what was going on, I'm sure internally within the city, a lot of things were going on in social media. What kind of plan did you guys have to utilize or damage control through social media channels during that first few days of of the tragedy? Cathy: The team was really making sure that we were monitoring social media, which was really important, so we knew what people were saying so that we could respond with messaging that was correct. The other thing was really making sure that there was a lot of media that had congregated on the strip near the site, and so the team actually went down and handed out information to the reporters that were there so that you could build relationships with the people that were there. You could also make sure that they had the correct information. Really monitoring the social media and the ability to respond with correct information is really important. And then proactively going out there with, okay here are things we can tell you. And really letting, obviously on the investigation, Metro was the lead in making sure that we could refer people to the right context there. If there were a media that wanted more information, they were making sure they were getting it from the right source is also important. Chad: So stepping back a little bit and talking about this podcast is about Cult Brands, but we need to understand that brands are really cemented in the people. Can you talk a little bit about how the people really are the ones who embody the brand, especially around this type of a crisis? Cathy: The thing was amazing to us was that we had taken down all media and there was a conversation around, okay, what ... We have to say something obviously as a brand and you have to say something that's most appropriate and what is that? And so the first thing we did was reached out to Andre Agassi, who is actually a resident of Las Vegas, grew up here, and the agency created a spot that just was a spot that could go out there that just said, we're together in this. And so Andre agreed to record that spot, and so we started to push that out. And that was just a message of encouragement. And then as we talked about, okay, what comes next and what does the messaging look like, we noticed, because we were monitoring social media so closely, there was a lot of UGC, user generated content, that was coming out where people were very supportive of Las Vegas as a brand and as a city and saying, we love Vegas and this won't stop us from coming and we're here for you Vegas, and some really moving messages. Cathy: And so what the agency really did was take those UGC spots and we reached out to people and asked if we could use their content and then stitch together some spots that really was reflecting what people were saying. Instead of us talking about Vegas as a brand and a city and it really was about people that had come here before and loved the city and that's where the cult-like following is so important, because they were talking about Vegas in a way that was really authentic and we were able to stitch together those pieces and use that user generated content to really reflect what people were saying, which was really more powerful than anything we could have created on our own. Joel: Was there a worst case scenario in terms of what you guys thought about, I'm assuming that it sounds like the messaging worked sort of the the damage control through that, was their worst case scenario. I know that we never got to that, but assuming things really got bad, what were some of the things that maybe you thought about in terms of strategy to help control the damage that was being done? Cathy: We really thought that we would have to do more transitional messaging than we actually did. One of the things that happened in between is that the Rock 'n' Roll Marathon and Half Marathon comes to Las Vegas and the fall of every year, and it was in November, scheduled for November, and there was conversations around do we continue to do the marathon? The competitive group was really sensitive to doing what was right for the community, and we said yes, we think it's really important that we still do that race now more so than ever, because people needed to have the visual that the city was still open, that we were open for business. This is a tourism based economy. If we lost the tourism base, it would really be devastating to the community as a whole, and so it was important that that happened. Cathy: And they did a phenomenal job, really recalculating the route, because they wanted to make sure that they start an end line had been in the festival lot where the incident occurred, so obviously they couldn't start. And then there was a crime scene, so they had to move the start and end of the race. They also made sure that they were very appropriate in how it was reflected, so people did run by, they went down to the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, which brought them down by where the shooting had occurred. But there was just some beautiful music at the Welcome to Las Vegas sign so people could have that moment if they wanted it. And then they ran back by and went downtown and finished the race. And so for us, making sure that partners like that stayed in was really important in recalculating the city itself and that we were still open for business and that we were a safe destination. Cathy: And the other thing that we did was research is always very important, and so we would make sure that we were talking to our visitors about how did they feel in making sure that travel intent, while it softened a bit, didn't fall off a cliff. That people did to feel like Las Vegas was a safe destination. That there wasn't a misperception about the strip being closed. There was some in the beginning misperception that the Southend of the strip was closed, which it wasn't. And that people were saying, well they wanted to come to Vegas, but they wanted it to be an appropriate time. And so postponing trips was important that we said, now is the time we need you. It is an appropriate time, because now is when we really need you as a visitor. And so that really helped, I think propel the community forward by having all of those things kind of moving in tandem. Cathy: And we expected as a destination that we would have to do additional transitioning messaging through December and maybe into the new year, and what happened was people started to say in December, I want my Vegas back. I don't want one crazy person who did this awful, terrible thing to really change the Vegas we know and love. And so we said, okay. In January, we started to go back to some regular messaging, I think the other thing that really made it, increased our ability to be able to do it was our media partners donated space to promote the Vegas strong messaging that we had running. There was $3.6 million worth of media that was donated by all the media partners we had worked with over the years, which really allowed us to push some of that messaging, that UGC campaign, and some of that traditional Vegas strong messaging out into the marketplace in a way that we hadn't done before. We had some messaging in times square and we hadn't done that before. Having partners like that really made a difference as well. Chad: So if you could point at one thing, and I'm sure there are many things, but the biggest thing, if you could point out one thing that actually helped you and the brand in Vegas really through this, what would that be? Cathy: I think one of the biggest learnings, and the one thing that really helped us be successful was developing that communication system between us and the key stakeholders and the community so that we could share information quickly and we can be sure that it was accurate and that we could make sure that we were a voice for the community in a way that traditionally were their voice to welcome the community here, but we also needed to make sure that we were helping pushing out some messaging as a city of where people could help. And so I think bridging those communication systems was really what helped the community respond in a way that was amazing. Joel: Well, Kathy, we thank you for your time and sharing, I know a heartfelt story, a tragedy. I'm sure it's not easy for you to talk about that incident. We really appreciate you taking some time out and sort of framing what that day and those few days after that and the months after that really entailed for you in the city of Vegas. Thank you so much. Cathy: Thank you. #CultBrandSeries #CultBrands #Vegas #crisis #Brand #EmployerBrand #EmploymentBrand #TheGathering

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps businesses find qualified candidates with disabilities for their job postings. It's The Shred a mini Chad and Cheese bite of Breaking News -- This is Chad Sowash The Shred is brought to you by Recruitology -- Recruitology brings artificial intelligence - that's AI kids - to job posting and distribution for employers large and small. Post once, pay once, and have your jobs automatically distributed to the right sites where you’ll get the most bang for your buck. Start posting your jobs using Recruitology today at recruitology.com/employers ON TO THE NEWS: Stories dropped late last week by The Daily Beast, The Verge, Business Insider, CEO letter and other LinkedIn posts are providing the following story... New LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky took the helm last Monday and by Thursday LinkedIn's racist employees were climbing out of their holes. On Thursday LinkedIn held a virtual global town hall to address the nationwide social unrest sparked by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. Mourners were welcomed with peer employee comments like: “Blacks kill blacks at 50 times the rate that whites kill blacks,” wrote one employee. “Usually it is the result of gang violence in the inner city. Where is the outcry?” Another employee said, “As a non-minority, all this talk makes me feel like I am supposed to feel guilty of my skin color. I feel like I should let someone less qualified fill my position. Is that ok? It appears that I am a prisoner of my birth. This is not what Martin Luther King Jr would have wanted for anyone.” I'm sure those individuals were fired on the spot... Right... Ummm, well, uh no... LinkedIn allowed anonymous comments so racist idiots could throw verbal Molotov cocktails and fan the flames. In a public follow-up letter to employees on LinkedIn Roslansky writes: "we offered the ability to ask questions anonymously with the intention of creating a safe space for all. Unfortunately, that made it possible to add offensive comments without accountability. We require members on our platform to have real identities and we will not allow anonymous questions in all hands meetings in the future. I said it in the Company Group yesterday, and I will say it again, we are not and will not be a company or platform where racism or hateful speech is allowed." This forum was obviously not a safe space. LinkedIn's culture problems are bigger than just a few people, it's baked right in their own dammed recipe. Check this out, LinkedIn released a report last year showing just 3.5% of its workforce was Black and with the Black representation of the US workforce hovering just over 12.5% you start to understand the landscape a tad better. Simply, if you are not hiring diversity into your ranks what signal does that send to the employees? To you customers and users? Personally I believe LinkedIn had an opportunity to change this culture when Jeff Weiner stepped down as CEO. They could have easily found a person of color with the chops for the position. Ryan Roslansky was an SVP at Linked for 11+ years prior and I'm sure qualified for the position, but companies need to be stepping away from the good-ole-boy c-suites and actually demonstrating that diversity isn't a cliché, it's human, necessary, and demands execution with real outcomes. Let's be honest, this is a microcosm of America today. Companies have lavish diversity statements, but it's only cosmetic. Message to LinkedIn, it you want to be a part of the solution, stop being a part of the problem. 3.5% is a big fucking problem. Needless to say, Joel and I will talk in-depth about that very topic on this Friday's show. Big thanks Recruitology for supporting The Shred. Recruitology has the latest in machine learning and programmatic advertising technology so get your jobs on best of breed niche sites and on top job boards at recruitology.com/employers. Last but never least remember to subscribe to The Chad and Cheese Podcast - HR's Most Dangerous -for late-breaking news, snark, knowledge droppin' and pure stupidity. SOWASH OUT!

How's that saying go? Empires don't die with a bang, they go out with a whimper. Or something like that. If you're thinking the acquisition of Brassring, after it was snatched up by IBM a decade ago with a price tag just north of a billion dollars, is kind of like that whole whimper thing, you're not alone. And good luck recognizing the company who wrote the check this time 'round. If you're more into up-and-comers, however, this week's got that too, with university employment solution RippleMatch getting big money to take on Handshake and the other companies hoping to own the college recruitment space. Want established players? Of course this show discusses the latest LinkedIn news. With their latest initiative, newly minted unicorn Degreed might be a little nervous. The whole show is bookended with McDonald's latest strategy to combat candidate ghosting. As usual, this bit of aural gold is powered 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. WARNING (0s): Hey guys, it's Cheese. Look, Chad's on vacation this week, which means two things. One, we have a guest cohost be nice to him. Just like Chad, he's a middle aged bald white guy. So you probably won't even notice a difference. And two, since Chad does all of our editing, this episode is going to come at you *raw. So what we say is what you'll get no filter dogs barking and doorbell's ringing. So buckle up. This is Chadless and Cheese. *NOTE: Raw means Joel has podcasted for 4+ years and barely knows how to set-up his own mic, let alone produce a clean podcast. - Chad INTRO (37s): 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 (59s): I hope you love East coast bias and mad science. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel "lean, mean and vaccine" Cheeseman Chris (1m 10s): and I'm Chris "yes, I listen to yacht rot" Russell. Joel (1m 14s): On this week's show LinkedIn tells Degreed, hold my beer. Hey, do you smell an IPO? And no, no, no. That's McDonald's anti-ghosting strategy you're smelling, I'll have a number three with a McOrange. Thanks. Sovren Promo (1m 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" Sovren Promo (2m 15s): 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 32s): Chris Russell. Welcome to the show, man. What's up? Chris (2m 37s): Hey, now I'm a good replacement for Chad. I think. Joel (2m 42s): Like I said, another middle-aged balding white guy. What could go wrong? Chris (2m 46s): You can keep the same avatar Joel. Joel (2m 49s): Hey man. Yeah. So some people don't know who you are, you and I go back 15 years, at least. All County Jobs and Cheesehead for who remember that stuff. But those, for those that don't know, you rattle off, I guess the number of shit, that your stuff you're doing right now. And, and it talk about your podcast and just get them up to speed. Chris (3m 12s): Yeah. Rick Tech Media is my company. I've been in the space for 20 years, ran a bunch of job boards back in the two thousands. And a couple of other startups that went bust. Was a corporate recruiter for a couple of years until I got fired. And since then been doing Rec Tech Media. So I'm an entrepreneur, podcaster, writer, consultants, and kind of a recruiting junkie if you will. Joel (3m 40s): Yeah. Yeah. So you haven't, you haven't started a new job board lately. I guess that's very telling because you used to love to start those things up. Chris (3m 47s): I do a lot of consulting jobs today. Joel (3m 50s): Yeah. You're you're also an avid sports fan and I want to make sure that you're not on the ledge right now. The Yankees are in last place and the red Sox are in first place. How do you feel about that? Chris (3m 60s): I've stopped watching the Yankees at this point. Joel. Joel (4m 4s): You're probably pretty torn up about the A-Rod, J-Lo breakup too, right? Chris (4m 8s): Oh God, no, but I'll just say that analytics has ruined baseball, let's put it that way. Joel (4m 13s): Analytics has ruined baseball, but you're a Knicks fan. So there is room. for what happens to him there, man. Whatever I want. I want some of that shit. Chris (4m 25s): Whole new level. Fourth place in the NBA East and coming for the Nets. Joel (4m 32s): Come'in for the Nets, all right. All right. Apologies to all of our international listeners who hate when we talk about regionalized and Americanized sports. So Adam Gordon, sorry about that, man. Let's get, let's get to some outs. Shall we? I'm going to make it short. Chad's the big shout out guy. So I'll keep it brief. Victoria Conley everybody she won our beer drop last month and she beer dropped the beer droppers. She sent Chad and I a six pack of beer called John out of Philly and a couple of tomboys, a sweatshirt, and even a koozie. Joel (5m 13s): Chris, are you familiar with the terms, John, as a New Yorker, Connecticuter. Chris (5m 17s): And it was Sean John Puff Daddy. Joel (5m 21s): Yeah. The term John is like a thing of a ma jiggy, I guess in Philly. It's it's new to me. Yeah. Chris (5m 26s): Wow never heard of that. Joel (5m 28s): Wikipedia that shit. If you're interested, you got any shout outs? Chris (5m 31s): I do actually. Shout out to my 18 year old daughter, Joel. Joel (5m 34s): What? Chris (5m 35s): She is going to be 25% raise, She bolted a $12 an hour job at a daycare for a waitress job at a country club making $15. And perhaps she'll now stop asking me to borrow 20 bucks every other day for gas. Joel (5m 54s): Daycare job. Jesus. Chris (5m 56s): Ironically though the job she got is thanks to pandemic, because a country club told her in the interview that they normally hire temporary workers from Europe to come in and do the serving stuff. But because of restrictions they had to hire from the US obviously, so good for her actually. So. Joel (6m 14s): So she's in what grade? Chris (6m 16s): She's a graduating high school in a couple of months. Joel (6m 18s): Okay. So you're going to be an empty nester, right? Chris (6m 20s): Yep. She's off to Endicott College in the fall North of Boston there and yeah, I'm already saving my