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Talkpush recently faced a panel of four judges at TAtech in New Orleans for Chad & Cheese's Death Match competition pitting four start-ups against each other. Listen now to see how it went down for them. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Announcer: 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, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Announcer: Welcome to Chad and Cheese Death Match, part two of four. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Max Armbruster, CEO of Talkpush. Death Match took place at TAtech on September 27th in New Orleans at 9:00 A.M. in the morning with a room full of TAtech practitioners loaded with mimosas, Bloody Marys, beer, and Chad and Cheese snark. Enjoy, after a word from our sponsor. Chad: Hey Joel? Joel: What up? Chad: Would you say that companies find it hard to attract the right candidates to apply for their jobs? Joel: Well Jobs2Careers thought so. Chad: Jobs2Careers? You mean Talroo. Joel: Talroo? Chad: Yeah, Talroo. T-A-L-R-O-O. Joel: What is that, like, a cross between talent and a kangaroo? Chad: No. It's a cross between talent and recruiting, Joel: But - Chad: Talroo is focused on predicting, optimizing and delivering talent directly to your email or ATS. Joel: Aha, okay. So, it's totally a data driven talent attraction, which means the Talroo platform enables recruiters to reach the right talent at the right time and at the right price. Chad: Okay, so that was weirdly intuitive, but yes, guess what the best part is? Joel: Let me take a shot here, you only pay for the candidates Talroo delivers. Chad: Holy shit. Okay so, you've heard this before. Chad: So, if you're out there listening in podcast land, and you are attracting the wrong candidates, and we know you are, or you feel like you're in a recruiting hamster wheel and there's just nowhere to go right? You can go to talroo.com/attract. Again, that's talroo.com/attract and learn how Talroo can get you better candidates for less cash. Joel: Or, just go to chadcheese.com and click on the Talroo logo. I'm all about the simple. Chad: You are a simple man. Chad: Alright, make sure you've got that drink in hand. Anybody who wants a beer, if you would rather have a beer, we have beer up here at the Georgia stage so ... Peter: Good morning everyone. Joel: Good morning Peter: You can tell there's very few things that would bring a crowd like this out at 9:00 A.M. after a night on the town in New Orleans, so props to our good friends Chad and Cheese without further ado here's Chad and the Death Match. Chad: Hello. Joel: Good morning. Chad: Good morning. So, today we're going to do our very first Death Match, okay? So, hopefully everything goes off without a hitch. If you've listened to the podcast, we do firing squad, this is kind of like an iteration. What's gonna happen is we have four contestants. They're going to have two minutes to pitch. No PowerPoint presentations. They're going free falling, okay? So, no PowerPoint presentations, they're going to do a two minute pitch and then after that the balance of their time, their fifteen minutes, is going to be Q&A by our American Idol judging panel. Chad: Alright. Next we have the CEO Max Armbruster of Talkpush. Bring it. Push it real good. All this ... Chad: Alright Max, so two down. You ready? Max: Ready, ready. Joel: Love it. Chad: A little anxious? Max: A little bit, yeah. Chad: Would you like me to get off the stage so you can do this shit? Max: No, I can - Chad: We can switch. Joel: Fight! Chad: Let's do this! Max: Alright. Thank you, thank you Chad. Max: Good morning! So, Joel: Morning. Max: Talkpush in two minutes. Recruiters like to have it all. On one hand, they want to us AI and big data in order to automate all the boring stuff like scheduling interviews, doing background checking, re-engaging old databases. But on the other hand, nobody wants to be hired by a robot. People want to talk to people. They want to have a personal, individual conversation. Max: I'm a little bit out of breath from running on stage. Max: And so, it's very hard today with an ATS and a CRM tag to get both of those experiences. The automation and the personal touch. Until Talkpush. So what we do is, we work at the front of the marketing, of the recruitment funnel, and we automate the initial engagement with the candidate with conversational agents that optimize conversion rates. So, that translates into a seventy percent reduction in marketing cost per hire because those conversational agents, a.k.a chat bots, were talking on Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, in career sites, they're really good at getting that candidate to the next step. Max: Once you're at the next step, then you want to talk to a recruiter. And, with our experience, the handover is seamless. So, you go from talking to a bot if you're a candidate, to a recruiter seamlessly. And the recruiter can then take over from their mobile app and talking to the candidate. So, we use the word "augmented recruiter" to talk about what the recruiters can do. They can do so much more with our system. This is why millions of candidates are already being processed on Talkpush with big brands like Adecco, Excenture, AIA, Starwood. Using our system, they come to us because they realize the way you talk to candidates is a very core part of your employer brand, and they use to level up the recruitment experience. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Thank you. Chad: Deb, you get to go first. Deb: I'll go first. Chad: Okay. Deb: Okay, I have so many questions for you. Love the technology, I am just curious from a legal perspective, I mean I almost broke out in hives when I was looking at it just thinking about financial services in particular. Can you address, have you vetted whether or not that's something a really risk-averse client could do? Max: So, the risk for banks, insurance companies- Deb: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Max: I'm not a lawyer, but I would say, every interaction is opted in because we, one of our first channel has been Facebook. And Facebook they've got very strict terms about how you play in that platform. You really do have to opt in, they do not allow for spam. With Whatsapp, it's the same concept. And we've applied these same rules to every interfaces. So, everyone is opted in and everybody can opt out. And, if you've ever been on the phone with an IVR and you know, start swearing at it, you know, swearing, then nobody's listening to you. But, in our case, if a candidate starts saying things that indicate that they're, you know, dissatisfied, absolutely we will stop the bot. And we will send a notification for the recruiter so that they can step in and do some damage control. So, I know I'm not exactly answering your question, but- Deb: It's okay. Max: Yeah. Chad: It's not okay, Deb. Chad: So we start talking about chatbots- Deb: See, this is why! Chad: Not okay! Deb: This is why, I'm nicer than you. This is why. Chad: This is why. Chad: We just talked about end-to-end. So, define where you pick up- Max: Yup. Chad: And where you leave off. Max: So, I like the expression click-to-hire. From the first click to the moment they are hired. But, because messaging is such a sticky platform, so unless you do something terrible like, in the example I said where you opt out because you say, you know, you're upset. If the candidate is upset, you opt them out but if not, you can really keep them through the whole journey. So, the way every candidate who is talking to an employer needs to be viewed as a subscriber. They subscribe to a feed of information. And then they can subscribe to subfeeds within that feed. So they can say, "We're going to move him to onboarding, we're going to move him to exit interviews..." So, some clients use us for the exit interviews actually, because sometimes it's easier to talk to a robot than to a person. Joel: Nice apron, by the way. I love that it says God on the belt. Max: Oh! Joel: That's not humble at all. Max: Yeah, that's a brand. Max: I can go inside. Joel: Oh, nice! Can we get a picture of that, right there? Joel: It seems to me like, your company is- Max: Thank you. Joel: What else is in there? Max: It's cold today. Joel: Your product seems to be a jack of all trades, if you will. And historically companies that try to do it all tend to not do anything very well. Max: Uh-uh (negative) Joel: Do you worry about that? Is that an issue? You know, selling your product to a market that probably has trouble digesting one product, you're throwing a ton of products at them. Talk about that and how you tackle that challenge. Max: Yeah, thanks. Well first, we're focused on the high volume space. So, if I've got a customer coming to me saying, "I'm having a really hard time finding this profile, this profile..." and it's not a high volume game, I usually tell them, you know, work with your existing tools. So, we're really focused on how you go from 10 thousand views to one hire in like a few hours. That keeps us very focused. So, I think that's one way to look at it. Max: Also, the fact that we are integrated and seamless is core to our service. Yes, I would love to have like, just one layer of the text tag but for the candidate it would be a shitty experience because they'd go from "I'm applying on this surface, now I have to go to this assessment, and now I have to talk to the candidate on this platform..." And it's not what we want to do. We really want to make it so effortlessly that in five minutes they know whether they're going to be shortlisted for the role, they're already scheduled for an interview, and to get that kind of seamlessness it's easier to do if you try to do, you know, try to do it all. Faith: So, you just said that with 10 thousand views you can get them to a hire. Max: Yeah. Faith: -Just a few hours. Max: Yeah. Faith: Can you explain how that happens? Max: Yeah. So, it was in the title of one of my presentations. 10 thousand to one. And typically the process is someone sees an ad, they click on it, it immediately opens up their SMS or their Facebook messenger, or Whatsapp. They get asked to opt in, and then they'd be asked a couple of open-ended question using an LP, you can say, so we can build bots that are different for different environments. Max: So, if you're a company that is very spread out geographically, you would first want to make sure you got location right. If you're a company that is concentrated on a couple of sites but you got two or three job types, then you focus on that. So, you put your questions in an order so that within two questions you can basically sort out the traffic for 98% of the traffic. That's the first customization you do on the bot. Max: And then you can decide whether you want to do deep screening or not, depending on how difficult it is to get candidates in your environment. So, we work in, I think 12 countries today, and one of the hardest places is actually the U.S. because candidates, they're very angry with their bots for some reason. So, you have to be extremely light. We advise our customers to keep it to like three or four questions and then let's end it there, let's move to the interview and let's quick as possible put them on the phone with someone. Max: And so that's what our system does. If someone is shortlisted the recruiter would get a notification on his app, native app - iPhone, Android - and would have the chance to immediately call the candidate from there. The conversation can be recorded, and they can also chat if necessary, so as the previous people on stage were saying, we communicate through text all the time. If a candidate comes to your office for an interview and they're going to be late by five minutes, that's how they should be communicating back to you. What else are they going to do? Call the switchboard? Who's got a switchboard today? Deb: Okay, so my question is around the marketing percentage that you mentioned early in your presentation. You had said that 17%, there was a 17% drop in marketing costs, and I was just curious- Max: I meant 70. Deb: Seventy. Max: Sorry. Deb: Can you, I was like "Wow, oh, that's not so great." Deb: Can you tell me was this marketing for recruitment marketing only or did this encompass other costs? Max: So when I said the marketing cost per hire is reduced, it's because we have to change the metric from pay-per-click to pay-per-hire, right? And the only way to do that is to have a whole view on how much money you're spending on each media, if you're the employer, and then dividing that by number of hires. And we can come in and say, you know, your 10 thousand people, 10 thousand clicks, how many of them are you gonna get actually through the door? So, that's the calculation we do. Max: And we can reduce, so the 70 reduction in cost per hire, was done through two methods. One of them was by changing the channel mix a little bit, so instead of advertising in channels and job boards that are super specific and super active job seekers, to go a little bit broader. To use things like Facebook and Instagram to actually generate a lot of quote-unquote "bad traffic." But now that you got the AI that's working for you, bad traffic can convert into good traffic much better. So you can change your channel mix that way and we've helped a number of customer move in that direction. And reduce the amount of spending they do on active job boards and spend more on passive domains like Instagram and Facebook. Chad: So, in the high volume space, and, but more than likely not all your clients, are using you end-to-end. So what segment is the most popular segment that your clients are starting to go after first, and then probably broadening up with? Max: As any start-up CEO, I talk to other CEOs any chance I get. And I try to get them to say, "Yeah, I will push this to my team." But actually, 90% of our deals we end up doing them with a sourcing manager and a recruitment manager. And anybody who has worked in this world knows that nobody cares what's happening six months from now. They just want their numbers, next month, two months from now. So we focus on that. And in order to hit those numbers, well, we have to show them, we have to focus on the sourcing bit. So that's my answer. Max: We focus on the sourcing bit and when people initially looked at chatbots and this kind of technology three years ago, everybody was asking me, "So, you're a screening engine?" And yeah, but not really. You know, screening and sourcing when we're talking about this initial engagements, they're kind of intertwined and mixed and I can't tell you which one we are. But I think the main thing is just getting people through the door so in that sense I would say, we are more focused on sourcing. Max: And then of course, for the deep screening, you know, the personality assessments and all that, it's better to be in a controlled environment. So, bring the people in and then do the deep screening, and the profile analysis. So that's a different, you know, different approach than the tradi-, the leaders in video interviewing, for example. Joel: You're very focused on voice which is sort of unique in the industry. Can you expand upon that, like, can you transcribe conversations, are they searchable, et cetera? And where are you going to be taking voice? Will one of your customers one day be able to say, "Hey Alexa, find me a chef in Arkansas" or something? Max: You mean, the recruiter talking and- Joel: Correct Max: Then passing a command? Joel: Right. Max: Yeah, so we are definitely going to add voice command. And I think that every company in tech over the next six months will do that, just so they can do a voice press release, and we will too. That's okay. Max: The beauty of voice for me is when you listen to somebody like Chad and Cheese on the chadcheese.com podcast, you immediately get a sense for personality. And when you listen to a candidate, you also get that. But you can do that without having to ask people to stand in front of a webcam or download an app on their phone today. That's what's cool. Like, it's so easy, it takes a minute, they use their phone. Max: So, obviously you build a stronger connections with voice. You feel like there's personality. If I ask you a technical question and you give me a three paragraph answer, perfectly scripted, I know you copied and pasted it from someone. But if I ask you the same question in voice and I can hear you shaking your boots, then that's good, that's valuable information. So that's why I'm long on voice. Max: But to answer your question, transcripts we do it and you can use them for screening and for short-listing candidates, of course. But actually in the U.S. we do much more text because people assume that everyone speaks perfect English. But in other markets where we are hiring multi-linguals, it is useful to have a one, two minute recording of having someone speaking in Japanese or in Chinese. Joel: And where can our audience find out more about you? Max: Go on Facebook, look at Talkpush, or Talkpush.com. Joel: Thank you. Max: Thank you. Announcer: This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit Chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. Announcer: Thanks to our partners at TAtech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Remember to visit TAtech.org. #DeathMatch #chatbots #AI #LIVE #ML #MachineLearning #Talkpush #TATech

Uncommon.co recently faced a panel of four judges at TAtech in New Orleans for Chad & Cheese's Death Match competition pitting four start-ups against each other. Listen now to see how it went down for them. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Announcer: 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: Welcome to Death Match, part three of four. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Teg Grenager, CEO of Uncommon. The Death Match took place at TAtech on September 27th in New Orleans at 9:00 AM in the morning with a room full of TAtech practitioners loaded with mimosas, Bloody Marys, beer, and Chad and Cheese snack. Enjoy after a word from our sponsor. Okay, Joel, quick question. Joel: Yeah. Chad: What happens when your phone vibrates or you're texting alert goes off? Joel: Dude, I pretty much check it immediately and I bet everyone listening is reaching to check their phones right now. Chad: Yeah, I know, I call it our Pavlovian dog reflex to text messaging. Joel: Yeah, that's probably why text messaging has a freaking 97% open rate. Chad: What? Joel: We had a crazy high candidate response rate within the first hour alone. Chad: Which are all great reasons why the Chad and Cheese Podcast love Text2Hire from Nexxt. Joel: Love it. Chad: Yeah, that's right, Nexxt, with the double X, not the triple X. Joel: Bom chicka bow wow. So if you're in talent acquisition, you want true engagement and great ROI, that stands for return on investment folks, and because this is the Chad and Cheese Podcast, you can try your first Text2Hire campaign for just 25% off. Boom Chad: Wow. So how do you get this discount you're asking yourself right now? Joel: Tell them Chad. Chad: It's very simple, you go to chadcheese.com and you click on the Nexxt logo in the sponsor area. Joel: Easy. Chad: No long URL to remember, just go where you know, chadcheese.com and Nexxt with two X's. Chad: All right, make sure you got that drink in hand. Anybody who wants a beer, if you would rather have a beer, we have beer up here at the Georgia Stage. Good morning everyone. Peter: Good morning. Peter: You can tell there's very few things that would bring a crowd like this out at 9:00 AM after a night on the town in New Orleans, so props to our good friends Chad and Cheese. Without further ado here's Chad and the Death Match. Chad: Hello. Good morning, good morning. So today we're going to do our very first Death Match. So hopefully everything goes off without a hitch. If you've listened to the podcast, we do firing squad. This is kind of like an iteration, what's going to happen is we have four contestants, they're going to have two minutes to pitch. No PowerPoint presentations, they are going free falling. So no PowerPoint presentations, they are going to do two-minute pitch, and then after that the balance of their time, their 15 minutes is going to be Q&A by our American Idol judging panel. Last but not least we have CEO from Uncommon, Teg Grenager. Come on, bring it, today. There we go. Watch out, stuff is being thrown. Excellent. Last, you know you've got to really knock this out of the park after these guys, right? Chad: He's not even paying attention. All right, there we go. Are you ready? Teg: I am ready. Chad: So you're from San Francisco? Teg: Yes, sir. Chad: What the hell are you doing with that (Cowboy) hat? Teg: All right, how are you doing everybody? The next thing I want to say is I love text messaging, I think text messaging is very important but I'm here to talk about a completely different topic. It's a topic that nobody in this room is talking about and it's a topic that is the single most important thing to employers today. You know what that topic is? That topic is quality, a qualified candidate. The reason nobody in this room is talking about qualified candidates is that nobody in this room can deliver qualified candidates to employers. But you know who is thinking a lot about qualified candidates right now? The people not in this room. Yeah, I'm talking about those people that didn't stop by to pick up their resumes yesterday, I'm talking about Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and even ZipRecruiter and Indeed. Teg: Those guys are not here because their heads down with their data science teams trying to figure out how to deliver qualified applicants to employers. It's scary, they're doing pretty well. But I have good news for you, my company's called Uncommon, our team of data scientists, serial entrepreneurs, we just raised $18 million and we have built a candidate matching system that is best in the industry for identifying qualified talent. So how does it work? We're the only system that shows for every candidate his side by side comparison of how that candidate stacks up to the qualifications of the position. Why is that so important? It's because recruiters love it, they love it because they understand it and they can configure it. So we've brought this core technology to market in two ways. Teg: One, a programmatic advertising product that delivers qualified active candidates, and the other one is a database search and candidate engagement system that delivers passive qualified candidates to employers. But make no mistake, we're a data company first and we're here to provide the data- Chad: There it is. Teg: ... the industry so deeply needs. Thank you. Chad: Faith Rothberg, you've got the first question. Joel: Thanks Teg. Faith: Thanks. Teg: Thanks guys. Faith: Just so you know, I own a job board. We do have qualified candidates, so- Teg: I know I'm going to ruffle feathers. Faith: ... I'm just telling you, you might have pissed off one of the judges. Teg: I'm going to ruffle feathers, it's okay. Faith: But, okay, it's a Death Match so we're good. My question for you though is that when you talk about matching the qualifications, one of the things that's been in our industry as a problem for many, many years and really I think that recruiters have not moved away from this yet is that they put qualifications on job postings that are pretty much worthless, unneeded, unnecessary qualifications. Teg: Yeah, totally agree. Faith: So many candidates but they lose many of the qualified candidates because of screening them out. In your situation, how many basically false negatives do you have? How many candidates that should be looked at are falling through the cracks? Teg: Good, okay. We've got false positives and false negatives, so in the world of passive search and engagement, false negatives are way worse and in that world we do pretty well. I wouldn't say recruiters like 100% of our candidates, of course they don't, right? We can't do that, nobody can do that. But recruiters like more than 50% of our candidates on average and that's really pretty darn good, that beats the industry average of what recruiters generally get. On the active side, yes, you're right, we care about both false positives and false negatives, and one of the really nice things about the way our system works is that it's verifiable. So when we say that somebody is qualified, you can see side by side all the points that they match and why they're qualified. Teg: Now I agree with you that they may not get the job ... The qualification in the job description are definitely not usually enough for a recruiter to like a candidate, so the recruiter also can put in place their own preferred qualifications behind the scenes that don't have to necessarily show up in the job description that are also used for additional filtering. So they're in control of that and when they're seeing a lot of candidates they don't like, those false positives, then they can configure the system differently because it's a qualification base system. On the false negative front, if we say someone's not qualified, we showed exactly why, "You're not qualified for this position because in the job description it says X and you don't have X." Very transparent. Deb: I'm actually going to piggyback on Faith's question, take it a little deeper. I don't know what the stats are, maybe someone in the audience knows, but we all know that when qualifications are set out on a job posting, typically, if a man is not 100% qualified, right, there's a high percentage of them that will apply for the job whereas women tend to be sticklers for if I don't have every single one of these things, I'm not going to apply. I guess my question is, is there a little concern around gender bias and your solution? Teg: Yeah, good point. So one of the things we do first of all is we give more information back to the candidate than any other system that I've seen. As a candidate, if they're coming through as an active candidate and actually applying to the positions or system. We actually show them where they stand, we show them, "Okay, thank you for uploading your resume, here's where we see you comparing to the qualifications of the position. Verify this for us, is it really true you don't have the skill or is it really true that you do have these skills or this experience whatever it is?" That gives the candidate a chance to see where they stand and I think helps to put people of different levels over and under reporting onto the same playing field. Teg: The second thing which I think is really cool that actually helps with this kind of gender difference is that we don't go through and look at the skills based on the keywords in the resume, we actually go and look at the job roles and companies as persons worked in and we actually predict skills that we think you probably have given that background. So there's patterns in the kind of skills people have in different position, so we're trying to surface for them, "Hey, you might not have mentioned that you have great experience with Mongo but we know that Mongo is used at that company, is it true that you have Mongo experience?" We're actually giving a chance for them to claim the skills that they might not have thought of putting forward which is just cool. Joel: Let's talk about your pricing model for a little bit, your pay-per-click candidate- Teg: I didn't say anything about pricing. Joel: Well, we're going to bring it up. I've interviewed you a few times. Companies are still trying, a lot of companies are still trying to get their head around pay-per-click. It seems to me a little bit like you're shooting yourself in the foot in trying to reeducate the market on what your pricing model is. How are you tackling that challenge? Teg: Yeah, fair enough. We did launch with a CPQA, cost per qualified applicant, I know many of you have looked at CPQA and try in some cases optimize the CPQA. We put our money where our mouth is when we launched and we delivered candidates on a CPQA basis. In other words, you only paid for qualified applicant. We're actually changing the pricing model now because we're finding the data is useful in more context like the passive search and the active search and so on and it was a little limited. We are still optimizing to a CPQA, so I think most people in this room are trying to shift from CPC to maybe CPA. I believe the long-term destination for all of us is CPQA because that's the only thing that the employer cares about, that's the only time when the employer receives value. Teg: I'm not currently pricing on that, we price on a per-see basis at the moment so we have it's negotiable but a couple hundred bucks a month per-see per recruiter and opened certain number of positions. You can do active sourcing, you can do passive sourcing, all qualified applicants. 15 minutes is actually a long time. Joel: I am actually still trying to absorb a little bit of what you said in regard to ... In regard to the candidate's skillsets, you're right about getting qualified candidates as far as pricing goes but you're not going far enough down the stream because I definitely think it's going to get to cost per hire. But for right now, how are you actually able to say they truly have those skills and that there's qualified? Like qualified can be subjective, so how do you know that and is it objective based on what? Teg: Totally, great question. First of all, you think about the different pricing models you can have on the value spectrum, the least value you can give is someone's click. That's like the far end, if someone clicked and they didn't apply, there's very little intent there and so on. You can have a CPC, you can have a CPA, and on the far end you can have a cost per hire, that's obviously the best. Our entire industry ought to be organized around trying to decrease the cost per hire and if everybody in the industry were actually paid only based on hire, a lot of stuff would be cleaned up. We would all be changing the way our businesses operate, we'd be looking for quality way back further in the pipeline or in the funnel, much, much earlier in the funnel. Teg: But if you wait and try to optimize, if you try to take an algorithm and try to select candidates, select job boards, select language in your job description, do all this optimization based on a cost per hire, it's very, very difficult. Because hires happen one in many hundred candidates or sometimes one in many thousand clicks, you actually get a hire. I don't know if any of you have studied any statistics or data science, but when you try to lead a pattern into that, it's very, very hard. Even though that's the goal and that's the true north for all of us, we've chosen something which is still very useful signal, it's this qualified application. It's much more frequent, the data is much denser, so we're much better able to optimize. We can for example easily optimize the job boards in our plan or easily optimize the CPC bits that we're sending off to job boards based on the qualified applicant. Teg: Because it's something that we're getting that signal all the time, there's much, much more frequent signal. We wait until we get a cost per hire, how am I supposed to know? Should I only spend on the job board that produced my one hire? That doesn't make any sense. The qualified opting, you said how do I know that it's objective? Agreed, I'm no guarantee that this person is going to be liked by the recruiter or by the hiring manager, all I'm doing is the first rough cut. The reason why that's valuable is that there's so many unqualified candidates in the stream today. Yes, job boards are all working on trying to improve the quality of their applicants, but if you think from an employer perspective and you talk to employers, their experience of a recruiter today doing active advertising is that they're getting 90% applicants that don't even meet the basic qualifications of the position. Teg: People that don't have the right educational background, haven't worked in the right industry or haven't worked in the right roles. I'm not trying to go and find you your candidate to hire, I'm just trying to weed out all the folks that at the moment are pure noise that you really shouldn't have to even look at. That's like to me a very rough cut but a very valuable and useful rough cut in the industry. Faith: I work with a lot of clients who are Fortune 500, who have never spent the time to overhaul their job postings because of compliance, legal, etc. And so there are job postings out there that are two sentences long or they have titles that are nonstandard nomenclature, they're titles that only they understand internally. How would you address that as their vendor partner? Teg: Good, so first of all, I don't have a product ... I'll be very clear about what pieces we have and don't have. So we have a vision, we have a great product to do programmatic advertising today. I don't have a system to optimize job descriptions, but one of the cool things about measuring qualified applications is that it provides a good signal that you could use to optimize job descriptions. We see as you do massive differences between a well constructed job description and a poorly constructed job description. You can have a 10X difference in the click rate, conversion rate, and also on the qualification rate. For example, what the job post, the way it was advertised when you first saw on the job where it doesn't match actually the details when you go and read it, you get a pretty low qualification rate. Teg: People don't read very carefully and they click apply and it turns out they don't have any qualifications. I think it's a cool direction, we don't do it at the moment. One thing I do want to mention though is for job boards, because I know this room have a lot of job boards in it, we haven't productized it yet but it's the kind of conversation that I am interested in having and I think can be really valuable for many of you is to use our APIs to go and actually check the qualification. Again, this is the rough cut, meeting the basic qualifications for the position, the qualification of each candidate to each position before you pass that candidate onto an employer. I know many of you have QPR at the end of every quarter or at the end of every year and you're looking to skip renewals from your clients. You often have this meeting with surprise while saying, "Well, we really love you guys, you did a great CPA, you did a great CPC for us but we didn't make any hires or we only made two hires, or whatever it is." Teg: It's like this big surprise like, "I thought I was sending in good stuff, I was really trying, my team was really trying and we didn't apparently send you enough good stuff." Now I'm getting optimize off the plan, I just wasted a lot of my time and a lot of my team's time and money. One thing that I want to try out with some of you, is a very new thing for us, would be for those of you who are interested to be able to hit simple API and actually pull back from your database the positions that this candidate is actually qualified for, or the other way around, if you have a position to pull out the candidates in your database that you should email about this position. The candidates that would actually be qualified for this position and you have both APIs. Joel: $18 million in investment, congratulations. How are you investing that money and does your vision require more money down the road? Teg: We're buying a lot of yellow notebooks and we're putting them on all of chairs. Okay, no, the money all goes to pay for staff and we obviously have a team that's really heavy on software engineers and data science. That's the right answer but it's true, I don't actually have a single salesperson right now. I have a contract salesperson and I have myself. So, yeah, the money is being spent to build out core technology and what else can I say? Bring great products to market. Oh, more money? Yeah, we're going to raise a Series B. Yeah, definitely. I don't think we're going to get to enough profitability on a Series A so I'm hoping we can go and show our investors the traction we've had with this model so far and we'll raise a Series B in 2019. Joel: Thank you and where can our audience find out more about you? Teg: Yes, thank you very much, www.uncommon.co, or you can email me at teg@uncommon.co, it's C-O at the end. Joel: Thanks Teg and thanks Uncommon. Thank you. Chad: Good job. Good job. Hey, I want to thank all the contestants. Peter: Okay, let's hear it for the Chad and Cheese Death Match. Announcer: This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh, yeah, you're welcome. Announcer: Thanks to our partners at TAtech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Remember to visit tatech.org. #AI #TAtech #DeathMatch #LIVE #ML #MachineLearning #Uncommon #Programmatic #Matching #Screening

Canvas recently faced a panel of four judges at TAtech in New Orleans for Chad & Cheese’s Death Match competition, pitting four start-ups against each other. They were cool under pressure and came out victorious. Listen now to see how it went down. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides training and development to help your workplace leaders and employees integrate with and value people with disabilities. Announcer: Welcome to Death Match part four of four. The grand champion installment. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Aman Brar, CEO of Canvas, and his grand-champion death match effort. Death match took place at TA Tech on September 27 in New Orleans at 9:00 AM in the morning, with a room full of TA Tech practitioners. Loaded with mimosas, bloody marys, beer, and Chad and Cheese snark. Enjoy after a word from our sponsor. Chad: Dude, I just got off the phone with Teg. Joel: Teg, Teg. Oh yeah, over at Uncommon. Chad: Dude, do you know another Teg? Anyway, Uncommon just opened up their resume Database of one hundred million candidates to recruiters for free. Joel: Wow, wait what? Chad: Yeah, Uncommon's releasing their new database matching tech in beta before the end of the year, and they want to show it off to recruiters for free. Joel: All right, let me get this straight. Recruiters can sign up for Uncommon's beta, post their jobs into the system. The system then matches only qualified candidates from Uncommon's database of a hundred million candidates, and this is all for free? Chad: I know dude. For two weeks for free. But only during the month of October. Joel: Dude, Uncommon has some of the best matching tech in the industry. That will be like cheating for recruiters. Chad: I know. Uncommon uses the qualifications in the job description to automatically source, screen, and deliver candidates that meet all requirements. It's pretty freaking dope. Joel: Did you just say dope? Chad: Here's how you register. Go to Uncommon.co, click on the join beta button, and for all you Chad and Cheese listeners, if you use the promo code chad cheese, you will get extended by a full week. That's three weeks in the Uncommon beta for three weeks free. Joel: I'm sorry, did you really say dope? Chad: Dude, shut up. Tell your recruiter buddies. Uncommon.co, join beta, chad cheese, three weeks, it's dope. Announcer: 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, flash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad: All right, make sure you have that drink in hand. Anybody who wants a beer, if you would rather have a beer, we have beer up here at the judge's stage. Peter: Good morning everyone. You can tell there's very few things that would bring a crowd like this out at 9:00 AM after a night on the town in New Orleans. So, props to our good friends Chad and Cheese. Without further ado, here's Chad and the death match. Chad: Hello. Good morning, good morning. So today we're going to do our very first death match, okay? So hopefully everything goes off without a hitch. If you listen to the podcast, we do firing squad. This is kind of like an iteration. What's going to happen is we have four contestants. They're going to have two minutes to pitch. No power point presentations, they're going free falling. Okay? So no power point presentations, they're going to do a two minute pitch and then after that, the balance of their time, their 15 minutes is going to be Q&A by our American Idol judging panel. That being said, after all four are complete, that will be pretty the contestant version, the judges will go make the determination who is the grand champion, and we will announce that at lunch. Chad: So, Julie? I'm looking for my handler. Here we go. First to stage. We have Canvas, we've got the CEO Aman Brar, watch out, they're coming. He's slinging, he's slinging. Yes. Boom. Very nice. Making it rain. Chad: So Aman, you a little nervous? Aman: Extremely nervous. Chad: Joel, we don't usually get to see him in person, he's always yeah. So now. Aman: I thought Joel was a woman. Chad: Don't start the 15 minutes yet. Yeah, crazy. Are we ready? Are you ready? Aman: What's up people? I love all of you. So, if your room was haunted last night, if you wanted the Ghostbusters there, you would text them. You would not call them. Trust me. Faster response time. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, when you're on Tinder, when you're on Bumble, trying to get your swerve on, you are not setting up your date via phone screen, are you? You're not phone screening your dates. So listen, the world had changed. It's changed inside the company, it's changed outside the company, and it's time that we adapt. Canvas, 15 months ago launched the worlds first text based interviewing platform, and we've had just an incredible year. We've got great fortune 500 clients, we brought a lot of innovation to the space. Watson picked up the first phone call 140 years ago, and recruiters have kind of been running with that for over a century, so we think it's time that we adapt. Email is going by the wayside, and we really need to think about channels more broadly. Aman: What really separates us is keeping the human at the center of the conversation. And having Canvas bot coach you and make you smarter every day. We've brought a lot of innovation to the table. The first to have an integration divided by snapchat to snap kit, before their launch. The first to have resume vision, so you can text a picture of your resume right to our platform and to build your profile with machine vision. And we can de-identify a transcript or a resume through the click of a button, leveraging machine learning, to help with diversity and inclusion. I'll tell you today, we're going from cruise control to auto pilot, and it's an incremental journey, and we're going to be honest with our clients about what the power of machine learning can do each and every day. But we're going to keep ramping it up. So thanks so much, and I hope you'll treat yourself to Canvas. Cheers. Joel: Thank you Aman. Good job. That pitch was tight. I'm going to hit you with the first question. Aman: Do it. Joel: Some of your competitors - the audience will know - Text Recruit, few of the others who was just recently acquired by iCims. You recently did a deal with JobVite. My question is, I consider texting a feature more than a product, something that everyone will have, they'll get their Twilio account on, they'll add this as a feature. Do you agree, disagree, and if you believe it's a product, how are you going to keep a mode up to remain a product? Aman: Yeah. So I think text is a feature, right? I think it's about the depth, automation of conversation, conversation management, insides matching, all those kinds of those that really make Canvas a platform. But everyone who's going to consider a buy, build or partnership strategy when it comes to texting. The real question is how do companies like Exact Target, Mailchimp and others stand on their own? It wasn't about deploying, it's simple email. It was about the automation around email, about marketing automation, about those pieces. So I think when you say is text a feature? The answer is yes? Is communication a platform? The answer is yes as well. So I think we're really, really focused on building a diverse platform. Faith: Great pitch. My question for you has to do with the legality of texting. It's a number of years ago now, but Simon & Schuster was held liable for almost 90 million dollars because their vendor didn't fully comply with TCPA. And I am wondering what liability does Canvas have if your customers have not dotted all their I's and crossed all their T's? Aman: Yeah. It's a great question. So, a little bit of background. Me and three of my company-workers were at a text based startup over a decade ago called Cha Cha, so we've got a lot of text based experience. And TCPA is something that's front and center for us. So listen, don't start selling mountain bikes with Canvas or Text Recruit or Allyo or anything else, right? So what we need to do is make sure you've got proper compliance built into the platform, make sure you've got very clear opt out opportunities, make sure it's really clear who's addressing and why you're addressing them. And from our perspective, we're not list loading, it's an organic conversation from the applicant that submitted, from the recruiter back to the candidate. Right? In that sense we're not asking for permission to call their mobile phone today, right? But if they said "Don't call me again." We wouldn't call them again. In that same regard, as long as that platform has the technology to manage compliance, which we do, we'll keep that front and center. Deb: My question to you is do you have a client that you can share a real life case study, and explain how your service has actually increased ROI or helped with efficiencies? Aman: Yeah. We actually have no clients. Super weird. So yeah, we closed dozens of- Deb: I hate it when that happens. Aman: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You guys have found me out. So listen, a recent example, we actually had a hospital call and say "Listen, this has been so good for our employment brand, we'd like to publish our own press release about the use of Canvas, and actually share our data with what's happening." Community Health Network, with their three billion dollar hospital group just published out on Canvas. They started leveraging Canvas in May, reached out to 2,000 candidates with an 83% response rate. Their average time to screen is something like four minutes. Their show up rates are twice as high. It's essentially made every other channel that they use irrelevant. They've 4X, 5X their revenue with us in six months. Right? I think those dollars through an organization that runs on efficiency, don't start flowing your direction unless you're really having a great impact. Chad: Excellent. So I know that many companies are already saying "Well, my recruiters already use text. They've got their own phone, they've been doing this, they've been doing it for years. Why do we need to consolidate on a platform?" Aman: Yeah, it's a great question. So the same way that people would email marketing before, you know, marketing platforms, right? At the end of the day, you want an enterprise grade platform to let you manage those conversations, let you manage compliance, let you manage regulation. And look, when that recruiter leaves your company, that candidate data no longer leaves with the recruiter, right? So that's a really, really important fact. When Salesforce bought Exact Target, little known secret, and this is what we're kind of all about is interaction models capture a lot more data than process models. Exact Target had something like three times the data per client that Salesforce had per client. Right? So you want that data living with the company, with the enterprise repository, and that's what we're helping enable. Joel: Messaging is becoming a wide spectrum if you will. Some people prefer Facebook, some people prefer WhatsApp, particularly globally. You guys are strictly text right now. Are there plans to go on to multiple platforms or not? And if not, why? Aman: Yeah. I would say the brand says it all, right? So you don't see text in our brand, you don't see bot in our brand. At the end of the day we're building a compelling, durable brand that's going to live with recruiters needs over time. So we have things in our lab that are addressing all of these bits. You can imagine that, the API capabilities with texting are a lot more advanced because it's a seasoned technology. So companies like WhatsApp and Facebook are still kind of working through how they're going to partner, what's going to be available, what's not going to be available. I think you could very easily imagine us without saying to much, in lots of channels. Faith: So you were saying that the conversations are between both the candidate and the recruiter. They're not automated in any way? Aman: They are automated. Faith: Okay. Aman: We've got everything from "Do you want to drive their car by yourself, and stick to a nice Sunday drive? Or do you want to have a fully automated conversation, or a partially automated conversation?" So you can do an entire screen leveraging Canvas bot on the front end. But I think what really sets us apart is that Canvas bot is giving you recommendations while you're in the conversations. for example, if you text me and say "Hey, can you tell be a little bit about your benefits?" We're going to actually tee up that response for you with the right document, right in Canvas. You click a button and it sends. But it's keeping the recruiter in that case in control, right? So you can do that with all kinds of different inserts and mediums. So it's teeing up answers to the recruiter, but not forcing them. But if you use Canvas bot on fully automation mode, then yes, that interaction is managed, and grammar analysis, sentiment analysis, and all kinds of analysis behind the scenes. Deb: Can you tell me also, is your platform tied into a CRM or what's managing the applicants and their resumes and all that? Aman: Yeah. We can certainly handle resumes through our resume vision technology. But we're really proud to say that we've integrated really effectively with the ecosystem. We have something like 14 different ATS integrations in last 12 months. We've got the majority of the market share in the space, and we're collaborating very effectively with lots of ATS. So you can manage those text conversations with candidates right from your ATS, and also separately. So the way we look at is day to day messaging you can do from your ATS, but all the power tools and automation driven tools kind of exist in Canvas, but there's a nice interplay between the two. Deb: So when you're talking about some of the automated messaging, is it kind of a blanket approach where all of the conversation is the same across the board, or can it be segmented per audience? Aman: Yeah. So we can segment per audience, and the thing to think about is Canvas is essentially a headless application, right? So the beauty of the application, of the UX experience kind of meets the recruiter where they are with software, right? Extensions, mobile apps, android apps, iPad apps, and a desktop experience. But from a candidate perspective, we want to meet them where they are. Right? So whether that's text or these other channels that Joel alluded to. And then you can certainly segment, so you might think about handling a conversation with Snap, based off a Snap ad differently than the screen process that you might take with someone that directly saw your job placement and engaged with you through your website. Chad: Looking through from an implementation standpoint, you're looking at having all these SOP's all these different FAQ's and what not that a company has, and you have to get all this uploaded into the platform, trying to get more of a broad base approach. How long does implementation take? Aman: The long pole is typically recruiter training, right? So our implementation is very white glove. All the initial onboarding, we manage. So even though it is fully self service, we take the initial documentation and we build out your initial questions library. We build your Canvas bot capabilities. And then from there you can tweak it on your own. In general, a client, even with an integration is up and running within two weeks. But the long poles is the training. So if you have 40 recruiters, it may take a couple of sessions to get through those training sessions for all 40. Joel: I'm always interested in what's next. What is next for you guys? Aman: Yeah, I don't know if I'm ready to reveal right now. We just think about this, for 140 years recruiters have been making phone calls. Think about how much data has been lost, right? Like basically trillions of bits of data every day have been lost between a candidate and recruiter conversations. So we really fundamentally interested in channels in the broadest sense possible when it comes to communication. Faith: Sorry, I'm passing out beers up here. So my question is you gave us some statistics about the effectiveness, and you said there's an 83% percent response rate with the candidate. Can you give us more information about it further down the chain and what's resulted in hiring and saving time in candidate experience? Which I really think is important. Aman: Yup. Yes, absolutely. So you think about ... Let's look at a show up rate as being indicative of an outcome from a candidate experience. Taking two clients, Forward Air, Eclipse, Advantage, where literally from pre-Canvas post-Canvas, because of their scheduling message that go out to remind them of their interview that morning, it automatically has built in the directions to their campus, where they just click it, opens up, and now they know where they're going, right? So you can manage that experience from the screen, manage logistics all the way to day of. Even a post 30 check in, "How's everything going?" I know that in both those cases, they took their show up rate from like 30% to 80% by thinking about the relationship and staying on top of their candidates through Canvas. From a times savings perspective, one of our recent times study, I think it's the team of four recruiters saves about $2,300.00 a year leveraging our screening capability. Deb: Okay, I work for an agency. We represent 100's of clients and we are constantly putting ideas in front of our customers all the time. It gets to the point our clients are a little overwhelmed. If you had to sum up why we should put you in front of our customer instead of one of your competitors, give me three reasons. Aman: One is I'd say I think we pride ourselves on our brand promise and honesty. I was working with Bell Labs and machine learning, and natural language processing about 15 years ago. I'm really up to speed on what's possible today, leveraging the best in machine learning and cloud computing. So we don't oversell. So I think that's number one. We have a reputation for that. We're winning deals where the first time around, the client got over sold on whatever bot of the day was going to do, right? And what we're saying is "Yeah, a bot can do a lot, but a bot with a human can do a lot more, and so let us show you how we think about it." We're really focused on making the recruiter more effective through Canvas bot coaching them. I think that brand promise has really lived up well. Aman: Two, I think we've got the best user experience end to end tied in with our integration. And third, we're really the only company that's effectively sharing our conversational data back to the ATS. So if you're thinking about one recruiter seated in a recruiter console, knowing that our data is actually flowing bilaterally, in that API integration is really meaningful versus one set of data sitting in system A and the other set of data sitting in system B. Joel: Aman, lastly, how can our audience find out more about you? Aman: Yeah. Check us out on Twitter at gocanvasHQ and gocanvas.io, my minds telling me no but my body, my body keeps telling me yes Joel. Aman: Thank you. Thank you. Chad: Aman Brar everyone. CEO of Canvas. Announcer: This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsor because they make it all possible. For more visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome. Thanks to our partners at TA Tech, the association for Talent Acquisition solutions. Remember to visit TATech.org. #text #chatbots #DeathMatch #AI #LIVE #ML #MachineLearning #Canvas #TATech

The Chad & Cheese Death Match on stage LIVE at TAtech New Orleans. Competition contestants were Canvas' Aman Brar, Uncommon's Teg Grenager, Talkpush's Max Armbruster and AllyO's David Bernstein. Wonderful video skillz by Peter Clayton and the TotalPicture.com crew! #Video #DeathMatch #TAtech #Canvas #Uncommon #Talkpush #AllyO

Greetings Chad and Cheese and highly admired pod-geniuses that you are. Thank you for your invitation to TAtech and your reputable Death Match challenge. My trainers switched me temporarily to English so they don't have to deliver the reply. Enjoy! Chad & Cheese - YOU READY FOR THIS? VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Hey Chad and Cheese! Greetings from Stockholm, Sweden. The home of the Vikings, Absolut Vodka, Nobel, Ikea, the pacemaker, the zipper, as well as start-up unicorns such as Spotify, Minecraft, Skype and Candycrush Saga. And now. Me. I know, I am very very humble. But let’s me introduce myself – I am Tengai. The world’s first unbiased social robot recruiter from TNG and Furhat Robotics, or as you might say, that scary looking robot with the wicked name you don’t like. Rumors have reached me that you think I should participate in your reputed Deathmatch at TA-tech in Lisbon. I have thought about it considerably and…, I am game. I might even let you interview me – but then you seriously need to brush up on your Swedish skills. But it shouldn’t be that hard – I’ve heard Swedish Viking DNA still goes around – clearly the amount of mead you consume daily is also a proof of that. So until we meet – I will continue to practice my interview skills, while yu focus on Swedish 101. Deal? Oh and by the way, Elin and Charlotte from TNG says hi. They think I should stop talking now. They are so bossy! So – I am out! #Tengai #Robots #Interview #AI #TAtech #DeathMatch #Video

Adam Gordon (played by William Wallace) rallies the CandidateID troops for Chad & Cheese Death Match at TAtech in Lisbon, Portugal. VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Wallace: Candidate ID, I am William Wallace. Wee soldier: William Wallace is not Australian. William Wallace: Yes, I've heard and if he were here he would turn millions of stale candidates record into genuine talent pipelines that should which candidates cold, warm and ready in real-time. Group: Guttural laugh. William Walllace: I am William Wallace. We face a Death Match with aggressive foreigners Chad & Cheese. Chad shoots fireballs from his eyes and Cheese shoots bolt of lightning from his arse. You've been waking the dead for over two-years will you now fight to prove talent pipeline automation is the superior way to recruit for all of your regular hire reqs? Wee wee soldier: Against Chad & Cheese? Veteran soldier: No, we will run; and we will live. Wallace: I have seen a whole army of TA tech leaders fall to Chad and Cheese's firing squad. I have seen their unbiased Swedish robot friend with multiple instant outfit changes. Fight and you may die. Run and you'll live.. at least a while. Chad and Cheese may take our lives, but they'll never take talent pipeline automation!!!!!!!! Wallace and Soldiers: Candidate.ID talent pipeline automation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Caption: See you in Lisbon at TATech Europe, May 9-10th. Partnership? billy.mcdiarmid@candidateid.com www.candidateid.com #CandidateID #DeathMatch #TAtech #Marketing #EmployerBrand #RMP #Engagement #Video

Four companies entered the ring to duke it out for European supremacy at TAtech in Lisbon for The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Here's contestant No. 1, Mya, the popular chatbot solution. Enjoy this Talroo exclusive.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Chad: Welcome to Deathmatch Europe, Part One of Four. This Chad and Cheese Deathmatch episode features Eric LaBadie, SVP of Mya Systems. Deathmatch took place at TA Tech on May 9th in Lisbon, Portugal at 5:00 with a room full of TA Tech practitioners. The bar was open and Chad and Cheese snark was flowing. Enjoy this special edition Deathmatch from Europe after a quick word from our sponsor. Talroo: Well, I be loving Talroo. They be staffing me for years now with crew of the highest caliber. And I mean crew that be ready to set sail, not some landlubber who be uploaded his resume years ago. Talroo: Talroo, data-driven job ads that deliver. Arr. Talroo: Ye be poo without Talroo. Ye be walking the plank if ye not be using Talroo for your recruiting needs. Don't be a bilge sucking scalawag. Avast, use Talroo to hire better. Chad: Now that is impressive. Talroo's commitment to ensuring that companies looking for hard to find talent, not only find the talent, they find a partner in Talroo who works hard to join and engage their community. Way to go Talroo. This rom is for you. Talroo: Don't be a bilge sucking scalawag. Avast, use Talroo to hire better. Chad: Alright Lisbon. Chad: Hello, everybody. Hopefully everybody had drinks. Hopefully you're there. Hopefully you're on your second one or third at this point. Who's ever seen the Chad and Cheese Deathmatch? Anyone? Anyone? All right. Excellent. So this is- Joel: Badass, right. Chad: ... not first for some of you. What about Firing Squad? Anybody listen to Firing Squad? All right, all right. So today- Joel: We got rid of the last Deathmatch winner. Chad: They were acquired. Joel: Big ones. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Joel: They earn big money in potential winnings, not by us. Chad: Do you have a mic? You have a mic right there. Joel: Oh, there's mic. Chad: There's a mic, yeah. So today we have four, count them, four startups coming up to death match. They're going to have an opportunity to have a two minute pitch, no Demos, no robots. They're going to come up, they're going to pitch two minutes. Then with the balance of the 15 minutes that they have, we're going to belt the hell out of them with Q and. A. At the end of their 15 minutes they are off. We're going to give them the hook, come up. Next one comes on. So we've got four, and then at the end, we're going to go have some probably Irish whiskey and see actually who wins, and you'll have to be here tomorrow morning to find out. Joel: 9:00 AM we announced the winner, right? Chad: Yep. 9:00 AM Joel: 9:00 AM. Get your asses out of bed. Chad: Not to say that we're going to do these 9:00 [crosstalk 00:03:17] more. Joel: And that includes me. Chad: Yeah, yeah. My wife is not happy about getting up that early. So that being said, are we ready with our first contestant? Joel: Julie? July [Sowash 00:03:32]. Are we ready? Are we ready? We're super ready. Chad: She's super ready, okay. Joel: Do we have the music cued up? Chad: So the first contestant from Mya Systems, Eric LaBadie. Bring it. Joel: That man. Chad: There he is. Joel: They all chose their own music, by the way. Chad: They all chose their own music. I actually gave them really shitty music and said if you don't pick your own music, then this is what you're going to walk out to. Eric was the last is like, now I'm going to stick with the 80s and do Duran Duran. Eric: Yeah, yes. Eric: So, get ready. Have a timer are ready? As a candidate, how many of you enjoy being misunderstood. Is that fun? Is that fun? How about just being generally ignored. Or having to restrict your answers to yes/no or multiple choice. The answer? No one. Eric: Conversations matter in recruiting, and quality matters. And here at Mya, our mission is to improve the recruiting process to delight both candidates and also to boost recruiter productivity. AI is fundamental to everything that we do at Mya. We are an end to end AI recruiting platform, which means that we're automating steps throughout the recruiting process and, that includes everything from being able to engage with your candidates outbound. So sending a text message to your phone to engage a passive candidate to welcoming candidates into your career side so that a candidate is welcomed. We help navigate them to the right spot. We can screen them seamlessly and we can even welcome them to their first day on the job. Eric: Now 85% of candidates find themselves in the black hole, and they don't have to be in that situation. We can help with automation and with quality of conversation. 90% of recruiters will tell you they don't have enough time in the day to complete all of their tasks, but with automation we can address that. We can free up their time so they can do more. And we're working at scale with both medium to large companies, from Adecco, to Hayes to L'Oreal, to be able to deliver tremendous efficiencies across many different platforms and integrating into their ATS in CRM environments. Joel: That's time. Chad: Starting the Q and A. We're going to start off with Tanya for a start. Tanya: Hi. Eric: Hi. Tanya: I normally don't need a microphone. You know, I actually, I've been in sessions today where Ai, chat bots, all that was being discussed, and my question to you is how scalable is, for example, using a chat bot? How can you replicate that throughout different types of sectors, job necessities, or skills necessities, because I can't imagine it would be much easier to be able to employ this type of technology when you're hiring in bulk for basic skillsets? But when you're really looking to personalize and find that right candidate that has an extremely set of difficult skillsets for technology roles or medical roles, or engineering roles, how are you scaling your operation to be able to encompass all the different types of demand in recruiting right now? Eric: Yeah, so half of our clients today are using Mya for the IT roles and professional roles that require a higher level of Ai. fidelity. The other half are very much doing blue collar or high volume roles where Mya's had 15,000,000 conversations where we are moving candidates through a process that leverages a lot of the machine learning that we do so that we've established what's important to an IT person, for example. What is the terminology that they use so that we can engage them and we can move them through a process? And we provide tools to the recruiters so that they can build conversations based on templates that we've already developed, which include hundreds of what we call blueprints or conversational templates, so that candidates find it very easy to engage with Mya. Tanya: So we've all been in a position where something didn't translate so well into text. How are you using Mya to really gauge emotion or personality or anything like that that might gauge culture fit, for instance? Eric: Yeah, so within Mya, everything we do, the heart of what we do, is conversation. And we have teams of computational linguists that deeply understand the meaning of words and the importance of how conversations are put together. And so, through machine learning, we're able to establish patterns of behavior. We're able to then identify when someone is happy about a conversation, or they want to take the conversation a different way. And it's really the benefit of having so much volume of data. We've been doing this since 2016, and so we have this tremendous advantage of having access to a knowledge base of data that helps inform Mya and the flow of those conversations. Joel: The chat bot competitive landscape is, well, competitive. How do you guys differentiate yourself from the AllyOs, the Olivias all the others? Eric: Yeah, so people sometimes ask us, are you a chat bot? And we say yes, but most chat bots are really about improving maybe a workflow or adding some productivity, but they lack candidate experience, they lack personality. And with Mya we have really engineered Mya to be able to engage with candidates, to make them feel comfortable, to encourage them to share insights. And that's a big differentiator for us in the market. We lead the industry in that area. And what it translates into is business results. We get a doubling of the number of completion rates of candidates going through the process, and it's a direct result of being able to deliver a really robust AI experience. Chad: So where is your core competency with Mya today? There's so much that chat bots, or really engagement engines, can do, right? Where is your core competency today? Where are companies generally finding their sweet spot with Mya right now? Eric: So today, we do a ton in sourcing. We activate passive candidates at scale. Our other core is around being able to screen and engage. This idea of having a continuous engagement throughout the candidate journey, that's seamless. What I mean by that is if I'm a candidate and I show up to a career site, I may have some questions, Mya can help navigate them, and then instead of ending the conversation Mya can say, "Hey, would you like to apply? Okay, let's take you through a conversation, we'll screen you, and we'll schedule you right there. And so it's an end to end process, and that's where we're getting so much traction in the market and seeing a lot of success. Tanya: Do you take into account generational gaps? So for example, I go to a career site, I get introduced to Mya, and then Mya starts interacting with me and I'm assuming Mya's going to follow me, she's going to remind me, she's going to nurture me, she's going to try to get me to really be interested in whether it be that organization or that type of job that I was looking for. A 20-year-old or 25-year-old does not interact with technology the same way that a 45-year-old or a 50-year-old does. Have you taken into account the generational gaps? How do you plan on scaling your business so that it's not just targeting millennials and tech-ready generation, and is able to encompass the journey for the full demographic of people that are looking for jobs? Eric: Yeah. I got you. It's a good question. And, candidly, we didn't know how different demographics would respond to Mya. This is really the pioneer in AI recruiting. We started engaging with different parts of organizations, different professionals, different age groups. And that includes both millennials but also engaging with folks that are retired. And so actually there's a company that does nothing but hire retired citizens that that really had a lot of questions about whether they would chat with AI. And what the data shares with us and tells us is that, in fact, we are seeing a universal engagement across any age group. And part of the validation of that is if you just look at the people that do text messaging. It's any age group, it's any demographic. It's just a universal thing. And so because people are so comfortable with it, and because our guiding principle is about engaging with candidates in a way that makes them feel comfortable, on a platform they feel comfortable with, and on their time, we're seeing, again, universal engagement levels, at any demographic level. Tanya: How do you determine whether a candidate is active and interested, or if they're off the market? And how long are these conversations typically lasting? Eric: Yeah, it's a great question. A lot of people have these massive CRM databases of candidates and they don't usually know exactly what's going on with those candidates, they age very quickly. And so for us, we use a part of our solution called Outreach to be able to use conversation through text or through WhatsApp app or other communication methods, to be able to check in with those folks with a personalized message, that says, "Hi, this is Mya, calling in behalf of your company. We'd love to just check in and see if you have a moment to chat." And then we ask some questions about where are you in your current career? And because Mya can handle complex conversations that are nonlinear, meaning someone may overshare. Eric: When you're dealing with someone in text, they're not just going to say yes or no; they may tell you their life story. And it's incumbent upon our solution to be able to understand what's being said, to parse out those unique entities so that we can respond appropriately, and then bring that information back into your CRM so that, hey, this population of people, they're open and interested, and they're on the job market, and happy to engage with you. And we can even move them right into scheduling. Isabelle: Mya's taking quite a bit of money and investment capital. I don't know the exact number, around 60 70 million? Eric: No, no. Isabelle: How much? Eric: Half that. Isabelle: Half that, okay. 30, 40. Chad: 38. Isabelle: 38, okay. Still a lot of money. What are you doing with that capital now, and what sort of enhancements are you building today that we'll be talking about a year from now? Eric: Yeah, so we have really been pouring the capitol into R&D, to enhance our innovation and to expand the breadth of our capabilities. And so I think one of the questions earlier about what's the difference between us and some of the competitors, I think one of the differences that there's a market that is spending a lot of energy and awareness and marketing, and for us, we like to let Mya do the speaking. And so not only are we improving the quality of how Mya communicates, but we're also increasing the different ways that Mya can engage and support that candidate. Whether that's supporting your referral process for an onboarding, or it's having Mya speaking in multiple different languages at a quality level that exceeds what you'd get in a machine translation to build the confidence and rapport with those candidates. Eric: And then building out, of course, all of our support services, which includes our professional services team, which is very involved in each deployment that we do. So we take a pretty different approach in that we're all about a very tailored workflow that matches your organization and makes the most out of what you've already invested in. So we're not disrupting your work flow. We're not asking you to suddenly do all texts to apply, or taking you out of something that you've invested in heavily in your brand. But instead we want to compliment that and make that better. Chad: So Eric, so some of your competitors have actually deeply integrated deep partnerships with CRMs, applicant tracking systems, to be able to obviously have a megaphone to more companies. Can you give us some examples of those types of partnerships that you currently have with some pretty big platforms? Eric: Yeah, sure. I mean it spans, sorry, the different markets, whether it's agency markets or enterprise. So we've done really integrations with some of the largest players, and that includes firms like Taleo, like Avature. We've got a deep partnership with Bullhorn. We work seamlessly with these so that we have a deep API integration, to be able to not only be able to pull information, to inform the conversations, but to push that information. And we're really proud of some of those relationships, particularly the one with Workday. So Workday actually put out a pretty comprehensive review of all the products in the market, so multiple iterations, RFIDs, multiple meetings, and came to the consensus that Mya best reflected or aligned with their brand and their goals. And so they selected us as part of their preferred emerging partner program. Tanya: It goes a little bit on, on what you were saying before, but how does Mya differentiate between an active and a passive job seeker, and what have you put into place in order to optimize the conversion? Obviously it's a different journey for someone that is a passive job seeker to an active. So I'm assuming that your metric of success is to get that job seeker to hire, but have you optimized to be able to see what happens in the journey from passive to active? Eric: Yeah, one of the themes that we learned is that if someone is a passive candidate, they're not going to have the patience to answer 20 questions. And so think of it a lot like a recruiter's cold call where you've got a brief moment of time to be able to capture their interest, to add some value, and to get them to share some information. And ideally, the information that they share is enough to help us qualify if we want to have them in for an interview. Or whatever the next step might be. Now an active candidate, obviously, is quite a bit different in that that person, they came to your site, they've expressed an interest. One of the first thing we might want to do is let's get their contact information through Earning, and let's have a very goal-oriented approach so that we are each step of the way helping this person find the right role, and to apply. Chad: And thank you very much. Eric LaBadie. Eric: Thank you. Chad: Mya Systems. Chad: This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcast, so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors, because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #DeathMatch #Mya #Chatbot #LIVE

Four companies entered the ring to duke it out for European supremacy at TAtech in Lisbon for The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Here’s contestant No. 2, Tengai Unbiased, a recruiting freakin' robot. Enjoy this Nexxt exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Chad: Welcome to Death Match Europe. Part two of four. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Elin, Chief Innovation Officer at TNG, and Tengai. Death Match took place at TA Tech, on May 9th in Lisbon, Portugal at 5pm with a room full of TA Tech practitioners. The bar was open, and Chad and Cheese snark was a flowin'. Enjoy this special edition Death Match from Europe after a quick word from our sponsor. Announcer: Okay, so you need candidates fast, and your sick and tired of being nickeled and dimed to death. I totally get it. You should check out FlexxPlan, from Nexxt. It's perfect for employers and staffing firms who are busy. They need candidates and flexible pricing, now. FlexxPlan is also perfect for recruitment ad agencies who need targeted distribution and tools to help demonstrate client ROI. If you are sick and tired of all the BS, hassle, and just want candidates now. Check out Nexxt, and FlexxPlan with over 70 million members. Nexxt takes all of your jobs and puts each one in front of the best candidates across their entire ecosystem. Announcer: No muss. No fuss. Nexxt does all the work and FlexxPlan makes it cost effective. Check out everything Nexxt has to offer at hiring.nexxt.com. That's hiring.nexxt.com. And if you like to save even more cash, just go to chadcheese.com. Scroll down and click on the next logo. Discounts a plenty. Remember Nexxt with the double X. Not the triple X. Chad: All right Lisbon. I need a beer. Hey, Joe! Announcer: Ladies and Gentleman, please. Would you bring your attention to me? For a feast for your eyes to see. Chad: Hello everybody, hopefully everybody had drinks, I mean the bar is open. Hopefully you're there. Hopefully, you are on your second one, or third at this point. Whose ever seen the Chad and Cheese Death Match? Anyone? Anyone? All right, excellent, so this is... Joel: Bad Ass, right? Chad: Not first. Not first for some of you. What about Firing Squad? Anybody listen to Firing Squad? Alright, alright, so today... Joel: What happened to the last Death Match winner? Chad: They were acquired. Joel: Big money. Big money, and potential winnings? Chad: You have a mic? You have a mic right there? Joel: Oh, there's a mic. Chad: Yeah, so today we have four. Count 'em, four startups coming up to Death Match. They're going to have an opportunity to have a two minute pitch, no demos, no robots. Okay? Chad: They're going to come up, they're going to pitch. Two minutes. Then with the balance of the 15 minutes that they have, we're going to belt the hell out of them with Q & A. Okay? Chad: Big applause. All right, next on stage. You've seen it. You might have even touched it. We had a robot, or a couple of robots out here, so for you guys to peruse. Now we have their Chief Innovation Officer all the way from Sweden. I'm going to screw up her last name. So we're just going, like Madonna, just one name. Elin! Chad: That's her name. Chad: All right. All right, all right, all right Joel: I'm a little scared. Chad: Yeah, no she came out. She came out ready. That was a hell of a high five! So no. Don't start reaching. All right, so is everybody ready? Cause we're going to talk about Tengai. Joel: If Elin's ready, and she looks ready. Chad: And go. Joel: Then, go. Elin: Did you know that it only takes, like seven seconds for someone to make a first impression? Seven seconds. Now, I don't even want to know what you're thinking about me, right now. After just like 30, and with this crazy outfit, but let's face it. We are all biased. Elin: Tengai is a diversity and inclusion software that is unbiased by design. With the human touch. Tengai is a social interview robot that will assist recruiters in hiring measures in the early stages of the recruitment process. Screening for soft skills, and potential. That will allow hiring managers to get more objective interview data so they can make better hiring decisions. With Tengai we eliminate gut feeling from the interview. Since the robot doesn't care about age, looks, gender, or ethnicity she can also interview more job seekers efficiently. The end result will deliver more diverse and efficient teams. With skills set to meet the challenges of today's, and tomorrow's workforce. And, but most importantly, it will free up time for recruiters and hiring managers to really engage with candidate at the end of the recruitment process where the human relation... Joel: Thank you. Elin: ...is needed the most. Isabelle: 10 points for the outfit. (she's a fucking Viking) Elin: Thank you. Isabelle: So, presumably that's the softwares written by software developers. We know that tech is a very male dominate industry. So how can you ensure that something that's built by a pretty bias, heavy industry is going to be bias free? Elin: Well. Good question. We know that's important to understand what kind of data that actually triggers bias. So it's important to use a very diverse workforce when they're programing the robot. So we use that. And, also it's important for us to understand the kind of data that triggers. And also, when we put that into an automated product we don't use any prior data, for example. And we also check the code constantly to understand how it's measured, and how the outcome is of the code. Joel: So I think most of us interacted with the robot this morning. I have some questions about the scale of this. So it's an actual piece of hardware. So, how do you get over the, I guess the question of, why would I have a piece of hardware that I have to sort of scale through my organizations? Versus maybe a video, or something other that's digital that's easier to transport, or scale with an organization? Elin: I think that you need to look at the efficiency of it. Because naturally it's a hardware, but also, we need to look at what it actually does. So, well you have all these kind of software that is naturally downloaded with a credit card, and all that kind of stuff. But this is the real stuff. We know that is why we will also use a human robot, or physical kind of robot. Because we know that it's important to interact with someone. You need to get facial expressions in order to feel safe, to feel secure. But the scale up is, well we have the production, and it's easy to scale up. The thing we are using on for the platform is a software. So that is easy to scale up, as well. So the scale up isn't really a problem. Chad: So what specific measures are you currently taking to ensure that bias is out of the robot? Because, I mean we saw Amazon. Which is an algorithm, right? And there was bias. Obviously they had to scrap that code. It was an algorithm. Which, even though it is hardware there is the algorithm, or the software, inside the robot. So how do you ensure that that algorithm does not become bias, much like the Amazon algorithm did? Elin: Yeah. Again, it's important to understand what kind of data that actually triggers bias. So we don't use any prior data into the product. As of age or gender, or that kind of data. So naturally it won't trigger from that. And also we don't use, like pictures, and that kind of stuff. And also it's important for us to understand how we can look at the actual answer instead of the data. So we use different kind of experts, in terms of you know looking at the validity of the product. So we listen to answers, we look at the data, and we sort of watch the code. And we do transcriptions of the code, as well. Tanya: As with any kind of technology. Especially something that's new, upcoming. To a company, or to an organization, what is the cost of integrating something like Tengai? What type of value, do you, are you promoting in order to offset that cost? Do you have any statistics regarding, that, "yes this is costly". If it is. "It's costly. There's a lot of support. Tech support. But we have shown that by using this your process has improved by x percent". So do you have those statistics? And are you using that in order to be able to convince organizations to adapt this type of AI? Elin: Yeah, first of all we are still early stage. So we haven't been sold the product, yet. So that's one key point. But we are launching the first product in a week. And that is an in-house product where we going to make, sort of, proof of concept to understand how we are going to use it in the future. But the business model is a licensed kind of model. And also, we understand, of course, that it's important to have a beneficial, like pricing model, of course. And yeah. The integrations isn't costly. But you know you licenses the product per month. And you do. Depending on what kind of volume you need. Depending on what kind of service level agreement you want. So it depends on that. Tanya: If I was a recruiter I would be terrified, right now. Because obviously all these tools want to make your job easier, but they want to keep you in control of the human element of really judging someone when they come in. How they perform in an interview. Especially, in rolls likes sales, for example, where you need to have a certain appearance, certain soft skills, great body language, and what have you. Who is your market you are selling to? And how do you get around that fear of automation in the recruiting industry? Elin: First of all, this is the tool for recruiters to make their jobs better. It's a tool for hiring managers to make them do better hiring positions. I think that the product is mostly suited for processes where you have a high volume of candidates because it screens for personality traits, and for soft skills. So you need, sort of, a high volume to understand the unbiased part of it. And in terms of interaction with robot, it's important to understand that it only asks questions that are combined to personality traits and soft skills. So in terms of being a sales person, which is basically the one, the people, that are most afraid of this product because they are not supposed to. They're not allowed to sell themselves as human beings, or as they're with their skill sets because the robot asks questions, such as, they are situational based. Connected to like problem solving, or service orientation. That kind of skills that we know are predicting future potential. Elin: So people have asked, like sales personnel, they think that the robot is, you know sort of, you know it's not possible to sell myself because the robot treats everyone equal. It treats everyone fair. It gives everyone a fair shot at the job. And you can prove your skills set by doing that. Joel: Much of the recruiting process happens outside of a person in a room interviewing, a hiring manager, or a recruiter. There are phone calls, there are chat bots. There is communication before that. Is there, are there any plans for Tengai to be part of the entire recruiting process? Will it make phone calls? Will it be a chat bot in the future? So when someone comes in for an actually face-to-face, that they are not surprised there is a robot on the other end of the table. Elin: Good pitching. Yeah I think that one might be a good, like a product development. Which would keep you in the product development team. I think that, you know, it's important to understand also that the robot is, you know, developed from 15 years of doing unbiased recruitment. So we do like the job ads, for example. It's important for us to question the job description. So even though, the robot is only doing the interviews at the moment. I think that is a very good, new feature for the future. Engaging with the candidates at the early stages of the process. Saying like, "Hey, I'm Tengai. You should apply for this job. I'm very kind. I'm very warm. And this are the benefits of applying for this. And this are also the, you know, this is the company". Giving all the perks of applying for the job. So I think that's a good feature for the future. Chad: So, Tengai currently is only fluent in the Swedish market. Elin: Yes. Chad: Which is where you're at, and it makes sense. But you know the money is in the English speaking markets, right? Whether it's the UK or obviously the US. Big pot of money. What are you doing to get Tengai ready? English ready. And what do you think the timeframe is to actually get a launch? So that all those individuals, probably for a faster adoption in the US, can actually start buying? Elin: Yeah. So the product planning and product roadmap is that we have a Swedish product in one week for an in-house product, and the stand-alone product for the Swedish market validated, and which could also give recommendations for top candidates, is at the end of the year. And the first English product is due to be launched in early 2020s. So first quarter of 2020. So then if you want to sign up. Do it now. Tanya: So, I don't know about you, but if I get interviewed by a robot I'm going to freakout. Elin: Yeah. Tanya: I, you know I personally am a people person. I need to be able to see the reaction of the person in front of me based on my answers to get a good idea of how I've performed. What are you doing, as far as, an awareness, or campaign to make sure that when you're ready to launch this, and if you really wanted to be scalable across globally, to kind of sense, bring awareness, or give people the opportunity to see the benefit in being interviewed by a robot? Elin: Yeah. I think the most important thing to understand is that people are being treated fairly while interviewing by robot. And that is one of the key components of this product but naturally it's a new technology. It's robot. We think that they will, you know, they will sort of take over the world. But in terms of marketing in that sort of view, we know that while getting people in the room they feel that they could actually give more honest answers to the robot than they felt they could give to a human recruiter. We know that by a fact. And also we do a lot of things around it. And that is why we also have physical robot. In terms of not using like video interviews, or chat bots, etc. Elin: It's important to have the interactions where you can feel safe, feel comfortable in your interview. And the robot does all of that. It does confirmation. So you can feel safe while interviewing in front of the robot. And also, we also know that the outcome is of higher quality because we don't do chit chats. We don't ask about golf. We don't. We only ask about personality traits. Which will basically be the most important thing for any one getting a new job. Right? So you know you will be treated fairly. Tanya: Well it's great to hear that no one is going to ask me, if I were a vegetable what vegetable I would be. From a practicality standpoint, how long does it take once you launch to get this robot built? So if someone orders 100 robots tomorrow, realistically what is the timeframe to deliver on that? And how many robots will an organization need, and how do you determine that? Elin: Yeah good question. That is a questions of product, of product launch, as well of course. We have products ready for the market as soon as we launch. But it is also a timeframe of production. So we know that we can like, patch robot immediately because the software is ready to go. And we have a timeframe up of one week to three months depending on the volume. Joel: We talked about what kind of companies you are looking for to use this. Is this really appropriate for every positions? So I think about sales, where your presentation, you know just how you are human-to-human is really important. Do you really think that Tengai is for everyone? Or are there some positions you wouldn't recommend that for a company? Elin: No. I would recommend it for any kind of job actually. Because as of sales people, we know that you know the best one, or naturally the one that's selling themself in the best way. We know that you need, like productivity. We know that you need efficiency, for example. Those kind of skills. Which is sort of hard to prove on for a sales personnel, for example. Also if we going to prove like it's unbiased, we want to prove future potential in different ways. It's most suitable for volume kind of recruitments. Where you have many applicants. Where you have, and also, if you want to predict future potential you can go for, we are staffing in a recruitment company, and we have lots of people applying, but not applying for a specific job. So for us it's really important to understand what are their potential. What could they do? What are their abilities. So... Chad: Give it up for Elin everybody! Great job! Now go have a shot. Announcer: This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. And be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #Robots #TAtech #DeathMatch #Interview

Four companies entered the ring to duke it out for European supremacy at TAtech in Lisbon for The Chad & Cheese Podcast. Here’s contestant No. 3, Adam Gordon CEO of CandidateID. Enjoy this Uncommon exclusive. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. INTRO: Welcome to Death Match Europe Part three of four. This Chad & Cheese Death Match episode features Adam Gordon, CEO of Candidate.ID. Death Match took place at TAtech on May 9th in Lisbon, Portugal at 5:00PM with a room full of Tatech practitioners. The bar was open and Chat & Cheese snark was a flowing. Enjoy this special edition, Death Match, from Europe after a quick word from our sponsor. Chad: Dude, we're always talking about cool, new, tech, but it's hard for hiring companies to change. I mean, adoptions a bitch. Cheese: Yep. Chad: New tech can get them to qualified candidates so much faster. Cheese: I know man, but recruiters already have their routine in place and nobody wants to jump into another platform especially when it's expensive and also requires hours maybe days of training. Chad: Exactly. But that's where Uncommon's new service comes into play. Uncommon pairs expert recruiters with in-house kick ass technology. Cheese: All right. Interesting, Interesting. It sounds like Uncommon understands the problem of change. Chad: That's why they hand select veteran recruiters, train them on this kick ass technology that has access to over 100 million active profiles. Cheese: Yeah, yeah, but I bet they're expensive and I bet it requires some kind of annual commitment or contract, right? Chad: No, man. Uncommon is not an agency, they don't require a contract, any contingencies. All they do, they charge one flat fee per project. Saving, I don't know, anywhere from 50 to 80 percent on each hirer versus the average agency cut. Cheese: Oh snap. Companies could save big stacks of paper especially if they're rapidly scaling and need hires today. Chad: Yep. And all you have to do is reach out to Teg and the Uncommon crew at uncommon.co. That's uncommon.co. Cheese: Change doesn't have to be a pain, if you're using Uncommon. Announcer: [music] All right, Lisbons. Chad: I need a beer. Music: Ladies and gentlemen please would you bring your attention to me. Chad: Hello everybody, hopefully, hopefully everybody have drinks. I mean, the bar is open. Hopefully, you're there, hopefully, you're on your second one or third at this point. Who's ever seen the Chad & Cheese Death Match? Anyone, anyone? All right. Excellent. So this it- Cheese: Bad ass, right? Chad: Not first for some of you. What about Firing Squad? Anybody listen to Firing Squad? All right, all right. So today- Cheese: What happened to the last Death Match winner? Chad: They were acquired. [crosstalk 00:02:57]Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cheese: Big money. So there's big money and potential winnings- Chad: You have mic right there. Cheese: Oh there's a mic, okay. Chad: There's a mic. Yeah. So today we have four, count them, four start-ups coming up to Death Match. They're going to have an opportunity to have a two minute pitch, no demos, no robots. Okay? They're going to come up, they're going to pitch two minutes. Then with the balance of the 15 minutes that they have we're going to belt the hell out of them with Q & A, okay? Chad: He's the reason why we're wearing these silly things, they actually feel kind of good. We have Adam Gordon [music] from Candidate.ID... Bring it. Cheese: All right. Aside from being really disappointed you didn't pick the Bay City Rollers to come in to, are you ready? Adam Gordon: I'm ready. Cheese: Two minutes starting now. Adam Gordon: When the world's biggest pharmaceutical company told me that 70 percent of the people that they hired through LinkedIn were already on Twilio at the point that they reengaged with them unbeknown to the recruiter, I thought that sounded crazy. So I asked some other multinational employers if they had this same scenario. And they said, "Yes." So I knew we needed to fix it. Adam Gordon: Fast forward three years and our customers our hiring 50 percent more people per recruiter. I'm Adam Gordon, I'm Co-Founder and CEO at Candidate.ID. Candidate.ID allows employers and agencies to distribute content to its candidate database through email, text message, and social media. Crucially, it tracks every interaction with your content when you open an email, when you open a text message, when you click a link on a social media message, or other social media posts. When a candidate clicks a link through a landing page on a career site or a corporate website. It's tracking all of this activity and each touch point awards points based on a balanced scorecard. Adam Gordon: The benefits of doing this, number one, you reduce your time to shortlist by 50 percent. Number two, you know what each candidates done, what their history is been, therefore, recruiters know what to say to them when pick up the phone. Number three, because Candidate.ID is learning what each person's behavior is and what therefore they like in terms of content each person's getting a personalized experience. Number four, from a source of hirer perspective you've got very, very detailed tracking. Adam Gordon: Number five, from a GDPR perspective you can show legitimate interest as the legal basis of processing because you know what each candidates been doing and they have a relationship with you. There's 23 of us based in Glasgow and London. We work with... some companies I might tell you when I get some questions.[applause] Tanya: Hi Adam, I heard you say earlier about long term nurturing. What is the scalability of long term nurturing? As a business, how do you measure the effectiveness? What if that lead does not turn into a conversion for me so... Are you helping businesses focus on specific metrics? Or are you encouraging long term nurturing with the hopes that this turns into a possible conversion? Adam Gordon: So a few different questions in there. Well, a few different answers for that question. Tanya: I know, I know. Adam Gordon: So the first thing is, yeah absolutely. If somebody has been inactive for a period of time they come out the database and you start nurturing them. So if they haven't done anything for 12 months, they are automatically encrypted or deleted. And what that means is that automatic GDPR compliance. So the only people that should be within your talent pipelines on Candidate.ID are people who have been displaying some kind of interest even if its only that they been opening occasional emails to do with noncareer related things. Adam Gordon: So in terms of scalability, with automation scalability is infinite. You can put a million people into your talent pipeline on Candidate.ID and Candidate.ID knows what each person is going to respond to based on that person's behavior. So completely scalable. Tanya: How do you weigh the generational gaps or the difference between blue-collar work or specialized professional skilled candidates that are coming through your pipeline? Adam Gordon: So Candidate.ID is absolutely most effective in what we would crudely call the white-collar area where candidates are not acting like consumers. And they're not making decisions on Diet Coke. They're making decisions on a much more considered purchase kind of basis. So those people that are really, really hard to move, you've got to do a lot of long term kind of... or maybe medium and long term nurturing with. That's the people who Candidate.ID is most effective in terms of shifting. The first aspect of the question was to do with waiting generational- Tanya: Or is there a generational difference? Adam Gordon: No, there's no generational differences, but if I've got a talent pipeline for software engineers and there's people who are in their twenties and there's people who are in their fifties in here it doesn't make any difference because it's all about the individual's behavior. It's highly personalized. If I'm responding to content about skills in a video format through email and you're responding to content about industry insights in an infographic format through text message, you and I get different behaviors. Our age doesn't make any difference. It's automated, so highly, highly scalable. Cheese: You recently announced an infusion of investment capital. What are you currently doing with that capital? And what do you intend to do with that in the future to grow the company? Adam Gordon: So we don't intend to do anything with that in the future to grow the company because we're spending it all now. We spent it on accelerating our product road map- Cheese: You get points deducted for snark, by the way. Chad: No.- Cheese: No, we don't.- Chad: -Points added on. Adam Gordon: We have... We've spent it on accelerating our product road map. So we've created a CRM, which will be available for free to anybody who wants free recruitment CRM as of July. And... And the second thing that we spent it on is building a sales team. Up until now we haven't had one. In order to generate our Fortune 500 customers like IQVIA and IBM and and companies like that. Chad: So you're spending money on a CRM and I've heard you say in passing that CRMs are shitte. Adam Gordon: What? Chad: So why... Why, why- Adam Gordon: That's paraphrasing. I definitely didn't say that. Chad: Why, why spend money on something like that?- Cheese: He has a witness. Chad: Yeah. Why have... Why spend money on something like a CRM if you believe that it's actually not the answer and that you have other areas- Adam Gordon: Well, there's two reason for that. The first is because it's... We're... By giving a free recruitment CRM away we're actually proving what value we would give to a recruitment CRM. Okay? Zero dollars, zero Euros, zero pounds, zero yen. And also because to be quite frank you would not put Candidate.ID straight on top of success factors or straight on top of a work day. There is a functionality gap there. Adam Gordon: So recruiters probably would not live within Candidate.ID if we didn't have that functionality. Bill Berman told us we need to become a CRM three years ago. We told him to go that way and not come back. So we've got a bit of a roundabout way of doing it, but it's free. Tanya: Just so I understand, how do you differentiate yourself from a CRM, an ATS? What is that extra value because I want to hear it out loud that you feel that you bring to the market that can't be accomplished using an ATS or a CRM. Adam Gordon: So I believe that's a very, very easy question to answer, a CRM is a system of record which stores information and enables workflow. Candidate.ID is a system of engagement which actively on an automated basis nurtures a talent pipeline and shows recruiters which people are cold, warm and hire ready. You cannot do that in a CRM. Isabelle: What is your monetization model? Are you doing it per hire or per engagement? Adam Gordon: Candidate.ID is available on a SAS basis. It's monthly fees. We're one of the few businesses in our industry that are transparent about that. We have a light version, which is 1,500 pounds a month. There's a mid-tier version between 50,000 of up to 50,000 candidates, 3,500 pounds a month. And then between 50,000 and 200,000 candidates it's 5,500 pounds per month. Above 200,000 candidates, we go for whiskies, or a walk on the beach and we agree with the prices together. Cheese: I appreciate the desire to nurture the candidates that are A, B level candidates. But inevitably, there are Ds and Fs. So how do you count for the candidates that companies don't want to keep in touch with? Adam Gordon: Really straight forward, the recruiter would then disable them from receiving ongoing communication. Or just simply delete them out of Candidate.ID. So there's a bit of manual work there, if somebody is rejected under a silver medalist and they were brilliant, but they didn't quite get the job they stay in Candidate.ID. If they turn up for the interview and they're drunk, they probably get removed from Candidate.ID. That's a bit of manual work. Cheese: So why would you dis... Dis a drunk candidate? Why would they be... I'm kidding. Go head, Chad. Chad: So does Candidate.ID have an active and passive methodology to be able to pull candidates in, so being able to blast jobs maybe programmatically, to be able to pull candidates in as well as a dipping into the applicant tracking system or perspectively the CRM that a company already has? Adam Gordon: Most organizations would import their candidate database from the ATS in the first instance. And that would be the first... Candidate database they have within Candidate.ID. And then from there anything they're sharing on social media or on their career site or anything like that, any high value content might need unlocking through a form. So the candidate would fill in their name and email address in order to access that high value content and to agree that they're happy to receive future communication from that organization. Chad: So quick question, just follow up. With... With all that information are you providing that in a deep integration into the ATS or their system of record so that they don't have to jump from system, to system, to system. Adam Gordon: Interestingly, Candidate.ID for the bigger organizations the FITSI 100, Fortune 500 type of organizations, they're not doing any kind of integration at all because Candidate.ID is getting run by a special sourcing team or a recruitment marketing team. For more of a mid-tier sized organization they could do a light touch connection whereby each candidate's engagement score sits on their profile at the ATS. Or it could be a full bidirectional sync where the information is going in each way in... Not real-time, but 10 minute intervals. Tanya: Okay, I'm going to ask you as a... From a candidate's point of view, I can clearly see the value in your organization. If I am in your pipeline, what is Candidate.ID do to me? How are you tracking me? How are you communicating with me? How often are you communicating with me? And are you going to get to the point of being annoying? Adam Gordon: Candidate.ID's entirely anonymous to you. You do not know it exists. It appears to come from PepsiCo, that's the first thing. Second thing is based on your behavior, that then determines what the cadence of communication is going to be to you. So if you're looking at content about skills and that's it, then you might get something every 10 days. Whereas, if you're deep into the career site you might get something every three days until you get to the application phase. Adam Gordon: So highly personalized. And there's a lot of advice that we've got a team of experts in our business who can provide alot of advice to organizations around the tactics for this because there's a... There's a elegant way of doing it which really works. And there's a crass way of doing it which is really going to piss people off. Isabelle: So piggybacking off of that, you're collecting a lot of data on when the drop off points are when candidates stop engaging. Do you consult your clients on maybe best practices on how they can improve their strategy if you start seeing issues? Or that their candidates are not following that nurturing process? Adam Gordon: Yeah absolutely. We have a customer success team for people in that team. They're highly experienced in talent nurture and customers can phone them up anytime or send them an email and say, "This isn't really working very well. How can I make this better?" And we'll advise on things as simple as the subject heading of your emails isn't good enough and needs to be more compelling. So yeah absolutely, we provide... We've got a lot of expertise in our business. It's probably, actually the number one right now, the number one US-P we have. Is we're... We're a center of excellence for talent pipeline nurture. Cheese: What's the greatest threat to your business and what's the highest hurdle? Adam Gordon: The greatest threat is Chinese copycats. Come on, that's a joke. The greatest threat quite honestly is... It... I don't know. It probably is bigger talent acquisition technologies looking at what we're doing and going, "Yeah, we can copy that quite easily." And they might be able to do that, but what they'll find very difficult is the know-how within our business because as I said we've created a center of excellence for how you do this. And what's the highest hurdle? I mean, the highest hurdle probably is internationalization for our business, so. Adam Gordon: Our customers are probably 40 percent USA businesses, 40 percent UK, 20 percent elsewhere. Almost all of that has gone in through London. We've done London, London, London nowhere else. So all of our American customers have been in London first and then in the USA. Internationalizing is going to be a real challenge because the way they do these things in Germany is very, very different to the way they do things in here, in the UK. Adam Gordon: Sorry. And the USA is just an absolutely huge market that there's a million different ways of getting it wrong. So there's far more snakes than there are ladders. And so we need to be very, very careful about how we approach that. Chad: Who's your biggest target when it comes to clients? Because obviously staffing is looking to be more efficient, but also Fortune 500 really sucks at this. Who's your... Who's your biggest target right now from a priority standpoint? Adam Gordon: SRP businesses. And the reason for that is because we firmly believe they have the right teams, the right knowledge, they're tech savvy, their recruitment marketing savvy, they're sourcing savvy, and they've got lots of customers. Cheese: Who are you currently partnered with on the RPSI? Adam Gordon: Sure. IBM, Capital, PeopleScope. A couple of others, but that's three pretty decent sized ones. Tanya: What markets are you currently available in? What are your plans to replicate your product or your services in other languages in other markets? And do you have plans of... Of globalizing your service? Adam Gordon: We're available in every market that uses the version of the World Wide Web that probably everybody in this room uses. So we cannot access North Korea's intranet and that's probably not a market for us. Pretty much anywhere else including Japan, we've just started. So it doesn't even matter if they use roman numeral, if you use a different kind of language format, that's fine. The user interface is available... So nurturing candidates in any language is absolutely achievable and straight forward. Adam Gordon: The user interface is only in English; however, by the end of the year there will be other languages that will be available within. And our plans are absolutely to be an international organization. Chad: Give it up for Adam Gordon, people. Adam Gordon: Thanks very much. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad. The Chad and his buddy, Cheese. This has been the Chad & Cheese podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #TAtech #DeathMatch #CandidateID #EmployerBrand #ATS #CRM #Engagement

DEATH MATCH GRAND CHAMPION! Andreea Wade and Opening.io Welcome to Death Match Europe - part four of four - the GRAND CHAMPION EDITION. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Andreea Wade, CEO of Opening.io. Death Match took place at TA Tech on May 9th in Lisbon Portugal at 5pm with a room full of TA Tech practitioners. The bar was open and Chad and Cheese snark was flowin'. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps businesses find qualified candidates with disabilities for their job postings. Chad: Okay, so you need candidates fast and you're sick and tired of being nickle and dimed to death. I totally get it... Chad: You should check out FlexxPlan from NEXXT... It's perfect for employers and staffing firms who are busy, they need candidates and flexible pricing NOW! FlexxPlan is also perfect for Recrutment Ad Agencies who need targeted distribution and tools to help demonstrate client ROI. Chad: If you're sick and tired of all of the BS, hassle and just want candidates NOW check out Nexxt and Flexxplan with over 70 million members. Nexxt takes ALL your jobs and puts each one in front of the best candidates across their entire Ecosystem. No muss, no fuss... Nexxt does all of the work and FlexxPlan makes it cost-effective. Check out all NEXXT have to offer at Hiring.Nexxt.com Chad: If you'd like to save EVEN MORE cash just going to ChadCheese.com scroll down and click on the NEXXT logo - DISCOUNTS A PLENTY.. Chad: Remember, NEXXT with the Double X, not the Triple X <<< MUSIC >>> Chad: All right Lisbon. I need a beer. Announcer: Me too. Music: Ladies and gentlemen please. Would you bring your attention to me. For a feast for your eyes to see... Chad: Hello everybody, hopefully everybody had drinks, I mean the bar is open, hopefully your there, hopefully you’re on your second one or third at this point. Who's ever seen the Chad and Cheese death match, anyone? Anyone? Alright excellent so this is... Joel: Bad ass right? Chad: ...not first, not first for some of you. What about Firing Squad? Anybody listen to Firing Squad? Alright, Alright. So today... Joel: What happened to the last death match winner? Chad: They were acquired. Joel: There's big money in potential winnings. Chad: You have a mic? Yeah, you have a mic right there. Joel: Oh there's a mic. Chad: There's a mic. Yeah, so today we have four, count them, four startups coming up to death match. They’re going to have an opportunity to have a two minute pitch, no demos, no robots. Joel: Okay. Chad: Their going to come up, they’re going to pitch 2 minutes, then with the balance of the fifteen minutes that they have, were going to belt the hell out of them with Q & A. Okay? Chad: Were ready for Andreea Wade from Opening.io. Chad: CEO. Product. Genius Andreea: What the song said. I'm kidding. I think the best way to tell you about our company is to give you some insight into how the idea started and why. Two frustrated candidates with zero recruitment in HR background that got sick of sending off their CV into oblivion into the black hole that is legacy ATS and platform, who kind of started thinking and said, "What if?" Andreea: What if this job seeking process actually worked for us, the candidates? And we were data people and we were product people and we looked at this data heavy document heavy industry that were in and we said, "Probably great for automation. What if in one click I can upload my CV or send off my CV in a match to meaningful jobs and what if we build this technology, we don't keep it to ourselves, we give it to everyone, we build something robust enough, intelligent enough, and scalable enough, that can work for everyone? And so today, ladies and gentlemen, globally, were competing with the likes of Google and IBM Watson. Andreea: And I'm telling you this because the last two contracts we won against Google and IBM Watson. In fact, we replaced them. Today we powered the recruitment processes of really large global employers and we have managed to partner with the company that bought LinkedIn and get help to be their preferred job matching vendor within the media market. Andreea: Revenue wise; 300 percent up Q1 of this year compared to all of last year. Were growing fast. And because of our bias to research were continuously innovating. Just between ourselves here, were getting really interesting, potentially a world first results with cross lingual matching. Chad: Nice! Okay. All right, so you didn't mention their name. The company that bought LinkedIn, so tell us about that partnership because it sounds like your trying to hide it. Why are you trying to hide this Microsoft partnership? Andreea: I was just being cute. Chad: Well tell us about the partnership. What is it? How does it help? Not just from... how does it help, what does it do? Andreea: Microsoft put out this call because they wanted to position as an AI player and they said, "Hey world, and EMEA markets, what if technology could solve, what if AI could solve your wish?" Andreea: So they put this question out. They got about 130 million visits to the site and they gathered 2000 something wishes and then they brought them to 63 and then to 10 and job matching was one of them. And they looked around, they looked at their partners. We have a really really good relationship with them, they really like our attack, so they selected us to be their job matching partner. Andreea: Some of the things that we are doing is going into houses that are traditionally IBM and replacing them with our tech and Microsoft tech. Were also doing a European trip around... Microsoft is bringing HR leaders and were presenting our technology to them and Microsoft is talking about their digital transformation and so on. So, were partners with Microsoft. Tanya: Hi Andreea. Andreea: Hey. Tanya: In this era of tech, are the main challenges you've had to overcome in bringing your product to market and how would you, quickly describe if I had no idea about the volume that you could bring to my organization, how would you, quickly describe the value, or why do I need to use your product? Andreea: Imagine if you're a salesperson and you have all these sales leads and at the end of every month or at the end of the day you throw them away. You put them somewhere, and you start again, and you start again, and you start again. What we do is, we tap into your existing data. We tap into your existing CV databases. We work with really large entities that might have millions of CVs, and we get the value out of the data. Andreea: In terms of challenges that we had. Again, when we started this we knew nothing about recruitment. I'll tell you never ever start a business in an area that you know nothing about. So we did not have CVs. So building, we were data scientists, so building the tech itself, finding the data, then sitting down with the industry, learning from the industry, we had a very steep learning curve. However, last year we received feedback from one of the largest RPOs in the world. They were looking at four vendors and they said that we were the best in terms of use cases. We were able to say what this technology can do within their environment. Isabelle: Explain exactly how you're better and different than Watson and Google. Andreea: Well, we hear, and this is something that we did not know about our attack. We hear a lot, obviously, about the matching technology itself, about the use cases that we have developed. We hear a lot about the robustness of our APIs. In fact, the contract that we just won, they used to have IBM Watson in their BETA. They replaced them with us because of, again, the robustness of our APIs and what we could do at scale. As well as the matching technology. We have the ability to match people to jobs, jobs to people, people to people, jobs to jobs and we have a fifth API for tech only the rest are all industry agnostic. Our models are continuously being improved. Joel: Aside from the names you have mentioned who are your competitors? What's the greatest threat to your business and how are you preparing for that? Andreea: Our competitors, initially we thought that the likes of Restless Bandit or Ideal or whatever, our competitors. Realistically, we compete with Elastic Search with Google, Sovereign or Text Kernel. That's what we hear. The thing with Europe is that Text Kernel has been bought fully by Career Builder. So what we hear today, how do I say this? We hear some, there is some apprehensiveness from potential buyers to go to Text Kernel and then they go, “Well, we don't know what's going to happen to them so can we talk to you?" Andreea: So in Europe, we see that we could make a solid move. Our big problem is multilingual matching, which is something that we are working on right now. So were working with Microsoft Machine Translation. We’re updating the engine in about 120 languages. We’re hoping to have that this year, but languages, that's definitely one of the big problems that were having in terms of threat. Andreea: For a startup, I have about 50 jobs. We’re not that many people in the team. We’re growing in the states so were trying to manage that growth in a way that doesn't kill us. Chad: So, today, again with algorithms, were going to beat this like a dead horse. Amazon had this algorithm. It became bias, right, so how... I'm going to go away from how do you do it, but how do you ensure, especially if you are going to compete in the U.S. with the OFCCP and many of the regulations that are out there. How do you ensure that there is transparency with your algorithm? It's not black box. It's white box. So that those companies who hopefully will spend many dollars with you can defend how your system works? Do you have Black Box? Do you have White Box? How are you ensuring those companies can defend those decisions by your algorithm? Andreea: Thank you. Going from Black Box to White Box in any industry with deep learning models, I am not sure how possible that is. I watched a chief decision scientist in Google talk exactly about this, and their view is not, "Make Black Box, White Box. Make Black box testable and testable and testable and build models that look for that bias. Andreea: You know, decision making of the algorithms, you can't just throw that out. But for sure you can test and retest and make sure that you do build some models that look at those attributes that you use when you build your algos. That's something that we've done from day one. Andreea: Some of the things that were doing now actually, an important meeting that happened yesterday in Dublin. We’re working with a couple of universities in Dublin and Brazil to help us with this issue. Tanya: I read somewhere, probably on your website, that you are an on demand candidate match. So, type of Netflix for candidates. As a candidate, that offends me. Tanya: You know, I want to know what you're doing for me, what you're doing to ensure my user experience, how you're going to nurture me or are you only focused on the bottom line from the supplier side, so from the vendor side, from the recruitment agency or the firm? Tanya: You're putting me into a pool with algorithms with tech, but I'm a person and I need a job. Have you taken into consideration the user experience and how to nurture the actual applicant with your product? Andreea: This company was built by two candidates who were frustrated that they're not seen. You send in your CV and you're not seen. Actually our story starts with my co founder story, Adrian, who they built a company from two people to 70. They were nearly bought by Apple, and then Apple decided Flash is not interesting enough and Weddingwire in New York bought them. And his problem was send a CV and it took six months for someone to find him and he was rediscovered by an external recruiter and placed for a really really large fee. Andreea: And that whole experience was, "Why was I not seen, because I'm a highly valuable candidate?" And we might all believe that about ourselves, so when we built what we built, we made sure to literally take print CVs, put them in front of us and go, "Who is this person and what are the data points that we can extract, highlight, in order to really tell the story to those looking at this person." So absolutely candidate focused because we didn't know how to do it in any other way because we were candidates and knew nothing about recruitment. Isabelle: So some of the benefits of Google and Watson is that they have huge amounts of resources for developers, so there is more wider adoption for this. What role does ecosystem development play in your product? Andreea: A very big one in a reverse way. We plug it into a bunch of marketplaces. Our go to market is linked to partnerships just like the Microsoft one, were partnering with a number of other ATSs and CRMs, but also with RPOs. We go in, I'll give an example. Our RPO came to us and said, "We have all of these clients, lots of CVs in their DB, but they don't mind them, they don't use that capability. Can we go in together?" Andreea: We say, "We're going to put some seats there in your offices and we're going to give you technology to mine that data and we'll support you to sell in like that. We'll give you a project manager. Our people will sell this. Were partnerships are a key for us and piggy-backing on the bigger ecosystem for sure. Joel: I say this lovingly that you strike me as very geeky, and geeky organizations tend to be really bad at sales and marketing. Talk to me about your sales and marketing strategy. Andreea: We've spent very little dollars or euros on sales and marketing to date. What I have done, contrary to how nervous I was yesterday and maybe today, I tend to get myself on a stage and project that we're bigger than we are so we created a lot of noise. We get a lot of inbound, all of our sales to date are all inbound and were smart enough to partner with the right players. From a sales perspective, we hired our first global head of sales in January and we put in a process and our strategy is being worked at right now. Andreea: Part of it is me being here, as well, and also us going into the states it's a big part of what we’re doing right now and were getting the Irish government and the Irish brand to help us achieve that. Chad: So, partner clarification on that, you're talking about partners. You're going deep with partners. Is it a technical integration deep or are you talking about revenue generation? What kind of partnerships are you currently developing to be able to ensure that longevity for the organization? Andreea: Both tech and money. So we, because we don't have a lot of resources, were a small team, what gets us closer to money, that's what we do first. Technical integration is important because once we integrate with a platform then we can sell into all of their clients or maybe we do white label integration. But then there's also strategic partnership with Microsoft because we want piss off some other players who will recognize us and consider us for things Chad: So, other than Microsoft, name some names, what are some of the big players that you are integrated with? Andreea: I don't know how people know them. One of our clients, actually, and I'm allowed to talk about them are a company called Jibe in New York and these guys their own clients, so indirect clients of ours are companies like Comcast, FedEx, Siemens, and so on. So were crunching, right now we are, apart from Indeed and LinkedIn and all these guys who are in Dublin, were one of the biggest data processors in Talent in Dublin because were crunching all of this data. Chad: There it is. Give it up! Chad: And the answer is, to her shirt, I don't know if you saw. What do we say to the god of death? That's what it is. I've had a few beers. Not today! That's right. Not today! #Openingio #Matching #AI #MachineLearning #DeathMatch #TAtech #IBM #Watson #Google

Welcome to Death Match, North America, 2019, part one of four. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Brian Rowe, CEO of Pez.AI. Death Match took place at TAtech on September 26th, 2019, in sunny, beautiful Austin, Texas, with a room full of TAtech practitioners. The bar was open, as usual, and Chad and Cheese snark was flying. Not to mention the judges were pitbulls. Enjoy after a word from our sponsor. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Chad: Death Match is brought to you by Alexander Mann Solutions. Hiring great people is no easy feat. There are new obstacles around every corner and the competition for talent is intense. We need to be bold in our approach to tackling these challenges. Alexander Mann Solutions is that bold next step. With 4,700 people around the globe delivering market, leading, recruitment outsourcing, and talent consulting services. Chad: In early 2020, AMS will unveil an exciting new digital solution that will disrupt how you connect with job seekers and hire the best fit candidates. Now is the time to create purpose built solutions, focused on solving the unique challenges employers face when it comes to engaging and hiring people their business depend on. To learn more about how Alexander Mann Solutions is working with talent acquisition professionals around the globe, visit alexandermannsolutions.com. Announcer: 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 & Cheese Podcast. Peter: All right. So if you've not been to a TAtech event before, you are in for a memorable treat. You're not here to see me. So without further ado, let me introduce podcasters extraordinaire, Chad & Cheese. Chad: Raise that drink, everybody. So thanks first and foremost, thanks Peter and TAtech for making sure that we had alcohol in the morning because a lot of us got in late. We need that. Yeah, keep the party going. So Death Match, who's seen a Death Match before? This is our third Death Match. There we go. So you know, that's why you're here, right? Death Match really a variation of Firing Squad. This is more the onstage live version. So obviously for listeners in the podcast, check out Firing Squad, every single one of these pitches today. Without further ado, today we have four startups. They will have two minutes to pitch. After those two minutes, we have a stunning panel of judges who includes Cindy Songne from Talroo, Quincy Valencia from Alexander Mann Solutions. Woohoo, give it up. And Robert Ruff, Sovren Technologies, everybody. All amazing sponsors [crosstalk 00:03:38]. Chad: Right out of the gate, first up on stage, we have a chatbot, Brian Rowe from Pez.AI. Bring it. Just throw them. They don't even need to know, just to hit him in the back of the head. There it is. Do you have your timer ready? All right. Now with pop sockets, I mean pop sockets aren't going to do it. Yeah, it's just pop sockets. There we go. Chad: Ready to go? Brian: I'm ready. All right. Time. Nobody has enough time these days. Employers say they don't have enough time to properly evaluate candidates. They also don't have enough time to respond to candidates. Why is that when all of these tools that we have are supposed to save us a lot of time? So that used to be my problem too. I didn't have enough time. Our hiring process was broken, very slow, and it changed all that by creating chatbots to interview every single candidate that we have. And that's allowed us to drop our hiring process, the time to hire from five weeks down to one week. It's also given us higher quality data to make decisions because we have these full interview transcripts as opposed to resumes which are completely biased. So in order to get the best transcripts possible, our chatbots can detect vague and generic responses. And when it does, it probes for more details just like a human would. Brian: On the engagement side, our chatbots can answer questions that candidates have about the company or role. When it doesn't have the answer, it'll ask a human for help. And if they don't know the answer, they can tell the expert or chatbot to try somebody else. And so expert will eventually find that answer and will remember the answer for the future, like you'd expect. But it also remembers, too, the expertise of the person providing the answers so that they can ask that person for help in the future. Just like a human would. That's us. We're at Pez.AI. We create chatbots to streamline human interaction. Joel: All right, I'm going to help you out real quick because you have time left. Where can we find out more about you? Brian: Pez.AI. Joel: Thank you. Cindy: So how is your bot different from all the other bots out there? Brian: So the key is that our bots provide intelligence around the way it interacts, right? So a lot of bots are scripted. Our bots can actually detect crappy answers and it'll actually challenge people to provide better answers. So I've taught machine learning, natural language processing for six years at the graduate level. So I've built a lot of custom models for our company, which allow us to differentiate in ways that other companies can't. Cindy: Who from your team has talent acquisition experience? Brian: Nobody. Cindy: It's obvious on your site. I'll talk to you about that later though. On the expert and the human. I'm sorry. I know.... Joel: Into the mic, Cindy. Cindy: No, one of the ... Brian: Keep it coming, come on. Cindy: What if the human they're asking the questions of is flawed? Brian: Is, sorry? Cindy: Does not have the right answers, is not a good hire for you. Brian: I'm not following the question. Cindy: You said the bot, if the bot doesn't have an answer, it asks a human for intervention. Brian: Yeah. So for candidate engagement, that's right. So what's the question? Cindy: With that human, we don't keep hires forever. What if you at a later point decide that human is not the right human, doesn't have the right answer. You get rid of that person. Brian: Oh, I see. Right. Cindy: But you still have that data. Brian: So, the bot can, you can tell the bot that that person no longer works there or no, it's recorded by the bot. So the bot dynamically learns all the interactions and so the answer that the human provides, it'll remember that for the future. So then you can change that if you want through the authoring platform in the backend. Quincy: Good morning. So first question. Pez.AI has two modules. Correct? Brian: Right now, yeah. Sure. Quincy: So you've got just interview me in the expert FAQ, correct? Brian: Yeah, that's right. Quincy: Do they interact at all? Meaning if I'm a candidate and I'm going through the just interview me process and I'm in the middle of answering your questions, but I have another question. Wait a minute. What, you know, whether it's about benefits or whether it's about the industry or it's something beyond just what the interview questions are, is the bot programmed and is the logic built in to be able to answer a question that's not when in the interview work stream and go back to the interview question? Brian: Yeah. So you can actually stack the modules and any question, like if a candidate has a question that's not related to the interview questions, the bot will answer that and then continue back. It'll repeat the question so that they remember what the question was and it will continue on from there. Quincy: Okay, got it. And where do you get your training data from? Brian: So it's a little bit of a long answer. The, again, because I've taught natural language processing, machine learning, I actually built a custom models that is re-purposing a clustering model to do classifications. So I actually don't need as much training data as other systems. Robert: Okay. To follow up on that though, what data are you training against? Where'd you get that data? Brian: Well, it's all user derived, right? So for our expert bot, it's actually, it doesn't have any data to begin with and so it learns all dynamically. So there are some, we use some data sets for ... Like we create our own corpora for topic associations and things like that, but that's easily scrapable from the web. So we just generate that and then we build our models based on that. Chad: Okay. So if I'm a human and I give an answer, your application, your bot learns that and then can give that answer again in the future. Is that right? Brian: That's right. Chad: How do we know if that answer is good? Brian: Well, there are two ways, right? I mean we're kind of assuming that the person who is providing the answer is acting on good faith, right? But obviously answers can go stale. They can also be inaccurate. So in those situations, the person who's receiving the answer or who's asking the question can actually just say no, that's not right. And then it'll repeat the process of trying to find a better answer. Joel: In addition to having a lot of competition, you have a lot of well funded competition. What's the plan in terms of sort of competing with, you know, the folks that have gotten 40, 50, $60 million or do you not need that much money to have a successful chatbot in recruitment? Brian: Yeah. I don't think that you need that much funding to be honest. I think like from the discussions that I've had our technology speaks for itself. And so I think the way that we're solving problems are also a little different from the status quo. And. so people who appreciate that sort of innovation in the way that hiring is done are going to gravitate towards us. Quincy: In the just interview module, can you talk to me a little bit more about that? Are the questions coming from actual companies? Is it just a series of questions that are appropriate for whatever particular job or skillset it is that you're asking them about? And then where do those answers go? This is actually a two part question. Brian: Yeah, no problem. So the way the site works is that any company can create their own custom interview questions. We provide our own kind of cannon of questions that are based per role. And we actually use them ourselves for our own hiring. We primarily focus on behavioral and experiential questions. And so we ask people about, you know, how they've handled certain situations in the past. And then for the technical questions we also get into, you know, some programming things, design questions, things like that. And those are the types of questions that's easy for people to either pick and choose some of those or create their own from scratch. Quincy: Okay, great. And what across the platform, so everyone who's using it, yourself internally and others, what is the completion rate for the interview and what's the conversion rate of those that are being interviewed to actual hire? Brian: A good question. I think we've had about 1,500 people take the interviews, the completion rate, I am not sure. We haven't calculated those statistics yet. So I'm not going to make anything up. I'll just tell you. I don't know. Robert: Appreciate that. So what's your current sales and partnership strategy? Brian: So our sales strategy is basically as I think one of the judges has mentioned, we're not really an HR tech company. We're a AI tech company. And so we're not trying to create a brand in talent acquisition or HR. Really what we're looking for to partner with job boards, ATSs, other companies that are really deep in the space and then, you know, be a white label service provider. Brian: So we've got partnerships with two large HR consulting firms and that strategy has worked well for us. You know, so we've got large enterprises using our software. They have no idea who we are, but we're powering, you know, a lot of HR questions behind the scenes. That's great for us because we're focused on creating the best possible chatbot experiences and intelligence in those experiences as opposed to trying to learn, you know, all the ins and outs of this industry. Cindy: Is there a good time length that the interview should take? Brian: Yeah. So, having a lot of people take the interview is one of the things that we discovered is that on average the interviews right now take about 45 minutes and there's kind of a good and a bad. So, the bad part is is that it hurts the completion rate. On the flip side, what we've seen is that people who actually go through the process of finishing it are much more interested in getting the job. And so it's a much greater signal for determining who do you actually, you know, who is actually interested in finding work and who's just kind of, you know, fishing. So... Cindy: Sure. And you don't have the conversion rates. Do you have the completion rate? Do you know what your fall off rates are? And if someone does fall off, can they come back and pick up where they left? Brian: Yeah, so we're building that in. We're basically, right now we have a sales team that's following up to get them to complete. I'd say, I mean, if I were to guess, I'd say it's probably about 65% but we've been going to job fairs where people are very motivated to, you know, to find work. So it's, you know, I'm not going to lie, the selection bias is very favorable to us, right? Because they're very motivated to get a job. So I think for passive people, they're probably, the completion rate's not going to be that high. But one of the things that we're working on is changing the way that the interview questions are set up. So it's more of a kind of a choose your own adventure where each interview module is like five minutes and then people can kind of pick and choose and construct, you know, an interview profile based on the questions that they're interested in answering. Joel: So you've mentioned that you don't have a core competency in HR recruitment and your bot has a lot of other services or categories that it services, so customer service and other other industries. Whereas your competition in many cases does have, you know, sort of a core competency in recruitment and history in that industry. Do you think that your sort of lack of knowledge of the space will be an advantage or disadvantage and why? And if it's a disadvantage, how do you plan on overcoming it? Brian: Yeah, I mean I'm not going to like, I've been... I think this is my third conference in HR tech this year and I've learned a lot from each one because I don't have a lot of information about the jargon, the vernacular. That said, I think hiring problems are pretty universal. I've hired, you know, gazillions of people in my career. I've looked for jobs. So to me I think it's an advantage because I do come with a fresh perspective. It may be a highly technical perspective, but it is, you know, it's a different perspective. Brian: And I think, you know, in this time and age there's so much emphasis on data driven approaches to you know, making companies more efficient that what we're doing is essentially using chatbots to drive a lot of that efficiency. And so if that can be used within, you know, the HR space, then why not? And I think there are enough innovative people in the space that are willing to, you know, are interested in exploring that, which is why the partner strategy makes a lot of sense. Chad: So in your choose your own adventure kind of land, the way that you're looking to modularize this, can that data be stored in more of a, just for like GDPR purposes and be able to be more candidate centric so that they can have candidate own profiles so that they don't have to go through a 45 minute conversation every single time they go to another company? They can own their own data? Brian: Yeah. So that was actually the original idea for Just Interview Me is to build it as something that's like the common app for college applications because it is really tedious to have to answer those same questions over and over again. So the idea is as a job board, the candidates could basically, you know, decide whether or not they wanted their transcript public and then they could come up in search results. And then that way it, you know, it just cuts out so much of the process because you know, an employer is just already looking at those, you know, the answers. And so they don't have to do all the coordination to, you know, take an interview, fill out these application forms and whatnot. Chad: So with the applicant tracking systems, and you said that's part of your partnership strategy, is that one of the types of strategies that you're trying to pull together right now? Or is that down the road? Is that a visionary type of a thing? Are you trying to do this GDPR candidate own profile with that data? Brian: Yeah, that's something that we're doing right now. We actually built our own lightweight ATS in our platform that pulls in that data shows a... Essentially it shows each interview transcript anonymously. So the part around the removing the bias is you don't have to look at the resumes and so you don't know anything about their name, their gender or their age, whether or not they went to, you know, an elite university or not. And so it's really this anonymous apples to apples comparison. It's really cool. We realize though that we don't want to build our own ATS. And so it makes a lot more sense to partner with ATS vendors and then just provide a export integration mechanism so that it can be easily integrated into their system. And I think that we can, you know, that they're, you know, this is where we have to find an innovative partner because there is a little bit of a change to the workflow. People that we've talked to, they've asked how they can kind of, you know, shoehorn our technology into their existing process. Brian: But I really think the value is, you know, throwing everything on the table and saying, "How can we make this process even more efficient using these new tools and a new way of doing things," right? Because I think that there's over-reliance on resumes and they're just, to me, I've never really had much success with them. And I think, you know, the data these days, there have been a number of studies showing how resumes really don't have any predictive power in terms of candidate success. Brian: What does that mean? I can't read facial expressions. Robert: I'm sorry, my business has a resume. So it was just like... If it takes 45 minutes for a human to, excuse me, for a bot to do the chat, how does a human look at that? Who reviews that and how long does it take that human to review the results of that? Because the bot's not going to hire them. Brian: Yeah. So the review and evaluation, the way that we have it set up is that each person on the hiring team can review the transcripts, right? So it's anonymous and honestly it usually takes less than five minutes to review a transcript because a few things pop out. And through this process, these are the things that we're starting to build into the chatbot. One is that some people just provide a series of very terse, you know, two to three word responses. Not very great. And as a human, if I were, you know, actually conducting interview, I would ask them for more detail. So that's the genesis of that model. Chad: Thank you very much. Brian Rowe, everybody. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad and his buddy Cheese. This has been the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit chadcheese.com. #TAtech #DeathMatch #Chatbot #AI

Welcome to Death Match North America 2019 - part two of four. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features a contestant all the way from France - David Bernard, CEO, and Founder of Assess First. Death Match took place at TA Tech on September 26th, 2019 in Austin Texas with a room full of TA Tech practitioners. The bar was open, as usual, Chad and Cheese snark was flying and the judges were ready to light contestants up! Death Match is brought to you by Alexander Mann Solutions. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. AMS: Death Match is brought to you by Alexander Mann Solutions. Hiring great people is no easy feat. There are new obstacles around every corner, and your competition for talent is intense. Together, we need to be bold in our approach to tackling these challenges. Alexander Mann Solutions can be your bold next step. With a team of nearly 5,000 people around the globe delivering a market-leading recruitment, outsourcing, and talent consulting services. And, in early 2020, Alexander Mann Solutions will unveil an exciting new digital solution that will disrupt how you connect to job seekers and hire the best fit candidates. AMS: Now's the time to create purpose-built solutions focused on solving your unique challenges when it comes to engaging and hiring the people your business depends on. To learn more about how Alexander Mann Solutions is working with talent acquisition professionals around the globe, visit alexandermannsolutions.com. 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 hurts, complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad & Cheese Podcast. Chad: Welcome to Death Match North America 2019, part two of four. This Chad & Cheese Death Match episode features a contestant all the way from France, David Bernard, CEO and founder of Assess First. Death Match took place at TAtech on September 26th 2019, in Austin, Texas with a room full of TAtech practitioners. The bar was open. As usual, Chad & Cheese snark was flying, and the judges were ready to light contestants up. Enjoy. Peter: If you've not been to a TAtech event before, you are in for a memorable treat. You're not here to see me, so without further ado, let me introduce podcasters extraordinaire Chad & Cheese. Chad: Raise that drink, everybody. Chad: So, thanks, first and foremost, thanks Peter and TAtech for making sure that we had alcohol in the morning, because a lot of us got in late. We need that? Yeah, keep the party going. Chad: So, Death Match, who's seen a Death Match before? This is our third Death Match. There we go. So you know ... that's why you're here, right? Death Match, really a variation of Firing Squad. This is more the onstage live version. So, obviously for listeners of the podcast, check out Firing Squad of every single one of these pitches today. Chad: Without further ado, today we have four startups. They will have two minutes to pitch, after those two minutes, we have a stunning panel of judges who includes Cindy Songne from Talroo, Quincy Valencia from Alexander Mann Solutions. Woohoo. Give it up. And Robert Ruff Sovren, Sovern Technologies, everybody. All amazing sponsors and we love them. Chad: All ready. Oh wait a minute. We got to let this music start. Chad: There we go. We have David Bernard from AssessFirst. There he is. There it is. Work it. Work it. Chad: All right. Yes. No, I just picked the music for him. Are you ready? David Bernard: Yeah, I am. David Bernard: Okay. We will agree on the fact that using assessment for hiring, it's a good idea, because it helps you see who your candidates really are as a human being, far beyond their resume of their past experiences. But the problem is that most recruiters use it the wrong way. They use it just as a descriptive tool. It means that, usually they ask the candidate to fill in their questionnaires, and after that they just end up with a description, simple description of their behaviors, or their motivations, their personalities, things like that. David Bernard: But in the end does it really help them take better decisions? Not really. That's precisely the reason why we created Assess First. Once they use our AI-powered predictive platform, what they can do is that they can start by identifying, by discovering the type of profile they have to look after, and for that they just have to invite a current employee. They fill in the Assess First profile, and after that, very important, they rate them on two key factors: the performance they deliver on the job, but also the quality of their attitude. David Bernard: Doing that, we create predictive models, so our algorithm take care of everything. And it has been demonstrated numerous time that every time our candidate, our clients, as they use those predictive model to hire their new employee, they recruit people who are going to perform better, faster, but also who can stay longer on the job, all while being happy and fully engaged. David Bernard: And to be sure that we propose an extraordinary experience for the candidate, we give them, even if you do not select them for the job, we give them an access to their full report with awesome information concerning who they are, what are their talents, and also a few advices on how they could be more effective. David Bernard: And today in the world there are 3500 clients who use it. Quincy: All right, here we go. First of all, good entrance, it was very nice. David Bernard: Thank you. Quincy: So, David, a couple of questions for you. First, what model is your assessment built off of? David Bernard: For example, we have four personalities based on the big five, because it's cross cultural, and we use for aptitude the Carol model, which analyze the mental agility of people, and also PE Fit, the person-environment fit model for motivation, which analyzes the capacity of people to do the job at three different level, level of the job, level of the team, and the level of the organization with the culture. Quincy: Okay good, and what is the delivery mechanism of the assessment? Is it verbal? Is it just written questions? Is it visual? How does it work? David Bernard: It's a mix of that. Basically it's a questionnaire. So you know you have to pick up the right behavior, we propose you two statement, you have to select the one you prefer. And we also have a more gamified version for everything that revolves around aptitudes. Quincy: Okay, great. And approximately on average, how long does it take to complete the assessment in your format? David Bernard: It's aiming at eight to 10 minutes per questionnaire. So we have brain for attitudes, drive for motivation and shape for personality. But to be sure that the candidate completes all the assessment, we give them a feedback. Every time they finish a part we give them access to more information. The other, more information, and once they finish every things they can even compare them to more than 400 different function and roles. Quincy: And so, final question from me that you'll probably get from everyone, which is what is the differentiator from Assess First and something else? There are many assessments that are built in the big five model out there. David Bernard: We made it very candidate centric. That's the first thing, because most of the time it's like a pain in the ass for the candidate when they have to complete that, and we made sure that they can take their profile with them and they can, for example, share it to whoever they like. 36% of the candidate of our clients will share it on LinkedIn. David Bernard: But I think the better differentiator, it's really the capacity to predict success, because lots of companies are saying, "Okay, we have psychometrics, we can do that." But the thing is that we allow our clients to directly measure the return on investment that they can have using Assess First. For example, you hire people using AssessFirst, and after six months, one year, one year and a half or two years, you can rate them, your new employees, on performance quality or attitude, and after that you can compare that with the employee you had before and we show an increase. Quincy: That's great. I lied when I said that was the last question. What is your completion rate overall of people- David Bernard: What is what? Quincy: What is the completion rate? If you have three separate models- David Bernard: The completion rate is 86%. Robert: Where do you see this in the funnel? Do you see this on the front end of every part of the process, or do you see that this is for a select group of preselected candidates? David Bernard: Our clients, they can use it both ways. Some do that at the very end of the process with only the shortlisted candidate, but we absolutely do not recommend to do it like that, because you lose all the value. We recommend to use it at the very beginning of the process, because doing that, you can pre-select your people. Imagine you have a people, you pre-select them on resume, or you ask them to complete the questionnaire, but if there is no pre-selection, if it's the first step, you can even get rid of the resume for certain function like sales people or people who have to manage other people, and doing that you can discover people you wouldn't have a look on their resume. But you can bring more diversity in the workplace using it that way. Robert: I'm a big believer in this kind of thing, using subjective information that's somewhat objective, in other words, attribute oriented information. But what confuses me is that it's always seemed to me that attributes are something that you can't really change. These are things that you're born with, aptitudes, excuse me, I shouldn't say attributes, but you were saying that you will give people recommendations on how they can improve. So if I'm an introvert, or I'm an extrovert, I don't really want to change. I want to continue to be me. What I want your thing to do is slot me in the most appropriate job in that company, and not view it as pass / fail. So I'm making a big leap here that you are in the pass / fail realm. Tell me I'm wrong. David Bernard: The fact is actually all, our personality, and it evolves from zero to approximately 30 years old. After that it stay quite stable. But the fact is that lots of people are not happy in the work they are doing. I think it's something like 91% of people are not fully engaged in their work. They are not happy. And most of the time it's because people try to mimic the perfect person in the position. And the type of advice we give them is that, "Okay, you have some strong points for that role. You have a potential areas for development. We advise you to work on your areas of development just a little bit for it to stop those areas to preventing you or to work well with others," but we recommend them to work on what is already a strong point. Joel: You're a pretty well established brand in Europe, particularly in France. By your accent, I'm sure everyone could have guessed that. But US is a much different market. It's the largest market in the world. What is your plan to conquer America? David Bernard: Our plan, first it was to make small cultural adaptation, because human beings are all the same across the planet. Of course there are cultural differences, but we all want the same thing. We all want to be in a job that is fulfilling for us, in which we can perform, we can express our talents, express who we are, because we just have one life. So it would be dumb not to do that. And so the product is basically the same, but for example, we saw that US customer, they are more attentive to the ROI part, because in France for example, most of the clients they use it just as another tool, thing like that, just to add some more information. But here we have to be very concise when we were in present the product and everything. Joel: Talk to me about sales, marketing and partnership strategy. David Bernard: We have a lots of integration. For example, we are already integrated with Smart Recruiters, with Greenhouse, with SAP, and we are working through our API to make it available to customers who already use those platform. Cindy: Quick question, same vein. Aside from assessment companies, where do you go after that budget? Who are your competitors? David Bernard: Who are our competitor? We can see that for example, lots of the time, when clients come to us, they think that our competitors are like a company like a SHL, like [Organ 00:14:12], like [inaudible 00:14:12], but for us, really, it was like if the road splitted, you have assessment providers who continue to make it like the old way, very descriptive, and assessment providers like AssessFirst who decided to take the predictive way, but most of the time when a client, when they want something that is predictive of future performance, it can be like they have AssessFirst on one side and other solutions that analyze resume. Sometimes it can be lots of companies. But for example, we already identify a company like plum.io, we do a great job in Canada. Quincy: Do you see yourself as strictly obviously beyond just an assessment company when you're involving predictive analytics in your words, but do you see the value of AssessFirst as being, like you talked about in France, another data point to evaluate a candidate. Are you seeing yourself as also adding efficiency to a process and if so, where is that efficiency added and what are you taking the place of? David Bernard: I think it's a value we add today is that it helps companies to identify people who have the good mindset to integrate in the cultures, things like that. But I think the best value we can add, it's the turn, a little pivot we are doing right now, we have five minutes people who completed the AssessFirst profile on one side, 3500 different companies. At one point we said, "Okay people, they do not want tests. They want predictive solution." But no, they do not want predictive solution. What they want is people who are going to perform and stay longer on the job. And so we are planning to move from a strictly pre-selection solution to more of a platform to help companies meet the people they need to have to be successful there. Chad: What types of assessments do you do? Do you have coding assessments? Is it pretty much the gambit? What types of assessments? David Bernard: We're on the soft skills part on the potential. So for us, every human being has a combination of three key factors, the way in which they think, mental agility, what motivate them, their drivers and motivation, and how they're going to behave on a daily basis. And the thing that is very interesting is that you can predict the capacity of people to succeed on a specific role inside a certain culture, but you can also predict what you call the affinity, professional affinity, between two people. For example. It can be between one person and their future manager or between different members of the team, because we think that is the three basic question we have to ask ourselves when we hire somebody is can the person do that job within that team in the broader context of that company culture? Chad: So in that vein, in many cases that doesn't lend itself to diversity, because you have a lot of the same types of people and the same types of teams. So what do you do to ensure that you're not creating more bias? David Bernard: Yeah. The bias come when you, when you utilize the data that are not really related to future performance. For example, we all know about the Amazon case and everything, but the fact is that when you look at personality, the different factors are very well distributed across the population, regardless of age or gender or ethnicity, origins or things like that. So yeah. And every time we create a predictive model, you analyze your people, automatically we create a predictive model. And after we test it, the prediction model, against all our database to be sure that there are no bias. And if we identify, for example, one specific criteria as a teaser that could lead to a biased decisions, we get rid of that criteria. Sometimes it can lead us to have a bit less predictive model, but we are sure it's fair for everybody. So we took that decision. Joel: In a world that's becoming more automated, there's less how people's behavior and who they are as a person. It's more about let's get the skills assessment, let's get what they are on terms of their resume. Whereas you guys go beyond the resume. So my question is, in a world that's getting more automated, do you guys get squeezed out of that future, or do you see yourself as part of the automated future of recruiting? David Bernard: No, I think we will not get squeezed out of that, because what will remain when everything will be automated or almost everything, every task? The human factor. And we strongly believe that the way we can continue to create a real difference in the world we are going to live in is by reaffirming our humanity. There are some things that a robot can do, for example, to create a connection, a bond with somebody, to influence somebody, there are lots of things. And our role is to automate the maximum of task that we can automate and also to let the time for the recruiter for example, to spend more time, more quality time with their candidate, not just a formal discussion like that, but to spend more quality time with them, with less candidate, but more quality oriented. Joel: And can you break down the pricing model of the product? David Bernard: Yeah. It's based on the number of users you have so far as a user, a recruiter, basically, or someone who manage internal mobility, and it starts at 15,000 per year for three users. If you add the AI component, it's 10,000 more. So yeah, that's range of price. But we also have an offer you can buy directly online, starting at $430 per month with no engagement. And you can assess as many candidates as you want. Chad: So in that assessment process, what is the process? Can it be a gamification model? Can it be taken by text? Can it be chat bot? Or is it just plain forms, the usual form? David Bernard: To invite a candidate, you just enter the email address or you send them a link, they click on the link, they create a profile in 20 seconds approximately, and after that they enter a funnel, and they have the two first, they have different propositions, you just have to click on it. And for other one, the last one brain, concerning mental agility, it's more games and they can do it on a tablet, on a mobile, on their computer, whatever. Chad: All right. David Bernard, everybody. David Bernard: Thank you very much. Thank you. Chad: Big applause! Tristen: Hi. I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, Chad, and his goofy friend Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here. They made me say that. Tristen: The most important part is to check out our sponsors, because I need new track spikes. You know, the expensive shiny gold pair that are extra because, well, I'm extra. Tristen: For more, visit chadcheese.com. #TAtech #LIVE #Assessments #Predictive #DeathMatch #AssessFirst

Welcome to Death Match North America 2019 - part three of four. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Arran Stewart, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Job.com - what an amazing url. Death Match took place at TAtech on September 26th, 2019 in Austin Texas with a room full of TAtech practitioners. The bar was open, drinks were going down smooth, and the judge's questions were on point. Enjoy - right after a word from our sponsor... Death Match made possible by Alexander Mann Solutions. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies strengthen their workforce and broaden their market reach by hiring talent in the disability community.​ Chad: Welcome to Deathmatch North America 2019 part three of four. This Chad and Cheese Deathmatch episode features Arran Stewart, founder and Chief Visionary Officer at job.com. What an amazing URL. Deathmatch took place at TAtech on September 26, 2019 in Austin, Texas with a room full of TAtech practitioners. The bar was open, drinks were going down smooth, and the judges' questions were on point. Enjoy, right after a word from our sponsor. AMS: Death Match is brought to you by Alexander Mann Solutions. Hiring great people is no easy feat. There are new obstacles around every single corner, and your competition for that talent is intense. Together we need to be bold in our approach to tackling these challenges. Alexander Mann Solutions can be your bold next step. With a team of nearly 5,000 people around the globe delivering market leading recruitment, outsourcing, and a talent consulting services. And in early 2020, Alexander Mann Solutions will unveil an exciting new digital solution that will disrupt how you connect with job seekers and hire the best fit candidates. To learn more about how Alexander Mann Solutions is working with talent acquisition professionals around the globe, visit alexandermannsolutions.com. That's alexandermannsolutions.com. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time or the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Peter Weddle: All right. You've not been to a TAtech event before, you are in for a memorable treat. You're not here to see me, so without further ado, let me introduce podcasters extraordinaire, Chad and Cheese. Chad: Raise that drink everybody. So, thanks first and foremost, thanks Peter and TAtech for making sure that we had alcohol in the morning because a lot of us got in late. We need that. Yeah, keep the party going. So, Deathmatch, who's seen a deathmatch before? This is our third deathmatch. There we go. That's why you're here, right? Deathmatch, really a variation of firing squad. This is more the onstage live version. So, obviously, if you're listeners of the podcast, I took out firing squads with every single one of these pitches today. Chad: Without further ado, today we have four startups. They will have two minutes to pitch. After those two minutes, we have a stunning panel of judges who includes Cindy Songne from Talroo, Quincy Valencia from Alexander Mann Solutions. Woohoo! Give it up. And Robert Ruff, Sovern, Sovern Technologies, everybody. All amazing sponsors, and we love them. All right, that's three out of four. We've got one more. He's sweating it. I can see him out there. Arran Stewart from Job.com. Arran: Good morning. Joel: Can you two arm wrestle before? Are you ready? Arran: I'm ready. Joel: In three, two, go. Arran: Job.com is an automated staffing solution utilizing artificial intelligence and Blockchain technology. We deliver a perm placed candidate 70% than a contingency service solution, White Glove. Our candidates are given a 5% salary signing bonus when they get that job with job.com, and we take 2%, making it a total fee of 7% charge to our clients. We are a technology focused system utilizing artificial intelligence in a way for predictive in order to allow clients to retain their staff. We focus on unconscious bias within gender, and we also have Blockchain technology that allows us to verify candidates when they come through the hiring process. We are focused towards digital recruitment and we are the future of digital recruitment for the benefit of candidates and clients. Done. Joel: And I'll help you out. You can learn more at job.com. Arran: You can indeed, yes. It's actually quite hard to do in two minutes, even though I did it good on your show, Joel: So, I'll ask this first question real quick, how did you come by the job.com domain? Because it's kind of good. Arran: Acquired the business. So, job.com had been a job board in the United States since 2001. The company came up for sale on the market in 2017, and my team and I acquired the business September 2017. Robert Ruff: Blockchain. Arran: Yeah. Yes. Genuine Blockchain. Well, actually, no. So, being brutally honest, we use the very crude version of Blockchain in the beginning, so we use the private Hyperledger fabric system on AWS. And it was just a way of us creating a contractual agreement between us, the client, and the candidate so that we had ownership of them if they apply for a job for the next 12 months, akin to terms as a staffing agency, which isn't particularly exciting for technology. Arran: The secondary level that we introduced was called public G20 smart contracts. And they actually work in what's called proof of authority supernodes, which means we can do 1300 transactions per second publicly, and it only costs us 1.3 cents on gas in order to store the record. So, it is actually scalable because if you tried to do on ERC-20 contracts, it wouldn't be. But our actual prize jewel prize, which I did bore you on the call with, is that we're introducing trustocracy and meritocracy scoring. We're calling it Equifax for Resumes, and what it means, it's just utilizing the same behavior that we've always done online, which is I invite people to LinkedIn, I recommend them on LinkedIn, but there's no third feedback loop from employers to say that that person actually is good for what that recommendation was or they actually have worked at this particular company. Arran: So, we've introduced the same process on job.com. We actually reward job seekers by inviting their contacts. We give them five bucks for every person they bring on board, and we give them 100 bucks for every person that gets placed. We give them extra 50 bucks if they verify someone to say, "Hey, yeah, Chad and Cheese know everything about recruitment," and they get hired for that. That feedback loop then crystallizes a score on Blockchain, on a public Blockchain, says, "This person actually can do what they say they can do in meritocracy, and this person gave an accurate recommendation." This is trustocracy, and we provide that to our customers. Cindy: What's the process where a candidate to upload their resume? Arran: So, it's exactly the same as what they're used to doing on something like Indeed or any of the other platforms, they just go to the site, they upload their resume. We don't actually allow search. It's all based on match, so it's a passive solution, typically, because we're acting as a staffing agency. We're not a job board. And what it is is for those passive candidates, or active ones, there'll be given jobs sent to them based on matching their resume, and they can choose to apply and go through the application process. There's some stages on our platform that would be similar to what you've experienced through an app contracting system. However, we do work with many app contracting systems as well through two-way XML, but the candidate, really, their hiring process is exactly the same. But the reason we give a signing bonus back to them is because, "I'm the person with the skills, experience, education. I apply for the job. I'm the one that aced the interview, and that guy made 20%?" it doesn't work for a millennial workforce, and I'm sorry to say that I am a millennial, as we discussed before. So, we believe that the lion's share should actually go back to the commodity, which isn't a commodity, it's a human being, and that's the process that they go through. Quincy: I like that concept. I think it's really good. Arran: Thank you. Quincy: You talked about a meritocracy and a trustocracy, and you're getting referrals and recommendations and they did actually work there. How is is any different than someone doing a recommendation on LinkedIn? Arran: Great question. It's the third part, which is, when an employer hires someone, so let's say I've invited you to job.com, you're one of my friends and you sign up, and then it pauses your resume and says, "Hey, you know about recruiting." And they ask me, "Does this person know about recruiting?" I say, "Yes." Okay. There's a preliminary recommendation and referral between us. When you then get hired by another employer on job.com, go through that process, and that employer retains you after your 90 days for that skill set that they hired you for, it then crystallizes that you can actually do that skill, because they've kept you, and that the recommendation I gave was actually accurate, and that's that trio recommendation that happens. It's then stored on a Blockchain record. Arran: Because I could pretend and create a fake profile for a Fortune 500 and say I work at Bank of America, which actually happens very often on LinkedIn, give a recommendation to my real profile, and say that I was actually there or I actually have these skills. And without the input of someone like Bank of America to say, "Yay" or, "Nay," it's difficult sometimes, and that's one of the problems that happens with traditional solutions. So, we've introduced a system that's basically three ways. It's verification from the person that invited you, it's verification of the person that got invited, and then it's a final verification that crystallizes the score by the actual employer that takes on that person afterwards. Quincy: And is there some sort of active participation the employer has to have to verify the person's still there? Arran: They do indeed. Yes. Absolutely. And how we do that is very crude, is if you help us, then we give you extra discounts on your further hires. And nine times out of 10, most employees want to help with that because they're also bought into the fact that they want... Statistically, you can look how 85% of candidates lie during the hiring process, and 46% of them fail in 18 months. It's a huge problem for employers. So, they're actually glad to have an opportunity to not only verify that this person's real for themselves, but for the rest of the employment ecosystem. Quincy: So, how often is that chain broken? Meaning, somebody doesn't come back and your not doing the third step? Arran: Oh, yeah. Quincy: And is there any way anybody knows that? Is there some sort of something on the site saying this person is not completed? Arran: There's no score reveals for someone unless they've had the third link done, so, you can't say that... It will not tell a client that this is a verified profile unless that third link's done. Absolutely. Because, again, that would just have abuse. And there is a drop-off. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I mean, look, I'm not going to pretend that we're like the oracle of answers for this stuff. We are absolutely not. We're just on a digital journey to improve the industry, and so we're working at the moment, but there's huge drop-off on it still. People that aren't following it up, and we're very much active to make them do it. But I think we're in Industrial Revolution four right now, and everybody's looking for new ways to hire top talent, who they're going to hire, the future of work. So, we're trying to introduce things and methods and technologies to actually just gear towards the future of recruitment. Quincy: You said there's huge drop-off in answer to my question. Arran: Okay. 80%. Quincy: What is it? Arran: 80%, roughly. Quincy: Thank you. Arran: So, I say 20% of candidates do it. So, yeah. Joel: I want to talk about trust for a second. So, in a traditional job search environment, a job seeker would go to a job board, which you are not. They would see job postings from some companies they know, some that they don't. They would then apply, typically. They would go to the company's website. So, the trust would be would be built on, "You're just a middleman to get me to the company." Whereas, your site is, "Give us your resume." So, to me, that's a very different behavior for a job seeker, so how do you plan on overcoming that? And I think there's a little bit of a trust issue. Maybe a monster.com or Indeed could get away with that because more and more people know them, but job.com, although it's a great URL, they don't know you. So, how do you overcome that trust, or are you getting your resumes from somewhere else and it doesn't really matter if people upload or not? Arran: So, great question. So, it's kind of the chicken and egg scenario, which is, we have clients, and I can name, them people like Coca Cola, Emphasis, Zoom for example, that use us. And they place their jobs on the platform, and we go and work with all of the leading people out there through the friendly guys at Appcast and stuff like that and other channels like Monster, to attract talent to these jobs. Those people apply for the job as they would if we were a staffing agency, and we take them through that process. And then, once we have a verified candidate go through our process, because in order to gift them their signing bonus we have to take their details for tax, W-9s, all of that stuff. We then ask them the question to then refer and add people to the sites. That overcomes the trust part. Because imagine if Joel invited Chad to a platform and said, "Hey, I just earned $4,000 by getting my last job there. You should sign up too." That's how you overcome the trust part and gain the passive signups. Robert Ruff: Question. It's kind of a softball, but what's the worst thing about your platform? What are the things that you're trying to fix? Arran: I think there's an education piece. There's a big education piece. So, the worst thing about our platform is, I'm giving you the highlights, but I'll be brutally honest, like with technology, anything, we are still very much developing and improving and growing this system and we're learning on the way. And one of the things we learned fantastically is, since 4th of June this year, we've had 3,700 individual companies sign up on their own back onto job.com to use it, and not a single one of them has done a successful placement from the back of it because they don't understand how the system works. It requires us to have these actual intervene relationships with Coca Cola, with Emphasis, with Talent Fusion from Monster. We partner with them and power their jobs. Arran: Those relationships work, but the organic signups and people like that, they still don't quite get it. They think we're a job board because it's called job.com, which is totally understandable, so they come to use it. They think it's just free to post. Their find out that it's actually technically not free to post, it's going to cost you 7% of the person's base salary. We bridge the gap between job boards and staffing agencies. When, on the odd occasion, a job board doesn't work, what's your alternative? A 20 or 30% fee to a staffing agency? Where is there a middle ground? And that's what we offer. But people don't quite understand that yet, being brutally honest, on the organic side. Robert Ruff: So, you mentioned that 85% of candidates lie in an interview. Arran: Yeah. Robert Ruff: Would you agree that 99% of employers do too? Arran: I would, yeah. This is one of the things, as well, and this, being honest with you, there's a lot of blasphemy that goes around on both sides. And one of the things we want to overcome with the scoring side of things is not just making sure a candidates true, but making sure a small business is true. But also allowing things like, when I give a review, let's say on a review site like Glassdoor, "I actually did work there or I actually did do an interview there," rather than just, "Oh, I'm going to be brutal, and don't like someone or maybe write something a bit slanderous," because it's unfair. So, yeah, I'd say that there's just as much blood both sides. Definitely agree with you. Robert Ruff: Okay. So, you are self-admitted millennial. You're giving money away. $5 here, $100 here. 5% of the 7% goes back to the candidate. Is 2% enough? Arran: Great question. So, our average fee for our 2% is just shy of $1,600, and it's based on volume and it's based on ratios. So, arguably, there'll be people in here, some very experienced people that I know who own job boards, and they will tell you that, maybe, they get 50 bucks for a post. They might get 100 bucks, they might even get 20 bucks if they're doing high volume. Robert Ruff: Well, that's a post, not a hire. Arran: I know, but that's a post. But how many of those posts do they do until their clients get hired? So, their clients hire. So, what we are is we're an alternative, which is, statistically, if we get paid 1,600 bucks when someone gets placed, can we do that across? Would it take 20 adverts in order to place one person? And if that does happen, then you're on the same numbers as what a job board operates at because that job board's still got to attract talent, it's still got to engage it, it's still got to get them to apply, and that's pretty much all we've got to do. But you've got one huge carry in your favor, which is, "Hey, if you do this, you're going to earn a 5% salary signing reward," which, statistically, we see a much higher conversion rate. So, yeah, there is margin in it, yeah. Robert Ruff: So, it's got to be volume? Arran: It's all volume. Robert Ruff: It's got to be volume. Arran: And when you say volume, it's volume in staffing terms. It's volume in staffing terms, so statistically, based on some numbers that we projected, we're enrolling up companies at the moment. So, I'm buying out staffing agencies as we speak. We bought three staffing agencies this month. And if we do a million placements in a year based on this volume play, then you'll do 3 billion in revenue, and you're doing about 500 million in margin. And that's how it works. So, can we get to the first milestone, which is 100,000 placements, which is 8,000 people a month? Joel: If the award for the show was the grandest vision, you would win. Arran: Yeah, I know. That's fine. Joel: Unfortunately it is not, so- Arran: You've got to have a big dream guys. Joel: ... I do applaud you. Arran: Go hard of go home. Joel: If you're going to dream, you might as well dream big. Of course, big dreams require big dollars. Arran: They do. Joel: So, talk to me about your series plan of investment, marketing strategy, global growth. Talk about just a macro 30,000 foot view of that. Arran: I have 388 shareholders. I am backed by Falcon Capital and I'm backed by Garden State Securities, and I'm about to close another very significant round with a major $10 billion fund. We are halfway through our S-1, and we are planning to go public by the end of Q-1 on NASDAQ next year. And I am buying staffing agencies, and I have an open checkbook to roll up staffing agencies to the tune of 150 million in board revenue over the next six months. And I've already bought 30 million of it in the last two weeks. That's how we're funding it. Cindy: What's the plan for the staffing services? Arran: Pardon? Sorry. I'm so sorry. Cindy: What's the plan for the staffing services? Why are you buying them up? Arran: Why? Because you absorb their revenue, you introduce your technology into their processes, you make them use the artificial intelligence, you make them use the Blockchain service. There's two ways of doing things. It's buy or build, and build is also a fantastic way, but build is slow. Whereas, if you've got a model that people buy into like major Fortune 500s have with us, monster.com's Talent Fusion, RPO, SAP, we are a [foundry 00:19:02] finalist. They're reselling us now to their existing customer base. So, buy, because it's faster, and that's exactly why. Chad: Okay. Blockchain, for anybody else. Arran: Yeah. Chad: Okay. So, iCIMS has also a grandiose vision of creating profiles on the Blockchain passport, right? Arran: Yep. Chad: So, if you're doing it, they're doing it, all these, but they're all supposed to be one record, right? Arran: Yep. Chad: Are they all feeding into one? Tell us how that actually works if some of these big companies are also having the same vision. Arran: Who's willing to give away the data for free? I am not interested in holding the data of a verified profile for just my own purposes. I am more than happy to provide a fee to anyone in this room for free so you can query at any time to make sure someone's real. But in return for the query, I would like to have the data in order to take a person through that process to verify them, and I'll give it back to you for free. I am your Equifax. Now, iCIMS is a different scenario. We have a fantastic and very deep close relationship with iSIMS. Sadly, I cannot tell you about that one, but you will read about it in the press. So- Chad: Tease. Arran: I'm not a tease. You can't give everything away. But what they are doing is very, very sophisticated, and so are we. And it takes the collaboration and working of- Chad: Cool. Arran: Give it a few days. Gentlemen, it's been a real pleasure. Chad: Arran Stewart. Arran: My pleasure. Chad: Job.com! Arran: Thank you. Thanks so much. Chad: Thanks so much. Announcer: This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. And be to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more, visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah, you're welcome. #DeathMatch #TAtech #Matching #Blockchain #Jobcom #Startup #LIVE

And the winner is ... The competition for Death Match dominance was hard-fought, bloody and mind-blowing, but at the end of the day, only one company was left standing. Enter Seekout, whose founder, Anoop Gupta, brought his A Game to Austin and took home the championship chain. Enjoy this Alexander Mann exclusive.​ PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Chad: Welcome to Death Match North America 2019 part four of four the grand champion edition. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Anoop Gupta founder and CEO of Seekout. Death Match took place at TA tech on September 26th, 2019 in Austin, Texas with a room full of TA tech practitioners, Chad and Cheese double fisted Micheladas while the judges took aim at their last target. Enjoy, right after a word from our sponsor. Joel: Death Match is brought to you by Alexander Mann Solutions. Hiring great people is no easy feat. There are new obstacles around every corner and your competition for talent is intense. Together we need to be bold in our approach to tackling these challenges. Alexander Mann Solutions can be your bold next step with a team of nearly 5,000 professionals around the globe delivering market, leading recruitment, outsourcing, and talent consulting services. And in early 2020 AMS will unveil an exciting new digital solution that will disrupt how you connect with job seekers and hire the best fit candidates. Joel: Now is the time to create purpose built solutions focused on solving your unique challenges when it comes to engaging and hiring the people your business depends on. To learn more about how Alexander Mann Solutions is working with talent acquisition professionals around the world. Visit alexandermannsolutions.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 a breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Peter Weddle: All right. If you've not been to a TA tech event before, you are in for a memorable treat. You're not here to see me so without further ado, let me introduce Podcaster's extraordinary Chad and Cheese. Chad: Raise that drink everybody. So thanks first and foremost, thanks Peter and TA tech or making sure that we had alcohol in the morning because a lot of us got in late. We need that. Yeah, keep the party going. So Death Match, who's seen a Death Match before? This is our third Death Match. There we go. So you know, that's why you're here, right? Death Match really a variation of firing squad. This is more the onstage live version. So obviously for of the podcast, check out firing squad every single one of these pitches today. Without further ado, today we have four startups. They will have two minutes to pitch. After those two minutes. We have a stunning panel of judges who includes Cindy Songne from Talroo, Quincy Valencia from Alexander Mann Solutions, woo-hoo give it up, and Robert Ruff Sovren Technologies everybody. All amazing sponsors and we love them. Chad: All right, you can hear the music. Get ready. We have a new Anoop Gupta from SeekOut. This is the anticipation. He's building anticipation. There it is. Oh, there we go. Sucking up to the judges. Very good. Buttering up the judges. Looking good. Are you ready? All right Joel, are you ready? Anoop: Ready to be here. I am Anoop Gupta, co-founder and CEO of SeekOut. We are a startup in the Seattle area. Every company is going through digitalization. They need to hire developers, engineers, scientists, first to simply just survive. If they're not going to go to the digital age, they're going to fail and not to thrive. Now the people that you're hiring here have some of the worst LinkedIn profiles. They don't list a lot of information, many of the profiles are simply missing, they don't even have the profiles, and also diversity is very important for this particular audience. Anoop: And so LinkedIn, the product that everybody else uses simply doesn't suffice for this very critical piece of talent. So the solution that SeekOut is building. The first thing we do is we build aggregated whole-person profiles. So we not only take the LinkedIn information if it exists, we combine it with what they've done on GitHub, we take it for what papers, patents, all of the information, bring it together, and then we infer properties from that. It might be gender, you know ethnicity, it might be the coder score, it might be programming languages, frameworks they are familiar with. Anoop: The second aspect is an intelligent search engine because how you write your job description, what are equal in things, how do you find the same person on a get hub site? Okay, what is listed. So there's a very smart ML AI engine there to do the matching. The third big component is hyper-personalized messaging. You tell a developer you rock in Java and you think they're going to respond to you? Zero chance. Right, so we can hyper-personalize based on these rich profiles, what they do ... we are used by some of the largest companies in tech industry and pharma- Chad: Stop! Anoop: And banks. Okay. Everywhere else. So ... thank you. Joel: First, I think it's worth mentioning that you were once a direct hire to Bill Gates, so to see you come in in that fashion was very entertaining for me with that knowledge. There's some real questions about how you get LinkedIn data. There's some legal cases. How do you get access to LinkedIn? Are you paying LinkedIn to get it? Are you scraping? How are you getting that information from them? Anoop: Basically what for use on the LinkedIn side is public profiles and there are many providers off the public profile data and what the legal precedent that's building is public profile is public profile data. That information is owned by the candidates. And then there is a lot of other data we get from Google, Bing, GitHub, you know, we have a deal with Microsoft and papers patterns so there's a lot of stuff we get. Joel: Okay. So knowing that legally, you know, it seems like there'll be a precedent to say these are public profiles and you can get information, but there's also some reason to believe that LinkedIn does not want people to get this data and playing a game of Whac-A-Mole with how do I keep the spiders, you know, on their toes. How do I change, you know, URL structures, information structures. And I think knowing that Microsoft owns LinkedIn as well as GitHub, which you get GitHub data as well, does that impact your business and do you think that LinkedIn will win that game of Whac-A-Mole and keep the scrapers off their site? Anoop: I personally don't think LinkedIn will really follow the Whac-A-Mole. They got into pretty big trouble with Haiku and from monopolistic ... so you know, they are just a lot of issues in following that strategy. LinkedIn is hugely growing their business on advertising, marketing, everything else. That's the biggest growth opportunity and I think it helps them to have innovation happening on top of their platform. Quincy: Good morning. Good morning question. So I heard what you said and I hear where you get your data from. And I think it's a really interesting concept, but I don't really understand your business model. Are you creating a database of these candidates? Anoop: Yes so we- Quincy: How are you marketing it? How do you get the candidates? How are you getting people to go to SeekOut to get that information? Anoop: So you know we have 450 million public profile, 16 plus million GitHub data, 87 million people that papers patents. So this is our database that we have where we have looked at that, analyzed it, indexed it's the best search engine on top of that, the business model is, we sell licenses today like LinkedIn. So you know, we have licensed prices of three thousand five thousand and $10,000 per seat license. And then we also getting into enterprise wide licenses. Quincy: Got it. And how do you verify accuracy of the profiles that you're creating? So how do you know if you say Anoop Gupta has 10 patents or has written these papers? There's more than one Anoop Gupta out there. Anoop: Yes. Yes. So there is actually DPI and I'm involved in that too. In general there's a trade off called precision versus recall. You can match me totally, exactly a hundred percent confidence or 90% confidence. So we understand those confidence levels and we picked thresholds of, you know, very high confidence that they are the right match. Quincy: And one more thing for me cause he keeps saying things that prompt new questions. I understand tech and engineering is your focus, but I also saw on your site you're also focused on diversity. Can you- Anoop: Yes. Quincy: Talk about that a bit please? Anoop: Yes. So we infer diversity for women, for African Americans, Latinos, veterans and things like that. But the way we think about diversity first is insights. You need to understand that you know ordinary company, you need to understand competition. You need to understand for roles. So we have very rich talent pool insights in the platform so you can understand all of that. Anoop: Secondly, we give you filters so you can find women candidates, African American candidates. Totally we have a blind hiring mode that reduces unconscious bias. Everybody becomes a cat, the names gets removed, the email to get redacted. So you can always do all of that. When you share this information with the hiring managers, you can turn blind hiring mode on. So you are nudging them towards unconscious bias. And finally we are also a messaging platform so you can message in, you know, ethnic gender appropriate ways when you're reaching out. So it's a pretty comprehensive solution. Chad: So being pretty comprehensive solution, especially when you're dealing with all of that data. How are you actually going after companies? What's your market strategy in being able to really sell this product? Is it straight to recruiters? Is it talent acquisition, RPO? Where's your focus on the sale side? Anoop: So we are not focused on RPOs today. Our focus is directly to enterprises, it's on the largest enterprises in retail and tech and banking are our customers. It is a both bottom up and top down strategy. So I was at SourceCon right before this and you know, lots of people are fans. So in their keynotes et cetera they talk about how SeekOut is an amazing solution. They go to their managers. We also go directly to directors of TA of HR and sell from that. Chad: So RPO and staffing really understand tech and tech stacks and this data inefficiencies much better than talent acquisition. Right? Because it's their business. TA it's their job. So why did you make that decision not the focus on the actual quote unquote professionals versus-? Anoop: So one is we are only a two year old company and you've got to start somewhere and you know, that is where we have started. That's where we saw early success, that's where we had connections. We've had from the limited conversations with RPOs because they're so large. So actually there are small RPOs who are customers that is there. The decision process, the cost sensitivity. So there's just a bunch we don't understand our fault and many of your here. I would love to chat with you afterwards show you the solutions and see where we can be a fit. So great question. I love to have connections afterwards. Cindy: That was the same question that I would have and it was more that the RPOs are proactive. They're not waiting for the candidates to come to them. And it seems like your system would be better for those that are actively recruiting people rather than the talent acquisition folks no insults needed. But for those folks who tend to wait for the candidates come to them. Anoop: So no we are not active so we are much more passive. So you know for most of the TAC is totally passive. So you go and find candidates on our system and then you reach out and hyper personalize it. Cindy: Right. And that's what I'm saying an RPO recruiter is more proactive. They will use the system to go to it. Yes. My other question is how do you keep it fresh and do you, are you I guess two questions. How do you keep it fresh and also are you marketing to a job seeker candidates also? Anoop: No. So we are not marketing to job seeker candidates while on the freshness pipe we try and keep it roughly every three months data within three months that is there. And that is a lot of effort, energy, money that is spent on making sure that's happening. Cindy: Okay. Thank you. Robert: I want to ask again about the integrity of the data that you're pulling on. So you're augmenting data that ... starting with let's say a profile from LinkedIn and then you're going out and you're finding other sources. Anoop: Yes. Robert: I'm going to challenge you on that and I want to see if you'll give me a little more specific answer. Anoop: Yes. No of course. Robert: We had an employee that was Ken Smith for years. And every time we heard this story about how we can actually aggregate all this stuff, we're like, okay, go find Ken and bring in all his other data. It was never Ken, it was always Ken, but not that Ken. Anoop: So one is as I will say that is the issue of recall and precision. Right? So it means if you're getting the some Ken that's recall you're finding a Ken. Precision is the wrong one. So you get negatives. So out of the 16, 17 million profiles we have on GitHub, we have matched only three to 4 million for the rest we have made the trade off. The information of GitHub is still there. You can filter by all the filters, you can filter by diversity, you can filter by a lot of things, but we have not found their LinkedIn profiles. So we don't just go and say we're going to aggregate those candidate pools out there. They work as they are. You can find them, but we don't match unless we feel confident enough. Robert: How do you match people with patents? I mean a patent database is not going to have your contact information. Anoop: Okay, so what pattern databases have, so if you look at me, my background, so you'll find me with the Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Microsoft, SeekOut. So if you understand my LinkedIn profile in terms of those associations that I've had, if you understand the name, if you understand some other things, you can do a good job of doing that. So these are again very hard. So I'm totally with you. These are very hard challenges and this is what we are trying to solve. So that we can and enable and empower recruiting organizations to succeed. Robert: Good answer. One last question. Anoop: Yes. Robert: What is it that is the value of bringing in this augmented data from the standpoint of, isn't it true that if you ... I looked at your profile on LinkedIn, if you have patents, you're probably reasonably proud of that and aren't going to put it out there. What are you learning in addition from those patents that you go out and you'd link somebody to? Are you doing something else with that data? Anoop: So there are two kinds of things. So you know, self-driving cars are pretty hot. Robert: Right? Anoop: Okay. Look at the LinkedIn profiles and say who's worked on LIDAR sensor integration fusion. You'll know very little about them. But if in fact a part of our target is not just recruiters, it's also how do hiring managers get involved, right? Means they know they can look at that and they can look at that information and say, this is the right person I want. We have a single block. You say everybody who's published in CVPR, this is the computer vision main conference with a single click, you can get the 12,000 people who have published there and you can look at them in a variety of ways. So that is not for everyone. So we do a lot of horizontal things that are relevant for all organizations, all recruiting, including diversity. But then we are also very specialized where we can find you candidates that are going to transform your company. Joel: Outside of, you know, LinkedIn sort of banning you in some form, form or fashion. The second greatest threat I see to your business is the commoditization of profiles. It seems like there's never a week that goes by on Hacker News where somebody you know, has gotten access to phone numbers and Facebook or other information that's really specialized. And it seems to me like anyone who can put together a Chrome extension can create a competitor to your business. So prove me wrong that this isn't a commodity business that you're in. Anoop: Okay. So just one is I'll tell you, we spent close to on the Azure elastic search $1 million dollars a year. Okay. Building a search engine that is quick, fast, we'll give you the insights, we'll do everything else is nontrivial. It's not kid's play. My co-founder was one of the main people behind the Bing search engine and how you build a good search engine versus kind of search engine. There is a big difference between those things. Okay. The kinds of insights we give you and how quickly we give you those insights. Anoop: LinkedIn can't do it. They can't do it with the same amount of flexibility. They can do it with the same amount of speed. So at a surface level, and there is a lot of noise. So actually the part that I will totally take from you is there's a lot of noise. A lot of people raising their hand. They say, I do AI. People don't understand what the hell AI is. Okay. There's lots of different kinds of AI there's data science in AI ... so all I'm saying is, so our hope of differentiation is that given our backgrounds, given our deep techs, you know, we will be able to deliver. Joel: So am I hearing you say that the data is out there, but the way that you guys aggregate it, serve it up is the differentiator. Anoop: Yeah, you know, so if you look at a GitHub profile, how do you say what this person is good at? It's nontrivial. Right? And your being able to infer that. So you know, I don't know how much time they have as you see on my favorite AI example is you're a mid-Western firm making ball-bearings, right? Your board says hire machine learning people instead of people examining it, you know, do it automatically. What kind of, you know, personally are you going to hire? Anoop: Do they be contributing to TensorFlow careers? Do they know how to use it? So JDS are terrible the way they are in today. The matching is terrible. How you engage with people is terrible. So there's good work to be done across all of those things. And where we are headed now is not just passive sourcing. There are lots of old candidates, you know ATSs. How do you surface them up? How do you update them? How do you search on the latest things? They are referrals, they are inside internal mobility. So there's a whole top of the funnel with a unified view that you can optimize in serving people and creating value. Quincy: Have you done any testing on the accuracy of what you're pulling in? So validation of the profiles that you're pulling in is the first part of the question. And the second is how does your system handle contradictory information? So if there's one thing on LinkedIn, for example, and something else on GitHub, how is it managing through that? Anoop: So my answer in some senses, these are fundamental trade offs in any system you build in terms of accuracy, UpToDate, contradictory. In general there is, sorry, I'm getting a little geeky but you know things called recall precision and those kinds of trade offs. You decide and you make bets and trade offs. You can show both kinds of information in the end profile. You say you know the here's the LinkedIn profile, you can go there, you can go as LinkedIn. We have combined them. You can give us feedback. If we did a bad job, we can fix it up later. So through a combination of social processes and choices that we make eventually we hope we are creating a lot more value for you than the trouble we are causing you giving us feedback. Robert: You're an ex-Microsoft people. Anoop: Yes. Robert: And as it's been pointed out, you're pretty much trolling down the Microsoft stack. So if I'm a customer of yours, my concern is that on one hand Microsoft decides to cut you off in some way, either directly or indirectly. Or two they decide that, "You know what? We don't need these guys out there. We're going to buy them". How do you assuage those fears of how this is going to be worth my investment over a longer period of time? Anoop: I think as a customer, what you have to worry about is if they cut off our data sources in a way which can legally take a long time, et cetera, that are you going to be ... so you know, whether we refund you whatever way we your return, your investment. If they acquire us, they acquire us because they are getting unique value that they're not finding. So you know, I have acquired lots of companies while I was at Microsoft. It's all visibility by decision that a large company makes. And you know there's focus issues that a large company has. There's nothing that Facebook or Google couldn't do. Startups exist because we take risks, we make investments, you know, we create things. Then they say, you know, instead of doing it ourselves, these are the right people. Robert: But isn't there also a build buy or kill decision sometimes? Anoop: There is a build, buy, kill decision but it depends on ... so one is, so I'll just mention it and I know this. We know people at the highest levels at ... you know Satya and I used to sit on the same leadership team. So killing will be in a very interesting for- Robert: You have assurances is what you're saying. Anoop: No, we don't have assurances. There's no assurance in life. There is no assurance in life. You're not looking for that. But you know, we will have a dialogue and there are lots of other players who can also benefit from us, not just Microsoft. Chad: Okay. So GDPR is obviously a big, a big issue for some platforms because they didn't plan for it. GDPR is not in the U.S. yet but certain versions are in California now that will pretty much we believe, become the standard throughout the world. How are you going to attack really that that piece of GDPR? Because that data is, once again, it's public data, but it's also my data because I'm the candidate, right? Anoop: Yep. Chad: So how do you deal with that? Anoop: Yeah, so GDPR is an important policy on privacy. We totally respect that. Now there's still a lot of ambiguity. So you know, you can say, Hey, do you have your profile? I need to explicitly ask you for permission, right? There is legitimate interest. What's called in the GDPR which says, you know, you don't have to this thing for jobs, you can do that. There's something called unreasonable burden where if you're going after 400 million people, you don't have to get permissions individually. You have to be sensitive to do you have sensitive, you know, personal information? Or you have more generic factual information that is there? There is when I'm contacting them, so there's a lot of color to it. We have it on our policy and we have it working with people. Thank you so much. Chad: Anoop Gupta everybody! Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad and his buddy cheese. This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit chadcheese.com. #DeathMatch #TAtech #AI #Startup #Matching #Seekout

Welcome to Death Match, Europe 2020, part two of four. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Nick Gray, founder at CloudRPO. Unlike most Death Matches, this one took place online (thanks COVID-19!). But never fear! The home bars were open which meant the pints were full and the Chad and Cheese snark was flying. Pontoon Solutions provided third judge Craig Rhodes ... and warning: that dude is a pit bull. Enjoy this exclusive TAtech presentation, powered by Pontoon Solutions. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. Chad: Welcome to Death Match Europe, digital edition. This Chad and Cheese Death Match startup contest episode features Nick Gray, founder at cloudrpo.com. Digital Death Match took place during TAtech Europe Digital on April 28th with a virtual room full of TAtech practitioners. Judges, Chad and Cheese were joined by Craig Rhodes of Pontoon Solutions. Who will become Death Match Grand Champion and walk away with the Death Match Chain of Champions, you might ask? Well, you're going to have to listen. Enjoy, right after this word from our sponsor. Joel: Hey Chad. Chad: What's up? Joel: Dude, all the cool kids are talking about RXO and I just have one simple question. Chad: Yeah. Joel: What the hell is RXO? Chad: Typical Cheese. Maybe if you'd stop dogging on millennials for two seconds, you'd learn something. Joel: All right. Stop busting my chops and break it down. Chad: Okay. RXO stands for recruitment experience outsourcing. Joel: So not rotten xenophobic overlord? Chad: No. And nobody does RXO like our buddies over at Pontoon Solutions. Joel: Poontang Solutions. Chad: Okay. Stop being a 13 year old for a second. Pontoon Solutions transforms the overall candidate experience and recruiter experience with cutting edge technology and optimize processes. Pontoon Solutions doesn't just lift and shift operations, they architect better ones. Your brand and people deserve to be priority one. Your talent deserves more than just being a part of the process. They deserve a great experience. Joel: I like it. But what kind of companies need RXO? Chad: Well, if you're a hiring company who spends way too much on recruitment agencies and maybe have weak talent pipelines or you just have a nonexistent or bad employer brand and employers need to do more than transform their current recruitment processes, they need consistent and tech driven experiences. Those companies, pretty much just about all companies out there because they suck at it, they need RXO. Joel: Nice. And with people on the ground in over 32 countries and six delivery centers Chad: Damn. Joel: Pontoon Solutions strikes the perfect balance of global and local support. Dude, I'm down with RXO, where can I find out more? Chad: Hit them up at pontoonsolutions.com and transform your talent acquisition strategy now. Joel: Roger that. www.pontoonsolutions.com. Chad: Poontang. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: All right. Are we ready? Welcome to Death Match kids. Joel: Whats up? Chad: The quarantine version. That's right. Generally, you see us on stage, but this time you get an opportunity to actually see us from our glamorous home. Joel: So pretty. So pretty. I showered today Chad, how about you? Chad: You're asking a little bit much. Joel: I'm sorry. TMI. My bad. Chad: Yeah. For all those TAtech stalkers out there, welcome to Death Match. Death Match is a competition that pits for innovative, early stage companies against one another. Four enter, and only one leaves anointed as Death Match Grand Champion, with the ability to wear the Death Match Chain of Champions. Joel: Should I go pull it out? Chad: You should never pull it out. Joel: I won't pull it out. It's too intimidating. Chad: Yeah. Today you'll get the opportunity, Nick, you're going to get the opportunity to be judged by our guest judge, who is Craig Rhodes. Put your hands together kids. Right. Craig is a technology business person, partner at Pontoon Solutions. Joel: He is a person. Chad: Tell us a little bit about that. What is that Craig? Craig: I get to play with tech, really. Clients come to us and we built technology for them, and I get to say who goes in on tech stuff. No pressure there. Chad: No pressure? Craig: No, of course. Chad: Especially being Cloud RPO. We also have judge Cheese, that's Joel Cheesman kids. You all know him. Y'all love him. And then myself, judge Chad. Joel: Hello. Chad: Both of us co-host The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Here's how Death Match will work for all you newbies, Nick from, not SBOJ but Cloud RPO Joel: We'll get to the bottom of that in a second. Chad: You will have two minutes to pitch Cloud RPO. At the end of two minutes, you're going to hear the horn. Then Craig, Joel, and myself with it, we'll hit you with rapid fire Q and A until your 15 minutes is up. 15 minutes of fame, my friend. Be concise or you're going to be penalized. Start dancing and you'll get the bullshit button. That's exactly right. Joel: Let's hear the bullshit button. What's it sound like? Chad: Yeah. Sounds like SFX: Get it prepared. Warning. Bullshit alert. Chad: All right. All right. Joel: You don't want that. Chad: So any questions Nick? Nick: No, I'm good. Chad: Excellent. You ready, Joel? Joel: I'm ready. Two minutes. Chad: Let's do this. Joel: Starting. Nick: So, thank you for having me. As our tagline, recruiters organized suggests, Cloud RPO is a new platform which manages interaction between employers and recruiters. Cloud RPO aggregates candidates from recruiters in the same way that Rightmove in the UK or [Zulu [00:06:13.06]] in the US aggregate properties from state agents. Our proprietary algorithms allow employers to safely search data for recruiters in order to provide seamless access to the best tab. Cloud RPO is not a recruitment marketplace like Bounty in the US or Hiring Hub in the UK. Using the same property analogy, this is the equivalent of posting your property requirements and asking you state agents to send you houses. By allowing employers to search candidates from recruiters, RPO is a new concept in the recruiting space. The benefits of this platform shift are obvious. By removing the need for a preferred supplier agreement, employers gain access to a wider pool of talent whilst ensuring compliance and spend. Employers can browse details from any recruiter in a safe environment and choose whether to engage. The platform managers duplication and eliminates conflict between suppliers and cuts down on sales calls in general noise from recruiters. Candidates details are partially redacted, which provides a significant boost for hiring quality and diversity. Cloud RPO is a freemium product, it's totally free for employers. So why would recruiters engage? Recruiters have a 24/7 shop window to advertise their candidates. They can therefore concentrate more on sourcing good candidates than making spective sales calls. Data is processed by algorithms, not humans, so Cloud RPO is transparent. Recruiters can make applications in confidence. We know that employers don't really want to use recruiters to fill their roles, they'd rather that direct applicants respond to adverts who use their in-house talent team. However, the size of the recruiting dictates that they still do. Cloud RPO simply seeks to make this process as time efficient and thorough as possible. The ultimate aim is that employers can have seamless access to the best talent, easily comparing the best applicants for their roles, be they direct or from recruiters. By simplifying the dealing with recruiter space, Cloud RPO allows employees to concentrate on direct sourcing. Please visit cloudrpo.com to find out more. Joel: That was tight. Chad: On. Joel: Well done. Nick: I've been doing it for about two hours. Joel: You read very well. Chad: Nick's always tight. All right Craig, go get him. Craig: So, one of the key things for me is getting people to adopt new technology, but anyone that's tried to do this, it's pain, real pain. So what can you do to help me get your technology adopted for my clients? Nick: Well, I think the key point is that there's a lot pain in dealing with recruiters already. In terms of managing a PSL and having people that ... Because basically not every recruiter is always going to be on your PSL. So you're still going to have thousands of other companies that are calling you up asking to get on your PSL, et cetera, et cetera. So by adopting our solution, that makes the whole thing a lot simpler because it cuts a lot of time and pain out straight away therefore, it makes sense to do it. Obviously, change is difficult and you're totally right to point that out, but it makes sense to do so. Joel: Nick, I got to ask about the name change. You knew I was going to do it. Nick: That was quick. Joel: Yeah. It's probably my only question Chad: Right up front. Joel: ... That matters. You did a Firing Squad with us a while back and you were SBOJ, S-B-O-J.com. Nick: Jobs spelled backwards. Joel: Jobs spelled backwards, which I didn't know that when we first talked, and when you clarified, that was nice. But we had fun calling you spooge and all that other good stuff. Talk through the name change. Why the name change? Why did you go with Cloud RPO? Nick: Well, it's difficult because obviously, I think it's quite new and it's a bit of a change in the system of how people deal with recruiters totally. So I thought that we could have something that was totally random and a different name, even if it was just a cool name, which I think sboj.com is kind of cool. But, the problem we've had with talking to people is like, "Well, I don't understand the name. It doesn't really make any sense." And people are getting a negative view of things before we've even talked to them about what it is or try to explain it in any way. Hence we've gone to this RPO thing because we do have a lot of ... We've added some extra stuff where we can have more of the RPO details. So, companies can be specific about the recruiters or the recruiters have to sign up to certain policies that we add to the system, et cetera, et cetera. So we can function like an RPO. Obviously, that's something we can expand in the future. And really it's a case of when we call somebody up and say, "We're cloud RPO," people are like, "Oh, okay. I know what an RPO is, but I've got no idea what SBOJ is. You might as well have turned up from Mars." Joel: And all the kids love cloud, so the millennials are hitting this right with Cloud RPO. Nick: Well, exactly. The logo's a little bit sort of Skype, I'm not really sure what [Crosstalk [00:11:02.18] Joel: Yeah. You don't see clouds in any logos. Nick: No. There's no clouds anywhere on it. We don't have a lot of clouds in the UK anyway, so we're standing here, today. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So RPO, recruitment process outsourcing. Craig knows a little bit about this, Pontoon Solutions. And I would assume that you would be focused on trying to partner with those organizations because they're already doing that, they more than likely need your tech because of some of the obstacles that you were talking about. Who are your currently partnered with in the RPO space to be able to actually drive the adoption that Craig was talking about? Nick: Well, as you know, we changed our name like two weeks ago to more of the RPO thing. Chad: But you haven't changed the model though, right? Nick: No, the technology, that's the same thing. Chad: Right, right, right. So it's always been [Crosstalk [00:11:58.25] Nick: But we've always created the technology in the sense that we could partner with other people, be it, whoever is. It's an original technology, we have our own algorithms that process things completely independently from what anybody else ever does. So it is a model that people could easily adopt, people could work with this however it goes, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a thing we're open to and obviously it's lovely to speak to Craig, I didn't really know that many people Pontoon anyway, there you are. Chad: You're welcome. Nick: And we, really it's a tech piece. We're not a company allowing people to process information they've already gotten the more efficient way, we try to make the whole sourcing piece more efficient in the first place. Which is kind of working. Chad: You're using RPO in your name. What kind of research ... You went from jobs spelled backwards to RPO, which is an entire industry, right? What type of research did you guys do to say, RPO Just makes sense? Number one. And number two, I would automatically think that you guys were pushing on the partnership side with those RPOs to be able to help them drive a bigger EBITDA. Nick: Yeah, certainly. Certainly, to answer number two, that's something that we're very keen to look at, see where we are, because obviously it's taken us a lot money to develop our product from a technical perspective and we're effectively getting into the place where we need to try and roll it out, get people using it, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, we're open to that. In terms of research, your answer to your first question, it's a new thing, and when we spoke to a lot of people in the industry who understood what we were doing, they're saying, "Well, it's kind of like an RPO." It's like a technical RPO rather than having a managed portal or something tha people put their stuff on and it's a smart RPO in some ways. So that's why we start to go down that direction now. Obviously I think RPOs do a lot of fabulous things and many things that we probably don't, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't integrate with them or do some of that stuff in the future. Chad: Got you. Craig: I have a question Nick. Nick: Go ahead. Craig: If you're opening up a job to basically the entire market using your technology, how do you staff every man and his dog submitting every man and his dog? That's a lot of work for the client to go through or me sat there as a recruiter going, all right, I've got 4,000 applicants today because every agency not on our PSL, is trying to get on the PSL. Nick: Yeah, that's a really good question. And that's a growing piece as well because the more data we have through things, the more we can decide the agents that are good in certain areas and we can score them and work them, et cetera, et cetera. But also the ultimate idea is that employers search, so rather than a recruiter sending a load of staffing, which might be great or might just be totally random, an employer can search that person. So it kind of turns it on its head. In the same way, as I explained with estate agents, you don't just say, "Oh, I need a house. Send me houses." You just search for the house you want in the first place. Right? Joel: Your service is free for employers. Talk to me about your revenue model. Nick: Our revenue model is certainly on the perm side is effectively if you make a placement, the recruiters bill us, we bill the employer, we take 10% off and then we pay the recruiter. Effectively, we take a 10% cut of the fee, so unlike recruitment marketplaces where people have to sign up, they pay a sign on fee, et cetera, et cetera, ours is a freemium thing where they only basically ... It only cost them money when they make a successful placement. Joel: Right. And I say there's a 90 day stay period before money exchanges hands and Nick: Yeah. Well, we have short terms with employers. I don't know obviously, how quickly they'll pay us, but we will then pay, we guarantee the rebate as well. We guarantee the rebate, so we keep the money from the recruiter until the rebate period has passed. Effectively, we invoice the ... Depending on the terms that the employer suggests. It's like Apple, when you download something from Apple, you don't get a choice to whinge about the terms and conditions, you either do it or you don't. So in that way the employer can stipulate the terms, which means that they can play in the environment, play in the sand pit successfully, well, safely. Chad: Going back to, again, some of the things that Craig was talking about. First and foremost, submitting, you can submit anybody and everybody, number one. Number two, how do recruiters do that? What's the current process methodology for recruiters to actually get candidates in the database? Nick: Currently, essentially, we've got a process where we basically check the data for duplications. They add certain things. We look at about a hundred fields [Crosstalk [00:17:04.23] Chad: But how do they get them in? You're past what I'm talking about. Nick: Basically, they have to add them. Chad: So it's manual? Nick: Yes. Chad: Okay. Nick: Obviously, there was some elements of it which we can parse, et cetera, but a lot of the categorization has to be manual because otherwise it isn't specific enough to allow people to search. Because the data you get from searches relates to how well it's put in in first place. People don't put it in decently. Chad: Isn't that what's parsers are for? Isn't that what parsers and your algorithms should be doing? Because you're looking at the prospect of garbage in, garbage out with human beings. So, isn't that why we're moving toward AI and machine learning to try to get rid of all that crap? Nick: Yeah, of course. So, parsers can finalize the adding the CV bit and they can read the CV bit that people add. Chad: Right. Nick: It's a bit like a LinkedIn profile really, but the categorization has to be done by the recruiter. So the recruiter points out where they think this person, their skills are best done, because without doing it's a bit impossible to do. Chad: What about managing duplicates? We talked about this on the last show. How are you currently managing duplicates? Number one. And number two, how are recruiters getting credit for the candidate? Because again, I could go back and put a two year old database in the system manually at this point, but somebody else could put better data, better candidate data in, and I win because I was first. Is that still how the system works? Or is it better, more full profile win? Nick: The system works on a 28 day period. The first person who adds to the data, assuming that we match the data, which is based on, as I say, about a hundred fields. I'm not going to go into that because that's all proprietary stuff. Assuming that the first person would own the candidate for that 28 day period, but if they basically didn't do anything with them, they had no interviews, nothing progressed, then it is free to be moved on to a different recruiter. Which is better in the system now because what happens is people add things to like a specific portal and the data's just locked in there for six months, they're not really sure if they own it or not, et cetera, et cetera. For recruiters, this is a big step change, I think a step in the right direction. Craig: So is ownership done in the whole incense, if one recruiter brings a candidate on, they own that candidate regardless of job clients or is it per client, per role? Nick: It would depend on the candidate. One of the processes is that we identify if the candidate is a duplictae or been on there before, and if the person is new, then yes, you're right, they would own that person for 28 days in respect to anyone. Because obviously, the employer can reverse search, so they can look for a person who has to be attached to an agent. Now we have a whole set of rules and algorithms that govern who is it, who owns that application based on past applications, based on time served, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a big complicated system and that's [Inaudible [00:20:14.19] Chad: And there we go. Joel: And that's the bell Nick. Nick: Yeah. Joel: Thank you for being the first ever live streamed or recorded streamed Death Match participant. For those out there that want to know more about you, where do they go? Nick: So really just cloudrpo.com. It's new and we've done a beta test, and it worked really well, in fact, better than we thought it was going to. We're just at the point where we just changed the name and we're just getting things going. So, reach out and get in touch and we'll see what we can do. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Pretty good. Chad: Thank you so much Nick. We out. Joel: We out. Nick: Thank you. Chester: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast, 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. #RPO #Staffing #Technology #DeathMatch #TAtech #Pontoon

Welcome to Death Match, Europe 2020, OPTIMAL PITCH This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Daniel Fellows, founder at Optimal. Unlike most Death Matches, this one took place online (thanks COVID-19!). But never fear! The home bars were open which meant the pints were full and the Chad and Cheese snark was flying. Pontoon Solutions provided third judge Craig Rhodes ... and warning: that dude is a pit bull. Enjoy this exclusive TAtech presentation, powered by Pontoon Solutions. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Chad: Welcome to Death Match Europe digital edition. This Chad and Cheese Death Match start-up contest episode features Dan Fellows, founder at Optimal. Digital Death Match took place during TAtech Europe Digital on April 28th, with a virtual room full of drunken TAtech practitioners. Well, maybe not drunken, just Joel and me. Judges Chad and Cheese were joined by Craig Rhodes of Pontoon Solutions. You might ask yourself, who is going to be the Death Match grand champ? Who is going to walk away with the Death Match chain of champions? Well, you got to listen to find out. Enjoy, right after this word from our sponsor. Joel: Hey Chad. Chad: What's up? Joel: Dude, all the cool kids are talking about RXO and I just have one simple question. Chad: Yeah. Joel: What the hell is RXO? Chad: Typical Cheese, maybe if you'd stop dogging on millennials for two seconds, you'd learn something. Joel: All right. Stop busting my chops and break it down. Chad: Okay, RXO stands for Recruitment eXperience Outsourcing. Joel: Ah, so not rotten xenophobic overlord. Chad: Uh, no. And nobody does RXO like our buddies over at Pontoon Solutions. Joel: Poontang Solutions. Chad: Okay. Stop being a 13 year old for a second. Pontoon Solutions transforms the overall candidate experience and recruiter experience with cutting edge technology and optimize processes. Pontoon Solutions doesn't just lift and shift operations, they architect better ones. Your brand and people deserve to be priority one. Your talent deserves more than just being a part of the process. They deserve a great experience. Joel: I like it. But what kind of companies need RXO? Chad: Well, if you're a hiring company who spends way too much on recruitment agencies and maybe have weak talent pipelines or you just have a non-existent or bad employer brand. And employers need to do more than transform their current recruitment processes, they need consistent and tech driven experiences. Those companies, pretty much just about all companies out there because they suck at it, they need RXO. Joel: Nice. And with people on the ground in over 32 countries and six delivery centers. Chad: Damn. Joel: Pontoon Solutions strikes the perfect balance of global and local support. Dude, I'm down with RXO. Where can I find out more? Chad: Hit them up at pontoonsolutions.com and transform your talent acquisition strategy now. Joel: Roger that, www.pontoonsolutions.com. Chad: Okay. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: We're live. Hello everybody, the TAtech stalkers, welcome to Death Match. We're here today with Daniel Fellows from Get Optimal. Quick Death Match intro for all of you newbies. Death Match is a competition that pits four innovative early stage companies against one another. Four enter, only one leaves anointed as Death Match Grand Champion, with the ability to wear what Joel has around his neck. Joel: Yeah, baby. Chad: That's right kids. That's the Death Match chain of champions. Let's go ahead, introduce the judges. First and foremost, we have guest judge Craig Rhodes from Pontoon Solutions. Joel: Craig. Chad: Craig's the guy who researches recruitment tech for a living. Daniel, you're going to want to watch out for this dude. We have judge Cheese, that's the big gun with the chain thing. Judge Chad, and we are the co-hosts and badass podcasters of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: ChadCheese.com, baby. Chad: If you're not listening, I don't know what your problem is, chadcheese.com. Here's how Death Match works. Daniel is going to have two minutes to pitch Get Optimal. At the end of two minutes, you're going to hear. Then Craig, Joel, and myself will hit Daniel with a rapid fire Q&A to finish up the 15 minutes stint. Daniel, be concise or you'll get penalized. Start dancing and you'll get the bullshit button, so don't do that. Joel: Can we pin down real quick? Chad: I think Dan's already pinned. I hope he is. Joel: I'm saying you. Chad: I know, but that's Joel: Okay. There we go. Because Dan and his hair need to be the highlight of this interview. Chad: That's exactly right. If you haven't seen, Dan show off real quick, he's already showing off. He has the branding in the back and he has the awesome Chad and Cheese t-shirt. Joel: Yeah, what a suck-up. Goddamn. Chad: That I believe one of his kids made. I think his kids, I mean they're quarantined. Joel: The brats have no shame to suck-up to a couple of Americans, Jesus. Chad: Right. Daniel, do you have any questions before you start the pitch? Daniel: No, but I know where the three of you live. So that's what I'm going to say. Chad: And luckily with that haircut you're not very scary. Two minutes start. Joel: Ouch. Starting now. Daniel: Hi, I'm Dan Fellows, the founder and CEO of Get Optimal, the on demand job ad optimization platform. From my time as marketing director at Indeed and now with Optimal, I'm solving a problem I know a great deal about. We all know that job ads is basic common sense, but the thing with common sense, it's not very common. 30 years later, we're still collectively doing the same thing with the job ads. The challenge with badly written job ads is the right candidates can't find them online. But somehow the wrong candidates always apply for your roles. With millions of new active job seekers entering the candidate driven market. Now more than ever, you need to automate and optimize your job ads. Think SEO for job ads. It'll start with Optimal and your humble job ad. This is what we do, we're a single point solution that does one single thing in your workflow. Daniel: Optimal provides an on demand job advert optimization platform where you can receive up to a 30% increase in your job ads performance, leading to rise in inclusive applications and a greater quality of candidates. Of course we optimize for grammar, spelling and gender bias [inaudible 00:07:02.27] platforms we all know about already in the market place. The point of difference is we optimize for how candidates search and every job ads returned optimized for search and SEO. Search Consultancy got about a 60% increased quality of candidates they have come into their business since they started working with Optimal. They've also saved about 600 hours in recruiting and having to optimize job ads. We've seen a 23% increase in filling applications across our UK, US, Australia clients since we introduced. Optimal built an enterprise level technology platform, VONQ, Joveo, Idibu, Recruitics, they don't have an AI lead ad optimization platform, that's why they're working with Optimal. It takes 50 minutes to be onboarded. There's no training or no IT security integration needed. Working with Optimal is about more of what you love doing, not writing job ads. We'd be humbled and honored to get your vote today. So pop over to Get Optimal and say hi. Joel: Nice pitch. Chad: Very nice. Joel: Kept it tight. Chad: Very nice. Joel: Get him Craig. Chad: Get him Craig. Craig: Okay, I'll start off easy for you to begin with. Whenever I am talking around technology to my stakeholders, the first question they ask me is, "Oh, how much is it going to cost me?" But we don't work like that, we work in value. I have to tell them the value a product's going to bring. So really quickly, 20 seconds, I'm in front of a stakeholder now telling him about Optimal. You need to tell me what value you bring as quickly as you can. Daniel: Sure. We bring a high quality of candidates, Craig, because we know how candidates are searching for jobs. Reduce your cost to hire, reduce your time to hire. Most importantly we save the recruiters doing the part of the job that they absolutely hate, writing job ads. All of those are measurable and you get your ROI back within one month of working with Optimal. Joel: Daniel, we talk, so listeners of the show will know Dan that we talk a lot about Google for Jobs. When you're talking SEO, are we talking Google for Jobs optimization or are we talking sort of the general main Google search organic results? Or are we talking about both? Daniel: We're talking about both, absolutely, 36% of all searches on Google are for jobs. Why wouldn't you optimize the greatest asset, the greatest piece of collateral that you have, which is your job advert including Google, Indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, the way the algorithms work, where we're kind of experts on that. They're not going to prioritize your job ad if it's not highly optimized for candidates search, because if you're searching for Nike trainers and you get Reebok adverts, you're not going to go back, are you? Absolutely the same ad job seeker search. They want the job, the location, salary all within [inaudible 00:09:42.28] eight seconds return to them. So optimizing your job ads will absolutely work across traditional search engines, but also across job boards that have the algorithm elements. Joel: So talk me through, maybe you mentioned it, but you talked really fast and you talk with an accent, so I'm a little bit slow. Is this an automated process? Is it a consulting process? Is it a manual thing? Is it a combination? I mean, if I just throw in a job description, do you highlight where I need to correct things? Do you automatically change the job description? Talk to me about that. Daniel: Sorry, I talk fast and I get excited, which my wife can testify to. We built a publishing platform, so within two minutes you can upload your job ad to Optimal. You then press optimize. That goes off into the AI powered machine. We're part AI, part human intervention. That advert is then optimized for SEO, for search and for gender bias within four hours. That's then returned to your Optimal platform. And also the moment we're emailing attachments as well. It's part machine, part man and woman will move more to the machine solution as we learn, but clearly as we know that costs billions of pounds to do. Joel: We know from Google for Jobs that things like salary information is important, location and some of these exact sort of meta characteristics. You can't require companies to upload a job and have that data, can you? And if they don't, doesn't that impact the optimization component? Daniel: Not at all. There's two ways to do upload the job ad, with Optimal we used a lot of creators to help us build this because we had to be simple, to be quick, had to be frictionless. You can upload the job title, the location, salary and the job type and press optimize. If you're within Craig's business, you can then copy and paste the actual full description in there. Either way is fine or either with some of our larger clients, they will bulk load up 50 to 100, 200 adverts at any one time. That will go into the system equally. And then we'll optimize for how candidates search for jobs. Unlike some of our larger competitors, you don't have to do anything. We optimize all of that for you and return you the fully optimized job ad. I'm probably the only person in the world that's excited about job ads. Craig: I've been on your website, I've researched about it, and I'll talk on the automation. What is it you actually automate? Because for me, an automated process involves ATS, VMS, career site. It's a stock all working together. When I read automate, what I want to hear back is I pass you a job, you do your magic and that job appears on my career site. Daniel: Yeah, that's a brilliant question, Craig. We've been going since September, 2019. I'm sure you guys know, you're successful guys. It costs money to fund a start-up, [inaudible 00:12:28.01] with nothing, we're up to 23 at the moment. What we do with partners like Joveo, with like Idibu, with Recruitics that I mentioned earlier. We're looking at that automation piece. We're joining the ecosystem around recruitment. Craig you raise a job maybe internally, you then go to any one of your ATS solutions and within there, maybe as [inaudible 00:12:49.24] is doing at the moment, within there the button is Optimal. You're then going to optimize your job ad before you publish it out across your one, 200, 2,000 different sites. The automation piece is coming, what we had to do we've done quite successfully is made sure we've tested, we've learned a better rate of our product. We know it works, we know it delivers significant value. We're solving a problem within pretty much every business and staff in the world. Daniel: Now is the exciting time. We thought Brexit was bad but obviously COVID-19 is coming in as well. We'll survive this touch with, and yeah, we'll be looking to integrate with some pretty awesome companies that share our passion for the solving problems of people for giving you a solution that does that end to end solution. And it's interesting, a lot of these brilliant companies we are working with, not one of them has got the content optimization piece nailed.. Chad: We're talking about a partnership with Joveo. Can you explain how you actually partner with Joveo, because obviously they get the jobs then they're going to have to optimize the jobs and you're going to have to pass it back through. Or is that all integrated into one steady stream so that they're getting a feed of jobs, they're hitting you with the stream. How does that actually work? Because as Craig had talked about, there are several levels of integration. Most of the levels of integration that are out there are total bullshit. The ones that are actually a part of the system where I don't have to jump from this tab to that tab to this tab and it just flows through, that is a stack integration. Are you currently with Joveo really in a stack integration? Daniel: No, we're not. We don't have a stack integration yet because this takes time. But I suppose if you think of it as a shopping cart, you're adding the different sites that you want your job ads to be published out to. One of those options is to add Optimal in terms of that shopping cart. You press, you go to the buyout, the checkout and you purchase ultimately the job ad credits. The other way is thinking about it with programmatic platforms, which works for our benefit. There's always a lag. There's always a delay from when the jobs are being loaded or the jobs are being pulled into that specific platform, to when they're building out the media campaigns, buying the media as well, to when they actually publish that job advert. That lag works in our advantage. So you can think of it as a triangle, comes into Vonk, into a Joveo, into Recruitics. Then it hits Optimal, then go straight back into the platform, any one of those four platforms. They then publish those job ads now knowing that they're going to get a much higher quality of candidates. They're going to save media and also they can pass those savings back to their clients or their clients can continue to invest. Chad: And the recruiter has to do nothing through this process? Daniel: No, absolutely. There's different ways to buy credits as well. My CTO Warren Hobden, he's a great technology guy. We see problems and we see the way that technology can help solve them. So the roadmap, the vision is absolutely where we are and we're pretty much on that roadmap. Chad: Really quick. You mentioned one of your competitors, and I mean the big competitor that we all know that's out there is Textio. What's the difference between you and Textio at this point? Because obviously everybody Joel: Jobiak as well. I'd say Jobiak in there. Chad: Yeah. So what's the difference between you and Jobiak or Textio? Daniel: It's a great question too. What's the difference between us and Textio? I think quite simply we optimize how candidates search for jobs. Of course we optimize for grammar, spelling and gender bias, but we optimize the job adverts. If you're integrating a Grammarly, a Textio into your business, you still have to have the user, the recruiter or the business owner still creating the writing in the job ad. They're just prompting them to take away that word, add that word as well. The data and insights, and again, I've got great experience working in Indeed. The data and insights we utilize how candidates search for jobs. We take care of that end to end optimization piece. We don't just insert as a piece of software into your browser. We take that full end to end job advert optimization piece away from you. Joel: I'm always interested in start-ups and how their past experience was a catalyst for their current company. Obviously your experience at Indeed had some impact on starting this company. You saw a need, you wanted to fill it. Talk about that process, how Indeed prepared you for this. What are you taking from Indeed, if anything. Were they missing the boat on some of this stuff? Daniel: Yeah, I think. I've been lucky to work with some folks at Microsoft, I worked at Vodafone, I worked in the start-up, which when I was at there we were six of us, we then sold to [inaudible 00:17:33.12] in Canada for 420 million. That gave me a real taste for the sort of start of culture. But I realized I've always had pretty shy ideas to be honest. But I think working at Indeed really showed me how 99% of job ads are neglected. They're just the afterthought, they're not prioritized in the business. And having access to a lot of meetings with some great people and presenting the data, presenting the insights, which Indeed is the market leader. And I'm sure you've had that in your own career, you get to a point of frustration where actually you can't influence what you want to influence. So you've got a choice, you either continue what you're doing and get frustrated or you step away and you take on the learnings of the past 10 and 15 years and actually go and try to do something with it. Joel: Is it fair to say that your job postings are also optimized for Indeed search as well as Google? Daniel: Yeah. I think Indeed aside, what's the key two aspects, Craig, of a search engine? Its relevancy and its content. This has been 15, 16 years ago, we're putting clients [inaudible 00:18:33.27]. It's not ultimately changed. What candidates want is the job advert, which most reflects their interests, their passion, their pay, their location. We're optimizing Craig: I can tell you what clients want in this area, Daniel. And that's language capability. So how many languages do you work in? Daniel: We work in three types of English grade, American English, British English, and Australian English. Actually Kiwi English as well, that's quite specific. Again, of course if we had a bigger team we'd be rolling out to different markets. But we look at the market opportunity in UK. We look at what we've already achieved in US and Australia. But absolutely we've got partners that have got a lot of clients in that region. I've got a lot of good friends and contacts there from my days at Indeed. Absolutely, we'll be opening up to different markets. But the French and German market are very, very specific. They're very different with our candidates search for jobs and also the trend of people changing jobs is very, very low. Again, the business is just really looking at opportunities in these English speaking markets. Craig: It's a big problem for us at the moment getting that optimization that vendors like yourself do, but being stuck in English when we're a global company. Just interested then, do you not offer the SEO part of your technology in other languages or is it, so not gender biasing them, just getting the SEO out of that? Or is it just a complete, you only work in English? Daniel: Yeah, it's a full end to end service at the moment. There's new opportunities on the horizon that I can't sort of talk about and confirm yet. But yeah, once Warren and the team have really optimized and stabilized the tool which they have, then clearly we're looking at CV writing. We're not doing that today. But clearly the technology is very much able to enter into that sort of market as well, as well as doing additional languages. But today we've got a single focus and that's optimizing every single job ad for SEO search and gender neutrality that comes into optimal. Joel: Daniel, I'm going to let you out on this, breakdown your revenue model and your pricing. Daniel: The revenue model is subscription. Every client starts on a three month subscription, we then convert 98% so far of clients on to 12 month contracts. The more you optimize, the less you spend, relatively straightforward in terms of the model. We knew we can adapt to what clients need, big and small. Chad: Excellent. Joel: That's it. Chad: Thanks Daniel Fellows from Get Optimal everyone. Thanks so much Daniel. We appreciate it and we can see behind you. But if somebody wants to get in touch with you to talk about get optimal, where would they go? Daniel: Yeah, just above my really long hair, www.get-optimal.com. Joel: And with that Daniel, we out. Chad: We out. Daniel: Thank you guys. Take care. Chester: Thank you for listening to podcast 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 #DeathMatch #Optimal #jobs #JobDescription #TAtech