pennies. Joel (6m 28s): So Chad became an empty-nester this year, essentially. Like, what are you looking forward to with the kids out of the house, Chris (6m 35s): Less of a mess, she makes. Joel (6m 39s): You know, I'm so jealous, cause I have a four year old I'm going to be like 89 by the time my kids are out of the house. Chris (6m 45s): So, leaving the door open every, every five minutes and leaving your crap all over the bathroom sink, you know. Joel (6m 51s): Nice, nice, nice. Well, shout out again, not necessarily shout out, but make sure you guys speaking of Victoria, if you haven't signed up for free shit, you gotta do it. We're giving away free t-shirts, we're giving away free beer sponsored by AdZuna. We're giving away whiskey sponsored by our buddies at Sovren and teaser alert, we're going to be starting, that the ink is still drying on the agreement where we're going to be starting wine with Cheese and Chad sponsored by High Bar. So We're fully committed to destroying every liver possible in our industry. Joel (7m 32s): And we couldn't be more excited. Chris (7m 35s): Well, you left out the Vodka, cause that's what I like Joel. So, I'm more of a vodka guy these days. Joel (7m 40s): Yeah. Vodka's kinda stretching it. We're gonna, we're gonna wait for weed to be legalized in the U S and we're gonna. We're pitching Peter Weddle on "Weed with Weddell". We're we'll see if he'll go for it. I'm not sure. I'm not sure he's that into it, but we'll see. Chris (7m 55s): Send me some Tito's listeners. Joel (7m 59s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any other shout outs for me, man? Chris (8m 2s): I got, well, I got one quick rant actually. Joel (8m 4s): Oh a rant. Okay. Hit us. Chris (8m 8s): Dear Facebook, Please stop trying to turn every one of my posts into a job ad. I mean, what the fuck? Joel. Everything I posted on Facebook, they want to take it and turn it into a job ad for the Facebook marketplace. It's happening to everyone. If you have any kind of word related to recruiting or hiring in your posts, it automatically asks you to turn it into a job ad. And I'm sick of it. I like to find the engineer who started this thing and have a little sit down with them. So that's my rant of the day. Joel (8m 40s): Little, little, little New York justice. Is that what you'd serve up a little, a little Capone style, Gotti, Gotti justice. Chris (8m 48s): On a Louisville Slugger. You know, Joel (8m 52s): You're the most laid back rancher on the planet. That's awesome. Let's get the topics. Shall we? I got shit to do. All right. In the news guys, Infinite Computer Solutions. I've never heard of them. Maybe you have acquired IBM/BrassRing this week. I guess empires fall, not with a bang, but they die with a whimper, I guess. Okay. These guys out of Rockville, Maryland, Infinite Computer Systems provide business tech and product engineering for telecom high-tech healthcare, media, entertainment, insurance, banking, financial, retail, public sector services, all kinds of fucking industries. Joel (9m 34s): They've signed a purchase agreement to acquire IBM's talent acquisition suite, including IBM lead manager, brass ring, and onboard. As part of the transaction Infinite we'll work closely with IBM to transition identified employees. After the closing, the company will also assume responsibility for service and support for up to 240 global customers using the purchase products worldwide, as well as all sales and marketing. A little bit of history here for those that don't know, IBM acquired Connects Us/BrassRing back in 2012, for $1.3 billion in the shadow of SAP's acquisition of Success Factors and Oracle's acquisition of Tulio. Joel (10m 16s): At the time, it was widely touted as IBM had more than 200,000 consultants around the world, working on IT implementation and other strategic business processes. And with Connexa assessments, IBM could then help its clients assess, hire, and train these people. Over the next decade, the partnership floundered, I guess that's fair to say, being passed up by the likes of iCIMS, Job by Greenhouse and other ATS providers, which leads us to today and the sale. No terms of the deal were disclosed. I got to think it was akin to the clearance rack at TJ Maxx. Chris (10m 52s): It wasn't 1 billion that's for sure. Joel (10m 54s): Yeah. It wasn't 1 billion. We'll see, we'll see what happens. And if they can revive the brand, I myself doubt it, Chris, it sounds like you agree. Chris (11m 5s): Yeah. I mean, it seems like an odd fit. Brass Rings is one of the oldest ATS tools in the market. My big question is how come Watson couldn't fix that shit? Joel (11m 15s): You know, I gotta say, it was a TA tech in Phoenix or somewhere and the IBM folks actually came on and talked about machine learning and big data when that was sort of popular and I thought the product was okay and that there could have been some synergies there, but I don't feel like their heart was ever into it. IBMs had their own bit of issues if we can say that nicely over the last decade or so losing ground to a lot of other players, but this was clearly an issue of look, we bought this turkey a decade ago. We haven't been able to turn it into the juggernaut that we thought it would be. Let's cut. Let's cut bait and move on. Joel (11m 56s): Yeah, I know you appreciate that as a fishermen. And I think it's just gonna, it's going to die on the vine, whatever, you know, whatever they call it, infinite ATS or infinite talent, or who knows what? I don't think we'll be hearing much about it in the years to come. Chris (12m 12s): No, and we haven't heard much about it lately anyway, so it means they're taking either offloading an aging product, taking the money for it and running. There'll be, it'll be interesting to see if Infinites wants to revitalize it, you know, if it can be, you know, I don't know how it's still so legacy probably. I mean, I don't think they've come out with any updates to it recently, you know, no one is talking about them at all. So at this point it's just kind of a dwindling, like user base that ... Joel (12m 42s): Yeah. Sounds to me like Infinite saw 240 global customers and said, can we make 240 new Infinite Computer Solutions customers out of this thing? And if that's all we get out of it, if we can turn half of those people into our clients. Chris (12m 58s): It's a classic buy versus build, you know? Yeah. Joel (13m 2s): Yeah. I think it's a little bit of that, but I think it's just sorta like somebody called the Infinite that that was an IBM and said, Hey, you know, you guys got some coins in your couch that you want to throw at this thing. And somebody said, yeah, fuck it. The world's opening up. Employment's going to blow up. Why not take a flyer on this ATS, human capital, big data, whatever thing and see if it can work. But do you remember the Brass Ring acquisition a decade ago? Chris (13m 29s): Vaguely. Joel (13m 30s): Yeah. Yeah. I got admit, I was, you know, you and I are both in sort of job board, you know, nightmare or heaven, one of the two back then and, and that whole space was weird at the time you had jobs to web and success factors and Taleo and people just throwing money at this shit. I think it's fair to say that the new generation of these, of these platforms, whether it be iCIMS, Jobvite even looking further into the future with, you know, the Seek Outs and those guys, these companies will be relics of the past and only old guys on podcasts will talk about them. I'm sure. Chris (14m 9s): Absolutely. Joel (14m 10s): Well, speaking of old guys, or maybe newer guys, LinkedIn is in the news. In a blog post, LinkedIn announced they'll launch, a skill building platform called LinkedIn learning hub. That's a mouthful during the second half of this calendar year, you'll be introduced to that referred to as LXPs. This is an incredibly hot market for the likes of Degreed, who we actually talked about last week and has become a $1 billion valued company. Unicorn alert. Companies will essentially integrate all their training content these are courses, articles, podcasts, books, documents, videos, events, pretty much anything into LinkedIn's LXP and the system will index the content, make it searchable and create collaboration pieces around each learning path. Joel (14m 59s): Companies can access skills, insights to understand the skills of their employees. They already have, including how they compare with peer companies and how they're evolving. I talked a lot about this last week. I think it's a little bit of having your cake and eating it too, for companies. They don't have to send their workers, you know, to a nice MBA program only to have them, you know, go somewhere else a couple of years later, after getting their degree, they can continue to educate their workforce, make them feel special, enhance their skills, without risk of losing them because they have a nice, shiny MBA from a nice college. Joel (15m 40s): I think LinkedIn has a nice upside in terms of their brand and they already have a lot of the relationships with the companies. However, I feel like similarly to LinkedIn launching an ATS, they're not going to be able to do it as well as companies, Chris (15m 58s): Sorry, whatever happened to the ATS from LinkedIn, by the way? Joel (16m 1s): Exactly. I think it's still there. As far as I know, they, they dropped that a few years ago. Chris (16m 9s): I definitely think LinkedIn does, you know, terms, the goal here, they, you know, their original marketplace sucks. You heard haven't heard a peep out of the ATS lately, but I do think LinkedIn learning will be homerun for them. I mean, to me it just makes total sense. Joel (16m 26s): Yeah. I mean, one of the advantages they have is they bought a company called Lynda awhile ago, L Y N D A and Lynda was essentially education and learning new shit and everything else. So if LinkedIn can harness what they've learned from that and have a nice certified, I don't know, program or a way for people to get certifications or badges that then they can then add to their LinkedIn profile. That's pretty convenient. And that's pretty, I'd say that's, I mean, that's a nice add on to your LinkedIn profile and which has already the default resume for pretty much everybody that's a professional. Joel (17m 8s): So I gave him a better than average chance to make this thing work and be successful. However, based on your comment they're also in the news AIM Group reported recently that they're, they're going hard into the gig economy. LinkedIn Gigs offer could launch this fall, according to AIM Group, by the way, if you're not, if you're not subscribed to AIM Group, aimgroup.com, you should do that. I know Chris and I are readers. Anyway, LinkedIn, isn't giving details on the gig attack, but it's developing several products that could tie in and even allow payments to gig workers. So you'll like them as an education platform, an upscaling platform. Joel (17m 53s): Do you like them as a gig platform? Chris (17m 56s): I don't know. I mean, they failed the first time with their ProFinder thing they think they had. Was it well executed? The digital wall is interesting. If you can pay somebody through LinkedIn that's pretty cool. Pretty cool. If you can do that, take that away from PayPal and things like that. The question is like how much of that piece of the, you know, the commissioner they want to take. I know I used to, I used Upwork a few times, a few years ago and they take 20%, which to me as a freelancer, I don't know, it seems a bit much, for taking 20% of my overall project fee. Chris (18m 42s): I'd love to see LinkedIn to come in, you know, under cut them a bit. And I do think it's really gonna affect Upwork a lot if LinkedIn does go into this market. So my big offend is short of work stock, perhaps for the announcements. Joel (19m 2s): On this show, don't buy stock or sell stock based on our recommendations. Please, please. How do you, how do you feel about Facebook as a gig competitor. And they've been talking about that for a while. Chris (19m 15s): Oh, they already have them. They already have jobs on there. What's the difference would just, you know, putting once they make a digital wall to themselves. Joel (19m 20s): Well, it's a gig platform, right? Yeah. You do work. You know, you get paid through Facebook, you get reviews on what you're on your landscaping abilities or your design abilities. I mean, ultimately like if everyone has this gig platform, I mean, not everyone is just going to be on every platform and like not the talent has to go somewhere. So to me, this is this fragmentation of the gig economy is ultimately bad. Nobody, nobody wants to buy talent on multiple platforms and no one wants to offer their services on multiple platforms. So to me, this is going to be like any other industry where it fragments, it becomes disparate. Joel (20m 8s): And then you get a few, you get two main players and then you get like a Dr. Pepper and that's it. Or you get like a, we talk about communo, who's only really targeted towards the creatives and the design folks. So maybe you get like job board fragmentation where you're only a technical or you're only design or you're only accounting or you're only whatever. Chris (20m 31s): Yeah. I think, I think you're on the money there. I think there's going to be a niche-ification of the gig economy. And I think you already seen, I mean, there's 20 different gig job market places you can go to. I've got one of my uncle HR lancers, which is HR pros and recruiters there. But I think almost every industry is going to have their own gig marketplace at some point, as we move forward. Joel (20m 55s): Yeah. You use, I assume you, you build a lot of shit. You contract that out, right? Yeah. Or you use it. Do you have, do you have a platform of choice? I know you're not using HR lancers to build your WordPress sites Chris (21m 10s): No, it's not a WordPress. Joel (21m 12s): I'm just joking. I say that jokingly. I have no idea what, what Chris is using. I'm just curious your experience with platforms and any advice you'd give to listeners. Chris (21m 21s): If you're looking to start any kind of like, you know, job marketplace, there's lots of software out there. Some good, some bad, you can build it on WordPress too, but I don't recommend WordPress for any kind of a marketplace like that. Wordpress is too clunky and need breaks a lot. But yeah, Joel (21m 38s): No more like hiring talent or are there places where you'd like to hire folks? Yeah. Like, do you get you know, banner ad makers at Fiverr or Chris (21m 47s): Fiverr is probably my favorite one. Okay. So my podcast intros, things like that on there, you can hire writers on there. Someone that's. Joel (21m 56s): No an Upwork user? Chris (21m 59s): I haven't, I haven't used Upwork lately to hire anybody if I used it more as a freelancer in the past. Joel (22m 6s): Okay. All right. Chris (22m 7s): Let's move on here. So talent.com the artist formerly known as Neuvoo . Joel (22m 15s): I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. Chris (22m 12s): Neuvoo. Joel (22m 12s): Neuvoo. Yeah. Currently they didn't know how to say it either. I talked to people at the company. They weren't, they weren't really sure. These guys aren't messing around. So they're job aggregator. I'd say, Indeed is competition. Anyone that's in that space Jubal, Globally. So according to Aim Group, they did some really great reporting this week. Talent.com is eyeing it a new funding round and a possible IPO that they got confirmation from the company. So talent.com this is probably news to quite a few people. So the site is now the 25th fastest growing company in the world according to the financial times. Joel (22m 57s): In 2019, the AIM group listed Neuvoo /talent.com as the 35th most visited job site in the world with 11.3 million visits per month, a year later, the company which had just rebranded as talent.com had moved up to number six on the charts with a bullet with 54.6 million visits per month. Quite an uptick, if I must say so myself. So this month they hired its first Chief Financial Officer and last week they posted an opening for a director of financial reporting and tax. For those in the know, you only make these kinds of hires, when you're going to raise a bunch of money, you go public, et cetera. Joel (23m 41s): So both additions anticipate serious fundraising, still a tad non-committal, friend of the show, and president Michael O'Dell said the company hasn't yet made concrete plans for the IPO. And he didn't say what talent aims for in terms of evaluation. Quote, "this is more of an exercise to make sure we have the talent we need in place. If and when an opportunity arises," that's really cute. Michael, we're just, we're just exercising our right to hire really high priced people just in case, just in case the opportunity comes to go public. What are your thoughts here, Chris? Chris (24m 19s): My guess is no, I'll tell you why in a second, but, you know, I love, first of all, I love what talent.com is doing, just from an execution standpoint. I've followed these guys for awhile. You know, Indeed needs competition because they are the dominant player in the market and we need a buffer to that, as an industry, and I think talent.com is well underway doing that. Their growth started out globally. So they really kind of launched almost globally if you will, in many different countries, I think from like 60 countries today. So I think a lot of their growth has come from those other countries. The U S market for them, you know, there's still, I mean, there's still below ZipRecruiter, I believe and things like that, but it's a great company overall, I like what they're doing, like their mission and they have a good team in place there overall. Chris (25m 5s): Yeah. Joel (25m 5s): I think they're still buying CareerBuilder in the States. Chris (25m 8s): So, so I don't think they're gonna go public. And here's why, so number one, going public never did much for Monster or Dice. Historically, if you look at any job boards that have gone public, the market has not been kind to them from an investor standpoint, investors like growth and talent.com is growing fast. They'll always be at the wim of the job market, in my opinion, right? So when the pandemic comes along, you know, stock's going to take a hit, right? Going public means you must constantly be looking for new revenue sources and that, you know, that's part of what helps sink Monster kept throwing money at, you know, throwing banner ads up on the site just to get money, launching stupid products, buying shit they didn't need. Joel (25m 54s): Don't forget the, the blimp, don't forget the blimp. Chris (25m 58s): You know, I