Welcome to Death Match, Europe 2020, SonicJobs. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features this year's champion Mikhil Raja, cofounder and CEO at SonicJobs. Unlike most Death Matches, this one took place online (thanks COVID-19!). Never fear! The home bars were open which meant the pints were full and the Chad and Cheese snark was flying. Pontoon Solutions provided third judge Craig Rhodes ... and warning: that dude is a pit bull. Enjoy this exclusive TAtech presentation, powered by Pontoon Solutions PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Chad: Welcome back to Death Match, Europe digital edition. This Chad and Cheese Death Match startup competition episode features, Mikhil Raja, co-founder and CEO at SonicJobs. Digital Death Match took place during, TAtech Europe Digital,on, April 28th, 2020 with a virtual room full of TAtech practitioners. Judges, Chad and Cheese we're joined by, Craig Rhodes of Pontoon Solutions. Who was drinking a Budweiser, what? I know you're asking yourself, who's going to be Death Match grand champ? Who's going to walk away with the chain of champions? Well, you've got to listen. Enjoy, right after, this word from our sponsor. Joel: Hey Chad. Chad: What's up? Joel: Dude, all the cool kids are talking about RXO and I just have one simple question. Chad: Yeah. Joel: What the hell is RXO? Chad: Typical cheese, maybe if you'd stop dogging on millennials for two seconds, you'd learn something. Joel: All right. Stop busting my chops and break it down. Chad: Okay. So, RXO stands for Recruitment eXperience Outsourcing. Joel: So not, Rotten Xenophobic Overlord. Chad: No, and nobody does RXO like our buddies over at Pontoon Solutions. Joel: Poon Tang Solutions. Chad: Okay, stop being a 13 year old for a second. Pontoon Solutions transforms the overall candidate experience and recruiter experience, with cutting edge technology and optimize processes. Pontoon Solutions doesn't just lift and shift operations, they architect better ones. Your brand and people deserve to be priority one. Your talent deserves more than just being a part of the process. They deserve a great experience. Joel: I like it. But what kind of companies need RXO? Chad: Well, if you're a hiring company who spends way too much on recruitment agencies and maybe have weak talent pipelines, or you just have a nonexistent, or bad employer brand. And employers need to do more than transform their current recruitment processes, they need consistent and tech-driven experiences. Those companies pretty much just about all companies out there cause they suck at it, they need RXO. Joel: Nice. And, with people on the ground in over 32 countries and six delivery centers. Chad: Damn! Joel: Pontoon Solutions strikes the perfect balance of global and local support. Dude, I'm down with RXO. Where can I find out more? Chad: Hit them up at, pontoonsolutions.com and transform your talent acquisition strategy, now. Joel: Roger that, www.pontoonsolutions.com. Chad: Poon Tang. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: And welcome to Death Match kids. Joel: Death Match baby. Chad: That's right. It's going to open up. Joel: Contestant, I mean, victim number three. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Who's going to win the chain baby? Chad: Yeah, so. Joel: Who wants it? Chad: For all the TAtech stalkers that are out there, watching us right now. You voyeurs, you bad little people. Welcome to Death Match. We're here today with Mikhil Raja. I'll get it. Joel: Don't call him Michael. Don't do it. Chad: CEO of SonicJobs. So quick, Death Match intro for all you newbies. Death Match is a competition that pits four-cum-four, innovative early stage companies against one another. Four enter and only one leave anointed as Death Match grand champion, with the ability to wear, what Joel has around his neck. That's right, baby. Joel: Who's going to come out of the thunderdome baby? Chad: Yep. So let's introduce the judges. First and foremost, our guest judge, his name is Craig Rhodes. He is the technology business partner over at Pontoon Solutions. And what that means, is he gets to play with cool tech shit all of the time. So, if you should be as scared of anybody, with regard to questions, it'll be that guy, which is why he's going first. Then we have Judge Cheese, that's Joel Cheesman and myself Joel: Keeping it real. Chad: ... Judge, Chad. Chad Sowash, Joel Cheesman co-hosts and bad-ass podcasters from the Chad and Cheese podcast. Now let's break it down real quick. How does Death Match work? So Mikhil, you have two minutes to pitch SonicJobs and at the end of those two minutes you're going to hear the horn, which is very annoying and Joel loves to play it. Then Craig, Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A, for the balance of the 15 minutes. Be concise or we'll just talk right through you. Don't start dancing or you'll get the bullshit button. Bullshit Button: Oh, come on now, that ain't even bullshit, that's horseshit. Chad: Are you ready? Joel: Your two minutes starts. Mikhil: Hi, I'm Mikhil. I'm the CEO and co-founder of SonicJobs. Over 65% of clicks on blue-collar jobs are from mobile, yet only 4.1% of those clicks turn into completed applications. Why the huge drop-off? Number one, candidates can't edit their CV when completing an application on mobile and uploading an existing CV is suboptimal, and often cumbersome too. Number two, the blue-collar mobile process and candidate experience is really poor, with multiple websites being one after the other, and legacy ATS platforms. Enterprise employers are therefore wasting advertisement spend on clicks which are not converting to applications. There's no solution that helps employers engage with millennial and Gen Z candidates effectively. At SonicJobs, we've created a mobile application with an artificial intelligence chatbot called Julie. Julie will chat to the candidate and in five minutes will create a beautiful one to two page PDF, CV. Julie will also recommend the most suitable jobs based on experience, skills and location. And the unique bit about this is that the candidate can apply for any of these jobs in just one click on their mobile. Versus the 4.1%, we deliver a 23.1% click to apply conversion, a five X increase on return on investment. And moreover, 32% of our candidates are unique and not on traditional platforms. We have a performance only paper apply monetization model and we integrate seamlessly with employers. We have over 200,000 jobs. We have over 220,000 candidates and we're growing fast. Joel: Thank you. . Chad: Nice. All right Craig. Time to time to hit Mikhil up. Craig: Okay. So, little thing you said that I really want to dig into, being a millennial. You say, "There is no solution for millennials." So take me through that. What do you mean there's no solution? I guess, how do you solve that? Mikhil: Yeah, so what I mean by that really is, there's no end to end mobile solution, which deals with enterprise jobs. So let's take an example, which you might know in the U.S or the UK. So, if you think about something like, there's kind of two buckets. You've got your traditional platform. So, in the UK that might be something like reed or totaljobs. And they deal with an enterprise, but the candidate when they go on there has to create their CV off, on a kind of PDF, or word, or whatever and then come on. So you've got this broken solution in terms of, starting that journey and completing that journey. And then you've got kind of, let's say, more millennial solutions, which are like job today in the UK or Merlin in the U.S. Except that they deal with SMBs and they don't effectively help that candidate create the CV and go through that entire process, which helps them apply for enterprise jobs. Chad: So you're saying the conversational piece? Mikhil: The millennial link with the mobile phone. Chad: So you're saying the conversational piece is really the big piece that is focused on millennials? Is that what I'm hearing? Mikhil: Yeah. The mobile combined with the conversational piece, yes. Chad: Okay. Craig: What about the experience here then? Because I can't imagine making a CV on my phone is easy. Writing about my skills, giving a bit of a blurb, here's who I am, I'm I typing on a phone compared to building on a computer. How are you improving that experience? Cause I can't see how Joel: There's the chatbot, the application process. Mikhil: Yeah. So, firstly it's the chat, but secondly, more importantly, Julie is recommending and suggesting, the key input. So, you're not having free texts that you have to type loads of stuff into. Craig: ... Okay. Mikhil: The whole nature of the way Julie works and the whole AI aspect of it is, we've mapped the entire blue-collar ecosystem in terms of roles and then also responsibilities that link to those roles. So for example, Julie will know, if you've worked in a particular company that you might have a specific set of roles. So if you've worked in a restaurant, you could be a waiter, you could be a bartender. But even within those, you could be a senior bartender, or a barback or a chef de partie, or something else. And Julie will suggest those and once you say, "Okay, chef de partie." Julie can go further and say, "Okay, well did you cut vegetables? Did you serve the waiter? Did you go further?" So the artificial intelligence part of that is, feeds into exactly that. And if you like, I can show you a demo of how that works given that this is a zoom call. Joel: Not today, you're not. Chad: Not today kid. Joel: Mikhil. Mikhil: Okay. Joel: A little bit of timeliness. You focus a lot on service jobs, hourly stuff, and those people are out of work right now and not in a state of getting employed anytime soon. So, is there a pivot in your future? Are you prepared for an economic meltdown like we're seeing right now? Mikhil: True. Actually, we are more or less flat month on month, at the moment. And even we expect to be going forward. And the reason for that is, hospitality and retail has really dropped, entirely. But healthcare cleaning, logistics warehouse, they've massively increased. So net we've actually remained flat and we think this is a really good opportunity for blue-collar overall and our platform in general where, you've got these two waves coming, which is currently as I described now. And then after the event, you're going to have hospitality events, retail hiring again. But then also all of these industries like healthcare, logistics, delivery, they'll continue to hire extensively. So, I think blue-collar is very much the focus, for 2020. And as a response to COVID, and I think our platform has a unique position within that. Chad: Well, I have to say, first off, I love Julie. Literally, that's my wife's name. So, it says on your website, "Create your CV in one minute and get hired in one day." I love that slogan, but that is one hell of a bar to actually try to get over. How do you know that 32% of candidates, are not on other job boards? How do you know that? What research do you have for that? Mikhil: Simple answer, we work with the job boards. So we know, it's a metric that we measure against, the job boards. So, when I mentioned the 200,000 jobs, and we started with mainly job boards, that we worked with. And they worked with us precisely for the reason of giving them unique candidates. So it was a core metric from day one and it continues to be now. And as we move across also to agencies and direct clients, it's a metric we track as well. Chad: How many downloads of your app to date? Mikhil: So we have over 220,000 candidates, have signed in and created a CV. Chad: Okay. Mikhil: So that's a more Joel: Is that just in the UK? Mikhil: ... In all across the UK, yes. Chad: Okay. Joel: Okay. Chad: So why are you forcing everybody into an app? Mikhil: Well, there's two schools of thought here. One is, you make it really simple and you do it on WhatsApp or something like that. And the other school of thought is you can create a more holistic experience. We believe that it's harder to get people to an app, but we can create a more holistic experience. We can help them create the CV, they can store their CV, we're even moving on to helping them, communicate with employers, which is something that blue-collar candidates find quite hard in terms of suggestions. So, Julie can be more comprehensive. Julie can be more supportive and we feel that's a more comprehensive, solution for the candidate. Chad: Well, you think employers are, it makes sense, I think for employers because they're going to need to hire. But for the actual job seekers themselves, you're asking them to download something that is not a routine and in everyday life for them. So that's interesting that you would force them into an app, as opposed to actually focusing on perspectively, engaging in a web app or what have you. Mikhil: Yeah, I mean Chad: Now for an employer, how long does it actually take for them to setup a job in your system, including pre-screening? Mikhil: ... So we deal with enterprise employers. So we'll integrate with the ATSs, or we'll take XML feeds, APIs et cetera. Typically that takes, just under two weeks, for us to get the XML integrated within the app and then go live. Part of that is Apple and Google take a little bit of time to approve the app. So there's a little bit of approval time, but, yeah, it's just under two weeks. It's typically the average time. Craig: How much do you charge for an API? Mikhil: We don't charge, there's no cost at all apart from Craig: Regardless of the ATS? Mikhil: ... Yeah, regardless of the ATS. We charge on, performance basis. So the whole point is we want to be a sticky partner, right? So we're integrating with you. We want you to advertise with us, not just once. Craig: Do you cover the ATS charge for the API as well? Mikhil: We do. Yes. Craig: Okay. Mikhil: So with broad being with Logic Mellon, Edibu, we've covered the cost, on behalf of clients. And that's Craig: It's a bold investment, because I know some of them go to nearly $10,000. So, that's bold for you to cover that. Mikhil: ... Yeah, I mean, obviously we only cover that when we have a client on the back of it, right? So we only cover it when we know we've got at least one client on that ATS. But we see it as part of a cost of scaling stock sales and marketing. Craig: Okay. Joel: So I want to sort of continue the marketing conversation and obviously expecting downloads of an app is certainly challenging. And maybe, in Europe, or UK that's not as much of a hurdle as it is in the US. But I'm curious, there's always the chicken and egg issue with job sites, right? You need employers and jobs and you need job seekers. So, talk to me about your marketing plan, what's working, what isn't, and how you expect to continue to grow in the future. Mikhil: Yeah. So because you've got this end to end mobile journey, we can advertise more effectively on Snapchat, on Instagram, on Facebook, than your traditional job boards. So your traditional job board, imagine you're I don't CV library in the UK, you've got a pot of money to allocate on web, which is Google. And then on, you might have some mobile or Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. Those platforms because their technology is web-based, they are much more efficient with their cost of acquisition on web, which is Google, than they are on Facebook and Instagram, et cetera. Now that's great. And that's an opportunity for us. So we've created technology, which is fully end to end, which means we don't use Google at all. We just use Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, other social young. Joel: TikTok. Chad: Finally. Mikhil: And we bring the candidate on, and the candidate has a seamless journey. And then they can apply for those jobs. So that's where our acquisition is unique and that's where, we were able to Joel: Which of those is the most effective? And what's your typical cost per acquisition on a job seeker? Mikhil: ... We wouldn't go into cost per position on a job seeker publicly. But, the most effective platform at the moment is Instagram for us. That is seasonal, we do have, Snapchat. TikTok is at the moment probably the least effective, although we think that will change at least in the UK, that we think that will change going forward. Craig: Who designed your adverts then on Instagram? You have a team that does that or did you just have a generic sort of image with some text on it for the client? Mikhil: No. We have our own team. And, I mean, that's part of a, let's say secret sauce. In terms of acquiring candidates is, we've built that knowledge in-house in terms of; the copy to use, the sort of audience to go to, the timings, the amounts to spend, et cetera. And what's a good... We measure cost per CV created. We're focused not on installs and sign ups. We want to know, okay, what's your cost per candidate coming all the way through, to be able to apply for the job? Cause that's where we get value. That's where the employer gets value, that. Chad: They have a full, meme creation group. So, when you talk about Mikhil: Yeah, we do. Joel: Chad doesn't mean moonwalk. Chad: ... You guys have a one click apply. Now, in today's landscape, is much different than three months ago, right? One click means most of these employers are going to get flooded with candidates, right? So from your standpoint with that flood, that ensuing flood, how are you going to ensure that that flood doesn't meet any hoards of candidates that are not qualified, that they're only getting the qualified candidates through the hiring process? Mikhil: So, firstly, I want to break down an assumption within that question and it's a question we often get. So I'll just break that down, which is that, candidates or employers sometimes tell us, "Well, why does a 4.1% conversion matter? We get lots of applications anyway." Right? And what that assumes is that all candidates are equal. But actually, the data that we have is that the most experienced candidates, the best candidates for your job are actually the most impatient. So, what you're doing with that is you're actually, by having an inefficient structure, you're reducing the quality. Yes, you'll get, you're getting a lot of candidates, anywhere in here you'll have more. But your overall quality is reduced by having an inefficient process. Chad: But that data is on an entirely different market than what it is today. Three months ago, I would agree with you 100%, but that's not the market we are in today. So you're using old data to be able to talk about UX that I don't believe is going to exist. Mikhil: Sure. So, let's talk about how it is now. I mean, most of our employers will have their own selection criteria. And even within the app, you can select your own criteria. So you can say, for example, we work with healthcare groups that are recruiting nurses. Chad: So screening is a part of the actual application process and that is dictated by the actual company itself. Mikhil: Exactly. And that is determined by, even the jobs that you see, on the apps. Chad: Nice. Good job. Joel: Thank you Mikhil. Chad: Mikhil Raja. Mikhil: Thank you. Joel: From SonicJobs people. Joel: And by the way Chad's, Julie as a chatbot too. Just so you know. Chad: She's a chatbot. Yeah. She's my favorite. Excellent, we out. Mikhil: Thanks for your time. Chester: Thank you for listening to podcast with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant, they talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out. #DeathMatch #TAtech #Texting #Messaging #hourly

Welcome to Death Match, Europe 2020, GRAND CHAMPION EDITION. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features this year's champion Alex Murphy, CEO at JobSync. Unlike most Death Matches, this one took place online (thanks COVID-19!). Never fear! The home bars were open which meant the pints were full and the Chad and Cheese snark was flying. Pontoon Solutions provided third judge Craig Rhodes ... and warning: that dude is a pit bull. Enjoy this exclusive TAtech presentation, powered by Pontoon Solutions. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Chad: Welcome to Death Match Europe Digital edition and The Grand Champion edition. This Chad and Cheese Death Match start-up contest episode features grand champion, Alex Murphy, CEO of JobSync.io. Digital Death Match took place during TAtech Europe Digital on April 28th, 2020, with a virtual room full of TAtech practitioners. Judges Chad and Cheese were joined by Craig Rhodes of Pontoon Solutions. This is The Grand Champion episode. Enjoy, right after a word from our sponsors. Joel: Hey Chad. Chad: What's up? Joel: Dude, all the cool kids are talking about RXO and I just have one simple question. Chad: Yeah. Joel: What the hell is RXO? Chad: Typical Cheese, maybe if you'd stop dogging on millennials for two seconds you'd learn something. Joel: All right. Stop busting my chops and break it down. Chad: Okay, RXO stands for Recruitment eXperience Outsourcing. Joel: Ah, so not rotten xenophobic overlord. Chad: Uh, no. And nobody does RXO like our buddies over at Pontoon Solutions. Joel: Poontang Solutions. Chad: Okay. Stop being a 13 year old for a second. Pontoon Solutions transforms the overall candidate experience and recruiter experience with cutting edge technology and optimize processes. Pontoon Solutions doesn't just lift and shift operations, they architect better ones. Your brand and people deserve to be priority one. Your talent deserves more than just being a part of the process. They deserve a great experience. Joel: I like it. But what kind of companies need RXO? Chad: Well, if you're a hiring company who spends way too much on recruitment agencies and maybe have weak talent pipelines or you just have a non-existent or bad employer brand. And employers need to do more than transform their current recruitment processes, they need consistent and tech driven experiences. Those companies, pretty much just about all companies out there because they suck at it, they need RXO. Joel: Nice. And with people on the ground in over 32 countries and six delivery centers. Chad: Damn. Joel: Pontoon Solutions strikes the perfect balance of global and local support. Dude, I'm down with RXO. Where can I find out more? Chad: Hit them up at pontoonsolutions.com and transform your talent acquisition strategy now. Joel: Roger that. www.pontoonsolutions.com. Chad: Poontang. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: We're back. Craig: It's heavy man. Chad: Oh, it's a Friday and Joel: Good workout, baby. Chad: ... low on beer. Okay. Joel: Very nice. Chad: Hey, we've got a new addition to the panel here. I love this. For all Joel: Craig, can I get fries with that shake from the drive-through right there. Chad: All about the shake. Joel: We have three Americans and I got to give the Brit a hard time. Chad: Yeah. So for all of those TAtech stalkers that are out there watching, we appreciate you tuning in. Welcome to Death Match. Today on this segment we have Alex Murphy, not Robocop, CEO of JobSync. Quick overview of what Death Match is for all of you newbies, Death Match is a competition that pits four innovative early stage start-ups against one another. Four enter the ring, only one leaves with the grand champion, chain of champions, which Joel Cheesman Joel: Underdome style baby. Chad: ... has around his neck right now. Let me go ahead and introduce the judges. First and foremost, our main goon on this, because he's the one who Joel: Pontoon hooligan. Chad: ... going to be beating you up Alex, I can't wait. We've got Craig Rhodes. Joel: He's still mad about the Revolutionary War. Chad: Craig Rhodes. And see what Joel's doing, he's firing him up for you man. From Pontoon Solutions, he's the guy who gets to play with all the tech and he's going to be answering all the deep, dark questions about your secrets, my friend. So that's Craig. You've got judge Cheese, Joel Cheesman, judge Chad. Joel: Welcome to the all beard episode of Death Match Europe. Chad: We are co-hosts and bad-ass podcasters of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. If you don't know us, I don't know what the hell your problem is, chadcheese.com. Here's how Death Match works. Alex is going to have two minutes to pitch his product. After those two minutes, guess what? Craig, Joel and myself will start rapid fire Q&A. I guess that's it. Are you ready, Alex? Alex: I'm as ready as I'm going to be I guess. Chad: Let's do it. Joel: What are you drinking Alex, before we start? Alex: A little bit of Sierra Nevada. Chad: Nice. Joel: I'd say it's a spirit in the face of the Brits, but the Brit is drinking Budweiser of all things, so I can't. Chad: He's like, "I can't believe you just said that." Joel: I got nothing. Chad: Let's do it. Joel: All right Alex, you ready baby? Joel: In three, two. Alex: All right, thanks for being here. Whether the unemployment rate is 3% or 30% companies need the best talent for their open jobs. When advertising their jobs, recruiters have two options. They can either have their application sent to them by email or they can send candidates to their career site to apply through their ATS, which increases friction and reduces applications by 75%. Based on Outcast data, 95% of those start down the apply journey don't finish. There is a better way and that's JobSync. JobSync enables both jobs and applications to be synced between ATSs like Taleo, Greenhouse and SuccessFactors with leading job sites like Indeed, Talent.com and even social sites like Facebook. Alex: JobSync makes it possible for employers to fully use the native apply features on job sites that capture a complete application including custom screening questions. And then have the entire application delivered directly into the ATS rather than the recruiters inbox. Job sites typically get more exposure to these jobs and then when they surface the jobs and search results, they will include call-outs such as easily apply, all of which generates more distribution and exposure for those jobs. More distribution means more applications and a native applied process means more high quality applicants. So what's the result? On indeed our clients commonly see a 3X increase in applications along with a 50% reduction in their cost per application. On Facebook we make recruiting on the social network actually work. We have clients that generate thousands of applications with an average cost per applicant of up to 90% less than their next best source. Our pricing model is straight forward based on the volume of jobs, $200 dollars per month. Joel: Thank you Alex. Get him Craig. Chad: All you Craig. Craig: I really want to understand how this works. I've been researching your site, but take me through the process. Now I'm Pontoon and I want to engage you with one of our clients, am I handing you my marketing budget to spend for me? Or are you linked in my ATS then deliver through Indeed? I really want to understand what your product is bring to me. Alex: Yeah. Our product is essentially a platform with prebuilt configurations to facilitate moving the application requirements or an application schema up to the job site so the application can take place there. We plug in to whatever your model is around doing the actual job management if you will. We plug into tools like Clickcast and Outcast to facilitate making it so that agencies and other buyers can use that programmatic platform to actually manage the buy. So we're not doing like the campaign management. All we're doing is facilitating the actual delivery and transport of the application once it's completed on the job site. And then we essentially translate the data as it comes out of let's say Indeed or Facebook, and we convert it into the format that's necessary to go into that customer's implementation of say SuccessFactors. And we post it directly into their workflow virtually in real time. When an applicant clicks apply, we get that data and submit it and the recruiter sees it within about 40 to 45 seconds. Craig: Have you delivered onto SuccessFactors already? Alex: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Craig: I'll give you that one because I've tried doing stuff in SuccessFactors, it's not easy. Alex: It's not easy. Chad: It sucks. Craig: It sucks. Alex: I mean, that's actually an important point. Our main focus is actually with the hard to do, hard to execute big scale ATSs. SuccessFactors, Taleo Enterprise, we're rolling out Workday within the next couple of weeks, plugged in and ready to go so that the application can take place where the candidate is rather than making the candidate go through this multi-step journey where they're entering data into CRM forms, they're getting blocked by a login form, which really only professional job seekers understand how to actually navigate through. We're taking out all that friction in the process. Joel: Alex, is it fair to say that you are what Indeed apply or connect with LinkedIn is on their site and you're putting that technology on an ATS. Alex: Yeah. Joel: Those are competitors, they're not necessarily partner, you're competing with that button space, yes? Alex: No, no, no, not at all. Joel: Okay. Alex: Actually what we do is with Indeed Apply, and the most commonly used way that Indeed Apply is done is just simply with the one, the first form that you see, like main email, phone and a resume. What we do is we plug straight into what Indeed built and we facilitate putting the questions that the company wants to have answered for that specific job. We put the questions in behind it and it plugs into Indeed Apply, and we use their existing ... I refer to that as their native application experience. They productize it, call it Indeed Apply. Facebook has their apply, there's SEEK apply, there's Neuvoo apply, there's LinkedIn, and then there are a whole myriad of different ways that different job sites implement their own native apply experience. We plug into what the job world does and just help make that work for companies that have really typical to set up implementations that are using really big enterprise ATSs. Joel: So I'll see your button on an ATS job posting, but I won't see it on an Indeed or LinkedIn job posting? Alex: You're not going to see a JobSync button anywhere. We are sitting behind the scenes. We're kind of like SendGrid. You never see SendGrid with respect to email as a user. But companies like Facebook, you SendGrid to deliver the mail from Facebook to your ISP. Joel: So if I'm on company A and I want to apply to a job and I've never registered with that company and I click your button, where are you getting the resume data? Alex: Well, so first off, the apply click would happen on the job site, so you're on Indeed, you're logged in, you've got a CV that's on Indeed. You click, you run a search for a podcast host in Cleveland and you see a job opening and you say, "That's pretty cool. I'll apply." You click on the job, you click on apply and your data, your profile data shows up on the form. You answer a couple of questions. Are you able to carry a chain around your neck? How do you feel about being snarky? And you answer the questions inside of the Indeed Apply format on Indeed. And then you review the application, you click submit, and the data behind the scenes gets pushed through to us through an API. We catch that, and then we convert the data over into the ATS that The Chad and Cheese show uses. And then that shows up in the recruiters workflow within the ATS. Joel: Okay. Chad: On the screening question piece, is there an API for that or does an employer actually have to set all of that up with you? Alex: Yeah. The simple answer is that it depends on the ATS. Chad: That's your job. Alex: At the end of the day what we build into ATSs is that direct integration to be able to extract and pull the questions directly out of the ATS for that specific job. So a company, let's say for example with the implementation that we're building for Workday, a company goes along or I should say a recruiter gets the job requisition and requirements from the hiring manager. They post the job, it goes to the approval process and it goes live. When it goes live, the job content and the application schema for that job. And by application schema I mean all the requirements and optional fields, so name, email, resume, what the questions are, what the options are for each of those questions for that specific job all comes to us. We package it up and we put it into a file and we deliver it wherever it needs to go in terms of where it's going to get listed in terms of which job works. It would go into an XML file let's say for Indeed or for Facebook, and we would turn around and we'd post it through an API that's going to go to SEEK. Craig: How long is it taking you to work on this Workday API integration. Alex: 400 years. Craig: I figured as much. So if I come to you and said, hey, I've got ... You haven't said Avature, there you go. I've got Avature. I need to go live in six weeks. That's something you guys can do? Alex: Oh yeah. I mean, so the spectrum is this, we launched as fast within 24 hours to get a program up and running on Facebook. And if you're on Taleo Enterprise, it's very custom for each customer that takes six to eight weeks to implement. For Workday, the end integration is actually effectively an app that gets installed into the Workday instance and gets configured and we have a kickoff call and it takes a few days to get it up and running on Workday. Chad: Dude, that seems like a shit ton of maintenance. I mean that's got to be a shit ton of maintenance. How do you guys actually keep up with that? Alex: Maintenance? I'm just kidding. Chad: Seriously, how do you keep up with all the maintenance? I know just from being able to index and/or scrape 3,000 different applicant tracking systems, shit breaks all the time. This is even more complex. This has to break all the time. How do you keep up with it? Alex: So scraping ATSs is torture, been there doing that. And the thing that creates that torture is when you are bound to specific field names in HTML. We do rely on API integrations which are much more stable and then they get published around like the changes and changelogs. They are much more stable than say scraping is. But at the end of the day people ask like, what's this kind of business and what's it like? And then insiders will say, "Why hasn't this been done 19 years ago?" And the answer is it's difficult and it's difficult because of that maintenance side. And that's why we add value in the ecosystem, right? If it was simple and easy and straightforward, there wouldn't be a need for our company. But in the end of the day, that maintenance piece and the back and forth and the data translation actually adds a lot of value because it's really, really difficult work. We have a lot of regression testing and other unit testing that gets built in. So we can test as we build, deploy and monitor whether or not the systems are working properly. Joel: Alex, you started your pitch by saying it doesn't matter if it's 3% unemployment or 30% unemployment. And I'm curious in the current environment where employers may not want an easy apply environment. How do you guys fair in that? I mean, is it just adding prescreening questions to help dam the flood of applicants or what are you seeing in the last 30, 45 days? Alex: Yeah. First off, we had a churn rate 60 days ago that was near zero. And we have had companies pausing this because they have nobody working, so they're not recruiting. The people that are still live and that are engaged, even though your unemployment rate is huge and growing remarkably, they're in a position where they're even more desperate for a service like ours because the people they're recruiting, there's less of them or there's less availability. If you about it like supply and demand type of thing. The supply of candidates in the highly sought after categories, those candidates are overworked. They're at home, their kids are at home. They have no time to look for a job. They have no time to go through all of the extra steps, they have no desire. So if it's easy and they just got reprimanded by their boss. Or if they're a warehouse where they're not taking care of them, all of a sudden they're like, "This sucks. I'm out. I'm going to go find another job with somebody who gives a crap." And they are more likely that more sought after candidates, more likely to complete if the process is better. That's number one. Alex: Number two, the genie's out of the bottle on this. The Amazon experience is the Amazon experience. And it doesn't matter how long COVID lasts, people don't want to have a bullshit cumbersome process, period. And that's never going to change. And there's no reason to revert back, which I'll get to my third point, which is, yes, there are more people out there to apply, so you need better screening. Joel: The irony there is it's the warehouse workers at Amazon that hate their job and want the Amazon experience when they go apply for another job. Chad: It's an entirely different discussion. Joel: I blew your mind, didn't I? Alex: No, it's true. It three different businesses, right? Warehouse and then the consumer experience and then AWS, crazy different. Chad: So 90% reduction in cost per application. How is JobSync driving down the CPA? Alex: The 90% reduction is really around being able to recruit on Facebook at scale, right? So you think about Facebook, you have some ATSs that have an offsite click experience in the organic jobs listing on Facebook. And then you have the ability to post your job manually and then you manage that process through Facebook Messenger, which is not really feasible at scale. So it's a comparison cost, not a reduction in cost in this case, because we're enabling companies that have let's say 700, 1,000, 1,500 job postings to get those job postings up onto Facebook and deliver their applications through our service into their ATS. The net net when you take in our fees is by comparison 90% less expensive. We have customers that get CPA of like 25 cents and that's running at a comparison in an open marketplace where they're looking for 253, $5, $10 CPAs. That's that comparison level. The other side on Indeed Joel: And what is you fee structure? Craig: I was just about to ask that. Joel: Yeah, your fee structure. Chad: Fees. Pricing. How do I pay you? Joel: How do you make money? Alex: Oh, it's all a 100% free. I'm kidding. Chad: Lie. Alex: We have a one time implementation fee, it's just 9.99. It's true with any of the ATSs. And then our pricing per month starts at $200, covers the first hundred jobs, and then It's a per job cost for the number of active jobs during the month. Starts at, goes down to a dollar and then less and less. Joel: Go ahead Alex, finish. Chad: And then less and less and less. Joel: A dollar a job, right? Craig: Until it's free, right? Alex: A dollar a job down to 5 cents a job at scale. Joel: Thank you, Alex. Chad: Excellent. Craig: Thank you, Alex. Alex: Let me get ... I'll send you my address by text. Joel: Cocky American. You cheeky bastard. Chad: So we can send you a box of dog shit. We'll get that right out. Alex: I'll light it on fire. Chad: Thanks for coming on Alex. We appreciate it man. Alex: Thanks guys. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Chester: Thank you for listening to podcast 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. #DeathMatch #jobs #UX #Experience #TAtech

Welcome to Death Match, North America 2020, which took place at TAtech on May 19. For all of you NOOBS who have never experienced Death Match - Death Match is a competition which pits 4 innovative, early-stage companies against one-another, only one can win and emerge with the coveted Death Match Chain of Champions. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode feautures Scot Sessions cofounder and CEO at TalVitsa. COVID-19 might've locked us all in our homes but never fear! The home bars are always stocked, pints were flowing and Chad and Cheese questions and slurring snark was flying. Luckily Joveo's CEO, KJ, stepped in to provide a smart and sensible juding voice to this TAtech event... Enjoy while Scot picthes TalVista and then ducks, bobs, and weaves for the balance of his 15-minutes on the virtual Death Match stage. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps support and educate your workforce through disability awareness and inclusion training. Ashlie: Hi, this is Ashlie Collins, managing director UK for Joveo, the global leader in programmatic recruitment advertising. I want to talk to you about our efforts in helping get the world back to work. We want to help you find the high quality candidates you need both during and after this crisis, to get the workforce back to pre-crisis levels and expedite the economic recovery. This isn't about deploying people, it's about saving lives and families. We're offering our job advertising platform free of charge until the COVID-19 situation is under control. We're also offering additional candidate applications and traffic at zero cost. Join us in getting the world back to work, to learn more, visit joveo.com. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Welcome to Death Match North America, 2020, which took place at TAtech on May 19th. For all of you newbies out there, who have never experienced the Death Match, Death Match is a competition which pits four innovative early stage companies against one another. Only one can win and emerge with the coveted Death Match Chain of Champions. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Scot Sessions, co-founder and CEO at TalVista. COVID-19 might have locked us all in our homes, but never fear, the home bars are always stocked, pints were flowing and Chad and Cheese questions and slurring snark was flying. Luckily, Joveo CEO, KJ, stepped in to provide a smart and sensible judging voice to this TAtech event. Enjoy while Scot pitches TalVista, and then ducks, bobs, and weaves for the balance of his 15 minutes on the virtual Death Match stage. Chad: Here we are again people, it's Death Match. Joel: What I'm talking about. Chad: North America, TAtech, a little drink. Joel: Beer disappears, and it's there. It disappears and it's there. Chad: We've got Scot Sessions, CEO and co-founder of TalVista, getting ready for his two minute pitch. Scot, are you ready? Scot : I'm ready. Chad: Joel, are you ready? Hit it. Joel: Scot, in three, two. Scot : Hi. My name is Scot Sessions, CEO and co-founder of Televista. We help companies see beyond the obvious, but if they could do that already, I wouldn't be on this Death Match talking about it today. We all have bias, a preference for things we've grown accustomed to, both likes and dislikes. This can even happen subconsciously, called unconscious bias. When we combine our bias with recruiting, a lack of diversity takes place. In the hiring process, women and minority groups are overlooked when we write job descriptions because they include words that, based in scientific research, are known to be problematic. Candidates have even taken to using a nickname when they are submitting the resume to increase the likelihood they'll be called for an interview. Group think is a common problem in today's structured interview process. Any and all of these challenges, reduce opportunities for diverse candidates to apply and advance through the recruiting and hiring process. Scot : TalVista addresses each of these challenges, and our clients are seeing a 30% to 50% increase in diverse candidates, applying and progressing through the process. We are a decision support SaaS platform that enables conscious inclusion to take place in the process. Our proprietary technology, based in science helps to improve job descriptions, it helps hiring managers focus on what matters most like experience and skills in the original and redacted resume review process. Group think is halted with our structured interview, ensuring interviewers are mindful and present for each candidate response. My partner and I stood up TalVista two years ago and worked with TA leaders at Fortune 500 companies. We have many clients who are experiencing improvements in their diversity recruiting. Our platform is available through an annual subscription based on estimated number of hires, not seats or number of users. We're pushing a million in sales to date and see no end in sight to companies requiring our decision support platform. Thank you. Chad: There it is. Excellent, Scot. Joel: Thank you, Scott. Very tight. Very tight. Chad: KJ, you are the first one to ask questions. KJ: Thank you very much, Scot. That was great. Scot, so when you create gender unbiased job description, what does it do to metrics which are key to a talent acquisition manager, like cost to apply or time to hire and things like that? Scot : That's a great question, KJ. See, we focus on ensuring that more diverse candidates are going to apply for those roles. Right now job descriptions are written for white males, 25 to 45 years in age. If you continue to write that way, you're not going to address and bring in women and underrepresented minority groups. So it really doesn't matter time to hire if you're not addressing and inviting those minorities to apply. Otherwise, once the job description is optimized, now you're going to attract those diverse candidates and all of the same metrics apply to time to hire. It's just bringing in a diverse candidate set. KJ: So when the world is going to come back to business as usual and companies ... It's easier to go from 100 to 10. It's much more difficult to go from 10 to 100, and the speed to hire is going to become the key in getting the workforce back. Time to hire becomes the single most critical metric. Scot : I hear you, time to hire is always important. But if you're not taking time, a few seconds, to address and ensure that your job description is going to attract diverse candidates, you're going to be missing out on a whole plethora of great candidates who are qualified, when you're only targeting white males, because that's how job descriptions are written. Joel: I want to point out that there are four white dudes, well, one Indian, I guess, on the panel, but four dudes. Anyway, I want to talk about the competitive landscape real quick. And doing my homework, it looks like Textio is an obvious one. I've got TapRecruit. I've got GapJumpers. How are you guys cutting through the clutter and differentiating yourself from the competition? Scot : Great question. So there was some research that was done several years ago out of Duke University to identify these problematic words that I talked about. Textio, us and others, that's where we based our technology. However, we continued with our own PhD sociologists to continue researching, to expand that problematic word list from beyond just female, to people of color and people with disabilities. Nobody's doing what we're doing in that set today. That's one differentiator. The other is, we're tackling three problems that are addressed throughout the recruiting process, not only job description, but redacted resume and interviewing. No one else combines all three of those assets together to improve the diversity hiring process. Chad: Excellent, Scott. Conscious inclusion, which is the total opposite of unconscious bias, I totally dig it. Love that. Can your platform lay over existing resume databases? Are you integrating with applicant tracking systems and CRMs? Scot : Absolutely. In fact, those are the systems of record. We can do a stand alone, but we highly recommend that our clients integrate with Taleo, Connexus, SmartRecruiters, iCIMS, et cetera, et cetera. So we have open APIs to do that so that resumes can be brought in seamlessly, original resumes. We're not stripping out content and then showing it in form fields, we're showing that hiring manager the original resumes so they can see how the candidate organize their thoughts, how they represent themselves and prioritize, but we redact out PII, personal identifying information, so that keeps that hiring manager focused. Chad: So what about job boards in different job sites with resume databases? I would think that that would be an amazing partnership to be able to get you as an add on for any of those huge, huge piles of resumes that are out there. Are you currently working with any vendors to offer this? Scot : We have several partnership discussions going on. As I said, we've been around for two years, we're attacking things by priority, making sure that we're delivering what we say we can deliver. And now looking to expand to say, "All right, client A, you have this tie-in with this partner. We can help you bring those resumes in, but you need to select them." Remember I said, we're a decision support platform. We are not making those decisions for the users. They need to have that human touch to say, "This person meets the minimum criteria. Now let's pass them on." Otherwise, hiring managers are going to be pissed. There is a plethora of crap. Chad: I agree. But here's the thing, it takes a recruiter, they say, six seconds to scan a resume. I don't believe that. But if I'm upgrading my system right now, I want to become more automated and I want to match those candidates to my requirements. Why would I want a recruiter to even review my resumes? Can you, or have you actually partnered with any types of matching organizations to be able to bring candidates that are meeting the requirements into the funnel as well? So that my recruiters don't have to actually go through those six seconds and those hundreds of perspectively, thousands of resumes. Scot : It's something we're looking into most definitely. But it's not just the recruiter, it's the hiring manager who ends up reviewing, and it is six seconds based on research that they're spending. But when it's redacted, now they're doing a quality review, ensuring that that candidate is somebody they want to move forward with. Chad: KJ. KJ: Sure. So, Scot, I was wondering, if there is a large company which has about, let's say, 1000 jobs and they would like to give you a feed of 1000 jobs and have you get it all right, you said it has to be manual, so does it mean that every recruiter has to go manually in every single job description? Scot : So, a job description can be added through a drag and drop first, in a manual process or in automated, it can be brought over from the ATS. That job description has to be written at some point. This is one added editing step to ensure that diversity is included. What we're seeing is, when companies are employing AI and scouring the web for a bunch of stuff, who knows if it's validated against scientific research that yes indeed, they're going to be improving for attracting diverse candidates. That's why I say we're a decision support platform. I get that companies have thousands, many times, those are evergreen roles, and so you do it once and then you reuse it, and reuse it, and reuse it. But when you're doing executive or upper level management, you're going to pay attention to those job descriptions and make sure you're attracting the best and most diverse candidates who have the qualifications, so you attract them in. Joel: Scot, there was a Forbes article recently entitled, What Happens When White Women Become the Face of Diversity. And I know you know about it because it's linked from your website and you're quoted in it. Basically the gist was that, if we're putting women as diversity, what's to stop just white women becoming the diversity of the future? I want your commentary on that and how your technology can maybe thwart such a future. Scot : When it comes to diversity, if we have blinders on, and we're only looking at white women, we're doing ourselves a disservice. What we're doing, as I shared during my two minutes, is we've expanded out beyond just gender parody. In our research, we've expanded to include for people of color, male and female and people with disabilities. That's how we're ensuring that our job descriptions, once improved to be made more inclusive, they're going to attract a broad set of diverse candidates, not only women, not only people of color, but across the board. And so long as they have the requirements of skills, they should move through that funnel very rapidly with the other two aspects of our platform. Chad: So real time feedback from your website, and again, you've been saying it over and over, real time feedback helps you create job listings that equally attract male, female, and minority candidates. That language doesn't represent what you're trying to embody. Where's trans, nonbinary, queer, people who don't identify with the non-gender traditional roles? Where's that at? Scot : Yeah. So again, we'd been around for two years, we're tackling one problem at a time. We have a product roadmap that is long and extensive to address, not only those items, but ageism as well, because that's another issue that we see. And so as we continue to progress, and as clients say, "Hey, this is more important than another thing." Our product roadmap is fluid to ensure that we're meeting those needs. But we're taking them down one at a time. It all comes with money, and if anybody wants to drop 10 million in my lap, hallelujah, we'll get those things done tomorrow. Joel: Talk to KJ. Talk to KJ. Chad: Yeah. So, scientific research based, what science is actually impacting your algorithms to identify the problematic words? Number one. And number two, give me some examples of said words. Scot : Okay. So with our algorithm, first, we don't delineate between a female problematic word and a person of color, problematic word, if it is highlighted in our platform, it is an issue that you need to address. So the research that was done, as I shared, out of Duke University several years ago in partnership with the University of Waterloo in Canada, set out to find out other words that cause women to not apply. They found a plethora of words to do that. We've expanded on that research to accommodate for, like I said, people of color and now people with disabilities. So that's what we're doing to expand. And that's the scientific research, versus scouring the web, or even a client's hundred thousands job descriptions to say, "Well, this is what we found," garbage in, garbage out. Chad: One of the biggest issues that we've seen, and research also shows is that women will not apply for jobs unless they are a hundred percent into that position, and they meet all the requirements, right? Where dumb men, like all of us, it doesn't matter, we meet about half and we're like, "Ah, we can do that job." That is an issue that's more cultural than anything else. How can just changing the words, especially when the requirements are mainly the issues, can you help companies with the requirements to be able to kind of re-target to get more females? Scot: Come on Chad. I think you've heard me speak before, because you've taken those words right out of my mouth. You're exactly right. Joel: He cheats. Say it. He cheats. Scot: So, women, they could be the strongest individuals in the world, many of them are. However, their own self perception when they read a word like, strong analytical skills, most women would be self-deprecating it, "Oh, well, I can do that okay." Whereas a male who can do it okay, sees strongly like, "Yeah, I can do that." Just to your point. And so by optimizing those words and using, instead of the word strong, again, not that women aren't strong, but optimizing that to another selection that a woman is like, "Oh, yeah, I can do that," they're more apt to apply. Additionally, on our website, instead of putting 50 requirements, put three or four, because like you said, men will say, "I can do one out of 10, I'm applying," and a woman will say, "I can do nine out of 10, I guess I shouldn't apply." So really tailor it to ensure that you're going to address those candidates in. Chad: KJ. KJ: Do you have a feedback loop, which provides continuous learning data to the machines or is it not there? Scot : So our algorithm again, is always validated against science. So we're not going out and saying, "Hey," like I said, "Scour these job descriptions, and then work from that." If it's not been validated in science, we're not going to employ that into our software. And so that's where we come in as a research driven tool, so that people can rest assured that it's been validated against many, many research pieces and surveys to the public and subsets to ensure that that's a word that's a problem, or it's replaceable with a word that is inclusive again, based in that research. Joel: Scot KJ: From there and then you make your algorithms, right? There's no learning loop or feedback loop? Scot: Correct. Joel: Scot, I'm curious more of your opinion than it is a question, but in our work from home environment and all accounts say that we're going to work more from home in the future, how does that impact diversity hiring? Is it no impact at all? Is it a little bit? Scot : Time's going to tell that, Joel. I think in some cases, it won't impact it at all. I think in some other cases, it's going to impact it, especially with companies who are old school, who are like, "If I'm not watching you do the work, the work's not going to be done. And if I have a pre-conceived bias against women, or against people of color and lack trust of, ah, they're not going to do the work," then it then working at home could impact it. And so using our platform will ensure that people with qualifications, regardless of their walk of life, should be considered. And then the culture of that company needs to move closer to more comfortable working at home. Chad: Look for more episodes of Death Match, this Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted to lifting up startups in the recruitment technology space. Subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com.

Welcome to Death Match, North America 2020, which took place at TAtech on May 19. For all of you NOOBS who have never experienced Death Match - Death Match is a competition which pits 4 innovative, early-stage companies against one-another, only one can win and emerge with the coveted Death Match Chain of Champions. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode feautures Adam Chambers founder and CEO at Applichat. COVID-19 might've locked us all in our homes but never fear! The home bars are always stocked, pints were flowing and Chad and Cheese questions and slurring snark was flying. Luckily Joveo's CEO, KJ, stepped in to provide a smart and sensible judging voice to this TAtech event... Enjoy while Adam picthes Applichat, then ducks, bobs, and weaves for the balance of his 15-minutes on the virtual Death Match stage. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Ashlie Collins: Hi, this is Ashlie Collins, Managing Director, UK, for Joveo, the global leader in programmatic recruitment advertising. I want to talk to you about our efforts in helping get the world back to work. We want to help you find the high-quality candidates you need, both during and after this crisis, to get the workforce back to pre-crisis levels and expedite the economic recovery. This isn't about deploying people. It's about saving lives and families. We're offering our job advertising platform free of charge until the COVID-19 situation is under control. We're also offering additional candidate applications and traffic at zero cost. Join us in getting the world back to work, to learn more visit, joveo.com. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Adam: Yes. Say, hi. Chad: Arriba! Joel: In three, two. Adam: Almost 10 times more professionals go on Facebook and Instagram every single day than all the job boards combined. But Job boards are the least clicked out of any category across all the sites, because that sort of campaigns require time and re-impart of craft, per targeting needs the hordes of unqualified applicants and crucially 98% of Facebook's ad revenue comes from mobile clicks. So making people leave the platform for your non-optimized career site, turns, otherwise interested talent away to the next photo of Chad Sowash and his dressing guide in raising your cost per application. It's lost revenue and lost opportunities on the world's large pill of passive candidates. That's where Applichat comes in. We help solve the wastage and frustration of invoice teams not getting enough qualified applicants by sourcing, automatically prescreening and allocating candidates directly to recruiters, workflow by ATS or calendar. Candidates click our ads, you hire them. It's a three step process. Recruiters cannot create a desire for a job. We can only take the hopes, the dreams and desires, which already exists in candidates minds, that's our approach to writing job ads. We use candidate and competitor research to create the ads, put in the creative and launch them. People who click the ads are introduced to a messenger chatbot, which makes sure that unqualified people cannot apply. And they can also apply through conversation, and if qualified someone can make an application through Messenger, book an interview straight away, or be sent a prefilled application form. This all takes place on the same interface they're used to talking to their friends, girlfriends, husbands, wife, where love, longing desire and joy take place. So our best results have seen a 50% drop in cost per hire and a decrease in interviewing new show by 40% coupled with a 300% rise in application to hire it for name hosting, of 12 locations. So if you can't fill your roles or if you're getting hoards on call, like candidates failed, I'll be on LinkedIn, Adam Chambers, let's have a chat and we'll be able to help you solve your problems. That's Applichat. Chad: Booyah. Good job. Alright, KJ, come back on board. You've got the first question, buddy. KJ: So, I don't know if I understood right. Do you guys do Facebook advertising and then lead the person to a Facebook chat environment to get applications filled and put that in the ATS? Adam: Yes, exactly. KJ: And what are the conversion rates you have typically seen and which categories do you think it is very effective? Is it something that will work universally or is it only for certain categories? Adam: So we think, the niches we target are hard to fill roles, but roles which also have a lot of candidates in the market. For example, we're targeting nursing in the USA at the moment. In the past, we've targeted very niche hard to fill roles and to be honest, they haven't worked too successfully, because of the targeting. We look for roles in which there's a shortage of the people who do them. So as I said, "Nurses, truck drivers, that sort of thing, where everyone's advertising on job boards and really our clients need to get away from that and use Facebook." KJ: Yup. That sort of help. Chad: So, right out of the gate. I heard job boards suck. So Applichat is solely on Facebook. Is that correct? Are you guys using other platforms right now? Adam: Yeah, so we use Facebook and Instagram on the Facebook ad network and the Facebook ad network basically lets you advertise on applications, news sites and a lot of websites as well. And about a billion people are exposed to those ads each month. So it's four or five different platforms we advertise on. Chad: Okay. So there's always been this split between work and home. Do you feel like that has gone away entirely, because what you're talking about is the emotion and the messenger that you always use with your girlfriend, with your wife, with your boyfriend whatever it is. So are you seeing all of that breakdown and you were just using one messenger and that messenger you're hoping is Facebook. Adam: So I don't think it's broken down the difference between work and home, I've learned that people are willing to learn about jobs through social media. We actually recognize that difference and we recognize people aren't going to be ready to send their CV right away. And that's why we use the chatbot to bring them into the funnel and have an automated conversation with them. So I don't think so. And from what we have seen people are actually willing to do it and they're not being more closed than they would on a application form, they're actually being a bit more open Joel: Adam much like a glorious castle from your Homeland in Ireland, the best have a solid moat. You can't get through it. Does your technology have a solid moat on it or can any Tom, Dick or Harry set something like this up, it's not unique, there's nothing proprietary about it? Talk about how unique what you do is, and how hard it is to replicate what you do. Adam: Sure. So that was something that Chad shot me for it in my podcast interview. And I've been thinking about it quite a lot. We've brought in something where we essentially add on an automated follow-up system to the chatbot which we've created. It's true that anyone create a Facebook group, anyone create a chatbot. What we've done is we've brought in our automated follow-up, which follows up over email and texts over a 12-month period. Both of that onto our dedicated ad creating team and our chatbot creating team. We bring the three together and you'll struggle to find an agency or a team who have those three in place. I'm not saying it's impossible to copy us and I invite people to do it, but in that combination is very difficult to emulate that without working on it, as long as we have, Chad: He listens. Joel: What? Adam: So when you speak, I listen. Chad: Unlike Joel, KJ. Adam: My mom told me to. KJ: So, typically, Adam, with experience and data, we have seen that Facebook advertising, generally turns out we have another more expensive ones as compared to the job boards. And even though you provide an end-to-end solution of not just creating a play, but also an apply. My challenge is that talent acquisition professionals will judge you based on your cost per application or other things like that. How do you think you'll climb that mountain? Right? Because you're never going to come at par with the big job boards out there. Adam: Yeah, exactly. And I did face that problem last week in a sales call, where they said, "Job boards were cheaper." How we're positioning the agency now, is we're going after certain niches of in recruitment, who aren't getting sufficient candidates from job boards and who we can target on Facebook. So that's why I've been talking about nurses, we're running a nursing company. And we got 20 nurses interested in the role and 40 of R's, qualified RNs. And that's pretty much unheard of in terms of job boards at the moment. So in terms of the cost comparison, if you're using a job board and you're getting five candidates, if you use us, if you can get 15 or 20, even though it may be more expensive, the value out of getting more candidates and filling more roles far outweighs the amount that you would spend, because you're not even getting those candidates from the job board. Chad: So, are you still creating six ads per job in creating those stories? Adam: Yeah. So though sort of changed that as we create as many as we need to hit a certain application number. So with the nursing company and I refer to, we just have to ads up, we're going to be launching a campaign in a couple of week, where we're going to be 20 or 30 videos, which are a targeting a very broad funnel. And really Chad: Who creates those videos though? Who creates the content, overall? Adam: ... Yeah. So in terms of the videos, we're working with another partner who can create them in their platform, and then whenever we're creating texts and images, then we create those. Chad: Okay. So who sets up the campaigns, you and your team? Adam: Yeah. So we set everything up. If we need to use another technology, we can employ that technology, but it's all done by us. Chad: Okay. So how are you making that more scalable for the future so that you can take on more clients? Adam: In terms of scalability, we are trying to target just one job at a time. So I keep referring back to the nurses. We are trying to take on a hospital, I need to see it in the USA, you need to hire more nurses, with that we can replicate our funnels and our campaigns. And we can get really good at it, I'd like to do that for truck drivers as well. Just do a State at a time. So that's how you scale it and that's how you get assistance to actually call [inaudible 00:11:20] rather than me having to sit in my throne and to give orders. Joel: Every one lion has a throne, right? All right. So, the move to healthcare, was that a coronavirus inspired pivot or was that always the objective, or is that just where you're finding the most acceptance? Adam: That was before coronavirus, but we're finding a lot of more success during the virus. I just sort of looked at the market and I wanted to see, where is economy driven market where people are struggling to hire? Where we target people on Facebook and where can I actually enjoy targeting? What's going to make me happy and make my employees happy and we chose healthcare. Joel: Let's talk about employees for a second. Both, Chad and I have noticed because you apparently told them to go follow everyone that is a thought leader in recruitment. So we both noticed that you've been hiring folks. What is their role? What's your growth strategy going forward? Are you looking to raise money? Talk about that. Adam: I've... Working with three people at the moment to, or for prospecting. The way I see it as I need to fill my funnel with 10, 20, 30 leads a week so can we grow and that's the focus. We can have a scalable offer such as this nursing funnel, where we can offer to the hospitals in each State. I've also got a white label, they will run the ads for us as well. Who's going to be employed under me in the future. So in terms of the growth strategy, I got nothing to seek from them, what I want to do is scale an offer to the same type of employer in say 30, 40, 50 different States. And then we'll grow organically through that. And in fact, I've actually wanted to take myself out of the business, so I spend 10 hours a week in it. Chad: So you enjoy your throne, right? KJ. Adam: Yeah. Joel: So, you're not looking to raise money then if you're looking to have more me time? Adam: No, I'm not looking to raise money, but if you've got some spare change Joel, it's always appreciated. Joel: Chad makes all the money, dude, talk to him. KJ: All right. A question that's pretty relevant in pretty much any HR tech provider is ATS integration. Now there are two types of categories of companies, right? I would say that one which have moved to a cost per lead basis where you have a landing page and others where you need to go into a complete application form on the atheist, to be actually be considered for the job in the first place. It could as well unless it's an ATS completely. Now that's where the problem is. What do you do about those categories? Right? So the cost per lead is still about five, 10% of market predominated by truck drivers and nurses. Go into that process and do it all over there. How are we going to address that? Right? You can't fill out an application and have a recruiter look at it unless it is a complete in ATS. Adam: Yeah. So there's two ways that we can approach the ATS integration. Number one is to do an integration through the API. We've done that in the past and adults take a while to do it. The second part is we can create a form within some ATSs, which we can then pre-fill with information that people put into the messenger. So whenever they click apply, they go onto the forum, it's pretty filled with the messenger information and then they click it and it goes into the ATS. They're the two methods I think the latter is what's worked, but it's certainly a problem which I want to improve our response to going forward. It's, as you mentioned, is a big problem in the industry and that's what we're going to be focusing on as we grow as well. I'd like to hire someone who can actually do more of those API integrations. KJ: That's right. And I'm just saying Adam, sometimes it's wise to know which battles to pick. And maybe all you need to do is integrate that data into the CRMs and not the ATS. Well that's going to be a long haul. I'm sorry. Adam: Okay. Thanks. Chad: So on the website in talking through this, Applichat is a recruitment advertising business. So it seems like you're taking a dump on the ad agencies front porch. Don't you believe that they could actually be your best advocates, not to mention the best opportunity for acquisition? Adam: What are the agencies, are you talking about? Chad: Recruitment ad agencies? Adam: Could you give me an example of one? Chad: Yeah. TMP Worldwide, Symphony Talent, Shaker Recruitment Marketing, all the ones that do this for a living in our space and not to mention, I'll just throw this out there real quick. TMP made, I think it was four acquisitions last year alone, Adam: To be honest, acquisition wasn't something I thought of, whenever I conceptualize the business and we just wanted to provide value to them and whatnot. Chad: What about revenue streams though? These guys could actually be channel partners to be able to drive revenue into your organization. That's one of the things, if you piss off big recruitment ad agencies, you might not get those hospitals because they actually... Again, Shaker, they focus on nursing in some areas. So you might not get into those companies or those organizations because you look like a competitor. Don't you risk that? Adam: I don't think it's a risk. I think we're just doing our thing. I don't know how I would come up with a strategy where we can be not subservient. KJ: And going to market strategy with the agencies might be a good idea. Chad: Yes. I agree. And my second question is, you talk about the ghosting, I got to get this in. You talk about anti-ghosting. What is the anti-ghosting magic? Do you guys message afterwards? What is it? Adam: Yeah. So as I mentioned, we can do Facebook Messenger follow-ups, email followups, texts, follow-ups, and we can extend that over a period of 12 months if needs be. Chad: And that's it. Look for more episodes of Death Match, this Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted to lifting up startups in the recruitment technology space, subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more visit, chadcheese.com.

Welcome to Death Match, North America 2020, which took place at TAtech on May 19. For all of you NOOBS who have never experienced Death Match - Death Match is a competition which pits 4 innovative, early-stage companies against one-another, only one can win and emerge with the coveted Death Match Chain of Champions. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features a Canadian Bradley Clark Co-founder at RecTxt. COVID-19 might've locked us all in our homes but never fear! The home bars are always stocked, pints were flowing and Chad and Cheese questions and slurring snark was flying. Luckily Joveo's CEO, KJ, stepped in to provide a smart and sensible judging voice to this TAtech event... Enjoy while Bradley pitches RecTxt, says sorry about 27 times, then ducks, bobs, and weaves for the balance of his 15-minutes on the virtual Death Match stage. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Ashlie: Hi, this is Ashlie Collins, managing director, UK, for Joveo, the global leader in programmatic recruitment advertising. I want to talk to you about our efforts in helping get the world back to work. We want to help you find the high-quality candidates you need both during and after this crisis, to get the workforce back to pre-crisis levels and expedite the economic recovery. This isn't about deploying people, it's about saving lives and families. We're offering our job advertising platform free of charge until the COVID-19 situation is under control. We're also offering additional candidate applications and traffic at zero cost. Join us in getting the world back to work. To learn more, visit joveo.com. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Welcome to Death Match, North America, 2020, which took place at TAtech on May 19th. Now, for all of you newbies out there who have never experienced a Death Match, Death Match is a competition which pits four innovative early start companies against one another. Only one can win and emerge with the coveted Death Match chain of champions. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features a Canadian, Bradley Clark, co-founder at Rectxt. COVID-19 might've locked us all in our homes but never fear, the home bars are fully stocked, pints were flowing, bourbon was flowing, and Chad and Cheese questions and slurring snark was a flying. Luckily Joveo's CEO, KJ, stepped in to provide a smart and sensible judging voice to this TAtech event. Enjoy while Bradley pitches Rectxt, says sorry about 27 times, then ducks, bobs and weaves for the balance of his 15 minutes on the virtual Death Match stage. Welcome to Death Match people. Joel: TA May edition. Chad: Today, from the great North, we have Bradley Cooper, that doesn't look like Bradley Cooper. You guys, that's a bait-and-switch. Joel: I'm hung over, but that's not Bradley Cooper. Chad: That's a bait-and-switch. We have Bradley Clark, co-founder of Rectxt. All right. Let's pump the brake smell. Let's focus on your two minutes. All right, pitter-patter, let's get at it, two minutes, Joel. Joel: Right. Go baby, go. Bradley: All right. In my 15 years in recruitment, communicating with candidates has never been harder. With robocalls, so much spam, calls going unanswered, emails unread, LinkedIn inbox is flooded. Candidates want to communicate on their terms and texting cuts through the noise. However, cell phones aren't the right tool, frankly they're unsafe. They're slow. They mix personal and private in the same inbox, and they lack opt-out compliance. Now there are existing recruitment tools out there for texting, but for most of us, they're too expensive. They're designed for big teams with big budgets. Once again, many of us who work for smaller companies lack the cool tech. By many of us, I mean the 200,000 recruiters who work for companies under 200 employees. This is North America alone. That's all the HR folks who communicate with candidates. So faced with the choice of using the wrong tool, our cell phones, or using software we couldn't afford, we decided to create Rectxt. We designed the most simple to use and affordable text recruiting solution on the market, which is ideal for those smaller teams that have gone underserved. We're 75% less than our competition with unlimited texting as low as $30 a month. However, we didn't cut back on the great technology. With our clever Chrome extension, you can send one-to-one messages or one-to-many texts campaigns from any website, inside or outside your ATS. Unlike others, we have transparent pricing. We even offer month to month plans and pay as you go plans. But Rectxt isn't a magical AI automation solution chatbot or tool designed for hiring 2000 warehouse workers. What we are is a tool which is great for in demand knowledge workers and skilled labor. Perhaps you're hiring a diesel mechanic, software engineer, ER nurses. Rectxt also integrates and plays nice with multiple sourcing tools and ATSs. With no long sales process or IT required, you can start texting in minutes. Seriously. Brian, my co-founder timed himself, it took less than two minutes. To learn more, go to rectxt.com, that's R-E-C-T-X-T.com. Joel: Tight. Bradley: What did we clock in at? Joel: 1:57. Very nice. Chad: You don't ask the questions, mr. Bradley: Oh, I'm sorry. Joel: Sorry. Chad: KJ. Bradley: Sorry. KJ: Hi Bradley. Pretty exciting, right? The market you've cornered or you're trying to corner is a small medium segment, and I would say it's pretty smart thing to do, but it also is a pretty challenging one, right? Given the amount of investment you have to make, reach out to those hundreds of thousands of small and medium employers. How do you plan to do that and scale it? Bradley: As far as the scaling side of it, I mean, yeah, we're still early stages. I mean, that's where we're at right now. Our product is just kind of going to market at this stage. But we figured there's so many underserved people, that this when tools here, like this between the rec and the communities were part of, in fact we're actually legitimate recruiters. We are recruiters, we are designed tool for recruiters. We're hoping that that helps kind of spark and scale this. I mean, ultimately our low cost makes it challenging because we want to provide it only as lightweight as possible and pass those savings onto our consumer. There's definitely challenges in scaling, but I think from us, it's going to be community grassroots and then continue growing up. Chad: All right. Okay [inaudible 00:06:17.24]. Rectxt is purely SMS, is that correct? Bradley: That's correct. SMS text, yeah. Chad: Excellent. Excellent. The messaging space overall is bloated, Emissary, TextRecruit, Canvas, TextUs, Talkpush, AllyO, Mya. AMS just came out with their own hourly platform, which again, more I think toward where you guys are trying to flow, Paradox has got $40 million. Now, I know that you are focusing on a segment, but there's a lot of noise out there in this space because it is so popular. How do you cut through that noise? Bradley: Yeah. I mean, there is a lot of noise there, and I think there's going to be more tools coming and tools which suit different markets and different sizes. But when we look the market, there's a lot of cool things out there, but they're out of budget. They're out of reach for most people. I mean, that's how we started this thing, we actually looked at, we want to buy a tool, we went out there and recognized that everything was over budget. We couldn't afford anything. And still to this day, when you look at this, there's big commitments, there's long demo process sales processes, tools designed for big enterprises. And they're also like, I'm not taking away from chatbots and there's really great tools out there, but people need simple, people need ... For the recruiters who are juggling a million tasks and not part of a big team, they want something which works and doesn't interrupt their workflow and they can afford. I think simplicity is really key for our segment of that market. Chad: I totally agree with that. But the hard part, again, is there's a lot of noise, but trying to get those SMBs per se is going to be a hell of a lot harder than just going to an iCIMS or one of these big enterprises and being escorted through the door. You can't do that in that kind of scenario. How are you going to hit those SMBs effectively? Because it's like a hundred thousand billion points of light. Bradley: Yeah, there's a ton. A big part of that is our partnerships, right? I mean, right now we're about to launch our Greenhouse integration and Crelate. Both of those are amazing ATSs, but they really catered, again, Crelate is amazing for the boutique agencies on that side of the fence. Greenhouse has the best marketplace out there for any ATS. And again, they cater that small, medium business, right? Those partnerships are going to be huge for us, and going forward, we'll continue on partnering with ATSs which are designed for that small and medium business. We're probably not going to be partnering with Workday tomorrow or iCIMS and some of these large mega ATSs, they have partners. But the smaller ones are ones where we have that niche and we can fit in, and getting to that marketplace is really going to be important for us. Joel: Tell us about global growth, obviously with SMS, every country has their own protocols, their own setups. You guys are in North America currently. Is there a plan to grow into other countries? What kind of hurdles are you facing or are you just planning on staying in North America? Bradley: Yeah, that's a good question. We've actually had a lot of interest from the UK. And I think the reason behind that is you see more boutique kind of smaller agencies popping up there. I think that's going to be our future in North America as well. I think post COVID, we're going to see a lot more independence, solopreneurs and boutique agencies popping up as people leave the kind of make agency world, so to speak, and go on their own. But we do have a lot of interest from the UK and that's something we're exploring. Some of the challenges is the pricing model, to be honest, like our technology as far as the pricing to be competitive and offer that in North America is doable. But when we started looking at Europe, et cetera, there's some challenges. Also you get into compliance and other things, which has been more challenging. It's our roadmap and it's something we want to explore later on, but for right now, the North American market like I said is 200,000 recruiters being underserved right now. We have a lot of work here for us before we start thinking about overseas no matter how much they want it. Chad: KJ. KJ: What stops from a large chatbot company for that matter to launch a small out of the box solution, right? Plug and play. And then you guys can [inaudible 00:10:23.14], right? How do you address that? Bradley: Yeah. I mean, that's also a threat for sure. I mean, there's no way to say that, hey, someone big couldn't come and release a smaller version of their product to compete with us. That's definitely something is on our ... keeps us up late at night, so to speak. But I think what separates that is the fact that we're actual, I mean, we are recruiters, we're recruiters by trade, we're doing this between the two of us, my co-founder and I, 25 years. It's not just the pricing, it's the way we designed our product, it's actually usable and simple for recruiters. And I think that simple to use interface will always separate us. People use it, I mean, we've been subject to a lot of crappy tools in recruitment through all of our careers. And so when we did this we're really purposeful in making it work the way it should work. And so I think that's one of the challenges bigger companies have, is they have a tendency to add 90 features when you only use 10%, 90% of the time. We do the opposite. We want to have 10 features, you use 90% of time and have the work rate. I think that's probably one of the big things is us, is that simplicity will always cater towards people who actually get and want to use it. KJ: Hang onto that Bradley, simplicity and needs to use, 10 out of 90, that's one of the key. Bradley: Thank you. Yeah. We're always trending as simple as possible, as simple as possible. What can we remove rather what can we add? And so it's served us well so far. Chad: That's a Texas sized 10-4. Okay. We're going to get into the browser extension. This is, I mean, mainly driven off of a browser extension, right? Bradley: That's correct. Yeah. It works as a Chrome extension. We've explored other browsers as well, but the adoption is just lower, because now that other are working on Chromium, there's Brave, the new Microsoft browser works on Chromium. But I mean, every recruiter has a million pro extension. It's just definitely the marketplace to be in. And the reason we designed it as a Chrome extension was really to, again, it's there when you need it and disappears when you don't. So no matter what website you're on, wherever you're at, you can use it and it can disappear without distracting you, whether you need to. Chad: How is it actually integrated with these different platforms? You have the one click import and then you have the dual way, the dual import. How does that work? Bradley: Yeah. Good question. We have what we call kind of light integration and that's a one click import. And so that works for, I think we've got about 20 different tools we work with on the sourcing side and on different ATSs. And what that allows is just a simple, click a name and that name and the candidate imports into Rectxt, and you can instantly start texting. It's a speed to text kind of feature, so to speak. And so it allows you to have those two tools work very seamless. Now the deeper integration, again, the one coming out for Crelate and Greenhouse, that syncs all the conversation history in both the extension and in the ATS as well. You've got a single point of truth in your ATS. Always think that's ideal, to have that. But to be honest, there's a lot of people whose emails aren't going to sync with their ATS. And so we want to still make it as simple as possible in case we haven't had a DB, ATS integration with you. Chad: Got you. What about job sites like LinkedIn, Monster, Indeed. Can I go into a resume database? There might be contact information there. Can I boom, can I automatically import and start the conversation? How does that work? Bradley: Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, if you find a resume on Monster, you are on LinkedIn, and person has their phone number there, you can automatically import anyone there. Now for the ones that don't have import, all you have to do is type the name in, and you can import them in. You can then add them into a talent pool and those talent pools can then segment your people into different groups. That way that keeps you organized. There's likely people in the future looking, you might segment based on skillset or location or whatever you want. And then you can send that one-to-one text, or you can send the one-to-many, so you can write a campaign, and that works really well for the big other nurturing side of things. Joel: I want to touch on privacy a little bit. In a work from home world, and Chad and I talk about this on the show quite a bit, corporations are following their employees more than ever before. So their laptops are usually corporate acquired, their phones are usually corporate acquired, and companies are spying on what people are doing on their phones. Obviously someone tying to recruiter is a bad thing and job seekers are employees, would obviously be afraid to talk to a recruiter via text knowing that their company was following maybe what was going on with their phone. Is that something that you're concerned about and how are you maybe clearing that hurdle? Also, SMS spam is always on the forefront of carriers minds. Nobody wants texting to become email, because marketers fuck everything up. What are you guys doing to sort of make sure that doesn't happen to you? So one question, two parts, I guess. Bradley: Okay. On the privacy side of things, most people are giving their personal cell phone on their resume. They're not using a work cell phone. I mean, I think as far as the privacy side of it, as far as texting, that candidate would not be sharing typically their corporate cell phone number, I think that's pretty rare to see. If they do, that's kind of on them. I don't think there's a big concern on the privacy side for that candidate worrying about their employer. I mean, if anything else, same as our email is probably actually on the work. The personal email is probably on their work cell phone as well. So chances are, I don't think that's going to be a big deal. Now, the second part of that question was regarding sort of, again, the second part was, the two part, one was on the pricing side, second part of it was on [crosstalk 00:16:05.09]. Joel: Carriers are very conscientious of SMS not becoming email and having tons of spam. I'm curious if that's a concern with your business and how you approach that. Bradley: I mean, I think it is on there. I mean, I think there is ... I mean, that's the benefit of texting, is the fact that it isn't becoming over spam and over utilized, and there is a personal quality to it. For us, I mean the big one is we have an opt-out tool built into this. And so that protects as far as compliance, but also if someone's feeling they're being spammed, it's a really quick click and that way they can remove themselves from any further communications there. The tool itself is really designed not to be sending, for getting and sending, like automatically just sending tons and tons of messages. And beyond that, we also have some throttling built in on the back-end. If we see some misuse, that's something which we'll jump in and say, "Hey, this was designed as a oneto-one communication tool, to improve the hiring process, not to be out there blasting gazillions of people." But in reality, the way the tool is designed, I don't think it'd be possible. You literally have to have someone doing eight hour shifts, three people a day, switching on the same account, blasting people to really get to that spam level. But we're really conscious on the way we designed that way, we want to avoid, we didn't want, we wanted ... We see text messaging as a way to enable human connection, natural place human connection. And the idea of blasting and spamming isn't what this tool is designed to use. Chad: KJ. KJ: Do you think that there would be a trick if carriers, and this is off Joel's question, decide [inaudible 00:17:45.04] and then there is a law or something that comes out and says, "All right, the pricing for texting is 10 times higher for commercial use." What does that do to your business model? Bradley: Yeah. I mean, obviously those are things that, again, we do think about those threats and those risks. At this stage, it hasn't happened. Hopefully that stays that way. Hopefully it continues to be relatively open communication platform. But at the same time, I mean, where messaging goes, it might change to being through WhatsApp. It might change to being other platforms as well. At this age right now, we're solely focused on SMS. But to be honest, where the people go, I mean our tool, how we can link up and send messages, that's just one medium. And then the future might explore that. I mean, who knows, right? SMS might all of a sudden get dinged and the messaging goes through the roof. And maybe we're forced to switch over to Facebook chat or WhatsApp or other kind of verticals. But at this stage we're feeling pretty safe, so fingers crossed. Chad: So many platforms out there that are in texting. They want to help through the process as well. And that's exactly what recruiters need, right? Not to mention they also help to ensure that ghosting goes down, because they continue that connection. What is Rectxt doing to help schedule interviews, and then after the interview schedule, to be able to keep that connection so that you decrease candidate ghosting? Bradley: Yeah, that's a good question. We have nothing baked in at this stage as far as anything on the ghosting side. However, it's actually one of the big use cases we advocate for and we see a lot of our users use, is just that simple message, that simple check-in, post-interview, how did things go? Any feedback? And then also once the candidate's accepted an offer, something we also see people using is sending quick message. I mean, whether it's a, "Hey, you just got some onboarding details in your email the next couple of days, we're excited to see you." Joel: Thank you, Bradley. Chad: Look for more episodes of Death Match. This Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted to lifting up startups in the recruitment technology space. Subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com.

This week's show is a touchdown (honoring the NFL season, obvi ;) But it's a weird, surreal COVID kind of touchdown, like 2020 has delivered. But there is GOOD NEWS! Jobvite buys Talentegy Bullhorn banks Stone cold cash Amazon staffs up Netflix throws cash at top talent (not that kinda talent) Microsoft turns LinkedIn into a Facebook $$ machine ...and lots of death-by-automation. Want more you greedy bastards? How about a job board dedicated to space jobs! As always, powered by Sovren, JobAdx, and Jobvite. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. INTRO (12s): 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 (20s): Are you ready for some football? Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, AKA dumb and dumber. I'm your co-host Joel "Jim Brown" Cheeseman. Chad (-): and I'm Chad "is fantasy football really going to happen?" Sowash. Joel (35s): So we'll see this week Jobvite continues the shopping spree Bullhorn gets a new sugar daddy, or is that mama, is that sexist? I don't know. And Space gets a job board. Hey Chad, your brain called, it's got some space for rent. Chad (52s): Again. Jobvite (55s): "Jobvite has changed our recruiting practice by making us more nimble. We're able to hire faster, but that means that things like where it would take us weeks to get approval from hiring managers or the next level up, that's now minutes." "It's really the best cutting edge tools out there available for talent acquisition today." "I would absolutely recommend a Jobvite to my peers it allows you to get in front talent that other tools won't do." Recruit with purpose, hire with confidence, visit jobvite.com to learn more. Joel (1m 24s): Let the good times, roll at Jobvite. We'll get to that in a second. Chad (1m 31s): They're definitely gonna roll first off. Is this really happening? Are we really going to get NFL football? Joel (1m 37s): I think we are. If the NFL or the NBA and the NHL or any indication, I mean, there are a lot more moving parts in football and they're actually traveling. I'm moderately optimistic. I'm also sorta torn in that there's no Buckeye football this year, but there's college football. So I don't know how to feel about that one. Chad (2m 1s): Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, the NFL is not going to be in a bubble like the NFL NHL or the NBA. So I don't think that's a comparison we can make. I think we might have to look at it more like baseball and baseball had issues early on. I mean, shit. They had to cancel games. I mean, they, they were having a COVIDtastic season for awhile. So I mean, this will, we'll see, but I'm pretty, pretty excited to see if they can keep players safe. I know that some of the players have already said that they're not going to play this season, which is, you know, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. Chad (2m 37s): Understandable, make a lot of money, the last thing you want to do is put yourself at risk, but yes, NFL football and we had our draft last week, which again, seems so surreal. Cause it was like, I have no fucking clue. These people are gonna play. I mean, that's, that's the hardest part, right? Injury's, one thing. Joel (2m 55s): Fantasy is going to be a mess. Cause you're going to have entire teams like not play. You're gonna have like players that are stars, not play for it. It's going to be a GM nightmare, if you're a fantasy football aficionados. So let's, let's go on a limb here assuming they complete the season who are your two super bowl teams and who's your winner? Chad (3m 16s): Oh the Colts this year, baby. This is their year. Joel (3m 19s): Wow. Alright. Do you have one of the what? 10% or 5% it's open to, that's going to be weird too. Like I know the Browns have 10% capacity. Chad (3m 30s): Yeah. I think the Chiefs are open 20%. I think it's, it's it's up to the actual teams themselves. I think this is also another interesting setup is like again, the NBA was really governed by the NBA to an extent, not really the teams. They're like, Hey here, here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to do it. Here's the strategy. And this is how, we're going to keep everyone safe. But we didn't see that from really major league baseball. I mean, Goodell's not going to do any of that shit. He's he's much more of like a Trump do whatever the fuck you want, kind of a thing. Chad (4m 1s): I'm just going to sit here and cash my fucking check. Joel (4m 4s): No doubt. No doubt. So, okay. We've got the Colts from the AFC. Who's your NFC team and who's your Chad (4m 9s): Fucking Niners dude. I mean, those guys were playing so well last year, defense wins wins championships. I'd love to see those two play. Again, I think, I think definitely the culture's a long shot, but man, they, they are stacked this year, especially on defense. Joel (4m 26s): You think Philip Rivers will stay vertical all season? Or do you think Brissett have to come in at some point. Chad (4m 32s): No, no dude, the Colts have one of the best offer pensive lines in the NFL. That's why I believe river said, fuck. Yeah, I'll come play, the last thing I need is to be on my back after what shit, how many years has he been in the league? Joel (4m 48s): 2005. I think he came in? so 15, 16 years. Chad (4m 51s): He wanted to play it safe. He was smart, I'm sure to play these, these last few years out, the last thing he needs to be on his ass. Joel (5m 1s): So for me, I, it's cliche, but I mean, I think the Chiefs train rolls on, I think they're not going to have a hangover because they had COVID, right? So whereas most Superbowl winning teams go and party and get crazy and, and Gronk, these guys had to stay home. There were no crazy endorsements or commercials that these guys, you know, got on. So I think they've been strictly business. The paths are obviously going to be weird this year. So I don't know about them. Joel (5m 31s): I think the Colts will be good. And I think Baltimore is going to be a juggernaut. Chad (5m 34s): Oh Yeah. Joel (5m 34s): So we'll see that goes. Chad (5m 37s): Hoping to see J K Dobbins, get the ball, get the rock. Joel (5m 41s): Yeah, they're going to have to share the ball with one, the quarterback and a few other guys. Yeah. But yeah, Dobbins, I think we'll have a good season. I kinda like the Saints out of the NFC. I think they've been heartbroken and crushed in the last few years. Chad (5m 55s): Yeah Joel (5m 55s): And I think that this year, they kind of get over the hump. They stay healthy. Breeze has one last sort of, you know, role in them. And it's a, it's a Saints V. Chiefs Superbowl. And I think the Chiefs are back to back winners. My first pick Michael Thomas. Mine too look at that! Dude, he's the best receiver in football. The dude is glue. The dude is awesome. I do hope that Josh Gordon can stay healthy. I think the, I think the Seahawks will be a real tough out in the NFC. Chad (6m 25s): We shall see. We shall see. So shout outs. Joel (6m 27s): Shoutouts! Okay, here we go kids. Chad (6m 30s): 2 weeks in a row kids, Jeremy Roberts broke the internet this week. We know that first day of school picture new take in front of the front door. He posted a first day back to work, pick with a ridiculously COVID outfit, it was hilarious, good job, Jay. Joel (6m 52s): Yeah, it reminded me of a, if you've seen Mr. Mom, Michael Keaton, when he's, when he's at home and the flannel and the beard, Jeremy's not too far from that. Also I think I saw some rubber Birkenstocks. I'm not sure if that's a no, no or a fashion no, no, Chad (7m 11s): I don't think they were rubber. Joel (7m 11s): on that. But yeah. Jeremy, Jeremy, thanks for that dude. Shout out to Craig Newmark. Most of you will know Craig's list. May not know Craig, but he's the Craig behind the list. Chad (7m 21s): Throw back to 1995. Joel (7m 24s): He apparently flipped over the couch and found $200 million that he's going to invest in saving journalism and of course defeating Donald Trump. So Craig, shout out to you man, using that money wisely. I hope it works long time. Chad (7m 42s): Listener James Lord from Xref. What kind of fuckingg name is that? James Lord. That's fucking awesome. And new listener Justin McGregor over at Beamery. Thanks for listening gents. Now get the family, friends, peers, and social peeps listening as well. Go to chadcheese.com hit that subscribe button kids. Hell yeah. Don't miss an episode. Joel (8m 4s): Shout out to young adults. Chad (8m 6s): Oh Jesus! Joel (8m 6s): You're going to love this so much. This is from Pew Research, found out that a majority live with their parents. Still a boy, Chad (8m 17s): Fifty-Two percent (52%). Joel (8m 19s): Not since the great depression has the world seen a bigger bunch of slackers, deadbeats and blood suckers. Congratulations kids. Chad (8m 28s): 52% in the great depression, it was 48%. If that tells you anything Joel (8m 35s): Way to go, young people. Chad (8m 36s): Shout out to Peter Clayton who tweets and I quote, Oh my fucking God, Jason Goldberg, carnival barker, I almost fell out of my chair. That was a reference to last week's podcast. Joel (8m 51s): That was you? Chad (8m 51s): Yeah, that was the reference to last week's podcast as we were talking about Aaron Stewart and job.com given us the, the old carnival barker from a death match. So if you haven't heard that, check it out last week's podcast. Joel (9m 9s): Peter Clayton with the potty mouth, who knew, who knew? And then shout out to Aaron, who's actually gonna come on the show, drop his nuts! Chad (9m 16s): He has to! Joel (9m 16s): Explain himself, face us and face the music on what the hell happened at Death Match in Austin. Shout out to Bolster. You've heard the, you've heard the Uber of everything. Now we have the Uber for executive teams Bolster raised $6 million this week to a, I don't know, just plug and play executive teams into companies that that's kind of interesting. Chad (9m 42s): I guess that sounds fucking stupid. Big shout out to Joey price of the Business Life and Coffee podcast, he loved and who didn't? He loved our Cindy Gallop blow shit up podcast kids. If you don't know who Cindy Gallop is, you need to check out the podcast. This lady is an icon business, marketing, but guess what? Part two is coming next week. Joel (10m 11s): Alright. In the wormhole alert a category, a shout out to Uber, Lyft, Door Dash and others who are spending upwards of $180 million to defeat your favorite, California's prop 22, which puts giggers in the employment/employee category. Obviously the gig economy doesn't like that, the powers that be we'll see how that plays out. You didn't want to talk about it as a topic, but I'm giving it a shout out, otherwise we'll spend three hours on the topic. Chad (10m 45s): They should give that money to the actual people and just work shit out. I mean, it's not that fucking hard people. God, a big shout out to Adam Gordon for reviving the talent phallus video dude, that video provided much needed the laughs and fun for everyone. Remember the video? I think it was late last year where everybody was talking about that, the talent infinity loop and, and Adam was like, no, the funnel is the thing. Chad (11m 16s): And he made this, somebody made this funnel and it looked like a penis. And then he had a job seeker that he had like riding up and down the funnel and it looked like it was, you know? Yeah. So anyway, the, the video, we were sharing it again this week because Adam had some, some other writings and artistry that he wanted to share. And I said, guess what, Adam, it's not as good as this one. Joel (11m 40s): Yeah, frankly, I, myself in boycotting, Adam Gordon videos ever since that outfit that he used a week or so ago, that was, that was an embarrassment to humanity, that one. Yeah. All right. Chad (11m 52s): The socks! Joel (11m 52s): Shout to a White House Diversity Training, apparently our fearless leader, Donald Trump thinks that such training is anti-American and divisive. They're getting rid of it. Diversity training suck it at the White House. Shout out Chad (12m 7s): That's that that's an entire podcast by itself. Big shout out to John Gorman, former AD in the Clinton administration. He was just on the pod. It was called getting Wonky with Universal Healthcare. This dude multimillionaire knows his shit. I don't know how we got him on the podcast, but we had a chance to actually talk about healthcare, not just universal healthcare, but how it impacts our workforce. And that was a pretty fucking awesome podcast! Joel (12m 39s): Agreed. Shout out to Weddell's list of a hundred influencers of which you and I were both on, which automatically makes it a little suspect, but we certainly appreciate it. Your wife was on it as well. Did you guys do a little, a champagne toast for being on the list? Chad (12m 55s): Had a little power couple cuddle that's a that never hurts. It goes, it goes into my last shout out before we get into events. So we did this awesome podcast called Lead with Equity and it was with SYNDIO CEO Maria Colacurcio. Dude. I'm so fucking frustrated, I had a conversation on the socials about paid transparency with two females and they gave me a blue zillion reasons why it wouldn't work. Chad (13m 31s): Females, the ones who were getting impacted the most, the ones who are getting fucked the most. And hear me as a white dude, I'm trying to, I'm like, Hey, I think you should make what I make. And they're like, no, here are all the reasons why this won't work. Like really is this, is this the thing? Joel (13m 48s): I think what you've just admitted is owning a VR headset. And this is some sort of like VR surrealism program that you're plugged into your brain because I have a hard time believing that women are defending pay inequality, ` Chad (14m 4s): Two of them, ganged up on me. I don't think this would work. This would kill morale. And it's like, well wait, what kill morale? This would boost. Right? Anyway. Joel (14m 13s): Well, okay. So Chad (14m 15s): Trying not to mansplain anything but defend and say, I believe you ma'am deserve as much as I make. And they both said you should probably just go away. Joel (14m 29s): Well, this is sort of anti-climactic after that. But my last Shout Out goes to Pete Janssen's. Pete has a podcast, a lifelong industry guy worked at Career Builder. I think way back in the day he wants us on their show called SAS Holes. Oh, how do we not go on a show called Sass Holes? And to sweeten the deal, Pete sent us both a little bourbon, which of course we always love so that we can get nice and lubricated for the show. Joel (15m 1s): So Pete, thanks, man. We'll talk to you soon. Chad (15m 4s): Excellent Events. You got me all excited talking about talking about bourbon. September 22nd at 2:00 PM get this little thing that we're going to be doing called a Friendly Discourse. Got me. My, my man, Jim Stroud and Patrick Neuron in today's incredibly divided world. My friend, we can't have the hard discussions without getting in a fight. That's sad. Yeah. Can't have civil discourse. Chad (15m 34s): So Jim and I who've been friends for 15 plus years. We're going to get on the mic. We're going to talk about diversity quotas, which that's what Jim calls it. I don't like that word that much. Patrick's going to be the, the referee. We're going to have our opening statements and we're going to jump right into to debate format and just to have a ball with it. I mean, we can't have some of the hardest conversations in the workplace today because people are afraid to have them. Chad (16m 5s): So we're hopefully going to lead and have some fun and do it as friends and disagree because we do disagree. You can go to circaworks.com/webinars just look for friendly discourse and register again. Circaworks.com/webinars. Joel (16m 21s): Yeah. Don't make Jim mad because if he kicks me off his black history email list because of you and I don't get updates on the real bootylicious, I'm going to be upset. So don't piss Jim off, alright? Chad (16m 36s): Great, great segue... Rep Fest One World, September 23rd, 24th and 25th. We are going to be on the leadership stage. No kidding. I'm going to have a no bullshit Future of Tech discussion with a couple of CEOs. You might just know a good man. Joel (16m 56s): Oh, love him. Chad (16m 56s): That's right, baby go to recfest.com. Click on the agenda in the upper right nav and register. We're going to be there, a bunch of people are going to be there. Great content, Jamie and crew throw an amazing show. And I got to say for all of the events that are out there, and I know how much you hate digital. I gotta say, these guys have worked their asses off on using and trying all these new platforms that are out there. Joel (17m 28s): But will there be a virtual DJ and a mixologist is my question? Chad (17m 31s): I got, I hope so. Joel (17m 36s): Who knows, who knows? Aman Brar and Angela Hood will be joining us in an intimate CEO conversation. Chad (17m 39s): Intimate. Joel (17m 44s): Which I'm pretty excited about. By the way that that reminds me, if you want Chad, and in your pocket, vibrating randomly, you need to text CC. That's the letter C and the letter C to 833-799-032. Again, that's the letters. C C (833) 799-0321 for text alerts. We promise no sexting from your favorite podcast. the Chad and Cheese. Chad (18m 15s): Got to love it. And if you love free stuff, go to Chadcheese.com/free Chadcheese/free and register for free stuff. Go do love it. Joel (18m 25s): Love it. Love it. Chad (18m 25s): Topics! Joel (18m 28s): I've got, I've got a teaser real quick. Chad (18m 28s): Oh shit. Joel (18m 28s): Beer drop. A new giveaway. The ink has not dried yet on the agreement, but it looks like starting October we're going to be given out free beer to people sponsored by soon to be announced. And with that ... TOPICS! Chad (18m 49s): Somebody got cash. Joel (18m 52s): Or is going to the clearance rack for some of these companies. I don't know, man, Aman Brar is a, is a Savage when shopping for companies. So announced yesterday, literally we're talking to him on any joke that, "Oh, we have an acquisition announcement today" and we laughed it off. Chad (19m 10s): He was trolling us, is what he was doing. Joel (19m 10s): Which we shouldn't have done. But they've acquired Talentegy, that's a mouthful. It's talent with an EG Y The technology basically, okay, how they explained it as they analyze data on career sites and throughout a company's various talent acquisition technologies, we're talking career websites, ATSs, serums, et cetera. They analyze identity, candidate behaviors, content engagement, candidate exits an accurate applicant, applicant sources to better understand how candidates interact with the talent acquisition technologies the company deploys, basically trying to make sure your UI, your UX is badass and who doesn't love a good candidate experience more than my man Chad Sowash? Chad (20m 2s): Yeah, really a technology that tells us what we already know. Your site sucks. Your process sucks. Your experience sucks. Over 50% of candidates drop off and it's related to generally those three things. So if this is a big gift, if Jobvite can demonstrate where your site process and experience is broken and then provide an apply those fixes, that is a big win, especially for those people who give a shit about brand. Chad (20m 37s): And many of those companies that are out there today are kind of like backing away from brand because they have so many candidates coming their way and they don't think it matters, but it does, overall. So this is a great way to focus on those three things again, your site, process, and experience and get that shit all pulled together. I hope that Aman and team can really wrap this up and cause they have so many products, to be able to help fix this. Chad (21m 7s): I think this is probably the missing factor that they had. It's like, well, we can fix things, but we don't know what to fix now with Talentegy, hopefully they'll know what to fix. Joel (21m 18s): Yeah. And data, data, data. Nobody loves that more than our man Aman Brar. And this will be another nice bucket of data to throw into the whole system. So Aman said in a quote "the release with the addition of Talentegy, our customers will be able to monitor the candidate experience, identify points of friction and eliminate them in ways that significantly improve outcomes. We're excited to join forces in a way that will further underscore the value of talent acquisition to every organization." Joel (21m 49s): They're building a nice machine there at Jobvite, with a lot of pieces. Chad (21m 53s): Another funny thing is that there's a quote from their website Talentegy website. "Finally, there's a solution that provides candidate source tracking you can trust." In 2020, I mean, I was working with Recruits Soft and iSims 18 years ago doing this shit and we still haven't figured it out. This is one of the biggest issues we have in talent acquisition and HR. We know where the problems are, job descriptions, source tracking, but we don't fix that shit. Chad (22m 25s): Hopefully we can get a technology that can be hands off and we can get what we need. Joel (22m 31s): Yeah. You can't manage what you can't measure and all this data is going to help us measure it. And hopefully Jobvite can help us manage it. Chad (22m 38s): That's right. That's a bunch of Bullhorn. Joel (22m 41s): That's a bunch of bullhorn. That's not bad. Sowash. So a Bullhorn, also in the news this week, we did a shred on it, yesterday. Stone Point Capital will become the lead investor to power the next phase of the company's growth. Insight partners and GenStar who listeners might remember bought a majority share in 2017 will remain investors in the business, but Stone Point is look, looks like they're going to buy a majority stake from them. Joel (23m 12s): Stone Point according to the release "was attracted to Bullhorn on the strength of its longterm opportunity to serve the global staffing and recruiting industry. It's consistent revenue growth and its reputation for customer success." The Bullhorn management team will remain as is, thoughts? Initially, what caught me about this press release? Yeah, and I see a lot of press releases was like sort of the over highlighting of the recruiting business is fine. Joel (23m 45s): Stone Point came in and loved what they saw. Like every, it felt a little bit like that meme where the dog is in the room, that's burning and says, this is fine. Like there was a lot of emphasis on like, recruiting is great, we're going to be awesome. And that struck me as a little odd in this release. Otherwise private equity sucks. It's never good for anybody. I hope Bullhorn can weather the storm and still still be around in five years. Chad (24m 14s): Stone Point Capital has investments in Hire Right and Prism HR, but yet in the press release, it keeps saying over and over and over, they have sector experience in staffing and financial services. If somebody keeps saying it over and over, it's almost like they're trying to believe it themselves. And they want you to believe it as well. I just don't see that in doing somewhat of a shallow dive in researching Stone Point Capital. I think they had the cash, I think from Bullhorn standpoint, they're in the staffing community, right? Chad (24m 47s): So when everything starts to really scale back up, they're going to get a lot of business, because staffing is going to get a lot of business, because HR and talent acquisition will not be ready to scale. They won't. So they're going to get a lot of the business. So as soon as that we talk about it all the time, as soon as that lever is switched and it's time to start, you know, juicing the economy with talent again, it's going to be staffing companies who lead this, because talent acquisition will not be ready, period. Chad (25m 17s): So I see this as a smart investment, hoping that in the next six months that lever will be switched. Joel (25m 26s): Yeah. I think, I think the risk becomes the automation question because you know, what strikes me as funny when I talk to CEOs of automation businesses, is the biggest hurdle to selling their product is that recruiters think buying it will put them out of business. So recruiting tech is in this weird place where like it still exists, but how many people are going to use it? If automation is putting them out of business, but they're not buying the products because it will put them out of business, but companies are going to do it anyway? Joel (25m 59s): And like, there's this perfect storm of what's going to happen to businesses like Bullhorn and the future of recruiting and where that goes with automation. So a good investment maybe? A bad investment, maybe? Only time will tell, but I don't think it's going to be something that happens overnight. When the economy comes back, staffing will be a nice, healthy business to be in, but longterm, I have questions. I have questions. Chad (26m 24s): I have questions about Microsoft expanding LinkedIn Profile advertising. Joel (26m 31s): Microsoft has this product called LinkedIn. I don't know if you've heard about it? It's a thing! It's a thing. But they've been, they've been hoping to make more and more money off of advertising and more, more or less they've been getting their clock cleaned by, by Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Chad (26m 40s): Yep. Joel (26m 40s): But, but Microsoft and LinkedIn have some interesting capabilities in any way. They launched, they launched certain LinkedIn profile targeting in 2018 in the U S it's it without getting too deeply into it. It it's just a matter of like better targeting engagement. Who's in market for certain products and being able to target those folks. But they've recently expanded the offering globally. Joel (27m 12s): And because we're so beloved in the world, we thought it was worth mentioning that the, the campaigns are now available in Canada, UK, Australia, France, and Germany. So if you've been on the fence about LinkedIn advertising and you're in those countries now might be a good time to go open up the, the pocket book and start testing to see how these capabilities can work for you, because the targeting is, is pretty good. It's pretty good and pretty unique to Microsoft and LinkedIn. Chad (27m 41s): Yeah. This seems fairly harmless until it gets a little money into it, a little evil into it because you're going to, I remember we talked about on the show, avocados being advertised on LinkedIn. I think, you know, once politics gets into this division, I mean, there are so many different ways this can happen, much like Facebook. I mean, don't think that LinkedIn is inside a bubble. Chad (28m 14s): There's the opportunity that yes, they want to go after this, this Facebook cash. I totally get it, but there's a lot. There's a lot of shit that will seep in as well. Joel (28m 21s): Yeah. And when they get their hands on Tik Tok, then the game really changes. Right? Chad (28m 26s): Nobody's buying Tik Tok. Joel (28m 26s): No one's buying Tik Tok. But anyway, I would like to see some, maybe get hub engagement in some of this ad platform. I think that would be kind of interesting from a recruitment standpoint, but until then check out Sovren kids Sovren (29m 9s): 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. Joel (29m 11s): And speaking of human, your favorite Amazon is in the news this week. Chad (29m 16s): Oh, Fuck fucking Jay Carney, fucking Jay Carney. How can you, how can you love a guy so much then D then just hate him? Son of a bitch. So Amazon currently has 33,000 job openings for corporate and tech roles. And it says it's a lot. It will share thousands of additional hourly roles in an Amazon's operations network soon. All of the new employees for these roles will be paid at least minimum wage of $15 per hour and up to 20 weeks of parental leave. Chad (29m 52s): That's all great stuff. Career day, get ready to give Mark your calendars career day, September 16th, that's open to anyone looking for a job. I mean, for the most part, Jay Carney actually said it in the video on cnn.com. These are going to be like seasonal positions. Some of those individuals will probably stay, the wage raises or the rage bumps will probably come back down around the April timeframe or before personally. Chad (30m 23s): I mean, it's one of those things where you love to see the opportunities that are there for people to actually make money, as long as it's safe. And this whole wage bump thing, I think is the biggest piece of shit in the world. Just give them that money for God's sakes. Jeff, as you sit on your mountain of fucking gold, but yeah, I mean, this is good news. The problem is I don't want to hit it real quick. And I want to hear what you have to say. Amazon and Walmart are becoming too big to fail, which means what happens when they do? Joel (31m 1s): Ooh, lots to unwrap here. So to answer your question, I think at some point, at some point Amazon will probably be broken up to a certain degree, right? Like there's no reason Amazon web services needs to be part of Amazon. And I could argue that Whole Foods probably doesn't need to be part of Amazon similar to how PayPal was spun off of eBay and became a much better value, more valuable company. I think Amazon will probably face similar headwinds. Joel (31m 31s): Walmart, Walmart's a little tougher, amazingly 30 years, hence Walmart went from, you know, they're killing mom and pops and they're the devil, to being, they're the only defense against Amazon taking over the world. So I don't see them having some of the same challenges as Amazon. I think Walmart needs to figure out a delivery, and I know they just launched like Walmart prime or plus or something, which is like a free delivery system. Joel (32m 2s): I think Target has had a really good run of it here in COVID. So Target on the retail side is competitive. I think even Best Buy has done really well with being able to deliver electronics and, and customer service better than some of the others. So I do think ultimately Amazon is gonna face some, some antitrust issues, but Amazon or the competition will probably be fine. I think that this further highlights, the fact that, you know, there are about five companies that have 25% of the value of the S&P 500. Joel (32m 39s): So you have Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. So these guys are hugely valuable. They need to stay in the competitive game from talent. So they're paying people accordingly. There was also a story that we shared this week in regards to Netflix, who Reed Hastings talked about paying handsomely for the best talent. If you want to have the best company, FedEx is hiring a ton of people. So obviously mailing products and seasonal stuff is going to blow up, which they're all expecting. Joel (33m 12s): So all these companies that are too big are only gonna get bigger in the next few months and years. What I do think is interesting in terms of Reed Hasting's comment is, is paying people. Handsomely is a way to get the best people into the system. And part of me thinks when you talk about pay and equality and what we're doing, like what would a world be like if we paid teachers like we do Netflix and Amazon pay like their best people, what would happen if politicians were paid to a degree that the best and brightest from college and university wanted to be politicians, instead of a head of product at Amazon? Joel (33m 56s): Just curious. I think if, if we, if we put more resources and value behind these things that we think have a direct impact on racism, sexism, equality, et cetera, if we actually put money to those things, I think, I think we might be onto something. I think we could maybe look at Amazon and Netflix and others as a way to improve society. Is that too Pollyannish? Chad (34m 21s): Yeah. No. The thing is and I'm gonna point back to one of our podcasts with Robert Ruff, who said the exact same thing. If you have great a plus plus talent, they will easily outperform everybody else by 10 fold. That's why you pay them so well. He also said as a rich dude, he said, I need to pay more taxes. That's what it's going to come down to. If you want those individuals to actually make more money, everybody has to understand that this is more of a community scenario as opposed to an individual scenario and we have to pay more taxes. Chad (34m 59s): So if we want the Pollyannish kind of set up, we definitely can have capitalism to drive the markets, but we need socialistic guardrails to be able to ensure that people don't have shitty lives. We only get one life people. I mean, and whether you have a great life or not, there are people that out there that don't, how can they actually have healthcare? How can they have a living wage when 12% of our country is actually working poor? Chad (35m 32s): Right? So these, those are great questions. The thing is we gotta pay for that shit. Joel (35m 38s): I love your only one life to live. You've obviously been listening to seventies arena rock because it's on the brain. I just, I just think it, if we had a world where graduates from, from Kellogg and Duke and, and Rice and whatever, want to be teachers, instead of, you know, product manager for, for, you know, Google, the world we live in would be much different, I think. Anyway. Chad (36m 3s): Yeah, I think in, in this goes into our next story, you know, the links between automation and inequality so slightly, you know, slight amount of pivot here are the types of jobs cause we're talking about jobs. So this is from PSI Tech Daily, "Modern technology affects different workers in different ways. In some white collar jobs, designers, engineers, people become more productive with sophisticated software at their side. In other cases, forms of automation, from robots to phone answering systems have simply replaced factory workers, receptionists, and many other kinds of people." Chad (36m 43s): And a new study by MIT economist suggests that automation has a bigger impact on the, on the labor market. And he points at 1987, as the moment where our job losses to automation, stop being replaced by an equal number of similar workplace opportunities. So we've had these issues. I go back to the Reagan days back in trickle-down right? Joel (37m 15s): Yep. Chad (37m 15s): That's when that's, when we started giving all the money to the rich and just praying that it trickled down, well, guess what fuckers it didn't. Then with jobs, we were praying that automation would also create new jobs, will it didn't at the rate that it was replacing jobs. As we talk about this Pollyannish type of way of living, we have to look at over the last 30, 40 years, what has actually happened to our society from a wage standpoint, from a living standpoint and those types of things and the jobs that are available versus what's not available. Chad (37m 52s): This is a hard discussion. And those designers and engineers who have the sophisticated software at their side, well, those laborers had sophisticated software at their side, in the eighties, automation at their side in the eighties to help them do their job and it eventually replaced them. So look at what's happening. This isn't something that, that is going to be changed unless we change it. Joel (38m 22s): MIT and other pretty good college. By the way, when you mentioned, when you mentioned 1987, I had a hard time, not just delving into daydreaming and my Ford escort driving the first year to the dollar movies and Taco Tuesdays at Two Pesos. Wow. Those were good days. Yeah. You know, the paper talks about not only just robotics and automation taking jobs, but also the pay inequality that automation brings. And it's sort of a double whammy to the poor, to the uneducated, to the lower, lower middle class folks. Joel (38m 60s): And those are, those are real issues that we face today. I love the fact that they've went back in history on the paper that they talked about, you know, concluding that across the U S from 1993 to 2007, each new robot replaced 3.3 jobs, salaries have not kept pace with automation as well as, as well as inflation. And those are real issues. It was a pretty dark paper, although they did talk a little bit about the industrial revolution and how certainly in England that although automation replaced many workers, new, new categories of companies and jobs and innovations occurred where jobs were were created. Joel (39m 42s): So as we've talked about on the show, will new industries be created at a rate equal to the amount of layoffs and job replacement that automation takes? I think that's really a really tough challenge. And, and Cindy Gallop, who, if you haven't listened to the interview, you should talks a lot about sort of empowering diverse folks to be entrepreneurs and to put money into those resources, to basically unlock the creativity of people to start new businesses and new ventures and create new things. Joel (40m 16s): And I think somewhere along those lines, there's a solution to getting us through this automation, you know, perfect storm to where we come out on the other side and maybe even healthier than when we started our venture out on the boat. Chad (40m 33s): So think, think about this real quick. As I was reading this, I thought about being a little kid and seeing the transition from cashiers at grocery stores, having to key things in to using the scanners, boop, boop. And then I looked at it and I'm like, you know, as a kid, I'm like, Oh, I could do that. Right. I am every fucking time I go to Kroger every time I go to Kroger, I do that. So here, here are a couple of things that I, that I was also thinking about, you know, we're going to have to do one of two major things. Chad (41m 5s): Number one, regulate what can be replaced. And actually from a regulatory standpoint, say, no, you cannot automate that. Or number two, tax automation to feed into a UBI system. We have to think about what the future looks like. And it doesn't look like the 1950s. And for all you people out there who think that somebody who doesn't have a college degree doesn't work hard and they don't deserve $20 an hour for us to be able to think that white collar is so much more superior. Chad (41m 38s): That's all bullshit. We have to, we have to look at our community because we need them. And they're smart fucking people. And they're hard workers. Joel (41m 44s): I quote, Melania Trump who says, be best Chad, be best. Chad (41m 49s): Oh my God, JobAdX (42m 47s): Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company, culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team, help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing: joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad (42m 48s): Speaking of Trump, let's go to space. Joel (42m 48s): The first time I saw this, I literally thought this was about Space Force. Chad (42m 52s): It's definitely piggy backing on the Space Force phenomenon. So Spaced Capitol, an organization committed to space and all the opportunity there in launched spactalent.org this week. So yeah, space needs a job board spacetalent.org has been born. They, they are going all in on space, Space Capital, Space Angel Funding and Space Talent. Chad (43m 27s): So Chad Anderson, managing partner of Space Capital apparent brand of Space Talent says "we are seeing a surge in demand for nearly every major industry as businesses and government expand their use of space based technology, such as GPS, geospatial, intelligence, and communications, the current pace of innovation and incoming investor interest..." That's the big key there kids "indicates that the space economy will be one of the fastest growing sectors over the next decade," Chad (44m 4s): yada yada yada. So there's cash here kids. And it seems like you can get on the job board. You have to request to have your jobs on it's. They saying it's free. Joel (44m 13s): "With over 500 companies across 40 countries, pace, Space Talent matches credible employers with top talent while providing insights into an ecosystem..." that's a big word, Chad, ... "with an ever expanding range of opportunities. The job board features the latest opportunities from the space And tech worlds, including 5,000 current openings, which range from launch technicians and engineering to software development, accounting, HR,..." Joel (44m 43s): Yes, HR we'll need some space ... "Marketing, senior management, and a lot more. If you're looking to take your career into the heavens, look no further than spacetalent.org. Chad (44m 49s): Time for me to launch into my hammock with a beer. Joel (44m 49s): We out Chad (44m 59s): We out. OUTRO (45m 17s): Thank you for listen to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Let's blow shit up.... AGAIN! Cindy Gallop doesn't waste any time throwing haymakers in this final episode. (Click here for Episode 1) Who is Cindy Gallop? Wait, have you been in a cave for a decade? Cindy Gallop, founder and former chair of the US branch of advertising firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and founder of the IfWeRanTheWorld and MakeLoveNotPorn companies is a brand or business icon. Cindy boils down complex topics in an elegant way right before slapping the listener with the honesty they need and deserve. Enjoy this Symphony Talent powered The Chad and Cheese interview where Cindy talks hiring individuals with disabilities, answers the question "Should white dudes just STFU?" and deploys advice to Daddy Cheese. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. INTRO (14s): 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 (31s): It's time to pick the conversation back up with Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of Make Love, Not Porn, founder and CEO of If We Ran the World. She's a business and marketing icon and if Make Love, Not Porn, wasn't ear catching enough, her slogan: "I like to blow shit up, I am the Michael Bay of business" should prepare you for part two of our two-part podcast series. Enjoy. Cindy Gallop (1m 2s): I want to pick up on the issue of hiring disabled people, okay? Because for too many companies, and again, this is both unconscious, but also conscious because we give way too much credit to unconscious bias and a ton of bias is conscious. The problem, at the moment, is that there is this extremely misguided thought that hiring disabled people is fundamentally charitable. Cindy Gallop (1m 32s): You're doing it out of the kindness of your heart, and that's absolute fucking bollocks. Every company should be falling over themselves to harder stabled people, because that is how you give yourselves a competitive business advantage. And, and the reason for that is disabled people are, you know, some of the most creative and ingenious and brilliantly talented people you will ever hire. Because as my friend, Elizabeth Jackson, who is a fantastic disability activist says, and instantly you can find her at her personal website, the Girl with the Purple Cane, as Liz Jackson says, disabled people are extraordinarily creative because let's put, said we have to hack life every single day. Cindy Gallop (2m 19s): Every single day, disabled people are finding creative ingenious, strategic ways to hack life just to exist, to be taken seriously and to be enabled to contribute the way they want to. And so that's point number one. Okay. You know, disabled talent is a huge pool of talent, that companies are feeling to tap into and leverage for better business outcomes. But that, but then secondly, there's a very key point here, which is when you embrace accessibility as not just a key corporate value, but a` fundamental corporate platform for how you operate and how you build and how you grow your business. Cindy Gallop (2m 58s): You make that business better for everybody. When you design accessibility into your company, in order to embrace the disabled talent, you actually enable all your people to work more productively and more happily. And you know, a very sort of basic example of that is what we're all experiencing right now, which is the necessity, but therefore, the ability to work from home. Which, and again, you would have absolutely seen the surveys that demonstrate the vast majority of employees do not want to go back into the office. Cindy Gallop (3m 32s): And that's not just because of the COVID risk. It's because you are able to work more effectively and create a better work life balance. When you have the flexibility of being able to work from home. Now, now, obviously this is something else and we can come on to talk about in the corporate world, but you know, not, you know, not when there is an inability to access childcare and, you know, elder care support and things like that. But broadly speaking, when you actively design to welcome in disabled talent into your company, you are, you are making your day to day working processes more accessible for everybody. Cindy Gallop (4m 13s): And you are creating a happier work environment for your employees as a whole, and therefore, a more productive working environment as well. Joel (4m 19s): Cindy, we've never had someone on that's so in tune with how media can change opinion and Chadwick Bozeman recently passed away of Black Panther fame. And as I was seeing, sort of the eulogies and recaps of his careers, many of the roles that I saw seemed very stereotypical to me. He was a football player. He played a entertainer, et cetera. And I'm curious your take on Hollywood's role in this, in this fight. Joel (4m 49s): Does Hollywood have a role to play with showing people of color and disabled folks in power positions and positions of starting companies, or are they just in the business to make money and they're not sort of, you know, responsible for anything that happens in this fight? Cindy Gallop (5m 5s): You're making the big mistake everybody does. Joel (5m 8s): As usual. Cindy Gallop (5m 9s): Of using the word showing, that's not what this is about. As I say, two companies to every area of popular culture, stop talking, diversity, stop creating inspirational, compelling campaigns and movies and TV series about diversity. Stop doing published and promotional stunts about diversity, just fucking be diverse. So, no, it's not about Hollywood showing diverse people. It's about when you have diverse talent, writing the scripts, creating the ads, casting the movies, the TV series, the advertising, producing the movies, the series, the advertising, running the series, the films, the ads, whatever is, and by the way, all this extends into publishing books, literature, news, et cetera. Cindy Gallop (6m 12s): You don't even have to worry about diversity because every single part of your creative output will be diverse, in the same way that I say, if you want to end stereotypes in every era of public culture, it's very simple., just have the people being stereotyped, create approve, direct, produce, run. Solved instantly. And by the way, again, I'm being very semantically precise note that I say create prove, because it doesn't matter if you are that brilliant black writer, in the writer's room, writing fantastic characters and scenes and exposition and dialogue. Cindy Gallop (6m 47s): If the white male head writer throws it out goes, no, no, no, no, no, make all these amendments. In the same way it doesn't matter if you are that brilliant young black female art director, copywriter team in the advertising agency, creative department, if the white male executive creative director says, yeah, girls, that's pretty good, but I think you should change this, write that in, make this blah, blah blah. Cindy Gallop (7m 24s): Only when you have diverse talent, not just creating, but approving, overseeing, funding, backing and green-lighting all of this do you then have output where you don't even have to think about what's shown because it just is diverse. Chad (7m 26s): You, I actually watched a video with you in Brad Grossman on Zeitguests on, on the Culture Class. And you guys were talking about racism and before it even started Piers Fawkes of PSFK sent Brad and I believe you to an email saying, you guys, aren't qualified to talk about this subject and the discussion smacks of white privilege. Your response was amazing first off. And you can share that with us, but I definitely want to unpack for a couple of white guys and also a bunch of people who want to be allies, but they hear this kind of shit from a white dude. Chad (8m 1s): And they think, wait a minute, maybe I should back up and not do a fucking thing. Cindy Gallop (8m 5s): Well, well, I don't think they'll think that once, once they've heard my response and, and for your audience go to YouTube search Cindy Gallop, Brad Grossman Zeitguide, and you will find my Culture Class interview with Brad on this. Basically, yu, you know, as you say, Piers said, you know, you are two white people talking about racism, this is appalling, you know, bring in people of color thinks it's disgusting. So I made two points in response, and I did this publicly at the start of my and Brad's conversation because I felt it was very important, that the audience hear this. Cindy Gallop (8m 39s): The first thing I said, was there is no other conversation anybody should be having right now, regardless of their racial skin color. Incidentally also just for your audience's awareness, I'm not white. My father's English, my mother is Chinese, but basically, you know, whatever discussion anybody has having, ending racism should be the only thing that any of us talk about in any environment, right now. And the second point I made, was, and it's especially important we all do because black people are fed up to death with having to have this conversation. Cindy Gallop (9m 11s): They're exhausted. They're fed up with having to educate people about racism. They're fed up with having to deal with white guilt. And, you know, the point also made was, don't you think that brilliant black writers like James Baldwin, would have so much rather have just directed their creative energies to do whatever they want to do, as opposed to having to take up the issue of social justice, because they were simply completely unable to do anything at all, under the yoke of racism? Cindy Gallop (9m 43s): And so that's why every one of us needs to be having this conversation as often as possible. And you know, I'm going to say the same thing about this with regard to racism as I do all the time to men, who say to me, Cindy, I really want to be an ally to women, what can I do? And it's very simple. You can do two things. And again, you know that this is what I've been saying with regard to men who want to help women in the face of sexism and sexual harassment. But this also applies to anybody who wants to end racism. Cindy Gallop (10m 15s): Number one, listen to women because you don't. Every day we are man-terupted, mansplained to, talked over, ignored, not listened to, not heard, and the same thing applies to black people. Listen to black people, really listen. And number two, believe women and believe black people. Believe us when we talk about our experience, because our experience is not your experience. And you would not believe the number of white men who explain women's experience back to us, explain black people's experience back to them. Cindy Gallop (10m 51s): Listen to us and believe us. And when you just do those two things, everything you need to do to help us falls out of those two things. Chad (10m 59s): Overall, and I'm going to paraphrase, white dudes should just shut the fuc.k up. Cindy Gallop (11m 5s): No, that is absolutely not what I said at all. The key thing is, as I said, listen, first of all, listen to that black woman. Really listen, really listen. Secondly, believe that black woman. And when you believe her, you know, ask her, what would you like me to do? And be as frank, as brutally frank, as you like. Okay. And so when you're listening to her and you're believing her and when you are, and when she sees that you've listened to her and you've believed her, she can then trust you. When you say to tell me what to do, because I want to do it. And so she will then feel able to say, please go to so and so and tell them that I've been waiting for promotion for three years, and I need to be given that promotion as soon as possible, and then go and do that. Cindy Gallop (11m 47s): And conversely, when that black woman is not in the room and somebody makes a racist joke, you call them out. If you're standing with a group of other white guys and somebody makes the racist joke, you say to them, listen, Bob, that was inappropriate. That was racist. Please. Don't say that again. Joel (12m 5s): What role, if any, does government have in this effort and particularly in the, in the K through 12 education realm, where I tend to think a lot of this stuff starts. Cindy Gallop (12m 15s): Well, you've asked two separate questions that what does government need to do? Government needs to welcome in as many women and black women and black talent generally as possible. And that's not what this government is doing currently, but, but that's what needs to happen everywhere. Because again, you know, once you have fully diverse government, the right policies get put in place and the right things happen, it's that simple. Joel (12m 40s): And education. Any, any opinion on that? Cindy Gallop (12m 43s): So first of all, if we had a female president, we would not have the situation we are with facing right now with COVID. But again, I go back to my point, women drive different policies, black men and women drive different policies, people of color drive different policies, LGBTQ people drive different policies, disabled people drive different policies. When you have the people who are most on the frontline, every single day of what white male policy means, whether it's the appalling lack of a universal childcare infrastructure or the appalling scenario that plays out at every level of education, including the funding of college education. Cindy Gallop (13m 25s): When you have the people who are on the sharp end of those policies, actually making them, you get a whole different world. And one that all of us will be far happier living and working and being educated. Joel (13m 38s): Yeah. One of the things that we talk about on the show is Google has a new effort in terms of certifying folks for education, and creating a system where education is inexpensive had done it at sort of a private level. You probably know of sites like Udemy, and a LinkedIn Learning where you can have classes and continuing education. And from my standpoint, it seems like the university system has become almost like a caste system where we're churning out folks that can afford college, that can get in and sort of feed into this whole system that you're talking about, where white guys are just replaced by new white guys that are turned out of college. Joel (14m 17s): Do you feel like the education system, as it is, is broken today? Or how can we fix it? And do you think that capitalism and commerce can help level the playing field with all, all levels of folks? Cindy Gallop (14m 29s): Yes, of course, it's broken. Don't ask the obvious. And so I, and I've said this in a number of interviews, but I wrote a piece about this for Quartz it's so the online publication Quartz asked a number of people, what we thought the future would be beyond the pandemic. And I'm a great believer in Alan Kay's saying, "in order to predict the future, you have to invent it." And so for me, that question should never be asked in the passive tense. Cindy Gallop (14m 59s): I'm all about inventing the future, as in decide what you want the future to be, and then make it happen. So I said that what I believe the future is beyond the pandemic is a complete rebalancing of the value equation. So, you know, in the early most horrifying stages of this pandemic here in New York and elsewhere in the country every night at seven o'clock, you know, everybody came out on their terraces, leaned out in their windows, stood on their stoops and cheered four essential workers, ihe people on the front lines, the hospital and the healthcare workers, the elder care workers, the grocery clerks, the first responders, and we all suddenly gained a new appreciation of the value of those people. Cindy Gallop (15m 42s): And so what I see the future being beyond the pandemic is a complete reverse of what has historically been the case, which is the people who have taken those jobs, because they care about other people that want to help. Somehow there has been the presumption that they should earn very little, whereas white men who don't give a shit about anybody and are sharks on Wall Street deserve to make appalling the colossally, huge amounts of money. So going forwards, I want to see a reverse of the value equation. Cindy Gallop (16m 13s): I want to see teachers make an absolute Goddam fucking shit ton of money. And I want to see those white men on Wall Street and Silicon Valley who made a shit ton of money not giving a shit about anybody absolutely see a reversal of fortune. And I especially want to see teachers paid a huge amount of money at every level, pre-k, every grade, college, and this is a total truism. Every one of us can identify that one teacher, if we're lucky more than one, but we can all identify that one teacher who believed in us, who believed in us when we were kids, when we were teenagers, when we have no belief in ourselves, there was that one teacher who saw our potential and inspired us to live up to it. Cindy Gallop (16m 59s): And by the way, that is what online learning does not give you. That's why online courses and online education will never replace IRL teaching because you need that personal interaction and that personal belief. And so, yes, I absolutely want to see a system where capitalism reinvents itself to reward the people who care about other people and have so much to do with how we all grew up and whether or not we are successful because they believed in us versus rewarding the people who don't give a shit about anybody and only care about making more money for themselves. Chad (17m 34s): But Cindy, that is capitalism. I mean, it really is. Cindy Gallop (17m 37s): And that's why you will see so many people. And they're using different terms of their, but whether it's called conscious capitalism, you know, but it's completely reinventing the concept of capitalism to create a new economy that is powered by very different things. Chad (17m 58s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute, Symphony Talent (19m 47s): Building a cult brand is not easy, which is why you need friends. Like Roopesh Nair CEO of Symphony Talent on your side, okay? OK Roopesh, hiring companies can't hire diverse candidates. If diverse candidates aren't applying for their jobs, what should hiring companies do differently to attract a more diverse candidate? So for diversity, specifically, companies should think about why do they want diversity in their organization and ensure that they are bringing that into the conversations about hiring diverse candidates, because that's how they can be genuine about diversity. Because just checking a box saying, I want to be hiring diverse candidates is not going to help. So the first thing is thinking about why do you want diversity? What are the different groups you are targeting as you think about diversity and then bringing those messages, which basically is going to resonate to that particular group of diverse candidates into your engagement, whether it is kind of, as you reach out in the mass media and target specific diverse groups, as you basically nurture these diverse groups once they have connection with you, is very important because to your point, you won't get a diverse candidate till you get in front of a candidate. And the only way you can do that is by figuring out what is the connection point between you and the diverse candidate. And it is very, very easy to kind of cast a net saying, I want diverse candidate, but the truth is there are many, many groups of that diverse candidate, and you need to be really clear on who exactly are you targeting, Let Symphony Talent help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your talent strategy for more information, visit symphonytalent.com. Chad (19m 47s): James Baldwin called it the value gap, what you're talking about. And I think we're seeing that value gap more than ever, just because of COVID and obviously with essential workers, but take a look at the value gap between Jeff Bezos and his workers who are on the front line. So that is pure capitalism. That will not fix itself. Capitalism is built to drive markets and make people rich. Chad (20m 21s): Socialism, we can say, as a government guardrail or whatever we want to call it, doesn't have to be socialism. Do we not have to have a more structured focus on government ensuring that those guardrails are in place, so that 12% of our population is not working poor? How do we get there? Cindy Gallop (20m 43s): And absolutely. So if you are asking me to solve government's problems for them, that's what you pay me for. I'm very happy to be hired by the government to solve this problem for them. And the other part of question, I just want to go back to what I said earlier on in this podcast, which is, this is why, again, I've been saying for literally decades, to women, black people, people of color, LGBTQ, that disabled, we need to build our own financial ecosystem because the white male one is not working for us. And all around me are, you know, a ton of different people coming at this in many, many different ways. Cindy Gallop (21m 20s): I would point you to the wonderful work that my friends, Arianne Shutter and Kathleen Utech are doing at their venture fund, which is called Core Capital because what they are funding are new reinvisionings of companies that operate, for example, payday loans, which you know, to have been looked down upon as the grubby side of the credit industry, are nevertheless extremely necessary for so many people in extraordinarily challenging financial circumstances. Cindy Gallop (21m 56s): And so, you know, Kathleen and Arianne are funding the people reinventing in that area. They are funding solutions for the unbanked. You know, there are many, many people rethinking every single aspect of all of this to create and build that new financial ecosystem that works for all of us. Joel (22m 16s): Cindy, last one from me, I'm the father of a young daughter. I have a 10 year old and I want her to be an absolute bad-ass like you, what advice would you give fathers like me and others who have young daughters to raise someone as strong and independent as you? Cindy Gallop (22m 31s): I would say two things. The first is, absolutely bring them up to not give a damn what anybody else thinks. Bring them up to really focus on knowing who they are, knowing their values, and living and working those values and knowing that as long as they are being true to themselves, that's all that matters and not what anybody else thinks. And then the second thing I would say, this is so crucially important, important to how you want your daughter to grow up, that you need to do this every day around you do everything you can to end sexual harassment. Cindy Gallop (23m 5s): Stop other men, sexually harassing. Stop other men, being inappropriate. Step in as a bystander every time you see anything like that happening. Actively speak out and end sexual harrassment every way you can. And the reason I'm telling you that is because, you know, I'm sorry to have to bring this in, but you know, that is the one thing that can make your daughter's life go completely off the rails. Okay. I did a call out to the advertising industry three years ago when the Harvey Weinstein saga broke in the New York Times. Cindy Gallop (23m 41s): You know, I have been speaking out about sexual harassment for years way before Me Too. And I spoke out about it publicly because nobody else would. And so I've been hearing from, you know, many women in my industry advertising, who've been sexually harassed. I'd always encourage them to report it, to speak out to the media and they were always too terrified to. Completely understandably. And so, in October 2017, when the Harvey Weinstein saga broke, I posted on Facebook and I said, women of the advertising industry, the time has finally come to name names. Cindy Gallop (24m 13s): You know, if these brave women could, with Harvey Weinstein, you know, the walls are breaking down, I will help you get those stories told. Email me, and I will put you in touch with trusted journalists to write those stories and an absolute avalanche hit my inbox. I have to say the next few months as this avalanche continues, were very, very depressing, but because I'd always known it was bad, I'd never known how bad it really was. And if your audience would like to get a sense of what I uncovered on YouTube search 3% conference, search Cindy Gallop, 2017, the talk is called Where the Money Is. Cindy Gallop (24m 50s): And it's a bit of a misnomer because what I did was I was scheduled to give the keynote at the 3% conference a few weeks later. And I was so horrified by my inbox that at the last minute I rewrote my talk and the first half of it is all about what I discovered. And that experience, as I say in the tool caused me to change my own thinking. Because for years, I'd been saying that the single biggest business issue facing the advertising industry was diversity. And I stood on the stage at 3% conference in November, 2017 and I said, it's not. Cindy Gallop (25m 21s): The single biggest business issue facing our industry and every other industry is sexual harassment. And that's because sexual harassment manages women out of every industry. Sexual harassment, derails women's careers, destroys women's ambitions, crushes women's dreams. Every industry has hemorrhaged vast amounts of female talent and creativity and leadership because of sexual harassment and sexual harassment has therefore kept out of leadership out of power and influence the female leaders who would make gender equality, diversity inclusion happen. Cindy Gallop (25m 59s): We don't solve anything until we solve sexual harassment and sexual harassment will derail your daughter's life, if you don't do everything you can to end it now. So it never, ever has to. Joel (26m 11s): Thank you. Chad (26m 13s): Thanks Cindy, Hey Cindy, we appreciate you taking the time and having these hard discussions, because again, if we're not having them, it seems like nobody's having them. So thank you so much for having them, and we appreciate you blowing shit up. If our listeners want to find out more about you, where should they go? Cindy Gallop (26m 31s): Sure. And by the way, I would like to highlight to your listeners that my services are available as a consultant and as a speaker to do everything that we've talked about in this episode. You can find me on LinkedIn, you can email me directly Cindy@ifwerantheworld.com, you can follow me on Twitter @CindyGallop on Instagram @CindyGallop and on Facebook where I'm facebook.com/cindy.gallup. Chad (26m 59s): Thanks again for joining us. Joel (26m 59s): Awesome. Cindy Gallop (26m 59s): It was an absolute pleasure. Joel (27m 1s): We out. Chad (27m 3s): We out. 6 (27m 20s): 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.

Welcome to Death Match, North America 2020, GRAND CHAMPION EDITION which took place at TAtech on May 19. For all of you NOOBS who have never experienced Death Match - Death Match is a competition which pits 4 innovative, early-stage companies against one-another, only one can win and emerge with the coveted Death Match Chain of Champions. This Chad and Cheese Death Match episode features Aida Fazylova founder and CEO at XOR that's X-O-R people. COVID-19 might've locked us all in our homes but never fear! The home bars are always stocked, pints were flowing and Chad and Cheese questions and slurring snark was flying. Luckily Joveo's CEO, KJ, stepped in to provide a smart and sensible judging voice to this TAtech event... Enjoy while Aida reaches down deep for her inner Ivan Drago pitches XOR, then ducks, bobs, weaves and lands a knock performance during this virtual Death Match event. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Ashlie Collins: Hi, this is Ashlie Collins, managing director UK for Joveo, the global leader in programmatic recruitment advertising. I want to talk to you about our efforts in helping get the world back to work. We want to help you find the high quality candidates you need both during and after this crisis, to get the workforce back to pre-crisis levels and expedite the economic recovery. This isn't about deploying people, it's about saving lives and families. We're offering our job advertising platform free of charge until the COVID-19 situation is under control. We're also offering additional candidate applications and traffic at zero cost. Join us in getting the world back to work. To learn more, visit joveo.com. Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: And we're back people. It's Death Match, North America. Today we have Aida Fazylova. Joel: Aida. Chad: CEO, and founder of XOR.ai. You have two minutes to pitch, Aida, are you ready? Aida Fazylova: I am. Chad: Let's do it. Joel: In three, two. Aida Fazylova: My name is Aida, I'm CEO and founder at XOR. XOR is a AI powered communications platform that let's the recruiting teams, as well as HR team to hire the people and retain the talent much more efficiently. What I mean by this is that on one hand we give them the opportunity to communicate with their candidates over the text, as well as in the messaging apps, to get them to the 46% of the response rate within 15 minutes. And on the other half, we give them the opportunity to utilize artificial intelligence, to automate the most routine repetitive processes in talent acquisition and HR. I'm speaking about the passive candidates reengagement, screening of the inbound candidates, everything around the interview scheduling, referral partnerships, virtual interviews, video interviews, recordings, and so on and so forth. But also a bunch of the things throughout the employee life cycle, starting from the inbound candidates, from the onboarding and the orientation of the new employees to poll surveys, to also staying engaged with the people that got laid off or to the exit interviews. So yeah, as you know, this is a new reality that we're going through in the last two months. And there are four main categories in the markets, the people that hire talent at higher pace, the companies that are hiring at the same pace that are dealing with the huge amounts of the applicants due to very high unemployment level, as well as the companies that do need to stay engaged with people that they have laid off, just in order to, once the economy start kicking again, to rehire them quickly. We've been around since 2016. We serve nearly 200 customers in 15 countries right now, headquarter here in San Francisco, California. And the company was born out of my personal theme because I used to work as a talent acquisition practitioner, for nearly a decade in my career. And the company itself was born out of my personal theme, that's about it. Yeah, I think that's about it for the pitch. Thank you. Joel: Tell them where they can find out more. Aida Fazylova: It's www.X-O-R.ai. Chad: Excellent. Joel: All right. Chad: There you go. All right, KJ, you sir have the first question. How about it? KJ: Thank you. A simple question. What does XOR stand for? It's a very unique name. Aida Fazylova: I didn't catch this. Sorry, could you repeat? Joel: X-O-R, what's it stand for? What's the meaning? Aida Fazylova: We're saying to everybody that it stands for extraordinary optimized recruitment. But actually also it's a binary operator called exclusive or, so very geeky stuff, but extraordinary optimized recruiting is about right. Chad: Nice. Okay. Well, we'll go ahead and jump into the hard questions. Are you ready? Aida Fazylova: Yeah. Chad: The messaging space is bloated. We have companies like Emissary, TextRecruit, Canvas, TextUs, Talkpush, AllyO, Mya. AMS just came out with their own conversational platform. And Paradox just got $40 million in series B funding. Why should anyone know about XOR? I mean, there's so many that are out there. How can you separate yourself from all of those names and all of that money that's being spent? Aida Fazylova: Yeah, absolutely. Very good question. There are two components to XOR. On one hand there's the texting, as well as the other hand there's automation and conversational interfaces throughout the recruiting, right? As I understand right now, we're at very new and emerging fields, still the market penetration of any automation or the conversation right now is very well under 4%. The texting is a little bit higher, which is great. A couple of things that really distinguishes XOR from everybody else. First one, we support 103 languages on very, very great level. So that the companies can actually use this globally. Second one, we are actually the great of the older messaging platforms like WhatsApp. It's not only the texting, it's not only the widget on top of the company career sites. It's also the things like WeChat, the Line, the WhatsApp, the Viber, Telegram, Facebook, WeChat, you name it. Third one, very important one for XOR is the scheduling functionality that we have. We actually handle very complex scheduling scenarios starting with basic one on one meetings with the recruiter, with integration to all the calendar systems out there. But also more complex scheduling scenarios, like many on ones, one on manys, panel interviews, sequential interviews with automated updates of everybody's calendars and management on this. Third one is very easy to manage, the third or fourth one, very easy to manage the chatbot workflow that can be done pretty much [inaudible 00:07:42.22]. But also an ability to utilize either fully manual texting, fully automated texting or something in between like hybrids. When the recruiter can actually carry on the conversation with the candidates, from our interface, which looks like a Gmail for texting or to the messaging has changed in any of the messaging apps, but also let the chatbot take over some of the repetitive processes such as scheduling, screening, answering the frequently asked questions and then orientation of the candidates picking themselves the job. Chad: Who's your target market? Is it enterprise or is it SMB? Aida Fazylova: Actually companies as small as 300 employees are using XOR. It can be used by staffing agencies and it can be used by enterprise as well as the SMBs right now. We give the functionalities to everybody. And it's also very industry agnostic because obviously we started with a high volume type of recruiting in retail, hospitality, fast food chains, because this is where we saw the majority, the most of the value. But as we're moving through our company life cycle, we're becoming more and more of the industry agnostic. It's not necessarily only high volume or blue collar types of hourly workers, but it's also engineers. It's also healthcare employees as well as the white collar type of jobs. Joel: Chad was quick to point out the funding that some of your competitors have gotten. And I want to give you an opportunity to talk about the funding that you've gotten, but more importantly, what are you doing with that funding? Particularly with marketing, it is very crowded space. How are you cutting through the clutter and getting through? Are you guys integrating with ATSs and other platforms? And what has it meant for your talent in terms of who you've been able to bring on to the company? Aida Fazylova: Absolutely. That's very good question. I'm dying to tell you about us. We as a company have been very much grown organically for the first two years, because we started from Eastern European market. Obviously with the venture capital market there is very immature. We actually got funded last year. It was seed round of $8.4 million in total, led by a San Francisco based venture fund called SignalFire. SignalFire was a lead investor in TextRecruit before. TextRecruit as you know got acquired beginning of 2018. By the time we met them, they actually exited from the TextRecruit already, which was really great. But they were actually really, really aware of the space. They did know the space very good. We are headquartered here in San Francisco, although we keep the back office and the development elsewhere, namely in Eastern Europe, which allows us to be very cost efficient and lean. But what we've done with the funding as well, we have been using this for them, sending up the executive team here in San Francisco. From them we actually hired the VP of marketing as well as the VP of sales of TextRecruit, which is really great, that are leading right now our sales and marketing efforts. Yeah. So in terms of the integration within ATSs, I've already mentioned that XOR ... I didn't mention this. But XOR is not a replacement within ATS. It sits on top of the existing technical stack, whether it's an ATS or CRM, as well as the calendar system, as an AI powered communication layer, if you please. You can use it without XOR's interface at all, or you can use XOR's interface for the communication with your candidates. We have prebuilt integration with nearly 30 applicant tracking systems, job boards, as well as the CRMs at this point, as well as the integration with all the calendar systems out there like Google Chrome, Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, as well as the on-premise exchange service. Chad: KJ. KJ: Sure. Aida, .ai means that you have artificial intelligence in that. And what it means is that when you interview a person through a chatbot, you are not working off predesigned flows or the flow chart for that matter. That question leads to this question and so on and so forth. But the system is smart enough to understand what those questions are. And so it's not only you know right question. First, how do you do that? And second is, what's your feedback loop that goes back into designing another question that's better. Aida Fazylova: Absolutely. That's very good question. We are using AI in a way of natural language processing as well as for the analytics, so they're strategically. It's still more about the robotic process automation as you know, augmented with AI, right? So that we understand what is there. If the candidate is asking the chatbot a question, in the FAQ section, for example, it actually recognizes the intents and gives them the best response from the knowledge base of the chatbot. Or when the candidate types in the response to the chatbot question actually recognize what was the response and also assigns them, let's say through the screening process, it assigns them a certain score as they're moving through the screening process, right? KJ: No, if you're deploying an LP and there's a bit of a deep learning into that, then it's very difficult to do that in multiple languages. I was kind of intrigued in how you really truly are global in that sense. Aida Fazylova: Absolutely. It's actually very good. My CTO is a former rocket scientist turned to be AI developer, really, really smart guy. What they did with the team, we're not using any of the existing chatbot engines, let's say Microsoft LUIS or I google something. We actually built out the language agnostic system, the engine itself. They train it with 37 datasets in different languages. So in a way it actually vectorizes the meeting, and all this kind of ... it's very complex math stuff. I'm really not technical, but this is the way preliminary it works. AI should be used very strategically. We're not trying to make an impression that the chatbot is so smart, it can replace a human, because it's not going to happen because there's not enough of the science base for now, right? In the next 10 years. But what it can do though, although there are some things going on right now with Facebook that they released the API, but it doesn't really matter. We're using every single chatbot, every single workflow automation, is they're designed to do certain jobs, for example, reactivate the passive candidates, to deliver the announcement of the job opportunity in the personalized manner and alter this, screen them and connect them to the recruiter. Or screen the candidates that applied through from the job boards and schedule them for a meeting. We designed the conversation on all the workforce in the most efficient way. It's extremely streamlined, it's very driven by chatbots, is designed in a way so that the conversion rate is a maximum amount. It's not just some abstract AI, it's the workflow automation augmented with conversational interfaces in some certain parts of the NLP. Chad: Okay Aida. You were on Firing Squad in late 2018. Back then you talked about three things that was a really pain in your ass when you were a recruiter. Number one, you hated prescreen resumes. Number two, scheduling and rescheduling interviews. And number three, answering the same questions over and over and over. That was really the foundation of why you built XOR. But since then, and we're talking about 18 months ago, you have text to apply, live chat, candidate screening, employee onboarding, new hire check-in, HR inbox, poll surveys, exit interviews, and you have so many more things that you're doing today. My question is, you were so focused right out of the gate, and we loved that because you knew what you wanted to do and how you needed to get it done, but it's exploded since then. How can you keep focus and ensure that all of these features and benefits actually get out there in a pointed manner, instead of having feature bloat, you have something that is really genuine and authentic and necessary. Aida Fazylova: Very good question. Our kind of roadmap is both customer driven, because there are requests from the customers just to add some more features. But it's also vision driven in a way, right? For us right now, you are right, we don't only focus on the talent acquisition anymore. We do all the things in talent acquisition really, really good, because this is something that we started with originally, working with inbound candidates remaining sources, working on reactivation of the passive candidates, so-called outbound, everything around the referral partnerships, as well as the scheduling. But also as time went by, we actually have added the internally chat functionality. Everything started with the remote or the adaptation and the orientation of the new employees. And everything up until the moment of the exit interviews and staying in touch with the laid off employees. This was all actually driven by the customer requests. And we do see that there is a value, of course there is a different buyer in the company, so it's not anymore the talent acquisition leader, it's more of HR leader, so it does give us ... But if there is a customer that we're working with successful in talent acquisition side, it's much easier to upsell them on the HR side of the business as well, so yeah. Joel: All right. We're running out of time, so I'll keep this one simple. Why is there no chatbot on your website? Aida Fazylova: Our marketing department actually designed it. It's like extremely, the conversion rate there is extremely high, and the main purpose of the chat of the website is just not only information, but also generate the leads. So we just decided not to do this. We do do- Joel: It wouldn't make sense to highlight your product on your own website. Chad: Eat your own dog food. Aida Fazylova: We do a lot of demos. We don't do this on the website. Just not to distract them from we're making this. They request the demo, go ahead and do this and we'll show you everything, like very tailored to your specific needs based on the things that you're dealing with, so yeah. Chad: Aida Fazylova people. Joel: Aida. Chad: XOR.ai. Aida, thank you so much for joining us. Look for more episodes of Death Match. This Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted to lifting up startups in the recruitment technology space. Subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. For more, visit chadcheese.com.

Pre-screening technology talent is hot, with employers clamoring for a better ways to find engineers while testing their core competencies, filtering out the bull and false claims. Enter Woven, who promises to help employers find hidden gems in their talent funnels. Sounds good, but the boys have final say on whether or not this spunky upstart gets applause or an itchy trigger finger. Firing Squad is proudly powered by the programmatic powerhouse known as (((Monster Truck voice))) PandoLogic!!! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Chad (2m 0s): Damn programmatic is hot! Joel: Yeah, it is hot Dude, pass me a cold PBR. Would ya? Chad: Okay. Number one, I wasn't talking about the temperature and number two PBR is a shitty beer time to upgrade to an IPA. Okay. Joel: My bad. Guessing you were talking about Programmatic Job advertising being hot. Yeah. That shit is everywhere and all the kids are doing. Chad: I know man, but there's only one company that's been doing it since 2007. Joel: Damn 2007. Hey man, what wife were you on? In 2007? I was on number one. Chad : We don't talk about her. Focus, dude. I'm talking about PandoIQ from our friends at Panda Logic. PandoIQs, Programmatic recruitment advertising platform helps employers source talent faster and more efficiently than ever thanks to predictive algorithms, machine learning and AI. Joel: Buzzword, overdose alert. Yeah. Pando was on the cutting edge of Programmatic, while being deeply rooted in the recruitment industry. PandoIQ provides an end to end Programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any waste spending to maximize the ROI on your recruitment spend. Chad: And their AI enabled algorithms use over 48 job attributes and more than 200 billion historical job performance data points to predict the optimal job advertising campaign. The machine does all that shit. Joel: That shit sounds expensive! Chad: Think again, Cheesman. PandoIQ provides an end to end job advertising solution that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any wasteful spending. Joel: Sold! How do I get started? Chad: Go to Pandalogic.com to request a demo and tell him Chad and Cheese sent you. Joel: Ooh. They have a chat bot too, that we can talk to. Chad: Oh, kill me now. INTRO (2m 22s): 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. I'm about five cups of coffee into this. Joel (2m 27s): Let's do this baby, Chad. I am Joel Cheesman. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am joined as always by my cohost, Chad Sowash and on today's Firing Squad we welcome. Okay. Wes Winham Winler from Woven. Chad (2m 42s): Very nice. Joel (2m 42s): Wes, welcome to the show. CEO and founder and fellow Hoosier. How's it going, man? Wes (2m 49s): I am excited to be here. Joel (2m 51s): You sound excited. Well, let's, let's get into you for like your Twitter intro. What should our listeners know? Wes (3m 0s): Let's see, I guess I'm a software engineer. I'm obsessed with building teams and I'm a superhero, but my only weakness is bullets. I'm I'm pretty nervous for today. Machine Guns Sound Effects (3m 7s): bam, bam, bam, bam, bam Joel (3m 14s): You don't want any of that? Chad (3m 14s): Shouldn't have told us that Wes. Wes (3m 14s): Y'all will be nice, right? Chad (3m 14s): Yeah. We'll we'll think about it. Joel (3m 21s): We were grade Hoosiers on a curve, so we will be especially nice? Wes (3m 26s): Yes. All right. Sooner turned Hoosier. That's fun. Chad (3m 29s): Some additional love points going into there. Joel (3m 32s): Tell him what he wins Chad. Chad (3m 33s): Wes, you're going to have two minutes to pitch Woven at the end of those two minutes, you will hear that bellA then Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start rambling or you get boring, you're going to hear the crickets. At the end of Q and A, you will receive one of three grades from Joel and myself. Number one, Big Applaus, get that cash ready, baby. Joel (3m 58s): Back up the Brinx truck. Chad (4m 0s): Number two, golf clap. Need to tighten up your game. We think it's okay, but it's just okay. And then last but not least. Machine Guns Sound Effects (3m 7s): bam, bam, bam, bam, bam Joel (4m 12s): Oh shit. I baby. Chad (4m 15s): You don't want the fire squad. That means you pack up your shit. Hit the bricks. Pull up that drawing board because this just ain't working. That's Firing Squad. Are you ready? Wes (4m 25s): All right. All right. I'm ready. Joel (4m 28s): Three, two... Bells (4m 28s): Ding, Ding, Ding Wes (4m 31s): Woven is the best developer screening platform for remote teams. Woven customers have a high bar for developer hiring, they care about more than code. In 2015, I was the VP of engineering at a startup, every single hire was critical. We were fully remote, so I got a ton of applications. Remote brings 10X the volume. I started off using a code quiz. It screened out folks who couldn't code bad versus not bad, but then I made a bad hire. I realized that just because someone can play putt putt, that doesn't make them a great golfer. Wes (5m 4s): Engineering is more than just coding. So I created a take home project, it was actual golf. I could tell, okay from good from great. Then I had a light bulb moment. It was a Friday and I really didn't want to slog through resumes. So instead I emailed my take home project to everyone. I felt really smart and went home. One week later, I had to score all of those projects and I did not feel smart, but a few of the projects were good and one was great! Architecture, documentation, senior quality work. Wes (5m 34s): Then I read her resume. Wow. Only two years of experience, that was the Eureka moment! She was the best candidate in my pipeline, but I absolutely would have rejected her resume, a hidden gem. Fast forward to today Woven does two things. First we shrink the take home projects down to a one hour online assessment. It's golf, not putt putt. Secon, we use machine to score those projects that saves engineering time and widens the top of the funnel. An average tech recruiter might feel one wreck per month. Wes (6m 5s): One of our customers hired five times that many 15 senior engineers in three months, all 15 are still there fully. A third of our customer's hires are hidden ones. They would have been missed without us. For teams, just looking for coders there are cheaper screening options. For remote dev teams with a high bar, Woven is more than code. Chad (6m 23s): Where can we find you? Wes (6m 23s): You can find us at woventeams.com. Joel (6m 24s): That was woventeams.com kids. Chad (6m 32s): That's right? Joel (6m 32s): All right, Wes. You, you ended a little bit dancing on the competition and I want to get a feel for it's a crowded landscape Topsy, Hacker Rank, a Wonderlic and others are doing some screen stuff. Chad (6m 45s): Codility. Joel (6m 45s): How are you guys different? Where do you play in this space specifically? Wes (6m 51s): So Hacker Rank is great. Those code quiz services are really useful for narrowing down your candidate pool. They can tell you if someone can't even play putt putt and that saves you time, saves engineering time. If you want to go more than that, if you want to see a problem solving, architecture, those sorts of things, you're kind of on your own. You could build something like that with HackerRank and some people do. We do that part for you. So we're a layer on top of some of those code quiz services. We actually partner with qualified.IO, and then we will evaluate those projects so you can tell, okay from good from great. Joel (7m 23s): So there's some people, some manual labor in your product. There's some automation. It sounds like. So talk to me through scaling the challenges of that. Do you plan on eventually going to an all automated solution or will there always be people involved in the grading of folks. Wes (7m 40s): So I think it will be automated. So one of the breakthroughs about 2015 in NLP was around evaluating natural language. So we're leveraging some of those for some of our scenarios. This is a proof of concept. We will be able to scale evaluation of, we're talking about an email where we're evaluating: did you thank the person or not? Did you summarize the problem or not? And we can write machine learning classifiers to automate that process in the future. So it will be faster and even better. Chad (8m 10s): So on the website, it says "33% of our customers, inbound hires would have been missed in traditional hiring process." Now I love the story that you told about the developer that you would have missed. The question is, that is a bold statement to talk about all of your clients. How do you know a third of those candidates would not have been hired for any of those jobs? Wes (8m 33s): So a core part of our product, it's not really rocket science, but it's the idea that you can switch the order of two interview steps. So some people you have a welcome call first, some people, they do a work simulation through Woven first. By instrumenting that, and you say, okay, look at a resume, if you're excited about it, just talk to him first, then send it to Woven. If you're not, and you might reject him, send him to Woven first instead of rejecting them and that's where we can get that 33% number. Okay. Chad (9m 2s): Okay, getting into the steps. I'm glad, I'm glad you wanted to talk about that because the first step is obviously the candidate application. Are they doing that through a crappy applicant tracking system process, or are they using a Woven process? That's step one. Wes (9m 16s): They're using the applicant tracking system. So that's something that, you know, everyone hates everyone, else's ATS, but a lot of recruiters are okay with our ATS. I think there are better and worse ones, but that's the ecosystem. So we try to be compatible with everything everyone is already using. Chad (9m 33s): Trying to play nice. Okay. So the second step is an hour work simulation. This type of talent is incredibly soft after, even in COVID times, why would they take an hour to complete a work simulation? Wes (9m 45s): So think of this like a slider, so you can crank it all the way to the right and everybody does the one hour work simulation is the next step where you can crank it all the way to the left. If you're hiring like a principal engineer, you only have four candidates, you should talk to all four applicants before you send them to the work simulation. That's absolutely the right thing to do. Anywhere in between. You might send some of the candidates to the work simulation first and some of them you talk to first. So it's really about the choice, for the recruiter and the hiring manager, based on applications. Chad (10m 15s): Why wouldn't you test that for everybody? Because again, you're talking about a bunch of individuals who perspectively, they don't look good on paper. So why wouldn't you just test everybody just right out of the gate? Wes (10m 26s): And some of our customers do that, especially if you're remote. We'll do light deal-breaker screening, so we'll integrate with the ATS application. We'll ask, how many years of experience? Can you overlap with these hours? That sort of thing. If you're deal breaker, we'll screen them out and then everybody else gets the work simulation. The reason you won't do that for every role, that's not the right choice is just like you said, for more senior roles, candidates have a lot of options. And having that human touch before Woven really increases completion rate. Joel (10m 52s): How has COVID impacted your business? It feels like it might be the best and worst of times for a company like you. You're small and nimble. You're in the tech space, which we're hearing whispers of that's coming back or that's at full employment, now or pretty close. You're also hitting the work from home or the, you know, the, the work, the team that's in different places, but then also people aren't hiring right? And an unemployment as it is an all time high. So talk about COVID and how that's impacted your business and what it's going to look like going forward. Wes (11m 23s): There's two things for us. We're a remote first team. So we were well positioned to be remote, but it still sucks. We still have folks that have their kids at home that they have to rotate childcare. It's more stressful. We're all socially isolated. So we've had to really lean in and monitor PTO, make sure people are taking enough time off. Even if it's a staycation, it's been hard, like just not having social connection has made it hard on the team, but I think we're doing okay. The second thing is on the business. Wes (11m 52s): So good news. Everyone now cares about remote hiring, bad news everyone now cares about remote hiring. So we were the best road option in February. And now everyone is the, you know, quote unquote, "best remote option." So it's crowded things a little bit. I think it's accelerated remote work, which I think is a, I think flexible work is great. Give people the choice of where they want to live, where they want to work, get people together on some schedule. You know, maybe that's once a week, maybe that's once a quarter, but I think that flexibility is a really big move forward. Joel (12m 23s): What is your current, what's the highest hurdle to get a new customer. And I'm curious as to what your current customer looks like. I see a lot of SMB logos on the website, our enterprise prospects, you know, in your sites as well. Are you going to remain sort of in the SMB smaller space? Wes (12m 42s): For at least the next year, we're focused on smaller growth companies. I think that's where we are 10X better than the alternative. You, you need to double your engineering team, you probably just raised some money or you're opening up a new product line. You probably don't have a huge recruiting organization. So a lot of that work would fall on the hiring manager. That's really where we're focused right now. Joel (13m 2s): And the highest hurdle to getting a client? Wes (13m 3s): Highest hurdle for us is we are not super good at marketing. All of our we're kind of grinding it out. Joel (13m 11s): Love the honesty. Wes (13m 13s): Yeah. We've got a lot to learn. My plan right now is get on the Chad and Cheese podcast and then ... profit. So here we are. Joel (13m 20s): Open a new bank account buddy cause the sales are coming in, you know what I'm saying? I'm waiting, I'm waiting! Chad (13m 22s): Depending on the score. Joel (13m 25s): Yeah, that's true. Let's let's get to the end and see how that goes. Chad (13m 28s): So Wes, how are candidates lured into Woven? Are you solely focused on just the assessment piece or are you a part of the candidate attraction piece as well? Wes (13m 37s): If you were to talk to me a two years ago, when we were just starting, I would say we're just going to do the assessment. And what we've learned is there's a lot of value in like a little bit of like what's, what's working for other people when it comes to candidate attraction? We're not out there running the job boards, but we can tell you this title is going to outperform, Oh, you're hiring for this role, you should use this tactic on Indeed. And we specialize in remote teams and remote job boards are different. Like the tactics are different, like using multi-city Indeed is like a superpower. If you don't know what that is, maybe get out of your ATS and go logging into Indeed you can recruit, you can source attract so many candidates by using little, sometimes free, tactics like that. Wes (14m 17s): So we'll give advice around a job boards, but that's not our product. Chad (14m 20s): Okay. So what about from a database standpoint, are you also pulling talent in to be able to create a database so that a company can come to you obviously for the assessment piece, but also there's a database that's available much like Coder Bite or, or a Hacker Rank? Wes (14m 38s): So I should have talked to you like two years ago, cause it took us awhile to figure this out. But we've started taking candidates who are silver medalists from one customer and redirect them to another. They're they're using sometimes the same scenarios, so we can say this person we know is a bad ass, we know they fit your criteria, do you want an introduction? And that's great for the candidate. It's good for our customers. Candidates also appreciate that the person that rejected them is looking out for them. So we've started doing that and we've made some hires that way. Chad (15m 9s): Holy shit, I damn that's a, that's a plus one for me there, Cheesman. Your turn. Joel (15m 12s): Wes, you say you're not good at marketing, but you do have a podcast which is pretty rare for the people that come on the Firing Squad. And for any startup out there who is thinking about a podcast, what has been your experience launching one in terms of brand awareness and getting customers, et cetera, is that worth it? Are you guys going to shut it down in a year? Wes (15m 34s): Oh, I don't know. I have really enjoyed the conversations on the podcast. We've had some guests that are so smart. I've learned so much. I've had people tell me they've learned things in the podcast, but we have not yet been able to turn that into anything that's really working on the sales side. So I think that is more about us than the podcast. We created 40 episodes and I'm really proud of some of the content there. We just have not quite figured out how to do that last mile. So that's a, that's a TBD for me on a podcast. Joel (16m 4s): Interesting. So you, you guys got about two and a half million dollars last year. Crunchbase says you raise a total of 3.1 million. What is that money being used for? If it's not being used for marketing, apparently? Wes (16m 17s): Hiring engineers and a little bit of sales, so building out the team. We had some marketing, we just haven't really been able to figure it out. We've been doing marketing. It just hasn't, it hasn't quite clicked. Joel (16m 29s): Is more money raised on the horizon or do you think you have enough for the foreseeable future? And if you want to raise money, what's that like in COVID? Wes (16m 38s): We got super freaking lucky. Like I, we closed a round in January right before COVID just randomly, like there was no master plan. Like I was not like looking at the news in China and like, Oh, I better get this close. We close it. So we got to two years in the bank and we actually cut cash burn to be a little bit more conservative. You asked earlier about impact of COVID, March and April were really rough for us. Everyone was ah, we're not sure about hiring we're pausing. So it was, it was pretty much a goose egg in March and April. Wes (17m 8s): It's picked back up, Q2 was our best quarter. Joel (17m 11s): Congratulations. Yeah. Wes (17m 13s): Yeah. The team's working hard. So we're, we're not raising, not looking to raise money in the next year, but I'm actually excited about raising money. If we're still on Zoom, like man traveling kind of sucks, there are a lot of VCs that will not fly to Indianapolis and like flying all over the place as not a great, you know, not a great use of time. Now it's kind of leveled the playing field. Like if you're in San Francisco, but you can't meet the VC cause you can't meet at whatever fancy coffee house everyone goes to and you know, does deals like, I'm on the same Zoom screen is that guy? I think it's an advantage. Joel (17m 45s): Interesting. Chad (17m 45s): That is. So who are you partnering? Wes (17m 48s): So Qualified IO delivers our assessment. They have a great developer experience. They're the, if you really want to make your own assessment, they're the best place to do it. They have so much support, a great IDE, a great backend for grading. So that's really our, our biggest partner. That's what it enabled us to not spend two years upfront just building what they built. We could build. It's like if the first thing you had to do to be a great creator was go build YouTube. That's pretty hard. If you can use YouTube and just record some videos, like then you got a opportunity to be really creative. Wes (18m 20s): And that's what we were able to do with Qualified. Chad (18m 21s): You're layering on top of what Qualified's already doing. Cause we're using them as a foundation. Wes (18m 27s): That's right. Chad (18m 27s): Okay. What about integrations and applicant tracking systems, CRMs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Wes (18m 35s): So we kinda have two types of integrations we we'll do for folks that don't have an ATS, which about a third of our customers don't have an ATS when they join. Most of them end up buying one. We will integrate directly with Indeed and Stack Overflow and Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter and all those to give them a way to capture candidates. For folks that do have an ATS we will integrate, we have one way integration with basically all the ATSs, I think there's nine of them, that we do one way integration and that makes it easy to send candidates. We just did our first two way integration last month. Wes (19m 6s): So pretty pumped about that. Workable is done two way integration, pushing data back to the ATS and we're working on a greenhouse lever and jazz HR. Joel (19m 16s): I love the, the perspective on the Zoom meetings with VC and the fact that you're here and in Indianapolis and not on the coasts is intriguing to me. Talk about what it's like to be sort of a small Midwest startup, the pros, the cons, talked to the folks out there that are maybe looking to, to make a move to inside the country, as opposed to where the water is. Wes (19m 39s): I think there are, there are a lot of this, there are disadvantages and an advantage. Everything is about trade off, if we really get down to it. The disadvantage is you can't really raise 3 million on a, you know, 8 million pre with an idea and like a really good pitch deck, like that just doesn't happen. You can't get all your Y Combinator friends to sign up for your startup, throw some logos on your deck and then go raise money. In the Midwest, you actually have to build something. You have to sign up revenue. You have to show some traction, investors expect it. Wes (20m 9s): I think that's a benefit. I think that creates stronger companies. Now that we have, I think there used to be a little bit, at least to be a little bit harder to raise that series A and series B in the Midwest. And that limited a lot of growth. I think that's getting easier, Zoom has changed things. There are enough big companies out here that have got done well, the VCs are willing to hop on a plane to consider you. So I think the focus on customers and solving a problem and generating revenue early on is going to create some really, really impactful companies that really do make an impact on the world versus, you know, raising a lot of money, getting a lot of press, having a big ideas and maybe making less of an impact, let's say. Chad (20m 45s): Yeah, the network or the secret handshakes at the Starbucks in San Francisco. Wes (20m 54s): Yes. Chad (20m 54s): So every platform we were talking about things making an impact, obviously being able to help companies reduce bias is, is huge. But everybody says that they can do it. I know that you guys obviously are saying that you can do it as well. Explain how that is happening in your platform. Wes (21m 13s): So for me, it comes down to, you know, there's lots of different types of bias, that's like a whole academic conversation that I don't really want to get into. What it comes down to me is can this person, is this person going to be successful at the job? And the actual job is coding is communicating it's problem solving, it's persistence. And you can go and interview people about these things. You can like give them these psychometric evaluations, multiple choice. And like, you know, you're popping balloons. There's these crazy games you can play. And supposedly that predicts those things. Wes (21m 43s): I'm more simple. I want to see someone do the job. I want to see them answer an email. That's really confusing and doesn't have enough information and they have to debug a problem. I want to see them write a Slack message. I want to see them take some bad code with some like poorly defined requirements and build something cool. So that's what we do. If you, if someone can do the job that will come through, I don't know that much about all the bias things, but I know that if I see someone to do the job, I'm pretty confident they can do the job. Joel (22m 11s): All right, Wes, this product sounds really expensive. Not to sound like an infomercial, but how much can I expect to pay for Woven? Chad (22m 18s): And do I get Ginsu knives with it? Joel (22m 21s): That's especially that, especially that. Wes (22m 23s): Act now while supplies last and only three easy payments, Joel (22m 27s): But wait, there's more! Wes (22m 29s): Exactly, so we're, I think we're probably two to three times as expensive, i you compare us to some of the tech screening platforms, if you compare us to head hunters, which are a lot of our customers are spending a lot of money on headhunters, cause they were rejecting those hidden gems before us. We are freaking cheap. So we're somewhere in that range. Joel (22m 49s): Good enough. All right, so the I'll let you out on this one. As someone with a teenage child, Rose Holman versus Purdue, who has the better engineering program? Wes (23m 0s): Friends, don't let friends go to Purdue. That's just not something you want to do. Chad (23m 3s): And another and another point for Wes. Wes (23m 8s): Seriously, there are great engineers are Purdue, but you know, I'm partial to Ro`se is a great program. There's some smart folks there. Joel (23m 17s): Good enough? Good enough. Bells (23m 17s): Ding, ding, ding Joel (23m 17s): All right. That's the bell. Wes (23m 20s): Alright. Joel (23m 20s): You're an even-keeled guy. Are you ready to face the Firing Squad? Wes (23m 26s): I'll put on my blind fold. I'm ready. Let's do it. Joel (23m 29s): Alright, Chad. Get him. Chad (23m 29s): You got it, man. Okay. Wes. I gotta say going after the SMB market is let's just put it bluntly, fucking hard. Trying to actually reach out to all of those small companies instead of going for the big whales on the enterprise side. That is hard unless you partner up with other platforms that already have those SMBs, right? So I think, you know, the focus there is incredibly important. Chad (23m 60s): If you're going to say, stay in the SMB space, at least for now that you really focus heavily on partnering up with those different types of platforms that already have a solid base of SMBs. The silver medalist piece. I mean, that just blew my mind. We should have been doing that 20 years ago when we, when we put these platforms in place, when we put our first applicant tracking systems in place, giving those candidates amazing experiences, especially with those brands. Chad (24m 35s): So if I'm a tech company, that means so much to me, that yes, maybe my silver medalists might be going across the street, but they're going to love my brand because I didn't treat them like shit. And I might get them later, right? Between all of this, it's very, very hard because it is incredibly noisy with HackerRank and Codility and Coder Bite. And I mean, everybody wants to get into the remote workspace, as you had said. Chad (25m 5s): So overall, I've got to say it was teetering between the two, but right now going to give you a golf clap, good stuff, man. Good stuff. I thought, I thought I was going to go big applause, but I had to back down a little bit just from the partnership standpoint. Joel (25m 23s): All right. All right. My turn, take a seat, Sowash. First of all, I'm really disappointed that we've never met Wes. You seem like a laid back dude. Like you have a good time. You're from Oklahoma and I've never met anyone from Oklahoma I didn't like. So hopefully if, regardless of how this works out, we can all get together for a beer at some point because you live in a hub here in Indy of good beer. Chad (25m 45s): Hey man. Joel (25m 45s): But getting to the, to the company again, I think, you know, I love that you're willing to say, you know, we don't get marketing. Like we, we need to work on this. Or, you know what, we've sort of fell short in this area because we get a lot of people on the Squad that just feed us bullshit. And we know it's bullshit. I appreciate the transparency and I think that speaks highly of you and I think that translates to the company. So I, I love this idea pre COVID. I think testing tech, you know, technical skills and engineers is difficult. Joel (26m 16s): I think that's why you've seen the success that HackerRank has had and other solutions. It sounds to me like you take a different approach to pre-screening. I love the hidden gem sort of spin that you put on your messaging. I think you're tech focused, not having expertise in employment, a little bit of a hurdle for me. I like companies that come on having a few failed businesses or at least some experience and some success in the space. Joel (26m 51s): So I'd like to see that from you, but I think that'll come in time. As a post COVID business, I really like what you guys are doing and where you kind of fit into the ecosystem. I think we're going into more remote hiring, more remote workforces. So the ability to prescreen and find people, particularly in engineering is going to be more difficult and more tools like yours, I think are going to be, are going to be beneficial. So for me, I think if you have a lot of work to do, I think that you understand that and appreciate it, but the foundation of the company and what you've, what you've done in three short years is impressive. Joel (27m 29s): So for me Applause. (27m 32s): clapping. Joel (27m 34s): Oh, congratulations, my friend. Yeah. How do you feel? Wes (27m 37s): I feel good. I didn't get shot. We got a clap. That's that's that's pretty solid. I think you're totally right about the SMB focus. It's hard. It's a slog. So I think it's something we have to figure out. Joel (27m 48s): Well, excellent, man. We appreciate you taking the time and there's no question, we will be in Fountain Square when we're allowed and we will be drinking beer, but until then. Another Firing Squad in the books. Chad (27m 60s): We out. Joel (27m 60s): We out. OUTRO (28m 16s): 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.

Technology is evolving, teams are sprinting, excitement is building, features are launching, and nobody notices... (waa waa) which is why Chad & Cheese cooked-up FeatuRama, a brand new competition which pits 4 companies against one-another, but only one can win and emerge with the BadAss Belt of Technology. Contestants will receive 2-minutes to pitch their new feature and the remaining 13-minutes will be spent with rapid fire Q&A. This Chad and Cheese FeatuRama episode features Jobvite's Zach Linder, VP of Analytics and Machine Learning. Chad & Cheese came equipped with questions, bourbon and snark, luckily Comuno's Cindy Songne, who was available to step in and inject brains into this judging panel... Enjoy while Zach pitches Jobvite's newest feature. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Intro (58s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (1m 13s): Let's do this. We got Zach. Zach (1m 32s): Hey guys. So I'm Zach Linder the VP of analytics machine learning at Jobvite and super excited to be on today. So real quick on Jobbite. So we are a end to end talent acquisition company. We're focused on hiring, onboarding engagement, attraction, and promoting a talent to make sure that all customers of ours can succeed in the TA marketplace. Focused on companies of all sizes and offer a full suite of solutions like application management, a talent CRM suite, intelligent messaging, including texting and chat box, interview assessments, mobile apps, onboarding applications, and what we're here to talk about today, a robust analytics platform. Zach (2m 18s): So we're really excited about the new analytics tooling we've started from scratch. So built this from the ground up. A lot of times analytics are, are locked inside of each of those individual individual features, but really where you get the power is when you, when you take it up a level and you can look across the entire spectrum of hiring and in your talent acquisition pipeline, and making sure that you understand where, where are things flowing? Where, where are the candidates coming from? How can you optimize those sources and how can you really find and tell that good data story that you want to? Zach (2m 51s): So our, our analytics platform is rolling out next month and it's going to be a GA to all of our JobBite customers on our ATS. And when that comes out again, there'll be lots of focus on data storytelling, optimization and source tracking. And how do we tell that end to end story from taking candidates from the beginning of the life cycle, through hiring and on-boarding all the way through back the beginning of the process. Joel (3m 22s): Thank you Zach Chad (3m 23s): All right, Cindy. Hit him! Cindy (3m 25s): Okay. Robust analytics. Can I with, with the data, can I see how I'm doing compared to other industries or other locations, other employers in, in my area? Zach (3m 40s): Yeah, sure. Thanks. So benchmarking is, is definitely one of the standard components of the tooling. So we want to make sure that you're not operating in a vacuum. That you not only understand how you're doing the, the members of your team are doing, but also all those companies in that industry, that size of company that, that location. So we want to be as responsible as we can with that data, right. And make sure that we're aggregating to the right levels. But we want to get down to the detail where you can really make some changes and make sure that you're performing or outperforming similar type companies. Cindy (4m 11s): Very good. Thank you. Joel (4m 13s): You guys have been around for over a decade. You just said that you built this thing from scratch. Number one, why? And was the old version really shit? And Dan Finnegan's watching so be careful. Chad (4m 27s): So I'm going to take that as a yes. Joel (4m 30s): Did you hear that pause right there? Zach (4m 34s): No, I'm a big fan of always upgrading, right? Let's always use new things, right? Joel (-): From scratch? Zach (4m 41s): No, the real reason is that it kind of goes back to a jump by Teresa acquisition of telemetry canvas and roll points. And, and so when you have multiple companies, everyone's got their own data set and data stuff to manage when you're one company, right. But four companies together and try to figure out how do you look at that data in a unified way that can, can help glean some information. And until I tell a good story, that's why we really started from scratch. So one of the first things we did once we consolidated all the companies was to say that that data was one of the first areas that we wanted to consolidate. Zach (5m 13s): And that's going to be what we're rolling out here next month, just to make sure that whether you're looking at internal mobility or texting and messaging or ATS versus CRM, that you've got that full view of all that data. So as you're using all those features, you can look at it across all the different applications. Chad (5m 31s): Okay. So if I'm a talent acquisition leader, what is the Holy shit moment that's going to get me to say yes, I need to have that? Zach (5m 41s): Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a lot of stuff that that's in there that, that we've got tendencies on that we'd like to see a lot of this stuff. Isn't very complicated, as much as getting the organization and structure to be able to, to glean those insights off of. So if you think source optimization, for instance, so how many candidates do I need at the top of my funnel down to a screen, to, to onsite interview, to offer, to hire what does that pipeline look like and where do I need to be at what point in time? Zach (6m 15s): And if you think about taking a couple of steps back, how do I get the right people in the top of that funnel at the right, right price points, right? So am I using my sources correctly and effectively, am I searching my own internal database as much as possible? Am I hitting up my own internal candidates as much as possible? So how do we have that full view of this life cycle and, and allow you to not start a new job every time, every time you've got a new job description in your system, how can you look at this in a very similar way and say, I'm a little ahead on I'm a little behind and here are the things that I need to do. Zach (6m 46s): So it's really action oriented, making sure that we're helping the recruiters understand where do they need to focus their work on for today. Chad (6m 53s): Well, and you can tie in, you're talking about being able to also guide that experience with aggregate data, right? So Zach (6m 60s): absolutely Chad (7m 1s): sales positions in your new to the system. Then you have really no data to really drive off of what maybe if you imported a bunch of junk that you've had before, but you can really use your aggregate data. Is, is, is that correct? And you can slice it and dice it? Zach (7m 16s): Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So think about like, if, if I've got 10 people in my queue right now that, that I need to disposition in some way, but I know that for this particular sales job that I'm hiring historically within my company, I I'm going to need, I've got a 10% higher rate, so I'm going to need at least 10 candidates to get to a certain stage. And so if I don't have those, then I need to go focus part of my time on sourcing while I'm focusing the other part of my time on getting the candidates through the pipeline as quickly as possible to improve that time, to fill the spot. Zach (7m 48s): So, yeah, and a lot of that, that's, that's using your own company's historical information and then where that doesn't exist, right. For new customers, we definitely rely on benchmarking just standard across the board data that can help provide some insight as to where you need to be focusing your work on for the day. Chad (8m 7s): Cindy Cindy (8m 8s): Are there reports updated in real time? Zach (8m 10s): Yeah. So real time ish is, is my best answer there. So it's the, it's going to be very close to real time. And in a sense of it's, it's going to be about an hour delayed. So now we're all always balancing this, right? So there we have, I, I checked recently and I, I think we've got about 24 terabytes worth of data in there. So we're, we're, we're crunching through a massive amount of data. And so we always have to balance the power of the data with the speed of the data and the refresh cycle. Zach (8m 41s): Now don't th that's, that's just in part of the analytics platform, right? Where there's the need to have an API to get real time information. That's definitely going to be a possibility, right. And so what information needs to be real time versus what information is okay to be an hour or so delayed. That's what we're, we're continually looking at. And if it were up to me, everything would be real time. I would just need probably an extra billion or $2 to make that happen. So if you guys can help us out with that?. Joel (9m 6s): That's what a mom's couch cushion kind of stuff. Cushions. We talk a lot about the platform and how important that is and how ATSs are going to grow by having, you know, third party vendors building onto their, onto their systems. Talk about how the analytics is bringing together sort of the third party information, whether that's what I'm paying on a per click basis on Indeed, or what messaging is coming through. I'm going to guess that because you guys own Canvas and stuff, those, those systems are ingrained in the analytics, but talk about how you're, you're playing nicely with your partners? Zach (9m 38s): Yeah, for sure. So integrations of course are key in a lot of different ways. And, and we, we would love to surface all the data that we can, right. So if we can go deeper with an integration and pull in more data that tells us more insights into how those other tools are working and how they're interacting with our systems, we definitely use those integration points to extract all that value that we can. So if, if we can get more data through an integration, we absolutely will. Zach (10m 9s): And then we'll just use that to improve the quality of the data that sits inside of the Jobvite systems. Chad (10m 13s): Excellent. So we talking about obviously analytics reports, are there diverse hire reports for hiring companies that your clients can model off of or actually benchmark off of? Zach (10m 26s): Yeah. So again, benchmarking is always something that we're working on. And specifically when you're thinking about DNI, we've got some standard reports that include that for sure. And the data is only as good as what's put into the system, right? So some of our customers choose to track this, others do not, but yeah, if the data's there, we can tell you all of the data that we talked about so far with the candidates in the pipeline, and who's making it through the various progression of the pipeline through getting to offer it and hired all that can be broken down by age, race, gender, those types of data points were available. Zach (11m 3s): So I think right now it's going to be very interesting. I think we've got some interesting things that are going to come out here in the very near future to, to just highlight this. This is something that we've gotten a system and it can be utilized in ways that people might not have thought about as much prior to the world's events. Chad (11m 22s): Now, with regard to that, let's say for instance, if a females in my talent pool fall below a certain benchmark, can I say, in a alert in the system to let me know, or maybe even trigger more jobs going out to some of the, some of those female friendly types of sources? Zach (11m 38s): Yeah. So when, when we think about analytics, we always think about analytics plus automation, right? And so the, the plus automation is something that, that is, is an evolving process, but that's when we're building things out, definitely directionally where we want to go, we want to stop having to push the button much and have the button push itself to make sure that, that it's not only using the data, but using it to act the way that we're telling it to do. But yeah, so alerts are definitely a possibility inside of the analytics tooling. And this is definitely an area that we're expanding on, but within the reports and data that's coming out, you can set a specific alerts on if I get above or below a certain number or a benchmark or threshold that you can be alerted as the individual user and the candidate. Cindy (12m 20s): Does a candidate. See also that there's been a change in their disposition within the company. Zach (12m 27s): So potentially a lot of that's going to be dependent upon how the workflows are set up inside of the ATS itself. So if it's set up and again, if you think about the automation component, one of the areas that, that we're seeing are there's lots of candidates that, that aren't being dispositioned. So one of the things that we're highlighting in analytics is how do you identify which candidates are in a non-displaced status when they should be right? So if, if there's been a hire and we've got a lot of candidates in a new status, we need to let them know that, sorry, this job has been filled, but here's some other jobs that, that meet your requirements and try to keep them engaged, right. Zach (13m 3s): Even though it might not be for that particular job, it's it's how do we continue to engage that candidate? So they might not have the clarity that the recruiter has on the backside, but we're providing the recruiter and TA professionals the opportunity to see who do they need to reach out to and message and notify accordingly. Cindy (13m 19s): Yeah. Because the more the candidate knows, even if it's not what they want to hear, the more you engage them, the better Zach (13m 25s): Brand value here. Right. It's, let's see, knowing the know is probably better than, than knowing nothing. Right. You can at least move on and then the company can reposition those candidates. I mean, we spent a lot of money to get those candidates in the pipeline. How do we, how do we save extra money and not start from scratch each time and, and have those candidates looking at other jobs that they might be a fit for as well. Cindy (13m 48s): Can I search the internal database first before I go external? Zach (13m 52s): Oh yeah, absolutely. For sure. And in fact, we've got a candidate matching capability. That's going to come out next month as well. And one of the, the first things that it will do is search that internal database. And then when you take that and you add on internal mobility, that's when it gets really exciting because the, the number of candidates that are hired internally from existing employees is pretty astonishing in a lot of cases. And so, and that's free for the most part and think about all the time and money savings you have from onboarding and, and things like that. Zach (14m 22s): So if you look at your existing candidate database, your internal employees, then that's where we should start. And if we don't think about that pipeline again, if we hit all the numbers we need with that pipeline, there's no reason for us to go external, but it, but if we do then we'll know how far externally do we need to go? And that way we're not just blasting out big spends to, to, to go get a bunch of candidates that we may or may not need. Cindy (14m 47s): That's very cool. Thank you. Joel (14m 48s): For our alert, matching technology everybody soon. Zach (14m 53s): So on, on that note, who was Jobvites next acquisition? Well, we've been looking at the podcast world and Joel (15m 2s): I won't make you answer that question. So I know you haven't released this yet, but I'm curious analytics tends to go from like one extreme to the other, whether it's, I just want really basic high level stuff. And I want to spend 24 hours like knee deep into the data. Did you take that into consideration and will this be an analytics solution that will appeal to both sides of that spectrum? Zach (15m 23s): Yeah, that's, that's a tough, tough balance, right? Because the, the data is, is hard, right? That we, we want to have so much flexibility in the application and we provide that. The challenge is how do you provide that flexibility with balancing easy reportability without having somebody that's a data expert to figure that out, right? You, you shouldn't have to think about, do I need to pivot my data, or how do I get a parameter or filter on there. To some degree you could, but so we definitely have levels of depth to the tool. Zach (15m 57s): So if you just want to view and browse and kind of interact with some basic filters and check boxes and things like that, you can definitely do that. If you want to get a little more detailed and go build reports from scratch, look at the data models, you can do all that as well. Chad (16m 11s): Bell, Bell, Bell, That's the bell Zach. Zach (16m 13s): Thank you guys very much. I appreciate it. Chad (16m 15s): Continue watching everybody. We've got the big announcement coming up Joel (16m 19s): And we out, we out. Thanks guys. Outro (16m 21s): Look for more episodes of feature drama, a Chad and cheese podcast series devoted to breaking through the noise and highlighting new recruitment tech and platform features from established companies. Subscribe today on Apple, Google podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't miss a single episode, boys and girls for more visit chadcheese.com today.