think any kind of job marketplace is just best suited to be a private company. In my opinion, overall, just having grown up in this space. What I think they should do is, you know, do what Indeed does and take a page out of their book. They should, you know, they should by CareerBuilder by Monster backfill with their jobs and just, you know, gain users. That's what they need most is users right now in the US anyway. Ultimately you're in the applied business when you launch any kind of a job marketplace. So if you can't succeed at driving applications, then don't go into that business. Joel (26m 32s): Gotcha.Let's let's ask the judges, judges? Oh, I'm sorry, Chris. They don't agree with you whatsoever. So I think they're going to go IPO and I think they're going to go IPO for few reasons. Number one is they kind of have to, they raised around 54 million, according to Crunchbase, when you raised 54 million, the investors want some sort of a liquidation event. And you can say Monster sucked as a public company is as Dice does now but the people who invest in those companies early on would disagree that they sucked because they all got paid once the IPOs happened. In addition to that, you've got a perfect storm of the world reopening, everyone talking about hiring, going through the roof, you got free money in the system because the fed just keeps lowering rates. Joel (27m 20s): You got VCs that have sat on companies for a year. They're hungry for profits. They're hungry to like cash in on these companies. And then lastly, you have allegedly ZipRecruiter is on the border for IPO to go an IPO land. You got, Chris (27m 38s): Hold on, stop. Sorry. Ziprecrutier on the show about IPO hasn't happened yet. You can talk about that for a year. Joel (27m 45s): This year 2021 is only four months old now Chris (27m 49s): I know it's still, I don't think it's going to happen. Okay. Joel (27m 52s): Well, if okay, so we have iCIMS and ZipRecruiter, allegedly primed to go public. And if this happens, you're going to see this flood of job related, employment related companies. Just start going public. Now, if that doesn't happen, then the other option is you sell the company to somebody. So who do the next question would be who does talent.com sell to? You know, if they can pitch their investors on, we can grow into a billion dollar company through profits, I mean, have at it, but they're only like two or three of those that have done that. I'd say good luck. Joel (28m 33s): So what you're saying is you think they can grow into being a billion dollar business? Chris (28m 38s): Yeah. You know, globally. Yes. I mean, that's, I think I love a lot of the growth will come from overseas markets that Indeed is not as strong in to. Right. Indeed. Indeed's main basically the US. Joel (28m 51s): And Indeed is owned by a public company. So it's not like they're not kind of public. Chris (28m 55s): Yeah. The kind of public, but it's only important part of the mix, but I just don't think it'll happen. I mean, I do think you're right though. If you know, ZipRecruiter and iCIMS do go public, I think you will see a flood most likely because they're going to follow that train. Joel (29m 11s): Oh, I mean, think of how much money has been flowing into our space for the last two, three, four years. I mean, all these, all these investors are ready to fucking cash in boy. Chris (29m 21s): Dude, in the last 2 weeks, they're have been three companies. Well, yeah, Joel (29m 24s): You're talking about LA you know? Yeah. LA Rocks numbers. I mean the last quarter was bigger than the whole entire half year of last. So the money that's coming into this space is ridiculous. Anyway, it's either going to be super exciting and really fun to watch, or it's going to be really super bummer if none of these companies go public and just get sold, sold to people. Cause we've had a nice void in our space of having no real public companies for awhile. I know there are, but back in the days, you and I remember when everybody was going public, that was a lot of fun, so anyway. All right, man, you know, who else has a lot of fun is Jobvite, let's hear from them and we'll talk a little ripple match in GM. Chris (30m 20s): All right. Joel (30m 20s): That soundbite has not worked very well. We're gonna, we're going to hear from JobAdX and see if we can fix the Jobvite. You know, the funniest thing is this, this is the most attention those companies will have gotten on the show probably in a long time. So, okay everybody we may have, we may have lost. Yeah. Our soundboard has been possessed, but we're 30 minutes into the fucking show. So we're going to keep going with it. Anyway. Go check out jobvite.com. Go check out jobadx.com. Joel (31m 3s): Let's talk about GM! Chris (31m 6s): GM. Joel (31m 7s): How exciting. Okay. Are we going back to the office or not? GM is taking a surprisingly simple approach to its return to work strategy for employees. They're calling it Work Appropriately. What the fuck? That's the message being conveyed this past Tuesday by CEO, Mary Barra, and other GM leaders about how the automaker plans to reintegrate its 155,000 global employees in a post vaccine work world. It's a flexible, evolving policy that will differ depending on the employee week and project, according to the executives. The decision to create such a program, followed feedback from employees, many of whom have been working remotely for a year due to the Corona coronavirus pandemic. Joel (31m 55s): GM conducted several surveys regarding how and where employees would prefer to work in the future, officials said. Such flexible and ambiguous policies are meant to empower GM's leaders to take responsibility for their departments and employees. GM recently held 52 workshops for 1100 company leaders. God, that sounds like a big company, doesn't it? To lay out it's remote work initiative. According to officials, each leader will work with their employees to determine what is an appropriate work schedule. Work appropriately Chris, are you down with that? Chris (32m 31s): They might need some recruiting software to manage, holy shit. Joel (32m 36s): So we have this whole thing like, Oh, we're all working from home now. We had companies like Twitter, say we're never coming back to the office if you don't want to. And then it feels like there was a 180 on this and we have companies like Amazon, we have Google, we have companies sort of doing an about face, on some of this stuff. And GM is the latest, I guess, iteration of what we're talking about saying like basically you're all adults figure it out, work appropriately. If you need to be in the office, be in the office. If you don't want to be in the office, don't be in the office. Chris (33m 11s): Yeah. I like that approach. It's a people want flexibility in their lives today and that's important. It's a benefit that you can offer that doesn't cost you any money. You know, I've always felt that remote being remote isn't a great benefit offer that doesn't cost you anything as an employer. Sure. It just makes sense. So, Joel (33m 32s): So, so here's why it's going to fail and I'm going to try the wrong soundbite. See if that's working. Okay. Yeah. That one works great. Thanks Jen Castro. The ads don't but the wrong button works. So you know these, so you have these companies that have a vacation policy of, Hey, if you want to go on vacation, go on vacation. We don't, we don't, we don't keep track. If you need a break, go take a break. You know, these companies. Right. Okay. And what happens at these companies? Nobody goes on vacation, right? Because they feel guilty about going on vacation. It's the companies that are like, okay, you have this much vacation. Joel (34m 12s): And if you don't take it, you lose it. Basically forcing people to take their vacation. And what happens is nobody takes vacation. This is like the companies that say, Oh, you know, get your work done and go home. What happens is nobody goes home early. Nobody goes home before five or before six even. To me, this feels like the same kind of thing. Like let's pay lip service and say like work appropriately, if you have to be here, be here. I think what's going to happen is companies that, that lay this strategy out are basically going to have people that say, well, I probably better be in the office because otherwise I'm working appropriately. So to me, this is Latin for get your ass back to the headquarters. Chris (34m 55s): Yeah. The article says such flexible and ambiguous policies. It's almost like they wanted to make it ambiguous so that employees were kind of default to going in. Joel (35m 5s): Sure. I mean, do you think in the 52 workshops, they held that this policy became clear. Obviously not 52 workshops. Nothing's like it. If it takes more than an index card to just to explain something to somebody, then, then you're kind of screwed. So I expect more companies to do this work appropriately policy and what's going to happen is everybody's going to get their ass back to work, Chris (35m 30s): Go with it. Joel (35m 31s): And speaking of going to work, Ripple Match is in the news. I don't know if I like that name or do you like Ripple Match? Chris (35m 40s): I dunno. Joel (35m 40s): I think it's awful. Ripple Match? Ripple is a cheap drink. Chris (35m 46s): Real match. I'm thinking a real match. Joel (35m 50s): Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I copied and pasted that correctly. So Ripple Match. Okay. Two Yale kids, at least one of them dropped out, started a site to help college kids get jobs and they just raise, get this 23 million for their five-year-old startup, bringing its total funding to $34 million at a valuation of nearly $100 million. Okay, stop me if you've heard this one before Chris, college students can create profiles on Ripple Match for free, after they fill in details about their work history, values and motivations, Ripple Match uses AI to scan students' profiles and identify top candidates for internships and jobs posted by employers who pay an annual subscription fee between 25K and 250K. Chris (36m 43s): What? Joel (36m 43s): The average enterprise company typically forms relationships with five to 10 college career service offices. Something that Ripple Match says often results in them inadvertently ignoring talent from large swaths of the country because Ripple Match uses users represent 1300 schools, including more than 150 historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic serving institutions. It says it allows employers to consider 50% more candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. Chris, if we were playing buy or sell, would you buy or sell Ripple Match? Chris (37m 22s): I'd sell it. There's the already way too many, you know, "early career" quote/unquote players in the space. Yeah, Way Up, you got Handshake, both of them have bigger headstarts overall. I don't see anything new here as far as technology goes or what's the hook here? It's just seems like a college job board essentially. I mean, you can save the money, go spend it on a collegerecruiter.com. Joel (37m 49s): This is historically the shittiest business, I think, in our space. Chris (37m 54s): Every few years, something pops up. Joel (37m 56s): So yeah, exactly. So that, so historically the business model is like, okay, you need jobs and you need people. And with this model, you throw in the universities and on top of that, you get, you have to attract people that, you know, they're 18 one year and then the next year they're 20 and need to like, think about a job. So you're constantly filling the funnel with people to use your services. And yeah, like you said, I mean, we've seen Handshake. We, I mean College Recruiters, probably the only ones still around that I can, I know of. We had After College, which is more or less now Recruitology notch up. We had a Blue Chip something or other one point. Joel (38m 38s): So this is just historically a really bad business. So unless they've done something to the investors that they're going to pivot out of college or add something else, they got to throw in a virtual job fairs like Handshake did at another, you know, a hundred million dollars for their evaluation. This is historically a real shitty business. So I, I think, I think we're both selling this. We're both selling this. Chris (39m 5s): Must be Way Up, which you know, started out I think it was called collegegrad.com and then they shifted it to be more like Early Careers they're calling it now versus just the college student that they were targeting. Yeah. Way Up evolved a little bit. Ripple Match came in at that later point now in the early career phrase, is it really the soup du jour, as far as the tagline, these days for these companies. Joel (39m 30s): Yeah. They all rebrand. They go out of business, you know, whatever happens. So Chris (39m 35s): Another one of these sites, so that's what I'm selling. Joel (39m 38s): Yeah. But they're still getting $34 million. What the fuck is going on? Right. Let's take a try at the soundboard to see if one of our ads will play? All right. All right. So that didn't work. Let's talk about data. McDonald's they're in the news. So a Florida McDonald's is paying people $50 just to show up for a job interview and get this, they're still struggling to find applicants. Blake Casper, the franchisee who owns 60 Mickey D's in the Tampa area, told business insider quote, "it's a perfect storm right now. Joel (40m 18s): You've got a lot of people with a lot of money and they're out there shopping. And then on the flip side, we're scrambling for help. To his surprise, offering people 50 bucks just to come in and get a Whopper and have it sit down, hasn't convinced many people to apply for jobs. He has found more success with referral programs, signing bonuses and allowing people to apply via text message. Casper is also considering raising starting wages from $12, which is three bucks above Florida's minimum wage to $13 in an effort to attract more employees. The biggest challenge out there is the federal government and the state government are going to continue with this unemployment, meaning unemployment payments, I guess, because that is truly creating incentive to not work right now. Joel (41m 9s): And how do you blame somebody? You can make more money on unemployment. This is a serious issue with employers, Chris, maybe you should raise it to a hundred dollars. I mean, is this cash incentive, something that you expect to see employers do or not? Chris (41m 26s): Yeah. You know, what's interesting in that story, Joel is a, this quote here, he says, he told, that a general manager or supervisor up with the idea for the interview reward. After he told them to quote, "Do whatever you need to do to hire workers." That's where we've come today as far as recruiting goes in America? I thought that was a very poignant phrase there to hit it off. But yeah, I think you're gonna have to, I mean, there's a company in Connecticut here, I was doing some research before the show Max Restaurant Group, they're offering a thousand dollars sign-on bonuses for dishwashers. It's on their Facebook page and our local paper did a story on them. Chris (42m 6s): I mean, you're going to have to, there's just, there's just no way around it right now. I think the federal stimulus payments, which I think are about 300 bucks a month combined with the state ones, people are making like five, 600 bucks a week. That's basically what they were making at McDonald's right. So that ends in September. I believe so until then, it's going to be a scrambled to find these workers overall. Joel (42m 30s): Yeah. This phenomenon is really fascinating and we talked about it a few weeks ago, I believe. And so you have people afraid of COVID so younger people that take these jobs haven't been vaccinated yet. You have the mental hurdle, which I found interesting in that they've they applied early on. Didn't get any bites at all. So they became so demoralized that it's like, why even look for jobs? And they still haven't, I guess been told they didn't get the memo that the world was opening back up and these opportunities are available. And Oh, by the way, in the meantime, I'm getting federal unemployment checks and stimulus checks and everything else. Oh yeah. And I just bought a bunch of Bitcoin, which is worth eight times what I paid for it. Joel (43m 10s): So fuck work. That's bullshit. It also reminds me a little bit of a, do you remember 20, twentyone.co? I think it was 21. I think it's gone, but they, they accepted. So people were on Bitcoin, like Marc Andreessen. I think he was an investor in it. So you could, you could decide a number payment number for people to have a text chat with you or an email conversation with you. And so he was like, you know, a hundred bucks and you could contact him. And I always thought at the time that that would be a really interesting way for developers or people who are really hot in demand to have employers say like, yeah, I'll pay a hundred dollars to have a conversation with a PHP program or this Ruby on rails guy or gal. Joel (44m 2s): An engineer could make quite a bit of money by taking calls from head hunters. And if they got hit up on Get Hub or wherever they could be like, Oh yeah, go to twentyone.co here's my profile page. If you want to talk to me, it's going to cost $500 and makes a little extra, extra change. So it sounds like there's an opportunity to create a service industry, twentyone.co and have people tell McDonald's. Yeah. If you want to talk to me, you can, you can buy into it for 50 bucks and people can make 50 bucks a head on Wendy's, Taco Bell, KFC and all the other fast food places that one aired interview, it could be a nice little cottage industry. Chris (44m 39s): It's like a reverse job where we have a bunch of people literally interview me. Joel (44m 42s): It's literally, I'm going to go out and interview with a five companies today and make 250 bucks a day. How many, how many companies can I just sit down with? Chris (44m 55s): Your job is just interviewing.Maybe companies start offering Bitcoin as a reward. Joel (45m 1s): Hey, Hey, you're onto something. You're onto something, Chris man, thanks for coming on the show. I, we haven't tried the outro music yet. So this is going to be a total surprise, whether it plays or not, but whether or not it plays, Chris, thanks for coming. We appreciate your time and your insights. Keep it real for people that want to know more about you or connect, where would you send them? Chris (45m 30s): RecTechmedia.com, my friends. Joel (45m 30s): Dig it. And Chris, you know how we end the show, baby? We out. Chris (45m 32s): We out. OUTRO (45m 32s): Adios, Turd nuggets.

We've made significant progress making our workplaces more equitable, diverse, and inclusive, right? Not so fast, says Jackye Clayton, DEI strategist at Seekout and cohost of the Inclusive AF podcast. The industry vet joins the boys for a reality check and a deep dive into what's wrong with the current infrastructure of corporate America. This podcast is power by Sovren's AI, it's so human you'll want to take it to dinner. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Joel (0s): Did the movie have anything to do with it? Jackye (2s): No, no, no, no. We were watching the first Footloose. Chad (10s): That is, yeah. That's about as white as you can get. INTRO (14s): 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 (36s): What's up everybody. This is Joel Cheeseman of your favorite podcast. The Chad and Cheese podcast joined as always by my cohost, Chad Sowash and today we are tickled pink to welcome Jackye Clayton. Jackye (50s): Hello. Joel (51s): DEI Strategist at Seekout and podcaster to the show. Jackye, what up? Jackye (57s): Hey, I am so glad to be here. Thank you so much. I'm honored. Joel (1m 0s): Callin' in from Waco home of the new NCAA basketball champions. Is it just one big party there in Waco! Jackye (1m 7s): Absolutely! Joel (1m 8s): Dr. Pepper and yeah. Party time. I love it. I love it. So, so for those listeners who don't know you, Jackye, give us the Twitter bio. What did I miss in the intro? Jackye (1m 18s): Yeah. So a cohost of Inclusive AF podcast. Love that. Trying to change the world one recruiter at a time through diversity and inclusion. That's kind of my shtick. Joel (1m 29s): Look at you with the AF being all dangerous. Jackye (1m 32s): I know, I know it's naughty. It's a little naughty, Chad (1m 36s): So it's a little naughty. Jackye (1m 40s): And it's hard to, we have to be inclusive. We have to still be inclusive. You mean even when you don't feel like it. Chad (1m 46s): Yeah. Yeah. So, well, in that being said, DEI seems to be the new AI everybody's talking about it. Everybody says they have it. Joel (1m 56s): Everybody's buying it. Chad (1m 58s): How does it feel to be the cool kid in the room? Jackye (2m 1s): Terrifying. I kind of liked it a little bit when people said, no, that's not important and people aren't gonna buy it. No, I mean, I'm the one hand it's good. But then on the other hand, it's scary because it's like so many people can do it wrong. Chad (2m 17s): Yes. Jackye (2m 17s): Right? Same with recruiting. Right? It's like, Oh, get a recruiter. Right. If you remember, they are in the two thousands, like 2005, when everybody was opening their own recruiting firm. Joel (2m 29s): You're the garage band that's made it. And now all these people want to be Nirvana, but they're nowhere near the talent level. Right? So all these people that are getting into the profession and have no idea what the fuck is going on. Jackye (2m 39s): Absolutely. Yeah, so that's the scary part. Joel (2m 42s): You've been around a lot, Jackye at meaning the industry, not the other way around. Jackye (2m 49s): Thank you for clarifying. Joel (2m 51s): SeekOut. What are you doing for them specifically? Talk a little bit about your history cause I think it's relevant for a lot of the listeners. Jackye (2m 58s): Yes, so my background is in recruiting. So it started with talent acquisition and recruiting for a number of years. And, but I started writing about diversity in 2008, really because the way everybody was being trained on how to recruit diverse talent meant they weren't going to find me. Right. So they would say, Oh, look at HBCUs. It's like, okay, I didn't go to one or look at these sororities or, and I wasn't a member look at these clubs. And I was like, I'm never going to be on the list, based on those things. And I'm really, I really want to be a part of it. So I kept researching what the problem was or issues and concerns were. Jackye (3m 38s): And so it's always been kind of a part of what I do. I was mostly doing recruiting on the tech side. So you do kind of get a diverse/non-diverse background. You notice those kinds of gaps. And so I started with that. And so now really doing it on a full-time basis because I used to analyze tech as well. And as I was analyzing technology really was noticing the gaps or how is this going to work as we went into AI, how is that going to affect diversity and inclusion? So now, primarily I work with our clients that are trying to build out diversity strategies and letting them know, you know, how they can do it, what they need to do, if it's possible. Jackye (4m 21s): And then of course I work for a startup. So I do all the other things too. Joel (4m 25s): More of a consulting basis because I think when I thought of this, I thought, well, okay, she could help make the tech better. She could make hiring at Seek Out better and more inclusive. And a third thing you mentioned was you can consult with clients to help make their recruiter. Is it all those three? Or did, or am I overstepping in terms of your role there? Okay. Jackye (4m 45s): All those three, because one of the things, and this kind of goes with the fear is like they have all these tools that talk about diversity and inclusion, but really they're talking about gender and ethnicity, right. And leaving out all of these different groups. And it became very clear that if that's all we're going to do that's as far as organizations will go. And so you have to open that up so that people understand what it means and have access to our different ways of finding those people so you can start bringing them into the fold because it's a distraction for people who are trying to find top talent, if it's more difficult. And so if we can make, make it easier to find diverse talent, then we can incorporate more diverse talent. Jackye (5m 28s): Okay. Chad (5m 29s): But Jackye, I'm just not convinced that corporate America really wants to be diverse. Jackye (5m 35s): They don't! Chad (5m 35s): I mean, do they really want to be equitable? I mean, seriously, we put Whitey on the moon in 1969, but we can't figure this shit out. So for me, you take a look at the DEI training segment, right? It's like a $9 billion industry. It's fucking enormous, but we don't see outcomes coming from that, from the hiring retention promotion, any of that stuff. So, I mean, I don't personally believe corporate America wants to be diverse. So that seems like an uphill battle for you, even though it's the cool thing. It's the cool thing. I don't believe that's what they want. Do you? Jackye (6m 15s): No, they don't. And the reason that I say that is because we're able to find the talent so quickly. So what's the problem. So I don't understand why there's still an issue and that's what we started looking into. Well, I started looking into years ago, but what's going into it. And that's, what's so interesting. I think about like, when we talk about the podcast with inclusive AI, like we look at some of these issues, like what's really the barrier, right? And I think that diversity and inclusion, all the people that are participating in it, one of the challenges is you get this nice to have a dream from your C-level executives. Right? Chad (6m 51s): Right. Jackye (6m 52s): But they didn't even talk to talent acquisition at all to see if it's possible. Chad (6m 56s): Because they never do. Jackye (6m 57s): For example, there's a place that is not, nowhere near Texas, but their CEOs that they were going to increase by 30% of people of color. But they only have 5% in the city. 5% people of color. Chad (7m 11s): Yeah. Jackye (7m 12s): So how are you going to do that? Where are these people coming from and what are you going to do? I mean, even more, we've already seen the gap when human resources went from nurturing personnel to protecting organizations and taking the human out. But they take the human out in diversity and inclusion because it becomes like they look at these like people as items, you know, as widgets, instead of understanding what goes into it. So I think we will, want to, but they just don't understand what it takes. It's like, you know what to expect when you're expecting or whatever. Like we all have kids, right. And then you read the book and you're like, Oh, is that going to happen? You're like, yeah, Joel (7m 51s): There's no conspiracy here to say, Oh, you know what? We're going to tell everyone we're going to up it by 30% and hope that no one checks us on that. You think it's more like, they just don't know. They say what they think is the right thing. But they don't really think about logistically, how are we going to do this? Chad (8m 9s): Which means they're not serious. Jackye (8m 10s): Hey, because they don't, they'll say that they want to have diverse talent. But what they don't say is we need to evenly distribute the power around our organization. Right? Chad (8m 19s): Right. Jackye (8m 20s): Or they'll say, Oh, we're diverse because we have 50% female. But if you look at what they pay out in salaries, I bet you, that's not 50% male/females. Right? Joel (8m 29s): Such a cynic. Chad (8m 32s): So, it's hard not to be a cynic because these companies aren't transparent. They don't actually show their workforce composition number one. Right? They don't show their pay equity. They don't show any of that stuff. And they could do it in large groups. They don't have to do it in a person by person basis. They're not being transparent with the market itself. And that's, it should be step one. Jackye (8m 57s): That absolutely has to be step one. And, I should say, I should back up and say, I think that people want it, but they don't want everything else that comes along with it. It's one of those we have to slow down in order to speed up. Chad (9m 9s): What comes with it though? Jackye (9m 11s): You have to admit your shortcomings, your failures, you know, you implemented maybe a company culture that wasn't the best, you know, and it takes away especially understanding that you're going to bring in conflict at the very beginning because people don't think the way you do. Chad (9m 29s): Oh yeah. Joel (9m 29s): So Jackye, we, we brought, we brought Cindy Gallop on the podcast and I don't know if you've heard that episode or not, but she's very adamant of saying that the only solution, ultimately, you know, the white C-suite is not really going to change what they are. And as a corporation, the only way to change this is to empower diverse folks, to create their own businesses and build their own companies. That's the only way they're going to do this. Do you agree with that? Or are there other, like, is it market forces? Does government need to get involved? Does, journalism need to do its job? Like, what is the solution? If, if what you're saying is sort of like people pay lip service, but nothing's really happening. Jackye (10m 12s): I think a lot of it has to do with really getting real with what's going on in the organization. Because I think what you have to do is get rid of the people that are getting in the way of diversity and inclusion. Right. Get rid of those people and then replace it with diverse talent. Joel (10m 28s): But that, I mean, that sounds good. But if, if you have a profitable company that shareholders love, and I mean, employees are happy. It's hard to justify getting rid of them, isn't it? Jackye (10m 39s): But they're going to have people are falling out of love with those companies. Joel (10m 42s): Okay. So market forces is what you're saying, Jackye (10m 45s): So look at Georgia. Right? And Delta. Yeah. Because it's the most recent example, right? Chad (10m 53s): Yeah. Jackye (10m 53s): Coke in, Atlanta, you know, is a part of the whole culture and they're like, fuck that. We're not doing it. Right. Major league baseball. It's America's team. They're like, we're not going to Georgia. I'm not saying all of that is great. But I mean, that's what it takes because people fall out of love. And then in result, what you're seeing is people fall in love with those organizations and start supporting those organizations that they didn't before. I think you guys know that I'm a NASCAR fan, right? Chad and Joel (11m 21s): Yep. Jackye (11m 22s): And as we were, as we're going through the years, it was always uncomfortable. I love going to the races and loved it just to, because I am able to live a life of privilege that I didn't have to go in the stands. Right? I was always like in the infield and I didn't get exposed to a lot of that stuff, but I knew it was there. Right. It's the whole culture. As soon as they stopped having rebel flags, that became a nicer place for me. Chad and Joel (11m 45s): I'll bet. Jesus. Jackye (11m 48s): Because that's terrifying. Right? That was terrifying for me. On the flip side, I understand, for other people that was terrifying because I think they were just scared of what it's going to happen. But now you look at people. What would have happened if that would have happened 10 years ago? Michael Jordan is a major investor in a car. Now level Wallace is driving number 23, based on Michael Jordan, putting his own funds, black people of wealth, putting their own money into a sport that has never seen it. Yeah. I mean, Michael, Jordan's been rich for a long time. There's a reason why he's decided to invest. And other people have started to invest into those things. So I understand what you're saying on the one side, Oh, they're profitable. Jackye (12m 28s): Why would they have to change? But I think that they're missing the entire market. And as we know, as this progresses, this is going to be the majority market and people don't forget that easily. Chad (12m 38s): Well. And how much more profitable could they be? Take a look at Nike, right. For taking a stand and their, I mean, their fricking stock shot up after Kap, right? So it's like, yes, you are quote unquote profitable. But instead of trying to be all things to everybody and not having a stand on anything, you could prospectively be losing big time. And I think those are, those are really good examples. I hate to see this so blatantly happening in Georgia. And I hate that, you know, all the people that it's going to actually impact, I hope it does move them, even though they're making it harder, move them to the polls, to get these assholes out of power. Chad (13m 23s): Because I think personally, the only way that we can make this thing move, and I saw Jackye, and I think it was like 2008 when the government shut down America's job bank. And there was a change in the VEVRAA was, was something that everybody had to focus on. So veterans, and then 503 individuals with disabilities. Everybody was like, Oh, Holy shit. We have benchmarks we have to reach. They're not quote/unquote. These are things that we have to focus on and numbers that we have to start to try to demonstrate that we're trying to get to. Personally, market forces is total bullshit. If you don't have somebody with guard rails, they're forcing something to happen they're going to do what they do. Jackye (14m 6s): Listen, I tell ya veterans, you brought up veterans. So I was talking to an organization that hires a lot of veterans, right? And so when we were talking about diversity and inclusion and they said, we don't need to focus on women and people of color, we just need to focus on veterans. And I'm like, okay, let me educate you. Right. Joel (14m 24s): It's commercial time. Sovren (14m 25s): 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 (15m 26s): It's Showtime Jackye (15m 28s): General, like people who are joining the military has fallen 25% women. It's gone up 40%. People of color has gone up 15%. You better figure out how to talk to women and people of color, or you're not going to have the veterans that you want to talk to. Like, they'll remember that conversation. People remember that if you don't know how to relate and bring people in, you're going to have a hard problem, right? So you have to look at all of these things and how it impacts the future and where the future is going. Right? Joel (15m 57s): For the record. You know, you've really fucked up when Delta airlines is like, Hey, you need to treat people with respect. Jackye (16m 4s): Yeah. We can drag people off planes? That wasn't that them? Chad (16m 7s): No that wasn't. That was United. Joel (16m 9s): Jackye, one of the things I think has been curious at best for me in the last six months or so, is sort of the anti-Asian sentiment. And I feel like there are so many groups that either sort of go through these periods where they have challenges. What are your thoughts on that? And what are some individuals or groups of folks that we forget about? I mean, you mentioned disability in one of your articles. I feel like age-ism is becoming more of a thing. Now what's your take on all that? Jackye (16m 41s): I agree with that. I feel like if you look, you know, we're always looking for an enemy. I think people look at different people as being more acceptable. If you look at how