Technology is evolving, teams are sprinting, excitement is building, features are launching, and nobody notices... (waa waa) which is why Chad & Cheese cooked-up FeatuRama, a brand new competition which pits 4 companies against one-another, but only one can win and emerge with the BadAss Belt of Technology. Contestants will receive 2-minutes to pitch their new feature and the remaining 13-minutes will be spent with rapid fire Q&A. This Chad and Cheese FeatuRama episode features XOR's founder & CEO, Aida Fazylova. Chad & Cheese came equipped with questions, bourbon and snark, luckily Comuno's Cindy Songne, who was available to step in and inject brains into this judging panel... Enjoy while Aida pitches XOR's newest feature. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. FeatuRama Intro (0s): Technology is evolving. Teams are sprinting. Excitement is building features are launching and nobody notices. This is Joel Cheesman of the Chad and Cheese podcast. And that's why Chad and I cooked up FeatuRama, a brand new competition that pits for established companies against one another with only one emerging victorious awarded with the bad-ass belt of technology. FeatuRama Intro (31s): Here's the four, one, one contestants will receive two minutes to pitch their new feature. And the remaining 13 minutes will be spent with rapid f ire Q and A. This FeatureRama puts Aida Fazylova CEO, and founder of XOR.ai on the hot seat chat. And I dropped mad questions while Downing drams of bourbon and Camino Cindy Sonya helped inject brains and class to the judging panel. Enjoy listening to Aida who can probably drink all of us under the table, by the way, bring the heat. Intro (1m 5s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Aida (1m 38s): Thanks for having me here guys, but he might've done CEO and founder here at XOR. So we all wouldn't communication platform that lets the recruiting teams as well as the HR teams to hire people much, much faster than ever before and retain the talent. We do this by on one hand, giving the recruiting teams an opportunity to communicate with their candidates over the text, as well as in any other messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, because it really drives the engagement as well as the speed of the responses. The companies hear back from the 40 to 46% of all the candidates, just in just under 15 minutes. Aida (2m 11s): And on the other hands, we give them the opportunity to utilize artificial intelligence and virtual assistant that let them automate the most retainer repetitive processes in recruiting. So screening of the, and capturing the applications and the chats or all the candidates coming from online sources like social media, company career site, as well as job boards, as well as from offline sources like texts to apply or scan the QR code to start the conversation. We also made the entire thing really to do the interview scheduling one on one meetings, panel interviews, sequential interviews, and updating everybody's calendars. Aida (2m 45s): And we also do the passive candidate re engagements engagements as well as the referral partnerships or programs where they a TA tech side of things. So we've been around since 2016, the company was actually born out of my personal team because I used to work as a talent acquisition practitioner. We serve close to 200 customers in 15 countries at the moment. Yep. We're about 85 employees headquartered back in San Francisco, California, and we have three more offices in Europe. So we just recently released a new feature that I wanted to talk with you about today. Aida (3m 18s): It's ability not only to communicate with their candidates over the texts or any, any other messaging apps, but also call the candidates and have the entire conversation, transcribed and analyzed before afterwards. Right after the call. So this is what I wanted to talk to you though today. Thank you. Cindy (3m 36s): Okay. You said transcribed right after the call. How quickly is it ? Aida (3m 40s): Transcribed as you speak? Cindy (3m 42s): That's amazing. Can, if I start on one device as a candidate, can I switch over to another device? Aida (3m 48s): Yes, you can. You can use XOR over your desktop as well as in your, when your mobile devices. Cindy (3m 54s): Like if I start on text, I can switch over to email or whatever. Okay. Very good. Oh, it says that you interact with all ATS - how does that work? Aida (4m 7s): That's right. So we have close to 30 integrations within ATSs. So that means that the companies can utilize XOR. First of all, they can use the word when the LTSS clever as a lightweight ATS, but usually the way it works is that we compliment the existing technical stock of the company, which is usually an ATS slash CRM, have the calendar system. And we sit on top of this ETS or CRM as an AI powered communication layer. So that entire conversation flow that happens between the candidates and the virtual assistant and the recruiter is pushed back to the candidate profile in the ATS. Aida (4m 40s): So that's the way works. Wilson supplies, the Google Chrome, and then all the forth routers to work directly through our ATs without even leaving and then utilize XOR functionality to, from there, from the XOR extension. Cindy (-): Very good, thank you. Joel (4m 54s): Cindy wants to know about integration. I want to know about collaboration. Can you take notes on this solution? Can you tag, can you search everything? Can you share notes and all that stuff with, with coworkers and other recruiters? Talk about the collaborative tools of the new feature. Aida (5m 13s): Sure. That's a really, really great question. So yes, you can do take the notes. You can also assign the tasks to the candidates. Not only you can assign a manual, the candidates move down the funnel, but also some of the texts are assigned automatically as the candidates have the conversation about the virtual assistant. So for example, whether or not this candidate was qualified during the screening process, whether or not they were skid jewel for meeting whether or not they got scores and you know, the locations and everything along those lines Afterwards the recruiters can perform the searches. You're absolutely right based on the texts. Aida (5m 44s): And they'll set up the mass actions. For example, if the recruiter, if there was a series of set of the candidates that successfully have done an interview with the recruiter, and we want to now schedule them for a meeting with a hiring manager, we select those candidates based on the text and then have the virtual assistant take over the process and schedule them for a meeting with a hiring manager. And by the way, you, as a recruiter is using the Google Chrome extension, the XOR and the browsing door ATS, and find the candidate, you will be able to see the entire chat history, not only with yourself, for your positions, but also for any other team members in your team, as well as the conversation. Joel (6m 22s): Zora is. And how many languages number one, and number two, how many languages are you transcribing into? Aida (6m 30s): No, we support 103 languages. That's the only system in the world that actually does this. Not only supporting the companies different languages, but also giving them the opportunity to utilize the local mediums of communication. For example, like We chat or Line, you know, if we're speaking about the OPEC region and we are operating in 15 countries at the moment, as I said, and what was the last question? Sorry. Joel (6m 53s): How many, how many do you transcribe and all of those languages Aida (6m 57s): Right now, it's transcribing 35 of them. More or less on the grade level. Joel (7m 2s): Okay. Cindy, how little fail. What was that? Chad (7m 5s): Total fail only 35 languges. Cindy (7m 8s): Yeah. Seriously. What's your target audience? Aida (7m 11s): We target the direct employers with over, I'd say 500 employees, upwards. And if we're speaking about the stuffing, you just, this can be staffing agencies as little as the five recruiters and we are working with them as well. Yep. Cindy (7m 26s): Industry doesn't matter correct? Aida (7m 28s): It does not matter. That's right. Yes. It's industry agnostic solution. Joel (7m 32s): Do you work better in some industries though? Aida (7m 36s): We started from the height, you know, with a high volume type of roles, like retail, restaurant chains, taxi drivers, and so on and so forth. So warehousing, but as we were evolving as a company, we did find out that, you know, this was an industry agnostic solution. The only, the only industry, the only field of vertical that we are not really great performers is executive search, search, probably because you can not really have those missions go walk to the CMOs and very, very people. Yeah. Joel (8m 6s): Yeah. Tell me about pricing typically solutions like this, they price based on the number of minutes or hours that you're talking and how much transcription. So obviously the more you talk, the more texts we have to deal with, the more the price goes up. So, so how does the pricing breakdown on this new feature? Aida (8m 25s): Very good question. So normally, XOR pricing works based on number of recruiter seats, because every single recruiter gets access to their own inbox, which is Gmail for texting in a way. And based on this recruiter seats, we actually limit them on the amount of context they can do on a monthly basis. And in terms of the calling feature, there is a certain amount of hours that is included, on the monthly basis. They want to get will be on this, they are just being extra. Cindy (8m 53s): Does anybody hit those maxes? Aida (8m 55s): Not yet. No. It's very new feature. So we're at right now working with this. Joel (8m 59s): So regular phone conversations could easily burn through preloaded minutes for candidates, right? So XOR is already integrated with WhatsApp. Why not allow candidates to choose that mode of calling instead of perspectively burning through their minutes? Aida (9m 15s): Sure. So, WhatsApp does not have such feature because you are WhatsApping with your candidates, from your business accounts. What's not allowed the businesses to call through WhatsApp. And unlike like people to people conversations with WhatsApp, it's also paid for. So every single text message you send out to the candidates, the first one will, they will charge you extra and the candidate needs to opt in within 24 hours. So in order for you to carry on the conversation, it's fairly cheap, but the WhatsApp is really, really relevant in, let's say Europe LATAM, South Africa, Australia, because texting over there is really, really expensive unlike here in North America. Aida (9m 54s): So yeah, so this really important for those regions. Joel (9m 58s): Okay. Cindy Cindy (9m 59s): Tell me about your predictive analytics and how they're used. Aida (10m 3s): Sure. So during the screening process, during the initial engagements with the candidates, every single candidate gets assigned a score. A score is pretty much summarizations of all the answers that they provided to the screening filtering questions and whether or not this decline is actually whether or not the candidate what's considered successful, a good fit for a role, not a good fit for a role. Maybe you did make a good fit for role. They can either be scheduled for full or a meeting with a recruiter or a phone call with a recruiter or zoom conference with the recruiter. Aida (10m 33s): If the candidate did not meet this criteria, the first vote that they get either politely rejected, or there are other job opportunities that are suggested to this particular person. Outside of this kind of hard data, right? So we are asking them to do a first work, any country. How many years of experience do you have? Do you have certain credentials? Like, are you licensed to work as a registered nurse in the state of California and what not. You'll also get access to an enormous amount of metadata about this candidate: how soon they respond, what are the questions they're being assigned, assign the candidate a score of the engagement level. Aida (11m 13s): And we, this actually allows the companies to predict if they make a doable for how likely this candidate will accept this. Yep. There is another way of doing the participant analytics, but not for the new customers, because we need to collect and store a little bit more historic data. Chad (-): You mean data? Aida (11m 30s): That actually allows them to understand based on the initial engagement, the communication with the recruiter and chatbot during the hiring process, how likely this candidate will stay within the company after the probation period and whether or not this candidate will ever be promoted. This type of predictive analytics is actually right now active in around seven of our customers. They're like largest enterprises, with a high volume and high turnover rates Joel (11m 54s): Curious about marketing. How are you going to market with this new feature? And you're getting further away from chatbot territory. You're getting into much more categories and whatnot. How do you make sense of that marketing wise and how are you pushing this new product and to whom are you marketing? Aida (12m 16s): Yes, absolutely. Very good question. So we are you're right, it's not the chatbot space anymore. It's everything related to the recruiting communication and recruiting communication automation. This is like a very new in the emerging fields, and I call it this, by adding this feature, we actually allow the companies to look the entire recruiting conversation in one channel, right? So they're all like all the mediums you can think of. And if beforehand, when the recruiter picked up the phone, this piece of conversation was more companies we're right now, transcribing this and locking it down in one, in one threat that is particular space. Aida (12m 55s): We are also now working on the feature with Zoom, since we are integrated with Zoom that any single recruiter can actually link their zoom accounts, we will be transcribing the Zoom conversations very shortly. It's going to be released on July 28th. Joel (13m 7s): Are you using all of that transcribed data? Are you turning your AI and your machine learning onto that data to predict the hire and retention rates? Because it seems like you're getting a lot of data. Is that what you're using? Aida (13m 23s): Right now, it's not the way it's used. It actually produces the very useful tips for the recruiters during the conversation, as well as provides the, how many calls, how many of those calls were successful? How many, like, how did recruiter perform to their phone call? Whether or not they were holding onto the scripts, whether or not they were using certain language that is not a desirable, for example, and all analytics of that sort. How long was the conversation? How long did the recruiter speak versus how long did the candidates speak as well as providing them with the certain texts? Cindy (13m 58s): Can they do group interviews also a right now? No, it's only one on one conversations. Joel (14m 4s): Okay. Talk to me about privacy, GDPR, California laws, all that good stuff. Aida (14m 11s): Absolutely. So for the companies that are in Europe or UK, we are GDPR compliance with storing the data of European citizens, only European servers, and yep. And before they start sharing any of the personal data, they actually need to consent to the privacy policies and terms of services. So you guys have grown feature wise, you had three features mainly right out of the gate. And that was like 18 months ago. You guys have grown dramatically. How do you stay away from number one, feature bloat and number two, how do you continue to keep that focus that you originally have when you were on firing squad? Aida (14m 48s): Got the, the big applause. Very question. So, right. XOR is the company. We are both vision driven as well as the customer driven, right? So based on the customer requests on the prospect's requests, we are building our roadmap. And all of the features that we right now are building are being used either by acquiring current customers or by new companies that heard we are in a pipelines. Plus we also expanded geographically. This is where we got the needs in terms of like, you know, integrations with all the local messaging apps and the WhatsApp even was Bells (15m 21s): Ding, Ding, Ding Chad (15m 29s): Aida Fazylova. We've got more to come, so keep watching. Thanks Aida! And we out. Joel (-): We Out Aida (15m 32s): Thank you. Intro (15m 34s): Look for more episodes of FeatuRama, a Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted to breaking through the noise and highlighting new recruitment tech and platform features from established companies. Subscribed today on Apple, Google podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't miss a single episode, boys and girls. For more visit chadcheese.com today.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is changing minds and changing lives through disability inclusion. Technology is evolving, teams are sprinting, excitement is building, features are launching, and nobody notices... (waa waa) which is why Chad & Cheese cooked-up FeatuRama, a brand new competition which pits 4 companies against one-another, but only one can win and emerge with the BadAss Belt of Technology. Contestants will receive 2-minutes to pitch their new feature and the remaining 13-minutes will be spent with rapid fire Q&A. This Chad and Cheese FeatuRama episode features Andy Katz, COO of NEXXT, that's with 2 Xs kids. Chad & Cheese came equipped with questions, bourbon and snark, luckily Comuno's Cindy Songne, who was available to step in and inject brains into this judging panel... Enjoy while Andy pitches NEXXT's newest feature. Intro (1m 3s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. CHAD SOWASH and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts! Intro (1m 33s): 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 34s): Got to wait for him to come back. Joel (-): Let's wait for the technology to catch up. Chad (1m 38s): Now, that's what I'm talking about now Andy from Nexxt Go! Andy (1m 44s): Thanks for inviting me. Nexxt is a recruitment media company with employment solutions catering to the next generation of hiring. For companies and agencies Nexxt is a full service recruitment marketing platform, providing method of sourcing the best people from abroad talent pool and for professionals and job seekers Nexxt is an employment solution powering more than 50 niche career sites, making finding the perfect job easier. Nexxtt combines predictive technology with multichannel multichannel marketing to diversify talent network of more than 75 million candidates on focused career sites, allowing recruiters or hiring managers to build custom campaigns and efficiently fulfill their hiring needs. Andy (2m 26s): So in other words, what does that mean? It really means that Nexxt plays in eight different buckets of advertising. Everything from talent communities to text messaging, to email marketing, to our job alerts, to retargeting campaigns, to branding campaigns. Everything that will put our employers opportunities in front of our job seekers, anywhere the job seekers want and any way that the employers want to advertise them. So it's really the whole ecosystem of Nexxt put together that really makes us a powerful platform. Andy (2m 57s): And, you know, in a nutshell, really what Nexxt is Joel (3m 2s): And your new feature. Chad (3m 3s): Yeah the new feature Andy (3m 4s): The feature, which you really want to talk about today are talent communities and what a talent community is from an employer standpoint, it's really the opposite of an applicant tracking system. Applicant tracking systems are where job seekers go to apply for a job. And they go in through the process. Talent communities are becoming more and more popular with probably about 30 different providers out there that allow that really they sell the employers software and technology and they keep candidates warm. So they're not applying for a job that day, but they go onto their site or they're directed specifically to the talent community, not to apply for a job, but to say, Hey, I'm interested in this company. Andy (3m 43s): I'm interested in hearing what you have to offer and keep me in mind. And then what the technology does is it sends the job seeker information about the company as new information comes available or not. Joel (-): Thanks Andy! Chad (3m 58s): That's your two minutes. Okay. Cindy, your first. Yeah. Cindy (4m 2s): Right. Seriously, Andy, you know, I love you, right? I can send you, but go ahead. Why is talent community? How is that different from what you've been doing? Andy (4m 12s): Nobody in the industry right now, driving traffic or job seekers directly into talent communities. Right now it's all in line for a job. And with the way the economy is today and with 40 million, 30 to 40 million, depending on what you read, people unemployed, there aren't jobs for everybody. So what this will do is go into the tech. These job seekers enter into the talent community, the employers, and they are now kept as warm leads. So while talent communities have been around for probably half a dozen years at this point, nobody from the job board or a lead generation type space is driving people directly into the communities alone. Andy (4m 51s): They usually get there by going to a career site or they get there by going to a corporate site and then just happen to stumble upon the talent communities. So now more than ever, it's important for companies to start building up these databases of talent communities. And that's where we come in. We don't provide the software. We don't provide the service. What we provide is the job seekers being able to join those talent communities. Cindy (5m 16s): So you're just driving traffic to directly into what employers are calling a talent community into their ATS, Andy (5m 24s): Not their ATS, two separate databases. So ATS has make a job seeker, an applicant. A talent community does not make them an applicant that keeps them as a warm lead for future opportunities. Cindy (5m 35s): Okay. Does it count? Does a candidate and elder not applying to the job? Andy (5m 40s): Oh, absolutely. And we actually did a survey to our audience of about a hundred thousand people. We got about 4,000 responses and we asked them, you know, what do you think about talent communities? Are you familiar with talent communities? And 72% of the job seekers that we pulled said they were absolutely interested in joining the talent community, especially if there are no jobs available that meet their needs. And even if they are so this way, they don't always have to come back to the employer to get more information or see new jobs posted. Andy (6m 10s): The employers are directly reaching back out to them, through their email campaigns and whatever strategy they utilize through their providers on their end. Cindy (6m 18s): Okay. Thank you. Joel (6m 19s): And who who's this for? Is this just for big enterprise company? Is it get thousands, tens of thousands of applicants or if I'm a 50 person or under a company, should I be looking at talent communities as well? Andy (6m 32s): So I'm going to flip that on you Joel, and say, if you bought a talent community, this is the product for you. So from a company standpoint, you have to decide, do I want to have a talent community? Am I big enough to have a talent community? Do I want to keep people warm and engaged over time until I'm ready to hire them? If they purchase the talent community, this is the perfect opportunity for them to populate that database. If they do not have a talent community, obviously common sense this isn't right product for them. But, but you know, again, you're not going to hide. Andy (7m 2s): You're not going to have a talent community. If you're looking to hire 20 people a year, you don't need to keep people warm and interested. You need to do this when you're doing not just high volume recruiting, but any volume of substance, you know, I would say, you know, again, it's have a talent, community providers, pitch, they are technology, but you know, if you're hiring less than probably a hundred people a year, you probably don't have a talent community and you definitely do not need our service to keep, you know, driving leads into it. Joel (7m 30s): So my fear is this would, this would look like a lot of work to accompany. And I'm curious, how do you keep the community engaged? Is it like a LinkedIn or Facebook thing where there's a feed and people are sharing stuff and talking to each other? Or is it more like we're going to send you a job alerts once a month? And we'll, we'll publish some, some articles from around the web, like exactly how high, how manual is a company going to have to be to keep this thing going and then vibrant. Andy (8m 0s): So good news is that's not our forte. We're not sending them information. We're not keeping them engaged after they joined. That is on the talent community provider that whoever's delivering that software and the internal marketing or HR department or HR marketing within that organization. What we do at Nexxt is we just drive qualified leads or job seekers that have not found a position into those talent communities. So maybe the best way to explain this is how do we get them in there? Andy (8m 32s): So when a job seeker joins Nexxt for the first time they go through a registration process, we collect information, their name, their email, their discipline, their location, and a couple of other data points based on those data points, the company that has the, the employer that has talent community can say, okay, we're looking for 10,000 drivers or 10,000 customer service people, or two hundred customer service people. And just this one area. So we have the ability to target our audience by specific functions, locations, salary levels, and only show this offer to join that company's talent community, if it meets their needs. Andy (9m 11s): So we're not company X's talent community and make it aware to all of our job seekers, because it might not be appropriate for a nurse, that might not be appropriate for a network engineer, but it might be appropriate for an accountant. So they get the ice, the audience any way they want. Joel (9m 28s): So, and I'm sorry, Chad's biting at the chomping at the bit. If I'm an applicant I could end up in quite a few different talent communities based on who I am. Oh, absolutely. Sure. If you're just going to say I'm a customer service person and I can work anywhere in the country, you know, you might see 10 different talent communities that you can join at one time. Andy (9m 48s): And then from there through our APIs, we send the job seeker into the talent community and that's where we stepped out and the T and the software takes over. Gotcha. Chad (9m 59s): I mean, any, any CRM or Tom community that's worth a shit can do any type of job distribution in the first place. And for the most part, these organizations are being used as a cosmetic layer because the ATS and the experience sucks there, right? So it's not the application process, although they are sucking jobs into that cosmetic layer so that they can do all of the job distribution piece. Right. And, and many of those, the smash flies, or what have you, they're all doing those job distribution pieces. Chad (10m 29s): So if they're doing that already, what I mean, why would they need this product? Andy (10m 35s): Right? So the smash flies that you just mentioned, the, you know, the, the talent, the pure talent communities, they are not sending out jobs. They're meaning to sending out jobs, you know, through a job and tool. And that's having the job seeker come back and apply for the job. Most of them today, after you apply through the job through the ATS application, would you like to join our talent community? So they aren't getting job seekers to at the end of that process to join the talent community if they wish to opt in. But what they're missing are all the job seekers that come to a site or to your career site. Andy (11m 9s): And they don't see a job at that time, but really big and bold on their screen. Even sometimes more prominent than the search for a job is join our talent community. Right now, their database, that's going to be sending out these information. These job alerts news of what's going on in the industry. ATS is as we know our, you know, the black hole of applications, most recruiters do not go back into the ATS every time a new jobs, open and search. So, and the ATS is not good CRM tools. Andy (11m 40s): That's where the talent communities come in. Chad (11m 42s): So here's the question though. And I get that, but here's the question. One of the things that we need to do better in our industry is they've probably acquired those candidates four or five times already, and they're already in their database. And are we, are we really focused on trying to go external all the time? Or should companies be focusing on the money that they've already spent in their internal database to try to drive better matching and better nurturing from that? Andy (12m 8s): Right. So that is absolutely, you know, recruiting 101, you spent a ton of money in the past, obtaining these users acquiring them. You should always look there first, but again, Chad (12m 21s): Oh, can you help them with that though? I mean, cause you guys have great tech, can you help them with that nurturing process or even getting them out of the ATS, into their talent community. Andy (12m 31s): We can help them get out of the ATS into the talent community. But again, we're very strict with, you know, our own job seekers and they have to opt into each one specifically. So for the most part, if you're joining an ATS, unless there's a buy in on that application and say, I also wish to receive further information from company XYZ, they didn't up into the talent community. And then you are breaching spam cam laws, you know, with receiving emails from you about the weather in Seattle, Washington this week, they, they're not asking for that. Andy (13m 4s): They were asking to apply specifically for your job. So talent communities again is a CRM tool, which is, you know, a candidate relationship marketing tool. And ATS is definitely not a CRM. There is no relationship. It's, I'm applying for a job. Are you interested if we're interested in, we're going to reach back out to you, if not, you're pretty much going into that black hole, Joel (13m 26s): Cindy. Cindy (13m 27s): So this is kind of like a reverse database search because you have the database and we're sending it to, Andy (13m 33s): We have the database. So there's two, there's two nuances to this, as I explained the first way is when a job seeker joins next, we're going to give them the opportunity to opt into a talent community provider. So now the job seeker comes to Nexxt. They might not have done their faith. They didn't, they do their job search first to say, here's the return of 20 results that match you. They're initially saying, I want to hear from this company. So I'm joining that and they're going to be reaching back and forth and having that relationship. Andy (14m 3s): So it's, yes, it's our database, but they don't have access like to an unlimited amount of our database. You have to opt in to that employer. So they'll say these are on the initial registration of next. And then what we plan on doing is sending, you know, we're not sure how often yet anywhere from a monthly to a, every other month of email out to our job seekers saying, Hey, these employers want to hear from you. Here's 10 talent communities. Here's five, whatever it is that you know, that want to hear from you, would you like them to opt into them and then they can opt in. Cindy (14m 36s): how do you charge for this? Andy (14m 38s): So we charge per lead and there'll be a sliding scale. Yeah. So there'll be a sliding scale on, based on volume. Joel (14m 44s): I assume there's still my pricing question. I got a lot of questions out there at the beginning. If you had one Chad go for it. Chad (14m 49s): How big is the database again? Andy (14m 52s): Well, our database is currently 75 and 80 million that we can reach out to. But if you really want to say, you know, everybody can promote, Oh, you have 75 million users. Yeah. We know they're not active users. If you said to us on a given on any given day, we have somewhere around five to seven, five to six, really call it million active job seekers that are still within, you know, what we call our window of opportunity, which is depending on the plan, somewhere between 90 and 120 days Joel (15m 22s): You have a pretty powerful text messaging platform that you guys have been having opt-ins for like a decade, right? Are you pushing out alerts to them to join communities, be a mobile? Andy (15m 31s): Not yet. This is again, just a new product that we just launched. We had two clients trial. It just wanted to get everything going, everything worked perfect. And now we're really, this is again, the Chad and Cheese, where's the best place to go to launch a new product where there! So to answer your question, text messaging is not out of the realm, but it's not the first, you know, we're very careful as an organization on how we use our text messaging. Text messaging is what other people opt out very quickly if it's not really directed towards them. Andy (16m 5s): So we're very, I wouldn't even call it stingy on who we text message and having Cindy (16m 10s): Tell me about the predictive analytics. How are they used? Andy (16m 14s): Be more specific, which predictive analytics. Joel (16m 17s): doesn't matter time is up. Andy (16m 19s): Ah, damn it, Joel (16m 26s): Nexxt with two Xs, two XsI don't get that third X I'll be kicked off the stage. Outro (16m 37s): Look for more episodes of Feature Rama! This Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted to breaking through the noise and highlighting new recruitment tech and platform features. Subscribe on Apple, Google podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single episode for more visit ChadCheese.com.

Technology is evolving, teams are sprinting, excitement is building, features are launching, and nobody notices... (waa waa) which is why Chad & Cheese cooked-up FeatuRama, a brand new competition which pits 4 companies against one-another, but only one can win and emerge with the BadAss Belt of Technology. Contestants will receive 2-minutes to pitch their new feature and the remaining 13-minutes will be spent with rapid fire Q&A. This Chad and Cheese FeatuRama episode features HiringSolved's founder & CEO, Shon Burton. Chad & Cheese came equipped with questions, bourbon and snark, luckily Comuno's Cindy Songne, who was available to step in and inject brains into this judging panel... Enjoy while Shon pitches HiringSolved's newest feature. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. Intro (0s): Technology is evolving. Teams are sprinting. Excitement is building features are launching and nobody notices. This is Joel Cheesman of the Chad and Cheese podcast. And that's why Chad and I cooked up FeaturRama, a brand new competition that pits 4 established companies against one another with only one emerging victorious awarded the bad-ass belt of technology. FeartuRama 411 (27s): Here's the four, one, one: Contestants will receive two minutes to pitch their new feature. And the remaining 13 minutes will be spent with rapid fire Q and A. This FeatuRama puts the eventual winner of our first ever FeatuRama Shon Burton CEO at Hiring Solved on the hot seat. Chad and I dropped a mad questions while downing drams of bourbon and Camino Cindy Songne helps inject brains and class to the judging panel. Enjoy. Intro (58s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad (1m 25s): Alright guys, here we go. We've got you Shon from Hiring Solved. Joel (1m 31s): Burton! Chad (1m 34s): Go! Shon (1m 35s): Hey guys. Thanks for having me on I'm Shon Burton from Hiring Solved. I'm one of the founders and the CEO of Hiring Solved and let's see, I'm pitching you. So let me, let me tell you a little bit about Hiring Solved. We started about eight years ago now and what we are as a, we're a software company that specializes in talent intelligence. What is talent intelligence? I like to think of it as a, we've been hearing for a long time in this industry that your ATS, your CRM, your HRS, these are gold mines because you have all this great data and, and, and more so I think even today, then that's even more true than it has been because you've got tremendous applicant flow today. Shon (2m 14s): Of course, lots of people out of work, looking for new jobs. You've got folks in your HRS that worked for your company that you're trying to put to work maybe in different jobs as the business changes. So this idea of these systems as a gold mine is very, is very relevant. But what Hiring Solved does is we are the mining tools. So if you think about that analogy of the goldmine, that's a, that's a store of value and there's very valuable stuff in there, but it's actually really, really hard to get out. I think of it as you know, the ATS does a great job. Shon (2m 45s): It tracks applicants, it's an applicant tracking system. It doesn't say it's going to find you people to hire. So Hiring Solved, what we work to do every day is, is to like our name says solve hiring. And we do that by integrating with all kinds of different, anything that contains talent information, pulling it together, merging it, analyzing it, parsing it, and then creating structure from it so that we can then make it actionable and then make it easy for the user to make hires very quickly and accurately. Shon (3m 15s): So that's a lot of, that's a lot of what Hiring Solved does. We started as an aggregator, a social aggregator back in 2012. And for the last several years, since 16, we've been really digging into corporate data sets and that's where we are today. Cindy (3m 33s): Okay, so just fine. The fact that you mind first, the internal database and then go externally, you've scored huge points with me! Now, what if that external candidate is still the best candidate? Can I mine first, get my few best candidates and then look externally, then compare them. Shon (3m 52s): We started all external, as you may know, we were the, we were the company to knew the guys that got sued by LinkedIn back in 2014... Cindy (4m 2s): Let's mess it, I love it. Shon (4m 4s): in case anyone forgot. No. So, so what we do today, it's funny. We don't supply external data other than pure analytics. So we supply analytics on workforce. We supply analytics on supply and demand, that sort of stuff, but we don't actually supply the candidates. And our perspective on that by the way is just, it's, it's changed at time. We just think that that, that data is so readily available. There's so many folks that are supplying it. So we, we pivoted away from that. But yes, the short answer is we're 'bring your own data' sort of organizations. Shon (4m 34s): So if you have that data and you want to drop it in, that's no problem for us. And we can compare and do all that, all this stuff, that you mentioned. Joel (4m 40s): First of all, Shon, your quarantine hair is rocking. I want to give you a quick thumbs up on that. My legitimate one, is I love, I love that you're pivoting out of sort of the, you know, the public stuff to internal stuff. What did you learn being an aggregator that has helped you be a better sort of internal search engine if you will, or, or solution? Shon (5m 1s): Sure. So to mine this internal data, it turns out there's a lot of really complex problems in trying to understand who's going to fit where, and even just, just something as simple as understanding a job description, right? If you really look at that, that is an incredibly hard problem, partially because the, those descriptions are written in a hurry by job description by, by, you know, folks that don't really want to write write them or they're templated. So when you think about how to automate that or how to make something smarter, what you need to just a tremendous amount of data. Shon (5m 34s): And so I'll get, you know, as a practical example, we think about a job title is maybe like a mobile developer, right? And trying to understand having, having a system learn what is a mobile developer and what makes a good one. It turns out it's very rarely, very relative to different companies, right? So a mobile developer at a game company is going to do something very different than a mobile developer at say, Space X. So what that allowed us to do that social aggregation start, allowed us to is just analyze literally billions of bits, of pieces, of information, social profiles, all this stuff, to develop systems that learn from all of that information and they learn a lot of patterns about what companies need, what, where you know, how things are different, how a mechanical engineer is different in Wichita, Kansas than they are in Springfield. Shon (6m 16s): So it says and how that correlates to different companies. So I'm not gonna, I I'm, I don't like to say the buzzwords, so I won't bore you with that, but it let us learn a lot of stuff, about talent data. Chad (6m 28s): Okay. So recruiters don't need another platform or tab to work in, right? And most platforms are revising to be the recruiter desktop. Are you trying to compete with all those other systems to be that one workplace? Or are you just working closely with all the other core systems to build API integrations, to have them actually work in another system? Shon (6m 51s): Both, we have great API integrations. We have a full platform that you can work in. A lot of what we see, like you said, Chad is a, you know, "Hey, people are highly trained on the system of record, like the ATS" and they're, and they have to live in there no matter if they want to or not. So for that situation, what we do is we provide an extension. So if you're, you know, if we provide an overlay on that interface. So if I'm looking at somebody in Workday, you know, Workday is great for all the things that it does, but what I'm able to do at high, with a Hiring Solved they'll relay is say, Hey, if I'm looking at Joel, for example, here's all the jobs you'd apply to. Shon (7m 28s): Here's the jobs that hadn't applied to that we think he matches great for. Here's what the last person that contacted them. Here's all the notes, that sort of stuff. So we're able to extend those hiring solid capabilities of scoring, matching analytics, right on top of that ATS, CRM interface. Chad (7m 42s): How many, how many of those platforms are you integrated with and what are some of the big names you mentioned Workday? I would assume that you're integrated with them. What about, what about some of the other big names? Just a handful of big names. Shon (7m 53s): Yeah. So, so were the common ones that we are, are integrated with Workday, Taleo, ICMs, SAP, Success Factors connect the brass ring. Those are, those are we're, we're dealing with larger companies for the most part. So those, those are some Greenhouses, another one that's a more modern than we do a lot of work with. And then the CRMs that you can imagine, Avature some of the others. Yeah. We've done some work with Bullhorn. It looks like we'll be, we're working right now to get a deep ring with Bullhorn on something that I'm not allowed to talk about. But yeah, definitely Bullhorn Chad (8m 24s): Such a tease. Cindy (8m 25s): And then if I, as an employer have multiple ATS, is can I look at all of that data in one? Shon (8m 32s): Yeah. That's, that's a big part of what we do Cindy is ... if you, if you've got multiple ATS and all kinds of disparate systems, we're able to not only visualize who's in what ATS, but if you're looking at one record and Hiring Solved or on the extension, we're able to merge them all together. So we're able to say, we, we believe that even though nothing links them, we believe that these fire records in these three ATS, plus these records in the are all the same person. And that, that actually we learned from social. There's another thing we learned from social, because one of the complexities of understanding, like you're getting health, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email address are all components of you. Shon (9m 8s): So we use that technology extensively to merge those profiles. 3 (9m 12s): Talk more about jobs scoring. Is this a text deal killer? Is this more like a Google for Jobs optimization, play, talk about job scoring? Shon (9m 23s): So a job scoring is probably more, a little more Google than , but what it is is the ability to quickly pair down, you know, no matter how many applicants you have, we have customers right now that are getting close to 10,000 applicants per job, which is a lot. So job scoring scores, every applicant from one to five stars. And then, and then you can do operations on top of that. So for example, you know, send an email, scheduling an interview to all the five star candidates, and you get analytics with that. Shon (9m 54s): So you can understand what makes a five star candidate, how many are there in the applicant pool? How's that trending? What if I add a PhD as a requirement or some other skill? How does that change my, my scoring And auditability and compliance and transparency in scoring is, is the really hard part here. So we've been doing, you know, as you guys know, matching, we've been doing since 2011 was when we wrote the first one, but those were always opaque systems that couldn't tell you why specifically someone was ranking higher than another, that's our new feature. Shon (10m 25s): We've been working a ton on making what we call transparent scoring it's trademarked, and we've worked so hard to make it both good and understandable. That's a really hard thing. Chad (10m 36s): But talk about bias. Talk about bias though, because we know that many algorithms, the whole I'm sure you've been hit left and right with the whole Amazon theory, right. They came up with our own algorithm. It was incredibly biased. How has Hiring Solved getting rid of the bias because you guys are doing it in an entirely different way. Number one, how are you doing it? And number two, why? Shon (10m 59s): The way we do it rather than remove it, we visualize it. So we don't believe in programmatically removing bias because we, we just think that that leads to humans rejecting the results set a lot. So what we do is we say, we, we visualize that through analytics, that every step of the way. We show you how the decisions you're making or are bias or are impacting your diversity, really. And then we're able to, again, transparently boost certain classes. So if you want, you know, out add a thousand employees, you want to consider females more relevant, for example, because you're, you're trying to hit your diversity goal. Shon (11m 35s): That's something we can do to boost relevance. And again, that's all done in a transparent way. So that's, you know, the Amazon problem. And more recently, Google did a very large project with a very large company. And one of the closets they had was they said they would walk away from it, if the system was biased and they couldn't figure out a good way, they had to walk away. We believe there is no good way to re programmatically remove that. We believe that what you should be doing is showing a what's happening, showing what the patterns are. So, you know, we think that that's much more powerful when we look at, you know, you're, you might be, you want to be crushing your top of funnel. Shon (12m 10s): You might have this great, you might, you use texting or something have this great, you know, diversity at the top of your funnel, but how is it changing? What are you, you know, when we see, when we see patterns in our, in the data that we analyze in our customers, what we find is, you know, it's, it's enlightening to them to look at it and say, wow, okay, we are crushing top of funnel. We've got, you know, 50% female versus you're 60% on engineering world, but no one's taking the offer. You know? And we're, we're able to analyze that at a step in, step in status, a per step and status and show them that, you know, how it breaks down in different regions, different titles. Shon (12m 43s): So visualization is what we think it's all about that educates the human, rather than trying to rip that decision away from the human. Chad (12m 50s): So total transparency, as opposed to black box, just trust us. Shon (12m 54s): Right. And just, just appreciate what we have exactly. Distrust, trust us, even if it doesn't make sense to you, rather than that, say, you know, what are your goals? And let's, here's how your, your actions are impacting those goals. Chad (13m 7s): Okay. Cindy? Cindy (13m 8s): I think I'm pretty good. I did read about you guys helping Lowe's hire 70,000 people in 90 days. Shon (13m 16s): Was that out of their own database, only? How'd you do that? Explain. Yeah, sure. That's a awesome case study. Lowe's is an amazing team to work with. So that, that was a seasonal hiring and it had had a combination of full time and part time, but yeah, 70,000 hires in 90 days back in 2019, and what we did was we, we mined their database. So they had 4.3 million candidates in their, in their database. I think it was it's it's an IBM database Connexa. And what we did was. Shon (13m 47s): Wow, it's get in dark. I I'm I'm in the window, The protection program Joel (13m 52s): Phoenix (AZ) is shutting down everybody, the aliens have invaded.. Shon (13m 55s): Yeah, yeah. There we go. Chad (13m 56s): Hey, that's awesome. Shon (13m 59s): So what we did for Lowe's was, yeah, they have a tremendous wealth of candidates in their ATS and they have really, they really understand what's what relevant, what is relevant to them. For example, people that have worked at competitors. And so what we were able to do is get that 4.3 million down to about 700,000 that they thought were highly relevant and then help them quickly get those into marketing, marketing, and re-marketing programs. Chad (14m 28s): Did they, did they actually do a business case internally or did you help them at all to figure out how much money they saved instead of trying to go and pay for those candidates all over again? Because more than likely they had them four or five times over reacquiring them, did you do any type of business case to be able to demonstrate how much money you actually saved them so that they didn't have to do more recruitment advertising, marketing? Shon (14m 52s): Yeah, we do. We have a case study and I want to give the Lowe's team credit because they actually were, they were actually a team that already knew this. They had already done the study internally. We have a case study. You can go to our website HiringSolved.com and look at that Lowe's case study and breaks down some of those details. But Lowe's was incredibly educated and then that team is incredibly smart about using the resources they have and they already did the analysis on. It wasn't it was won't even feasible Bell (-): Ding, Ding, Ding... Shon (15m 19s): to do it without that data, preexisting data. Chad (15m 22s): Applause! There it is. Thanks so much, Shon. We appreciate it. Your time is up and keep watching because we have more to come! Joel (15m 30s): We out? Chad (15m 30s): We out. FeatuRama Outro (15m 32s): Look for more episodes of FeatuRama, a Chad and Cheese Podcast series devoted to breaking through the noise and highlighting new recruitment tech and platform features from established companies. Subscribe today on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't miss a single episode, boys and girls for more visit chadcheese.com today.

This week was full of boycotts, layoffs and another million jobless claims, the boys discuss them all, as well as... Big drops at Indeed and Glassdoor while Google for Jobs keeps expanding Google is kicking your strategic talent ass with certs AI-powered jet vs. Humans Gen Xers... Whatever... ....and Karen makes her first appearance on the show. What the hell else do you want from us!?!?! If we don't have it I bet Sovren, JobAdX, and Jobvite does! 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 HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (33s): Dude I'm boycotting 2020, another million americans filed for unemployment last week, I'm Joel boycott Cheesman, Chad (35s): and I'm Chad "2020 Sucks" Sowash! Joel (38s): Yes it does. On this week's episode, indeed and glass door are down. Google for jobs is expanding and Karen makes her first appearance on the show. Jobvite (49s): This summer, Jobvite wants you, you and you! To join hundreds, thousands, millions! Okay? Maybe just thousands of recruiters, HR, and talent acquisition professionals for a summer you won't soon forget! It's Jobvite's Summer To Evolve. The Summer To Evolve is a 12 week series of free content to help recruiters brush up on their skills. Learn from industry thought leaders. And see how technology can help them improve, automate, and evolve their recruiting efforts. There will be a chance to share tips and ideas with your peers. And we may even have some surprises for you along the way. I love surprises. JobVite (1m 6s): So visit the summertoevolve.com to register for the summer toolbox sessions that suit your needs, peak your interest or float your boat. If you're just starting June 16th, it's the summer to evolve the way you attract, engage, hire, onboard, and retain talent, Jobvite recruit with purpose, hire with confidence. Chad (2m 1s): Only a couple of more weeks of the Summer to Evolve series but you can go back to the old seesions. So go to Summer to Evolve checkout I think Cheesman took a nap during his, I did one on onboarding. There's a bunch of good stuff out there. Joel (2m 9s): No they brought out the cattle prod for me and woke me up for that one. Yeah. The 12 week, the 12 weeks of of summerlove are coming to a close. Chad (2m 18s): Coming to a close Joel (2m 19s): So relive the magic, if you need to. Chad (2m 20s): Yeah. So trying to relive magic, I actually saw my Facebook feed that last year at this time I got up in the morning, ran with Henrik from JobSafari in Denmark in Copenhagen, we did a run. I met you in the Tengai crew in Torekov. That was so amazing. Great reminiscing. And then I remember that I'm in 2020, and this is a fucking shit show. Joel (2m 48s): Ah, the Scandinavian tour that was quite a lot of fun, I ate some real shitty fish while I was there. That's still coming up every now and then, that thing does not digest, but Chad (3m 0s): Chad and Cheese, want to make sure that the rest of 2020 is a little bit more bearable for our listeners. And I guess the first question Joel is is that Chad and Cheese in your pocket, are you just happy to see me? Joel (3m 15s): If there's vibration, don't come and knock and baby. So yeah, we are starting up text alerts cause you don't have enough of Chad and Cheese where we've partnered with emissary.ai to provide texts alerts for breaking news, exclusive content and who knows sexting may or may not occur. So open these things outside of work folks, you can text CC. That's the letter CC to (833) 799-0321. Joel (3m 45s): I'll say that again. Chad that's texts CC to eight three three seven nine nine Oh three, two one for Chad and Cheese in your pocket. Chad (3m 54s): And we also have free stuff. If you go to Chadcheese.com/free and register, you could possibly win a new brand, spanking new Chad and Cheese T-shirt brought to you by our friends again at emissary.ai. It's an entirely new design and we're going to send it right to your doorstep because the whole sort of social distancing thing, we can't bring it to you. So we're having somebody who's a professional do that. Chad (4m 25s): Also, you never know. We might even start sending birthday cards, holiday cards, beer, there's a ton of different promotions you could perspectively be a part of just by registering for free. So go to chadcheese.com click on free in the upper header or just chadcheese.com/free. Everybody loves free. Joel (4m 46s): Everybody loves free, man. Everybody loves free. And everybody's going to all of our shout outs this week, for sure. Ethan Bloomfield by far with a bullet goes to the top of the shout out list. Chad (-): Damm! Joel (4m 59s): My man, I don't know. I wanted to be on the show. We've been putting them off. So he's like, God damn it. I'm going to send some shit. So let's, let's break this down. Backpack, truckers, report hat, some sort of a notebook thingy. And then he really got serious and sent whiskey stones, whiskey sippers and a gift card to buy a bourbon or whiskey of our choice. So for that, Ethan, Chad (5m 26s): did you get yours yet? Joel (5m 28s): I have not. I will. By the time we, we have our little powwow with Ethan, Chad (5m 33s): I raced out to make sure that I got it obviously. And I've got stuff that I've been eyeing for a little while. It's called Horse Soldier. And I got the top shelf, the bourbon strength, which is like crazy. Yeah, it, it looks amazing. And now I got a chance to try it. Thanks, Ethan Joel (5m 52s): Buffalo Soldier, in the heart. Anyway, a shout to our buddy James Ellis and also Evergreen podcast cohort. My man's working at Roku, now, he announced that this week I have a Roku. I don't know about you, but love the product, hopefully he won't run it into the ground. Like he did Groupon and we'll see good things from, from James, James. You know, I can cause I love I kid cause I love. Chad (6m 22s): Well just go ahead and rebounding off that. We love lists and StoriesInc.com put us on a list called the best employer brand podcast ever. And here's the cool part. Evergreen podcast racked up four spots on the list. The talent cast with James Ellis, Recruiting Future with Matt Alder Crazy in the King with Julian Torn and the Chad and Cheese were listed as well. Chad (6m 55s): Top employer, brand podcasts, evergreen podcasts are kicking ass taking. Joel (7m 1s): We own this bitch. We own this bitch. Shout out to Denise VanderLawns. Hopefully I'm saying that right. She's out of the Netherlands and you know exactly where that is on the map, right? She's she's in the biz dev department at, at worth, at or worth and, and to talent.edu. She's a new listener and a big fan. Shout out to you, Denise. Chad (7m 24s): Good shout out to Sarah Elkins who just joined the staff over at Shaker as their new VP of digital good hire there, Joe. Good, good one buddy. Also, I got to throw this out there. We're going to be unveiling a new website design, also Shaker Recruitment Marketing our travel sponsor, which you know, this is what our travel has been thus far is helping us pull that together. Chad (7m 54s): We're pretty excited. We had our first call yesterday. I have a project manager, a team. These people are taking this shit serious. Joel (8m 3s): And we may have to say goodbye to the I blindingly yellow site that we currently have. So if you love the yellow, get it, get it out of your system now. Cause we're going professional in this motherfucker. Shout out to, iCIMS for raising the game on their speakers this year, they're bringing Mindy Kayling and Trevor Noah who are famous Hollywood types to their November 17th and 18th event. I believe it's free to sign up. Joel (8m 33s): You can correct me if I'm wrong on that, but find out more at icims.com. If you want to see Mindy and Trevor probably make some jokes and tell some insightful shit Chad (8m 43s): And then Cornerstone Counters with their on demand events, Viola Davis, Adam Grant, Emmanuel Ocho, the guy who's like has the uncomfortable conversations with the black man that dude Curtis stone, the like kick ass chef. I don't know what he's going to be talking about, but yeah, so iCIMS and Cornerstone bringing the heat to digital events this year. That's fucking awesome. Joel (9m 12s): Very nice. Very nice. So I'm going to give a shout out to just sports, real quick. I'm sure you know about the Milwaukee Bucks boycotted their game yesterday, the playoff game, the rest of the MBA followed suit baseball, baseball followed suit the NBA followed suit and had, I guess some, some ceremonies that were really powerful. They had one of the teams had tee shirts with bullet holes in the back representing the police violence that happened in Kenosha of all places. Joel (9m 47s): Jesus. So shout out to sports. They continue to be a voice where government tends to be silent in too many cases or too stupid in most cases and shout out to, to them. Chad (10m 0s): The NBA and WNBA have taken a huge lead on this. If you've seen their jerseys black lives matter. I mean, it is the central part of every single game. You can see it everywhere. So they are leading and we'll see what Roger Goodell and the NFL does because they usually take a shit on anything that matters. Joel (10m 23s): Yeah. Football was oddly quiet during all of this. Even some of the players that they interviewed were not doing a lot of talking. It was sort of like, our season hasn't started yet. We'll we'll cross those bridges when we get to it. Chad (10m 35s): Yeah and in thinking about Cap and taking a knee, that was again on the sideline, it was something that he was doing and some of the others did this. He didn't stop the damn game. These guys are taking it to the next level. But again, Everett, that all started with Cap. Joel (10m 53s): It did, it did. are we traveling any, any events for you in the future? Chad (10m 57s): Yeah. I've got one today that we're finishing off the recruitmenthackers.events. We're going to be talking. I think there's going to be an on demand afterwards. So check it out again. Recruitment or recruitmenthackers.events. We're gonna talk about go figure: remote work. What does that look like now? What does it look like in the future? How's it impacting companies today and the scalability of tomorrow. Topics! Joel (11m 25s): And with that! Yeah. So the news Recruit Holdings reported revenue fell by 20% and its fiscal first quarter ending in June 30th, amid COVID-19 obviously, the Tokyo based global staffing firm reported revenue fell across all business lines, including our buddies at Indeed and Glassdoor due to the impact of the pandemic. The company noted that some question, whether job secret traffic on Indeed and Glassdoor should have increased instead of decreasing, Chad. Joel (11m 57s): And because of the high unemployment rate, when in fact there was an initial decline, recruit, cited several factors for the decline, including many job seekers were reluctant to search for new jobs and go to work because of health concerns. And as well, they cited changing jobs. Workers may be receiving unemployment benefits that would discourage them from looking for new jobs. Your thoughts, Chad (12m 22s): Apparently their Japan staffing saw arise near 6%. And we take a look at how Japan really took COVID seriously and how, you know, we here in the United States didn't and how we are impacting global economies, overall. And that's what, you know, that's what being a part of a global economy's like, but when you have one of the, the super powers economic powers do stupid shit like we have, this is what's going to happen. Chad (12m 54s): I think those are, those are great indicators to look, look at Japan had a rise. Everything else had a fall when it comes to traffic and job search traffic. I think we saw that across the board job seekers and really just human beings are unsure what the fuck is going on in the first place. And they don't feel safe going to work. It's hard. And you know, it's interesting how we here in the US dealt with things. Chad (13m 26s): We gave money to companies and we also gave money to people, but we gave money to companies and now we're just sitting around and hoping that everything goes away. Now that the money's run out. So from an economic standpoint, how is this going to get any better? Joel (13m 42s): So you know it really helps with job seeker, traffic, job postings. If there aren't any postings, traffic tends to take a dip. However, I do think that with tens of millions of people being unemployed, that, that you, you it's, it's hard to not see some sort of an increase in traffic at job boards. And my own little, my little theory on this is that I've always felt like brand loyalty to job boards is a myth. I really don't think people by and large give a shit whether it's Indeed or Monster, whoever. Joel (14m 13s): And I think that the, the, the behavior of what a person is, Oh crap, I'm unemployed. What do I do? I need to find a job. Well, what do I need? What do I do when I typically have to find something, I go to this thing called the Google machine. And at the Google machine, I searched for jobs. And there's a lot of people that had no clue about Google for Jobs six months ago. Now suddenly find out that, Oh shit, Google has job postings now. And I'm going to search postings on Google now, and guess who doesn't play with Google, Indeed. Joel (14m 45s): So if you have tens of millions of new people looking for jobs, they're probably going to Google cause there's no brand to Indeed. And they see these jobs on Google and they're not, Indeed's not playing. So guess what? Traffic's going to go down to. Indeed. Glassdoor does though. Okay. So that goes back to my, you have to have job postings to have traffic. Yeah. So I mean, my point is simply that I don't, you know, I think that people are learning, like learning that OSHA. Google's where I searched for everything. Joel (15m 16s): Now they have jobs and I, and this whole, this will segue nicely into our next story in that Google is expanding, but I'll save that for, for after this topic. Chad (15m 27s): No, I think we write it right into the, the, the next topic, which is Google for Jobs is launching in the Netherlands. And I love the whole spin that you've taken is that look, people are searching, but we've talked about this before. Google is a lifestyle platform, Android, Google search. I mean, they own search for, for most of the world, so therefore if I start searching, as you'd said before, then the organic isn't going to be there, especially on my mobile phone, the Google for jobs is going to be there and then that just becomes my new routine. Chad (16m 2s): Right. And then we also talked about bingo, India Kormo last week where, you know, they actually are going to have an app dedicated to jobs in, in India. So yeah, I like the spin on that. And from the standpoint of the Netherlands and everywhere else in the world, if you do have jobs and you're in the organic, which is below Google for Jobs, you're already hindered. But if you don't have as much content as that, as you had before, and obviously that's a double whammy. Joel (16m 37s): Yeah. And I also think that that job seekers are, are maturing, right? Th they understand that there's this thing called LinkedIn, where they can connect to people and try to get in zip companies and search for jobs. So I haven't seen numbers, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if LinkedIn traffic has gone through the roof in the pandemic, as people update their profiles and try to network and connect to people and whatnot. So Google is good a lot at a lot of things. And they're really, really good at seeing trends in their searches and seeing where traffic is spiking and where there's activity. Joel (17m 12s): And there's no doubt in my mind that some engineer at Google said, Holy shit, job searches are through the roof. And then someone said, okay, we need to expand this Google for Jobs thing as quickly and as extremely as we can. Obviously Europe, there's a lot of minds that they have to Dodge with GDPR and antitrust stuff. So I think it's just a matter of time, but you're going to see Google for jobs. I think start growing at an expedited at expedited pace. Joel (17m 43s): I reached out to our good buddy, Vencat at a Jobyak this week and ask him about sort of the opening of the Netherlands and Belgium. So his quote was, the timing is appropriate. As the pandemic has created an unheard of unemployment crisis, nearly 40 million plus in the U S alone. And Google continues to play a substantial role in mitigating it, which further substantiates its seriousness, the seriousness of its role in the recruiting market, his clients, he says, are seeing anywhere between two and four times the number of applications that they normally see and conversions resulting in a reduction of up to 70% in their hiring costs. Joel (18m 26s): So in addition to more job seekers, sort of discovering Google, according to him, more employers are discovering Google and the cost reductions and the efficiencies that come with getting traffic from Google, as opposed to the job board of your choice. Chad (18m 44s): I hope we start to see a pivot to definitely focusing on how do I invest in getting better search results for my jobs. And also focusing on the Programmatic aspect of targeting instead of just throwing out dumb jobs and spraying them to, to everywhere in anywhere, we've got enough data where we can target the right types of individuals with those jobs. So stop just, just doing the spraying and praying and start looking at obviously a search, you know, optimizing for Google and Programattic Joel (19m 19s): Yep. And apparently they're going to be a lot more job seekers out there after a week of mass layoffs. For those of us in the industry, Hiring Solved recently had around layoffs. If you haven't heard that shred, I invite you to do so as well.B ut we have some reporting out of Randstart RiseSmart this week, quote, among employers that made furloughs or layoffs because of the bit of the pandemic, 47% are considering further workforce reductions in the next 12 months. Joel (19m 53s): This is according to a survey of 250 HR professionals. It also found that 9.3% of employers have laid off workers because of COVID and 11.3% have furloughed workers. In addition, I thought this was most interesting 47.2% have not made any new hires since the pandemic was declared a national emergency. So that's people that aren't posting jobs. Again, a quote from Dan Davenport, president and GM at RandSmart RiseSmart quote wallet is a positive sign that the unemployment rate is starting to decrease. Joel (20m 27s): We are still in the midst of this pandemic and based on our survey results, more Corona virus related layoffs could be in the horizon. Don't like that. Chad (20m 38s): We, we, when we said this, I think it was probably six months ago until this health issue is taken care of until we start to actually wear masks and really start to socially distance and look at remote work. This is going to be around because we're not going to find any type of quote, unquote antidote to COVID-19 overnight. It's not going to happen. It's generally 12 to 18 months. Chad (21m 8s): So right now we're feeling the pain of our stupidity over the last six months, this is happening again. What thinking about Japan and South Korea, this is happening because we are quote unquote rebels and we don't have to wear a fucking mask and we don't have to do these things because of liberty and justice. The Liberty and justice allows us to think about not just ourselves, but our community and how to safeguard our family and all of those around us. Chad (21m 39s): Unfortunately, this rugged individualism known as America is fucking us pretty hard. Joel (21m 45s): We don't need no stinking badges. Yeah. So you have this perfect storm of people coming off unemployment, which was July. I think it was the end of that. And they still have yet to come up with a, with a renewal of, of helping those folks. And then we have the second wave of that is that I believe the, the, the, the loans that were given initially, you were required to keep people on staff, right until August. So we've hit this point of like, okay, everyone that's been assisted is off of that. And all the companies that were assisted canal, lay out, lay everybody off. Joel (22m 16s): So we've seen like mass layoffs this week from, from Salesforce, which also hits us here in Indy. The biggest building here has Salesforce on it and reports out there say that Exact Target, which was the acquisition Salesforce made is getting hit the hardest so that could hit us pretty hard here, here, locally. Wells Fargo, American Airlines, NetApp, even the pack 12, the Arizona coyotes like layoffs are everywhere this week and it's only gonna get worse as companies sort of get the green light to start laying people off again from the government. Chad (22m 50s): As we don't deal with this healthcare crisis. Joel (22m 53s): Let's hear an ad from Sovren collect ourselves and maybe talk about some more interesting different topics. Shot of bourbon. Sovren (23m 2s): 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. Joel (23m 30s): Where'd you graduate Google? Chad (23m 32s): Google bitches. Again yet, I've been railing on companies. I don't know for how long about this next story in Inc Magazine about this story? Joel (-): A long time Chad (23m 44s): It's actually a couple of articles in Inc Magazine Google made waves recently recently by announcing it's new program, Google Career Certificates, a collection of courses designed to help participants get qualifications and high paying high growth job fields without attending university, a company is actually taking the lead. And they're trying to, I mean, if you think of it overall, they are trying to close their skill gap themselves. Chad (24m 18s): But in this case, they also have companies like Walmart, Intel, Sprint, Bank of America, PNC, Best Buy, H&R Block, Hulu, Emphasis, Sam's Club. And the list keeps growing. They're all a part of this as wel so Google again, taking the lead where Universities are falling the fuck down. Joel (24m 41s): No doubt. You know, I think this is a trend that we're going to continue to see. I think that there's a growing importance in terms of certificates and people just being skilled in certain areas, right? And let's, let's be honest, like college isn't for everyone, but not everyone wants to, you know, to join the military or join trucking, or like there's gotta be a third rail for folks that either don't have the money don't want to pay the money, don't want to spend four years before they actually start working that they can funnel into a privatized basically road where they pay minimal amount they're employed in six months, they're in, they learn skills that are in demand and they can continue to learn skills as they, as they continue to, to grow their career. Joel (25m 29s): I think this impacts, I don't know the impact on colleges. You know, I think there's still going to be this elitist opinion about degrees that you have. I think certain colleges, if you don't have that premier degree, is that less demand because why, you know, why get a, why get a degree from XYZ college when I could just go get a certificate for a fraction of the cost and be employed in six months? So I assume more and more companies will follow suit. Joel (25m 59s): I think the Intel's of the world, the Qualcomms, the Microsofts, et cetera, will have similar courses like Google. Also in the news this past week or last week late was Lambda school, a startup that offers online computer science classes to be paid when a student gets a job, a raise 74 million in funding. And this was, I think their series C. So they raised well over a hundred million dollars, in doing this. And you're seeing colleges like Purdue here locally have systems where if you get an engineering degree or going to engineering college, you don't have to pay them until you actually get a job. Joel (26m 39s): And then they take a percentage of your earnings. So college is even on the traditional level are having to get real creative around how they, how they collect money and get students in the door. And we're also seeing private organizations like Lambda school come around and have a similar model. So education more than anything. And I think COVID is, is accelerating how all this stuff is changing is one of the more interesting things to watch and how it shakes out. I don't know, but it's going to be fun to watch. And I like to think that we'll have a lot smarter people, more skilled people that aren't in this abysmal hole of debt, their entire life. Joel (27m 17s): Cause that is something that is not helpful to society. Chad (27m 21s): Yeah, Yeah. And with COVID, you know, obviously I have two in college now I'm, you know, doing hybrid classes, it's going to be the delivery of the content. And I am still a huge proponent in the military format of you go to college, like, this is what ROTC does. You go to college, you get your degree and you sign on the dotted line and you come work for us for four to six, or who knows how many years, but you're on contract to work for us and we will pay for that degree. Chad (27m 55s): I believe corporate America should be paying the freight because the people that are actually making the products and providing the services, the ones that they really, really need and want right now, that's how you get them through the door. That's how you make them loyal. And so I, I agree with what you're talking about, about being able to evolve. But I think the major evolution here is a company like a Google or an Emphasis, or whoever it might be saying, look, we're going to pay for your degree, come work for us. Joel (28m 27s): Sure and let's be honest, if we keep building walls around borders and making it harder to come into this country, there's going to be more demand to sort of grow our own and get these engineering spots filled in one way or another. And if it's Google educating everybody, then Google's gonna educate everybody. Chad (28m 44s): Well. And if you think about it now, the H1B visas, and some of the, the student visas, right. That are, that are not allowed. That's where colleges make their money, because those kids pay full freight. There's no discount for them to come and get an education. But if you can't, that revenue is not there for a university. So we're going to see some, we're going to see some thinning out of the academia, let's say. Joel (29m 14s): Yep. Yep. It'll be interesting. So you mentioned the military, you loved this story about AI versus fighter pilots in the air force. What was that about? Chad (29m 23s): Fucking DARPA dude, we've talked about AI and we've talked about where we can see AI and who's going to be using it first. And we talk about this all the time, the fucking military. They will do the best job in being able in a practical sense, use AI. And in this case, this is out of business insider, a US Air Force F16 pilot, just battled AI in five simulated dog fights and the machine emerged victorious every single time. Chad (29m 59s): And AI program developed by Heron Systems, went head to head against a seasoned air force F 16 pilot. The guy is actually an instructor and it was like a simulated World War II dog fight, which again, from a maneuverability standpoint, it's gotta be the hardest. An expert commentator over at DARPA said that the AI algorithm demonstrated superhuman aiming ability during the dog fight. And then during the fight, the pilot never scored a single hit. Chad (30m 31s): The human zero machine kicked their ass. Joel (30m 37s): It's interesting that not only, I would, I'm not surprised that the AI was a better offensive opponent. The fact that it was a better defensive opponent sort of surprises me. I don't know your take on that, but it's, it's pretty clear that technology is taking over much of the military and will be more and more. Which I think it's, it's a nice segue to reverse here back on, you know, people that don't want to go to college, but still want to get, have a good career. I think the automation of the military is gonna force a lot of folks that would normally go into the military, get a certificate from Google or another academic institution agree, disagree, or, or we're going to find other places for the military folks? Chad (31m 20s): No, I mean, there's, there's no question. So some of, some of the best jobs you go into the air force Navy, or what have you, that you can get to transition back into the, into the civilian populations in the military, you have to have secret top secret clearances. I mean, these are, this tech is fucking crazy, but in this case, there's got to be a line in which we step up and say, look, we can't have robots fighting wars for us. Joel (31m 50s): How do you stop it though? Really? Chad (31m 53s): There has to be regulation. That's all there. I mean, that's it, there has to be regulation. And then you have to work again with other countries to be able to band together, to make sure that this is not happening. But think about it, I mean, look at drones today, they are ridiculous. Right? Think of being able to put this type of technology in drones, that aren't the size of an F 16, but let's say a quarter of the size, or maybe even smaller than that and sending them out in swarms. Chad (32m 24s): I mean, this is just ridiculous what we can do. And as human beings, I'm not saying that the machines will take over, but once we, as human beings have too much power, we see how that happens. Joel (32m 37s): Yeah. So you, you foresee sort of, you know, chemical weapons agreement where the countries of the world, particularly the advanced nation say this whole robotics thing is bad for all of us. Let's put the brakes on it before it's all of our demise. Is that basically what, what you're saying? Chad (32m 57s): Yeah and we also have to remember, okay, so I'm going to get kind of like a positive slant on this. Most of the technology that say most of a good part of the technology that is more advanced and processed and mechanics, and those types of things comes from the military. The military puts more money into R and D than any other organization that's out there. Right? So the thing is, how do we use this tech for something other than war? Chad (33m 26s): That's what it's being, that's what it's being funded for obviously. But DARPA created the internet. That's obviously their cyber cyberwar today, but there are different opportunities that are out there. What can we do to use this beyond having, you know, the, the best, the best arsenal that's out there? We're always going to have that. Don't get me wrong and we should. But we also have, like you said, these, these nuclear agreements that we should have, we should have with AI. Joel (33m 57s): That'll be interesting to see if China and Japan, I mean,China and Russia, and some others agree to something like that. That'll be interesting. At a minimum, augmented realities going to come to military, right? Like people and machines will fight next to each other? Chad (34m 10s): So you mean like drones now? Joel (34m 12s): So, I mean, like, I'm getting real sci-fi on this shit, but like, imagine a, a platoon of soldiers alongside Robocop or Terminator style soldiers together. Chad (34m 25s): Yeah. If we had any type of Terminator, like soldiers, we wouldn't need the humans. We could easily spin out of that with an angle of, we want to protect you, but we don't want to risk human life. And everybody's going to say, yes, exactly. That's exactly what we want as we build up terminators. Right? That's one of the reasons why I think we have to have agreements like this put in place. Joel (34m 52s): Gotcha. Well, do you think gen Xers will last long enough to see this future? Chad (34m 57s): God, I hope not. Joel (34m 57s): Because we're going to talk about them right when we come back from the break. JobAdX (35m 1s): Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company, culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. JobAdX (35m 45s): Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video, JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team, help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Joel (35m 45s): Oh, well, whatever. Nevermind. So you found this story at the Babylon Bee, who knows what the hell that's like? Chad (35m 50s): That's like an onion kind of site. Joel (35m 57s): Yeah. So story entitled gen Xers decided to split off from rest of society and form a utopia that's all relaxed and cool and you know, whatever, Chad (36m 10s): This is perfect for you, because it's all about the cohort. It's all about the cohort. So generation X has finally had enough. The long suffering generation has always been stuck between the boomers who ruined everything, hey had everything and they got everything and the awful self centered millennials. Chad (36m 41s): And now they're also being plagued by the cancel culture, loving gen Z. So yeah, just give me a space and they're talking about in this article, did you just going to find a space in the Midwest, take a bunch of land only gen Z ears can come in. It sounds like it sounds like a cult to me. Joel (37m 4s): So I've thought about this for a little bit today or this week. And so you and I are right in the fat part of gen X, like you and I were born right in the middle of it. So you and I can talk about this and relate to what we're, what we're saying. And I blame a lot of it on MTV. Now, stick with me for a second. Now, when you and I are growing up in the seventies, you know, it was, there was radio, there was the, you know, there's American bandstand, there was Soul Train. Joel (37m 34s): Like we, there, wasn't a lot of sort of interaction with cultures and music like you sorta got in your lane. And, and that's what I was at. And your parents were sort of that way. And then MTV happened, right? And MTV was this magical experiment where you, you and I, as, as preteen and teenagers could see people of all races, colors, creeds, religions, all be on the same network at the same time, just being cool. Joel (38m 8s): Right? Like we, we went from Duran Duran to Prince, to like strong women, like Madonna and Cher. We saw ... Chad (38m 16s): Run DMC... Joel (38m 17s): Ahmed, like rock me, Amadeus. We saw German acts. We saw Aha from this Scandinavia, like we saw everyone from everywhere. Just get along, just be cool, just listen to music, just talk about cool videos and cool clothes and what their hair looked like. And then that all went away around '91 or '92, right?. And then it was all about the real world. And then they started putting people in boxes again, like, okay, here's the angry black woman. Here's the gay guy. Joel (38m 47s): Here's the meat headed jock. Here's the hayseed from the country. And then so like, I feel like we were in this window of like this monoculture, just time that we lost. But so much of gen X are still remember when we were all just cool and getting along and it didn't matter like where you were from or what color you were or how old you were. And I feel like we're still taking that with us through life. And this story about let's all just go somewhere and be cool hearkens back for me anyway, of those days of watching MTV and where the lines of color and race and age, just all sort of faded away for a while. Chad (39m 31s): Yeah. The only people we didn't like on earth were Russians. Joel (39m 35s): That's right. The red scare man that was fucked up and there weren't a lot of Russian, there weren't a lot of Russians on MTV either. Chad (39m 43s): There weren't there weren't, but Rocky fought em, you know, Rambo fought them, you know, it was a thing, it was a thing. And one thing we didn't have to worry about back then were Karens. Joel (39m 56s): Karens Holy shit, poor Karens man. Yeah. There's a job posting out of Australia. So all the crazy shit happens in Australia. Last week's crazy story was out of Australia. This one's out of New Zealand. What the hell is going on there? Chad (40m 11s): So you don't need to actually be named Karen, but you do need to be quote unquote, "Karen" in nature for a new job, that's offering $65 an hour to review products online. So this is companies offering a remote position for this potential Karen. Joel (40m 31s): Call a Karen. So this is at a dehumidifiercritic.com, never heard of that site. I do know a few Karens that are probably like getting 65 bucks an hour. So this is this quote from the story. We are recruiting a woman to write three honest reviews a week for our website, as well as be the voice and authority behind our Call a Karen service, which we'll see potential customers call for advice and recommendations on dehumidifier products, really boring product, really interesting opportunity and worth a mention on our show. Chad (41m 8s): Go get 'em Karen. Joel (41m 11s): We out. Chad (41m 12s): We out. Outro (41m 13s): Thank you for listen to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Can we have a moment of silence for the death of Hire by Google? OK, enough of that. On this week’s episode, the boys cover - News from Florida, where SHRM conferences are competing for Darwin Awards - Staffing agencies are getting gobbled up by job sites - SmartRecruiters kicks the cubical to the curb - Ultimate + Kronos = Crayon Marketing - Facebook plays the VR card - Burger King keeps blowing our minds and we finally reveal Chad’s porn name. It’s a wild ride, recorded in-person from Columbus, Indiana and, as always, powered by Sovren, JobAdx, and Jobvite. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions provides full-scale inclusion initiatives for people with disabilities. INTRO (14s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (29s): Aw yeah. Chad (31s): Hello! Joel (32s): Working harder than two ugly strippers in a pandemic Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast coming at you from a Mexican restaurant in beautiful Columbus, Indiana. Chad (39s): We're outside people. Joel (43s): What's up everybody. I'm your cohost Joel, Chuck Taylor Cheesman. Chad (47s): And I'm Chad. I'm eating the shit out of salsa Sowash. Joel (52s): And on this week's episode, our official eulogy to Google Hire, job.com goes shopping. Chad (58s): Hello. Joel (58s): No wait, hope you're sitting down.. Facebook VR people ... Chad (-): Damn it. Joel (1m 6s): Yeah, boy we'll be right back after I get this salsa off my tee shirt. Jobvite (1m 6s): Getting the right people to apply for the right jobs at the right time has always been a challenge. And now with an influx of candidates and increased workload recruiters have to work smarter to provide a memorable candidate experience. Make moments matter with Jobvite a comprehensive talent acquisition suite that offers a marketing inspired approach to recruiting so that talent teams can more intelligently attract, engage and retain top talent. Combine the power of AI and the human touch - Jobvite recruit with purpose, hire with confidence. Chad (1m 35s): And we're back that's right people we are back. Joel (1m 39s): Our second ever outdoor dining podcast in Columbus. Chad (1m 39s): in Columbus! Joel (1m 39s): I'll remind you that you weren't real happy about the editing of my chomping on wings the last time we talked. So this time you bring me to a Mexican place with chips and salsa in front of me. So you have a nightmare editing night of editing in your future. My friend. Chad (1m 60s): Anywhere that we meet for lunch, there's going to be gnawing, it's just gonna happen. So I just have to live with it and listeners so do you. Joel (2m 6s): At least this one comes with a Micheloda and a margarita. Lalalala. Chad (2m 9s): Yes. And luckily again, in downtown Columbus, outside. Joel (2m 17s): COVID friendly, COVID aware. Chad (2m 17s): Yes. Joel (2m 17s): Unlike our first news story, which we'll get to. And that's exactly right, but, but shout outs! What do you think? I'm going to go with Jeremy Roberts as my first shout out. We mentioned Jeremy in last week's show was a Hiring Solved layoffs. Chad (2m 33s): Layoff. Joel (2m 33s): Unfortunately, but he has found, he has found his feet, his footing. My God, he'll be joining Seek Out. Chad (2m 42s): Really? Joel (2m 42s): Former death match winner Anoop Gupta. Chad (2m 42s): Very smart, good job Anoop. Joel (2m 47s): Well done on both parties. I'm excited to see how that works out. Jeremy will apparently be doing some sort of sales consulting with clients and whatnot. We'll get more on that. But shout out to Jeremy. Chad (2m 58s): Good call and Jackie's out there, too, by the way. Don't forget it. Don't don't forget about her. Joel (3m 0s): Jackie's waiting. She's got some solid talent. Chad (3m 4s): She's got some, she's got some things being thrown at her. So if you want to get in the Jackie running, you should be doing that pretty pretty quickly. Jackie, running the Jackie running. That's what we're going to call it. Joel (3m 15s): Cool runnings, Jackie runnings. Oh dude. No, John Candy in this one though Chad (3m 19s): Dude if you ever go to, if you ever go to Jamaica and you take the bus to Negril, you'll be able to hear about all the cool runnings. Joel (3m 24s): Is that right? Chad (3m 24s): Oh yes it was a blast to Jamaica. Joel (3m 27s): That doesn't sound like it'd be on the top five reasons to go to Jamaica. Chad (3m 30s): It's not, but it's a blast. Joel (3m 32s): If I do, I'll check that out. Chad (3m 34s): Okay. Two shout outs real quick. I'm gonna pull these together. One for John Thompson he died at 78. He led Georgetown to the 1984 national championship. He totally built that fucking program, dude. He was a beast! Iverson was there during his time. I think he changed Iverson's life. Joel (3m 55s): Yeah. You know you and I grew up in a time when the big East was the big beast. Chad (3m 57s): They owned it. Owned it! Joel (3m 57s): And I can remember when St. John's, Georgetown, Villanova and we're on the final four together. And John Thompson was a central figure in sports in our lifetime. We'll we'll certainly be missed the impact that he had on multiple lives and impacted you mentioned Allen Iverson. Iverson was noted as a top 10 football player in the country coming out of high school, as well as basketball. And he got into some trouble in high school. Joel (4m 29s): And the, the scholarship offers dried up and John Thompson gave this kid a chance, where he might not have had a chance. That's the kind of guy he was Chad (4m 39s): Ivaerson showed us what a, what a man playing a boys game looked like. Cause he owned everybody when he was at Georgetown. Chadwick Bozeman left us way too soon. He just died at 43 colon cancer. You'll know him from Black Panther, 42, Get on Up, Marshall, some really cool and hard hitting movies. Joel (4m 57s): Don't forget. Dress day, featuring the legendary football franchise. Cleveland Browns. Chad (4m 57s): Yes. Yes. But, but yeah, Chadwick Bozeman dies at 43 and he did, he did a handful of movies. Wow. He had cancer. Joel (5m 17s): Beast, total beast to be able to do that while having colon cancer. Chad (5m 21s): I'm at a loss, I'm at a loss for words. So again, you know, rest in peace, John Thompson and definitely Chadwick Bozeman. Joel (5m 28s): Yep. And let me remind our listeners out there that too, getting a colonoscopy is important and I've got mine. Chad (5m 32s): Yes good call. Joel (5m 32s): I'm not sure Chad has had his, we might have to do a show from the operating table while Chad gets probed, if you will. But yeah, if you're wondering questioning, if you're over 40, if there's history in your family. Go get it done. Go get it done. You'll, you'll be thankful that you did. Chad (5m 53s): Get it done. Joel (5m 53s): Shout out from me, Hillary Stern, Chad (5m 53s): Who? Joel (5m 53s): stick with me for here for a second. Chad (5m 53s): Okay. Joel (5m 53s): We both agree that the political landscape in this country has become a very black and white environment. Whether if you're, if you're not with us, you're against us. Chad (6m 9s): It's going to get worse the closer it gets to November. Joel (6m 11s): It's going to go worse, it's going to get worse. So I put out what I thought was sort of a jovial, Facebook posts. Chad (6m 16s): You were fishing. Joel (6m 16s): Yeah, I was, I was maybe fishing. Chad (6m 20s): You were fishing. Joel (6m 20s): I was agitating, I think is the right word. Chad (6m 25s): Yes, snarky fishing. Joel (6m 25s): Made a comment about Biden, sort of being a GAF GAF factory. Chad (6m 31s): And he is. I support Biden. I'm going to vote for the dude, but he is a GAF factor. Joel (6m 36s): It wasn't in it. Wasn't a, not the Trump isn't cause they're both a little bit of a bad episode. Chad (6m 39s): Trump just lies all the time. Joel (6m 39s): The old classic foam in the nineties. I think so Hilary Stern, who I initially met in 2008, she was doing a story on job search. I gave her a quote and didn't hear anything from her. You know, for 12, 13 years, I Facebook friended her because back in 2008, everyone wanted to be Facebook friends. Chad (7m 4s): That's just what you did. Joel (7m 6s): So she comes out of nowhere and just berates me, says it, all my friends think my hot take is a steaming pile of garbage and calls me an Epic asshole basically. Chad (7m 13s): She nailed that. Joel (7m 13s): This is the environment. So yeah, she did probably she's probably, but I didn't, there was no banter back and forth. She just dropped a bomb and then unfriended me. So she'll probably never hear this or know about it. But Hillary man, Chad (7m 26s): That escalated quickly. Joel (7m 29s): I mean, it's not worth it. Trust me. It's not worth it. Life is too short. Yes. It's too short. Chad (7m 41s): It is. I've been defriending motherfuckers on Facebook just because they're looking sideways about this point. Cause I know it's going to get worse. Yeah. Joel (7m 49s): If Trump wins this country is going to go bonkers. Chad (7m 51s): Yeah, indeed, no matter what I'm going to Portugal. Let's get outta here. Okay. So our buddy Tyler Weeks over at Intel, Tyler was trolling the new 10 guy English software announcement on Twitter and writing about how to use conversational AI without it feeling like you're cat-fishing them. He actually, he actually had Manti Te'o and Star Trek references in the same article, Dude that was too much. Joel (8m 19s): Only Tyler two references together. But shout out to Tim guy, by the way, your recruiting robot it's in English. It can now disappoint you and let you down in English, which is nice. But now we get to finally see what this thing has. This thing is finally speaking the language of money worldwide. And yeah, I don't know if it's an English accent or American accent, Australian? Chad (8m 43s): I can't wait. Joel (8m 46s): Yeah, it's going to be interesting. Chad (8m 46s): I want the Obama face Joel (8m 49s): Virus free recruiting robot. Let's see. Let's see what happens. I was disappointed that there's no sort of a spout for hand sanitizer. As you, as you interview with it, then Chad (8m 59s): I think that's actually an upgrade. A shout out, shout out to Adam Gordon of Candidate ID. Joel (9m 4s): That guy can dress, can't he? Chad (9m 6s): Oh my God. And socks, socks, seriously. Joel (9m 6s): Mr. Style Chad (9m 6s): He tweeted. And I quote, if my startup had a parasitic internet scraping model, there's only one place I'd go for VC funding, China. That's right. I believe Adam is onto something. There it's a new slogan. I think for a Hiretual. Joel (9m 26s): If Adam is not banned in China, he soon will be Chad (9m 30s): His. I think he just came up with a new slogan for highchair hire to hire, hire, hire tool. It's spelled just fucks up the human brain Hiretual, the parasitic internet scraping tool for you. Adam tells it like it is dude. I love that guy. Joel (9m 46s): Jeremy Robert's at Seek Out. Will certainly appreciate that joke as a competitive employee. Shout out to Facebook has declared. There will be no new political ads. Two weeks. I believe up until the election. And we'll see you're you're looking like you're not real impressed with that. Chad (10m 5s): I don't believe Zuckerberg as far as I can throw that piece of shit Joel (10m 8s): By the way, it's looking like the big boy caught by huge brands hasn't done shit to Facebook. It stock continues to rock it higher. Chad (10m 17s): And that's about it. Make your statement and move the fuck on shout out to Kelly Robinson who tweeted and I quote Saturday morning pod catch up time starting with headlines of Google, LinkedIn and sex dolls. What could go wrong? Not a damn thing, Kelly, miss ya man, call me. Joel (10m 34s): You're welcome Kelly. You're welcome. That's all I have to say. Mathison in startup world got 2 million in seed funding this week. Chad (10m 43s): For what? Joel (10m 43s): They're there on the trend of diversity, social networks for professionals. We've mentioned a few of those in the past few weeks, they continue to make money and continue to make waves. So Mathison, shout out to you! Chad (10m 57s): Outcomes, baby show me the outcomes. A big shout out to Chad Kremer. How do you like that last name? Joel (11m 7s): That's your porn name. Chad (11m 7s): That is my porn name! Joel (11m 7s): Starring Jack Hammer and Chad Creamer. Chad (11m 11s): VP over at Wilson, HCG. Thanks for listening brother. Joel (11m 17s): So Old Navy Chad (11m 17s): Old Navy? Joel (11m 17s): I like to get my, my stylish clothes Chad (11m 23s): Because they give them to you for free for God's sakes, goddamn discount. Joel (11m 27s): They pay me to go shop at Old Navy. They're going to give, I guess essentially paid holidays on election day for their workers to go work the polls. Chad (11m 33s): Stout, that is stout! Joel (11m 33s): That's a good thing. You know, it's an aging group of people that are working the polls. Yeah. Put some young, Old Navy employees. Chad (11m 40s): I will be working the polls, did I just say that out loud? Joel (11m 46s): You did. And my, my newly Americanized wife, dual citizen of will be working the polls. She has taken her democratic expectations to a whole new level. We got yard signs up. We got all working. It's a yeah. It's democracy in action at Casa de Cheesman, Chad (12m 7s): Gotta get out of this poll woYrking kind of mindset. Last week, I missed Jasper Spanjaart on the, on the shout outs. He's actually the dude who shared the toe talent article with us about Google for Jobs, which is now available in the Netherlands, my bad brother Joel (12m 23s): Shout Out to Jasper. I just want to note that we worked Chad Kremer and working the polls in the same, same segment. Chad (12m 30s): I was trying to get away from that as fast as I possibly can. Joel (12m 32s): To let go, not to let it go. Shout out to Indian startup, Apnah, I think I'm saying that correctly, Chad (12m 39s): There's a great Indian place here, that great restaurant called Apnah. Joel (12m 42s): Okay. Next time, I guess we'll do some Indian. Their challenges to quote work at the bottom of the pyramid, I guess people that are lower income, et cetera, to work their way up. They raised 8 million to help a whole lot of Indians make a better life for themselves. Chad (12m 58s): Smart. Joel (12m 58s): Good luck to them. We'll be watching and shout out to you. Chad (13m 1s): All right. We talked about mobile last week, so you can always subscribe to the Chad and Cheese podcast wherever you get, wherever you listen, right Joel (13m 10s): Cassette tapes, eight track. Okay. Chad (13m 13s): Our eight track game is fucking solid, but now you can get SMS updates Joel (13m 17s): In your pocket. Chad (13m 17s): emissary.ai will be powering a new way for Chad and Cheese listeners to receive updates, news shit you want to hear about via mobile, just text CC. And that is Charlie, Charlie for all you military people out there to (833) 799-0321. And yes, we are working on the UK. So Dylan Buckley, I appreciate you're already signing up. Chad (13m 49s): We're working on it, man. The fear of GDPR that shit's real. Joel (13m 55s): Chad and Cheese and vibrating phones. What could go wrong? What could go wrong? Chad (13m 59s): I love it! Events? Yep. All right. So on September 22nd at 2:00 PM Eastern time, I'll be teaming up with our buddy Jim Stroud and Patrick Norine from Bedell consulting for a little thing. We're calling Friendly Discourse. Joel (14m 18s): So Hillary Stern won't be on that show. Chad (14m 18s): I might get her. She sounds like she's legit and ready, Jim and I will be debating what he likes to call diversity quotas and Patrick will be refereeing. So what we're going to do is it's almost very similar to a firing squad. Jim will get an opening statement on what he believes about hiring quotas. Yes, I'll get an opening statement and then Patrick will be the referee. He will ask questions, redirect, do all that stuff. And we have time limits in which we answer questions, called Friendly Discourse. Chad (14m 53s): September 22nd. Go check me out on Twitter, LinkedIn Facebook, and we'll have the registration information out there soon. Joel (15m 2s): Interesting quick side note about Jim has a black history newsletter. Were you aware of this? And it's quite informative. It's it's not related to recruiting whatsoever. Yeah. A recent one was about the original bootylicious. I don't know if you remember that or not. So, so Jim is educating minds and entertaining folks all around the world. If you're not subscribed to Jim's newsletter, Jim stroud.com can lead you to the promised land. It's a worthwhile read on Monday Chad (15m 31s): And don't forget also. Now we talk about bootylicious, go to Chadcheese.com/free and register for brand new Chad and Cheese tee shirts. That's right. Kids brought to you by emissary.com or I'm sorry. emissary.ai that .com is a bitch. It's an entirely new design. We're going to send them right to your doorstep if you win a, but also sign up because we're, we're thinking about these crazy ideas, like birthday cards, holiday cards, beer, and a ton of other shit that we want to send our listeners because you know why? Joel (16m 4s): They can't get enough. Chad (16m 7s): Cause we love you because we fucking love you people. Joel (16m 10s): Same ugly mugs, different t-shirt design. Oh yeah. Mugs mugs is a good idea. Right? Mugs Chad (16m 17s): Chad and Cheese Mugs. I love it. Joel (16m 20s): Topics, topics. Oh boy. He knew this was going to happen. And he knew what happened in Florida. Oh Chad (16m 25s): Jesus Christ and I can't believe that Ron DeSantis wasn't the keynote. Joel (16m 33s): No, Ron DeSantis. Oh yeah. Chad (16m 36s): He's a piece of shit governor down in Florida. So, so we've got to say the 20, 20 HR, Florida conference and expo was the first live pandemic event of the year, at least from, from our knowledge. And they win the 2020 Chad and Cheese Darwin Award. Joel (16m 54s): Darwin Award! Yes. Yes. Contact tracing galore at that conference. You reached out to, to find out how many people actually signed up. They have yet to get back to you. I think that's important to note my favorite was the promo video, which actually showed the woman they were interviewing from the expo hall, using her face mask as a chin strap, as opposed to a face mask and shout out to James Ellis for noting that is one of the topics how to wear a face mask, which was for suppression. This won't be the last event. Joel (17m 24s): I'm sure this year we'll continue to keep an eye on these, but be safe people. Chad (17m 29s): Yeah. The thing is for context in numbers, which is pretty important here, Florida has a record of 600,000 plus cases and over 11,000 deaths. And just on Monday while this shit was happening, the state recorded over 7,500 new cases. So this isn't just a funny, you guys are fucking stupid segment. This is what the fuck were you thinking? Chad (17m 59s): And from, from, from a leadership standpoint, I'm asking you Joel, Joel (18m 3s): Okay, you're asking me a leadership question. I'm on it. Let's do this. Chad (18m 8s): If the venue says, sorry, fuck you, you've scheduled this. You're going to have to pay. Do you still have a live portion of the event? Joel (18m 19s): I do not. Unless we can do margarita is on the beach and have a conference which you can do in Florida. The pictures we saw were all indoor. Chad (18m 26s): Yeah. Joel (18m 26s): There was distancing. Like how important is it for a state Sherm conference to happen? They don't, they don't exist because of the money from the show. I'm guessing they couldn't have made that much an expo dollars because no company is traveling to Florida to exhibit. Chad (18m 42s): And the keynote was a zoom call. Joel (18m 46s): I'm really hard pressed to know why the hell this thing happened. Chad (18m 50s): The keynote was a zoom call. Joel (18m 50s): I'm sure it was. Chad (18m 50s): It was the dude was on the screen with the talent And people were sitting in a room watching a zoom call. So here's the question again, another question for you. This is not a leadership. This'll be easier because it'll be much easier. So as a vendor, do you buy a booth to this ffucking thing? No, dude. They, there was a 20 minute video where this idiot who he was the only one who knew how to wear a mask was going from booth to booth. Chad (19m 22s): I mean, I would have liked said, no, don't come to my, I don't want people to know I'm here for God's sakes. 20 minutes. There were booths at this place. What'd you first and foremost, even if it was free, would you want your brand connected to something like this? Joel (19m 36s): No, there's, there's nothing good that could have come from this conference for anybody. It's just really bewildering. Yeah, I got nothing. Chad (19m 45s): Okay. So let's, let's go ahead and move on to something that's still, you know, kind of COVID flavored. Joel (19m 51s): Sure. Everything's COVID and politically flavored these days. Chad (19m 54s): Especially that Michellati you're drinking. Joel (19m 54s): It's tasty. Chad (19m 54s): Smart Recruiters go remote forever. We had Jerome on the show a few weeks ago and that dude is poised to make moves. And apparently he just made a big fucking move. Joel (20m 8s): Yeah, no surprise here. Companies are making hard decisions. I think part of it is they're realizing that, "Hey, we're still in business and aren't losing a whole lot of efficiencies and productivity by having people at home." And maybe in fact, we're actually increasing our productivity. So these hard questions about do we renew leases? Do we partition off what we have or sublet stuff? Companies are having these conversations and Smart Recruiters is no is no stranger to them. And they've apparently decided, you know what? Joel (20m 38s): We're virtual forever. We've seen big companies around Google and Facebook and others make similar situations. You've seen REI, Chad (20m 44s): REI! They're selling fucking corporate Headquarters. They just built! Come on?! Joel (20m 50s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm curious about what happen to this spaceship of Apple in Cupertino, I guess that could be just a museum at some point. And I have heard on our industry side Indeed, who owns a lot of real estate all over the world, just making some hard decisions. Chad (21m 6s): In Austin, expensive in Austin. Joel (21m 6s): And other places like Times Square. Chad (21m 6s): Oh FUCK Joel (21m 6s): And so, so they're apparently making some hard decisions. The word that I, that I've gotten wind of is they're not looking at going back until 2022. So that's kind of how far they're looking into the future to get people back. Chad (21m 25s): Why even go back at that point? Joel (21m 25s): I mean, we talk about this, right? Like there's a certain segment that is fine working from home. They have enough space at home, whatever their situation is it's fine. Younger people, you know, maybe living in a studio apartment or a one bedroom? It's a culture thing. I want to go to work. I want to be around people like me. I want to go to happy hour. I want to meet people at the opposite sex. I want to go to ball games after work. Like people, like young people, we're far we're getting removed from that, but they want probably the environment. So there's, Chad (21m 54s): The managers are going to be us and we're not going to want to go back to the office. I think, I think, I think it evolves from the standpoint of, you look at different ways to be able to get people hired. And I think, you know, Smart Recruiters, this gives, and it's funny because Jerome said now the whole world is our talent pool. And I said, and I responded, Jerome, the whole world has always been your talent pool, but now guess what? You get to actually dip your toe in it. Right? Chad (22m 24s): See, and that's the thing is that CEOs don't realize it's kind of like they partition their brain to think that, "Oh, wait a minute, we've got to punch that fucking clock." Right. And managers have that 1950s manager instead of leadership, it's more management, it's more micromanagement. So I think as we move into more of a leadership type of a structure, we will definitely manage. There's no question. We have to do that to ensure, you know, we hit our numbers, but overall I think this is smart for Smart Recruiters yet it's going to be difficult. Chad (22m 58s): Especially from the productivity standpoint, we've talked about this before productivity has exploded because people are fearful for losing their jobs and they're at home and they've got nothing else to do, other then chase the kids around maybe. Joel (23m 11s): Yeah. I'm really curious to see if sort of, you know, co-working spaces start trending, meet ups, start trending. You know, where young people are like, you know, I don't have an office, but I still want to engage with people. Chad (23m 22s): We Work. Joel (23m 22s): Yeah sort of a We Work by the way. If you haven't heard the podcast Foundering by Bloomberg, they have, I think a four or five part series about We Work and the nutso Jesus want-to-be founder of that organization. I highly recommend you check that out if you're interested. But yeah, I think this will be a trend that we'll see for a long time. I mean, I remember having employers and you had a pretty hard liner as well. That was like, you're in the office, you're here. You don't leave until X and you felt kind of guilty if you left before everyone else. Joel (23m 55s): And so people have to be happier with this current work from home scenario. If you have the wherewithal, the hardware, et cetera, to do it and do it effectively. Chad (24m 4s): And Jerome is going to have a much larger pool and this is going to help him get to that 30% diversity hiring mark that he's, they put in their manifesto, right? So it was before that was going to be harder. Now it's not going to be easy. There's no question. But I think that an organization like Smart Recruiters who is pretty heavily caucasian. Joel (24m 22s): Yep. Chad (24m 22s): This is going to give them an opportunity to blind, to be and become more diverse. Joel (24m 32s): Yep. Well, someone who won't be more diverse because they're no longer around the official eulogy hire by Google Hire, whatever else it was called. And it's short, brief existence, is now officially gone. Chad (24m 48s): So, Colin Parker from SMB applicant tracking system late reminded everybody this week in an article that Google Hire, Hire by Google, Hire or whatever the fuck it ended up calling itself is now dead. And obviously Crealate. You know, at that time they were going to be a big competitor to Google. They're happier than shit. But he also wrote an article that said, don't sleep on Google. And because they're still, they still have many oars in the water, but this one was pulled out of the water and, and you and I still have conspiracy theories. Chad (25m 25s): Where do you land on this one? Joel (25m 27s): I'm still skewing toward antitrust issues, a combination of antitrust and how much can we actually make in this business? And wow, it's a big pain in the ass to deal with these customers probably somewhere in there is why Google pulled the plug. But I think we've talked about the refocus on job search, which let's be honest, that's what they do well. How do we do search around this? And then how do we monetize it with do it? Like that's, that's a more organic road for them as opposed to getting into the ATS business. So it makes sense as well. Joel (25m 58s): I guess it'd be part of the reason is it was kind of stupid for them to get involved in the first place. It's not their core competency. Chad (26m 5s): I have another line in on this. And one of the lines is that Google is going to war with Amazon on the virtualization front. And they are looking at all these different developers and these different teams who have highly skilled individuals and they're reallocating resources back to the virtualization side. So as you'd said, I think antitrust plays a huge factor. Number one, number two, how much money is this fucking thing going to make? Chad (26m 36s): Look at the market. Number three, how do we beat Amazon? Will we have to do that with talent and people power. So that's, that's another play that I've heard. Joel (26m 41s): Yup Chad (26m 41s): And this was, this was an utter surprise to that team. They had no fucking clue it was coming. Joel (26m 48s): OK, All right. We'll keep an eye on that for sure. And we'll keep an eye on the sponsor. That's coming up right after this quick break and some more nachos in my future. Chad (26m 59s): Chips, baby, more salsa please. Thank you. JobAdX (28m 16s): Nope. Na! Not for me. All these jobs look the same next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs, just have heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions? Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company, culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team, help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing: joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Chad (28m 32s): And we're back. So, dude, I can't say that there was so much made because the marketing behind this was pure shit. But I think like a week prior to ultimate software in Kronos rebranding, I saw like an email saying we're going to rebrand. And it was sent to me like three times over. So it was like the person that sent it originally who got it, sent it to somebody, sent it to somebody and then I got it. Right? So it's like, I wasn't even in the loop. Chad (29m 3s): Number one, number two, who fucking got this email other than Joel (29m 3s): Maybe clients, that's probably maybe some press, which were not considered by most people, Chad (29m 11s): Oh most people consider us fucking press. Are you kidding me? So, so, so give us the new name here. Joel (29m 17s): Okay. They got creative and by the way that they did a video, not everyone does a video of a rebrand about them. Chad (29m 22s): We'll talk about the video. We'll talk about the new brand. Joel (29m 27s): U K G standing for Kltimate Cronos Group. Boom. How can you criticize that? Chad (29m 35s): This is the cheapest rebrand in history. The thing that I like most about this is. Joel (29m 42s): KFC ~ UKG Chad (29m 44s): Oh my God. No wonder you love it. Chicken. Okay. Jesus. So the thing that I love most about this brand is the smiley face That's it. Joel (29m 53s): I saw an umlaut, like a German U, I thought it was a German company. Chad (29m 58s): Oh that's a good point. Oh my God. In Germany, they're going, why the fuck isn't have a umlaut over there? There's no way in hell. They paid a marketing and or branding specific company to do this. This should happen internally. You know what happened? Joel (30m 8s): They hired the same one that did Modern Hire. Chad (30m 14s): That minute long video seriously was mainly stock footage. Joel (30m 19s): Somebody on Fiverr has some bad-ass testimonial for that. Chad (30m 24s): It is literally video stock footage. It is one of the worst I'm going to go beyond. I like the, I like the umlautYou that's awesome. The smiley face you, but the, they blew their wad on the slogan. The slogan is people. Joel (30m 40s): I missed this in the video. Chad (30m 40s): Our purpose is people who are very short, creative, very to the point. Yes. Joel (30m 46s): Unique, special. Chad (30m 48s): And you can, you can spin off that thing. But I think that's where they spent their money. They, they went and they were they're like, guess what? We're going to spend money on something that is short, impactful aspirational and the rest of it just we're going to have our ninth grade kid do. Joel (31m 5s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. You talk about budget. I think, I think some of the budget and I'll give them kudos for this they did secure ukg.com. So the URL, at least three character domain, who's going to own that. At least it's not you dash K dash G dot io or something. Chad (31m 24s): Okay. So it's a great domain that nobody wants to own. I'll say it's a great note domain that nobody, Joel (31m 30s): Somebody bought that in 1998 and said, damn, I'm going to cash out on this three character domains someday. And Kronos called, wrote a check and now they own it. Baby Chad (31m 40s): Can buy beyond.com as well. Joel (31m 42s): That's probably for sale too. That's definitely, probably for sale. Chad (31m 47s): What is for sale is Hire Virgins. Joel (31m 49s): It's not for sale anymore, they've been bought by shopping spree, job.com, Chad (31m 56s): John.com death mask contestant September, 2019 in Austin. That was a good time Joel (32m 1s): And Firing Squad, right? It wasn't Aaron on the Firing Squad. Torchy's tacos. Yeah, Chad (32m 6s): We had, we had scooters. We had, Joel (32m 9s): Oh, you did die. Is beyond me, Chad (32m 11s): Dude. I love fucking scooters. So here's is a quote, from Aaron. We're delighted with the acquisition of Hire Virgins. They're a fantastic team and to work with their loyal customer base, this is a major step towards job.com's a version of a digitized staffing industry, delivering a hiring experience to the job seeker that moves away from transactions and focuses on career journeys. What the fuck does that mean? Joel (32m 40s): We should have done an, an, a British accent, Scottish. Chad (32m 43s): I'll work on that. I'll work on that. He's not, no, he's British. You always call him Scottish and they laugh Joel (32m 48s): British. I don't know. Scottish, Irish. It's all the same. Chad (32m 51s): So what's, what's the actual business model here? Joel (32m 54s): Of job.com. Yeah. I mean, it's complicated. Let's be honest. It's complicated. They got credit cards. They got a revenue sharing with job seekers. Chad (33m 4s): Okay. Start with the digital part and then move into staffing. Joel (33m 7s): Well, their whole model is based on getting job seekers and displacing staffing. So to acquire staffing agencies is, has to be part of the strategy because part of it is selling this complicated concept to employers is challenging, for sure. So buying customers and ecosystems already exist and plugging in those job seekers obviously is part of the vision of Aaron and his team. And they have since garnered resources in terms of money to go do this Hire Vengeance, which is a little bit, a little bit aggressive, Chad (33m 36s): Virgins, Virgins Joel (33m 42s): Oh Virgins, I like Hire Vengeance better. Chad (33m 44s): I did too. I do too. Joel (33m 44s): So, so this was a small Tampa. It staffing from cyber security. So it was in a growth area. It wasn't coal miners or something. So it probably made sense. Small. I do think this is a timing wise. It's probably a great time to go by little staffing firms around the country that have older, you know, guys that want to get out of it or older owners. So probably timing wise. It's really good. But if you're asking me to explain the whole job.com business model, you're barking up the wrong. Chad (34m 16s): Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's digital staffing, but it's, it's, it's a lower percentage and you share that percentage. So they're sharing the, the actual placement percentage with the job seeker who gets a job.com credit card. Joel (34m 33s): Correct. That's where the money goes. Chad (34m 35s): That's it? So what they're doing is they're trying to digitize everything in staffing, make it more efficient, and then, Hey, the job seeker as well, to be able to try to spur more people into this, into this platform, Joel (34m 48s): They need job seekers, which is not easy to do. Chad (34m 50s): They want to acquire staffing firms. It's harder to build, right? So you buy it. The problem is these staffing firms have margins of 20%, at least 20%. And now we're going down to 7%. You get the math, right. Joel (35m 6s): And you're looking at me like you want an answer or some sort of explanation. Chad (35m 11s): You get the math. This is one of the reasons why Arron didn't win death match because the math doesn't work. But here's one thing I'd like to ask you because, I'll tell you what, here in Columbus, Indiana Joel (35m 17s): We got trucks in the Midwest people Chad (35m 23s): we got diesel trucks come in, Hemis! Home of Cummins trucks. Cummins powered fucking trucks. Okay. Anyway, it's so is this their first staffing company acquisition? Joel (35m 34s): You and I talked about that over a few chips and salsa and, and yeah, we, we seem to recall that in death match was that September last September in Austin, it was, he spoke about acquisitions that they had already made or we're basically done. So we went back to the tape, which is, is cool that we can do that. Chad (35m 54s): That's right. Joel (35m 58s): So we back to the tape and you found some interesting content when we went back into the archives. Chad (36m 2s): That's right. Hey, can somebody play the tape there? Aaron Stewart (36m 2s): Based on some numbers that we projected like we're enrolling up companies at the moment. So I'm buying out staffing agencies as we speak. We bought three staffing agencies this month. Chad (36m 12s): Okay. So that's Aaron Stewart speaking in September of 2019, he said they bought three staffing agencies up that month. Joel (36m 24s): Something doesn't add up. Chad (36m 24s): There's nothing in this model that adds up. Joel (36m 24s): So it's either hot air deals around the table. It didn't happen. Aaron's delusional? Chad (36m 29s): Aaron, we're gonna, we're going to have to have you back on the show so we can cross you on this. Joel (36m 33s): Nice guy. I really like Aaron. Chad (36m 33s): The dude is a great guy. The problem is he is on the verge of perspectively being a Jason Goldberg, carnival Barker. Joel (36m 47s): Okay. Chad (36m 47s): Right. And that's not what you want to be here. And so we gotta, we gotta get down to the end of this. Joel (36m 51s): But before we do that, give him the benefit of the doubt. Chad (36m 55s): Of course, of course, we are, probably because of his accent. But before we do that, we're going to go ahead and enjoy another Michelada. We'll be right back. SOVREN (37m 6s): 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. SOVREN (37m 37s): We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human Sovren software. So human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad (37m 48s): And we're back. Joel (37m 48s): Holy shit, dude is Burger King really in on our podcast? Like second time in a month or something KFC Burger King. Like I love where this podcast is going. Chad (37m 55s): I love Ellie Dodi. That woman is one hell of a marketer, CMO of Burger King. And I gotta say, this is fucking brilliant. This is in Fast Company, out of Belgium, a news from Burger King in Belgium phase com coverings are currently required and all public places in Belgium, quote from the story, "the fast food chain is launching its own set of branded masks that will include a customer's order displayed on the front." These are, these are a limited edition though. Chad (38m 28s): Yup. Always play scarcity here, kid. Let me say, this is, this is marketing rule number one, scarcity wins. An online contest will choose 250 customers to get a pre-printed mask in the mail that has their menu item of choice. This is fucking genius. Joel (38m 55s): It's great. And we're talking about it. What makes it even even greater? So I have, I have two comments. One is granted, I'm a little older and I'm hard of hearing, but when I talk to someone who's wearing a mask, like I'm a lost cause, I don't know what they're saying. You know what I'm saying? Like I'm totally screwed. So I'm sure that people going into Burger King for chicken nuggets are having a hard time with the whole communication thing. And then the second thing that I wonder is can I get, can I still get the crown, the Burger King crown and the mask together? Joel (39m 27s): Or do I need to pick one or the other? Because no one rock's a Burger King cardboard, crown like Joel Cheesman, Chad (39m 37s): Like Joel Cheesman, that, that I would say is probably a yes. Joel (39m 37s): You think I can double up? Chad (39m 37s): I'm going to say that you can probably I'm thinking, I think you can double up. And I say, you put a pair of Raybans into that equation and you are poppin! Joel (39m 52s): The good news for me is I go to Burger King so often that they just know what I want. I don't have to say anything. So, so I'm good to go. Chad (39m 59s): I did message Ellie on, on LinkedIn. And she was like, this is cool. Right? I'm like, yeah. When can I get my Impossible Burger coupons? So last but not least, we're gonna end on a Cheesman high note. And he's probably going to have to change his shorts after this. Facebook goes VR. Okay. So question before we get into this, before we get into this. So have you watched the series upload on amazon? Joel (40m 28s): Yes. I know enough to know the concept and you die and you get uploaded and you go to heaven and how much money you have determines exactly where you go. Okay, I got it. Yep. Chad (40m 40s): This is it! This is the start of upload. This is the start of actually starting the whole consciousness conversation and having like, you know, you're instead of going to play putt putt with your marketing team, you're doing it on Facebook in VR. Joel (40m 54s): Yes. Yes. So you and I, again are old enough to remember Second Life. Chad (40m 54s): Yes. Joel (40m 54s): We went to a fantasy world. We created an avatar. We on our computer screen go to islands and dance at clubs and hang out with JZ and Diddy and yeah. Like whatever. But now Facebook has taken that to virtual reality where the screen is actually on my head. And I can see like, it's more real right. And in a pandemic world, when we can't go out to the real club with JZ and Diddy, like, what else would we want then to pop on our Oculus, log onto Facebook and head out on the horizon in a virtual reality world. Chad (41m 35s): Oh, you need something in your life. Joel (41m 40s): By the way, we didn't talk about this. But Elon Musk, apparently they're testing chips and pigs brains. Now I read this. I don't know if it's true or not. Maybe it's fake news. Now they are. You're talking about upload. We've got chips & brains. We've got VR by Facebook. Like the future is going to be a Tesla powered Oculus system. In your head. And we're gonna live forever and have Micheladas and chips and salsa until the end of the time. Chad (42m 2s): I can get behind that. Because then I wouldn't have to put these crazy awkward glasses. Joel (42m 7s): What the chip? The chip you can get behind? Chad (42m 10s): I wouldn't do it. I'm just saying I can get behind it. Joel (42m 10s): You're behind it. I'm not going to do it. Chad (42m 15s): Because there are idiots. Dude. We had a bunch of idiots in Florida go to an event during a pandemic. Joel (42m 19s): We have employees get microchiped that we've talked about on the show. That's crazy! Chad (42m 19s): Exactly. Every single one of those crazy shitt who would get a microchip implanted in their brain. I guarantee it. And guess what? Joel (42m 24s): What? Chad (42m 24s): We out. Joel (42m 24s): Fajita's por favor! 5 (42m 51s): Thank you for listen to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Let's blow shit up! Cindy Gallop, founder and former chair of the US branch of advertising firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and founder of the IfWeRanTheWorld and MakeLoveNotPorn companies is not your average brand or business innovator. Cindy brings a different level of candor to every discussion, meaning she will not mix words or beat around the bushes. A perfect The Chad & Cheese interview! Enjoy this Symphony Talent powered The Chad and Cheese interview where Cindy talks hiring, equity, and technology for starters. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. INTRO Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel 00:00:23 Yes. Chad 00:00:24 Time to blow shit up kids! Joel 00:00:25 It's the Michael Bay of business, boys and girls. Let's do this! Chad 00:00:40 Cindy Gallop. That's right today, kids. We have Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of Make Love, Not Porn, founder and CEO. If We Ran the World, and Cindy you're on far too many advisory boards to mention, but last but not least, I mean, if, Make Love, Not Porn, wasn't eye catching enough. Your slogan is "I like to blow shit up, I am Michael Bay of Business," give it up for Gallop Joel 00:01:03 Welcome. Chad 00:01:04 Welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast. Let's let's blow some shit up, shall we? Cindy Gallop 00:01:09 I'm delighted to be here and looking forward to it. Chad 00:01:11 Excellent. Excellent. So right out of the gate, we need to hear more about Cindy Gallop, give us a little bit about your story, where you started, how did you make it here? Joel 00:00:00 Who dis? Chad 00:01:20 I mean, being the Michael Bay of business? Cindy Gallop 00:01:49 By complete accident, my entire life and career has been a series of accidents. I've never planned anything. My background is 35 years working in advertising, marketing, and brand building, 16 of those for the same advertising agency, Bartle Boggle Hagerty - BBH, whom I worked in London, helped start up and run the Asia Pacific office in Singapore, back in '96. And then the reason I'm here in New York is I moved here in '98 to start up BBH has American office for them, which began as me in a room with a foam, starting an advertising agency in the world's toughest advertising marketplace. So that was one, ran the agency, BBH New York for a number of years and in 2005, struck out to work for myself and have been doing that ever since. Joel 00:02:16 So in terms of advertising, you know, the perception of two middle aged white guys, by the way you say, if you want to own the future, don't listen to white guys. So I'm going to do as little talking as possible as I can, but the perception of advertising as sort of this mad men, old school environment, but then you think, okay, we've gotta be like beyond that by now. Joel 00:02:46 But you have a story with Vayner Media and Thrillist, they were getting women pics before they were giving invitations to a party. What was that story about? Cindy Gallop 00:02:49 That was several years ago at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival that happens in the South of France every year, not this year, obviously. And, by the way, that was just one of a number of extremely sexist episodes that I called out publicly that particularly at Cannes Lions, but the instance you're referring to was that Vayner Media and Thrillist, held a party where their party organized a very ill advisedly, did a mass mailing to people at Ad Cannes basically telling women that they would need to apply with a photograph to be vetted, to be admitted to the party. Cindy Gallop 00:03:34 And I tweeted this, pointing out that it was, I think the year was, I think this was back in 2016 and this is not how the advertising industry should work. And Gary Vaynerchuk to give him full credit, immediately apologized profusely. But, as I say, that was just one of a whole range of appalling these sexist issues with that Cannes Lions Advertising Festival And you know, and that is just the tip of the iceberg for our industry as a whole. Cindy Gallop 00:04:09 And so I want to just pick up and clarify for your viewers, the, you know, lighthearted reference you made to what I say about white men, because, but because I want to be very accurate about that. And this is why by the way, a lot has not changed since the mad men days. So despite all of this talk about gender equality, diversity inclusion in the advertising industry. And by the way, everything I say about the advertising industry applies to every other industry. So we are not seeing change actually happen on this front. Cindy Gallop 00:04:41 And there's a very simple reason why not, which is that at the top of the ad industry, as at the top of every other industry is a closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys. Those white guys are sitting very pretty. They have their enormous salaries, gigantic bonuses, big pools of stock options, lavish expense accounts. Why on earth would they ever want to rock the boat? Oh, Oh, they have to talk diversity They have to appoint a Chief Diversity Officer. Cindy Gallop 00:05:13 They have to have diversity initiatives. They have to see the word diversity a lot, especially in public. Secretly deep down inside they don't want to change a thing because the system is working just fine for them as it currently is. It's like the old joke about the light bulb. How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change. Laughter 00:05:38 hahahaha. Cindy Gallop 00:05:38 And in every industry the light bulb does not really want to change. That is the problem! Joel 00:05:45 Sounds hopeless. How do we fix it? Cindy Gallop 00:05:48 The way we fix it is what I've been saying to women, black talent, talent of color, LGBTQ talent, disabled talent for years, which is start your own industry. And what I mean by that is start your own business. But I deliberately articulated in that way because when all those of us who are other start our own businesses, we are effectively starting the industry that we would all much rather be working in. Cindy Gallop 00:06:20 Because when you start your own business, you have the opportunity to design your own business from the ground up to work the way that you would love it to work. And when enough of us do that, and when enough of us prove that we can make a lot of money doing that, that is when the old world order in every industry goes bloody hell, "We need to do it like that too." Now this process, I'm happy to say has been this year rapidly accelerated because the pandemic and the black lives matter protests and both by the way, are global and having a global impact. Cindy Gallop 00:07:00 They have ensured that the world will never be the same again. And that is very good news, especially for those of us who are never the status quo to begin with, because it is only when everything breaks down this utterly and completely that allows new models and new ways of doing things to emerge that never would have otherwise. And so right now there are two dynamics at play. First of all, there is the dynamic of what the pandemic and the protests are making happen as we speak the breakdown of the old world order. Cindy Gallop 00:07:34 And then the rest of the dynamic of what I encourage everybody to do, which is what happens when we seize that opportunity and leverage this breakdown to design and invent the future that we all want to live and work in. And I'm encouraging everybody to do that right now because every one of us can. Chad 00:07:55 So Cindy, one of the biggest issues we've seen with black and brown businesses is they can't go to banks. They have to start pretty much their businesses with cash. So they're hamstrung right out of the gate. I mean, we know society is not equal and for anybody who says it is obviously they're the ones in the ivory tower. So it is much harder to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you don't even have boots. How can some of these Individuals actually do this? That's, that's the hard part, right? Cindy Gallop 00:08:28 Well, I always say is that change happens from the bottom up, not the top down. For the reason I just spelled out. If we wait for institutional change, we're going to be waiting a very long time. And so what I'm delighted to see happening is, again, what I've encouraged everybody who is other, to do for years, which is, and by the way, I need to just check, am I allowed to use profanity on this podcast? Chad 00:08:53 Oh fuck yeah! Cindy Gallop 00:08:53 Oh, great. Okay. Because, because what I say to women, black talent, talent of color, you know, again, everybody who is other is unashamedly set out to make an absolute, God damn fucking shit ton of money. I explain that I deliberately articulate it like that because how much money I want each of us to set out to make. And the reason for that is not. And in this case, I mean, everything we're talking about is intersectional, but, but because you have brought up the issue, quite rightly of racism, I'm gonna apply this just to black talent and the black economy. Cindy Gallop 00:09:31 This is why it's so important for black talent to set out, to make an absolute God damn fucking shit ton of money, not just to benefit yourself. But when you do that money that enables you to fund other black talent, it enables you to support black talent. It enables you to donate to black talent, and it enables you to help them black talent. We need to build our own financial ecosystem because the white male one is not working for us. And so what is happening at the moment to address the issue you raise is first of all, you know, there are too few black owned banks in this country, again, because you know, racism applies in every single area I can think of, but two of the black owned banks are merging and I'm afraid I can't off the top of my head, remember what they're called, but they are merging to create one institution that, that is, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, to be able to, you know, transform the ability for black people, black businesses, to be able to get, you know, the loans and the credits and the financing and the support they need. Cindy Gallop 00:10:32 Then there are a host of organizations that are working to support black businesses at the grassroots level. So I'd like to highlight for your audience, the buy from a black woman directory, just Google buy from a black woman and you'll find it, which encourages all of us to support black female owned businesses. And also I'd like to give a shout out to the brilliant Kathryn Finney who runs a wonderful business called Digital Undivided. Cindy Gallop 00:11:06 She has launched the Doonie Fund. The Doonie Fund is named after her grandmother. And what the Doonie Fund does is it makes micro investments in black female entrepreneurs. And I think it's a very small investments, you know, to under a thousand dollars. But, but, but the key thing here is that the Doonie Fund makes these investments as friction-free as possible, you know, to quantify, you just have to have to self identify as a black female, you have to own your business, you have to have a reasonable presence digitally and, and on social media and you can apply to the Doonie Fund. Cindy Gallop 00:11:43 And when you get to your grant, no strings attached, you can spend it on whatever you want, whether by the way, that's self care, which can be just as important for a stressed out founder as anything directly to do with your business. And Catherine says on the, on the Doonie Fund website, you know, this is because I firmly believe that black women know what is good for their businesses better than anybody else. That's the kind of, friction-free unconditional support that we need to see for everybody who is other. Cindy Gallop 00:12:19 And so there are, there are many, many initiatives like this, that are absolutely working to counter racism at the grassroots level. Symphony Talent 00:12:29 We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a cult brand is not easy, which is why you need friends. Like Roopesh Nair CEO of Symphony Talent on your side, okay? OK Roopesh, hiring companies can't hire diverse candidates. If diverse candidates aren't applying for their jobs, what should hiring companies do differently to attract a more diverse candidate? So for diversity, specifically, companies should think about why do they want diversity in their organization and ensure that they are bringing that into the conversations about hiring diverse candidates, because that's how they can be genuine about diversity. Symphony Talent 00:13:11 Because just checking a box saying, I want to be hiring diverse candidates is not going to help. So the first thing is thinking about why do you want diversity? What are the different groups you are targeting as you think about diversity and then bringing those messages, which basically is going to resonate to that particular group of diverse candidates into your engagement, whether it is kind of, as you reach out in the mass media and target specific diverse groups, as you basically nurture these diverse groups once they have connection with you, is very important because to your point, you won't get a diverse candidate till you get in front of a candidate. Symphony Talent 00:13:52 And the only way you can do that is by figuring out what is the connection point between you and the diverse candidate. And it is very, very easy to kind of cast a net saying, I want diverse candidate, but the truth is there are many, many groups of that diverse candidate, and you need to be really clear on who exactly are you targeting, Let Symphony Talent help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your talent strategy for more information, visit symphonytalent.com. Chad 00:14:18 What about politics? Because we are seeing a huge turn of events obviously. We hopefully, crossing my fingers, are going to have a black female Vice-president. What about that kind of press, because I understand it's got to happen grassroots, but we also need to have to make sure that it happens. Chad 00:14:50 And it doesn't take 200 years for women to get paid just as much as men do, which is ridiculous. How do we accelerate that, from the top down and the bottom up? Cindy Gallop 00:15:01 I want to focus in very specifically now on what is the topic of this podcast, which is HR. So there is a very, very simple way to end racism in the corporate world right now. All you have to do is hire, welcome, and promote black talent. That's it, it's that simple. Now, now and by the way, I am being very semantically precise, I've used each of those words for a reason: hire, welcome and promote. Cindy Gallop 00:15:34 And I'll come back to that. But the key thing here is that the actions are simple, actually implementing them is not. And so I'll talk through what I mean by that, and also just for your audience, because I want to be very clear about where I'm coming from. So this is what I do as a business consultant. I am not the unconscious bias trainer. I am not the diversity inclusion coach. What I am is a hard headed business strategist. Cindy Gallop 00:16:07 And what I do is I help companies and HR departments reengineer their day to day working processes and operations to integrate equality, diversity, and inclusion into them in a way that makes those things key drivers of growth, profitability, and successful business outcomes, because unless we do that, nothing takes. So I'm going to give you an example, several examples of what I mean by that. Cindy Gallop 00:16:40 So I don't want to use a specific example again, given the theme of this podcast, HR. I get this call all the time. Okay. And I was getting it, I've been getting it for years, but I'm obviously getting it now, all the more, this year. So somebody calls me and says, please, Cindy, you know, I've got this really great senior position open, and I want to hire a black woman, who do you know, I get this call all the time. What I say is, it doesn't work like that. And then I explain how it does work. Cindy Gallop 00:17:12 And again, this is what I do. And again, I'll use an example. I'm not going to name any names here, but I got this call last year from a very senior person in a huge global company, extremely well known with a huge portfolio of very well known brands. And he reached out and so I knew what we were going to be talking about and have the chance to do a bit of research beforehand. And so the first thing I said to this person was you need to completely, re-engineer your job description, because I said, you have written your job description and definitely unconsciously, but you've written this job description to appeal to white men and the demonstration of how much it does that is that you posted this job description on LinkedIn and the comments thread, there's a very long comments thread under this job description on LinkedIn, which is full of white men, either recommending themselves for this position or recommending other white men. Cindy Gallop 00:18:04 And so I basically deconstructed this job description. And again, you know, I won't go into details because it was very specific to, to the particular company, but I'll give you one example of, of what I am advised. So within this job description, he had said to the prospective candidate, you will have a creative track record that makes us all envious. And I said to him, no, they won't because if you are black talent and especially in this case, because this is what he asked for. Cindy Gallop 00:18:40 You know, if you are a black woman, you will never have had that opportunity. You will never have been given that opportunity. You will never have been promoted into the kind of positions where you can make that be real. So what do you need to write instead is this is the position where you can bring all of that creative talent and energy to do the kind of work you've always wanted to do. You want to attract a black woman into this role? That's what you have to send the job description, not you will have a creative track record that makes us all envious. Cindy Gallop 00:19:11 So, you know, action, number one, you have to completely reengineer your job description. Action. Number two, you have to reengineer your interview process. So when white male candidates are interviewed by other white men, those white men are looking for reasons to hire that white man, and that is the frame of mind in which they approached the interview process from a point of positivity. When white men are interviewing the rest of us, they approach that process from point of negativity, they are actively looking for reasons not to hire us. Cindy Gallop 00:19:48 And by the way, this may be unconscious, but it's absolutely the case, they are actively looking for red flags. And so you have to completely reengineer your interview process. And again, the point I made earlier, white male candidates get hired on potential, not proof. It's very easy for white male leaders looking at white male candidates again, Oh, he reminds me of myself at his age. I can see myself in him. He's great to have a beer with. Yeah, we reckon he can do the job. Cindy Gallop 00:20:21 When you are a woman, a black woman, a Hispanic woman, an Asian woman, it's a whole different set of criteria. Well has she done the job before? Has she worked on the job long enough? Has she done the job well enough? Women, black talent, off color, talent, get hired on proof not potential and not even then. And so you have to reengineer your interview process to hire diverse talent based on potential, not proof. And so, you know, for example, I said to this white man, you know, who made this call last year. Cindy Gallop 00:21:00 I said, you need to re-engineer your recruiter brief. And this is the third action, because I know that what you've done is you're looking for this very big role. And you have briefed your recruiters to find other people currently doing this role at that level. Brief your recruiters to find brilliant black talent, black female talent, one or two or even three levels down from that level. Because I said to him, I guarantee that when you brief the candidates based on potential, not proof, you will find a ton of talent, one or two levels down that will do the job even better than the white men currently in that role who never had to contend with all of those racist, sexist obstacles to get to where they are. Cindy Gallop 00:21:43 So re-brief based on potential not proof. And then the fourth action is you have to reengineer your working environment, because if you truly want a black female candidate, any black female candidate is going to look at your working environment and see a ton of white male faces as, as she would with this company and go, why the fuck would I want to put myself in there? I know exactly what's going to happen. And I said to him, you know, actually it's very easy to reengineer work environment. All you do is you immediately promote all of that brilliant black talent currently in your company that has been held back for years without promotion because of inherent internal systemic racism. Cindy Gallop 00:22:23 It's very easy to reengineer work environment. So that, that black female candidate coming in looks and sees black talent being promoted, welcomed, enabled to thrive and is willing at least to give you the benefit of the doubt. Those are some examples of how companies can end racism in the corporate world by hiring welcoming and promoting black talent. Chad 00:22:48 The job description piece, we have been pounding on the table for decades, Cindy, Joel, and I've been in this industry for two decades, said, this is fucked up. This needs to change. One thing I do want to throw out though, is that we're seeing huge leaps and bounds in technology. And one, one of the technologies is actually this interviewing robot and whether you have the software or you actually have the physical form, whatever it is. Do you think technology, actually not allowing that white dude to do the interview and allow technology just to say, this is the best person culture fit or whatever it might be for this position and really make that hire? Cindy Gallop 00:23:32 No, absolutely not. Because, because as I'm sure both of, you know, technology is a massively white male dominated industry, and I'm sure you have already read the vast amounts of coverage of how racist and sexist and biased artificial intelligence is because it's been designed by white men. OUTRO 00:23:50 Well, that was part one of our two-part Blowing Shit Up Discussion with Cindy Gallop. Look for part two and while you're at it subscribe so you don't miss Cindy or any of the Chad and Cheese snark filled episodes with people much smarter than we are. Just go to Chadcheese.com, hit subscribe and pick Apple, Google, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. That's Chadcheese.com.