people treat each other, it's like they pick the group that is unable to defend themselves, or is unaware of these things happening first, to pick on. There's like bullies. We have a bullying problem in our country. Joel (17m 8s): Sure. Jackye (17m 9s): And I think there are people with disabilities that go to work every day that aren't getting their needs fully met by an organization that try so hard, right. That are working very hard to be successful, that we ignore. And again, so another example in recruiting, we talk about behavioral interviews, right? Chad (17m 32s): Yeah. Jackye (17m 33s): Talk to me, Bill, tell me about a time when dot, dot, dot every recruiter is taught that that's the best way of doing things. However, if a person has as neuro-diverse or has learned differently than someone else, they might not remember a time that they did that. Or they're not sure if that's what you mean can take longer. Their interviewer will say, Oh, they didn't have a time. Or they didn't answer the question correctly. Like we were not thinking about how, what the impact is. I think that it's really important that we look at peoples with disabilities, but you don't see it on people's lists. And there's organizations, colleges, fraternities, again, that support, cater and assist people with disabilities, that it makes it easier to find these candidates so that we can bring into the fold to make sure that not only are we being fair and equitable, but that our products are made to be equitable and usable by people with these, in these situations. Jackye (18m 37s): And that's what people don't realize. Again, like if I know that you're doing something for me, it gets rewarded by dollars. Chad (18m 45s): Right. Don't most companies look at tech as a way to solve a problem that tech didn't create in the first place? So they're looking for this silver bullet, this easy button to hit once, we're going to integrate it and it's going to take care of everything. And they don't realize that tech is definitely, you know, a force multiplier, no question, it helps you scale and helps you do a lot of things, much faster, much more efficient, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not just a silver bullet fix everything. And it's not something that you just plug in and walk away from. Isn't our industry just so bad at tech? Jackye (19m 26s): We're just shortsighted. We've given everyone the ability to create a product, right. Everybody can create a project. It doesn't take very much. And so we get these small wins and stop, you know, like you're saying, and now I'm making my money and I'm going home. I'm going to take my ball and I'm going home. And so I don't think kind of what we were alluding to earlier. I don't think it takes like government intervention or any of that intervention. I think it's really people making that connection again and connecting with people. And, I don't know how to do that, but to your point, tech didn't create these problems or a lack of technology didn't create this problem. Joel (20m 7s): Right. For those that don't know, diversity recruiting 15 years ago used to be, we put a banner ad on BET's website. So we're diverse, we're recruiting for diverse candidates. Have we evolved from that or do you feel like we're still in that mentality? And the tech really isn't, hasn't caught up much more than that. Are we really making strides with the algorithms and the technology to be a more unbiased recruiting process? Jackye (20m 34s): A little bit and just to be fair, my solution is to fire the people and then you can use the tech to find the people that you need to replace them with. To be clear. Chad (20m 43s): We're becoming robots. The robots are coming. Jackye (20m 47s): It's finding the people is easy. I think the issue still remains that you're asking non-diverse people to solve a problem to people that are diverse. So case in point, me and my daughter are watching one of those like free movies, but you have to watch commercials, you know? And every commercial had black people in it, everyone. For the two hours that was shown to us. And my daughter reminded me, she was like, it's the cookies? Like it's because you buy, you know, black girl magic candles. Joel (21m 20s): Was, did the movie have anything to do with it? Jackye (21m 23s): No, no, no. We were watching the first Footloose. Chad (21m 30s): That is, yeah. That's about as white as you can get. Yeah. Jackye (21m 36s): Streaming thing. I had to use this app because nobody else was having, so what was funny though? Here's what was funny. So we're looking at it. We're like, Oh, that's nice. But then they were things. And my daughter looked at me and she was like, black people wouldn't do that? Like, we're watching the commercial of the family, you know, and grandpa and the baby and the beach and whatever. She's like that doesn't even look that doesn't even look right. Like we're looking at these families. Somebody made me to the decision to increase their diversity in their ads, but it didn't feel genuine. Joel (22m 6s): Like it's the equivalent of stock photos on a website. Correct? You got an old person, a black person, an asian american, a check-in we're checking off all the boxes. Jackye (22m 17s): Yeah. Grandpa's back didn't hurt throwing the kid, grandma, you know, wasn't in her special chair. She's running with the kids in the front yard. That's just not, which goes into ages. I'm like, that's those things we're not getting real yet. And so those decisions are made by non-diverse populations. I think we're getting closer. Like we're getting to the match, but people are forgetting what the lesson is. I think one of my favorite things that I hear is people say, well, you should post jobs on sites that attract black candidates. Like you were saying, a banner ad on BET or something like that. And I said, why don't you post it? Why don't you post it on LinkedIn? Like, everybody's on LinkedIn. Jackye (22m 59s): The other ones aren't exclusive. Why aren't you putting it on Indeed? Like, why aren't you putting it on the places where people go to look for jobs? Like you can't the whole point is inclusionary. Quit othering me and bring everyone together because my othering is causing a greater divide. Joel (23m 20s): I'm remember, back in the day, people would target certain key phrases on Google, around like black jobs. Like they're not searching black jobs. I'm not searching white jobs or male jobs. Like it seems so stupid. Chad (23m 35s): Jobs for Whitey. Jackye (23m 36s): Yeah. I was about to say something not great. Chad (23m 40s): You should of, that would have been funny. Joel (23m 43s): We need the ratings, Jackye. Jackye (23m 45s): I'm not doing it. I mean, the thing is like, it's like quit asking people who aren't a part, that's what's the funniest part, is that people think that it's easy. So there's a bunch of still the white board room having a, what can we do for black people and making these choices and decisions, but not actually meeting, learning about the people. Chad (24m 11s): One of your big recruiting diversity kind of like w wrong things to do is just focused on the entry-level piece. Right? Jackye (24m 20s): Yes! Chad (24m 21s): Instead of doing that, why aren't we focusing on leadership and being able to, there are only six, Oh, go 8%. I'm sorry. I think it's 8% of fortune 500 company CEOs are female. Okay. So that shows you that we have an issue with when we've got a 50, 50% composition from male to female, just overall populous wise. And you can't tell me that we can't find some black females for God's sakes to be able to take up some additional roles. So it just seems to me again, that corporate America is not going to get there on their own. Chad (25m 1s): This has gotta be something that is forced from somewhere. Jackye (25m 5s): It's deep. The system is deep. The problem, there's a book, and it's not an easy book. I'm not saying I'm not going to give you my personal opinion. I will tell you, I read it. I read, and I recommend this book, but please, Joel (25m 18s): That excludes our listeners, but go ahead. Jackye (25m 19s): It's called Mediocre: the Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Chad (25m 24s): By Joel Cheeseman. Joel (25m 28s): Forward by Joel Cheeseman. Jackye (25m 33s): But what it does is that the problem is okay, so let's back up. The thing that's really interesting and this is came out of learning more about diversity and inclusion is that when you are nonwhite, you identify with your own culture, with your black culture, with your Latin X, Hispanic culture, you know, all of these different cultures. When the groups came to the United States, they had to turn their back on their culture and were told, this is what you deserve just for being here, right? Like we're talking about privilege. Chad (26m 3s): So we're still doing that. Jackye (26m 4s): Generation after generation of white men in particular feel like they deserve power just for doing that. Even though the reason the book is called Mediocre is because we know that from an education standpoint, it's kind of slipped like the numbers have slipped and we have more educated women and people of color than we do white males. And yet they're still getting into those, this it's this whole new phenomenon of the new white male identity that's free from racism and sexism has to occur. And so I think it's hard, right? I, when you're benefiting, why would you want to change. Jackye (26m 44s): And so the thing that we've said in the past was that, you know, equal treatment and equity looks like oppression. The people who have felt this boost of power and ability that they didn't earn. So that's where the issue is. It's okay. You didn't deserve this. You didn't really work your weight. Why don't you just step back and give it to somebody who deserves it, but people feel like they deserve it. Chad (27m 9s): Well, it's the same. It feels like the same conversation when you're talking about black lives matter. And a white person says, well, I think all lives matter. It's like, that's not what we were talking about, asshole, right? I mean, that's what it's like, wait a minute, me, me talk about me. You're not talking about me. Why aren't you talking about me? It's like, look, we always talk about you. Okay. What we're not talking about is the black people who actually matter over here as well. That's what you're missing is that these people matter in the conversation. We're just trying to focus on their lives and how they matter. And we're not going to talk about you for a minute. And I think that, you know, we are so self absorbed, because that is what we've been used to in this country for centuries. Chad (27m 55s): And that is what's been bred into really the culture of America, which is why we have so many angry white males right now. Jackye (28m 4s): And because that's what they, so that became the culture. They already went, you know, you can do the 23 and me. And it says, Oh, you know, I'm German and this and that, but they reject that culture and say, I'm American so this is mine. Right? And that's why you mentioned earlier, what they say is that they want the diverse talent, but they don't say is that we want an even distribution of wealth and power in our organization. And we can do that. Right. But then again, you're asking somebody to take a step back and make it more fair, which means giving something that they feel like they either deserve, or they just want, because who doesn't want that. So it's a little bit trickier than that, you know? And so we have to start at the top, but that's difficult too. Jackye (28m 46s): You have some organizations that have been around for a hundred years, family run organizations they've been working at this company, believe it or not, there's still places where people have worked for 20 years and their next step is, should be in the C suite. And they're getting told no. So how do you deal with that? And so it is, but we have to get, we don't have the same level playing field or the same baseline where people understand why we're doing this. What it should be, the outcome and work towards those goals. And so, as a result, we're seeing people doing it half ass and there have a straight line from the front door, straight to the back door. Joel (29m 24s): Jackye, I want to kind of circle back to one of my previous questions. Cause I think, I think it cuts to the heart of what a lot of our listeners want to know from your perspective. And I don't know, Chad likes to say DNI, D&I is the new AI. Like if, if we were going to HR tech, you know, this year, last AI would have been replaced with diversity and inclusion and products that we, that we provide. Can AI be the panacea that everyone is touting to create an unbiased recruiting situation and an unbiased hiring strategies for companies? Or is it a facade? Jackye (30m 1s): Can, this is what's so laughable. I think because we've already have evidence that AI is less biased. Joel (30m 9s): But you also have Amazon which canceled. It canceled their AI because it wasn't. Jackye (30m 13s): Well, they didn't use the, they didn't ask the right questions. Joel (30m 16s): They didn't use SeekOut. Jackye (30m 20s): They didn't use SeekOut at the time. But the thing is, it's like, what's funny is that we are trusting the people that we just said were wrong, to tell us that it's wrong. That we just proved don't, can't do it. Chad (30m 32s): Right. Jackye (30m 33s): And then they say, Oh, it doesn't work. And that's the funniest part. It's just, it's ridiculous. I don't know if it's going to be a full panacea, but it is part of the solution because we can also tweak algorithms to make sure that there is not as much bias, but you have to stay on top of it. It's like anything it's like, it's like Vegas, right? Can you make a lot of money? Yeah. Can you lose? Yeah. But are people cheating? Yeah. And you have to look at it all the time and they're finding new ways to go against it. Joel (31m 8s): I think the hurdle of saying, we're just going to let the AI make our hiring decisions. Jackye (31m 12s): Yeah, don't do that. Joel (31m 13s): At whatever point you say, okay, this is going to be handed off to a human being. That bias is going to be part of this part of the decision. Am I right about that? Or no? Jackye (31m 23s): But I think, I don't think you're fully right. But I think what we can do is I think most of this has to do with awareness. And I think because so much of this is unconscious. We have to bring it into the light. Chad (31m 34s): An awareness that we're all biased. That's the awareness. Jackye (31m 38s): Number one, that we're all biased. Chad (31m 40s): Yes. Jackye (31m 41s): Number two, that this is how your bias shows itself in your process. Meaning there were 30 women that were in the candidate pool. You didn't select anybody to go to the interview process. Where you saw these people in this department and you can actually trace that stuff and see where the gaps are. And so, and then you go to the person and say, this is an area that I think of that you can work on because you probably didn't know that that was occurring. And they either say, yeah, I want to work on it. Or they say no. And then, then, okay, then you have to leave. Joel (32m 16s): Right? So we need 12 steps. Hi, my name is Joel and I'm a bias recruiter. That's what we need. Jackye (32m 23s): Hi Joel. Chad (32m 25s): They don't know because they don't want to know for the most part. Jackye (32m 29s): That's right. Everybody knows, if you go to a company right now and you've gave them the theory of we're going to fire 30% of the racist, sexist, misogynist people at this company. Chad (32m 42s): They all could. Yeah. They all good. 30%, only 30%, right. We're going to, we're going to save 70%, right? Jackye (32m 50s): 15 minutes or less, you would have your 30% on a piece of paper. Chad (32m 56s): Oh, that's going to be, that's going to be the new exercise people. That's what we want to do. Jackye (33m 1s): That's the boss thing of America. Joel (33m 3s): Someone needs an intervention. Chad (33m 5s): That's it and that's where we're going to end on, Jackye. Joel (33m 9s): Thanks, Jackye. Chad (33m 10s): We appreciate you coming on this show, taking the time, being inclusive as fuck. And we definitely, we definitely want to have you come back. If people want to connect with you or where they want to find out more about what you're doing at SeekOut, where would you send them? Jackye (33m 27s): Easiest place. Even my sister and brother contact me on Twitter. It's @JackyeClayton. I spell it. J A C K Y E C L A Y T O N. And I'm on Twitter most of the time. So you can find me there, but it's all of my usernames are @ Jackye Clayton. So I'm easy to find. Chad (33m 44s): Too easy. Well, love it. Jackye (33m 47s): Thanks guys. I appreciate it. Chad (33m 48s): Hi I'm Joel a bias recruiter. Chad and Joel (33m 53s): We out! OUTRO (34m 13s): 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.