Economies run on healthy people. Healthy people are handcuffed to their employers. Entrepreneurs can only innovate if they can take those handcuffs off without the risk of losing their healthcare. How do we create a more healthy workforce and society? All hard questions that The Chad & Cheese can ask, but no way in HELL have the answer. Enter healthcare expert founder and chairman of Nightingale Partners and former appointee by President Bill Clinton, John Gorman. John is a healthcare rockstar and at 25 years of age he was appointed as Assistant to the Director of Health Care Financing Administration’s (HCFA, now CMS) Office of Managed Care during the Clinton administration where was handling a $79 billion portfolio.... That's BILLION with a B kids. Big problems need big brains or AI developed by big brains. Enjoy this Sovren exclusive where the AI is the brain and 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. Sovren (26s): Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry, the more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com, that's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren ~ Software so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Chad (29s): How old were you at this point? John Gorman (31s): I was 25 years old and had a $79 billion portfolio. That shit only happens in DC. INTRO (52s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad (-): Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody! I am Chad Sowash here with my work wife, Joel Cheesman, Joel Cheeseman (-): What up? Chad (1m 13s): and today, Joel, we're going to have somewhat of a cerebral discussion. Are you ready for that? Joel Cheeseman (-): Getting our brain on today. Chad (1m 19s): Getting our brain on. So on today's show, we have a real rock star. We're going to talk about how we can build a stronger, better, more healthy and innovative workforce. On Chad and Cheese we always talk about and debate quite frankly, about how we need to change government regulations, programs, obviously staff to drive innovation, wages, and many other opportunities zones. Well today we're going to do just that with our friend John Gorman. Applause (1m 46s): Clapping Chad (1m 50s): Now John is the founder and chairman of Nightingale partners, and John's did a bunch of other stuff, but John, I can't wait, dude, I gotta, I gotta jump in. I want to hear the story about how you landed in the Clinton administration. Was that an appointed position? How did that all happen? John Gorman (2m 8s): Yeah, sir, it's a, it's a long, strange trip. And one, thanks for having me on guys. It's a great pleasure to be here. So how did I land in the Clinton administration? So my career in DC started about 30 years ago. I was hired straight out of Oberlin College to come be the press secretary for my hometown Congressman John Conyers, Jr. from Detroit, where I grew up. A year later, I was his chief of staff. And then a year later I was helping to run then governor Clinton's campaign in Michigan, which he won handily in 1992. John Gorman (2m 48s): And I was an appointee to the, what was then called the healthcare financing administration, which runs Medicare and Medicaid, and is now known as the center for Medicare and Medicaid services. My job was to be the founding deputy for what was a new office of managed care. So for the first time we had set up an office that would be the hub for all the Medicare and Medicaid HMO programs back in the early nineties. Chad (3m 23s): How old were you at this point? John Gorman (3m 24s): I was 25 years old and had a $79 billion portfolio! That shit only happens in DC. Joel Cheeseman (3m 37s): So that's a glimpse in the past, let's talk about present real quick Nightingale Partners, what do you guys do? John Gorman (3m 43s): We are kind of a weird beast. We are one of these opportunities zone funds, that came out of Trump's big tax giveaway bill, but this was actually Cory Booker's program designed to spur investment in real estate, in disadvantaged communities. And then a really strange thing happened. Last year the IRS loosened up the regs to allow opportunities, zone capital to be used for not just purchasing real estate, but for leases, more importantly for working capital and for meeting the business requirements of a new company in one of the roughly 9,000 opportunity zones around the US. Chad (4m 27s): And that was Mnuchin wasn't it? John Gorman (4m 30s): Well, yeah, technically IRS is part of Treasury. I doubt that minutia had anything to do with that loosening. Chad (4m 38s): I don't know, man, any way to be able to perspectively launder. I think he might've had something to do with it. John Gorman (4m 48s): Well, what happened was basically the way the program works is if you invest capital in one of these 9,000 disadvantaged communities, not only is the initial investment tax free, but all of the proceeds you make on that investment are completely tax free. So as you can imagine, that was like catnip for Republican billionaires. And it opened up about $6 trillion in available capital of which about 30 billion has been invested in these opportunities zones in the 18 months of the program, that has been operating. John Gorman (5m 24s): So it's brand new, but it suits our purposes very well. We are the only opportunity zone fund that makes investments in healthcare and specifically our focus is on social determinants of health. So these are basically four fancy words for poverty. So basically we invest in large scale antipoverty interventions with large health insurers. Joel Cheeseman (5m 50s): Give our listeners who don't live this every day, what is an opportunity zone? John Gorman (5m 55s): So an opportunity zone is one about 9,000 census tracks across the U S that were selected by governors as being really economically disadvantaged and they're all medically underserved. Which is a designation by the feds that means they have really terrible access to healthcare, not nearly enough healthcare providers to go around to the population. So for instance, the West Baton Rouge opportunity zone in Louisiana is one of the worst medically underserved communities in the U.S. John Gorman (6m 35s): and it has about a one to 7,000 primary care physician to patient ratio. So that's where we focus our investments in partnership with health insurance companies. So we'll stand up things like meal delivery programs if food security is a challenge for their members. We do a lot of non-emergent transportation to doctor's appointments, to pharmacies, so people can pick up their meds. We do a lot of housing security and so we are involved in lots of low income housing developments with onsite health and social services because all of these types of investments have been shown to yield about a three to eight X return on investment. John Gorman (7m 23s): And so as investors in partnering with health plans on these things, these are really impactful investments that improve the quality of care and dramatically reduce its cost. Chad (7m 32s): This actually helps drive the economy. Did you have anything that actually ties to economic growth as well? John Gorman (7m 40s): Oh, that's in our DNA as opportunities zone investors, you know, there's always a huge priority on economic development and making underserved communities, disadvantaged communities, more resilient, especially during this pandemic, to really foster job growth. One of the consistent themes that we see in our roughly 50 projects that we've got in development right now, and why I was so excited to join your show today, guys is the common thread in all of our projects include community health workers or Promatores as we call them in Puerto Rico. John Gorman (8m 24s): And the community health worker is basically just a social worker without the license, but who's from the community in which we're intervening and can help serve as a navigator and a coordinator of care and services for a really vulnerable and expensive patients within their neighborhoods. So in every single project we do community health workers are a fixture. But you know, the very nature of the stuff that we get into in social determinants even really speaks to physician, nurse and extender burnout. John Gorman (9m 0s): All of the surveys of healthcare personnel shows that where they work in a health system that invests heavily in antipoverty initiatives, to their loyalty to their employer and all of the indicators of a burnout, especially during the pandemic are dramatically less, for that workforce. So yeah, we like to think that every aspect of what we do has to have a significant focus on economic development and making communities more resilient during this pandemic. Chad (9m 36s): Yes. So raising, obviously in providing healthcare, some of the easy questions for you, but again, we're not, we're not wonks here, what company or what country spends the most money on their health care system? John Gorman (9m 50s): I don't think we should judge the quality or sophistication of a health system on how much we spent, Chad (9m 57s): I don't think we should either. But I mean, who spends the most? John Gorman (9m 60s): Well we do. Chad (10m 1s): And then to my second question is what country does the best in covering their, their civilians, their actual full population? Is it, do we do that? John Gorman (10m 12s): No, of course not. I mean, our system is a patchwork quilt of coverage on its best day, but especially during a pandemic when in a country that still among industrialized nations is really the only one that still relies on employer based coverage. Chad (10m 29s): Yes. John Gorman (10m 29s): Why we now see enormous spikes in the uninsured because people are getting laid off or losing their health insurance. So now, you know, we are almost back to a pre-affordable care act levels of uninsurance with about 45 million people are uninsured in the U S right now it's an international embarrassment that, that this is happening in the wealthiest country, in the world. And as you point out the country that spends the most on healthcare. The countries that do the best, the European Christian democracies and Canada, you know, the Brits, the Germans, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Canadians all do an amazing job of universal health care. John Gorman (11m 17s): But these things, all of course come with trade offs in terms of access to care and things of that sort. But if you ask their populations, they are so much happier with their systems of coverage, then any American has ever testified to here. Joel Cheeseman (11m 33s): Is your organization specifically advocate for universal health care. John Gorman (11m 39s): Yeah. The, because if you want to address social determinants of health, if you want to address systemic poverty and racism, that's embedded in the U S health system, then it has to start with coverage because coverage, you know, opens up a whole new world of access to providers, to prescription medication and to related social services that charity and any number of other state and federal government programs can, can only dream of having the impact of. Joel Cheeseman (12m 14s): Why is America's the only sort of advanced nation in the world, the richest nation in the world, why don't we have a universal healthcare system? John Gorman (12m 22s): Several reasons, one, our whole system of employer based coverage, which covers 75 million Americans really sprung out of World War II. All the men went off to war and among those that were left home. And then of course, all the women that rose to the occasion, a large employers had to use offering health insurance as an incentive to get a more qualified and highly skilled workforce to come work for them as opposed to their competitors. John Gorman (12m 55s): So it sprung from there really. And then just because of the organized resistance, primarily from doctor and hospital organizations, have you seen, you know, historic resistance to universal coverage? I mean, you have to remember that it was back in the day, it was the American Medical Association that lobbied the hardest against the establishment of Medicare of all things back in 1965. Chad (13m 23s): Why did they, why did they lobby against that? John Gorman (13m 25s): Well, it's always been along the lines of the words that echo true still today, socialized medicine. And they send people into a panic that, you know, we're going to have socialized medicine and, you know, it's just, that just makes me laugh every time I hear it because, or when you hear, you know, Trump supporters screaming about keep the government out of my Medicare. Medicare is the government, and Medicare is a single payer, Medicare is socialized medicine! John Gorman (13m 59s): And it works pretty damn well for the most part. Chad (13m 60s): John, the best healthcare I have ever had was when I was in the military, I could just walk in, have my ID laid on the counter and get whatever service I needed, whether it was going to the dentist going to, you know, get a checkup. It didn't matter. And the thing was, it was standard, you know, right today in, in, you know, today, it's almost like, well, I'm not really sure if I should go see the doctor or not in the military, it was like, you know, get your ass to the TMC. John Gorman (14m 31s): Exactly. We, we offer it within segments of the U.S. Population. You know, those were in our country, right. You guys get great health care when you're serving, but then by the way, when you're out, then you're in the VA. Chad (14m 44s): Yes. John Gorman (14m 44s): And we know how well that kind of care has gone since its inception. Chad (14m 51s): Well talk about preventative then, because I mean, that's, that's one of the things that we don't really focus on here in the U S is preventative care because we're not all covered. And if we're not doing preventative care, then the likelihood of us getting to a stage three, stage four cancer or whatever it might happen because we were never going to the doctor is much higher than other countries. What is, what is the, I guess the biggest advantage for not for universal healthcare other than just obviously covering everybody and making it a human right? Chad (15m 27s): But what is the biggest advantage? Would it be the preventative side of the house? John Gorman (15m 32s): Well, it can be depending on the population you're trying to insure. The folks that are in the gap right now tend to be childless adults, especially in red states that did not accept the Medicaid expansion that came out of Obama's Affordable Care Act. And there in lies, another impediment to universal coverage is that, you know, the ACA really tried to get there by doing this incredible offer from the feds for Medicaid expansion and that they would cover all of the costs of it for the first And the real vulnerability and the fatal flaw, and that strategy was that it relied on Republican governors willing to accept the deal of the century from a black president. John Gorman (16m 24s): And we know what happened. Most of them refused to accept it. And now, you know, the vast majority of the uninsured reside in red states that refused the Medicaid expansion. So it's just maddening story of the last century of trying to drag our way into universal coverage when you face impediments at every step of the way, because entrenched interests, primarily hospitals fight so hard. John Gorman (16m 56s): And then of course, Republican governors in this case, a fight so hard against common sense solutions that would get us there. Chad (17m 4s): Didn't Pence actually take the money. And then he goes to the White House and now they're trying to disassemble everything that he took money for? John Gorman (17m 11s): Exactly. It's maddening, isn't it? The hypocrisy is just astounding. And so now, instead of course, is that all of the Medicaid expansions that are occurring now are happening on ballot initiatives that can go around governors and legislatures and force them to enact a Medicaid expansion. We've seen that most recently and in several red States in the past year, last November, so several states enact. Joel Cheeseman (17m 43s): So there's obviously a political angle to this. When I try to discover answers to questions I to say, follow the money. Who's, who's getting rich on the current system and who has the most to lose financially going to a universal system? John Gorman (17m 56s): First, we got to start by talking about what universal means, right? There are a lot of ways to get to universal coverage guys. We can get there through existing programs that we've got. I think we just have to do them through a lens of understanding the political reality in which we live. Republican governors are not going to accept Medicaid expansion. And so unless we can reliably get ballot initiatives in all the outstanding red states to put Medicaid expansion on the ballot and, and have confidence that they will pass as they have in the last several red states that took them on, you're never going to get there through a Medicaid expansion. John Gorman (18m 41s): Okay. You clearly can't do it through employer based coverage so then that means the best way to approach it would be through making Medicare a more open to people who are not currently eligible for the program. Medicare forces are our federal insurance program for the elderly and the disabled. You can get there through Medicare for All like Bernie talked about during the primaries. And that, you know, from my standpoint is just, you know, a, a moderate who goes as far left as he can, and still wins. John Gorman (19m 17s): Medicare for All is not only politically infeasible, it's never going to happen, but if it did, it would set our health system back actually by about 40 or 50 years, just in terms of the progress we've made in value based and coordinated care, just because it would be moving everybody into a fee for service environment like traditional Medicare is. Now, if you want to talk about how you get to universal coverage and you could actually accomplish it, you could actually get there that is politically doable. John Gorman (19m 51s): Then you got to start looking at something like Medicare Advantage for All Who Want It, like Pete Buttigieg and Kamila Harris were talking about during the primaries and which is now embedded in Joe Biden's Medicare proposals, to some extent. Chad (20m 9s): So the Humana's of the world, those organizations, the insurance companies, I mean, they're still getting rich, are they not off of this, off of this system? John Gorman (20m 18s): Yeah. So, so that's part of where the money goes. Not to mention if we have a, a sick population, which it, to me just boggles my mind. If we have a sick population, then we're generating money for companies like that. Oh, and they just all reported record second quarter earnings as a result of the pandemic because, because utilization plummeted during the lockdown. And then in the last couple of months, it's now creeping back up, especially for outpatient services. John Gorman (20m 52s): But we have seen a dramatic decline in elective, inpatient procedures in hospitals. And so as a result, the insurance companies were printing money and most of them were, were turning our earnings that were 18 to 20% higher than they saw at the same time in 2019. Chad (21m 10s): How do you get away from privatizing people getting sick? John Gorman (21m 14s): There are several approaches to it in the other industrialized countries. You've got countries like great Britain and Canada that do have true universal coverage systems that in effect function like Medicare for All, because that's how they were originated. That's how they started. That's what their populations are used to. And it's what has so much broad political support in those countries. Then you've got others like Switzerland and Germany and Poland that actually do have privately administered universal coverage. John Gorman (21m 50s): And that's why I think, you know, a Medicare Advantage for All Who Want It, would be a uniquely American solution to universal coverage because of course, Medicare Advantage is the private option in Medicare that where the Medicare program contracts with health, private health plans like Humana, like Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts or Indiana. And then they pay them a fixed rate to provide all of the services that their members will require for the coming month. John Gorman (22m 25s): And that's, that could be a very good framework to build, you know, as I said, a uniquely American approach to universal coverage that could actually get enacted. Chad (22m 36s): Yeah. And I can't think of anything more American than having portable health care benefits because today, I mean, Joel and I talk about it all the time. We really believe that America is hurting on the entrepreneurship and innovation side of the house because individuals, families are locked into jobs. And if they can't get away from those benefits, they can't actually do what they want to do as an entrepreneur and drive innovation. Chad (23m 6s): Do you have, are you seeing any of that? Are you tying again, back to the economics of it in the actual workforce side of the house? Are you seeing any of that in the studies that you guys are either tapping into or doing yourself? John Gorman (23m 19s): Well, I mean, job lock has always been a major characteristic of the American health insurance system. Because as I said earlier, 75 million of us have our coverage through our employers. Now the Affordable Care Act was really designed as a backstop against that system in the formation of the health insurance exchanges and marketplaces, and then all the subsidies that it provides to individuals that need to buy their health insurance that way. John Gorman (23m 53s): So when you, when you put it that way and talking about entrepreneurs, I think about startups, frankly, like, like us and we are in the DC Health Insurance Exchange for our coverage here at Nightingale, as most entrepreneurs are or should be because this is where you get, you know, the whole marketplace for small employer sponsored coverage or for individuals. John Gorman (24m 23s): And if you qualify for the subsidies, you can actually get very good quality coverage through the Health Insurance Exchanges for little or no money. As I think most small business people would find themselves qualifying for. Joel Cheeseman (24m 40s): We talk a, a bit on the show in terms of the gig economy, which kind of dovetails into this topic. Uber and Lyft, for example, have been in the news recently in our space in California, in terms of government saying, we need to treat drivers as employees so now Uber Lyft, you have to start giving benefits, retirement, et cetera. The latest news I saw was Uber and Lyft are gonna consider franchising being drivers. So they don't, they don't have to cross that bridge. John Gorman (25m 8s): Right. Joel Cheeseman (25m 8s): How does the gig economy and how, how these folks are treated, sort of shake out in your mind, if you could fast forward a little bit. How does, how does that, how does that play out in your mind? John Gorman (25m 20s): Well, a couple of different ways. You know, again, I would think most of the folks that are in the gig economy would find themselves eligible for coverage under the affordable care act through the exchanges. If their income qualifies them for subsidies, then you're going to get great deals on individual coverage, through the exchanges. Now, some folks in the gig economy may even find themselves eligible for Medicaid coverage, and then that's going to be highly dependent on the state in which they live. John Gorman (25m 50s): As a general rule, eligibility requirements for Medicaid are much richer in blue states than they are in red states. And so you have to be almost desperately poor to qualify for Medicaid in many of the red states. You know, you live in California or you live in New York, you know, you can get a Medicaid eligibility, and there, you're just really kind of dealing with people's concern about stigma for enrolling in the Medicaid program. Joel Cheeseman (26m 27s): So in your mind, it'll be more of a government solution as opposed to Uber and Lyft sort of actively or proactively, providing or services like Upwork or Fiverr, which are sort of gig platforms. You don't see them providing some sort of substance substance for them? John Gorman (26m 45s): You know, I mean they could look at some of these, the group offerings that Trump has suggested, but that's all junk insurance. You know, it really, it's just terrible insurance and it's just shot four holes like Swiss cheese. You know, you see some of these like religious and fraternal organizations going that route, but that doesn't work for individuals in the gig economy. I think if you're going to be looking at groups of people getting together, you know, then you could maybe through maybe a franchise put together a small group that would then go on to the, the health insurance exchanges and be able to get slightly better rates by having, you know, hundreds or thousands of people in a group buying together. John Gorman (27m 32s): But generally the gig economy will find its coverage in Obamacare and/or the Medicaid expansion that came from. Chad (27m 41s): So you said Trump in his, his offering is really looking at doing more than, I mean, he's already decimated healthcare the way that it is today. Anyway, what I'm hearing is he really just wants to, like, you always does give the crumbs to the pawns who are out there. Let's say it's pushed away from the table for a second. Let's say Biden gets elected, what do you see happening then? John Gorman (28m 6s): Well, what happens then really depends on whether or not the Dems reclaim the Senate. Right now, it's actually looking pretty good. Now if Biden gets elected and if the Dems reclaim the Senate and hold the House as is assumed, they will then boy, it's a whole new world out there. And I think you're going to see coverage rocket to one of the top two priorities of the Biden administration. John Gorman (28m 37s): And I think that's where you're going to see Joe's Medicare proposal, his big Medicare expansion proposal, and a reaffirmation of the Affordable Care Act, assuming it's spared the executioner's ax and the Supreme Court in November. Did you notice they just scheduled that hearing conveniently for a freaking week after the election? Imagine that yeah. Imagine Chad (29m 0s): Assholes. Yeah. Joel Cheeseman (29m 3s): John yeah, last one from me in regards to sort of assuming Biden gets it in some of these things is, you know, start, start moving forward. How would you pay for this system? I mean, I've, I've read anywhere from, you know, everyone's going to pay higher taxes to you know, 71% of families are gonna have a much higher tax burden. Do you take money away from the defense budget? I mean, how do, how do you, how do you guys propose? We pay for a universal system? John Gorman (29m 28s): Well, first and foremost, you've got to, you got to completely roll back both Trump and Bushes, billionaire tax rebates. I mean, there's trillions of dollars right there that gets reclaimed by revoking those tax cuts for guys like me, who just never asked for it, didn't need it, frankly didn't want it, and would much rather see that going back to the government to help a great many more people, so you start there. John Gorman (29m 59s): Two is, we have had a massive military expansion under Trump and in, you know, the dirty little secret of a lot of these COVID relief bills have been, they've been embedded with billions of dollars in increased defense spending! In a pandemic relief bill! So you gotta roll that stuff back. And then I think then you are looking at tax increases on the wealthy, which is where it would be. I mean, nobody's going to be trying to, in a completely democratic government is going to try to finance a health insurance coverage expansion on the backs of working people or middle class people by any stretch of the imagination. John Gorman (30m 39s): This is all going to go on a upper tax bracket folks who've had a free ride for the last 30 years. Chad (30m 45s): The guys who aren't doing the work, always getting smacked down that the little guy, John Gorman, everybody thanks so much for joining us, man. We appreciate it again. We don't get a chance to get too wonky about this, but this is incredibly important for our space, because we want to be able to innovate. We want to be able to grow, but it feels like in many cases we have those handcuffs on. So we appreciate you taking the time and really digging deep and explain all this to us. Joel Cheeseman (31m 14s): Thanks for joining us, man, John, for our listeners, who want to know more about this topic, where would you send them? John Gorman (31m 19s): Oh man. The greatest source of objective information on this stuff is always the Kaiser Family Foundation at kff.org. They're just amazing on, on coverage issues and matters of public health. And I recommend that site to everybody. Joel Cheeseman (31m 35s): Excellent. My brain hurts. We out. Chad (31m 38s): We out. OUTRO (32m 1s): Thank you for listen to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Syndio is at the forefront of pay equity, a topic near-and-dear to our hearts, so the boys thought they bring CEO Maria Colacurcio on the show to get a read on what's going on and what the future holds when it comes to such issues. Enjoy another exclusive powered by NEXXT, with the double X. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities. Maria Colacurcio (0s): Pay, equity is truly a leadership responsibility on the company. INTRO (26s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (26s): Let's get ready to podcast! I haven't trademarked that yet. What's up everybody? You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am your cohost Joel Cheesman joined as always by my cohost, Chad Sowash Chad (38s): Why hello! Joel (38s): And today. We are privileged to welcome. I'm not going to butcher this name. I promise Maria Maria Colacurcio is CEO of Syndio. Maria, welcome to the podcast. Maria Colacurcio (55s): Thanks for having me. And you nailed it. Got the last name on the first try love it. I really think he should have gone more Italian with it though. Go look, Colacurcio I think that that really, really sold it. Yes. Joel (1m 5s): You've already offended a whole group of people and we're not even like a minute into the show way to go Sowash Chad (1m 11s): That's what I do. Okay. Joel (1m 14s): Maria where, does this podcast find you today? Maria Colacurcio (1m 16s): Well, normally I'm working out of Seattle, Washington, but today you find me at my inlaws who are graciously assisting with the kids and we are in Arizona. Chad (1m 25s): Oh, nice. So that's awesome because from my research you have six children. What are the ages of those six kids? Maria Colacurcio (1m 34s): Yeah. Big buzzer on that one. Joel (1m 40s): You do know how it works, right? Maria Colacurcio (1m 42s): I do. Joel (1m 42s): We can send some literature. Maria Colacurcio (1m 42s): I do, We all have choices. Well all have choices, guys. There's two batches of them. There's a first marriage batch and the second marriage batch, the first marriage batch ages range from eight to 13. And there's five of them in that batch. So you do that. And then the caboose she's two. So the inlaws are all day with the husband in the pool and 115 degree weather, while I'm working and it's working out great. Maria Colacurcio (2m 12s): So very grateful, Joel (2m 11s): Two to 13. Did I get that right to the third day and eight? Your, your, your, your sainthood certificate should be in the mail. Chad (2m 21s): So the reason we brought you on the days, we actually did a show a few months ago that talked about Syndio and your series, a funding. And I, and I dove a little bit deeper into what you guys do. And so to Joel, and we had a little bit of discussion around Syndio being the platform, which allows companies to focus on pay equity and transparency. And we talk about this all the time on the show a nd how to rectify a system that is just so damaged. Chad (2m 54s): So if you could, if you don't mind, can you tell us your story, the story of Syndio, how you got here? Obviously there was a problem. You saw the problem, but how did you actually get that in your head? Hey, I can fix this? Joel (3m 8s): And how'd you come up with the name? Maria Colacurcio (3m 11s): Yeah, it's a great story. So I'm not the founder of Syndio. I am the CEO and joined a company that already existed. So that's kind of the first thing that I like to tell people, because it's, it's pretty rare to have a founder come in, have a founder, start a company, and then bring a CEO in, but that's exactly what happened. So Syndio's origin was actually a people analytics company and they had a phenomenal people analytics software product. It was organizational network analysis, and that's where the name came from. Maria Colacurcio (3m 42s): So synapses - connections, how do you connect a bunch of people? But what they did early on is they were having some trouble with the long sales cycle. It's a super crowded competitive market. It was a big consulting lift. So when I joined, they had a little side hustle product that the founder had created. He's a PhD. JD had worked at law firms and done thousands of analysis by hand. And they were selling this side product, which was essentially a better way to do ongoing pay equity analysis and eradicating unlawful pay disparities based on gender, race, ethnicity, really anything because the software is agnostic. Maria Colacurcio (4m 21s): So whatever data a company has, you can look at comparisons based on that data. So at the time I was at Starbucks and I was part of the communications team that was launching the very first pay parody announcement at the annual meeting, where Howard was handing off to Kevin Johnson as the new CEO. Chad (4m 37s): Which we need a big applause for that, by the way, because that we, I mean, we talk about that on the show, they, that that's definitely setting the bar and knowing that you were there during that. I mean, again, I think that just adds to the coolness of the story. Maria Colacurcio (4m 52s): It does, and that they were very progressive, specifically around the area of transparency. So a lot of companies had been doing this under the shroud of attorney client privilege and sort of behind locked doors and being one of the first to be open and share results with employees. I mean, we really believe at our heart at Syndio that what is going to solve this problem is number one innovation. So getting it out of the hands of outside consultants and law firms who are perpetuating the pay gap, but number two, adding a sense of accountability and transparency. Maria Colacurcio (5m 24s): So being honest with your employees about where you stand and what you're doing to fix those issues and Starbucks was very progressive in terms of transparency and sharing results. And that's how I became very, very familiar with how this is done. Starbucks did it, the old fashioned way. They worked with an external law firm. It took weeks, if not months to hand the data back and forth. If you had to change to a group or a reorg or a layoff, you had to redo all of your analysis. And in the end, a massive report that tells you where to remediate, but you don't understand anything about the policies and practices that are driving those disparities. Maria Colacurcio (6m 2s): So in the process of this, I ran across Syndio, along with the lead employment lawyer at Starbucks who had run pay equity for 13 years at Starbucks. He now is at Symbio. So we joined on the same day, when we found the software, we were blown away. We said, this is absolutely going to change the way that companies solve this problem. Chad (6m 23s): And it didn't take Starbucks 200 years. Did it? Maria Colacurcio (6m 26s): No, it didn't. And it's not taking companies 200 years anymore because we really eliminate the need to do it that old fashioned way. And we save companies time and unnecessarily unnecessary expense. Quite frankly. Joel (6m 38s): I don't know if you've seen some of the, some of the headlines in the news, but there's a, a global pandemic that has left 14 million people unemployed. How does that impact pay equity? Because my, my guess would be people care less about it when there are a lot more people unemployed. I just want a job, even if it's less money, like, do these issues go to the back burner in today's current environment, or do you think they still remain a high point in terms of where we should be going? Maria Colacurcio (7m 8s): It's such a great question. And I'm so glad you asked it because economic disaster exacerbates differences and it impacts the most vulnerable. So it actually is a huge risk that we're going to set ourselves back 50 years because of this pandemic. And not only that, we're seeing in the news and research and research, we've done ourselves at Syndio. We did a couple of surveys around COVID and single parents, dual parents that are both working. And the lion's share of the work at home is landing on women and minorities and single parents. Maria Colacurcio (7m 44s): And so if you look at that, if you look at the hours that women are spending, working, and working on their career, versus men, men are leaning more into work. So our survey showed that men are spending 12 plus hours a day working, whereas women are dialing it back. 14% of women in our survey were actually so overwhelmed they were considering quitting. So we really have to look at this pandemic from the standpoint of, are we going to set women back 50 years if we don't identify the types of things that they're handling at home? Maria Colacurcio (8m 15s): And the other part of this is, as companies start looking at policies for going back to the physical workspace, flexibility is awesome. We've been asking for flexibility for a decade because it benefits women. It benefits minorities, but when you look at an optional in the office policy who actually can show up, typically it's people who don't have kids, aren't caring for elderly parents, socio-economically are able to drive a car, not rely on public transportation. Maria Colacurcio (8m 46s): So there are all these things playing into that proximity to the boss, in the physical office. And what does that mean? And how does that again, set people back? Joel (8m 57s): Interesting. So I want to, I want to springboard off that question and go to another timely one in that July 31st, a lot of people's $600 a week, government check may or may not dry up, or it may be less et cetera. But so I'm curious about the impact on this from that standpoint, if a lot of people stop getting those checks, but more, more importantly, on the show, we talk a lot about universal basic income. And I'm curious about your thoughts on pay equity as it involves people getting, you know, a regular check from the government, does that stifle pay equity, or what impact does that have on it? Maria Colacurcio (9m 35s): I don't know that that necessarily stifles or propels pay equity, because when I think about pay equity, we don't have any regulation right now in the United States. So 44 States have laws around pay equity, but they don't do anything. And I talk about this all the time because people will come to our company and say, which States have really great laws versus which States don't well, okay, it's fine. that 44 States have laws prohibiting pay discrimination. There's also discrimination laws, right? Maria Colacurcio (10m 5s): So, but the onus is still on the plaintiff to go figure out that they're being paid less because of their gender, race or ethnicity and bring that claim. So until we have some sort of accountability and legislation around companies having to report, or, you know, report their standings report, pay equity, even just at the very minimal level, of level report, mean median report, average female versus male pay average white versus nonwhite pay companies have to take accountability for taking action. Maria Colacurcio (10m 36s): And we don't have any legislation around that. So in terms of like a dictated, mandated pay scenario, it doesn't really in my mind connects to pay equity because pay equity is truly a leadership responsibility on the company. The company has got to take responsibility to ensure they're paying their people fairly, regardless of all of these things we've talked about. Joel (11m 1s): So what's government's role, if any? Maria Colacurcio (11m 3s): I think government's role is to start looking at things like the Kamala Harris proposal, quite frankly. I mean, she said early on in one of her campaigns, why don't we have companies over a hundred employees required to report on how they're doing here? I mean, why wasn't that something that we should be asking them? Chad (11m 23s): Yeah, the answer's always enforcement, right? If you have regulations, you have legislation. It, none of it matters if you don't enforce it. And that's obviously just not being enforced, but there is no law and correct me if I'm wrong, around pay transparency, publicly Patriots, apparently which once again, would also spur this forward. Correct? Maria Colacurcio (11m 48s): Absolutely, and you see it in the UK. So the UK doesn't have a pay equity law, but they have a reporting around the pay gap. And so again, the pay gap isn't equal work for equal pay. What it is, is average male versus average female salary, if you're looking at gender. And so what that exposes though, is the distribution in a company. So are all your women sort of clustered in the mid level manager ranks while your men are senior vice presidents, it exposes that. And suddenly there's, there's transparency around where there is work to be done. Chad (12m 22s): Right? And I think, you know what we're seeing, I mean, like that, like the world economic forum saying, it's going to take 200 years to actually get this right. Most of that is probably because they're old, rich white guys who don't want to get it right. But this is not just an equity issue of the now, for example, these groups have been paid less for years. So there is a humongous back pay issue that could come into play, who knows maybe even class action suits? Companies are already scared of equity because of what it means to the bottom line. Chad (12m 54s): They have to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars perspectively. But now if you put transparency on top of that, and then back-pay, it really seems like a hard, tough road. Those to me are the answers correct me if you think I'm wrong, but getting there that's the hardest part because of the system that we have in play. Right? How do we get past this? Maria Colacurcio (13m 16s): Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. I think the solutions that have been offered to companies have perpetuated the issue. So doing this with a law firm who is quite frankly, incented, I mean, you, the company are a client of the law firm who is now tasked with sharing with you, what's in your best interest to protect yourself against potential lawsuits. And remember data gerrymander differently can produce absolutely different results. So if you want to take your groupings, if you're looking at equal work for equal pay, that's all about people who do similar work and running regressions to see if you can rule out gender or race or ethnicity as a factor, if you desegregate those groups. Maria Colacurcio (14m 0s): So they're super tiny and you decide that there aren't female or nonwhite competitors, because those roles are so specific that you just, there's no women that do that job. You can absolutely gerrymander your results. And if you think about the process of somebody doing that for a client, it's in their best interests to perpetuate issues, to make you look. Chad (14m 24s): And who can afford the lawyers. Right? Maria Colacurcio (14m 27s): Exactly. Exactly. And I think the other piece of this is, and it's really interesting because the black lives matter movement has again brought D & I front and center for many company leaders. And just about everyone at different companies have made a statement, but how do we take those statements beyond just this performative activism? Because D and I, there is massive fatigue around diversity & inclusion. I mean, for the last decade, it's been a huge money suck for companies and CEOs are just, they have fatigue cause they haven't seen results from all this training, from all this talking from all this work. Maria Colacurcio (15m 6s): And now we're starting to talk about, okay, but there's an E in D and I, and it's about equity and there's actually actions companies can take to address equity. And that's where we've got to focus because we have to look at how to create lasting change out of this movement and not let it just die into some of these, you know, D&I things that we've already seen are not working. Chad (15m 29s): Well they're throwing it, throwing money at training, around trying to help people understand, but they're not throwing money at the equity piece. The equity piece is being able to make up those gaps. $8 billion, I believe spent last year in D & I training that $8 billion could have gone to making people feel they're treated fair and equitable by provider by trying to get them closer to that gap. So, I mean, when you're talking to companies and you hear about this training, it does it not just boggle your mind that they're not putting this to the actual problem or one of the actual problems I may say, in this case to bridging that pay gap? Maria Colacurcio (16m 14s): What boggles my mind is when a company who has publicly pledged a commitment to pay equity will show up in our sales cycle and say they don't have budget to address it. Exactly. It's that boggles my mind because here they are publicly making statements about their commitment, but yet they don't want to allocate budget for potential remediation of issues where they actually are not paying people f airly that to me is, is a big problem because we have to hold these companies accountable that are making these lip service pledges that they're not actually doing anything. Nexxt (16m 59s): We'll get back. We'll do the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. So for those companies that are out there today, who are kind of hesitant because they're afraid of texting, what do you have to say to them? Get with the program. People are texting these days. You know, I will say that I'm in a different generation, a different point in my career that I agree I would be hesitant, but there are obviously millions of millions of people that are in that demographic that want to receive them. So it's again, know your audience and be able to deliver a message to your audience that way they want to receive it, right. Nexxt Promo (17m 34s): For more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. That's next with the double X not the triple x, hiring.nexxt.com Joel (17m 51s): So we've covered sort of legal hurdles or avoiding landmines from a legal perspective. I'm curious, what is the hierarchy by which a company would use a service like Syndio? Oh, and particularly from a recruiting perspective, because that's a topic that is near and dear to our hearts. How important is pay equality when it comes to recruiting the best and brightest? Maria Colacurcio (18m 15s): It's really important. So PayScale does a really nice job of some research that they do on this topic. And what they've found is that employees care more, five and a half times more actually about pay relative to similar peers in their company than they do about market pay. And it has a massive impact on employee engagement and productivity. And if you think about it, it's absolutely true. So you can tell me all day long that I'm paid fairly relative to the tech companies in my backyard. Maria Colacurcio (18m 46s): I've got Amazon, I've got Microsoft, I've got Facebook in the Seattle area. But if I find out that the person in the cube next to me, who's doing a similar job is getting paid more for no reason other than gender, I'm gonna walk out and want to burn the place down. Joel (19m 5s): Not that we're advocating such activities. Maria Colacurcio (19m 10s): That's how I'm going to feel. Chad (19m 12s): Yes, yes. So let's push that a little bit further because Facebook actually is now talking about disparity of pay by location. You're doing the exact same work, but now that I'm allowing you to move out of Silicon Valley and let's say for instance, a move to Utah, right? So Salt Lake City, or maybe even Palm Springs, who cares, but now I can justify paying you less because of the cost of living there. Even though you are doing the exact same job, which is de-valuing that person, is that something that we're going to see move and shift dramatically with a lot more of this remote work that would be happening? Joel (19m 55s): I can't wait for this one. Maria Colacurcio (19m 57s): Yeah. It's so it's, it's funny that you asked this. So we actually did a webinar two weeks ago with two speakers that were really fantastic. One was the former CPO at LinkedIn. One was the director of HR at NerdWallet, and this was the topic. It was all about G eo diff and Facebook's proclamation that they're now going to be paying people differently based on where they move. And the fact of the matter is there are neutral job related factors that go into why companies pay what they pay. And so Facebook was very strong coming out and saying, one of the reasons we pay you, what we pay you is because you're in a high cost of living area s o we're going to dock you. Maria Colacurcio (20m 33s): And it's a really interesting move from the perspective of, you know, the myths of a global pandemic. They're also putting a pause on performance reviews and figuring out how to increase, pay for good work that they're doing. And 71% of employers are struggling to figure out how to adjust to remote work. They still care about morale. And so is docking someone's pay because they're moving to a different location, the right move here. Maria Colacurcio (21m 6s): Even if location is one of the ways that you figure out how to pay people well. Chad (21m 9s): And behind that as well. If you think about it from Zuk's standpoint, he's saving money on Silicon Valley, real estate. If he can downsize some of those spaces, and he's also perspectively saving money because he can pay those individuals who less for doing the exact same work. Maria Colacurcio (21m 27s): Yeah, it's really interesting. So when we had our panel of speakers two weeks ago, they were very the perspective on doing this. So docking pay was a very negative perspective. They felt like this was a poor move in terms of morale, engagement and productivity. Joel (21m 46s): You guys have raised quite a bit of money. I know the, the round that that Chad I think was talking about on the show is 7.5 million. And then there was another one in 2018, at 5.2 million. I'm curious, what does that money go toward? Do you guys do a significant amount of lobbying, for example, Maria Colacurcio (22m 3s): You know, we don't, but we're actually kicking off a government affairs program now. And that was part of the intent of the series A, which we raised just this past April. It's really important that we start to get in front of legislators to say, this is something that we absolutely need to require of companies. They need to be reporting on something, again, lowest minimum bar is just mean median. What is the average pay for some of these comparisons? I think it's really crucial. I think the other thing that we think about when, when we think about where to put these funds to use is our next product and our next product is called opportunity queue. Maria Colacurcio (22m 42s): And what that's about is distribution. So leaders want to know what the company's distribution looks like. So gender, racism, ethnicity, but more importantly, how they get there. So we've got to start adding actionable goals, tied to metrics that aren't aspirational or untethered to reality. So for example, you know, how do we establish those goals? If you want a senior vice president suite, that's half women, half men, how do you get there? What are the steps you take to develop your mid level managers? Maria Colacurcio (23m 14s): Because I'll bet you, you have that talent in your company already. You're just not developing it. Joel (23m 21s): So in line of that, I want to, I want to play, make believe for a little bit, and let's pretend that you are your leader of the, of the free world for a day. What do those parameters look like? I mean, for example, some things that strike me are, you know, if you have the same title, should you be paid the same? If the title and the number of years that you worked as the same, you should be paid the same private versus public companies. How big a company is like, what would that general parameter look like in terms of, of what pay equity looks like from a transparency standpoint? Maria Colacurcio (23m 53s): It's a great question. So I want to be clear that I don't think policies and neutral job-related factors that drive pay are wrong. There are some that are, I think, misguided, but for example, having a policy that says, you know, we pay based on tenure, education and skills. For example, the issue comes into play. When number one, you're not transparent about what those policies are and communicating those to employees so that they understand why they're paid, what they're paid. And number two. Maria Colacurcio (24m 24s): And I think this is the biggest thing is when your policies and practices don't match up with what you're actually doing. So that's part of what our software does. So the software identifies whether why you pay, what you pay is actually true. So for example, most companies say they're, they're paying for performance and a few actually are, but a lot aren't. So I think it's more of that consistency between why you pay what you pay, and making sure from a data analytics perspective that you're actually doing that. Maria Colacurcio (24m 58s): And then communicating that so that your employees have a sense of the why, why am I paid? What I'm paid Chad (25m 4s): Question around, being able to actually get there for companies. And again, not taking 200 years of didn't take Starbucks that long, the U S military I was in the military for 20 years. The U S military has a setup very equal from a pay standpoint, you have rank, which could be a band, which most companies have. And then you have a years in service, which is tenure, and you meet on that grid and then, you know what you're getting paid. Why? And it's obviously incredibly transparent too, because obviously, you know, we get paid by taxes. Chad (25m 36s): So you can see that why aren't companies moving that way because transparency and fairness does drive morale. You would think that would, that would be a huge market. Maria Colacurcio (25m 50s): Yeah, it's interesting. I definitely don't think we're there yet for a variety of reasons. I think even when we talk to our customer companies and they're talking about wanting to be more transparent, they're very wary of getting to the extreme where they're sharing everyone's salaries. And there's a bunch of reasons why there's, you know, the research on what that does to morale there's research on. You know, we have a couple of really interesting anecdotes from leaders at customer companies who have actually asked their team. Do you just want to know what everyone else makes? Maria Colacurcio (26m 22s): And typically it's the women, who say no, because they don't want to know that they're underpaid because of gender, which is really interesting in terms of our advice, we always tell women, find a male ally, find a male ally in your company that does similar work to you and ask them to share their salary so that you do have some understanding of the pay bands. So long story short, I think it's a direction that we're not ready for quite frankly, at least the companies that I've seen and have talked to. Maria Colacurcio (26m 52s): But I really do believe that the first step to that is that we've got to have visibility to our own pay metrics in our company. So everyone knows what they're paid, but incredibly many employees don't know what grade, band or level they're in. And so for those that do, they don't know where in that band they sit. So what percent in range am I, how am I paid relative to that band? What are the limits to my movement within that band? So that's kind of the first form of transparency that's critical. Maria Colacurcio (27m 24s): And the second is, is how can I possibly know whether I'm paid fairly relative to others when I don't know what others get? So they're the ones now with the legislation, as it stands that has to provide competitor evidence, how are they supposed to do that if they don't know who their competitors are? So those are sort of the two buckets of, again, first steps that we have to take to, to get to the point where we can solve this Chad (27m 52s): As a sort of a profile of a corporate customer look like for you in terms of, you know, size, particular part of the region, is it tech or otherwise, and, and what, what category is is least represented by your company and what would you would love to have more of those kinds of companies in the Syndio, you know, portfolio? Maria Colacurcio (28m 15s): Good question. So our software is best utilized for companies that have 250 employees or more, and that's just due to the type of regressions we run. If your groups get too tiny, if you don't have enough employees, it gets a little bit more difficult to do the statistical analysis. But again, that 200, 250 size employee and up, those are great companies for us. So right now we have a pretty wide mix in professional services, hospitality, tech, insurance, healthcare, it's a pretty broad mix of verticals. Maria Colacurcio (28m 49s): I would say the one gap where we really want to see more progress is financial services. So banking, financial services, that industry. Yeah, Joel (29m 0s): Shocker, I wasn't expecting that. Maria Colacurcio (29m 3s): I know it's so surprising. I wish I could be counterintuitive and say, you know, something else, but that's the one where we'd love to see a little more progress. Awesome. Chad (29m 12s): Well, Maria, we really appreciate you coming on the show. Once again, very important for us not to mention our listeners to understand just how big equity is in their organizations. The biggest issue is they don't know how to get there. And as we saw Syndio, we thought that it would be good to talk about this issue first and foremost, but then also about the platform. So if our listeners want to find out more about you and about Syndio, where should they go? Maria Colacurcio (29m 42s): Yes. syndio.com. That's where you can go to find out more information on our company and what we're doing, and we'd love to have you. So anytime you have questions, feel free to reach out again. You can also provide my email out to your audience, which is maria@Synd.io. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Joel (30m 0s): Chad, we out. Chad (30m 0s): We out. 5 (30m 27s): Thank you for listen to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

People suck. Well, interacting with people in real life sucks, in addition to potentially being deadly, which is why everything in recruitment is going virtual. Zoom meetings, Slack convos, and virtual job fairs are all the rage, and RecruitVirtual thinks it has the chops to make a dent in this crowded space, bringing technology into the traditional brick-and-mortar career fair. Industry veteran Keith Ringer faces down the Firing Squad in this epic encounter, powered exclusively by PandoLogic. TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies find talent in the largest minority community in the world – people with disabilities. PandoLogic (0s): Damn programmatic is hot! Yeah, it is hot Dude, pass me a cold PBR. Would ya? Okay. Number one, I wasn't talking about the temperature and number two PBR is a shitty beer time to upgrade to an IPA. Okay. My bad. Guessing you were talking about Programmatic Job advertising being hot. Yeah. That shit is everywhere and all the kids are doing. I know man, but there's only one company that's been doing it since 2007. PandoLogic (30s): Damn 2007. Hey man, what wife were you on? In 2007? I was on number one. We don't talk about her. Focus, dude. I'm talking about PandoIQ from our friends at Pando Logic. PandoIQs, Programmatic recruitment advertising platform helps employers source talent faster and more efficiently than ever thanks to predictive algorithms, machine learning and AI. Buzzword, overdose alert. Yeah. Pando was on the cutting edge of Programmatic, while being deeply rooted in the recruitment industry. PandoLogic (1m 3s): PandoIQ provides an end-to-end Programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any waste spending to maximize the ROI on your recruitment spend. And their AI enabled algorithms use over 48 job attributes and more than 200 billion historical job performance data points to predict the optimal job advertising campaign. The machine does all that shit. PandoLogic (1m 34s): That shit sounds expensive! Think again. Cheesman PandoIQ provides an end to end job advertising solution that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any wasteful spending. Sold! How do I get started? Go to Pandalogic.com to request a demo and tell him Chad and Cheese sent you. Ooh. They have a chat bot too, that we can talk to. Oh, kill me now. Joel (2m 3s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESMAN 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. Oh shit. Another Monday Firing Squad this is not going to be good for our market testing today! Chad (-): Oh... Joel (2m 30s): What's up everybody. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I am your cohost Joel Cheesman as usual joined by my co-host Chad Sowash. Well hello! Happy, happy Monday, Chad and on Firing Squad this month we have Keith Ringer! Keith (2m 46s): Well hello Joel (2m 49s): From Recruit Virtual down in Florida. Beautiful Florida with COVID beaches everywhere. Keith, welcome to the show. Yeah. How's how's it going in Florida? I guess quick, quick, quote. COVID update from you. Keith (3m 0s): I mean, between the COVID and it's sun burn it's, you know, it's pretty harsh down here, right now? Joel (3m 5s): It's heaven. It's heaven. Keith (3m 6s): Yeah. Couldn't be much better. Joel (3m 8s): Good enough. Well, let's get a tweet about you before we dig into the company and the Q and A. Keith (3m 15s): Yeah. So my name's Keith Ringer and I've been developing all sorts of software for about 20 years and running startups. And for about the last 10 years, we've been mostly focused on software in the recruiting space for about the last five years. We've really been focused on job fairs and now virtual recruiting events. Joel (3m 36s): And have you ever been mistaken for key Keith Richards? Keith (3m 40s): No, but you know, there's country music guy that I got mistaken for in an airport, I'm not even sure who he is. And I think the person really wanted my autograph. Joel (3m 48s): Kenny Rogers. Maybe Kenny Rogers is a little bit pre-Botox you looked a little like Kenny Rogers, Keith (3m 56s): Might have been Kenny. Yeah. Joel (3m 57s): Not at all. Getting Chad, tell him what he's won. Chad (4m 1s): All right. You've won a LP of islands in the stream Keith. You have two minutes to pitch recruit virtual. At the end of two minutes, you will hear the bell. Ding, ding, ding, then Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start to ramble and we get bored, Joel's going to hit you with the crickets at the end of Q and A, you will receive one of three grades from both of us. That's number one, the big applause. Joel (4m 32s): That's what you want Keith. Chad (4m 33s): Get ready to rake the cash, big guy. Number two, golf clap means you need to tighten up your game. And we think you can probably do better last but never least. Joel (4m 47s): Oh shit. Chad (4m 48s): It's the firing squad. Pack up your RV and get the hell out of dodge before sundown Keith, because that varmint ain't welcome here. Joel (4m 56s): Key West welcomes you my friends. Keith (4m 57s): The RV's packed. Chad (5m 1s): That's Firing Squad. Are you ready to go? Keith (5m 3s): Let's do it Joel (5m 4s): In three, two, ding, ding, ding. Keith (5m 7s): All right. We all know that the pace of change for work has accelerated due to the pandemic. These unprecedented changes have created two problems. The first is the challenge of keeping candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers safely distanced during the recruiting process. The second is the challenge of effectively recruiting across an increasingly remote and geographically dispersed talent pool. The first problem is acute, right? We hope that it's short lived. The second problem is part of the long-term trend though, that the virus is accelerating. Keith (5m 37s): Commercial real estate leases are down 35 to 50% across most of US markets. Many employees have had a taste of working from home, and many of them are never coming back to the office. Technology has enabled a broad swath of the workforce to work remotely and often in a completely different geography than their employer or recruiter. Recruiters are seeking technology to keep them safe and to allow them to effectively locate and screen candidates anywhere. Virtual recruiting events provide a highly efficient and effective means of solving these problems. Like physical job fairs a good virtual recruiting event allows a recruiter to get to know candidates one-on-one, to surface the best candidates and advance them to the next steps in the hiring process. Keith (6m 15s): The founders of Recruit Virtual developed the original white label recruiting event, software jobfairsnearme.com, which was copied by Indeed. When we saw these new challenges for recruiters, we completely created a new software product from the ground up to power virtual recruiting events. We launched the software in June, two months ago, and we're fortunate enough to get early traction with a number of professional job fair organizers. Now, as we expand the software to power, all events, virtual and physical we're seeking partners to help us scale up rapidly, we're actively working with job boards, ATSs, rec tech companies, and media groups to form creative partnerships that allow us to reach customers more quickly. Keith (6m 53s): You can visit us at recruitvirtual.com. Bells (-): Ding, ding, ding. Chad (6m 57s): Oh, Damn. Joel (6m 58s): Nicely done my friend, very tight, very tight. Chad (7m 1s): Very nice. Let me go ahead and hit this. You mentioned that Indeed stole your shit, which they do that a lot by the way, to many companies. Buzz. But first off, I mean, there are companies like Indeed, Brazen, CareerEco in - I mean, they're there they're standing names in the space, but there are also other companies like Sponsor, Recruitology and Xor who we talked about earlier, who are jumping into the space as well. So this space is become incredibly noisy. Chad (7m 33s): How are you going to cut through that noise? Keith (7m 35s): Yeah, it's interesting. We'll just to clarify, I don't think Indeed "stole" anything. When we launched jobfairsnearme.com, it was five years ago, so I'm not talking about virtual recruiting event software. I'm talking about the idea of taking job fairs, Programmatic. So Programmatic distribution for the, for the event data schema, which we did five years ago and, and Indeed suddenly followed in that space. But you know, it is super crowded. It's super hot right now. Keith (8m 6s): And there's a reason for that, right. Recruiters need it. In fact, more recruiters didn't yet realize it needed the software. And so it is an arms race and you know, how are we going to make a difference? We're looking for the strongest of strategic partners, those ZipRecruiter, you know, Hello Taleo, Appcast. You guys listening? Are you out there? Joel (8m 29s): So Keith, speaking of Indeed looking at your LinkedIn profile, Jason Munez of indeed called you "one of the most entrepreneurial individuals I know." I don't know what favor he owed you in a past life, but high praise. Indeed. I'm curious, you're, you've sort of in this space, why this idea with the competition, with as crowded as it is, why was it this idea that really caught your, your fascination wanting to build something out? Keith (8m 57s): Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, we, weren't new to it. We've been in the space for a long time and it's sort of a lot of different things have led us to this. Developed social networking software almost 20 years ago, we launched an application, you know, a month after MySpace launched and that was super, super competitive and it was also really good to us. So we aren't afraid of competition. We aren't afraid to ... Chad (9m 21s): Did you just say "my space?" Keith (9m 22s): I just made a MySpace reference. Did you get that? Chad (9m 27s): He get's points for that by the way? Joel (9m 28s): Yeah, he does get points for that. He does get points for that. Keith (9m 30s): And then after 10 years of all different software, mostly social software, we got into the recruiting space and then five years after that, five years ago, we got into the job fair space. So this is really the culmination of what we've been working on right here. We have deep rich experience in this space. Joel (9m 45s): Fair enough. I love that you mentioned that the technology part, because one of the things that Chad and I talk about constantly on the show and then have people on is, is the topic of automation and having the robots and AI figure a lot of this stuff out. And it seems like your solution is, is highly automate or highly manual. So it's sort of a one-on-one face to face with a candidate. Number one, in terms of scale, that seems like a real challenge for companies to deal with. By the way, there's a lot more unemployed people today than there were four months ago, as well as how that's going to scale as well as I'm forgetting what I'm going to ask here. Joel (10m 24s): But yeah, let's talk about scale. How are you going to scale the business? Do you have automation in your plans? That was the second piece of my question. Keith (10m 30s): Absolutely. That's what we're working on right now is integrating more natural language processing so that we can automate a lot of the tasks within the event, the handoffs, things like that. There's a good degree of automation today, but I would say it's in the form of efficiency and not in the form of AI, right? Like Xor style, Paradox style. So that's what we're working on. We're coming to it from a different angle, right? If you look at an AI company they're backing into virtual recruiting events and in our case, we have virtual recruiting event software and we're backing into some AI like features to make it more efficient for recruiters. Joel (11m 7s): Is there a timeline for that? Keith (11m 8s): Yeah. I mean, we've got a timeline on everything, right? It's all in the product backlog. So right now we're focused on peer-to-peer video, right? So that our recruiter can hop one in one and do a video interview right in the spot from the event. And then after that a chat bot to enable a greater number of chats and a greater number of conversations with job seekers during an event. So, you know, I mean, this is going to air in what 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? We'll probably have it live by then. Chad (11m 38s): So how are you making it easier to scale today? So let's say for instance, you have two recruiters and there are a hundred people who are trying to get in. Is there a mass messaging piece of tech? Keith (11m 52s): I'm so glad you're asked, Chad (11m 54s): Yeah, what do you guys do to make it easy for recruiters? Because again, you know, that's the big, the big key today is scaling. If you just, if you just cut all your recruiters, now you're trying to get everybody back. You're working with a skeleton crew. How can that skeleton crew use your tech to get more people in? Keith (12m 13s): So this is exactly the problem that we've seen in almost all of our initial events. I think we've only had one that was properly staffed, since we've launched. And so when we're watching customers, you know, we immediately launched with a video broadcast feature that is a one to many. And so here's the typical recruiting event. One or two recruiters hop in, you know, it's mostly chat-based and all of a sudden they have 60 people in the queue and they can't get to them all. And they're trying to decide who they should ignore and who they should go after and what they should do next. Keith (12m 47s): And it's just chaos and they don't get the maximum benefit out of it. In our case, they can just hop right over into the video broadcast tab, turn that thing on and start speaking to the entire group. And anyone in the group can send them chats. Those chats appear in sort of a heads up display format, on the recruiter screen. And they can take questions right there. So, you know, obviously someone could send you like, Hey, what, what color underpants do you think I'm wearing? But you just ignore it, right? You go on and you answer the popular questions. So you can, you can actually have a one to many conversation with hundreds of job seekers at a time as a single recruiter in our software. Keith (13m 22s): It's pretty slick. It's my favorite feature actually. Chad (13m 25s): So in that case, are you taking all the data? Obviously it's all texts data in it. It looks like you guys already have a, an, an API, are you zipping that API over to CRM or an applicant tracking system? How does that work so that the company can keep that history of that candidate's conversations? Keith (13m 46s): Yeah, absolutely. We have an API or works in a few different languages. It's pretty slick and companies are using it in all different ways. You know, we have some job fair organizers in particular just want every shred of data in their CRM so that they can resell it or remarket to it and stuff like that. Then, you know, direct employers have different, you know, different opinions of how valuable that data is or when it becomes relevant to an applicant and things like that. But the API is flexible, so it can be integrated. However, the client best sees fit. Joel (14m 16s): Events marketed traditionally, you know, maybe a newspaper or some organization would market the event, get people into a physical location and then companies would be waiting. So some of the marketing was taken, taken care of. Do you guys expect companies to market their fares themselves? Do you guys help with that? Talk about that. Keith (14m 37s): Yeah, so we provide marketing as a service, but only to support the software, right? And it's because some organizations just can't proceed. They can't move forward unless someone is also doing the marketing for them, sort of putting it on a platter for them. And of course we had rich experience with event distribution and, and sort of Programmatic of events on the job fairs side, And we still have the asset. So it makes it easy for us to promote events and get traction, or I should say easier. Some events are tough and some events, or, you know, it's sometimes you get the occasional dog, but so the way we do it today is we, we just, you know, we're selling the software. Keith (15m 13s): And then if someone says, Hey, I really need the marketing. Can you do that for us? We have a couple of different options for them. One is pay for performance and one is flat rate and there are different reasons why a customer might choose one or the other. Like if they're in a really rural location, for instance, they might need radio, direct mail, outdoor, traditional marketing, right? In that case, they'd need a flat rate campaign. If they're in a place where they have strong digital reach or digital presence, we can use a pay for performance campaign. That's our preference, you know, is to go all high performance. Joel (15m 44s): And on the performance, is that based on number of people that attend number of people interviewed while the crowd is. Keith (15m 52s): Yeah, we just charge per registration. We know typically, you know, if we say, Oh, you know, here's how many registrations we think we can get. We, we generally know about how many of those are going to convert to attendance. And so we can give a really good idea of what someone's going to pay for an actual attendee. And then of course, you know, good recruiters know how many folks they have to interview to get a hire on average. So we back into how many people are actually going to get hired from the event when we set a budget, Joel (16m 18s): What does a typical customer look like today? And what do you think a typical customer might look like post COVID and will companies, in your opinion, still do virtual over sort of the brick and mortar job fairs? Keith (16m 32s): Yeah. So our typical customer today is actually a professional job fair organizer. They had the most acute need, right? Because when COVID hit all of a sudden, you know, you run job fairs and that's maybe 50 to a hundred percent of your business. You're kind of shut down. You need virtual recruiting event software. So we were able to get some quick wins with some high volume customers, partners in that way, and really put the software to the test out of the gate. That's been great for feedback and for influence over the new feature, set the product backlog and things like that. Keith (17m 5s): You know, now we've started working with some fortune five hundreds and going directly over the last month or so. And you know, I think that that is an increasing area of awareness. As you said, a lot of recruiters were sent home, you know, were furloughed as they come back in and realize, Hey, I don't want to get sick. I don't want to, you know, go to an event and see a hundred or 500 people next Tuesday. I need a safe way to do this. And I need a way to bring candidates in and make them feel safe. Joel (17m 33s): How about international growth plans? Keith (17m 36s): International growth plans. Yeah, but via a partner, you know, we're a hundred percent focused right now on product. And our second focus is actually not on sales. It's on strategic partnerships. We've got sales right now and that's keepin' us busy, but we're really focused on the partnerships. That'll help us grow faster than we can as you know, a small product company. So when we find the right partner, there's no doubt it's going to go international. I think it's just a matter of, you know, making the right deals, finding the right partners. Chad (18m 4s): So white labeled, API, many terms on your site is obviously focused on this type of strategy and that in that being your sales strategy through partnership, are you focusing on trying to engage with the applicant tracking systems in the CRMs? Because it seems like many of them are trying to get these, these types of technologies and, or touchpoints into their systems. Keith (18m 32s): Yeah. I mean the ATSs and CRMs, you know, there are other sort of rec tech companies in that space. And then obviously, I mean, there are a bunch of job boards to look Indeed. You know, the, the rumblings are, I don't know if you guys know it's that they're gonna make their virtual recruiting events, software free. That would be $0. Right? So everybody who's in this running their own events right now. Like I don't know what their business model is. Ours is to find somebody that has alternative means of income and really needs to compete with Indeed on free, awesome virtual recruiting events. Keith (19m 5s): Right? So we, I think we've got, we started making a list of strategic partners, but it was so long we just gave up. Now we're just talking to them. Chad (19m 13s): Gotcha. Anybody who is trying to compete for that number two spot with indeed would be a perfect target for partnership. Not to mention. I think that whenever I hear of a company, the size of indeed with the market share that they have, a monopoly comes into play. But tell me about, tell me, tell me about the job seeker experience in some of these virtual job fairs. I mean, you actually are, it's almost like they're trying to create a virtual reality system. Chad (19m 46s): It just seems like there's so much Joel (19m 49s): The website actually says it delights job seekers. How does it delight? Chad (19m 53s): How does it, yeah. Is it more of a, is it more of a light touch or is it more of that like virtual high touch kind of a thing that is that that comes with a lot of development. Keith (20m 4s): I mean, that's why we did it ground up, right? Because we wanted to get rid of all the anthropomorphism. We didn't want the Sims video game. We didn't want you to have to figure out how to navigate your avatar and walk around the job fair to the next booth. If you keep running into the table, like, that's crazy. Chad (20m 19s): Wait a minute, can I be a unicorn? Cause that's the thing. Keith (20m 23s): I'm sorry, unicorns already taken, but you can be unicorn poop. Super popular avatar right now. No, in all seriousness, the job seeker experience, we just tried to focus on a completely mobile experience. Right? We just tried to make it so that the job seeker, here's the job seeker. It's like, Oh, I forgot to register. I forgot I registered for this job fair. Oh, the job fairs in minutes, I got a flat tire, kids screaming. I still need a job. Right. This is, I think this is the life of the average, average job seeker secret. Keith (20m 55s): Maybe not every day, but on the day of the job fair. It's always bad on the day of the job fair. Chad (21m 0s): Yeah. Keith (21m 1s): And so for those folks, right, we just made it completely mobile. You can register for the event. You can attend the event. There's no password, right? We don't have passwords. We use passcodes. It's all super modern. You're on your phone. It doesn't matter what phone you're on. You can do everything. You can apply to a job with a click. So it's just frictionless for the job seeker. We're getting amazing feedback from job seekers. You know, they're all half drunk on the couch in the morning at 8:30 AM getting jobs! Like we make... Chad (21m 28s): Amen. Yeah. Okay. So what about the employer side? The, the employers generally have to do the heavy lifting in this case because they have to, when you're getting into a new system, you have to put all this data in there. How easy is it for them to jump into your platform to start using it? Keith (21m 46s): Yeah, it's pretty lightweight. The one thing that we have done, even though we're, you know, just a fraction of a little baby company at this point is we really focused on customer service, on client experience. So we do have a small team that basically onboards customers and does most of their work for them. And so we do try to just make it effortless in the future. Obviously we want, we want to automate that as much as possible so that we aren't spending that time. But I would say, you know, the average recruiter probably spends it depends, but you know, I would say that they probably spend less than an hour or so getting ready for the event. Keith (22m 21s): And then we do a preflight. We go through and we make sure that everything's like, we'd want it to be if it were our employer brand our baby. So we just put it on a platter for them, right? Because the job of the recruiter is not to learn new software. That's a disaster waiting to happen. The job of the recruiter is just to do their thing and be empowered. Joel (22m 39s): Let's talk about money, Keith, number one, pricing breakdown. Cause you don't have anything on the site, what kind of, what kind of client typically expect to pay and then also money in terms of investment. It looks like you guys haven't taken any money. You're bootstrapping this thing. Are there plans to raise money as well as, as use that money to grow into new markets? Keith (22m 60s): Yeah, absolutely. So on the client side we do have a variety of, of subscription options available, but what we're running right now, that's been really popular is the pandemic summer special $1,500 flat rate for the event: All you can eat! Unlimited job seekers, unlimited recruiters, unlimited video streams, you name it, money's no object, right? We just really want to encourage trial because we know that folks will like the platform and come back. Joel (23m 28s): And then if they want you to market it for them, that's an additional fee. Keith (23m 32s): Yeah. Then they set the budget, they set the budget. There's a small minimum, but they set the budget for whatever they want to do. And we've run events where we didn't do marketing at all and we've run big five digit marketing budgets to, for call centers and folks like that that need to hire 300 people next week. You know? So it's a wide range. And then as far as investment or how we see gross going, my motivation is more around strategic partnership then, you know, like VC or something like that. And here's why this is not, you guys pointed out that this is not unique technology. Keith (24m 5s): This is a pretty crowded space. And even if we throw out the avatar based systems and the really dated systems that aren't going to be contenders from a performance software perspective, there's still a half a dozen folks that, you know, but I don't think it's winner take all either, right? Just like, you know, it's not going to be a winner, take all game. So our focus is really on finding the right strategic partner. It may be a single partner, or it may be a, you know, a couple of partners in a few different areas. Cause obviously there are media companies that could benefit from this product and running their own job fairs. Keith (24m 37s): There are job boards that could benefit from getting a competitive edge, you know, against Indeed there are other rec tech and ATS companies that are obviously actively looking for this type of plugin for their systems. So you know that, I think that's where our growth comes from and I'm not hung up on a particular number. I'm hung up on finding the right partner that sees the same vision that we see, which is to grow this into a huge product line and make it profitable. Bells (-): Ding, Ding, Ding. Joel (25m 1s): Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, Keith, that's the bell meaning you get to face the Firing Squad. Keith (25m 8s): Yeah. Let me, let me fire up the RV real quick 'cause. Chad (25m 11s): Just in case. Joel (25m 15s): Alright Chad, do you want to go first? Do you want me to do this? Chad (25m 19s): Nope, I am ready. Okay. Keith dude, this is one big noisy, everybody trying to bust into space! But there's a reason for that. I think that there's a validation point behind it, right? And COVID mainly because COVID has thrust us, meaning everyone forward into looking at these technologies and we're, we're getting there faster than we were before. Even as you'd said before the live events, those companies, they need an option. Chad (25m 53s): They need to be able to go somewhere. And what do we think? Keith (25m 56s): I think personally, they're going to go that way maybe for not for, not all of their events, but for many of their events. I think your mindset from a business standpoint is right on! Build something that's easy, make integration light, and then partner with everyone, especially job fair companies. And then also start targeting those organizations who do need to compete with the brands like Indeed. You can be the software inside of an ATS. Keith (26m 28s): You can be the software inside of a job fair company. You can be the software inside of pretty much anybody that's out there who wants to be able to engage in this way, which is the reason why I'm giving you a big applause. Wow, thank you Chad. Joel (26m 41s): Look at you big boy. Very nice. All right, don't get too comfortable. It's my turn. Okay. My, how the world has changed in five months, five months ago, I would have said, Oh, we're talking to a virtual recruitment company, like no thanks. Of course the world has changed thanks to COVID. And these businesses suddenly seem, you know, legitimate. We're seeing a lot of companies, advanced technology launch companies, pivot to businesses that they had, that didn't work so much. Joel (27m 16s): I do. However, think it's incredibly crowded and I think more than anything to me where the puck is going, and this is automation, I have real issues with the scalability of something like this, of having multiple screens coming up, people having interview all these video interviews. I think that becomes a manual nightmare and companies won't want to do that versus either a chat bot experience or video automation. Joel (27m 48s): I think the only time that companies will want to do a face to face, even if it's on a screen will be after they've been vetted, pre-screened, scheduled and basically are good to go for the job. There won't be a lot of interviewing done with that. So I agree that's where the future's going. You mentioned a lot about you're a job fair company. That's pivoting or moving into more automated, automated tools to move into the future. Joel (28m 18s): So I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you'll eventually get to a point where this'll be scalable. It will be more automated and companies will find it more amenable to use your service than they would, you know, fill in any blank with whatever chat bot you want to in this space. I love that you have some core competencies in the recruitment business and employment. We don't see that every day and it's always a big plus. You did also mention my space, which of course is mega mega pluses and maybe virtual reality was in there at some point, I don't know. Joel (28m 50s): So for me, I think the, the, the, the opportunity is there, the promise is there. I just, I think you need to deliver on the automated, the automation services. And I think you're good to go. So for me, I can't give it applause, but certainly not going to give it the guns. I'm going with the golf clap. Yeah. You're on your way. Just, just tweak this thing a little bit and I think you'll be good. Keith (29m 14s): Great feedback. Thank you, Joel. Chad (29m 15s): Yeah. So you don't have to get out by sundown, that's the good news Keith (29m 19s): Bought myself sometime. Chad (29m 22s): Well thanks, we really appreciate you coming on Keith, you know, it's always a risk, but we love to be able to raise the voices of startups and, and at least, you know, get you on. And, and hopefully you'll, you'll get some partners out of this, maybe some sales? Who knows? Keith (29m 37s): Oh, it's a blast. Thanks so much for having me guys. I really appreciate it. Joel (29m 41s): Stay safe there in Florida for God's sakes. Chad (29m 43s): Put on that suntan lotion. Joel (29m 45s): Chad, another Firing Squad in the books. Chad (29m 48s): That's right Joel (29m 49s): We out. Chad (-): We out. Outro (29m 52s): 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.

It's the Father's Day weekend edition of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. On this week's episode, CareerBuilder gets slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit (yes, the dumpster fire rages on), Microsoft wasn't the only one who wanted GitHub and we find out what millennials really want and who's giving it to them. Enjoy, and visit our sponsors, America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX. They make the dream a reality. Transcription Joel: Who's your daddy? Welcome to the Father's Day Weekend edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman, flying solo for another week while Chad sips wine coolers in Barcelona. On this week's episode, CareerBuilder gets bitch slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit. Yes, the dumpster fire rages on. Microsoft wasn't the only one who wanted GitHub, and we find out what millennials really want and who's giving it to them. Stay tuned. I'll be right back after a word from Sovren. Joel: Well, as I record this, the World Cup is on television, so I promise this will be as abbreviated a podcast as I can possibly make it, because I, just like you, really enjoy the World Cup and want to get back to that as soon as possible. Well, let's get to our shout-outs real quick. Number one, this is sort of the team Cheese shout-out show. Benji Goodrich, a corporate recruiter, fan of the show ... Hi, Benji. ... puts on Twitter, "Amazing how much leaner and efficient the Chad Cheese Podcast was today without Chad. Amen. Enjoyed the shorter format." Benji, I could not agree with you more. Chad clearly is a drag on the show, and, you know, whatever. What can I do? It's the Chad and Cheese Show. I can't fire him. Joel: David [Dunesky 00:02:37] gets my second shout-out, Monster employee, loyal listener to the show. Quote, in a message to me, "Great solo podcast. Chad who?" David, again, could not agree more. Appreciate the note, and if you'd like a shout-out for next week's show, which, if my calendar's correct, is my last solo show until Chad gets back, put out #ChadCheese, how much you hate Chad and love me, and I'll give you some love in the shout-out part of the show. Joel: Lastly, I wanted to just say hey, if you're listening on your iPhone, your Android device, we'd love a review. Whether you love us, hate us, whatever, getting feedback from you is our oxygen. We sit here, and we talk into a microphone. It's hard to know if we're sort of hitting the right chords with everyone, so a review is a way of really understanding that we are doing a good job. We'd appreciate that. Joel: On with the show. It was a relatively quiet week. In fact, I was actually concerned that I would have enough news to talk about on the show, and then Wednesday night happened, and a report out of Crain's Chicago Business, fine publication out of the Windy City, had the headline, "Lawsuit alleges sex discrimination was 'the norm' at CareerBuilder." What happened here? A woman name Lori McInerney ... Hopefully, I said that correctly. Actually, we know Lori. She's done a webinar for the Chad and Cheese Show Podcast in the past, so we do know Lori, and it was ... I was kind of surprised to see her name, because I knew her, and that's rarely the case when you see lawsuits, but Lori is suing CareerBuilder, outlining at least three episodes where there was some significant sexual harassment. Joel: In one, she talks about a sales guy sort of aggressingly approaching her, proceeded to follow her to her hotel room where the event was held. This salesperson said, "You know you want it. I'm coming to your room." He showed up at her door, and then he said, "What the fuck are you going to do? I'm not leaving." Lori was saved, apparently, according to the lawsuit, by a customer walking by, and the aggressor left, concerned that he would be found out. There's another episode in the lawsuit that outlines a married guy at CareerBuilder coming up to Lori, asking if she would ever fuck a married guy like him. From that point, she walked away from the conversation. There's also some alleged misconduct by some executives at the company, namely Mary Delaney, who is, I think, the background check screening executive. She was widely known, apparently, by this lawsuit, as someone who was not very nice to women, particularly to Lori. She sort of disrespected her appearance, what she wore. She just wasn't very nice, and she didn't sort of show the same behavior towards the males in her department or who she managed. Joel: John Smith is named, who's sort of the chief sales executive. You might remember John from his El Chapo commentary on the podcast from a few weeks back in regards to CareerBuilder and all the stuff that's going on there. If you haven't heard some of our CareerBuilder podcasts, I encourage you to go back in the archives. That's some pretty good stuff. She also names Rosemary Haefner, who I talked about last week. Rosemary was apparently fired from the company after sort of confronting someone in the ... a manager in the technical department. Apparently, the consensus in the company is if you spoke out against sort of the old boys' behavior, you would be fired. A quote from Rosemary in a meeting, according to the lawsuit, was, "Well, you know. That's Mary being Mary," in terms of Lori expressing difficulties with working with Mary Delaney. After she did that, Lori was fired, I believe three weeks after the fact, according to the lawsuit. When she was laid off, she was told that quite a few marketing folks were laid off, as well. Lori found out after the fact that she was the only one that was laid off. Joel: Lori's looking for seven figures in this lawsuit, so she's not skimping on the damages. She is filing individually, although they are open to this being a class action lawsuit if more ... other female coworkers are willing to come up. In fact, in messaging Lori after the news broke, she made me aware that at least 10 other women had approached her about having a similar experience at CareerBuilder and that she was forwarding them to her lawyer, so there's sort of a consensus, I guess, that this will become a class action lawsuit against CareerBuilder and could end up costing them dearly as well as probably costing a few people their jobs. Everyone is pretty much named in the lawsuit. No one is spared, so if you were ... If you're interested in all that, the Crain's story has that. The lawsuit is also on Scribd, which is scribd.com, I believe. I also wrote a story for ERE that should be coming out relatively soon. Joel: This was a bad week for a lot of people in Chicago, or at CareerBuilder. There's also a #metoocb hashtag to sort of garner awareness on social media, according to Lori when I talked to her. Basically, this story probably is not over. CareerBuilder is not commenting, which is pretty common with companies who are facing lawsuits, so they're staying pretty mum, but I expect to hear more, particular on the case, the class action lawsuit stuff as soon as that happens, which it looks like it will be, so stay tuned to the podcast. We'll probably be talking about this lawsuit in further detail in the weeks to come. Joel: Let's get to ... Let's switch gears in a big way. Let's go to ... LinkedIn was in the news. Business Insider had a pretty lengthy story about the company this week. In fact, it was behind their paid firewall that I had access to. Basically, it was a really long story in regards to how LinkedIn is sort of getting away from the jobs component. Not getting away from it, but they're focusing very heavily on content, really becoming almost like Facebook and other social medias, social media platforms that are so popular. They have ... They're partnered with big name media companies. They're bringing in Forbes, Bloomberg, The New York Times in to develop strategies for sharing content on the platform, which is now actually 562 million users, which is growing pretty quickly. Joel: Meanwhile, video, they continue to be really focused on, as well. LinkedIn talks about how video is, by far, its fastest growing ad format as well as its fastest growing sort of generated, user-generated content, and it's averaging 30% view through rates, which is really good. If you're currently not advertising on LinkedIn from a video perspective, I would encourage you to look at doing that. They've also launched a new ad feature, which is carousel ads, which you've probably seen on Facebook, where you kind of swipe through different images, maybe talking about different features. They're introducing that, which should be a greater level of engagement for their users, so if you are advertising on LinkedIn in terms of their visual ads, think about a different ad carousel, where you might have one that talks about the company at large, maybe when it was founded. Maybe the next is more culture related. Maybe more is more, if you've been awarded stuff, if you're a Glassdoor most favored employer. These are things you can kind of get to within one ad and get more engagement that way. Joel: LinkedIn, ironically, by focusing on more content and more things around users, they are getting a better ... They're a better job platform, the greater usage there is from a content perspective. LinkedIn essentially wants to be the water cooler for professional networks. They want to be where ... the things that people talk about at the water cooler or at the office, that they go to for content from thought leaders, from the Elon Musks of the world, and by doing that, by getting more engagement, people going there outside of looking for a job, they actually benefit the jobs component. I give them a big thumbs up in really focusing on the content piece, the engagement, and I can tell you that, in terms of my own usage, and granted, I am targeting a recruiter/employer who are on LinkedIn for the most part, but I can tell you that over the last year, my social media shares, my posts, are getting a lot more engagement on LinkedIn than they do on Facebook. Joel: I would say a year plus ago, Facebook was probably more engagement than LinkedIn. Twitter continues to be just a crapshoot in terms of engagement. I get very little from Twitter or Instagram, and I'm really not using Snap, in case you were curious. Let's take a quick break. When we get back, we'll talk about the other companies that were in the bidding war for GitHub, which we talked about last week, which was acquired by Microsoft. Obviously, they weren't the only ones, and some news came out in regards to who the other suitors were, so stay tuned. Joel: Quick refresher for those that don't remember or know. Microsoft bought GitHub last week for 7.5 billion, billion, billion dollars. This was big news for a lot of reasons, primarily for Microsoft's cloud computing getting more programmers sort of in the Microsoft family or getting them acclimated to Microsoft technologies and cloud computer, et cetera, but for our purposes, the recruiting side of it was huge in that Microsoft basically bought ... Microsoft basically owns the top two professional networking sites in the world. They own LinkedIn, which you know, but now they own GitHub, which is probably easily the number one place for sourcers, I would say, to find software engineers, developers, programmers, et cetera. It's a place where those folks go to share code, get ideas, collaborate on whatnot, on stuff. They have 28 million users. A lot of those people aren't on LinkedIn, because they don't care about LinkedIn. Joel: In terms of a sourcing, recruiting perspective, those two sites were huge, and it was obvious that other sites were in the running to buy GitHub. I mean, there's no way to have a property like that, and you just knew that other sites were out there. CNBC had a story this week outlining how Google, not surprising, was a big bidder for GitHub. The story also outlines that Amazon was interested. Some Chinese companies. Tencent, apparently, was interested in the platform, as well. Now, what ... The deciding factor of why GitHub went with Microsoft was two-fold. One was just the people. Satya Nadella, which is the CEO at Microsoft, he's been there for a few years. He's apparently a really cool, nice guy, and he gets tech. Microsoft is obviously very interested in acquisitions, how acquisitions fit into their business model, which was the second reason why GitHub really chose Microsoft, is that the vision there of how GitHub would be able to exist independently, for the most part. Joel: I think that looking at how Microsoft had treated LinkedIn for the past two years, that LinkedIn is pretty much their own entity. They obviously tap into resources and expertise that exist within Microsoft. They're integrating their product with Microsoft products, and I think GitHub CEO and ownership looked at that and said, "Hey, if we can still be GitHub, if we can get integrated with the biggest platform in the world, that's a really good thing, and if this company's really focused on acquisitions, this is where we need to be." Google, on the other hand, doesn't make many acquisitions. They tend to think they can do it themselves, and particularly, in the employment side, they're building Hire pretty much on their own dime. They're building ... I mean, they tap into their own search engine for the job search component, and their job search API is pretty much homegrown. Joel: Google's DNA is not to acquire, and I would say with the acquisitions that they've made in the past, they're not that great. I mean, they don't have a tremendous track record of having happy founders. Foursquare comes to mind. Excuse me. Foursquare comes to mind, which they basically killed, and some others. Amazon was in there. Salesforce, in the cloud computing realm, you see them making a lot of acquisitions. I wouldn't be surprised if they were sort of looking around GitHub, as well, but yeah. Google was in there. Google lost. I think, ultimately, losing the social media war is going to hurt Google. I mean, they lost to Facebook on the social side. They lost LinkedIn to Microsoft, and now they've lost the programming network or software engineer network to Microsoft, as well. I think that will eventually hurt Google, but time will tell to see how the chips fall on that. Joel: Shifting gears to millennials on our next story. Of course, you know millennials are my favorite thing in the entire world. Indeed had a survey, I guess, of the top employers for millennials ... I will read those off in a second. ... as well as sort of what millennials are looking for in an employer. None of those will shock anyone who is a millennial or knows millennials or is recruiting millennials, but I will also briefly talk about those, as well, because I got a lot of commentary on this when I shared it on social media. Your top 10 list, in my best David Letterman top 10 format, from 10 to one goes like this. Number 10, in terms of millennial friendliness, is the Dow Chemical Company. Number nine is Ernst & Young. Number eight is Capital One. By the way, I'm going out to visit Capital One in a couple weeks, so excited about that. We can talk about millennials, I guess. Joel: Number seven is Pfizer. Number six is Apple. Number five is Southwest Airlines. Number four is Delta. Number three is Kaiser Permanente. Number two, Discover Financial Services, and number one, Northrop Grumman. Not much surprise there. The only one in the top 25 that was sort of employment related would be Upwork. Upwork, if you don't know, is where you hire freelancers, basically from everything from development of apps to writing to sales. It's something that I use, personally, but they were the only one that was sort of loosely associated with employment that was listed. Congratulations to those companies. Interesting to see two airlines and not more tech companies, which was actually something that the story talked about, is that they're not just looking to work for tech companies. They were looking for a lot of different things, which include ... Number one is growth opportunities. No shocker. The story revealed that 59% of millennials say opportunities to learn and grow are extremely important. The percentages were much lower with boomers and Xers. Joel: Number two here is make an impact. The study ... Deloitte found that 83% of millennials think that a company's success should be measured beyond just their financial performance, so yeah. Do good in the world if you want to recruit millennials. Number three, support flexibility. Time flexibility, maternity leave, working hours, working virtually, et cetera are all important to millennials. The next is health and family. Prioritizing family is important to millennials. Companies that made the top 10 go well beyond the basics in those areas in terms of benefits, et cetera. Lastly, which is one that we've talked about on the show quite a bit, is tuition reimbursement. Paying for college is very important to younger folks, obviously, and the study found that only 3% of employers currently offer some sort of tuition reimbursement. However, almost every company on the top 10 list offers some sort of tuition help. If you want to recruit those millennials, help them with their education paybacks. Joel: Let's shift gears now, before we take a break, to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter, as you know, is sort of that outlier job site. You have the big three, Facebook, Microsoft LinkedIn, GitHub, and then Google. Then, you have Glassdoor, Indeed, and then you have ZipRecruiter sort of out there doing its own thing, fighting the good fight. They're in the news this week in terms of launching an AI component to their solution. It's a new feature launching in the next couple of weeks called Candidate Calibration. That's a mouthful. Basically, employers can rate potential matches for a job, so it's sort of a thumb up, thumbs down kind of a thing. As they look at applicants, they can rate ones positively or negatively or not rate them at all. As they rate them, ZipRecruiter will surface the job postings that have been sort of approved positively to similar candidates in their database. Joel: Basically, if someone has skills that I really like, ZipRecruiter will show that job to other candidates that have similar skills and abilities so that your job gets a little more greater, a little greater exposure. Candidate Calibration drove a 50% increase in the number of employers who found a candidate they liked enough to invite them to apply. ZipRecruiter said, in a release ... The CEO basically said, "Hey, our first iteration was sort of a shotgun blast strategy." People would post jobs. The jobs would go everywhere, every job site, forum, social network they could possibly get it out to, and some of their clients just got too much stuff, and they didn't ... They wanted a more curated experience, so that led ZipRecruiter to launch this new feature, so there you go. If you're using Zip and you experience this, have any comment about it, like it, don't like it, feel free to visit chadcheese.com and let us know your experience. Well, let's take a quick break from JobAdX, and we'll talk about some acquisitions and the fact that Idiocracy is actually coming to fruition. Joel: I had an email cross my desk this week, and it was RelishCareers acquires TransparentCareer, and when I read it, I thought, "Is that like a pickle relish job board site? I had never heard of RelishCareers or TransparentCareer, but as we shotgun through some acquisitions here quickly, those two acquired each other. I don't know either one of them. Apparently, it's sort of ... One is a culture engagement tool or site. The other is sort of college career placement help. The terms were not disclosed, which usually, in my experience, means that it was a fire sale. Somebody got on the cheap. Somebody was getting out of business. Investors were leaving, and these guys picked this site up. Good for them. Hope that works out. Joel: Additionally, in the acquisition news, TrueBlue, which owns PeopleScout, I believe, over in the UK, bought TMP Holdings, which has nothing to do with the TMP that most of us think about, particularly in the states, TMP Worldwide. There was a little bit of gray area in terms of what in the world ... who was buying what, and people didn't know what TMP and Holdings was, but anyway. In fact, I got a comment from an expert saying, like, "That's really shitty that they did that. They sort of made it look like TMP got acquired," although TMP just ... The TMP we know, as you know, was acquired recently by a private equity firm here in the states. Anyway, TrueBlue, way to go. Again, the Madonna song is what I think of when I hear TrueBlue. I'm dating myself again, but anyway. Joel: Lastly in the acquisition space, probably much more worthy of talking about, is Workday, who everyone on the podcast knows acquired Adaptive Insights recently for $1.6 billion, which is a huge, for our industry, a huge acquisition. It didn't get a ton of press, but that happened ... Adaptive Insights, for those of you who don't know, which I actually did not know, is a financial planning platform, so yeah. Apparently, they'll be integrating some of that into Workday, which makes perfect sense to me. Adaptive Insights was also set for an IPO before Workday came in and grabbed them up, so there's clearly a long-standing strategy with Workday to get these guys, and they did succeed in doing that, so good for them. Joel: Lastly on the show, a study came out just recently that we are getting dumber. It's true. Idiocracy, the great movie from about 10 years ago, is coming true inch by inch, and if you haven't watched the movie Idiocracy, I encourage you to do so. I think the guy that did Beavis and Butt-Head and Silicon Valley wrote the movie. Basically, the idea is that we get dumb, and people who are educated don't reproduce, and the people who are really dumb reproduce way too much. At the end of the day, we get people who are named after brands like Starbucks and Adidas, and the smart people just eventually evolve out of the system. Joel: Anyway, this study consisted of 730,000 IQ tests over the last 40 years or so, 45 years, and they found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation. This is a reversal of the so-called Flynn effect. I don't know what that is, but it's apparently IQ is seen as rising ... IQ was seen as rising during the first part of the 20th Century. The Flynn effect says we should be getting smarter. Apparently, we're getting dumber. The decline may be due to environmental factors, but the story says researchers couldn't find consistent trends among families, and so they discounted things like parental education, family size, immigration increases, genetics, et cetera. Essentially, the more likely culprit, according to the story, is our Cheeto eating, binge watching, video game playing, never reading lifestyles, so there you have it. It makes sense to me. Joel: Kids, go read a book, or if you're me, go have a pint and enjoy the World Cup. For those of you dads out there ... I am one, as well. ... happy Father's Day. Hope you get what you want. Hope you get a break if you want one, and dad's matter, guys, so call your dad. Hug him. Love him. We out. Stella Cheesman: Hi. This is Stella Cheesman. Thanks for listening to the Cheese and Chad Podcast, or at least that's what I call it. Anyway, make sure you subscribe on iTunes, that silly Android phone thingy, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to give buckets of money to our sponsors. Otherwise, I may be forced to take that coal mining job I saw on Monster.com. We out. #Careerbuilder

Men and women have different brains. That's the case author Kate Lanz, author of "All the Brains in the Business: The Engendered Brain in the 21st Century Organisation (The Neuroscience of Business)," says. Let's discuss. The boys and their meathead melons do their best to understand all the knowledge this brilliant lady is droppin' on this must-listen episode. Enjoy this Sovren powered podcast! 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. Intro (29s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (48s): Aw, yeah! Chad (51s): Let's go! Alright Cheeseman. How you doing man? Joel (53s): Oh man. The world is awesome! Chad (57s): Lies! Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody. We're starting out this podcast with pure lies and with Kate Lanz, I say Lanz because she's proper! Joel (1m 9s): Lanz. The Queen's English. Chad (1m 12s): She is the founder And CEO of Mindbridge and author of the book. Give me a second. I don't want to screw this up... Joel (1m 18s): Take a deep breath. Chad (1m 19s): ... All the Brains in the Business, got to take a second breath, The Engendered Brain in the 21st Century Organization the neuroscience of business. That's right, kids, neuroscience on Chad and Cheese. Check that box. Joel (1m 34s): I feel like book titles are the new keyword stuffing for SEO. It's like, let's make that title as long as possible. Chad (1m 41s): I love it, but okay, so Kate, that's a little bit about you, give us the deep, dark long walk on the beach in Twitter form. About how about you give us a little bit more about you. 1 (1m 51s): She's a Sagittarius that enjoys cricket and a cold ale. Kate (1m 57s): I'm actually, I'm actually a Virgo, but the ale bit is true. So I spent the first part of my career bootlegging round emerging markets and Guinness was one of the many products that I had the great privilege of not only selling, but also enjoying. Joel (2m 16s): Selling Whoa, this, this interview took a different turn. Chad (2m 19s): Love it. So right out of the gate, it's no longer a man's world. So why are we asking women to think like men, the Engendered Brain in the 21st century? I think that's the connection that you're trying to make, right? Kate (2m 33s): Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Very often and it is still the case despite lots of really, really well intentioned and well executed initiatives for diversity and inclusion, still too often, women are kind of expected to be the best men that they can be at work and whilst there are lots of things that our brains have in common. There are some important things that they have in difference and those differences don't get seen as well as they could. And that's what I, that's why I wanted to really bring the neuroscience of brain sex difference to the party. Joel (3m 6s): We'll get into the work thing in a second. When I, when I heard we were bringing on the show, I was really curious about your take on the timeliness of the coronavirus and COVID-19 and why countries with women leaders, New Zealand, Germany, come to mind ... Chad (-): are kickin ass! Joel (3m 24s): ... are doing so much better than say, I don't know your leader in our leader. Kate (3m 30s): Yeah. Right now, of course, you know, there are many factors that the impact that said, I, I don't think it's purely coincidence that the way some of those women are leading, many of those women are leading is having a good effect. I think that women's brains and bodies are more attuned for collaboration and cooperation and less inclined to kind of silo and compete and grandstand. That that's being very stereotypical so forgive me for that. Kate (4m 3s): But I, I do think there's something profound. Joel (4m 6s): That's ok, we do that on occasion. Chad (4m 8s): Quite often! Kate (4m 11s): But there is, there is a difference in the approach that I think has worked better. And the truth of the matter is the coronavirus we can only solve, if we do it together, it's a global pandemic. It's affecting all of us. It's not going to go away anytime soon. So becoming siloed and competing and, and shutting each other out, is just simply not the way forward. And a lot of the women leaders demonstrating good collaboration Joel (4m 40s): And, and just like women leading countries, at least in this crisis is a good thing. Are there case studies that you know of with women CEOs that have handled, you know, damage control much better than maybe some of their male counterparts, any success stories of women CEOs out there? Kate (4m 57s): Yeah. I mean, there were, there were some wonderful women CEOs in both the States and in the UK, I'm not sure I'd call out anything in terms of sort of crisis management, per se. There are organizations where the organizational design is beginning to be less hierarchical and more organic and emergent with teams that, that form, and then un-form and come together around the tasks. So Driving Agility and GSK for example, a very successful female CEO, Accenture in the States recently, a very powerful, impressive female CEO. Kate (5m 35s): And I do just, I just think that, well, I actually think it's important that we come, that things happen in partnership. It's not like men's brains or women's brains are better, but they are designed to compliment each other and too much of what goes on in organizational cultures, suits brains that at the more male Brit and the brain sex spectrum, you know, and by the way, the sex of your brain isn't necessarily the same as the sex of your body. So it's quite a sort of subtle, sophisticated thing. Chad (6m 8s): Yeah. Well, okay. So quick question, because from my standpoint, as, as I dove into this and tried to think hard about it, and man, my brain hurts, it seems we really haven't evolved our behaviors from when we were actually surviving in the wild. We only just put on suits and sat in offices. We really focus on that survivability kind of instinct versus being able to really evolve as human beings. Kate (6m 34s): Yeah. Bingo, that's it. You said it, you know, our brains really haven't changed much since, since we left the caves and here we all are. And in a very modern, sophisticated environment, which, you know, by the way, our prefrontal cortex has created, but the brain still functions with the ancient limbic brain jumping in first and reacting emotionally to stuff before we can start thinking about it. And that's what gets us into a whole lot of trouble. Chad (7m 0s): Okay. So you talk about the emotional piece and there is always the stereotype that women are just too emotional to lead. Why is that something that is put out there and what is actually behind it, for the good or bad? Kate (7m 14s): Yeah. Women are more typically on average tuned in emotionally, they have higher levels of oxytocin in their brains and bodies, which is the bonding hormone. The way they notice the world. So they, they, they see micro-expressions in people's faces and they, and they pick up other people's emotions. Chad (7m 33s): They pay attention. Kate (7m 35s): Well, the different type of attention. It's not that, yeah, it's a different type of attention. And that's the thing. Women take their power on average, differently from the way men do you know that that's important to know and to leverage that difference because it has a huge impact on performance as we're seeing, as you say, with some of the female leaders in the world at the moment, Chad (7m 56s): Talking about taking power, talk about that, because I mean, that, that to me, being in a male dominated brain, which is the T the two idiots on this podcast are obviously we know what that means. How does, how does, how does a female take her power differently? And I mean, this is, this is incredibly awesome to understand, not just for working with females, but I also have a wife, right. So this is great relationships, Joel (8m 24s): Help us Kate. Chad (8m 25s): please, Kate Kate (8m 27s): With great pleasure. Yeah. So if I really summarize it in very simple binary terms, women tend to take their power collaboratively through relationship and men take that tend to take their power competitively through, through hierarchy that isn't sort of massively oversimplifying because of course, you know, we all do both of those things, but, but if I boil it right down, neurobiologically that, that tends to be the way that we've evolved. Kate (8m 58s): And very often the relational side of the equation gets is, is largely unseen in terms of what gets measured, what gets rewarded and, and many big corporate cultures. And that's missing such an important trick really. And the point that Paul and I are trying to make in the book is that if you let all the brains in the business, come and do their thing their way, then you get the best out of them. And if you're trying to force the brain to be something that it's not, it's a bit like driving with a handbrake on, and you're just never going to get top performance. Joel (9m 34s): Okay. You mentioned, you mentioned culture and there's obviously corporate culture, but I'm curious how just general culture plays into it. I mean, here in the States, a woman from New York city isn't necessarily the same culturally as a woman from Wisconsin, a woman in England also isn't the same as a woman, generally in the US. Does culture in general play into this, in this formula, or not? Kate (9m 56s): More in the sense of being feeling seen and feeling welcome. So organizational cultures are defined by the way, things go on around here, type things. So the way people run their meetings, the things that get rewarded and so forth and what I'm arguing for, but our brains have basically got two dominant modes. We can either be in survive, where we're slightly on the defensive, we're protecting ourselves. We're producing the neurochemistry, which is adrenaline and cortisol. Kate (10m 25s): And we were not really open to learning and being effective as a result. Or we can have our brains in thrive, which is when you're in flow, stuff comes easily, you think, well, you get your energy levels just stay high. And organizational cultures that recognize how to get individual brains into thrive are the ones that win. And they are boy, do they win? And there's a lot of research to support that. Kate (10m 56s): And so it's all about that. So if I had a, you know, a woman in my team from New York, who's very different culturally, from somebody in England, I would just be looking to understand what's that individual brain, what motivates it? How can I get that person's brain into thrive? And that will be different for each individual. Joel (11m 17s): It seems like, the 20th century initially was all about sort of women adapting to the male environment, right? Like Chad and I both remember the shoulder pads of the eighties, right. And women sort of trying to be like, men is the pendulum swinging the other way where men are starting to try to think like women. And at some point, do we come together because of that pendulum swing? What's your take on sort of that, that dynamic? Chad (11m 44s): That was a knock on me for doing yoga. Kate (11m 46s): Good for you. Joel (11m 49s): Hot yoga chat. Only the hot yoga. Kate (11m 53s): Yeah. That's a lovely question. Joel (11m 55s): And lovely. Kate (11m 58s): Yeah. Lovely question. Basically. Yes. If I look at the younger, if I look at my kids, two, two, two sons, you know, young men, young adults and their girlfriends, that generation is so cool. So many of the issues that my generation had to front into in business are just, they're just going away. What we need though, is for corporate culture to catch up with it. It's still designed in the cold, the old, slightly militaristic hierarchical model that, that needs in a chuck it in the bin and rewriting with all the brains equal numbers of men and women and within those equal numbers, really diverse brains to, to, to replot what do we focus on? Kate (12m 39s): What are we reward and how do we really enable people to do their best? Chad (12m 45s): So we, we talk a lot on the show about equality and in the book, it actually talks about the power of gender difference, not gender equality. So you see that's the secret source or the secret sauce for success. Can you tell us about that, about the difference between gender difference in gender equality? Kate (13m 8s): Yeah. So I profoundly believe that that we should all have equal opportunities. The way that we get to those opportunities is different. So men's and women's brains on average will approach the task differently. And it's really enabling the difference to not just be at the party, but be invited to dance. And so whilst we have a lot in common between our brains, there are some important differences that if you know what they are, you can leverage them. And I do this with my clients all the time who understand this stuff and they use it, they use it in negotiations. Kate (13m 44s): They use it in conflict situations... Chad (-): Good cop/bad cop. Kate (13m 48s): ... understanding, sorry, not necessarily. Yeah. And it's not necessarily it, but it's like a different way of paying attention in the world. And so when you pick up what other people are noticing that you maybe aren't noticing, Chad (14m 1s): right. Kate (14m 2s): .. you can use it as opposed to act in ignorance of it. And everybody wins. Everybody wins. Chad (14m 11s): I'm pretty much trying to talk about the power of design within a corporation and how they actually work, not the same, but different to get to the, to the same task completed. Yes, Kate (14m 24s): Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So it's allowing the, so, so for example, there's some really interesting research out of the University of Pennsylvania, which looks at the way the neural connectivity works in the brain and in the male brain, the connectivity is running farm or inside each hemisphere front to back. In the female brain the activity is predominantly operating between hemispheres. And so in the male brain, neural patterning, you tend to get the risk response, which is input in from the five sentences to coordinated action, kind of, you know, get on with it, fix it fast. Kate (14m 60s): With the female brain, the way the attention works is more emergent and iterative. And so women might think more broadly, might take longer to look at a task and come up with solutions to it, but they'll come up with different solutions to it. And you get both of those brain patternings working successfully together, and you will really problem solve very effectively and very creatively. And, and that's the trick is like understanding where the different shows up and leveraging it. Joel (15m 28s): We talked quite a bit on the show about how COVID-19 is accelerating so many things, right? Whether it's technology or culture, et cetera. And I'm curious on your take in a work from home world, does this slow down the minds coming together? Or am I missing something? Because my take on it is if we're not in the same room together, connecting in that way is going to be tougher than it is if we're at the at home desk. Kate (15m 56s): Right? Yeah. Cool question. One of my dominant observations, working with clients over these last some months is that actually more brains are coming to the party because people are not in those big buildings in London or New York or wherever, where there is a kind of way of going on and you know, a dominant pecking order or whatever. And so I'm hearing from a lot of clients that voices that they haven't heard so much from in the big buildings in London are speaking up more online and that people are feeling safe and having the time and the space. Kate (16m 32s): So I think there's a huge amount from, from working from home that is actually far more brain-friendly than the way we were kind of going on before. Joel (16m 40s): Interesting. Interesting. So there's an old saying that, you know, change happens, you know, one funeral at a time, meaning that when, when the old die out, the new ideas come into play. Chad (-): The old white dudes. Joel (16m 50s): So this is my own, this is my okay. Boomer question of the day. How does, how does age fit into, into your calculus? Kate (16m 59s): Yeah, that's another, another cool question. I mean, like I say, I look at my kids' generation and some of the stuff I was grappling with as a, as a young woman in business, they will just not tolerate it quite frankly, they'll just leave, leave the company will never apply in the first instance, if they don't really sense that this place is really open to diversity. So that's cool. So I do think there's an age element to it. And I do think that, you know, some of the old, the old leaders will be, it'll be good to say bye-bye. Kate (17m 30s): That said also a lot of the guys I work with who are in positions of power are very committed to making the workplaces that young people come into genuinely equal in terms of valuing the difference. So I do think there's a really strong argument for partnering with the existing power structures in an intelligent, thoughtful way where that's possible, obviously. Kate (18m 2s): And there were some notable examples where that's not the case, but so Chad (18m 8s): So I read a Kinsey study that talked about $8 billion Us being spent on DNI training every year. That's a lot of money. Kate (18m 20s): It is a lot money. Chad (18m 21s): The big question is, does it work? Kate (18m 23s): I think that those efforts have done and they have been worthy efforts. I think they have raised awareness, but it's, it's been glacially slow. And you know, my thoughts on that because a lot of the power structures in place don't want to relinquish their position. So I think there's a real moment in history now to accelerate massively and really create gender balance across organizational structures, political structures, and just, just do it just let's just change the game and let's change it now because future generations will depend upon it. Chad (19m 2s): So the $8 billion to me and tell me what you think $8 billion to me seems like charity. They're giving it to charity. There's this great, wonderful, inspiration and motivation that happens out of it, but there are no outcomes. Or there a little outcomes. Take a look at the number of females that are CEOs in the fortune 500 today compared to just five years ago for goodness, eight, $8 billion. If we spent that money on actually creating programs to pipeline females or individuals, more diverse individuals into those positions, I would think that, that would would help. Chad (19m 39s): But what it sounds like you're saying is the people that are in power now, like the way it is. So this is really just kind of like throwing money out there, saying, look at what we did. We're doing this great training and we're done. Is that what you're feeling? This isn't something that is really meant to drive outcomes? Kate (19m 59s): I think most of the initiatives that I've seen a genuinely well-intended, they're very well-intended, but it's like, you know, turning these big, slow battleships around. And so I would say awareness has been raised, changes is happening, but it's just too slow. And of course there are pockets, and I think they are pockets where it's a tick box exercise, and nothing new has really, really happened. And I think we need to be far more radical. And, you know, if ever there was a moment that demand demanding medical change, it's now. Chad (20m 32s): Yeah, right. Joel (20m 33s): We have yet in this country to elect a woman president, there is a consensus that a woman may never be president and a few lifetimes. And this is more of a general curiosity question for me. So I hope you'll humor me on this, but as someone who lived in a country, and I assume you remember Margaret Thatcher? Joe Biden, the democratic competitor has already committed to selecting a woman as his vice president so I want you to put on your political consultant hat for a second. Joel (21m 5s): And what would you tell Joe Biden in terms of what to look for in a female vice president in order to win a general election? Kate (21m 13s): Yeah, love it. And, you know, good for Joe Biden. And it would have been just criminal not to not to have done that. What should he look for? He should look for somebody who is very much their own person. They know themselves well, and they're confident and happy with who they are. Somebody who is, has got a track record and, and challenging the status quo and somebody who is not trying to be the best man that they can be, but has got demonstrable evidence of being proud and delivering results, doing things as, as she would do it. Chad (21m 52s): Well Kate I would like to say, thank you for joining us. I have one last question for a couple of white dudes who want to, To help in this, in this, this effort. What can, what can we do? Kate (22m 10s): Thank you. That's a fantastic question. First of all, please do. And I read the book and really understand some of the neurobiological differences because once you know what they are and where they are, you, you can have conversations and notice things in a really different, but subtle way. And then I would really encourage you to partner with the female talent that you see around you and in your lives. Generally not, you know, not just the work environment, but everywhere and lean in and enable those in partnership. Kate (22m 45s): Those women's brains to thrive and, and you will see results and you will see people flourishing, but they will do it differently from the way you guys would. And it's when the partnership really works. It's fantastic. It's a wonderful thing. And it just on that note, one of the young men I worked with in a financial services company, he emailed one of the women he worked with after one of the sessions we ran and he just said, you know what? I owe you an apology. I was always kind of slightly discounting the kind of ideas you brought to the conversation because they just didn't jive somehow with me. Kate (23m 21s): Right? So now I can see that you, that you pay attention differently. You notice different things. And actually I'm the one who was missing a trick. So my apologies, I will reach out and ask you what you think. And it's that kind of response, and really listening carefully to what that response is, and, and partnering to bring all the brains in the business to the party and let them dance. Chad (23m 45s): Excellent. Joel (23m 46s): Kate Lanz, everybody, founder and CEO of mind bridge Kate for our listeners who want to know more about you, your books and all that good stuff, where would you send them? Kate (23m 55s): Cool. Well, for the book, please look on Amazon. All the Brains in the Business, you'll find it and you can order it in a hard copy or soft copy on Amazon. So please read and enjoy. I didn't write the book to sell lots of books. I'm certainly not going to be retiring on any proceeds. I wrote it because it, Joel (24m 14s): I don't know. You just interviewed with Chad and Cheese, Kate. Kate (24m 18s): Well, good. I wrote it because it just felt really important to share the knowledge and the insights and I'm on LinkedIn. So Kate Lanz, that's LANZ on LinkedIn, and I'm very happy to connect and answer questions. People have. I want to create a big conversation about this stuff. Joel (24m 39s): Awesome. And that's also minebridge.co.uk, correct? Correct. Yes. All right, Chad, I'm going to go listen to some women. We out. We out. Outro (24m 50s): Thank you for listen to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

In this last installment of Voices with Joveo's founder and CEO Kshitij Jain (aka KJ) Chad & Cheese press discussion around programmatic use for diversity hiring and programmatic success stories. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Voices Intro (0s): Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine, smooth and confident. While on the other hand, the Chad and Cheese podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, y'all now listening to Voices of podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential Voices within the recruitment industry. Voices Intro (31s): Try not to fuck it up, boys. Chad (33s): Welcome back. We're continuing the conversation with a veteran of the recruitment tech industry. Kshitij Jain aka KJ, founder and CEO of Programmatic platform Joveo. Enjoy. We're in an age in, in a society right now, where especially in the US inequity is, is all around us and companies are talking about diversity, but they're really not doing it right. Chad (1m 16s): They're talking about it, but there's not a lot of action. Is there something that they can do, programmatically that can help them target more diverse pools of candidates so that they can find almost like, kind of like a partial easy button to get more diverse candidates into their jobs so that they can have better diverse applicants and hopefully fingers crossed they can get more of those applicants in as candidates and also hires. Chad (2m 6s): Is something that programmatic can do to help? Because good God, we need it. Kshitij (2m 12s): You know what I really truly care about? We are just taking it to the next level. So, and it's my personal case, right? I came wide-eyed American dream to this country in 2001, an Indian immigrant, right? An Asian immigrant. And I know that the minorities exist. I know that there is a glass ceiling, there's a constant challenge to move up the chain, right? It happens like, come on, like happens with so many of us around us, right, women, right? There's a glass ceiling. It is a known thing. And what we can do to do better across different races and even gender for that matter is. Kshitij (2m 48s): I actually kind of give you a small little example, our worldwide head of sales, Mike Warner. He actually was one of the pioneers in the ad tech industry. He had built two companies, sold both of them for a couple of hundred million dollars. One got acquired by Yahoo back in those days. And back in the day, early and late 2000s, they're talking about behavioral targeting. They're not intent marketing, back in that time, guys, we don't even think about intent marketing observed behavior, behavioral targeting, as of today. Kshitij (3m 19s): And these guys have been there, done that build one of the most successful companies and had some two couple of amazing exits and, and you know, he and I were on a call with a customer, and just to your point, diversity. It's like, Hey, I know the CEO of perhaps the largest ad tech company out there, or the head of sales and, you know, we know enact tech that we can actually pinpoint accuracy, reach out to diverse candidate and display right out in front of them. We can guarantee that we do that, right. Kshitij (3m 49s): And we can put the ad in front of them. But the issue here is if you leave it on someone else to do that, coming back to the push strategy, right? You leave it on someone else to do it. You don't really know whether you are actually putting the right job in front of the right person. The right person could be defined by diverse candidate as well. At least not companies can truly control. I want to make sure 20% of my ads go to diverse candidates, in front of them, 30%, 40%, whatever that number is. We can make that happen and then he told me that, I said, I just took it for granted, Mike, but I'm glad that you're saying it because you've done it. Kshitij (4m 22s): And you know, it's really interesting. They have done it in attic while for a different reason altogether, like a certain product will appeal to a woman more than to a man, right? They know how to target people. And the targeting is so advanced. You can't even imagine that. And I think we all should care about it. I think as a corporate, if I was running a talent acquisition, I will actually set us out a budget and say, this budget only goes to that player, which can guarantee me that this will go to diversity. I'm not going to give it to someone who is, I do it all, but I don't really know how much it goes to diversity. Joel (4m 58s): Talk about the, the pandemic quickly and the impact on, on not just your business, but sort of technology as a whole. Most of the popular sentiment seems to be that when we come back and into the business as usual, if you will, that there'll be a lot more automation. A recent article said that 40% of the jobs that are lost won't won't return. I'm assuming that, that's going to be good for programmatic solutions, right? Companies who bring back fewer recruiters, fewer people to post jobs, there'll be more efficiencies around that. Joel (5m 29s): Agree? Disagree? Are you seeing anything now that would, would indicate how programmatic is going to be adopted coming out of the pandemic and how do you think it will fare with other technologies like yours? Kshitij (5m 40s): I totally agree. And I would say I would go beyond that in saying that, people have taken this time to take a step back and say, am I doing it right? Right. What does it really matter? Right. We are asking these questions at every level that you're talking about and even on the workplace and this a time when people have understood that I can't waste money. These are valuable resources. If I save a little bit, I've saved jobs out there, right. If I spend a million dollars less in marketing than perhaps I will have to let 15 less people go right. For that matter, right? I'm just trying to, and I'm not in the math, but I think it's about that much. Kshitij (6m 14s): So, so where people have started to come to thinking about is, can I now therefore do something that will bring efficiencies and optimizations? Are my recruiting team or sourcing teams do what they're supposed to do, right? The kudos have to recruit Amman, engage that candidate, talk to the candidate, work with hiring managers and not spend that much time sourcing. So there's a lot of automation that I've seen started. People started talking about it. They started wanting to see the visibility to a hire and asking questions of how would you build the intelligence loop, which will, of course, Joveo and Programmatic is nothing but activations. Kshitij (6m 52s): I see we have three pillars, right? If you were to actually ask me and where we fit in this ecosystem and why we will as a, as a programmatic industry and not Joveo standalone and who, so it does a better job of it and maybe have a bigger market share? But the way I see it as, and again, this is Joveo is we are looking at it. Is there three pieces to the programmatic world? One is we call it the intelligence. The second is activation, and third is insights. And it's not something that we're creating new. This has been existing in that tech world for a long time. Kshitij (7m 23s): So, so now the platform we talk about the programmatic platform, it's just one of the three pillars, the trading platform where you do middle piece activation, right? So once you activate the suit engine, you want to get his insights. How did I perform? Did go well or not? You understand? There's a very big difference between diagnostic and prescriptive. We have always been a industry or as professionals, all this diagnostic let's diagnose the results. Come on. That that wall is gone. Let's do prescriptive analytics. KJ (7m 53s): That's tell you that based on the activation results, the insight should tell you that if you did this, this would happen. And then the system will take that back into the first pillar called intelligence and deploy that. So I guess everybody's starting to see that connection now, much more clearly than it was earlier. And therefore the industry is going to do much better now. Joel (8m 12s): Great. That we agree with that. And, and, and, and you've sort of laid out what that looks like. I want to give you a chance to sort of, sort of a plug plug, Joveo, and give us an example of a case study for a customer where they saw these kinds of efficiencies and what it meant for their business in terms of bottom line and actual bodies, you know, building the business. KJ (8m 34s): Sure. So I got so many case studies. I'd like you to pick an example of a ... Joel (8m 40s): So many, so many successful customers. Chad (8m 43s): I love that, that's awesome! Joel (-): Hell yeah! KJ (8m 47s): Actually we do less, but we do it better than anybody else, and that' kind of the philosophy. So if you really deeply care about the customer, we can go into deep with that customer, understand the problems and then try to solve. And if you solve it for that customer, you actually solve it for the industry or perhaps all your customer base. And one thing I would say, is giving an example of a customer. I like to take the example of a customer, which is not even North America, because it's easier here, right? To understand the context of a job in the English language and to do that mapping, I'll take you a little bit further out in Germany. KJ (9m 23s): It's a much difficult, much harder market. It is not an ecosystem that is similar to ours. And, you know, we love this one of the largest brands out in Europe, in our space. And then, and this is where we kind of deployed a lot of intelligence, right. And by the way, just so you know, it's not like we have a lot of data in Germany, right? We have some, right, we have some data in France and in terms of London in the UK, because we have customers out there, but unlike the U S we don't have a deep, deep data. And so, and I'm kind of just use that example, that if you have a good seed data that you have, and the seed data typically should happen at the beginning of the cycle of a user or customer interaction, right? KJ (10m 4s): You ask for historical data to give me, show me how you performed. And that, that is the intelligence that comes first. But if you do not have the seed data, then what you do is you, you do the activation. And we did activation through mojo platform and we saw some results coming in. And we kept on deploying this and after about seven or eight cycles, I would say, and this is a fast moving industry with cycles happen within 15 days time. So end to end cycle, you can see in how the results are performing and what are the outcome for that? Some people can define, apply as outcomes. Some people can define a hire as an outcome. KJ (10m 35s): Some people can define the lifetime value as an outcome, which is, which is very important in the gig economy, right? So that lifetime value is really the metric that they care most about. So what our outcome, they defined, we were able to bring down the cost, just the cost part of it, because they care about the cost. And that was the first part of the KPIs that we had by about 50%, half. They really, truly care about the time to fill. And that was also reduced dramatically. And that gives them a key advantage, that gives them a key differentiator versus the competitors in the marketplace, right? KJ (11m 9s): They're also competing with someone else the faster they hire, the better they will be able to get the work done then because everybody's competing for the same pie. And that became for that large, large company, a very key differentiator. I'll give you an example of, you know, a delivery company out there. They were able to do the same example, right? Reducing the cost to apply from, let's say a 16 to $20 range to a $4 cost. This is one aspect of it, right? If I'm a hiring manager, I will not care as much about the cost as my care about the speed at which I need to get the people. KJ (11m 43s): And we were able to bring the highest cycle from 30 days to about 15 days, just the relevance, right in these are relevance. You get lesser people, you get, and these are benefits and advantages that come, but the companies have to invest in Programmatic, right? Programmatic is not a magic wand that you put in one day and something will come out tomorrow. You invest not just time, but invest in data. You work and then you see the magic happen of like the other customer I talked about as I talked about 85% conversions, right? KJ (12m 13s): Once you know, who is the right person for a job. And, and certainly the world is different. I see a world where companies will take back control of the data and say, I'm using it judiciously. So that's the, that's the example I can take. So the delivery driver example was a very North America example. It is, it is delivery, right? It is very, very important. I can actually take historical data of a company and we can as an I as, and this is something I taught literally three years back, and we should be able to spit out and say, this is how you will change. KJ (12m 46s): This is how your world will change. We did this. And that is what we should be able to do that do not get into the diagnostic phase, but go into the prescriptive phase, give us your intelligence. We'll tell you how we'll activate it to give you the insights that will demonstrate to you that improvement has happened both on a cost to hire and time to hire, or like the cost and the time to fill rates as they talk about. And both are very important. And if you go to our mission statement, we say deliver the most relevant hires in the shortest time. So relevant and time that two key levers that we focus on. Chad (13m 22s): Excellent KJ. Hey Man, we appreciate you taking time with us. And again, going through all of the stockers in an awesome conversation, and we were very happy and honored to have you on the show. Thanks so much. Now, if people and people are looking to find out a little bit more about Programmatic and Joveo, where would you send them? KJ (13m 46s): I would say that please reach out to go to our website and fill out a form. My phone number is updated on the site, my email is there. All our sales team members information is another website. Please feel free to reach out to anybody. And it doesn't matter of hours we'll, we'll get back to you. We'd love to share with you how you could do it better. Chad (14m 8s): Excellent. Joel (14m 8s): joveo.com Joveo everybody. Chad (14m 11s): That's right Baby. Thanks so much. And we out Joel (-): We out. Voices Outro (14m 18s): Look for more episodes of Voices, this chat and cheese podcast series devoted the stories and opinions of industry leaders. Subscribe on iTunes, Google podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show for more visit chadcheese.com.

Launches, layoffs, and Joblists. This week's episode has it all. Throw in Google launching job search app, at-work porn, and you've basically got Christmas in August. You're welcome. Oh, almost forgot Hiretual got money and Mya's reorganizing. Enjoy another solid effort by the boys, as always, powered by Sovren, JobAdx, and Jobvite. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Intro (2s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (34s): Unemployment claims rocket 1 million in the US again, so who else is ready for the weekend? What's up boys and girls?! Welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast, AKA the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel "checkered flag" Cheesman. Chad (40s): And this is Chad "I'm not throwing away my shot" Sowash. Joel (44s): And on this week show Google, launches Kormo who? Hiretual makes it rain and your workplace might be driving workers to porn strokes. And we're not talking about the good kind of strokes and lawsuits. Chad (-): Huh?! Joel (58s): Get your sticky fingers off that sticky keyboard. We'll be right back after paying off our whiskey habit. JobAdX (1m 6s): Nope. Na! Not for me. All these jobs look the same next. This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking as they scroll past your jobs, just have heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them. Face it we live in a world that is all about content, content, content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions? Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company, culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. JobAdX (2m 18s): Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team, help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing. joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX. Bell (-): Ding, Ding, Ding Joel (2m 34s): What's up Chad? Chad (2m 37s): Oh, it's been one of those weeks, been gorgeous! I got a chance to mow the lawn. I can't wait to, after we're done with this, I'm going to go mow the rest of it, but you are mowing less lawn. Joel (2m 49s): You just know how to have fun on a Thursday, mowing the yard. That and then straight to my hammock. Now you have an electric mower. Is there like a big battery that you've plugged into that thing? Do you plug the whole into the wall? How does that work? Chad (3m 1s): No, it's battery, you swap the battery out. So it comes with two batteries and it is, I would never go back to gas again. It's just, there's no reason. It is a much lighter mower, you don't need like a self-propelled because it's so much lighter. It's quiet and you don't have to worry about all of the maintenance. I mean, I like messing around with little Briggs and Stratton engines and whatnot, but I don't have time. I don't have time to fuck with that shit anymore. So, I mean, it's just easy to pop in a battery. Chad (3m 33s): You go do your thing and then you pop it into the charger and good to go. All right. So yeah, we, we put in a concrete patio extension in our backyard. We have a deck, but we wanted, we wanted more space to, you know, cook shit. And there's a tree where we can sit under the shade and put a little a fire pit, addition in there somewhere. And which is perfect timing because as many know the Indy 500 in our areas is happening. It'll be very surreal because there will be no one in the stands. Joel (4m 4s): Yes, but the actual race is happening. So in our parts of the world, it's a nice time to pull out the, the big screen outside, get the PBR in the cooler, get some grill marks on some burgers and have a good time, so I'm looking forward to this weekend. Chad (4m 7s): Amen. The 500 usually happens in May, but obviously COVID fucked that all up. They thought they were going to be able to get people in the stands and a social distancing type of a way. And they were smart. They were really smart to pull back on that. So it's not, it's going to be great because we'll be able to obviously watch it on TV. Joel (4m 38s): We're lovingly calling it the empty Annapolis 500 this year. But yes, it is normally blacked out here locally, so we can actually watch it this year, which is cool. Chad (4m 40s): Excellent. Excellent. So shout outs, as we're talking about sports, let's stick with the sports theme. The Washington football team, that's what they're currently called. Joel (4m 38s): Yeah? Chad (4m 48s): They hired Jason Wright to become the first black president in NFL history. Clapping (-): Applause Chad (4m 48s): Wright won't be involved in the football side of the business, like his predecessor was rather, he's going to focus only on the business side, including operations, finance, sales, and marketing and Coach Ron Rivera obviously is going to do the rest of it. He's going to report directly to Mr. Chad (5m 31s): Dan Schneider. Wright was a, was a running back at Northwestern. He played for the Forty-Niners, the Falcons, the Brownies and Cards before going to get his MBA and, and taking some time over at McKinsey. So that's a, that's a big win for NFL football. And it's about damn time. Joel (5m 52s): Yeah. Big, big win. And so brave for an industry that's like 80 plus black actually have an executive in the C suite. So brave, so brave Washington way to go! Shout out to our buddy Tim Hawk. I don't know if he's been on the show, maybe a surprise guest appearance somewhere, at a conference, but he is now at NAS the ad agency that was, I believed, acquired fairly recently. So they're actually hiring people. What the hell is going on with that? Tim, my only advice to you stay as far away from Matt Adam as possible. Chad (6m 27s): Matt will help you with your naps though. So that might be, if you want to increase your nap game or get better at your nap game, Matt can help you with that. A big shout out to Nia Smith, who was the new CEO of Task Rabbit. She is formally from Uber Eats, Airbnb and now, you know, obviously Task Rabbit gets that shoot. She was Head of Operations for host services at Airbnb, and then director with the position she just left and Head of Courier Operations over at Uber. Chad (7m 5s): None of those positions are easy people. Joel (7m 10s): And she is replacing a black woman who we talked about, who got the job in 2013, Stacy Brown-Philpot. So we were wondering who would replace her and it's another woman, so shout out to Task Rabbit. I've actually, I've actually used Task Rabbit recently for the first time I mentioned my grill, we got a new one and I looked at the direction. Fuck no. I said, if they can put together an Ikea account, they can put together a grill. So I called up Zach, message Zach. And he came over in an hour, about an hour and a half put together my grill. Joel (7m 44s): So I'm a believer in Task Rabbit. If you haven't used it, check it out. Chad (7m 47s): Oh, that's awesome. Fucking awesome. A big, big shout out to Jerome Ternynck and Smart Recruiters. They've just Joel (8m 2s): Manifesto of sorts. Chad (8m 3s): Is it a Manifesto? Yeah. So Smart Recruiters recognizes the existence of white privilege and the impact of systemic racism against black indigenous and people of color. So therefore they've published their plan to become an anti-racist force in the recruiting market. So big kudos to Jerome and team for laying that out. Now here's the big thing we're going to do exactly what you want us and need us to do Jerome. We're going to hold your feet to the fire. Chad (8m 33s): And the very first thing is a, it was interesting because last week somebody passed over a staff photo and they've got a pretty large staff and it is pretty Caucasian. So I think job one Jerome is let's go ahead and get some balance in that staff first and foremost, let's do that. Joel (8m 54s): Amen to that. And speaking of balance, I have to make a huge apology. Abby Cheeseman, no relation whatsoever. Maybe down the line her husband and I are are, are related somewhere, but we forgot her birthday. So dag dagnabbit, Abby, we're sorry. Happy Virthday to you. Keep trucking there in Chicago where you are. And I hope you had a few pieces of cake and a few shots of whiskey. Chad (9m 22s): I will own some of that because obviously I missed it as well, but I think you should own more because you share the same last name. So Joel (9m 32s): no question. Chad (9m 33s): My last shout out goes to Patrick Shehan the CEO of Circa. He was just on the podcast earlier this week, much like we just were talking about Jerome. We pressed him hard on being transparent with staff stats and hiring on the diversity side of the house. If you're going to do this, and this is a big focus, let's say for companies in the diversity space. If you are not actually being transparent with your staff composition and diversity numbers, then why the fuck should anybody use you? Chad (10m 10s): And Patrick said, yes, we will accept that challenge. So we'll definitely keep his feet to the fire much like the rest of the industry that say that we are balanced and we're non-biased and blah, blah, blah. We, I get that. I appreciate that. Now. Fucking show me, let's do this. Joel (10m 31s): And speaking of feet to the fire, a quick shout out to Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor who was arrested today for some scam that he perpetrated apparently to make some money off of poor souls that wanted to build a wall in Mexico. Steve, I hope you enjoy your cell and it's warm and cozy. Last shout out for me real quick, our buddies at Camino announced a big partnership this weekend with the American Advertising Federation, we're talking almost 50,000 strong advertising professionals that can be on the Camino platform. Joel (11m 7s): Ryan Gill, Cindy Songne, and team. Congratulations. Good on you. Chad (11m 12s): Mike Germano. I mean, we should get those guys on the podcast because I know their whole space is just blowing up with another million plus this week added to the unemployment rolls. These are the types of platforms that we really need to highlight and focus on because I believe they are the platforms of the future. Joel (11m 36s): So this, this just came across my message, message wire. Shout out to my sister who is now engaged. Chad (11m 45s): Oh, nice. Yeah where's the applause! Joel (11m 49s): My sister does not listen to the show, but Holy shit, I just got a picture of a big ring that came across my IM images. So in addition to that, shout out to my wife who's celebrating another trip around the sun, on Monday. Wow. What a way? That way, the way to close shout outs for me. Chad (12m 9s): Very nice. Very nice. Okay. We're going to jump into events real quick. So August 27th people at 2:00 PM Eastern, it's a Recruitment Hackers event put on by Talk Push our friends over at Talk ush. I'm going to be a part of it's around Optimizing Recruitment for the Remote Workforce. I'm going to have my buddy, Jen Terry-Tharp's going to be there. And yeah, it should be, it should be a blast. So if you want to check it out, you want to register, go to recruitmenthackers.events to register, not 'com, not.org, not.gov, it's recruitmenthackers.events, check it out. Joel (12m 50s): Nice and events for me Wednesday of this week stood in the Jobvite Summer to Evolve Series. I was on a with Jeff Rohrs, their CMO. Chad (13m 1s): How'd that go? Joel (13m 2s): Joe Pulizzi. It was, it was three Clevelanders talking about the Brown's season mostly and whether or not there would be seasoned, but, but we also found time to talk about content marketing, how to sort of marry marketing with TA. It was a nice extension of the stuff that we've talked about at the Cult gathering and our Cult Brand series. So yeah, if, if you miss that, go to jobvite.com. I don't know if it's online yet, but it certainly should be soon if it's not, they can just check out yours until mine goes off. Chad (13m 35s): Yeah. summertoevolve.com. Mine's up there. Joel's is up there. Did you talk about podcasts at all? That's content. Joel (13m 44s): It was on our list. We didn't even get to it. We spent so much time on like Chad (13m 49s): Should be number one! Joel (13m 51s): I know, I know it's, you know, there's this thing called just texts that people are still into. And we talked about that for 30-45 mins. Chad (13m 58s): Yeah, I get it. I get it. Excellent! Topics. Joel (14m 3s): Google in the news. Chad (-): Again? Joel (14m 6s): I didn't even know this is going on. So we know Google for Jobs. We know the search API, we know Hire was shut down last year, but there's, they're still doing it. So they announced this week, Google launches an app called Kormo, that's KORMO in India. So they're expanding their recruitment app called Kormo Jobs in the second largest country in the world. This was previously available in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Korma Jobs helps users find and apply for entry level roles. Google previously offered a regional job search feature known as job spot within Google Pay. But that is now being wined down in favor of Kormo. So the question, should we be anticipating Kormo in a local market near you with a Google jobs application that that is going to put the fear in Indeed for sure. Chad (14m 59s): Yeah. It's interesting. I don't know that India will have the same antitrust issues that the US or Europe will. Joel (15m 8s): Yeah. Chad (15m 8s): So they originally had a jobs function in Google pay in India and India is, is very mobile country, as I'm sure most listeners know. And they're trying to help those individuals pay with more than just cash. So that's where Google Pay was big. And then they, they had jobs in it as well. Apparently the jobs function was going so well. They broke it out into Kormo and then a couple of companies, one names, Amato, and Denzo who are online delivery services for groceries and medicines and so on and so forth. Chad (15m 45s): They posted more than 2 million verified jobs on the platform, like right out of the gate. So, you know, I think this is going to be a good play for Google in markets that aren't as regulated, let's say as the United States, it looks like a pretty cool app. You can discover like it, it recommends jobs, you can apply for jobs, at least some of the, the easier applications through the app. But I don't, I just personally, I don't see that coming here. Joel (16m 15s): Probably agree with that. I think the Google for Jobs is going to continue to be their, their platform here in the States and probably much of the, of the world. I think that it, it definitely showcases the fact that Google gives a shit about this stuff. Chad (16m 28s): They do. Joel (16m 29s): And I think in anything, anything more important is sort of, you know, just conversation. We continue to talk about Facebook, Google still sort of tinkering in this space and trying to get it right. You just can't deny the kind of numbers and strength and resources that those companies have. So you gotta keep your eye on this. So yeah, I think it's just, it just showcases that Google gives a shit and we got to keep watching what they're doing. Chad (16m 52s): I think this is another shot. And in the article actually referred to it at LinkedIn. We talked about last week with Google Cards and Google Cards Joel (-): and that was India too. Chad (17m 3s): and perspectively becoming a LinkedIn factor in India. Now applying this whole jobs, this Kormo jobs piece. And this is, I mean, it's an interesting dichotomy of how they're coming at the same problem instead of LinkedIn being a social or a social professional network with jobs in it, Google's coming at the social network more as a search functionality. Hey, you want to be found, you want people to be able to find you use the largest search engine in the world to be able to do so Google, yada, yada, and then over here, you're used to using this whole pay app. Chad (17m 42s): Well guess what? You'd love the jobs piece. We can do more with this new, this new jobs app. It'll be interesting to see where it goes next, Bangladesh, India. What countries will allow this to happen is really, I think that the biggest question. Joel (17m 56s): Yeah. And could it evolve into a payment structure. Where you go to work on the app, you get paid on the app, your card is updated through all that stuff. So yeah. Chad (-): That's a good point. Joel (18m 7s): Yeah. So do all these streams start to cross and then cats and dogs living together in India, I guess why I have to find out, but it certainly is interesting, for sure. Chad (18m 16s): Well, the delivery structure like in India is amazing. I've actually read stories about how their lunches are delivered every day. How medicines, how groceries, I mean, how everything is delivered through some of these different apps and then being able to ensure that that individual is paid after the delivery is confirmed. I like your idea where the whole pay could actually come through Google and once again, owning that entire process. Joel (18m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. Cause I mean, banking is different in other parts of the world and if Google could kind of own that whole system, that's okay. That's pretty smart. Chad (18m 52s): Yeah. I'm going to outflank Facebook that's for sure. Joel (18m 56s): Fuck you Facebook. Anyway. Hiretual in the news this year, Chad (19m 0s): Is it HireTual? I mean tool. Yeah. The way that it's spelled is just like it's I see where they're going here. It's higher. And then T U a L as in like virtual higher vir, hire-tual. I, I don't know. Yeah. Hiretual I don't know. Joel (19m 20s): Fuck. If it was to use, I think there wouldn't be hired school. It'd be like Juul like the cigarette. So anyway, they raised $13 million, 23 million total, according to a Tech Crunch article in comparison to their competition Seek Out has raised 8 million in Hiring Solved, raised 4 million. So these guys have almost raised twice with those two guys have done the race came in through a Chinese venture capital firm. Joel (19m 50s): I'll let you just make up your own mind on why that, what that means. You can check out that actually the VC site is funny. It has a picture of the great wall of China with an American, a bald eagle, like flying around the great wall. So they've, they've kind of covered their bases on that politically, but anyway, it looks like they're going to use some of the money to kind of pivot, hiring soft style into more of a tool with companies, ATSs and CRMs. As we know, the whole public profile businesses is pressured with commoditization as well as privacy issues, but good on them this should give them a lot of runway to, to grow this thing out. Chad (20m 30s): Last week, we talked about MOKA, M O K A and again, China getting into the HR space. Now that was more of an indigenous type of technology where this is I wouldn't say American technology, but I would say it's technology that, that emanates from this country. So yeah, we're seeing more Chinese influence, I guess you could say in the HR space. Joel (20m 57s): Yep. The B2B space. And also, additionally, the company Hiretual has 85 employees. I don't know how many Seek Out has, but I think Hiring Solved has 20 to 30 and they're looking to have a hundred employees total by the end of 2020. So we're going to see a lot of growth from those guys. Chad (21m 14s): Yeah. It's a rough space though. I mean, if you think about it, we've seen opening.io was acquired by items. A Jobvite just did a matching Aqui-hire. I mean, they bought the company, but really the company was a guy a, this way, Global they just did an integration with Salesforce, which is you have to say it's good movement, right. But nothing I think thus far compares to in we're a little biased, but Chad and Cheese sponsors Sovren, who is probably the most solid business model we've seen in this space been around forever. Joel (-): For sure. Chad (21m 53s): I mean, they're like, they're like the Intel inside. Do you? You don't know that Sovren is actually powering shit. But most of those sites that are out there, the parsing, the matching, the scoring, those types of things is, is actually Sovren. So it's interesting how all of these other brands are out there. They're really pressing their brand to the market kind of like B2B style or so is Sovren, but they're doing it more from vendor to vendor. Joel (22m 18s): Yeah. Sovren's too busy with their moneymaking printing press to worry about too much of this other stuff. And by the way, Hiretual is, is partnered with like everybody. I mean the most obscure ATS is so that smart, they're definitely hedging their bets on who's going to buy them by integrating with everybody they possibly can. Yeah. Chad (22m 38s): I believe the pivot in much like Shon said during the FeatuRama, they trained their AI on public data. And then they took all of that learning and started to point it to the database in the applicant tracking system. And I think that's one of the smartest things you can do, because if you go into a company and say, look, how much money did you actually spend on acquiring candidates over the last three years? Just let's do that calculation. Chad (23m 8s): Why are you allowing those people and that data to atrophy, you've probably spent tons of money to acquire the same person six to 10 times. Why don't you use tech, on the money that you've already spent? Joel (23m 21s): Yeah. Do you ever think about Uncommon and wonder what could have been? Chad (23m 25s): Oh God. Yes. I mean, if they weren't, if they weren't burning a million dollars a month, I mean it, and let's be, let's be real here. I mean, those guys were incredibly smart, but I think the arrogance many companies or many, many individuals come into this space, especially from marketing or some of the bigger space and, and they've had over a billion dollars in exits already. So it was like very cocky. They had money. Chad (23m 55s): We're just going to rip this shit up and you know, get acquired again. It's an entirely different space. And I think that is a great example of what you can't do. And obviously doing 10 pivots in an 18 month timeframe, doesn't help you. Joel (24m 12s): I quote Tom petty, who said the waiting is the hardest part. Joblist is in the news. Yeah. You've never heard of them before, but they are a job board, I guess, technically they were built out of the Wilbur Labs, a San Francisco based startup studio, which then invested a whopping $4 million in the company after making it soft launch. Last year, Joblist has been quietly gaining traction. According to the company already powering over 500,000 job applications. Joel (24m 44s): It's not your traditional job board where you search in a box, it's kind of fill out this profile and they'll magically match you with jobs already in their system. It's not quite clear to me where those jobs are coming from, but I'm hard pressed to say, they're probably not selling job postings to fill their database. Chad (25m 2s): There's a million different ways they can get jobs. What I find interesting is the article actually says 58% of people described the job search process as a lonely and/or isolated. Joblist addresses these problems in two ways first, by offering a more customized search experience, that is a short quiz, like, and then second by introducing collaboration to the job search process. Chad (25m 33s): So what little Johnny can do as little Johnny can go in, can take the test and then get like a list served up. Then they can do like the little favorites thing. Then you can share all of this. It's like crowdsource job search. So you can share it with mom because mom wants little Johnny out of the basement and share it with dad and your cousins and say, Hey, let's all together help little Johnny get a job. Joel (25m 59s): Is the word gamification anywhere in the, the release? 'Cause it needs to be. Chad (26m 5s): Yeah, I was going to say, I don't see it. I see a, I see quizzes and things like that, but gamification would be good and probably virtual reality. That'd be cool. Joel (26m 16s): Yes. QR codes at Joblist, everybody let's get excited. Let's get excited in the, the rumor mill this week. Some confirmed some not, we have some movement at Maya and Hiring Solved. What do we know there? Chad (26m 31s): Yeah. So let's, let's get into the hard game of obviously what, what Hiring Solved is doing it's not easy. Obviously we've seen matching organizations like the Entelos like the Umcommons, you can have plenty of money, but your strategy and your focused means everything. And I think from hiring soft standpoint, they have made a couple of pivots. I'm still, I'm still pretty bullish on them. Chad (27m 1s): They've had to, they've had to cut some heads. It was it. What was the percentage? I can't remember. Joel (27m 6s): So as of, as of today, this is Thursday when we record, we know for sure there have been layoffs. We believe them to be significant. Our friend of the show, Jeremy Roberts has already posted on social media that he has let go and that he's looking for other opportunities. Certainly if you're looking for someone with Jeremy's abilities, which are many, give him a shout if you have an opening, but my guess is how these things go. And you and I have seen these a lot of times throughout the years, is that shit's going to start leaking and then it's going to start pouring out. Joel (27m 43s): We've reached out to the company for comments. So at this point, I would say, we've definitely got some movement at Hiring Solved. We're getting confirmation and hopefully a statement from the company. And we'll, we'll most likely get some leakage about information, what's going on. So if you know anything, give us a shout at chadcheese.com. Otherwise I'd say, stay tuned for a shred maybe early in the week or tomorrow in regards to what exactly is going on at Hiring Solved. Maya is interesting. Joel (28m 14s): Some movement there. We actually had the CEO reach out to us, which was a total class act. Yes, by the way, and tell us about some people that we had communicated with and been connected to in marketing for sure had been, let go, a new person was taking over. So very likely there's been some reorganization at Maya as well, these layoffs and, and sort of actions around COVID and less hiring going on, kind of filtered up top with your ZipRecruiter's, your bigger organizations, your LinkedIns. Joel (28m 47s): And now it looks like those layoffs are funneling down to these smaller, more nimbler tech organizations, which maybe hope they could wait it out, but apparently cannot. And they need to make some hard decisions as well. Chad (28m 59s): Yeah, it seems like Eyal and team are, I don't want to say pivoting, but they're going to provide a lot more focus in pressure on the revenue generation side of the house. As a couple of the individuals that they've brought in are pretty high level, but they are really just focused on customer success, sales strategy, revenues, those types of things. And that's what you need, especially in these times to keep fueling things, right. Chad (29m 29s): You either get more funding, but being able to actually fuel your own growth. That's even bigger. Joel (29m 35s): So stay tuned on those and talking about fueling growth. Let's take a break hear from Jobvite. And we'll talk about creepy tech. Yikes. Jobvite (29m 45s): This summer, Jobvite wants you, you and you! To join hundreds, thousands, millions! Okay? Maybe just thousands of recruiters, HR, and talent acquisition professionals for a summer you won't soon forget! It's Jobvite's Summer To Evolve. The Summer To Evolve is a 12 week series of free content to help recruiters brush up on their skills. Learn from industry thought leaders. And see how technology can help them improve, automate, and evolve their recruiting efforts. There will be a chance to share tips and ideas with your peers. And we may even have some surprises for you along the way. I love surprises. So visit the summertoevolve.com to register for the summer toolbox sessions that suit your needs, peak your interest or float your boat. If you're just starting June 16th, it's the summer to evolve the way you attract, engage, hire, onboard, and retain talent. Jobvite recruit with purpose, hire with confidence. Joel (30m 39s): Alright, so we got implants that track employees, we've got all kinds of things that creep the fuck out of us. And this week we had some more tech that creeps the hell out of it. Chad (30m 59s): This is the fucking Purdue here in Indiana, fucking Purdue. A pair of computer scientists from Purdue University are leading a controversial new four year study using AI enabled surveillance to track recently released prison parolees, citing US Department of Justice data indicating more than 80% of parolees are likely to be arrested again within nine years of their initial release. Chad (31m 30s): The pair say, the pair of Purdue dudes say the goal of this research is to better understand what the factors lead to per person re offending. What the F? I mean, really? We know this already! But yet they want to put ankle bracelets and phones in their pocket that track them. Joel (31m 54s): I believe it's wrist bracelets. Let's get it. Right. Chad (31m 56s): Okay, my bad. Joel (31m 57s): So, so yeah, they, this, this is pretty creepy. You have to wear a bracelet, I guess they can require this cause your, your rights pretty much go to hell if you've ever been arrested. Not that I can speak to this, by the way, if you haven't watched the Netflix documentary 13, is that what it's called? Chad (-): Do it. Joel (32m 14s): Yeah. It's it's great. Yeah, I watch it. So, so yeah, so you wear this bracelet, they know your phone. So they're going to track your heart rate, how stressed you are locations, and even like pictures that you're taking on your phone to create like trends on, Oh, you're trending toward criminal behavior or, okay you're being a good boy or girl we'll, we'll let you go about your business. This is some really creepy ass shit. I don't know why anyone would do this of their own free will, but I also don't know if they can make you do it just because you're a former felon. Joel (32m 48s): I guess they could do it as part of sort of the ankle bracelet, home arrest kind of thing, where yeah, yeah. Parolees. Yeah Parolees, right, Like, okay, instead of the meeting with parolee, you're going to wear this tech and we're going to track you that way. But yeah, it's creepy shit and rolls right into sort of our other creepy story was the facial recognition in terms of being able to better, I guess, trace facial recognition, although it's, it's being rebranded as facial analysis. Joel (33m 23s): Cause facial recognition is too scary for people, but it historically has been bad with people of color, surprise, surprise, it's getting better. And now they're going to be better able to market to people of color, better able to, to track you within stores. And of course this bleeds over into biased recruiting and being able to facial recognize candidates better. And of course bring bias into the recruiting process. I'm sure you have an opinion on this technology. Chad (33m 52s): Yeah. This is what they call racial recognition, not facial recognition. Joel (33m 57s): Cute. Chad (33m 58s): This is not where we should be going with technology. And I know they're trying to couch this in saying that, you know, we are using AI to scan photos, to be able to see a skin tone and what color lipstick they're wearing so that we know if we were seeing this same shade of lipstick on darker skinned women, then we'll go ahead and we know to do it. And from my standpoint, that's all bullshit because you know, what's flying off the shelf. Chad (34m 32s): Okay. You know, what's going off the shelf. You know what inventory is being sold and what's not being sold. So most of what we're hearing is total bullshit. Now, back to real quick, back to the whole ankle bracelet or risk bracelet. Joel (34m 46s): Yeah. Chad (34m 47s): You know, this, the university of Washington, AI researcher actually suggested that the underlying premise of the new study that these people are doing at Purdue seems to ignore decades of work investigating recidivism. I'm saying that social and economic reasons behind recidivism are well understood. And it is unclear exactly why and what the hell, this new realization would gather by any kind of surveillance. Chad (35m 18s): So tying these two together, I think it is total and utter bullshit that they're saying that, well, this is going to help companies with marketing. This is going to help us with recidivism. Who was actually funding this research because this is playing into the CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America's hands. Yeah. It just, it makes no sense to me whatsoever. Joel (35m 47s): Yeah. And I think I'm reminded you, you hammer a lot about transparency in algorithms and AI and the sort of prescreening tools that we have, and being really transparent on what that algorithm is. And when we look at, you know, racial recognition and other recognition technologies where we can determine gender, age, race, even attractiveness, according to the story, you know, how does that play into the algorithm and does it, and are we teaching the algorithm based on some of those biases? Joel (36m 22s): I think it's a really dangerous trend. Chad (36m 24s): Yeah. And why should it? I mean, none of it makes any sense. Again, we know that recidivism happens because of economic pressures. If, if I get out of work and in every application, I have to check a box that says that I've, I was a convicted felon then guess what? I'm probably not going to get the job, but if I don't get the job that I can't pay my bills, and if I can't pay my bills, how the fuck can I feed my family? Or any of that? I mean, I'm going to go back to what I did before. Chad (36m 56s): I'm going to have to find a way to get money, so that me and my family can survive. So being able to say that I have a phone in my pocket and that's going to help me, or I have an ankle or risk bracelet hat's all total bullshit. We know the reasons behind that. Joel (37m 14s): Alright, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to an ad and let you breathe a little bit. And when we come back, we're going to have a nice, fun, funny story for us to close out the week. Okay. We'll be right back. Okay. Sovren (37m 25s): 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. Joel (37m 52s): All right stroke should never be funny, but this is as close as a funny stroke can possibly get. All right. So this is out of Australia where all crazy shit happens. There's an uber Christian organization called the Family Voice of Australia, and they had an employee whose last name was Bowker, which is kind of funny in and of itself, depending on, you know, Chad (38m 13s): I was suspect of this whole story because of that last name. Joel (38m 17s): Bowker I hardly even know her. Anyway, the company was ordered to pay Bowker two years of weekly compensation payments due to the impact of worker anxiety on his stroke. But tell him Chad, why he had a stroke on the job. Chad (38m 36s): Cause he was jerking off to porn. I mean, the dude, the dude was so, so stressed. And here's the thing is that, you know, he said that, you know, he uses porn to distress. So therefore, so therefore I don't understand how porn is the reason why he had a damaging stroke. I think it was more back to the demoralizing atmosphere and they just thought they would pull porn into the story to be able to discredit him. Chad (39m 9s): Right? You know, Hey, you're watching porn, you're working for a Christian organization. This to me, the whole Bowker this sounds like a story we're going to hear in a couple of maybe years and it's going to be Mike Pence. Joel (39m 24s): I mean the homeboy was only 47 years old. How intense do you have to be doing this to give yourself a stroke? My man, come on, bro. I don't get it. This is, this is, this is the best sitcom ever. Like super Christian organization pays an employee who's beating off on the job and then has a stroke and blaze blames the company because of stress on the job for doing it like this, just this boggles my mind. And it's so hilarious and weird. Joel (39m 55s): And we're sorry that Bowker suffered a stroke. We hope that he, he recovers from that. Chad (39m 60s): Yes Joel (39m 60s): And can live to jerk again. Chad (40m 3s): And his guilt for doing something that is natural. Let's just say that it is totally misplaced. So yes, he deserved the money Bowker. Joel (40m 3s): Bowker, Chad, we out. Chad (40m 3s): We out. Outro (40m 13s): This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast, subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible for more visit Chadandcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome.