Who needs a laugh? 2021, right!!?!?! That's exactly why The Chad & Cheese invited the folks at Watercooler Comedy to come on the show for a chat. The organization, headed by Clevelander David Horning, helps corporate teams use humor to overcome stress, adapt to uncertainty, boost creativity and engagement, and have fun doing it. Enjoy this laugh machine powered by Sovren AI! 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 (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. Who's ready to laugh. What's up everybody as always. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheeseman joined as always by my fearless companion Chad Sowash. Chad how're you? Chad (1m 37s): I can't get fucking Dream Academy out of my head. Joel (1m 41s): And, and we are honored to welcome leadership, speaker, comedian, social media icon, YouTube star, David Horning to the show. David welcome. David (1m 54s): Social media icon with 250 Twitter followers. That's what I'm talking about. Chad (1m 59s): And that's what I'm talking about. That's because you're selective. I appreciate that. There are way too many bots out there. And most of those comedy bots there for shit, dude. David (2m 9s): Taking everybody else's jokes, taking the general jokes. Joel (2m 12s): Comedy bots. Chad (2m 13s): Russian joke taken comedy bots. God damn that's. Yeah. Anyway, so David, let's go give us a little Twitter bio. I mean, we've already said a lot about you already, but give us a little Twitter, Twitter bio. Joel (2m 26s): We've raised the bar pretty high. David (2m 30s): Now I help leaders adapt to change, manage stress, engage their teams by using humor effectively in the workplace. So I'm a comedian, humor consultant, I do a podcast and I'm a leadership speaker. So I speak on leadership. Joel (2m 45s): You haven't been doing this long though, dude. It's been like, it's like 2018. What did you do beforehand? And why did you, or how did you get pushed into this segment? How did you get into this path? David (2m 57s): I wallowed in a of lot of bombing and failed attempts at speaking. I got into the speaking industry after doing comedy. I started in comedy in 2012 and then I moved to Ohio cause I was like, Oh, I can help people learn how to laugh rather than just making them laugh. Joel (3m 16s): We're in Ohio. David (3m 17s): Cleveland. Chad (3m 17s): Yeah. They need it in Ohio dude. That fucking place needs comedy more than any place needs comedy. Joel (3m 24s): East side or West side? David (3m 25s): West side. Joel (3m 26s): Oh gee. Yeah. You have until that. David (3m 30s): You got that Eastside? Joel (3m 32s): Yeah, Eastside University Heights. Yes. David (3m 35s): Did you go to Case or? Joel (3m 36s): No, I moved there as a young professional. Lived there for 10 years. Still have still have quite the affinity for the mistake on the Lake and still root for the Browns, which has actually paid off this year. Chad (3m 47s): He was a young professional. He was bum living out of a cardboard box. Come on. David (3m 53s): Oh, that was your place. It's been designated a historical landmark here. Chad (3m 56s): There it is there. Good job. Good job. Joel (3m 58s): I was living with bone thugs and harmony. All right. Chad (4m 1s): So anyway, back to my question, Jesus, how did you get into this? And, and then how did Water Cooler spring up out of this? David (4m 9s): Yeah, so I, so when I first started speaking, I did a lot just like, Oh, happiness. You know, you can make your team's happy and you can be happy and that's such a broad, just so I had a lot of roadblocks there and I did characters when I first started, which was as awkward and miserable as it sounds. Chad (4m 26s): Sock puppets? David (4m 27s): No I I didn't quite get that far. Chad (4m 29s): Damn. David (4m 30s): Didn't quite get that far. But like for example, I had a bit where I was as detective, that like in the message was personal accountability. And I would also, his name was detective Dick Ransom and he always traced like every, every case that he was tasked, he would trace the evidence back to himself and he would like turn in his gun and his badge and then I closed the bit by saying we've all got a little Dick inside of us. Chad (4m 57s): Yeah. Dick Ransom. Yeah. No, that goes well with a corporate crew. Joel (5m 3s): Yeah. And how'd you get into HR, were you a Dilbert fan? How did that come about? David (5m 8s): So I, I requested to speak at a couple Sherm chapters. And then I realized the lack of humor in the workplace, especially in HR. So I decided, Oh, there's a need here. And I can take what I'm good at, which is not characters, but actually, you know, making insights and observations and kind of making connections with that, between that, and more ideal workplace behaviors, which include using humor and a water-cooler Carl comedy started because of that. Because if, if you know, I can come in with comedians and turn your workplace into a comedy club and create an experience for your team and have where they're laughing together, you know, that's an instant trust building exercise. David (5m 50s): That's an instant bonding experience. And the raise the spirits and kind of gets rid of that boss and employee mentality. If you're laughing together with your, with your managers. You're not boss employee anymore, you're just two people who think the same thing as funny. And that's a subconscious shift that I think we can all benefit from. Joel (6m 7s): So what does a client usually look like? Are these bigger companies, smaller companies, are these banks, are these tech firms, like what is sort of the normal company that wants to have a good laugh look like? Chad (6m 18s): Massage parlors. David (6m 19s): Right? Yeah. Those are the best. Now the I've worked with some credit unions. I've worked with like midsize companies. I'm looking to expand into the larger corporations and really, really having an impact on a culture. Especially nowadays, you know, we need to laugh and having that be part of the workplace, day-to-day actually boosts creativity and the ability to adapt quickly to change. Joel (6m 46s): So the obvious question in the world of COVID, what is your comedy look like now? What is the medium by which you are telling jokes to companies? Obviously I would assume it has turned your sort of world upside down, talk about that. David (7m 1s): Yeah, absolutely. Especially when this first started, I lost a bunch of live speaking gigs and I was, you know, I kinda got down on myself because of it. I was like, what am I going to do? But then, Oh, virtual, you know, the fact that the world technologically was heading in this direction anyway. So I leaned into it and I kind of shifted the whole presentation of using humor at work to not only that, but using humor to find creative ways to solve problems, to create a culture of creativity. Even over Zoom, you know, there are organizations that do kind of fun exercises over Zoom and play games and stuff to bond and to remind one another, that we're all human. And that's kind of what I focus my program on is, is being vulnerable, especially leaders who are so quick to, you know, put on that facade, like, Oh, I'm never wrong. David (7m 52s): You know, I have all the answers. No, that's, you're just like each one of us, we're all going through this thing. It's okay to say, I don't know. And to say, you know, we'll get through this together. Chad (8m 3s): So in a time like this, you just gotta step back and ask yourself, what would Dick do? So you've got like 10 comics at least on the website. How do you find the comics? Are they friends? Do you hang out like and do comedy together? How do you even, how does this, this band of Merry men and women actually grow? David (8m 23s): The comics that I work with are all based out of Cleveland, except Raj just moved down to Bentonville Arkansas. Oh, random. But yeah, I know, right. He was like, I want to be close to Walmart, but you know, you'll find comedians are always looking for work, especially paid work and corporate gigs pay very well. But you know, it's an opportunity. I just asked. It's that's as simple as that, you know, I used to book shows locally here in Cleveland, we did a rooftop comedy show. I did a like, I'm really into food. So we would do, I am a foodie and I heard you guys talking about Pappy. David (9m 6s): I used to work at a restaurant that was chef-driven any other chef had won a James Beard award. And so we put on a comedy show where we would bring in five other comics and have a course that was based off of some of their content, some of their jokes to pair with the jokes and then a cocktail to pair with the food. So we would do. Yeah. So I, I would, I'm all about getting opportunities to comedians and you know, anything to, to allow them the chance to make more people laugh and to get to know who they are. Cause there's a lot of really funny local comics and, you know, nowadays with Spotify and Pandora and, you know, Sirius already, but, you know, that's kind of expanded and YouTube and podcasts, comedy comedians have at an opportunity to really lean into this disruption and use it. Chad (9m 54s): Does this allow you to expand now because Covid means, you know, we're doing things different. Obviously you've had to take this online as opposed to live, but the beautiful thing is going online means you can find talent anywhere. Are you looking to do that at all? Or are you just going to try to keep it close? Because when everything opens back up, you want to have a tight band that can do things in Cleveland. David (10m 18s): I'm leaning into the fact that I can connect with anybody from anywhere. This is really allowed us to do that. I have a podcast where we bring in comics to talk about, you know, different topics that can be considered taboo or offensive or too far. And we dive into the psychology of how they made that topic, funny to prove that anybody can laugh at it. And so I've been able to connect with comics from New York and LA and Toronto and Chicago and Houston, just all over the place. And we can just have this conversation across time and space. I was actually just in Connecticut, virtually. I just gave a presentation right before this. David (10m 58s): So it gives me an opportunity to connect with more audience members and more comedians. Chad (11m 2s): Well, that podcast, just so everybody knows, it's called You Can't Laugh At That. So check it out. David (11m 8s): Yeah. Not safe for work, for sure. Chad (11m 10s): After listening to this podcast, they're fine with that. Joel (11m 12s): What type of comedy do companies want? I assume all these different comedians have sort of different angles or things that they want to talk about will accompany say, Hey, you know, we want to talk about the, we'll talk about like stay away from politics or do we want to embrace politics? I assume companies don't. Is it keep it safe? No, none of this naughty talk, talk about how, what a difficult process and what what's sort of funny. What is in demand with corporate America now in terms of getting our people to laugh. Chad (11m 44s): Joel said naughty talk. David (11m 46s): Yeah. That's real. That's real sexy. Is that, are you married? Yeah. Let's get naughty baby. Was this Austin Powers? Joel (11m 58s): Easy there? David horny. I've heard the bit. David (12m 0s): Oh, you have? Yeah. Joel (12m 2s): I did some research on YouTube. David (12m 4s): I appreciate you, and you still had me on, that's a leap of faith. Joel (12m 8s): Well Chad had already booked you. David (12m 10s): You like, you can unbook. I have been unbooked from presentations based off of my content, so. Joel (12m 15s): That's not how we roll. David (12m 16s): Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. That's when I realized HR needed to laugh more when I got unbooked from an HR conference, but I figured, these companies they're, it varies. I've had companies, you know, I always make sure to ask if there's anything that's off limits. Some will say, you know, everything's on the table, we're here to have fun. I always host the show and I bring in two other comics. And when I host, I always make sure to write content based around their company, kind of poke fun at them, poke fun at their leadership. There was a chemical company out of Ohio that I did presentation for late last year or a presentation, a show for late last year. Joel (12m 52s): It sounds like a party. David (12m 53s): Yeah. They were mostly Ukrainian. And so that I didn't realize that coming in because they didn't, they didn't put that on their websites. They're like, Hey, a bunch of Ukrainians came together and did this. So, but I spent the first five minutes kind of roasting the CEO and the founder of the company. And they really dug that. And then I allow the comics to kind of do their thing. I'll let them know if there's any material restrictions. And that's why I give companies if they wanted to choose the comics that give them free reign to do that. And that's why I kind of have those profiles up on the website. Otherwise I'll pick them. Chad (13m 25s): It's like a menu. David (13m 26s): Yeah. Joel (13m 27s): Do you I guess everyone has their own style, but do you typically just sit there in front of the computer? Do you point the computer at like a microphone and stand, do standup comedy? Like from a distance? How does, I guess visualize this for me. David (13m 41s): Yeah. I mean, I just stand in front of a blank white wall, so it looks like I'm in an asylum and my padded cell and I just, you know, I have the Zoom thing pulled up the Brady Bunch, the Hollywood squares. Yeah. Visual. Joel (13m 56s): And you can't, can you hear them laugh? Do you have them un-muted so you can at least get feedback or is it sort of talking to a blank? David (14m 2s): For the most part? It's talking into a blank because yeah. Every once in a while somebody will be un-muted and a dog will bark and I'll draw attention to that. Joel (14m 11s): So is it safe to assume you, you would prefer the face-to-face in public and as soon as the pandemic ends, you'll go back to that. Or do you think this is such an opportunity that you'll continue to do Zoom corporate gigs in a world on a worldwide or at least national basis? David (14m 27s): Absolutely. If I have the opportunity to be in Seattle physically and give a presentation in Miami later that day, I'm going to take that. Absolutely. I'm going to lean into this. Not like resisting innovation and resisting what's going on right now is ridiculous to me, you know, you just got to lean into it and say, you know, this is an opportunity. Which is how I look at anything bad that happens. So I could be in front of this computer and, you know, be doing these presentations and then go live and find out that none of my new material's funny, but people keep booking me. So. Chad (14m 58s): Do you have times when you actually you're asked and there's a request that comes in and a company says, Hey, we want you to do something for us. And you do a little research on that company. And you're like, yeah, I don't want to do this for you. Has that happened? Or was it like starving comic time? You're going to take whatever the fuck comes to you. David (15m 17s): I'd had somebody reach out and say, Hey, we want to make our employees more compliant. What, you know, what presentation do you have for that? And I was like, no, yeah, that's not me. Chad (15m 28s): That's horrible. David (15m 28s): You're, you know, we're, we're not a fit here. You know, you go on a date with somebody and you can tell within the first few minutes, whether it's going to be, you know, a good experience or not, that was a Tinder conversation that I swiped left on. Joel (15m 38s): So I don't know a lot about comedy, but I do know that when you guys test out new stuff, it's usually in front of a live audience, maybe a small audience, and you get an idea of what's going to, what's going to hit and what isn't. When you can't do shows anymore, how do you test new material to see that it's going to work with a bigger audience? Do comedians, just get together on Zoom and run some stuff by each other. How does, how does it work these days? David (16m 3s): One way that, I've done, that I kind of used the podcast too. A lot of things come up in conversation. And if you know that for laughing together, something that I said, then I, you know, make sure to go back and write that down and kind of expand on it later. I've been doing on my Facebook, just posting for the last three weeks, but I called the loneliest open mic where I'm in my house alone. And I'm just turn on a camera. And I, I riff on topics that I want to talk about for a half hour without stopping myself. And then I turn the camera off and kind of piece together a video. And then I determine what's going to stay in based off of, you know, Facebook reactions, likes, shares, comments, things like that. Chad (16m 41s): What's your Twitter handle? Because I've got, I got to watch this. David (16m 45s): Yeah. That's not on Twitter yet. I've been, yeah, it's on Facebook. It's on my Facebook, but my Twitter handle is the David Horning. Joel (16m 52s): Talk about comedy these days. I know, you know, Chappelle and some others have talked about cancel culture, being afraid to say too much. And I imagine in a corporate environment, you're really boxed in with what you can can talk about, or am I wrong about that? What's the current state of the world and the corporate culture, particularly with comedy. David (17m 14s): Yes and no, you're boxed in. I mean, obviously it's good to have guidelines. It's good to know where the guardrails are, but you can operate anywhere within that creative space. You know, if you just have a blank canvas, it's almost overwhelming. You know, if you sit down and you're like, I can write about anything, go. That's almost harmful to the creative process. Whereas if, you know, say I'm speaking to a credit union, you know, and they said, avoid politics. All right, that gives me something to work with. I think I would cancel culture. I think to me, that's an opportunity to be a better writer. You know, you have to, you have to know your audience and that's first and foremost. And you know, people look at comedy and from the outsider's perspective, it's just people being funny on stage. David (17m 54s): But the point of comedy is to create a connection with the audience. So to me, when I write a joke or when I do a joke on stage, is because I had the idea, it made me laugh, and I want to share that moment of discovery with the audience. Joel (18m 8s): I'm curious, what would a company typically pay for you and your team to come in a, do they usually just get a couple people? Like, how does that usually work? What kind of timeframe do you perform under? Chad (18m 21s): Well, excellent. David, we'll go ahead and tell our audience where they can actually find you and book new one and also go to this comedian menu you have out there and pick from that, for their next corporate gigs that are happening. David (18m 38s): For sure. I'm at watercoolercomedy.org and you can contact me through the booking page. I do, you know, free a half-hour consultation. So kind of figure out where your pain points are and if we're a good fit, because not all workplaces are a good fit, you know, you've got an authoritarian boss and you have, you know, you have a lot of curmudgeons that you work with or the culture isn't there to support humor in the workplace. That's fine. You know, we can all use humor in our own individual way to kind of get us through there. So yeah, you can go to the watercoolercomedy.org and go to the booking page for that go into the programs page. There's the comedians menu there as well. And follow me on social media, @theDavidHorning on Instagram and Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn. David (19m 21s): So if you want to connect, have any questions, anything like that, find me there. And my blog is DavidHorning.wordpress.com. Chad (19m 30s): You're everywhere, man. David (19m 31s): I'm putting out the content. I watched a lot of Gary V at the beginning of the quarantine. Joel (19m 38s): Dig it, dude. Chad, Chad (19m 40s): We out. Joel (19m 40s): We out. OUTRO (20m 3s): 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.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added 233K jobs in January, 468K in February, and 916K in March. So, everyone who got a pink slip last year should be rejoicing and fully employed, right? Think again. Virus fears, childcare uncertainty and unawareness are keeping candidates on the sidelines. It's also sparking solutions like ZipRecruiter to reach for solutions, Degreed gained unicorn status (that makes eight in 2021) this week, Amazon beat back unionization #sad Salesforce rolled out the welcome mat for vaccinated employees ...and Dominos used robots to deliver pizzas in what looks like "a toaster with wheels" in Houston. Now bow down to your robot overlords, but hold the anchovies. As always, thank Sovren, JobAdx and Jobvite for all this cheesy goodness. 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): Look in California and feeling Minnesota. Welcome to HRS most dangerous podcast. This is Chad and Cheese on your cohost. Joel "Pfizer fan" Cheeseman. Chad (35s): And I'm Chad "fast act" Sowash. Joel (38s): And on this week's show ZipRecruiter wants you to act fast. Salesforce wants you to get Vaxxed and Houston, we have a pizza. Yes. Get ready for a podcast with some extra cheese. We'll be right back. 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. dinner. Joel (1m 52s): Super bowl, super bowl, super bowl. Shout out to the Lombardi trophy, which is obviously coming to Cleveland after the Jed Davey on Clowney signing, baby. Come on. Chad (2m 5s): Now that's a great pickup. Great pickup. I'm excited to see where Justin Fields goes. It seems like the talk, the draft. He's the Tanglin where? Joel (2m 18s): New England, that's my prediction. Fields to New England. Chad (2m 21s): I'm saying San Francisco. Joel (2m 22s): Oh, number three. Pick huh? Chad (2m 24s): Yep. Yep. I'm saying San Francisco. Yeah. Yeah. Joel (2m 27s): I'm excited about J D Davian until he gets hurt in week one against the Bengals and then sits out the whole season. But anyway, it's the preseason. So Browns fans get excited. Chad (2m 38s): Nothing like jinxin yourself already. Joel (2m 41s): That's what we do. That's what we do. And all the people, let's talk about winners though. Victoria Conley, she's a winner. We're a winner just having beer with her over zoom. That's who the real winner is on that one. Thanks Victoria. She had plenty. She had ample beer from a Chad and Cheese beer dropped. That's just good stuff. And I still don't know what John means and Philly, I still don't know. Chad (3m 8s): She's sending us some John beer. So I mean that, in itself, I'm just, I'm happy with a little of that, John. Joel (3m 16s): Yeah. See, I didn't even know it was a beer. I'm more confused now than I was before. Chad (3m 21s): So yeah, anybody want to be cool enough to be like Victoria, go to Chadcheese.com, click on free. You could win listen to this beer by Adzuna dropped on your front porch kids, oh, bourbon by Sovren, dropped on your front porch kids. That's right. All safe. COVID free. A T-shirt shirt. Jesus by emissary.ai. Telling you right now, free stuff. I love, not only I love giving free stuff to our listeners, but I love having an opportunity to have beer tasting and bourbon tasting and just time with them because we had some good conversations last night. Joel (4m 1s): Yeah. And speaking of free stuff. I got to give a shout out to, and this is one for the old timers. Jason Goldberg, everybody. For those of you that don't remember Jobster back in the mid aughts, raised $50 million. Jason Goldberg, at the time was the most entertaining, volatile fill in whatever word you want to, but the dude got attention and it was fun. He drove that company to the ground, but he continues to raise money. It's unbelievable. The guy is the ultimate winner. He just raised $6.3 million for Moxie, which is a virtual exercise app. After Jobster, he raised money for social media and he started Fabulous and then he raised like 350 million for fab and ran that into the ground. Joel (4m 45s): Started Him, he did some crypto thingy and now he's on the Moxie. So for the old timers who remembered Jason Goldberg, he keeps entertaining the gift that keeps on giving. Thank you, Jason. Chad (4m 58s): He's the ultimate carnival barker, whatever, it's like he carries vaporware in his back pocket. Joel (5m 5s): The tipping point was the blog post about dropping his Pradas loafers into the ocean. Do you remember that one? Chad (5m 13s): No, I defintely, remember that. Again, he's more of one of those guys that I would love to forget, but he just keeps, like a rash, keeps coming back. Joel (5m 22s): He's still the best a keynote speaker at a direct employers conference. Chad (5m 27s): Yeah, no, I think he had like a five minute segment that was the best. Some, news out there, after 10 years as Broadbean's, CEO Dom Barton has exited stage left. That's right, kids. Broadbeans, I think they're like they're their head of sales left earlier this year. CEO, Dom, Barton just left, he joins buddy Kelly Robinson friend of the show at a Red Dot Media. It sounds like you're putting the band back together, kids so good for Dom. Bad for Broadbeans. Joel (6m 3s): Love Kelly, great taste in bourbon. Great tastes. Yeah. Chad (6m 6s): I'm also hearing that Mary Delaney has taken over the reigns at Broadbean and her execution is going to be spend a shit ton of cash. Raise our revenue and let's sell this fucking thing now. So anybody who's out there, who's looking for something like Broadbean yeah. Look, look for something else. Joel (6m 27s): Didn't your boy, Tom Kenny, get a new gig somewhere? Chad (6m 30s): Yeah. So man, I got to say Tom Kenny, former CEO of SmashFly. He was the guy who actually got the Symphony Talent deal done. Right? That guy. Remember him? So on LinkedIn, the NATO allied command transformation profile, I guess you could call it posted this yesterday. NATO Allied Command. Okay. Quote "speaking at Tide Sprint, Tom Kenny explains how data and organizational interoperability can help the war fighter to do their job at the highest level possible. Data and AI innovator, entrepreneur, CEO, combat veteran, and most recently chief data officer at US Special Operations Command." Chad (7m 19s): Tom Kenny has fucking done it all. I mean, this dude just totally blows it out of the water, everywhere he goes. Joel (7m 27s): And I effectively cleaned my cat's litter box this morning. So there's that, there's that. It's almost the same thing. Almost the same thing. And shout out to our buddy Jamie Leonard of Rec Fest fame and over in the UK, he had a Jerry Maguire moment on Facebook this week. I don't know if you saw this, but he said, quote, I don't mind admitting it, but I am burnt out right now. 13 months of trying to lead an events company through a pandemic. Yeah. It feels like we're out the other side and that's great for business. But also when the adrenaline stops and the body says, yep, that's enough. I'm struggling to do the basics at work. I'm running at 20% at best. Joel (8m 8s): And that isn't fair on the team that have killed themselves to get us through. I think it might be time to recharge the batteries. Well, Jamie, I hope you recharge those batteries baby, because we're coming into the roaring twenties. And I know I speak for Chad and myself, when I say we can't wait to get back to the good old UK. Chad (8m 26s): You're a kid man. And I mean, he's just putting out there what many people are feeling. We all need to step the fuck back. Many people have been working much harder because they are at home and work's there 24/7. So hopefully, you know, at this time, many people will be able to take a step back, hopefully be fully vaccinated. Like I will next week and get on the road to Charleston or wherever you want to go. Just get the fuck out and enjoy yourself because you deserve it. Joel (8m 57s): Chad, we have a final shout out from, from Scotland. Are you ready? Scot (9m 1s): Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is if it's not Scottish it's crap! Joel (9m 6s): Our buddies candidate ID, Adam Gordon raised a little cash this week. The headline said 1.3 million pounds, but it's a little misleading. They raised about 700 and they had another 600 from the same firm a year before that. But hell it's makes for a better headline to say 1.3, either way based on the podcast that we've done recently, people love Candidate ID. Love Adam. They're going to grow the team from tech to sales to up growing globally. Couldn't be happier for them, make it happen and just wear a kilt when you do it. Okay? Chad (9m 40s): Any smart organization that has anything to do with candidate engagement should be looking at this firm to acquire. And I have to say I do have shares. Okay. But it is something in our industry we've needed for a very long time. And Adam, I don't want to say he's the only game in town, but he's pretty much the best game. Joel (9m 58s): Yeah. I can't help, but think that he could raise a lot more money if he wanted to. to Chad (10m 2s): Build it and then sell it and have a lot less to pay off at the end. Joel (10m 7s): Clearly soon to be the biggest thing out of Scotland, since William Wallace, without question. Chad (10m 12s): Wouldn't go that far. Okay. Here's my last list. Get ready. I'm going to ramble this one off. Big shout out to Matthew Goddard, TA leader over at Personio thanks for listening over in Berlin. That's right. Unicorn alert for Personio earlier this year, they were actually tagged as a unicorn. Tracy Klein. She loves the style of our podcast, the style. Joel (10m 39s): Okay, like that, style. Chad (10m 42s): Dennis Bauer, CTO of Job Lift also over in Deutschland. Thanks for listening buddy. Monica Berzinska, I think it is. Joel (10m 52s): Yeah. Is she in Berlin? Chad (10m 54s): She's actually in San Francisco and she works for LinkedIn. So thanks for recommending the pod and last but not least from New Zealand, thanks for listening to the show, Simon Oldham co-founder of Q Jumpers. Joel (11m 9s): I like it. I like it. Are we ready for topics? Chad (11m 12s): TOPICS! Scotsman (11m 13s): Welcome to all things Scottish. Our slogan is if it's not Scottish, it's crap! Joel (11m 18s): I like that better than the boxers on this week. All right. Too many jobs, too few candidates. There's an overarching theme in the economy right now that no one's applying to jobs that are actually available. So from the vendor side, ZipRecruiter has launched a pretty interesting new feature to their service. So Chad (11m 39s): Yeah. Joel (11m 40s): Zip says it's seen a growing number of recruiters miss out on promising candidates due to competition. So now when employers are combing through applicants on Zip act fast label, notifies them if candidates are being actively recruited by other employers. The label indicates that the candidate has received a signal of intent from multiple other employers in recent days and that they'd better reach out. They being the employer immediately or lose their chance. So basically they're algorithmically saying, Hey, this candidate is hot, they're getting a lot of attention. Yeah, you better, you better buy now, before someone takes it off the market, are we a fan of this feature? Chad (12m 21s): I'm going to call this fear and loathing at ZipRecruiter. Here's a quote from the press release "our act fast label benefits employers, by letting them know if they are at risk of losing a candidate they like" insert fear here. I think we're seeing the market. And we also remember because we hear it all the time. The promises that ZipRecruiter puts out there, as soon as you post a job within 24 hours, you will have X amount of qualified candidates. That at this point is, is possibly becoming an issue, so what they're doing is they're trying to gin up this, this new opportunity to say, Hey look, employer, we're sending you candidates, get on this shit fast cause they're not going to be around for long. Chad (13m 7s): They're doing that to cover their own ass, which I appreciate, which I appreciate. But overall, I think this is sparking more of the kind of like fear narrative, which is justified to an extent. Joel (13m 21s): Yeah. Chad (13m 22s): But I really believe this is something that's gonna last much longer than just a few months. Joel (13m 29s): Yeah, no question. It's sort of the reality of the current recruiting landscape. So according to the Bureau of labor statistics, the economy added 233,000 jobs in January, 468,000 in February and 916,000 in March. That's an uptrend, if you're keeping track, at home over the summer, the pace of hiring could accelerate even further if vaccination rates keep up, which I think you and I think they will. And the economy continues to reopen. A ZipRecruiter labor economist, Julia Pollock, told our buddies over at AIM Group that there are three primary reasons that this phenomenon is happening. Number one, older people are getting Vaxxed and younger people less so. Joel (14m 12s): Obviously if you're retired and vaccinated, you're not looking for a job, so you're not in the employment market. As it is number two, uncertainty around around school openings. I can certainly speak to this firsthand with all of my kids having sort of a stop and go policy at the schools that we attend. And if you have issues with daycare, that's a whole other thing. And that's keeping certainly a lot of mothers in this case, out of the workforce. And we've talked about that extensively of how layoffs have affected women more than men. And number three, just a loss of confidence as the job prospects improve. So basically, you know, I was laid off a year ago. I worked hell to get a job for the first 90 days. Joel (14m 54s): Nothing was there. So fuck it. I'm going to go trade Bitcoin and live with mom and play X-Box. Some of those people will eventually realize that there are now jobs open, but apparently that is taking them some time. I will also throw in a, I think a story you shared on our, on our private feed was that a lot of employers are seeing employees leave saying that I can make more on unemployment over the summer. So fuck it. I'll come back when it's done. That seems to be a reality as well for some employers. Yeah. Chad (15m 26s): Yeah. This is a self fulfilling prophecy kids, pandemic isn't over and much like you just said, why as soon as possible return to a job that pays me, starvation wages? It's a call to all employers that I guarantee you is falling on deaf ears. The narrative is being shaped by those pretty much in the ivory tower. Scott Galloway, this week, I was listening to the Pivot Podcast and he actually said, a Bessemer, Alabama, couple working for Amazon, making a combined $60,000 a year, you know, that's a good life. And Scott being a master of what I would like to call ivory tower economics. Chad (16m 7s): That's you know, someone looking down from privilege and saying, working 40 hours a week, pissing in bottles, just to keep your head above water is a good life. And I think that is one of the issues that we're having in our society today is that employers, I don't know, maybe like the CEO of Kroger, who's making $14 million a year. Joel (16m 31s): He's a rich, stupid motherfucker. Chad (16m 33s): He's rich, but he's also going to have problems moving product and doing the things that he needs to do because he refuses to pay his people an extra $4 an hour. So we have issues that can be solved. Let's make this clear can be solved by actually paying people better wages. Joel (16m 57s): I hate to bring up Ladders in a podcast. Chad (16m 59s): You do not. Joel (17m 1s): But, I couldn't help but think someone at the Ladders is thinking, Hey, Zips onto something. What if we charged 20 bucks a month to tell job seekers that we're telling employers that they're red, hot and getting a lot of attention to get more money out of job seekers? I don't know it could be happening. Chad (17m 22s): Why are you giving them any ideas? Here's an idea that I would like to give to employers, right? Other than stupid ass Ladders. So Dan Price, you might remember him. He's the CEO of Gravity Payments. He cut his own salary so that all of his employees could receive a living wage. And here's a quote from Dan "Six years ago today, I raised my company's minimum wage to $70,000. Fox news called me a socialist whose employees would be on the bread lines, but since then our revenue tripled, we are a Harvard business school case study. And our employees have a 10X boom in homes bought, always invest in your people." Chad (18m 9s): I think this is where we need to go toward, yes, CEO's making $14 million a year. They're not going to give that up, but we have to understand that we have to give more, because we've been taking for far too long. We need to invest in our people. Joel (18m 24s): They'll give it up if uncle Sam's, if Uncle Sam tells him to give it up. Chad (18m 28s): Dude, well. Yeah. And right now it's more corporate welfare than it is anything else. Joel (18m 33s): Anyway, speaking of upscaling, we have another unicorn alert. Degreed has raised 153 million in series defunding, the investment, which was co-led by Sapphire Ventures and Riverwood Capital values of the company at $1.4 billion. Chad (18m 51s): Hello. Joel (18m 52s): Dan Levin, the former CEO of Box will succeed Chris McCarthy who's apparently having some back issues as the CEO. The funding will be used to accelerate product development, enhanced data infrastructure, fuel global expansion, and pursue strategic acquisitions. A quote from managing partner at Riverwood, Jeff Parks, investing in skills, culture and career growth has become a critical differentiator for employers. In quote, since its founding in 2012, degreed has raised a total of $360 million. That's a lot of cabbage Chad, that's a lot of degrees going on. Chad (19m 31s): It's a lot. It's a lot of cabbage. And I don't, I don't believe that McCarthy leaving as CEO is going to slow this train down. They've seen huge increases all over the board. Joel (19m 43s): He's still on. He's still around. He's just got, he literally says he has back issues. So the dude is just, he's getting a massage, right now. Chad (19m 50s): Severe, back issues. So there's just probably going to be a little bit more than that. Joel (19m 54s): I'm so insensitive. Chad (19m 55s): Yeah, dude, this is employees kind of like signal at this point. This is a platform you should get on now, because if you want to keep your employees, you need to demonstrate that you care about their career at your organization before they leave for another one. Great example in the military, if you're promoted, you have mandatory courses you have to take and pass to keep your promotion. Plus if you want to switch jobs or add new skills into your portfolio, you can choose those courses right in the militaries education ecosystem. Employers could retain great talent, mentor those who need help, and create a real culture through a learning ecosystem by leveraging this type of tech. Chad (20m 41s): Vendors, if you're a big platform like SAP, Oracle, or even Microsoft blending this type of degreed platform into LinkedIn, that would be fucking brilliant. Joel (20m 53s): I'm not a doctor, but I want to start by saying, maybe if former CEO, Chris McCarthy laid down on a bed of cash, it might make his back feel better. I don't know. Retention is huge. Obviously we talked a lot about people not applying for jobs and that's likely going to continue to happen. So I think this is a huge thing for retention, which you touched upon. I also think, call me cynic cynical. It's also sort of, it allows employers to have their cake and eat it too. And what I mean by that is this. Historically, if companies wanted to reeducate or, you know, upskill one of their employees, what did they usually do? Joel (21m 34s): They send them back to school. In some cases, this was, Hey, we'll pay for your MBA. We'll pay for your college degree. We'll pay for whatever. And sometimes this meant, you know, they got to go to Kellogg at Northwestern or a really good MBA program and the company paid for that. Well, that's great. And the employee got to have, you know, the certificate, the degree from that certain certain university and that made them way more marketable. And instead of a retention tool, sometimes this became a loss for the company as the employee was able to give another job, thank you, former company for paying for my MBA, that was really nice of you. So with something like Degreed companies are able to upskill, they're able to have retention, increase retention, they're able to make employees feel special and like they're on a track for growth, but they can do it in a way that says, okay, they're not going to get an MBA from fill in the blank of whatever college so that they leave me after they get that degree. Joel (22m 31s): So call me cynical. But I think there is a benefit to companies to be able to have both best of both worlds. They keep their people and they keep them happy and keep them upscaled. So for me like Degreed is if we were playing by herself, it would be a huge buy. And I think with the fact that Coursera just when IPO, I think Degreed obviously is probably going to IPO this year, I would imagine as things get hot, but yeah, big fan of this for a lot of different reasons, not just because you're retraining and upskilling candidates or employees, but employers can also get the best of both worlds. Yeah. Well, call me cynical. Chad (23m 11s): Any company who sends somebody for an MBA and doesn't sign them onto a contract for two to three years are fucking idiots. But I also see Google certs, all these little things that are popping up. These are different ways for companies to start to easily instead of taking years, obviously to get certifications or to get that degree, these are skills, right? They're not degrees, they're skills that you can get and in a relatively quick fashion. Joel (23m 44s): Yeah, let's be honest. A lot of a lot, your workers don't want to go to a two year MBA program where they have to like go to night school or weekend school or whatever. So this is another great way to do that. And it probably save a ton of money. It's probably a little cheaper to do this than it is to get an MBA from Stanford. Chad (23m 59s): I'd like to also highlight, friend of the show, sponsor the show, Jobvite they have an Academy. I just got actually an email this week marketing to me that they have a recruitment marketing certification that is also accredited. So again, if you are one of these types of platforms, these are the things that you need to start integrating into your ecosystem because employers are going to need them. You're either acquiring them or you are developing them. Joel (24m 30s): I really just would want gift cards, to Chipolte, but that's just me. Jobvite (24m 33s): 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 (25m 19s): All right. Forget Bridgerton. Okay. Here's another shout out for you. A new show on TBS. You'll say it's the best name of any show of all time is called Chad. So if you're a fan of like quirky comedy of sorta like the Napoleon Dynamite kind of funny stuff, this is a show for you. It's about an awkward teenager named Chad obviously. And it's played by a woman, who's a boy. So right there, it's a little bit unnerving when you watch it. She was a former SNL cast member and it's just, just really weird and funny. There's one scene where his best friend let's call him a 14 year old is wearing leather shorts. Joel (26m 2s): He goes, Why are you wearing leather shorts? He goes, they're comfortable. Like where'd you get leather shorts? And he says, they're my mom's. He's like, don't worry your mom's clothes. It's it's just, yeah. It's funny if you like that quirky shit. Check out Chad. Chad (26m 15s): Awkward. Joel (26m 16s): Cause you can't get enough Chad in your life. Chad (26m 18s): Awkward. You know, I have a pair of leather shorts? Joel (26m 21s): Yeah. I don't want to know. I don't want to just don't wear them into the office. They have the flexible waistband so I can grow into them accordingly. Chad (26m 34s): Well, they're probably not leather. They're probably pleather. Joel (26m 39s): Anyway, Salesforce is in the news, maybe doing a 180. Let's read about this and decide for ourselves. Salesforce says it's allowing only employees who have been vaccinated to return to the office for now making it one of the first big US companies to extend the preferential treatment to workers who are vaccinated. This is per Reuters. The company said employees could quote, volunteer to be part of our a hundred or fewer workers to return to each of its offices, but would have to test for COVID twice a week. Back in February, as listeners will remember Salesforce also said, some employees can work remotely at least through this year while others would be office-based or able to work onsite a few days a week. Joel (27m 23s): COVID-19 testing that would be mandated twice a week as I said, in a phase reopening state stage offices will gradually reopen from 20% to 75% capacity. The hybrid model, which they touted pretty aggressively earlier this year will extend for employees to work from home through at least December. Does that mean 2022 everyone's back to work suckers? I think it does. Chad (27m 50s): Possibly. Joel (27m 51s): What do you think Chad? Chad (27m 53s): Yeah, I, I think we've seen, was it Google and Amazon, there was some big brands that actually said, Hey, look, we're, we're coming back to the office. Right. And we talked about that. There's a control factor to that. I think, you know, some companies will be hybrid. I think when they're talking about allowing a hundred percent, that is, that could be by choice, right? That I don't think this means you have to come back. I just think that you have a choice. You can get the fuck out of your house and you can actually come back into the office. I think this is a smart way to go at it. I know that there are many individuals who have a problem with this whole, you know, it's my choice, whether I want a vaccination or not. Chad (28m 38s): And I appreciate that it, an individual is free to make that decision of taking or not taking the vaccine, but you've got to remember it's your employer's choice because they have to mitigate risk by restricting unvaccinated employees. So, you know, there is this kind of like push and pull, but there are two parties here. This isn't just the individual who's getting the shot in their arm. This is also the employer who has to manage and mitigate risk. And in this case, they're doing it through restriction of access. You know, you get to keep your job just not in the office. And it'll be interesting to see if countries start to do this around, you know, allowing people who are not vaccinated on planes. Chad (29m 23s): And into their country. Joel (29m 25s): Yeah, that is. So to me, there's two, two sort of sides to this. One is that, you know, I think as good, as nice as it sounds for big name tech companies to say, we're going to work from home and we're going to be flexible and hybrid. I think the reality of the numbers and the investments that they've made in office space makes it really hard to go to hybrid or work from home all the time. And I think that's why you're seeing a lot of these companies do an about face on the headquarters and coming to the office. And I think this is only going to continue. I mean, Salesforce was a beacon of, Oh my God, work from home? Salesforce, big company is, has already announced their hybrid, you can choose which one you want. Now. Joel (30m 5s): It feels more like they're saying, okay, we're going to gradually all come back to the office. I think smaller companies are going to embrace work from home. And we talked about some of that in previous episodes, which people can go back and listen to the archives. The second phase of this, I think is the vaccination passport and what, how there's so much division on this. And it kind of shocks me that there is, but where do you fall in terms of, you know, a restaurant will accept you if you have the vaccine and if you don't, they won't, or maybe it's like, when you and I were growing up in the seventies where half the restaurant was smoking and the other half was not smoking. Joel (30m 46s): Of course it was stupid because we were all smoking in those restaurants at the time. But I'm just, I'm just curious. Why do you think there's such pushback? Is it just dumb Americans? And would you accept a passport and only being able to go places, games, concerts, et cetera if you had said passport. Chad (31m 4s): You got to remember that these are private organizations making the decision, right? So that's, there, if you're a restaurant, that's your decision. Now you will probably lose money from people who obviously won't come back, but that is your decision. So I think overall, this is about mitigating risk in a disease. Okay. That's the truth here. We're talking about mitigating risk. We're talking about lives. We're talking about, you know, approaching 600,000 dead people in the United States. So, you know, again, I think if you decide not to take the vaccine, there are consequences, right? Chad (31m 46s): That's all there is to it. And if you take the vaccine, there are consequences. They're different. They're on there, they're on different sides. So overall, those are the risks that you have to take. We see the Johnson and Johnson get a pause because you know, one in every million individuals who were vaccinated had blood clot issues, females did, that was one in a million. Right. But we're still taking a pause to check that out. There was a consequence there. On the other side, if you're not going to take the vaccine, there's also a consequence and you have to understand that. Yeah. Joel (32m 22s): You have to have a license to drive a car in this country. I don't know if you knew that or not, but yeah, I say, bring on the passport baby. I'll get my shot tomorrow. Now, apparently when I'm going to be bedridden for 24 hours, I don't know how you've how you handled your second shot, but anyway, I'm ready for the passport. I'm ready to go to restaurants. I'm ready go to concerts. I'm ready to go to games. I'm ready to travel the world again. I say, bring it on and make it voluntary. Like if you don't want it then fine. But if the airline doesn't want to accept you because you don't have the passport, you don't get a ticket. Chad (32m 50s): Yeah. Joel (32m 51s): That's it. Chad (32m 51s): Yeah. We're also seeing employers like Krispy Kreme, donuts, handout free donuts, if you show them their vaccination card, right? Chagrin cinemas in Cleveland, they're giving out free popcorn through the end of April for the moviegoers who demonstrate that they have a vaccination card. The Greenhouse of Walled Lake, a marijuana dispensary in Walled Lake, Michigan is giving anyone over the age of 21 with a proof of vaccination of free pre-rolled joint. Right? So again, these are organizations who are making decisions. I mean, this is kind of like their own passport. Seriously. You're getting, you're getting an opportunity to get all these perks because you got a shot in the arm. Joel (33m 33s): By the way, if you've never been to Chagrin Falls in Ohio, it's a beautiful, beautiful little town. There's a nice ice cream store and a nice waterfall. It's beautiful. Chad (33m 41s): It sounds. It just sounds beautiful. Joel (33m 46s): It sounds nothing like, is it Bessemer Alabama? Chad (33m 48s): Oh God. Yes. Joel (33m 51s): Oh man. You were all heated about this. You said a lot in the beginning of the show, do you want to continue with your rant or you want to read the news? Chad (33m 59s): Yeah, go ahead and read news? Joel (34m 1s): All right, so Amazon, most of our listeners probably know won a high profile battle against the union this week out of over 5,800 warehouse workers at an Alabama location, 3,215 cast ballots. The final tally was 1,798 votes against and 738 votes for, with 70.9% of valid votes counted against unionizing. The union had needed 50% plus one of the ballots to win. The union will be fighting the decision of course, but the outlook of winning that is pretty bleak for the union at this point. And it looks like a huge win for Amazon. Chad (34m 41s): Much like prop 22 in California. This is a loss for the collective good. We're playing off of this fear and I in the article, a warehouse worker told Business Insider in March that she joined the ranks of the no voters almost immediately after receiving her ballot. She said she feared losing free time off and benefits over the course of bargaining. Fear plays a huge degree in all of these discussions, instead of being able to talk about collectively coming together and not being so divided. Chad (35m 22s): Everybody likes to talk about rugged individualism and how that is like a strength, but that to be quite frank is showing our downfall or becoming more divided. And Amazon who, you know, you $15, a whole $30,000 of a fucking year before taxes pissing in pissing in garbage cans or what have you, a collective group can actually fight those things. Individuals it's very hard to do so. Joel (35m 52s): So the, the pro Amazon employees cited good wages. As you discussed and a distrust of unions who quote, "just overpay themselves" for just quote, "acting like a middleman" was one of the statements from, I think the Business Insider or Insider Business article. Amazon touted starting wages of $15 or more healthcare from day one and a safe and inclusive workplace, as reasons to decline unionization. Sometime, you know, you mentioned the prof G comment and, you know, sometimes I think at least for myself, I try to say, okay, if, if I'm a high school educated or less person in Bessemer, Alabama, and yeah, I'm married and we both work for Amazon and that's maybe the best job in town, a job that wasn't there, you know, a couple of years ago. Joel (36m 44s): And yeah, we're making 60 grand a year and 60 grand in that part of Alabama is a pretty good living. That again, wasn't there two years ago. And I think what we're also underestimating maybe is the fear that Amazon could say, fuck it. We're out of here. So if Amazon was to do that, then you know, the life that I had before Amazon came to town that I didn't like so much and then they came to town and I liked my life and I made a decent wage. And now they're gone because of this union. I kind of wonder the mentality of person, their family. They're thinking, geez, if this union thing happens, Amazon could be fucking gone. And you may think 30 grand is not a lot, but it's a hell of a lot more than I made before Amazon came to town. Joel (37m 28s): I do wonder how much that plays into the mentality of folks who are voting against unionization? Chad (37m 34s): Fear. Yeah. That that's it's fear. Would that quote unquote "good life" that Scott Galloway was talking about be good enough for your kids or grandkids? I mean, seriously. So if you had moved to Bessemer, Alabama, and when Cole and Stella are 18, would you be cool with sending them to work at $15 an hour? I know I wouldn't. And I think as Americans, we're starting to lose that sense of community where we're thinking more about ourselves. And when we put ourselves in the actual shoes of an individual living in Bessemer, Alabama, and if you take a look at the actual living wage for Bessemer, Alabama, that's $1 an hour more, which means again, I'm pretty much barely keeping my head above water. Chad (38m 23s): Right? So overall I think it's upon us as Americans to stop this ivory tower economics bullshit and say, well, that's good enough for them. Oh yeah, no. In Bessemer, Alabama. Yeah. No, that's probably good enough for them. Do your research and ask yourself this question. Would you think that would be good enough for your kids and your grandkids? For me, that answer would be no, which is why I am totally against this bullshit. Joel (38m 50s): I think Bernie should work on upping the minimum wage in Vermont before he goes to Bessemer, Alabama. Chad (38m 56s): I agree, Amazon and I agree. Bernie should not be going anywhere. Talking about a $15 wage. He needs to shut his fucking mouth and actually get something done in Congress. I agree. I agree. He needs to keep pounding the drum, but he needs to be pounding it for Vermont. And then also allow all those other representatives and senators to do the exact same thing in their backyards. Joel (39m 21s): And speaking of getting shit done, yes, here's JobAdX JOB AD X (39m 26s): 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 (40m 9s): JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for all your advertising needs. Chad (40m 17s): Dude, I just received a box of beer at my front door and listen to this, one of those beers is called Consensual Chocolate. Joel (40m 33s): Is it the offspring of sex, sexual chocolate? Chad (40m 36s): I hope so. God I hope so. Joel (40m 38s): Was it delivered by a robot is the question? Chad (40m 41s): It was not, but that is a great segue. Joel (40m 44s): Well, that's coming. That's coming. So get ready for robots to deliver your pizzas and chicken sandwich kids Domino's and Chick-fil-A are automating. Domino's pizza is launching a robotic pizza delivery service in Houston. Each town this week is order surge over the pandemic in partnership with Silicon Valley startup Nuro, N U R O. Customers will be able to receive their orders via small autonomous vehicles that look a little bit like toasters on wheels. That's per Forbes. Nuro was previously involved in pilot projects with Walmart, Kroger and CVS and received regulatory approval last year to start the unmanned delivery service. Joel (41m 26s): Side note here last month, Chipolte invested in Nuro as well. Also chicken sandwich chain Chick-fil-A is using Kiwibot fleets to cart orders to a few restaurants in Southern California. Up to three locations in the Santa Monica area are now offering customers the option of having their food brought to them by one of Kiwi bot semi-autonomous four-wheeled rovers. Robots promise at least to have the time it takes for all orders, a mile or closer and more than half the cost, as well as a smaller carbon footprint. Chad, are you ready to order pizza and Chick-fil-A and get it delivered by a toaster on wheels? Chad (42m 10s): I totally am. But I have to say, I'm going to say this again. It's been a little while since we've had a story like this, but you need to buy stock in aluminum ball bats right now, baby. Joel (42m 24s): Louisville, Slugger stock is surging right now Chad (42m 27s): That Kiwibot is the cutest thing ever, but it is so small. And to take that thing out, I mean, seriously, during kind of like nighttime operations, I mean, it would, it wouldn't be that hard now. The Nuro and, and definitely listeners go to these websites, check them out. Nuro, N U R O.ai. It's a really cool little van that I don't think a person could actually fit into. I mean, it is efficient, no question. And then Kiwibot.com. So kiwibot.com. I am ready for this. And because of what we were talking about earlier with individuals, really not wanting to do these jobs and them not paying a lot, this is going to be the future. Chad (43m 15s): This is going to be how shit's delivered. Joel (43m 17s): Remember a couple months ago when Texas was in a frost, lockdown, freeze lockdown. How do you think the Nuro would have fared during that couple of weeks in Houston? Chad (43m 30s): It would not have. Joel (43m 33s): That thing could heat our house, grab it. Chad (43m 35s): Well, think of, think of that when a situation is going on, like that, one of those things going down the road, that would totally be hijacked. Joel (43m 43s): Yeah. And are these things four wheel drive? Is this going to be able to like, you know, go over snow and rocks and who knows what else it's going to face in Houston? It's Texas man. Chad (43m 54s): It's Texas, right? No clue. All I, all I know is I don't care who delivers the pizza, just as long as it's hot and ready. Joel (44m 1s): I agree. I agree. And with that, I think it's lunchtime. It's time to dig into this beer. Yeah. So you're gone next week. Yeah. Side note. I'm going to try to find a guest co-host but are you going to any place special. Chad (44m 15s): Charleston? I'm actually going to be marrying a couple of our friends. We're going to spend the week there. Play golf, drink. Oh yeah. And have some sexy time. So we're excited. Joel (44m 25s): We're excited. Oh, that's just gross. We out. Chad (44m 27s): We out. 6 (45m 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.

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