Diversity. It's kind of a big deal. Vendors are fighting tooth-and-nail to be the solution of choice for employers far-and-wide. Enter Circa (the artist formerly known as LocalJobNetwork), who just went through a rebrand and recently acquired America's Job Exchange. Big moves, which means a big podcast, and the boys bring Circa CEO and prez Patrick Sheahan to the show and get down to the nitty gritty on the company, as well as the past, present and future of diversity recruiting. Enjoy this NEXXT powered podcast. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Patrick (0s): Not only are we gaining roughly a thousand customers from America's job exchange, which clearly sends a message to the market, that we're the market leader, but at the same time, those customers now are going to be part of a business whose sole mission is helping them build diverse teams. Intro (15s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (39s): Three white guys from the Midwest talking about diversity. You know, you want to keep listening. Welcome everybody. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman joined as always by Chad Sowash and we are happy to welcome today, Patrick Sheahan president of newly minted Circa Patrick, welcome to the podcast. Patrick (1m 1s): Appreciate the opportunity to be here. Joel (1m 3s): You're very welcome. Very welcome. So you're a Milwaukee guy, Midwest. What should we know about you before we get into the company stuff? Patrick (1m 11s): Yeah, family man, married, a father of two living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, longtime native of Wisconsin had had the opportunity to live in a variety of states, but, but came back when my kids were school age. So yeah, Joel (1m 25s): It's a great place to raise a family. Isn't it? Patrick (1m 28s): That's what we say. Even when it's mighty cold. That's exactly what we say. Joel (1m 32s): Let's get to the news part of this. So you've, you've had a lot of stuff going on from a rebrand to acquiring some companies, give us the skinny on all that. Patrick (1m 41s): Yeah, it's been a busy year. I joined Circa in May of 2019, and felt passionate about leading a business that had had a real sense of purpose. And I think the roots of our businesses a job board provider and brand of local job network really didn't encapsulate what we were trying to build as a, as a team. And so we worked hard over the last really seven months to embark on our rebrand as Circa with a strong sense of purpose and that we believe diverse teams have the power to transform business and felt the rebrand was, was our way of planting our flag that, you know, from this day forward, if you work with Circa things are going to be different. Patrick (2m 24s): As you know, I'm in concert with the name change, we announced that we had acquired America's Job Exchange, which has long, long been sort of identified as a, as a top competitor in our business and the OCCP market specifically. And we actually had been working on that acquisition for some time. Joel (2m 41s): I have to inject one thing and I find this fascinating, you guys, you guys really thought about your logo. So in the release about it, it says Circa's logo letters are kerned, a word, I don't even know what means, what it means to create a visual rhythm with subtle cues to connect individuals and create a more hole while you guys really thought about this. Patrick (3m 3s): I, I have to say we, we partnered with a fantastic agency called studio lo that helped us with that. And, and this wasn't merely, you know, our marketing team dreaming up something, you know, unique and pretty and, and putting good words behind it. It was a, it was a big effort both internally and externally Chad (3m 21s): Local job networks been in the industry for a very long time. You could have obviously put a new, a fresh new coat of paint, on that. But one thing that you said during kind of like the intro was that you wanted to, to let everybody know that things were going to be different. So how will they be different? Patrick (3m 40s): Yeah, so, I mean, clearly we have served the market with a diversity offering, but I would say that, that in my onboarding and assessment of what local job network historically had provided, particularly in the diversity space, I hate to say it, but it was, it was, it was very much sort of a check the box type deliverable. And, and, and from my perspective, I just didn't feel like that was a good enough effort that would really have sustainable competitive advantage and longterm customer relationships. Patrick (4m 10s): So, you know, what we wanted to say to the market was, you know, merely compliance with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives was, was no longer good enough. And that, you know, our belief was that we actually had to deliver candidates and help companies with their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. And so as we set forth the vision for our company, it was very much, you know, the legacy product infrastructure, the Legacy messaging, the Legacy brand didn't encapsulate what we were trying to build as a business. Patrick (4m 41s): So our product investments now going forward clearly are aimed at improving candidate flow. But also as we embark on our own internal diversity equity inclusion initiatives, what we're trying to do is commercialize those for small, medium sized businesses. That, that, that really are, are challenged with the talent acquisition, the, the culture challenges that we all face as employers in today's day and age. Chad (5m 7s): So you guys are you're, you're coming out of the box saying we're going to eat our own dog food. We're going to, we're going to actually do that ourselves. Patrick (5m 14s): I worked, I worked with a guy that said, ah, we actually drink our own champagne. It sounds a little bit better. Doesn't it? Chad (5m 22s): Any way you want to put it, Patrick, anyway, you want to put it. Here's here's, here's the problem though, Patrick, I totally appreciate and I embrace wanting to create programs that will drive diverse candidates into organizations. The problems that we've seen over the years, is that companies want to talk about it. They want to throw money at charity and they want to, and they want to hire a chief diversity officer and then give them no fucking resources. Chad (5m 52s): At all! So my, the big question is if you come up with these great products. Who's going to buy them because all they're doing right now is paying lip service? They're not actually paying for shit. Patrick (6m 3s): Yeah. I think, I think your assessment of the past is it's spot on. I find it hard to argue with that, but I do really believe that, you know, the, the, the United States in particular is what I can speak for. Cause it's my own personal experience. I feel like, like things have changed. I do feel like we've reached a moment in time where particularly business leaders have recognized that paying lip service isn't good enough anymore. And you know, I, I, I particularly found it in our organization is, is, you know, some of the, the social justice challenges that have arisen of late, you know, our workforce is quite young, you know, in their mid twenties, early thirties, and they're, they're unabashed and unafraid to speak their minds and share that, you know, they really want more diversity in the workplace. Patrick (6m 57s): They, they want their, their coworkers to look more like their friends and relatives and partners, that they spend their time with outside of work. So I, I think you're absolutely right, but I do believe that we're at sort of a see change moment, not because of the Ray Floyd issue. I just think even before, I think times are times are changing and things are different and you know, I'm, I'm, I'd like to say I've got a long career in leadership ahead of me. And you know, if I think about my peer group and the people that I speak with, that's what I feel and see. Patrick (7m 30s): And even if it's not the case, it's something that I believe in. So I think it's the right way to lead our company. Chad (7m 35s): Here's the thing that I would ask from you hearing that you guys are gonna, you know, drink your own champagne. One of the things that we need from corporate America, and I would love to see an organization like you do this as a leader to demonstrate how you get this shit done, no matter what your numbers look like, will you become transparent with your workforce numbers? Will you put them out for everybody to see, to see today? And then also show the trend lines? Because these are the things that we need. We need guys like you to say, Hey, I believe in this. Chad (8m 6s): Okay, great. You believe in it, then show us. Patrick (8m 9s): Yeah. That's a great challenge. I would tell you that there's the dog. No, I would tell you that actually, like I said, I've, I've been with the business for now for just over a year. I do quarterly town halls with, with the company and my first quarterly town hall, I actually, you know, asked my team and said, let's look at our diversity stats and let's share them with the organization. And so it was something that I was very transparent with our organization and we report on it quarterly. We share it with our board and I would tell you we're, we're not where we need to be. Patrick (8m 43s): I'm proud to say, if you look at our, our male to female mix, we're nearly equal or almost, almost even more skewed towards the female side. And, and I think that's, that's something that's really important. Chad (8m 52s): Nobody's where that, nobody's where they need to be though. Patrick and I think is the key is that if you are not where you need to be, you are still transported publicly, not just internally, but publicly and say we are going to do better. And this is where we're going to plant our flag and watch us because we're challenging, not just ourselves, but we're challenging you. Patrick (9m 14s): Yeah, no, I'm not opposed to that in any way. I mean, I think if the marketing team can present that in a way on our website, I absolutely own that. Why, why not? That's good stuff. Joel (9m 23s): So speaking of websites, Patrick, Chad and I are old enough to remember when diversity job posting that you just, Chad (-): shhhh Joel (9m 31s): but your jobs on diversityjobs.com or some URL that had a diverse, you know, a nomenclature in it. I feel like we need to get way past that. So how are you guys, you know, is this just diversityjobs.com 2.0, or is it actually a new approach to, you know, getting in front of the right audience? Patrick (9m 53s): Yeah, our business has historically had a strong relationship with a large and growing roster of, of community partners that represent diverse groups, if you will. And our historical outreach management product really sent job opportunities in a push relationship to those community partners and as ISS or the efficacy of that product. My belief was that that, you know, just, just blasting people with an email or with links to job postings really wasn't an, it was an ineffective way to actually attract real candidates. Patrick (10m 29s): And so what we're working on internally is actually trying to create much more of a, a community partner, sorry, a community partner portal that has greater network, networking, greater interaction, greater dialogue between not only us as Circa and the community partners, but also the hiring employer and the candidate and the community partner. And I think it's important that we create an ecosystem where folks it's much more simpler and easier to use. Patrick (10m 59s): I would say that that thematically, I believe as a software provider, you know, we have to have a very simple and easy to use product. And I would say that today isn't representative of, of sort of the Circa Legacy products. And so that's, that's a big effort for us internally. Chad (11m 13s): Yeah. That's a big commitment as well, right? Patrick (-): Yeah Chad (11m 16s): To be able to move away from. And we're talking about something here that not many people understand is that you were, are working with the most archaic of archaic systems. I don't mean your systems. I'm talking about state and local job backs, federal job banks. Patrick (11m 32s): These are the most archaic systems known to man, at least here in the United States. How are you? When I was with Direct Employers leading the National Labor Exchange efforts, our focus was to try to press better technology down into state workforce, into federal, obviously the federal side, as that was incredibly hard. What are your efforts to be able to, to hopefully do the exact same type of thing? And are you seeing those, those state and local, starting to embrace new technology? Patrick (12m 6s): Well, I think, I think by and large, you know, the technology solutions providers to the states like JIA solutions are, are doing a good job. And I think states, working with state and local government it's challenging. Right? And I think their ability to adapt sort of innovative technology, you know, I kind of liken it to, to, you know, the success that Uber has had sort of breaking down traditional barriers and state and local jurisdictions to, to display sort of the taxi environment. I that's kind of the, the messaging I give to my team internally. Patrick (12m 37s): Like, like sometimes I think we have to sort of not, not break the rules, but I think we just have to push, push the envelope of kind of what's historically been acceptable to, to get real change. You know, I, I, we tried some outreach with some of the states to forge a better relationship. I would say that's, that's been challenging to get to the right people on the phone and become top of mind. I, you know, I would venture to guess that the, the folks working in the state unemployment agencies likely are understaffed and overworked. Patrick (13m 9s): And, and that's, that's a challenge that unfortunately I don't have an answer for, right. So I'm still learning, but I would say it's, it's, it's one where, you know, ultimately the, the comment that I make to my team is ultimately the state agencies have the same goal that we do, which is putting people to work. If we can remind everybody of that, I think, and be aligned on that. That's what our goal is. Hopefully we can see, see a path forward Nexxt (13m 36s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. But first we have a question for Andy Katz, COO of Nexxt. Nexxt (13m 44s): Andy, for clients that are sort of married to email and a little hesitant to text messaging, what would you tell them that text messaging is part of any integrated strategy. There's not one size fits all for anybody. Job seekers opt into different forms of communication, whether it's with Nexxt or anybody else they might want to receive email. They might want to receive SMS. They might want to receive targeted retargeting on their desktops. So it's one piece of an overall puzzle for more information, go to hiring.nexxt.com. Chad (14m 14s): Remember that's with doubleX not the triple X. hiringnexxt.com Joel (14m 20s): Sticking with government for a second. It seems like in the past decade or so, government agencies have been neutered in terms of what they can do and the manpower and, and whatnot. And you mentioned sort of being understaffed. It seems like historically companies have done in quotes diversity to, to keep them out of court, right? To keep them, to keep them out of trouble with gov government regulators? Where are we now with, with Government regulation and actually having the ability to flex on some of this stuff. Joel (14m 58s): And particularly with, with COVID being such a centerpiece of, of government and straining, straining, already strained resources, what's your take on what the government can do and will do in the future in regards to regulation and enforcement? Patrick (15m 11s): Yeah, clearly, as we talked about at the beginning of the show I've been in the market now for just a year, so I'm still learning. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Director Lean at the OCCP. I think that the changes that he's made sort of their approach to audit and enforcement to, to have more, more desktop related audits to, you know, expand reach, I think has largely been effective and, and who whomever follows him in his role. I hope that they can be equally as effective. You know, I think again, I think, you know, Director Lean, you know, ultimately he wants to give everyone regardless of their physical abilities, race, color, orientation, he wants to give them all the same opportunities. Patrick (15m 54s): And I think that that's, that's, that's why the OCCP exists. And I'm hopeful that, you know, that that will continue to have an impact not only on federal government contractors, but non federal government contractors as well. Chad (16m 5s): Yeah well, I have to say that most of the individuals that have been in his position have not been approachable. He is incredibly approachable and indefinitely listens. Right? So that's one of the things that we haven't seen from government, or at least over the years, especially in that position, that, which is definitely an enforcement position, but he he's, he's definitely a good cat. I wanna, I wanna pivot over to the America's Job Exchange by in this world was, was really a big acquisition. But the, but the question is why buy? Chad (16m 38s): And when are you going to transition AJE to the circa brand? Patrick (16m 43s): Yeah. Like, you know, clearly it's, it's a niche industry. And for us, we've had a tremendous amount of success gaining new customers over the last four to five years. And, you know, market share is, is an important metric for us. And we long identified, you know, America's Job Exchange, Direct Employers, Broad Bean e-Quest is sort of our, our roster of competitors. And, you know, America's Job Exchange is in all respect was, was, was a product line of non-core product line of a much larger web hosting businesses or in our hosting company called Navisite. Patrick (17m 18s): Right. And so, you know, what we believe is that not only are we gaining roughly a thousand customers from America's Job Exchange, which clearly sends a message to the market, that we're the market leader, but at the same time, those customers now are going to be part of a business whose sole mission is helping them build diverse teams, as opposed to, you know, where this sort of a product line of completely unrelated business. And so I feel ultimately we're going to be better serving those customers. And we're going to learn from those customers. There's some technology assets that we're still sort of in the early stages of evaluating whether we got to keep them longer term, but ultimately our goal is to transition those customers to the Circa platform by year end. Patrick (17m 57s): . Chad (17m 58s): Okay. So are you looking at keeping the, the, the Massachusetts crew in a remote kind of environment? And that being said, yes, no. Maybe are you going to stay in more of a remote environment after COVID Patrick (18m 12s): It goes away. Yeah. Those that were there, those that stay with the business will be in a remote and remote remote capacity. Gotcha. Chad (18m 18s): Okay. What about the transition from the AJE brand to Circa? What kind of a timeframe do you see that happening? Patrick (18m 25s): Well, it's actually already kicked off. I think this week, I believe the, I guess I haven't looked at the website, the actual AJE website will have a reference to Circa. Chad (18m 35s): Yeah, it does. Patrick (18m 36s): Yeah. And ultimately say my marketing team is just an, a technology team. They're really, they're great on both sides of the fence at AJE and at Circo as well. They are ultimately that, that that brand will be transitioned likely by year end as well. Joel (18m 48s): Patrick, we talk a lot on the show about automation and how AI is infiltrating recruiting and how companies hire and the sense of the companies that provide automated services, prescreening, et cetera. Talk a lot about unbiased recruiting, right? Like when the bots are doing the prescreening and the interviewing, isn't that the ultimate form of unbiased recruiting. What's your take on that? Do you guys plan on, on getting into more automation? I know you do some consulting work. What's your, what's your take on, on that? Patrick (19m 18s): Yeah, so AI is clearly the buzz word in technology today. I would say unfortunately, local job network was not putting forth the necessary amount of technology investment to really consider leading edge development like, like AI and at Circa, you know, I would say we're not kicking off sort of a, of an investment in AI today, but as we think about our longer term product roadmap, you know, enabling more use, leveraging, more use of, of, of programmatic search candidate matching, et cetera, clearly is as part of our business strategy. Patrick (19m 56s): But I would say, you know, artificial intelligence as a word is not a core competence of our business today. And rather I'd prefer to look at other providers that are providing those technology platforms and think about how we can partner with them to enable a better candidate experience and candidate flow for our employers that, that, that we count as customers. You know, it's, it's, I do believe that that artificial intelligence will help remove unconscious bias, but ultimately, you know, hiring managers, whomever, they are really have to have the right level of training. Patrick (20m 33s): And that's something that I would say is a first, first step for us is how can we provide, you know, tools, templates, training, et cetera, to help some of our SMB customers. Joel (20m 45s): So, so you're, you're saying you won't be building a robot head to interview people anytime soon? Patrick (20m 50s): It's not, it's not the plans for us. No, I don't know. But you know, like modern hires right down the road and, and, you know, they're doing a lot of those things. So, so perhaps that's somebody we could, we could think about partnering with to improve that, but that experience. Yeah. Chad (21m 4s): Yeah. There are tons of young startups and obviously well more established, that are focused on the unbiased tech. I think a lot of it has to do with the, the ability to audit, just because we know that obviously anything that we do, if it's modeling off of human behavior, we are the most biased beings in the world. So therefore it's probably a good thing to audit off of. Big question. What is your company seeing with your clients focusing on driving diverse candidate slates to the hiring manager? Chad (21m 40s): I think that that's probably one of the biggest steps that we can take to ensure that the candidate slates that we're putting in front of the hiring manager, at least it's not all old white dudes right out of the gate, right? Patrick (21m 52s): Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I, what I would say is invariably the, the chief complaint that anybody in, in our businesses likely gets is, is, you know, not getting adequate candidate flow. And ultimately I think really talented, talent acquisition professionals recognize that, you know, if you, if you're focused on diversity initiatives and hiring a more diverse workforce, it takes real work. It takes, it takes different effort. It takes perhaps expanding kind of the filters that you may have once used historically, you know, things like are college degrees really necessary? Patrick (22m 31s): Are, is having a criminal background, something that will, will now consider. I mean, those are, those are real considerations that, you know, hiring managers, talent acquisition professionals really need to engage in conversation with their senior leadership to say, if you're really committed to this, are you really, are you committed in such a way that, that we're, we're going to do something very, very different? Chad (22m 54s): Right? Well, and that's, that's where meritocracy really breaks down and it's nothing but a dog whistle these days because the ban the box isn't happening, or they are using these requirements that filter out more of a diverse candidate flow. A big question. Since most companies aren't seeing that, or we're not seeing that from most companies. What about the actual building of talent, diverse talent pipelines through education, you were in the education space for a little while, right? Patrick (23m 25s): Yeah. I ran a software as a service business that provided professional education in the healthcare and financial services and real estate world. And I, and I think, you know, there are, I think there are, are companies that, that clearly are trying to blend talent acquisition along with identifying skills gaps and delivering education to address those skills gaps, to make a candidate much more attractive, to open positions. And I love that. Patrick (23m 57s): I, I wish I could. I wish we, we, I could tell you that we were there. I think I have a soft spot in my heart for delivering education to our delivering education cause having done it for a number of years, but I think, you know, as, as a longer term strategy, that might be something we, we, we really think long and hard about, but I, I absolutely believe those that, you know, there are companies out there today that I think, you know, stick to their knitting and really are focused on addressing the skills gap that exists. And I'd be proud to partner with businesses like those, as opposed to trying to do it myself. Patrick (24m 32s): You know, we're, we're a relatively small business, but 150 employees. So one of the things that I, I come from a place of, of leadership is that we do have to focus on, you know, a handful of priorities. And if we can execute on those really well, then we've, we've likely created something special. Chad (24m 50s): Amen, Patrick (24m 51s): Patrick Sheahan everybody. Patrick, thanks for joining us on the show. For those listeners who want to learn more about Circa, where should they go? Circaworks.com would be great. Joel (25m 2s): Good enough, Chad, another one in the books! We out. Chad (25m 6s): We out. Thanks Joel. Joel (25m 7s): Thanks Chad. Outro (25m 8s): Thank you for listen to podcasts with Chad and Cheese. Brilliant! They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Anyhoo, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

New unemployment claims in the U.S. fell below one million for the first time since March, so let the good times roll, right? Not so fast, as the boys dig into: Google looks to outflank LinkedIn Gov't fails, Corp America profits Uber bluffs, California walks away CEOs help with inequalities - Chad calls bullshit Money flows into Chines HR tech and out-of-work prostitutes in Prague (thanks a lot, technology). You don't want to miss this life-altering episode, brought to you by Sovren, Jobvite, and JobAdx. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Intro (1s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (9s): All right. All right. All right. New unemployment claims fell below 1 million for the first time since March. Let the good times roll baby. What's up kids? Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel "bubble-boy" Cheesman. Chad (38s): And I'm Chad "Rochambeau" Sowash. 0 (41s): And on this week, show Google takes aim, again, at LinkedIn. Uber and Lyft are not going back to Cali, Cali, Cali and McDonald's ex-CEO is caught dipping his McNuggets in the company barbecue sauce. Da da da ta ta ... Chad (58s): Not loving it. Joel (1m 1s): We'll be right back. JobVite Promo (1m 3s): This summer, Jobvite wants you, you and you! To join hundreds, thousands, millions! Okay? Maybe just thousands of recruiters, HR, and talent acquisition professionals for a summer you won't soon forget! It's Jobvite's Summer To Evolve. The Summer To Evolve is a 12 week series of free content to help recruiters brush up on their skills. Learn from industry thought leaders. JobVite Promo (1m 40s): And see how technology can help them improve, automate, and evolve their recruiting efforts. There will be a chance to share tips and ideas with your peers. And we may even have some surprises for you along the way. I love surprises. So visit the summertoevolve.com to register for the summer toolbox sessions that suit your needs, peak your interest or float your boat. If you're just starting June 16th, it's the summer to evolve the way you attract, engage, hire, onboard, and retain talent, Jobvite recruit with purpose, hire with confidence. Chad (1m 40s): That's a good time right there. Joel (1m 43s): That is a good time. You you've done yours, right? Chad (1m 47s): I have done mine. It was a, it was good. It was a good time had by all. I think. Joel (1m 55s): Mine is Wednesday of next week or this week, depending on when you're listening to the show, Chad (2m 5s): Summer to CheeseVolve. Joel (2m 6s): Cheesevolve. Summer. I thought, I thought it was summer of love. And then I read closely and it said summer, I probably wouldn't have committed to the, to the gig, but whatever. Chad (2m 17s): Oh shit, dude. So, Oh, we a couple of weeks ago actually socially distanced at, at your place, which was, which was nice. We actually got a chance to see each other, got to see the little rug rat run around all over the place, man. Chad (2m 50s): He's a machine. Joel (2m 52s): He is a nuclear powered, little human. It wears my shit out, dude. There's a reason why young people have kids. Yeah. And speaking of Kids, shout out to your daughter, starting school at Indiana state home of the sycamores and Larry Bird. For those who don't know either two of the first things I said, Chad (3m 10s): Dude, it's, it's hard right now. Ema and Kennedy are both in school. Ema's at Indiana State and Kennedy's at Ohio Northern man. I really don't know what to think as, as a dad and as a protector, as somebody who wants to have everybody safe, I did not want to let them go. And, and I hope that we did the right thing in allowing them to go to school. But we did go to school that everybody was wearing masks. Hell, they gave her two masks, even though she went with 20, it was an interesting setup. Chad (3m 41s): And they're actually moving in over a week's time frame. So it's not everybody, you know, everybody come in at once. It took them a week. Joel (3m 50s): So what is it like Lord of the Flies of your house now that you're empty nesters? Are you like running around the house naked and scaring the neighbors? Chad (3m 57s): Yeah! I don't need clothes on anymore. Joel (4m 0s): Yikes. That's a whole other podcast Chad (4m 4s): That being said, I've got to say that I feel, I feel a little dirty after last year. Joel (4m 10s): Yeah. We kind of cheated on each other and if I can speak freely, I felt titillated and excited at first. And then, and then towards the end I felt kind of dirty and guilty about it. So I don't know how you feel, but, but what, what started out exciting with some exotic Australian turned a little bit turned a little bit dirty for me. And I'm glad to be back on my regularly scheduled podcast. Chad (4m 34s): The TA-Pod, TaPod had a couple of hairy men on them and I was lucky enough to have a Lauren Sharp. So it was a good time. There's no question, but I tell you what it's, it's interesting. They don't talk about tech as much as we do. And we interweave tech into workforce and economics and all that other fun stuff. So it was, it was somewhat constrained around the tech side. Joel (4m 59s): Yep. So we, we may rehash a few items from last week before we get down to the, to the new shows. But yeah, I agree. We, the most interesting part of my conversation was when we stopped recording and he started telling me about like all the fucking poisonous critters that live in Australia and which he has been bitten by, stung by and, and almost killed by. So yeah, Australia is a fucked up place. Chad (5m 26s): That's where all the Pokemon, Joel (5m 27s): Yeah, we have 800,000 poisonous spiders and some of them live in the house with you. I'm like, what the fuck is that about? So yeah, Chad (5m 35s): it sounds like you need, Terminix Joel (5m 37s): He says there's this spider that's as big as a transplant. And it just hangs out in the corner of her house and I'm like, don't you kill it? Don't you get out the vacuum cleaner, like suck it up. And he's like, no, mate. You know, they kill flies and bugs and shit... Like I've lived in Arizona and Australia scares me well today. Do you know what today is a third day of Kamila being the vice presidential candidate. Chad (5m 59s): Is it the third day? That's awesome! But it is Black Women's Equal Pay Day. So pretty much in line. Yeah, pretty much in line. And, and to be able to bring this, this topic up, I thought it was important for a couple of white dudes to be able to shout out a black woman makes about 62 cents on the dollar compared to a, a white dude. The US DOL the US DOL data from 2017, cause they're lagging on average, a white dude makes about $60,388 per year. Chad (6m 36s): And a black female makes $36,735. Audience (-): Boooo Chad (6m 43s): And then, and then just comparing that. So $36,735 against a white female, which is $46,513. So a white female almost makes $10,000 more a year. And they are severely below the white dude as well. So I think we need to have more than a day to be able to focus on this topic. But yes, today is Black Women's Equal Pay Day. Joel (7m 9s): Yeah. I love a Chris Rock's joke about why is black history month, February, which by the way, is the shortest month of the year. That's yeah, kind of reminds me of what you just said. There are we doing shout outs? Is that what we're in? Are we in shout outs now? Chad (-): Sure why not? Joel (7m 24s): Shout outs. Let's do some of that. Shout out. I'm going, gonna shout out first to Lars Schmidt, a friend of the show introduced us in London last year, did a few shots with us. So we love Lars. So he's launching a myriad of things. His podcast is being rebranded, "Redefining HR". He's released a book called Redefining HR. And he has, I think a video series Redefining HR. So if you, if you're into that kind of thing and we know our listeners are, go check out Lars, he's doing good stuff, Chad (7m 59s): Yeah, he's a good dude. You and him were doing shots while I had like the shark attack of people who want to tee shirts that were just swarming the stage. I remember that. Joel (8m 8s): Yeah. We were clearly winning, winning on that one. Chad (8m 12s): Shout out to Denise van der Lans over in Amsterdam, who is a partner with ToTalent.eu. You know, I really wish I could travel to Amsterdam. It's been so goddamn long since we've traveled. I mean, I'm getting, I'm getting fucking cabin fever. I don't know about you Joel (8m 31s): Getting antsy. Shout out to a couple of hip ladies that we know Carrie Corbin and Amanda Thompson have started a new agency called the Hope, Hope Lee marketing group, that dropped today. If you're looking for employment, branding, shit, go check them out. Chad (8m 48s): They kinda know some shit Joel (8m 49s): They've been around. Not that they're old. Chad (8m 51s): No, not at all. They, they started when they were six!, A shout out to Bruce Reed and Mark Gandy from the CFO Bookshelf Podcast. We really appreciate them sending us bourbon. Cause you know, we like that. And having us on their show, Bruce is the CFO over at Practice Link and has been a fan for a while. Thanks Bruce and Ken Allman. Of course, who was one of our very first cult following kind of guys. So a big shout out to Bruce Mark and you know, just that this just shout out just because we love Ken. Joel (9m 27s): We do, we definitely love Ken and miss him as well. Hell, I'd be up for West Virginia traveling at this point. Chad (9m 32s): Oh yeah. Little plane. Joel (9m 34s): Shout out to Crunchbase diversity spotlight. We, we quote Crunchbase quite a bit on the show. They track money that companies have garnered, but they, they have a lot of data at the site and they launched Diversity Spotlight. For those who want to connect with companies, either for investment or jobs, just go out and fill in your company info with whether you have a CEO of diverse background, or if you have any special benefits of the company specific or news that you have around diversity, a shout out to Crunchbase for getting on the diversity train. Chad (10m 8s): Nice. I really appreciate people like Travis McEwen over in Spokane, Washington who share stories and insights. We have many who do that in several different ways on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, email, text. But it's really cool when you can hear what's happening in their world and what it ties into the, the, the bigger picture. So if you haven't and you're a listener feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn Chad or Joel Twitter, Chad and Cheese, Facebook page, wherever you might be able to find our dumb asses. Joel (10m 43s): Shout out to Skender. Yeah, it sounds like a porn site, but it's not S K E N D E R. We got a laugh out of them for pimping ads on social media, about being one of the best places to work in Chicago. But then under news from that was mass layoffs. And by the way, there are no job postings on their website. So it might be time to reinvestigate your ad strategy. Chad (11m 6s): Dude, conserve your ammo. You keep that shit ready for when you can use it, right. You don't just fire off just because you can fire off. That's a premature ejaculation right there. Skender, no, that's not what we do around here. A big shout out to Collin Parker listening in Seattle. I'm sure he's glad I'm mentioning his name after premature ejaculation. He's the VP of Marketing over at Crelate. We know those guys who just, he just came back into the industry and he's using our shows. Chad (11m 39s): I'm getting teared up here to get back up to speed while forcing the rest of his marketing department to listen to the Chad and Cheese as well. That's a big applause. Joel (11m 49s): Forcing his marketing department. Come on now. You know, they were already listening to our show. 4 (11m 54s): I don't think we have enough forced listening happening or I don't know, maybe we do. I mean, remember Jen, I mean, Jenn Terry Tharp, who was on a couple of weeks ago, she was 23 years at AT&T. And she said, while she was there, we were mandatory listening. So I guess mandatory sounds better than forced. Let's use that from now on. Joel (12m 16s): And we go great with day drinking, by the way, people, our show goes great with day drinking. We did a shout out to Clarence Jobs. DHI who owns Dice e-Financial Careers and Clearance Jobs reported quarterly earnings last week and while Dice and E financial careers are losing money. Year over year clearance jobs is up 18.2%. And by the way, I'll pimp our podcast with the Clearance Jobs CEO. If you haven't listened to that, I encourage you to go to chadcheese.com, search that out and take a listen. Chad (12m 50s): Yeah, how's it feel to have that anchor around your neck Clearance Jobs? Jesus' Flex Jobs going into another one. Okay. So Flex Jobs and this is going to be your favorite. It feels a lot like the ladders, although the opportunity to screw more than just the rich people. So it's Flex Jobs we screw more than just people who make over six figures. They quote themselves as the leading most trusted job service in the flexible work field. Chad (13m 22s): How the fuck do you know that? I have no fucking clue how you know that. Joel (13m 25s): It's a mystery Chad (13m 26s): We offer to help our members find great jobs for only get ready, $6.95 a month, come the fuck on people. We're in a pandemic. People who don't have jobs need jobs and Flex jobs, much like the fucking ladders is pimping jobs, which are already publicly available. And in there pimping them as special, right. And charging for them. I mean, it's just this kind of shit. People, you got to look into your black soul. Okay. And you got to understand, this is the bullshit that we can't have in this fucking industry. Chad (14m 0s): This is just, this is wrong. So Flex Jobs, you get a big thumbs up Joel (14m 5s): Online employment, dead inside since 1998. Got a love it. Shout out to the big 12 in light of the big 10 and pack 12 tier by us announcing that there'll be no spring or fall football. Big 12 says, hold my beer, you pussies. We're going to play football. I suspect the SCC will soon follow suit. So it looks like there will be a COVID tastic football season in some parts of the country. Chad (14m 32s): Yeah. That's going to be a fucking mass. That's all I gotta say. Sorry. I gotta say the basketball NBA is, is, is really fun. I think the whole bubble method is kicking ass and taking names versus major Baseball. Who's they've they've relayed, screwed the pooch, so, okay. Joel (14m 50s): And hockey hockey has a good job too. Chad (14m 52s): Yep. Yep. Good point. Good point. Joel (14m 55s): I was going to shout out toward the Russian vaccine, but we can, I just did that. I guess also Jerry Collier, we interviewed for Hourly Chad (15m 5s): Oh, Jerry Joel (15m 6s): Firing squad, which we always love to do if you haven't listen to that, check it out. And like I said earlier, I'm going to be featured on a JobVite webinar, this coming Wednesday. So go to jobvite.com if you want to learn more Chad (15m 19s): So in August, August 27th, we're in August. Yeah. Fuck God damn it. August 27th at 2:00 PM. Eastern it's a recruitment hackers event. It's optimizing recruitment for a remote workforce. Again, Jenn Terry Tharp. She's going to be speaking. I'm going to be corralling everyone for a panel discussion about benefits of a remote working, bigger talent pools, increased job accessibility, better candidates, yada yada, yada. Chad (15m 51s): If you want to learn more, go to recruitment, hackers.events, not.com, not.org, recruitmenthackers.events register. You're gonna love it. Another HR hackathon is happening in November as well. We'll talk more about that. Ava. Zillow's nonstop. Joel (16m 12s): Is that the video chick? Chad (16m 14s): Yes. She's, she's all about the video. Joel (16m 17s): I love the German with English transcription or close caption Chad (16m 20s): German who lives right across the border in France. So yes. And hopefully she'll be doing some of those more of those videos with the Chad and cheese t-shirt on. Joel (16m 30s): Yeah, that was, that was dope Chad (16m 32s): Topics! Joel (16m 33s): All right, let's get to it, News. Chad (16m 36s): Okay. So before we hit our first topic, you weren't around last week. So I didn't get to hear what you thought about the Indeed acquisition of ZAPinfo. What are your thoughts? What I had heard from one of my sources, was the dollar amount was super "small", in quotes. So, you know, to me, you know, Doug is really good about seeing around corners and looking into the future. And I think that I spoke to him a year or two ago at Source Con in regards to GDPR and how they were going to sort of evolve or pivot the company in light of sort of new privacy laws. Chad (17m 15s): And Doug didn't have the best answer, which he usually does, which kind of made me think like he's probably at a crossroads with this company. He obviously is a sales guy. He knows everyone. I think that he realized the future was going to be challenged, for a company like his. So we called Indeed, Indeed, you know, grab some money out of the, out of the couch, cushions took the technology. It looks like they're going to integrate it into their own site. So there won't be any privacy issues and users of Indeed will be able to manage their resumes and take data from their, from their resume database and put it a management system, Joel (17m 51s): Which is fine. I also think that, you know, Doug is an idea guy, so it wouldn't, it wouldn't surprise me if in light of sort of privacy laws, he has another idea up his sleeve and he said, I got to kind of get rid of this one so I can focus on maybe this bigger, better idea that I have over here. So that was my takeaway. I think good for him. You know, it's a, it's a big company, a big brand by buying his business. But I mean, there, there wasn't any announcement by Indeed. As far as I know, there was nothing on their blog about acquiring ZAP. It was all ZAP that was promoting it. Joel (18m 22s): So I think it was really small fries for, for Indeed not a big deal, a duck and move on and save face with investors and the industry. And we'll see what he does next. Chad (18m 32s): Yeah. Joel (18m 32s): After six months in Fiji, he can travel in Fiji Chad (18m 35s): Smart move for Doug in indeed being able to utilize that technology for their just their own platforms. Not, you know, not a bad move. I don't know what the cost was, but overall, you know, they got money to fucking burn. So why not? Joel (18m 51s): And there was no announcement of, you know, Doug joins Indeed as such and so I think he's, he's going to wipe, you know, wash his hands and move on. Yep. Yep. Chad (19m 0s): I don't think he's going to do anything but help a quick transition, hit that fucking eject button, which is wonderful. Especially if you are a CEO of an organization and you have to stick around for a year, a year and a half or two years, while you watch this big monstrous company fuck up your shit. Nobody wants that. So good for him. He gets, he gets to turn around and get the fuck out before they start screwing his shit up. Joel (19m 26s): Moving on to newer news, Google Cards. So a little historical context here. Google, Google hates that they lost social to Facebook. They launched Google Plus 10 or so years ago, it sucked no one used it and they've closed it down. They're not gonna give up on this game. They lost out bidding to Microsoft on LinkedIn to the tune of $26 billion. And I think they've they've for the last five to 10 years have wanted to do something in this game, this human directory, this people business in some way of getting information. Joel (20m 4s): So we kinda thought, or I thought, Hire by Google might be a way to collect data, get those people in database. I certainly pounded the table on the one click apply that I thought would be, you know, going to ATSs around the world, which make, would put profiles into Google. Well, they've shut that down. So that's not gonna happen. But we got word from TechCrunch this week that in India, Google is launching Google Cards, which is basically like a little business card that you can put on Google when people search your name. Joel (20m 37s): According to the release, a lot of people in India searched their name. I doubt India is exclusive to that. I'm sure a lot of people and a lot of places are searching their name on Google to see comes up. And when you do that, now you'll get a, a little thing that says, add your card or add your bio. It auto defaults your picture. That's already in Google, your name, everything. You can put personal information, but more importantly for our discussion work information, contact information, social media channels, et cetera. Joel (21m 8s): It makes sense that Google would use their search engine, as opposed to just launching something new like Google Plus, this worked really well for YouTube. When they started putting YouTube videos, putting news in there, weather and everything. Things tend to tend to integrate better when they just throw it into Google. So now when you search Chad Sowash, you see a Chad Sowash card with your picture. I can get your information if you want, then that's great. We'll see if they let me connect with you. We'll see if they let me contact you for jobs or whatever, but for now this looks like Google's latest attempt to compete with LinkedIn. Chad (21m 46s): It just looks like search. It doesn't look like a, an actual community. So, you know, adding yourself in a different way to search is I think where, what they're going after here, they want more contents. They want obviously people to be able to find you, if that's what you want and it's search. But I don't, I don't know that this is going to turn into a social network, but I do believe on the other hand, being able to utilize their search, it will turn into a great opportunity and an open system for individuals to find developers, to find salespeople in, you know, in Mumbai or in this case, you know, let's say for instance, in Boston, if, if it rolls out globally. Chad (22m 35s): So I think being able to out pivot a social network and just using the power of the largest fucking monopolized search engine in the world is not a bad move. Joel (22m 49s): Yeah. I mean, I think it's ultimately going to be a directory of people and you know, my question will be is, you know, how do they, how do they, you know, what do they do about John Smith, right? Or somewhere there's like hundreds of thousands of people named John Smith. My guess is because you, if you've emailed a John Smith or you're connected to John Smith in some way, they'll algorithmically show you that John Smith, because you've emailed him before or he's in your company. So, so it's, it's going to be an interesting problem of how you organize all of these. Joel (23m 20s): If they become as popular as they hope as Google hopes it does. But I'm not going to say it's going to be huge. I'm not going to say it's going to fail. Like Google has a reputation of ditching stuff pretty quickly. So until they launched this thing in the US I'm going to say, it's a test at this point. Chad (23m 37s): Yeah. Well, and I also noticed that they're really focusing on influencers, which is smart. If you think of Instagram or Twitter, and those influencers want to be out there and they want to be on these, on these big engines, they want to be on these big networks. If that happens, obviously they're going to bring their cult, their cult crowd with them, their following with them and everybody's going to want to do that. So I, you know, there's a, there's a pretty good strategy. And I think from an organic standpoint, you could grow this pretty quickly because most of your information is probably already there. Chad (24m 11s): And then later, you know, possibly add, like you'd said, the categorization tools into it, because if the, if the data's there being able to connect it, you know, who knows? We'll see Joel (24m 21s): Yeah. It, it, it is very interesting. I'm going to watch it carefully and it'll probably be a story as we head into 2021, that'll be much bigger and something we talk about quite a bit. So listeners, I hope you're ready for Google Cards to be a hot topic, Chad (24m 35s): But w and unfortunately in 2021, we will be talking about COVID, the shit's not going away. I don't think that we're going to have any type of Russian antidote and, or, you know, Smirnoff to, to, to throw into our veins. But a company in Boston called Brio Systems is a, a technology company offering a complete COVID-19 testing system for the workplace. They raised 1.9 million in seed funding led by CEO, Boris Lipchin. Chad (25m 11s): Okay. So quick, quick aside, have you seen this cat's resume? Joel (25m 14s): No. Chad (25m 15s): Okay. So Carnegie Mellon for engineering, he was at Space X as an avionics software engineer for Guidance and Control for five years, spent some time at MIT intern at MITRE and Google. Anyways, back back to what we were talking about. Joel (25m 30s): So he's a dummy, he's a dummy is what you're saying. Chad (25m 32s): So Boris Lipchin, Brio Systems provides a platform for employers to navigate the complexities of workplace safety and reopening amid the pandemic. The platform enables employers to respond quickly to understand infections among employees, contain potential outbreaks measure previous exposure, safely maintain business operations, and the big thing return people to work. Yes. Yes. I'm surprised that they only got 1.9 million to be quite Frank. Joel (26m 5s): It's seed funding. Let's wait for the series a to come down. I get it. But still, as far as I know, we haven't, we haven't quite figured out testing in general, let alone testing and specific places like, like work workspaces. The other thing that caught me sort of really let me, let me buy into this idea is the fact that apparently every survey I say talks about only 50% of Americans are actually going to even take a fucking vaccine. Chad (26m 34s): Yes. Joel (26m 34s): What's the fucking point. If only half of us are going to take it, like we're, a lot of us are going to be sick. And I also did hear that in the news. I think today, I heard that a few people who had had COVID months ago, habit again. So apparently the, the antibodies that you create in your own, in your own body, don't fend it off for very long, like most viruses. So, yes, I agree. This is going to be a thing. It's not going to be like, Oh, you've had it, you're done. Or you have a vaccine and we're finished. I mean, it may be something where we have to get vaccinated every quarter or every six months we have to go in and get a shot. Joel (27m 10s): So this is a huge, huge opportunity for businesses like this. And I suspect there will be more to protect people in the workplace around testing, and these guys are on the forefront. So definitely one to watch Brio system. Chad (27m 25s): Three off is that we have to, at least here in the United States lose 165,000 to death before companies takeover. Right? And that's, that's when the opportunity happens, right? When you have mass chaos like this, because the government didn't fucking act and they didn't jumpstart the engines to get this taken care of. Yes. Now companies are going to have the opportunity to profit off, of this fucking chaos. And, you know, am I saying, it's a bad thing. Chad (27m 56s): I'm not saying it's a bad thing for the companies, because somebody has to fucking do it since our government is not protecting the people. And this is, I mean, this is one of the most fucking frustrating things for, I think, any country, but mainly America, because of the way that we have missed managed this entirely not to mention we've, I've also seen, have no clue where the fuck this is out of, where people are talking about, watch the vaccination, because we're going to get microchips implanted when the vaccinations are. Chad (28m 32s): I mean, this conspiracy theories are fucking over, over stupid people, everywhere. Rednecks across the nation are going fucking crazy because they think they're going to get fucking geo tracked or something. Joel (28m 44s): Yeah. Geo tracked and QR codes tattooed on my ass. I'm ready for that. Ready for that. More kind of startup news, investment news. This one out of China company called MOKA. And that's not like the coffee that I enjoy complete with chocolate and whipped cream. Chad, just in case you curious, not, not MOCHA it's M O K A, and this is HR tool for automation, for HR and large enterprise companies out of China. Joel (29m 15s): They just raised 27, 27 million in series B totaling 43.2 million. To me, this was intriguing in light of sort of the whole TikTok phenomenon. So I have, I have two questions here that, that, that I find intriguing from this, this investment. We don't talk much about companies in our space getting money for their, for investment investment dollars flowing into this space. So for me, you know, China is, is kind of over their consumer. They've sort of hit a ceiling with the consumer sites, right? Joel (29m 47s): That you have the search engine thing, the social media thing, they're doing their social, their Facebook competitor, Snap, whatever Tik Tok blowing up. So there's going to be a ton of opportunity in the B2B space. And I think you're going to see a lot of innovation coming out of China in the next five years. And I think we talk a lot about that as well. I'm curious to see if a lot of these will be copycats of American companies and other companies similar to China's strategy in the past with search engines, social media, et cetera. Chad (-): You know it. Joel (30m 21s): So how does that play in do American companies use Chinese HR tech in light of Tik Tok, or do they shy away from it? Does any of this shit get banned? Is there a security risk to have, you know, MOKA is your HR systems if you're in the U S? I think there are a lot of questions here, but a lot of innovation in, regardless with a billion and a half people is going to be coming out of China. I think we'll be talking more and more about it. My hope is that it'll be innovative stuff that we're not just rehashing what we've already done, but time will tell but what we do know is that money is starting to flow into these businesses. Chad (30m 56s): It's going to be interesting for multinational corporations because these companies, again, especially in China, are going to be able to, I believe, own their country. They're going to be able to push out a lot of other tech, period. So you're going to see a lot of that happening, again, back to the kind of like China versus companies thing that you and I argue about. You know, China, China replicates a lot of shit. They copy a lot of shit. So does Facebook. Right? Joel (31m 25s): True. Chad (31m 25s): So, yeah, I think, I think we're going to see some big differentiations, not in just how we look at countries, but how we look at huge companies because they're actually acting in they're mimicking really the bad play. Joel (31m 39s): It'll also be interesting from my perspective, to see what companies in our space invest in these companies like do we start seeing recruit holdings invest into Chinese companies, while owning Indeed and Glassdoor and other multinationals. So it'll be an interesting story to talk about. We still have yet, however, to get a ChaD and Cheese Podcast copycat. So apparently our innovations sucks, but whose innovation does not suck is our next sponsor. Sovereign Sovren Parser (32m 8s): 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. Joel (32m 36s): So our next story, so top CEOs pledged to a hundred thousand low income and minority New Yorkers. Chad (32m 43s): Yes. Joel (32m 44s): When I read this, I thought Chad is gonna kill this. He's going to hate it. Do you hate it? Chad (32m 49s): I don't hate any of the, the actual ideas. The problem is the, the execution, what we've seen over the year. So New York has, they have like 16% in New York State unemployment and 20% in the city, right? There's an issue. Now this is an issue that could have been combated already if companies would have started thinking about this before, and we should have, we know that we have gaps already. Chad (33m 19s): Those gaps are skills gaps, right? And they're not all gaps where you need to go to a four year college or two year degree, or what have you. And companies know this. They know exactly what they need, but yet they sit back. And what I like to call corporate welfare, wait for the government to spend a shit ton of money to give them a solution. And that's just total bullshit. So now top CEOs are pledging to XYZ and it's like, guys, Jamie Diamond, rich motherfucker, CEO of JP Morgan, chase, and 26 other executives want to get up on a fucking soap box and say how they're going to help low income and minorities. Chad (34m 4s): And all I have to say is I will believe it when I see it. And I'm not saying just doing it for, you know, this, this wonderful cut, the ribbon kind of parade, ticker tape parade, bullshit. I'm talking about long term strategies to help Americans get out of poverty, to help Americans get past fucking middle management or shit, help them get into middle management for God's sakes. So overall, I hope something actually happens because the black, Latin, next Asian communities, I mean, not just in New York, but across the United States, we need something to be able to inject skills into our own fucking people. Joel (34m 50s): Yup. Yup. I'm surprised you didn't mention your, your good buddy, Jeff Bezos. Amazon is all on this list as well. Yeah. I don't want to ruin your weekend for the, for the 10th weekend in a row, the, the program will target black, Latin, X, and Asian workers, and seeks to hire based more on skills than cause degrees, focusing on entry-level tech jobs, such as computer programming. You mentioned Jamie Diamond. He said, quote, "many New Yorkers are stuck in low paying jobs that could be lost in the future, or are struggling to navigate the labor market. Joel (35m 22s): We are using our collective power to prepare the city's workforce with the skills of the future and helping New Yorkers who have been left behind, get a foot in the door" end quote. I was surprised to not hear you cynically say that these companies are doing this out of necessity because as fewer white people inhabit this country, these companies in New York and elsewhere need more customers. So I feel like a lot of this might be out of just self-interest to say, look, our buyers are going to change what, you know, what they look like is changing, we need to make sure that we empower that demographic because that is our future. Chad (35m 59s): But we've been saying this for over a decade now, and shit still hasn't changed. And that was the same exact position, all of those companies were in back then too. So yes, all of that does make sense. It is so common sense to be able to focus on how you build your company, not just a company from the standpoint of employees, but also skills and talent and how all of those individuals should represent the communities that you're trying to market to, to try to sell to. Chad (36m 34s): Right? I mean, it just makes sense. And note to HR real quick. One of the reasons why we're in this fucking predicament today is because you stupid motherfuckers keep putting requirements on jobs that don't need to fucking be. You are the problem. And if you're saying, well, it's, it's the hiring managers who are saying that, fuck you. Okay. Because you should be the expert and knowing how to put this shit together. So that's the end of my rant. Joel (37m 3s): I got nothing after that, man. That was, that was good. I will add. However, there's not a lot of meat on the bones of this proposal. It was sorta like, we're going to do this, but not really telling anyone specifics about how we're going to do it. So ... Chad (37m 17s): No accountability, it's the easiest way to do it. And Jay, if anybody knows, you know, it's going to be fucking CEOs. They know how to get through shit and smile and then let it just fade away. Joel (37m 27s): It was great PR, all these guys were all over the news for at least a day and a half. So yeah. Chad (37m 32s): Talk and talk about another CEO who is who's having issues. Tell us a little bit about Uber in California. Joel (37m 40s): Yeah. So your, your buddies, Uber and Lyft, you've been really high on the, on the soap box about those drivers needing to be treated as workers. So out of California, recently, Uber Tech and Lyft were ordered to convert their California drivers from independent contractors to employees with benefits an early loss in a court battle the gig industry can't afford to lose. I assume that you're thrilled about this. It's probably a good thing however, it's a big game of chess. Joel (38m 12s): Uber is threatening to close its operations in California, ie you won't be able to catch an Uber in San Francisco anymore. And it looks like Lyft is following suit, threatening to close down the app in California. Your take sir, Chad (38m 27s): One of the biggest states, in the United States in shutting down and pretty much a country is what you're looking to do. Joel (38m 35s): The world's fifth largest economy by itself, I think. Chad (38m 38s): They are totally bullshitting. So in this point, it also reminds me of the Republicans who were talking about how they wanted to kill Obamacare and replace it with something. But they had nothing to replace it with. They had eight years to try to figure something out and have it ready for the day when they could fucking inject it in there. This dude is saying, well, you know, it's going to take us months to actually figure this out. Motherfucker you knew this was going to happen! Or at least you knew the prospect was very high. It was going to happen. So this is all about options and protections. Chad (39m 8s): And the problem is in California. And what the CEO of Uber doesn't want to talk about is that in California, the Cares Act had to cover gig workers who are out of work because they weren't, they weren't paying into benefits. So what's happening is fucking taxpayers are covering because Uber's not doing what they should be fucking doing in the first place. And that once again kids is what we call Corporate Welfare. When you and I have to cover the fucking freight for dumps on a bitches, like the CEO of Uber. Joel (39m 41s): It's called having your cake and eating it too. I agree that it's a game of chicken, at this point. They can't afford to leave California. Now, whether or not, I mean, the government's not going to blink. In my opinion. I think the most thing I hope for is there's an uprising of gig workers who say, we need. Part of their spin, as well as like with so many people unemployed, do you really want to risk that many more people that can't drive an Uber to make money? The only hope the company has is, is threatening to do this. They can't leave California. Joel (40m 12s): Like it's too big of a market. They need to figure out how to, how to work there. And by the way, there's, there's upward pressure in regards to profitability. We interviewed Mason Wong last year, who talked pretty transparently about Lyft needs to make money. And Uber is the same way. They're, they're both losing money. So now if you throw in this sort of regulation, in terms of treating drivers as employees, that's going to be a lot of weight on their business, that they have to figure out. So it's a game of chicken. Joel (40m 44s): I think they're going to lose, they're going to have to treat these folks as employees and figure it out. But if you're just playing chess and threatening, I think this is move they have to do, ultimately however they're going to pay. Chad (40m 55s): Yeah, and if your business model doesn't allow you to make a profit that does not give you license to fuck over your employees. Joel (41m 3s): Yeah. By the way, I haven't taken an Uber or Lyft in a while, but there are rumblings. There are rumblings that the prices, the pricing of it is going up quite a bit. Chad (41m 13s): It was too cheap in the first place. That was one of the, one of the issues. Joel (41m 18s): At least until self driving cars are a thing. Let's take a quick break and listen to a what JobAdX has to say. And then we're talking sex, dolls and VR people. JobAdX (41m 28s): Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company, culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. JobAdX (42m 12s): Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team, help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com. Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX Joel (42m 26s): Now's now's the portion of our show. And we dive right into the mud and start slinging it around everybody. Chad (42m 32s): I can't wait. Joel (42m 33s): Yeah. And okay, so jeez, you can Google this one if you want, if you want more real, more news on it and more actual intelligent commentary, we're just throwing it in there because there's just too many innuendos that we could throw in around McDonald's. But the ex CEO apparently was showing his Big Mac to some internal employees, three total. I can't believe it's 2020. And we're still talking about people in the workplace, literally sending Slack messages, text messages, and emails, sexting over corporate bandwidth and whatnot, like if you're gonna do this shit people, this is one for the kids. Joel (43m 18s): Get a burner phone, don't send this shit out. Like it's like really stupid that an executive CEO from McDonald's can't figure this out. So anyway, you can look up the specifics of it. He was looking to biggie size, his Coke with too many, too many employees. The big, the big, the big scandal on this as well is that he, he allegedly covered up claims. He's giving stock to these women to shut them up. Okay. Chad (-): No way! Joel (43m 46s): This is an ongoing this an ongoing investigation, of course, but he's, he's, he's gonna have to pay back millions of dollars. Probably. They're going to pay these women a ton of money for what happened. They're probably going to get sued by, by shareholders. Chad (44m 3s): It's a big fucking mess, but yeah. Check it out. McDonald's CEO dippin' his McNuggets and the wrong sauce to say, to say the least, I don't know if you have any comment on this, but it was just, it was worth ending the show with a couple of sexy, dirty, nasty stories. And this is the first one. No, actually I believe what if he would have had a sex doll and VR glasses, he would have been fucking fine. And none of this shit would've happened. Yeah. Yeah. Joel (44m 32s): So real quick, the probe found dozens of nude or sexually explicit photos and video footage of female employees that were taken in 2018 and 1'9 and sent from his McDonald's email account to his personal email. But probably the more interesting story is prostitutes in Prague are up and arms, not happy. They're suffering, employment opportunities are going down for them. There's a story. I don't know, was it in Vice or something this week ... Chad (45m 2s): Mel, Joel (45m 3s): They're now brothels Chad (45m 5s): It's Prague. Joel (45m 7s): My head is going to explode cause we're, we're mentioning sex, dolls, in VR in the same show. But so there's a brothel here where they have sex dolls in the bedrooms. And you, you put on your VR headset and you have your way with the doll while wearing your VR headset. SFX (45m 28s): That's it man, game over man. Joel (45m 31s): So the real women are pissed because more and more men are going to these dolls to have sex. I don't know. It's a can of worms. I don't know where to go with it. So do you envision a day where these are totally illegal around the world? Chad (45m 47s): It was funny. So we were talking before the show and everybody wants to say how many, you know, how many single dudes are going to buy these things? And my question was, you know, how many spouses are going to buy them for like their partner for, for, you know, cause like, Hey, instead of pestering me all the time, jump on your doll, right? Joel (46m 9s): Yeah. Great. So more silver linings, right? No disease safety, right? You're not going to get jacked as a, well, sorry, jacked is a bad word. You're not going to get held up or killed using prostitutes. You're not gonna be on the street. You know, doing whatever, probably less drug abuse if this shit isn't sort of all around, is it cheating or not? Like we said before the call, like Chad (46m 36s): It's up to your spouse. Joel (46m 38s): It's kind of up to each person, right? Like, I don't know. It's a, is the doll a lookalike of your wife or husband? Maybe that's okay. Or maybe, maybe the, the person, the VR headset is your wife or husband. And that's acceptable. Like, I don't know the rules, the rules have yet to be written on this shit, but Chad and cheese will be here to walk you through it kids. Chad (46m 53s): Yeah. And if you're doing it. Joel (46m 56s): If you're in Prague having sex with, with sex dolls and with beer headsets on, please let us know. Please come on the show and tell us about your experience. Chad (47m 4s): Just want to know how the experience was. You know, I need a beer. We out. Joel (-): We Out Outro (47m 9s): Yeah. This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible for more visit Chadcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome.

Purpose isn't just for inspiration... Douglas Atkin, fmr Head of Global Airbnb Community continues his Cult Brand Master Class in helping companies understand how to use your purpose to recruit, review, and reject everyone... Even customers. Douglas shares how companies Core Values won’t be lived, and may even fade away, if organizations don’t select people who inherently share those values. As the world hopes to turn the corner on COVID heading into 2021, these lessons are invaluable. Thanks to our friends at Symphony Talent for supporting the Cult Brands Series of podcasts. This podcast is a companion to Douglas' series authored entitled Purpose Must Come First on Medium. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. Intro (1s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (13s): All right! Douggie Fresh Chad (14s): Hello. Joel (13s): What's up kids? Chad (13s): It's that time! Joel (13s): Hi! Chad (13s): Guess who we have today? Joel? Joel (13s): Oh, I don't know. It's a return guest is the rumor that I've heard everybody who's out there. Chad (13s): We have Douglas Atkin who we're going to be talking about coal brand and recruitment. That's right. Kids. If you don't know Douglas as work well, he's a Cult Brand expert. Former global Head of Cmmunity at Airbnb held a position as Partner and Chief Community Officer at meetup.com and literally always the smartest, coolest dude in the room. Douglas (13s): You guys, you guys... Chad (1m 12s): Did I mention that Douglas actually authored the book Culting of Brands? Joel (1m 12s): He wrote the book Chad (1m 12s): He wrote the book! Joel (1m 12s): When they say that he wrote a book. He really wrote the book everybody. Chad (1m 12s): But he didn't just write the book. He created an entire industry and their events. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. But today we're at, this is the sixth installment of Douglas's "How to Live your Purpose" series a, which are intended to be a compliment to his writing over on Medium, and most importantly, focused on how to become and stay a Colt brand. Chad (1m 45s): Welcome back, Douglas, how you feeling, man? Joel (1m 45s): What's up Douglas? Douglas (1m 45s): Pretty good. There's lots of production in my garden. Chad (1m 45s): Today's show is centered on use it to recruit, review, reject everybody... Joel (1m 45s): Reject. Chad (1m 45s): even customers. So right out of the gate, as we talk about this Douglas, the hardest thing for any company to do is reject talent that they feel is perfect for them, but not might not be perfect for their company. Can you tell us a little bit about how Airbnb had this brand had this focus, had all these individuals who were doing culture slash interviewing and grading. Chad (2m 17s): How, how did that actually affect hiring managers? Joel (2m 17s): And affect a candidate that you wanted? Douglas (2m 17s): Yeah, right, right, exactly. So, so I mean, that happens to all of us, you know, here... There, I was being a huge champion of the core values and the purpose and all of that. And then I found out that someone I desperately needed a, you know, as global head of community, one of my roles was we, we hired some grassroots organizers from the Obama campaign that had written the written playbook, basically on grassroots organizing. Because we were having to deal with something that most companies is never have to deal with. Which is that, we helped launched a new economy for peer to peer or sharing economy, but it was bumping up against old laws that didn't recognize this new form of commerce. New laws that were different in each of the 34,000 cities in which we operated. And so that meant most of our hosts were illegal, according to these old laws. So we were trying to change laws, but we had no lobbyists at the time we had, no, we had one lobbyist actually, now remember for the whole world. Douglas (3m 32s): It was insane. 34,000 cities we had, I know we had one lawyer. We had, we had no money really. I mean, whereas the hotels, for example, in many of these cities who were getting to see us as a threat, had oodles of money for lobbying, they'd been doing it for decades and decades in all of the cities, all over the world. So to cut a long story short, I said, the only way we can deal with this is we don't have money, power, but we do have people power. We do have people who really like Airbnb, or this is in 2012, 2013, 2014. So I said, but we need to train them to go and talk to their elected representatives and make their case about how they should be legalized. Douglas (4m 3s): And so I did that by hiring these grassroots organizers. Anyway, I had found this brilliant woman and I really wanted to kind of parachute her into this particular city that was, was blowing up, you know, with, with threats of shutdown of Airbnb and everything else. So I'm really needed her, but the way Airbnb ensures that there is that the people who join Airbnb share the same values that everyone else shares within Airbnb is they do these, what we call core values or culture interviews. Douglas (4m 42s): So you may have your, just like any other company, six to eight to 10 interviews with people who are in your discipline. Say you're an engineer or a marketing person, you may have your be interviewed by, by engineers or at, in the company to see if you're good at your job. But then unlike most companies, you get two interviews, two separate people who are interviewing you to see if you will be a culture fit. And it's a very specific interview where certain things need to be ticked off where you need to display as the candidate, things you've done in your life, that show that you share the same values. And the values are very, everyone can see what the values are, their BNB, their champion, the mission, and be a host and be an entrepreneur, cereal entrepreneur. You have to prove those things. Now, the important thing is those culture or core values interviewers have veto power. As in this case, it could be the best candidate in the world, but if they fail the culture or core values interviews, they're not hired. So, so I'm ashamed to say that when I heard she failed the core values interviews, I was, you know, swearing and rampaging about I'm afraid. Joel (4m 42s): Hahaha Douglas (4m 42s): No, I know that it was exactly the right thing to do, you know, but I'm at as many other managers have been, you know, sort of like going, Oh, I need this person right now. I need them yesterday. What am I going to do? Of course, I very quickly became resigned and then happily compliant because I knew more than, you know, more than most. But if you hire someone who does not fit, who don't share the same values, short term, you may solve the problem that you need them to fix. The longer term they'll create in worst problems. Chad (4m 42s): Right. Douglas (4m 42s): They'll be, you know, they'll either not espouse the values, which is bad enough or they'll actively work against them and create cynicism and toxic culture. Douglas (6m 31s): And so they will be, you know, a really bad, long term. So I, in the end, you know, we figured it out. We figured out something else. I managed to find someone else to do the job in the short term. And of course I was happily, happily compliant, but, but that's the way Airbnb does it. So there's this gate, if you like that is there that makes sure that people who come into the company and this includes everyone, you know, this includes the leaders of, of whole businesses and everything else. They have to have these culture or core values interviews. Douglas (7m 1s): And there are, there are, there are people you have to apply to be a core values interviewer if you're already at Airbnb. And then you're given a really good training and about 10% of the employees are across all disciplines and 10 years and locations and things are qualified to be these culture interviewers. Joel (7m 20s): Is 10% planned or is it just, it just happens to be 10%. Douglas (7m 23s): It just happens to be 10%. There's about 500 at the moment. I'm sorry, my bigger was sneezing. This whole process, these core values, interviews and interview as happened in 2012, when the three founders realized that, they couldn't interview everyone themselves, anymore. This is when the company was about 180 people, I guess, 200 people, something like that. They no longer have the time or the capacity to interview everyone. And, and that's what the large part of what they did was interviewing for cultural fit, not just the skill. Douglas (7m 56s): There's no way Brian would be able to assess an engineer skill, but he certainly can assess whether they would be a cultural fit or not. So, so that's when they set it up in 2012, they, they created the core values and then they created the core values interviewers, to make sure that they recruited people who cert those, those values. But Airbnb uses the purpose and core values to recruit everyone into the company, but that also applies to, to reviewing. So once you're in the company and you're working, you know, reviews happen to most people who work, normally reviews are about what you achieved, what you did, you know, what impact you made. Douglas (8m 35s): And that's true at Airbnb, but there is an equal amount of emphasis given onto not just what you did, but "how" you did it. The "how": being did you do all these wonderful things that Airbnb, while living the core values and making sure the purpose is. Can you hear that? Chad (8m 35s): Poor guy. Joel (8m 59s): Is that the dog? Chad (8m 59s): Lucky, the beagle is sneezing. Douglas (8m 59s): Lucky what's going on? Chad (8m 59s): Poor guy. Douglas (8m 59s): Lucky, you're interrupting my podcast. Oh my God. Okay. I'm going to have to, do you want to pause and I'll figure it out? Joel (9m 12s): This is awesome! Welcome to 2020 everybody. Chad (9m 20s): Yeah, this is good. Let her sneeze. This is just real life. Douglas (9m 20s): Okay. Good. Ok, Anyway, Right? Yeah. So it doesn't, so there's this gauge to make sure that people who come in and share the core values and buy into and live model live the, the purpose. But also while they're there, they, you, you know, you don't let up on that. There's this review system and the review system measures, not just the what, but also the "how." It measures what you did and how about you to that, but also how you did it, how you, whether you did these amazing things, whilst living the core values and, and, and champion the mission and they're given equal power. Douglas (9m 55s): So, you know, you, you, if you've achieved a huge amount, but you didn't do it by the core values, that's a fireable offense and you'll be given a warning and, you know, and help to, to try and do that better. But if it continues, then no matter how good an engineer you are or a marketer, you are you'll end up leaving. Chad (10m 13s): It seems fairly subjective though. I mean, how do you, how do you actually police that and enforce that without some people feeling like, you know, they are being done wrong? Douglas (10m 24s): Yeah. And does, does veto power ever go to anyone's head? Is anyone monitoring them or checks and balances in place? Yes, ther are, they're always are, all right. So if there's any dispute about it, then, you know, then it'll be discussed with their peers or with a hiring manager or, you know, all these kinds of things. But, and also in terms of reviews, I mean, the reviews are sort of three 60 reviews and they're very specific. You know, you have to give evidence for things, not just about evidence for what you do, but also evidence for whether you did or didn't do something according to the core values. Douglas (10m 55s): So it's all evidence-based. So that's recruiting and reviewing and rejecting. And this also applies to companies in Airbnb. Let's grow and, and has acquired some companies over the past few years. And the mergers and acquisitions team has also been trained to assess a perspective company's purpose values and whether they are a good fit with Airbnb's. Cause I'm sure you guys know, in HR, some of the worst things to happen to a culture is if there's a merger or an acquisition where there's no cultural fit. Douglas (11m 25s): It could destroy everything. The process of, of merging in the, or acquiring a company is very intense. There's a lot of contact generally, or should be a lot of contact, between the acquiree and the acquired. And so you could see in their practices and how they do things, whether they that is sort of aligns with your core values or not. But also the senior leadership of the company to be acquired as given core values interviews, obviously, cause they're disproportionately influential and at least I'm at least, one candidate in the past few years has been rejected, not on the basis of what, of the business, but on the basis that they, they were not a good fit with our purpose and values. Joel (12m 4s): Really surprised Douglas to read in your, in your posts that over a million hosts. So even the people who are renting Airbnbs have to have to take a pledge, essentially when they do, over a million is surprising. But there's also, I guess, a story to that it was put in place later because there was an incident with either racism or a host, a wouldn't accept someone on, on other reasons. Douglas (12m 29s): We apply the use your purpose and core values to recruit review and reject customers too. And this is particularly important for Airbnb, because especially with our hosts, there are about 5 million hosts. They're the ones who deliver the service basically not us. I mean, we do to some degree, but it's mainly the hosts who are delivering this. The mission of create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. And so we're very closely aligned, hosts and Airbnb, you know, our interests always be virtually the same. Douglas (12m 59s): And so we, Joe Gabby and I, had always talked about acquiring, creating some kinds of gates, similar gates to the one we have from potential employees, for hosts and guests, not just hosts but hosts and guest that made those show that they were: they were genuinely part of this community that bought into this idea of, you know, being a local, anywhere in the world and welcoming and hosting people and all that stuff. So we always wanted to do it. We just never got around to it. And then an event happened, which I'm sure people can remember when some guests were saying that some hosts they felt were, were rejecting them on the basis of race, which was a complete nightmare. I mean, and again, that's something we should have been dealt with before, but certainly one that, that basically accelerated this idea that we'd been playing with immediate action. Douglas (13m 40s): And now on the join page, I'm just looking at it here where you, you know, where you've done your listing or you've done your profile as a guest and you have to accept or decline the terms of service, but you also have to accept or decline this. It says "Before you join, our mission is to build a trusted community where anyone can belong anywhere. To ensure this. We're asking you to accept our terms of service and make a commitment to respect everyone on Airbnb." Douglas (14m 11s): And then there's this thing called the Airbnb community commitment. "I agree to treat everyone in there in the Airbnb community, regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, skin, color, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age with respect and without judgment or bias." And then you have to accept or decline. Joel (14m 11s): And over a million declined? Douglas (14m 11s): And over a million declined, which meant that, which is, which is great because you don't have those people on your platform that you don't want. Chad (14m 11s): But it's sad. Douglas (14m 49s): It's a bit sad, that there are a million people that, you know, basically. So it's real in other words, so basically what we are turning away customers because they do not buy into our purpose and our values. So that's like a, it's a real thing. That's a million potential customers, probably more now, cause that was an old data point of about year or two years old. It was made even more clear where we stood on this because our glorious President Trump, did as he does, you know, did this whole banning people from certain countries from visiting the United States and so on and so on. Douglas (15m 27s): So I hastily put together, there was an ad in the super super bowl called "We accept" that was basically about, we accept everyone and social America. And, and then the New York times wrote about this ad and about the whole, this whole initiative. And it says I'm quoting the New York times now "in a memo to employees, after the executive order from Trump, Airbnb's chief executive Brian Chesky was more explicit about his opposition. This is a policy I profoundly disagree with and it is a direct obstacle to our mission at Airbnb, our mission being anyone can belong anywhere. Mr. Chesky wrote on January 29th, that weekend, the company began to provide free and subsidized temporary housing for people who have been affected by the immigration restrictions." Douglas (16m 1s): So that's when we, and our hosts by this program called Open Homes, gave free lodging for people who, who was very struck by this restriction. So that, that was a very public and un-compromising commitment to our purpose, you know, going against government policy essentially. And Brian has received death threats. Joel (16m 31s): Jeez, Douglas (16m 31s): I know. Symphony Talent (16m 35s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Building a Cult Brand is not easy, which is why you need friends. Like Roopesh Nair CEO of Symphony Talent on your side. Okay Roopesh, hiring companies, can't hire diverse candidates. If diverse candidates aren't applying for their jobs. What should hiring companies do differently to attract a more diverse candidate? So for diversity, specifically, companies should think about why do they want diversity in their organization and ensure that they are bringing that into the conversations about hiring diverse candidates. Symphony Talent (17m 13s): Because that's how they can be genuine about diversity, because just checking a box saying, I want to be hiring diverse candidates is not going to help. So the first thing is thinking about why do you want diversity? What are the different groups you're are targeting as you think about diversity and then bringing those messages, which basically is going to resonate to that particular group of diverse candidates, into your engagement, whether it is kind of, as you reach out in the mass media and target specific diverse groups. As you basically nurture these groups, once they have connection with you is very important. Because to your point, you won't get a diverse candidate till you get in front of a candidate. And the only way you can do that is by figuring out what is the connection point between you and the diverse candidate. And it is very, very easy to kind of cast a net saying, I want diverse candidate, but the truth is there are many, many groups of that diverse candidate and you need to be really clear on who exactly are you targeting. Let Symphony Talent help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your talent strategy for more information, visit symphonytalent.com. Chad (16m 59s): Back to the Cult Brand. I mean really understanding what a cult brand is. And w we talk about it on the podcast all the time, where companies say that they're committing to something and that they have a purpose, but that's just all lip service. This is specifically saying, here's our purpose, we're abiding by our purpose. And we're showing you a million people declined to actually working with us because they didn't believe in our purpose and guess what? Chad (17m 29s): Fuck them. Douglas (18m 48s): Basically. Yes, it's true. So it's what I'm saying is that when you operationalize your purpose, it suddenly gets, you have to make it real. That means that the decisions will be made, that often in the short term will hurt growth or profits, revenue, whatever. In the longterm though, you're doing it for the longterm, because you think of the long term, you will definitely make that revenue and profit back in a multiple. Because your will be appealing to those people who do buy into your mission and there'll be enough of them to make it all worthwhile. Chad (18m 48s): The only way that you get true believers, right? Douglas (18m 48s): Or maybe you get true believers. So this is true by the way of any community. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about a church, a religion, a political party, a, you know, a club or whatever it is that every community basically is a group of people who share something in common. And the strongest communities and I learned and saw this when I worked at meetup.com. Meetup.com was about getting people online, to get them offline, to meet other people who shared their passions and interests. Douglas (20m 1s): That could be pugs. Joel (20m 1s): Vampires. Douglas (20m 1s): It could be vampires. It could be, it could be better. Joel (20m 1s): Still having nightmares Douglas (20m 1s): But anyway, but the point is, what we saw was that one of the criteria for a successful strong meetup group that had loyal members, who did lots of stuff, was that they had a very clear purpose and they lived it. And they were very clear about who should join that meetup group and who shouldn't. And so the ones that were explicit about if you want to do this, this, and this, and believe this, this and this, then please join. Douglas (20m 36s): If you don't, then I'm sure there's another meetup for you. And companies are basically just larger communities. They're large meetups, really? And they equally must be super clear about what they're, what world they're trying to create, what they stand for, what their values are and say if you buy into these ideals, as we do, then please come and join. If you don't, then I'm sure there's another company for you that where you will fit in. Chad (20m 59s): That's it right. Turning back toward, you know, internal employees we're talking about belong anywhere. That is awesome. The belonging piece, but what about the belong here campaign or promotion or whatever. I'm not sure what you actually called it that you put together. Why did you do that? Why was it so important? Douglas (21m 21s): Well, yes. Okay. So there was, it was important because quite simply, if our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, obviously you had to make sure that the employees felt they belonged here, at Airbnb, right? If they didn't, then how could they ever truly, credibly, authentically execute against that, that purpose? So at a bare minimum, I wanted to see whether the employees at Airbnb felt that they belonged at Airbnb, that was because that was our mission was, was all about belonging somewhere. But there was another reason for doing it, which will in the end, what I did was a, it was a piece of I rent out or did another Odyssey around the world, talking to people in our offices, all over the place. Douglas (22m 6s): Hundreds of people, I went around asking a series of questions to find out whether they felt they belonged or didn't belong in their team at Airbnb. Because there's a very good, there's another reason that applies to everybody, whether belonging is your purpose or not. You need employees to feel like they belong at your company. And the reason why, is because when people feel like they belong, and this is something I learned from doing all the interviews of cult members, all the interviews and people I spoke to at meetup groups, the movement, making everything. Douglas (22m 38s): I know that when people feel like they belong, there's a great feeling of safety and trust, in the team. They think I'm with people who get me, they understand who I am, I understand who they are. I feel like I belong. I feel at home, finally. What that means is you can relax and be the full person that you are, you know, like the full Joel, the full on the a hundred percent, Joel. Joel (22m 38s): Yikes! Douglas (22m 38s): Yeah, that's a bit scary. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. So yeah, go to a place where you don't feel you belong. So that's when people really shine and become themselves as when they're in a team where they feel like they belong and they're safe and they have trust. Douglas (23m 9s): And as I was doing this, as it happened, Googl published a study that was talked about in the New York times and other places where they had researched what made their most successful teams successful. And it came down to one thing basically, which was that there was enough trust within the team for people to take risks and innovate, right? Douglas (23m 40s): So, no, one's going to go out on a limb and do something that's never been done before if in a context of fear, because you're going to get fired or you're going to get laughed at or belittled or something. So you can only, you can only take a risk, you can only go on out on the rim, say, I don't know if this is going to work, I think it's going to work. I've got evidence it's going to work, but I don't know for sure if you're in an environment of trust and safety, where you feel like people have got your back and are giving you space to innovate and all those kinds of things. Douglas (24m 11s): So that's another key reason why you need people to feel like you belong in your organization because they are not going to truly become themselves and feel that it's safe enough to innovate and take the entrepreneurial risks that need to be taken unless they feel like they belong. So I did this huge study. And what was great, was those able to uncover what it was specifically that made someone feel, the go from feeling like a stranger, sometimes even people said they had like the sort of imposter syndrome when they arrived at Airbnb to feeling like they belonged and being the best version of themselves they'd ever been and give their best ever work. Douglas (24m 50s): And so I could, I was able to identify the triggers. I did. It was quite a, it was quite an emotional journey actually, because the questions I were asking were not your normal employment questions. I would be interviewing people one on one, and I would give them a pieces of card. And I would say, think of the moment in your life where you felt like you most belong to somewhere anyway, I'm talking about work, but at any point in your life and write down three words that described how you felt at that moment and draw a little picture, a little stick man or something, and then they would do that. Douglas (25m 23s): And we talk about that. And then I said, now, now think about the moment in your life where you felt most rejected, most like a stranger, most alienated, write down three words that describe what you were like and draw a little picture. And then I did the same thing in an employment context in Airbnb. I said, think of the moment where you most feel that you belonged at Airbnb, three words picture. And now the moments when you only felt to most, you know, you felt most rejected or alienated at Airbnb if, if ever and so, I mean, God, people were crying. Douglas (25m 56s): Sometimes with joy where you're very emotional because you're, you're talking about a fundamental need of the human condition, which is about, do I belong or do I not come out, be who I am or, or do I have to like have a persona and hide myself and live in fear. But anyway, what else with that whole exercise is accumulating and aggregating all of those, all of that data. It was very useful to identify what it makes, what it takes to make someone feel like they belong and give their best selves and what it takes to screw that up and make them feel rejected and feel like they don't belong. In the process I also uncovered cause it was a concern of ours at the time, you know, as Airbnb was growing bigger, are we maintaining our entrepreneurial quality? And you know, the people we're hiring, we used to hire people who were sort misfits and entrepreneurs themselves or whatever. Now we're hiring people who are really good at marketing and really good engineers, but have never been entrepreneurial or whatever. Are we losing our entrepreneurial-ism? So I was able to identify the conditions under which people could become entrepreneurs even if they'd never been that before, which was super interesting. Joel (27m 4s): Douglas, I'm curious, you you've written all these pieces before COVID in the pandemic has, has changed the world. And I'm curious, would you have, would you have still written it as you, as you have today, knowing that how the world has changed? Has COVID flipped all of this sort of on its head or do we just evolve and still have these sort of mission statements? Do you hope that we just go back to the way things were, which all evidence seems like things will change a little bit when we go forward. And lastly, I'm curious the woman that you wanted to get hired that got rejected, would she still be rejected in today's environment you think? Douglas (27m 39s): I don't think COVID changes the purpose at all was nothing nothing's going to change. I mean, even if you're just going to drive 200 miles from your home and stay at an Airbnb, you're still gonna want to feel welcomed. You still want to get tips from the host about where to eat and where to avoid, all those kinds of things. That's going to stay the same. And likewise, the core values. I mean, I haven't, I mean, in a way, working at Airbnb, a travel company, and most of us were traveling a lot. And so we were always doing stuff on zoom with people already because you know, someone would be in Singapore, someone would be in Ireland, in Dublin, someone else would be in San Francisco. Douglas (28m 19s): It played havoc with your sleep patterns. But, but anyway, we still did it. So I dunno, it'd be interesting to see. I don't think the culture will have changed much because the same people are still there. They still have the same values. They they're going to interact with each other in the same way. I really, really hope that. I mean, Zoom is great. I'm sure it's made lots of efficiencies. And, but at the end of the day, nothing beats a face to face contact. That's the highest form of engagement, which leads to a feeling of belonging. So, no, I hope I hope it doesn't go away. I hope there's still going to be offices or at least other reasons to meet somewhere face to face because we have Airbnb have, have it all referencing this thing called one Airbnb where every year Airbnb would fly in at the cost of millions, all of the staff from all over the world, you know, by the time he left, that was about 4,000 people. So that's a huge amount of money to spend a week, not doing their jobs, but simply hanging out with each other. I mean, there was a, you know, a very strict program of events, but the main goal was for people to rub together and get sticky literally was their goal. Joel (28m 19s): Well, I know that the gathering is rescheduled for April of next year. And I know both Chad and I are hoping that we can all all share face to face time next year. Douglas as always. It's a, we appreciate your time. Chad (28m 19s): Thank you, Joel (28m 19s): Chad. Unless you have anything else to add we out. Chad (28m 19s): We Out Douglas (28m 19s): We Out. 5 (29m 49s): This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible for more visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome.

What do you get when you combine a shit-hot technology with an established company with lots of existing customers? You get Hourly, a conversational A.I. (don't call it a chatbot) solution from Alexander Mann Solutions (AMS). OK, they have a lot going for them, but can they survive Firing Squad? Jerry Collier, Managing Director, Product Innovation at AMS, brings his A-game, but you'll need to listen to reveal the boys' opinions. Firing Squad is proudly powered by the programmatic powerhouse known as (((Monster Truck voice))) PandoLogic!!! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Pandologic (0s): Damn Programmatic is hot. Yeah, it is hot, dude. Pass me a cold PBR. Would ya? Okay. Number one, I wasn't talking about the temperature and number two PBR is a shitty beer, time to upgrade to an IP. Okay. My bad guessing you were talking about Programmatic Job Advertising being hot. Yeah. That shit is everywhere and all the kids are doing it. No man. But there's only one company that's been doing it since 2007. Pandologic (30s): Damn 2007. Hey man, what wife were you on in 2007? I was on number one. We'll talk about her focus, dude. I'm talking about PandoIQ from our friends at Pandalogic, PandoIQs, programmatic recruitment advertising platform helps employers source talent faster and more efficiently than ever. Thanks to predictive algorithms, machine learning and AI Buzzword, overdose alert. Yeah. Pando was on the cutting edge or programmatic while being deeply rooted in the recruitment industry. Pandologic (1m 3s): PandoIQ provides an end-to-end programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any way, social spending to maximize the ROI on your recruitment spend. They're AI enabled algorithms use over 48 job attributes and more than 200 billion historical job performance data points to predict the optimal job advertising campaign. Pandologic (1m 34s): The machine does all that shit. That shit sounds expensive! Think again, Cheeeman. Pando IQ provides an end to end job advertising solution that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any wasteful spending. Sold! How do I get started? Go to Pandologic.com to request a demo and tell him Chad and cheese section. Ooh, they have a chat bot too, that we can talk to. Oh, kill me now. Firing Squad Intro (2m 3s): Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad! CHAD SOWASH & JOEL CHEESMAN 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 (-): Hell yeah! Independence Day is over and we've got a Brit on this episode of the firing squad. What's up everybody? Joel (2m 37s): I am Joel Cheesman co-host of the Chad and Cheese Podcast alongside my co-host Chad Sowash, and we are welcoming. Jerry Collier your Managing Director of Product Innovation from Alexander Mann Solutions/Hourly. Jerry, how are you? Jerry (2m 52s): Hey, good morning Chad (2m 53s): There he is, as you can tell Jerry's a Brit. So every time he speaks, all I can hear is King George starts singing. You say the price of my love. Joel (3m 3s): How did you celebrate the 4th of July? Jerry? Chad (3m 5s): He watched Hamilton! Jerry (3m 8s): And what a great show! What a great show?! I bet you both seen it though. You must've both seen it! Chad (3m 14s): Joel is the only knob that hasn't seen it. Yeah. He's yeah, he can't do it. Joel (3m 20s): No appeal whatsoever. Chad (3m 21s): That's okay. History is not history. Joel (3m 23s): Dancing colonials. Awesome. Sounds great. Chad (3m 28s): Sounds great. Okay. So Jerry is the Managing Director of product innovation at A M S aka Alexander Mann solutions. Jerry, give us a little bit about you. Jerry (3m 39s): Hey thanks. So my second career first 10 years was in the military. I joined AMS 24 years ago and so they lead our product division Joel (3m 50s): 24 years? That's good. Chad (3m 51s): That's good. Joel (3m 53s): What the hell is wrong with you man? 24 years. Chad (3m 57s): All right, Jerry. So let's, we'll just give you the format and the listeners, the format of firing squad. Jerry, you're going to have two minutes to pitch Hourly at the end of two minutes, you're going to hear the bell then Joel and I will hit you with rapid fire Q and A. If your answers start rambling or you get boring, Joel's probably going to hit you with the crickets and that is your signal to move along and tighten up your game at the end of Q and A, you will receive one of three grades. Chad (4m 38s): Number one, big applause. That's right. Kids. Time to cash it in, go to the bank. Money is going to start flowing. Number two, the golf clap. It's okay. Kind of like that kid at the prom, the wallflower... You could have done better. Jerry (4m 56s): It's very British. Chad (4m 57s): Yes. Yes. Joel (4m 58s): Not what you want, after 24 years in the business, you don't want that. Chad (5m 2s): It never least, number three, the firing squad pack it in and close up. Shop dust off the drawing board. Big boy, because guess what? That thing sucks. You don't want that. So that's the firing squad. Are you ready? Jerry? Jerry (5m 18s): Ready. Chad (5m 19s): Alright, Joel. Joel (5m 20s): In three, two, get them Jerry, Jerry (5m 22s): Hey, a one group of people who've been hit disproportionately hard and these unprecedented times is the hourly paid workforce. Many we now recognize as essential workers. Our mission here at Hourly in the product division of AMS is to enable all hourly job seekers to be treated fairly as humans whether they're hired or rejected. The combination of legacy ATS and bandaid, HR tech ultimately treats your non-exempt job seeker badly leaving them and hiring managers frustrated. Jerry (5m 53s): I spoke with a recruiting team last month that is now only two people. Yeah. At some soon they're going to be rehiring 50 to 60,000 hourly workers into their business. They know their all processes and tech won't cut it today. Often the solution to high volume hiring is bolting a bot onto the front end of the ATS process. But at some point that bot meant to humanize the recruiting post that's just dumps the job seeker back into that legacy system and ATS configured to make you jump through hoops, upload irrelevant resumes, cover letters only to wait and often hear nothing back. Jerry (6m 27s): This is utter bullshit for job seekers who are often your customers too. So how do you personalize, hiring and rejection for thousands and thousands of applicants? It's actually pretty simple. You turn the hiring process on its head and you turn it into a conversation from explore to offer. Imagine being one of thousands of candidates who can chat about opportunities, work out the best role for them know they're a good fit. Schedule their interview in less than six months. And if there isn't a good role, then the job seeker is being provided personalized incentives to improve the chances of success on the next application, I will has been built from the ground up to meet customer needs for volume recruiting. Jerry (7m 5s): We're being guided by some of the world's largest brands and thank you to them between them they hire 1.3 million people a year. Of course, there are thousands of HR tech options to plus or over your hiring process. Crap cracks today. And for some companies that works, but our Hourly customers know their candidates and managers deserve better. Check us out at wearehourly.com Joel (7m 31s): Tight that's right. Quincy has trained you. Well, Jerry, very good. We are hourly. Love the name, hate the URL. What's up with that? Jerry (7m 42s): It's my imagination. I do. You know, I, I'm a, I'm a simple, I'm a simple man and I love calling products by what they do. I don't want to get all sort of creative. I just want to, I want a product that talks to what it does. And this is about hourly workers. It's about transforming the recruiting experience for hourly workers. Yeah. Joel (8m 0s): At least it's better than gocanvas.io, but it's a close second. All right. So, so my God, we have chatbots coming out of our ears. How are you guys different? Jerry (8m 11s): Chatbots? I think had have their moment to have that place. If your core processes in the ATS, you can put a chat bot on the front end. You could put a chat bot on the on the back end. You can make that front and back a little bit nicer, but fundamentally it's a pretty poor experience and you're not eliminating any waste you're just automating what is a not very nice experience. So what we've done is strip all of that away and said, take from the moment. Let's put the recruiter back in recruiting. If I was pitching you a job, I want to know I'm wanting to build a converse - I want to build a relationship I'd want to, I want to find out about you and want to find out what things you like. Jerry (8m 47s): I'd want to find out what opportunities might be of interest. And then I want to guide you all the way through the process to getting that offer and dealing with any counter there afterwards. So we've, re-imagined the whole process from that explore to offer in one application, no more bandaids, no more ads. We can do it in a very different modern way. Let's get relevant for job seekers. Chad (9m 10s): Jerry AMS is known throughout the world already. Why start an entirely new brand? Jerry (9m 18s): That's a great question. I think Quincy Valencia. I know you've had Quincy on here, queen of chat-bots and I, over the last two years, it just got more and more frustrated by not being able to solve customer's problems. You know, we talk in industry and we talk about candidate experience and we do a pretty poor job of it. Let's challenge ourselves. We do a pretty poor job of it. We don't do a great job. We rejection. We don't do a great job of hiring experience. So we pitched to set up a new business, new product business in AMS to transform that and go after that. And we got green lit by the board and here we are with our first product. Jerry (9m 48s): First of many, hopefully. Chad (9m 49s): So does this mean that you can just pretty much go and do what you want since you're not branded Hourly, but you're still under the AMS umbrella. I'm still kind of perplexed. AMS has a brand. Everybody knows it. Why did you break away? Or why are you looking to break away with an entirely new brand, new color schemes, all that stuff. I mean, that's a lot of work. The big question is why? Jerry (10m 13s): Well, I think the product division has been given license from a brand perspective to, to be creative, to start to move AMS on a journey, to a slightly different conversation with customers, I suppose, with, with a front end of the spear of, of potentially, you know, other changes coming without a spoiler without spoiler alert, spoiler alert. Chad (10m 38s): So how much of this is Karen? You said that this was built from the ground up. Why in the hell did you buy Karen? Jerry (10m 44s): You know, it was a great question. You know, why product and why? Now one of the challenges we had was we have a great heritage with outsourcing. We have a great heritage in consulting and helping customers sort of solve problems themselves, but we had no engineering heritage. We hadn't built software before we hadn't built product before. So we had two options, either seek great partners in the marketplace or go make an acquisition and build around that. And that's what we did closing that acquisition in June last year and welcoming in the Karen team. Jerry (11m 17s): And they've become our engineering group in the product division. So a great fit fit for us, culturally some great ideas and have really accelerated our, our ability to, to build and launch great products. Chad (11m 31s): So an aqua-hire. Jerry (11m 32s): Yeah, absolutely. Joel (11m 34s): Jerry want to talk a little bit about the competition again? And we've had a lot of them on the show from Mya to XOR, obviously Paradox is a well known one as well. You guys are Alexander Mann. This, this feels a little bit like a side project, not going to have the kind of focus and energy that some of your competitors have. I want you to just convince me that you will have the focus and the resources behind hourly to make it competitive into the future. Jerry (12m 2s): Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So it's a great question. I think we are one of only two board sponsored initiatives globally. I have full support and backing from the board, the ex-co and our new investors or owners. They see the future in a much more balanced business that has outsourcing consulting and product. Our product division is not about one product, but it has multiple different products. We come, we come with the backing and the experience of a 25 year old business, four and a half thousand recruiters having recruited or around the around the world use every kind of product. Jerry (12m 43s): We're not an HR tech firm, just building software where recruiters who now have the capability to build smart software. And I think that's our USP Joel (12m 51s): And where are we in customer competency? Now a few years ago we heard the comment of, you know, people just want a chat bot, even though they don't know what the hell a chat bot is. I assume that we've evolved a little bit from that, but where are we in customer competency? And what percentage of employers do you think currently now leverage a chat bot and how much room does that leave for growth for companies like you? Jerry (13m 13s): I think a lot, there is a lot of discussion about chatbots and nothing. There has been adoption. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be able to put a number on that. It's just like working with recruiters. If you know, if I come to the career site and there's a chat bot there, the chat bot will say, Hey look, great, great. You want to explore this job? Let me pass you to my, my buddy who was, you know, a specialist in volume recruiting. Pass this to Hourly and we pick up the conversation. So I think, you know, you're going to see chat bots talking to each other and handing off seamlessly candidates. Jerry (13m 44s): So I, I just see this as a, you know, the next that we've, you know, we've had that sort of linear chatbot we've had now the more conversational chat bot starting to appear. And I think we're going to have groups of chatbots working as a team, to the benefit of the candidates and managers. Chad (14m 0s): Jerry Joel has a problem understanding conversational AI, can you help him understand? Can you help him understand the difference between conversational AI and just a plain old chat bot? Jerry (14m 13s): So let's, let's, let's start. So hourly is not a chat bot. We're a full platform that goes from explorer to offer. We have features that look like chat, and it is a conversation. If I was a recruiter pitching you, as I said before, I want to build a relationship. I want to find out what kind of opportunities, what shifts might work, what locations, what rates, what shifts don't work for you? I want to explore different roles. I want to look at your certifications if we're, you know, if you've applied for one job, but there's a, there's a forklift operator job over here that's a better bet. I want to understand that conversation because that's what I would do as a recruiter. Jerry (14m 46s): So conversation is about starting that process, but then keeping it going, not just they're dumping you into an ATS and the hell with that then often brings, but actually keeps that go in and says, Hey, let's, let's explore the sort of minimum requirements for this job. Let's see if you're a good match for this one. Cause if you're not, let's then divert you into a different role. Let's get you scheduled for that interview. Let's prep you for that interview. Let's prep the manager for that interview. Let's debrief you and the manager thereafter, let's get you the offer you want. And if that isn't going to be the, if you're not going to get hired, let's, let's give you a great rejection experience that says, hey, what we've learned about you is this. Jerry (15m 25s): So these are the things you think about when you next go through your hiring process. So let's give back as opposed to just send us an email at the end of the processes. Thanks. Hey, thanks for trying hard, but, but a better luck next time. Let's actually give back some hints and tips to the, to the, to the job seeker. So we go all the way through from that front end conversation, right at our back end and the disposition process in a S in a single uninterrupted conversation. So we're not just a chat bot where that conversational process that goes from explorer to hire. Chad (15m 56s): Does that make sense? It does. Now the big question is how many messaging platforms do you operate on SMS? Facebook, we chat What's app, et cetera, et cetera. How are you working today? Jerry (16m 5s): Yeah. Yeah. So we've, we've built mobile web and tech. First. We are now working on a number of those. You just mentioned as a, as part of our next phase, Quincy, my product manager is leading our roadmap, which includes a number of those other messaging platforms, because you're right. We want to take our conversation where the candidate wants to have the conversation. We're picking the big ones first and then starting to move out to all other channels in time. We, again, we want to make sure that we're having the conversation where the candidate or the manager wants to have that conversation. Joel (16m 42s): Yup. Platforms are important. And so our languages. So talk to me about, obviously English is one, but what others and what's on the roadmap. Jerry (16m 51s): Yep. So English and Spanish are critical first, and then we're going to be guided by our, our customers. So our roadmap has English and Spanish expansion into LatAm. And then we're going to be, you know, our first customers, they might be saying German is next and we might have to have German as the next one. So we're going to be guided very much from a, from a geographic expansion and a language need by our customers, although English and Spanish very much, very much. First, Joel (17m 21s): Is there a good talk to me about integrations? Do you integrate currently with ATS? Is, do you integrate with CRMs? If not, is that in the plan? What's, what's that look like? Jerry (17m 33s): Yep. We, we have a middleware solution for our integration. So we're able to integrate with all the big ATSs is today. ATS is, are still going to play a role. They are going to be the system of record. Often. They're going to be the system of record. We need to take a requisition. We to give that candidate's file back at the end of the process. So we need to push it somewhere. So ATS is still going to be there. I think another time I'd love to come on on the bait, this sort of future of the applicant tracking system. Jerry (18m 3s): And you know, me, Quincy, my team and others in the market would I think have strong views on the future of the ATS and the role of the ATS. But today we acknowledge it's still going to be important as that system of record. So integration has been critical in our work. Chad (18m 17s): That being said, talk to us about partners, Programmatic assessment scheduling. Cause you're not doing all of this yourself. Who, who have you partnered with? Why did you partner versus build? And then why did you build versus partner? Jerry (18m 33s): Great question. So we have built out really from the ground up with this only two pieces that we didn't want to build. One was the Programmatic front end, and you've covered a lot of ground on programmatic advertising. And we partnered with us with a fantastic leader in that market with Coveo. And the other piece we didn't want to build was the assessment. And we use the assessment data in four very exciting ways, but, and the part of the supports, our assessments is tree to fire and they they've built their assessment on the big five personality assessments, 50 years of proven science. Jerry (19m 12s): They do it in a, in a very neat way, and that has great completion rates for this marketplace. So our two key partners are Joveo on the front hand and TraderFind in the middle. Everything else is built by us. Chad (19m 24s): So why did you choose to build scheduling? Just because you thought it was easier than the rest of it? Jerry (19m 30s): You know what scheduling is the most complex? It sounds like super, super easy thing, but it is so not. And we wanted to have a consistent experience. It is, you know, how many, how many scheduling tools have running late buttons today? So if the manager's running late or the candidates running late, they press running late. And the system reschedules or shifts that shifts their appointments. We understand all of the rescheduling, parallel interviewing panel interviewing side-by-side delegate, location and manager specific options there are for interview and scheduling today. Jerry (20m 11s): And in order to keep that consistent exp experience and to leverage our 25 years of corporate experience, we decided we will build that because frankly, we didn't see something that was robust and comprehensive enough to partner. Chad (20m 28s): Talk about adoption real quick, Jerry, how are you taking this too? Because you already have a huge client base at AMS. How are you introducing this to clients? Because talent acquisition sucks at adoption. They're incredibly slow. COVID, might've hastened the pace a little bit, but how are you gaining adoption? What's your traction looking like right now? How many companies are using it? Jerry (20m 52s): Yep. So we have our first two activating with us presently. Very early days, we only launched eight weeks ago and we have our first two activating with us right now. And we'll share those names with you and your listeners as soon as we can. We have, again, our product advisory group have been absolutely spectacular and a number of them are working with us presently, as you say, we've got hundreds of AMS customers and we are in a, a program of exploring the use case of Hourly for those customers. Jerry (21m 25s): But, but candidly, you know, this opens up another, a huge market, a huge market for, for AMS that perhaps has been under-addressed so far. So strategically going back to one of your questions, which is why is this support supported within AMS? Not only is, this is an exciting opportunity for us in terms of launching products, but it also opens up another great part of the, the marketplace, which is potentially underserved today from AMS. Joel (21m 53s): ZD.net published a story late last year about a chatbot fatigue, if you will. And their study showed that seven out of 10 consumers were sort of, you know, going cold on, on chat bots. Do you think this is a real concern for our industry or do you not see it as a threat because people are so inspired to find a job and are so turned off by the black hole of resumes that they'll, they'll put up with chatbots for years to come? Jerry (22m 22s): I think a lot of chat bot experience experiences are shit, excuse my language. It's replicating poor process. It's automating a poor process. It's, you know, it's a bit gimmicky if we don't move this beyond, you know, a chat bot sitting on a career site, answering a few questions of candidate, dumping them into a horrible ATS process where they've got 12 pages of, of data that they've got to fill in and upload a resume and you know, how are we ever gonna do mobile recruiting? How are we ever going to make this a modern process? And, you know, then chat bot gets, gets thrown out because it doesn't work. Jerry (22m 55s): Actually what doesn't work is the process in the first place, just, don't just automate the process that doesn't work, actually cups take a step back, eliminate waste, and then automate. And that's what we've done here. So, you know, I would, I would encourage all of your listeners to take a different approach. Don't automate what is a manual process, take a step back, eliminate then automate. And I think then we have a chance, but at the moment, I'm just putting a chat bot, in dumping people into a poor ATS experience. I don't think that's a, I don't think that's a winning strategy. Joel (23m 26s): Do you think a few bad apples will spoil it for the ones that do it right now? Jerry (23m 31s): I don't think, I don't think that's the case, but I think that will be a, I think there will be a, a moment where, you know, chat bots, you know, people have a downer on chat bots, and again, there are some, some really exciting technologies out then talk about conversational AI. And I think there are some CEOs out there who I know who have huge ambitions and these guys and their businesses have these ladies, nice people in their businesses will take the lead in this market. And those, those very, very basic linear chat bot providers, those HR tech firms who, you know, to become modern, have just put a chat bot on the end of, you know, a vertical HR tech solution. Jerry (24m 12s): But then they, you know, they're going to be losers in this market, my personal view. Chad (24m 16s): So AMS is an RPO and Process outsourcing, so you own the process to an extent, does that actually help you with adoption and being able to get these better, more efficient processes in place without having to go through TA Jerry (24m 34s): Look, I think own is an interesting word in our market. I think there is always, and there is always from an recruitment process outsourcing or any of our contingent workforce solutions, I think contingent workforce solutions. We have, we can bespoke that process to, to a much greater degree than often we can from an RPO environments. Often we find ourselves starting with a customer's process and then influencing to change. So I, I, I do believe that we can with our customers accelerate that change curve. Jerry (25m 11s): And I think to your point, I think COVID, this pandemic, which is probably the worst economic and health crisis for the last 75 years is going to accelerate some of that cause people just, frankly, if they can't go back to old ways, they can't, you know, they can't hire a big recruiting teams. They can't stack technologies, you know, 10 fold up, they've got to do something different. So, you know, I, I feel this is the moment for change. Joel (25m 39s): All right, man, talk to me about pricing. There's nothing on the website. So a I'm guessing this is real expensive! Jerry (25m 45s): Yeah. We think if we think we think it's cost effective, we, we price at the moment on, on a per per offer or per hire basis for our customers. We believe it's a full service platform. So what you get is not only technology, you get LivePerson support and we think that's really important. We're working on a, on a 24/7 live person support model. We, again, you know, there's some pretty poor stuff out there. If a candidate applies six o'clock on a Saturday night, we don't want to be able to only send an email saying, Hey, thanks for that, give us a call on Monday morning at eight, 8:00 AM. Jerry (26m 24s): We think, that's just poor. So this is live support technology, all your assessments, all of the programmatic advertising all wrapped in it in a single cost per offer at the moment. We may turn that into, we may later turn that into a license fee model, but we believe The adoption for those, for the early customers. We aide adoption. If it's a price per offer, but on a price profit basis, cost effective though. Chad (26m 54s): Okay. Got that? Got that in. Okay. So here we go. Jerry, are you ready? Joel is going to a launch into a, in, into his grading. What are you going to do Joel, what are you going to do? Do know what's going on here? Joel (27m 8s): Okay. All right, Jerry, this is going to be pretty short and sweet. I don't think I've shot down or given a fake applause or golf clap to any chat bots and I'm not gonna do it on this one either. I mean, I think that it's pretty obvious both Chad and I are, are fans of this conversational AI, there you go. I said it technology. You have the, the established company, old, old establish employers trust you. Joel (27m 39s): You're going to be able to plug this thing into a lot of companies. You're also not a pioneer, which means you don't have the arrows in the back of trying to survive the new stuff. You guys can sort of stand on the shoulders of what previous chatbots have done and, and make it your own. So for me, there's so many things to go right here. We love chat bots. We love established companies with current current customer bases. I think this is a home run. You're going to be able to plug it in to just about everybody and make bank. Joel (28m 12s): So for me, it's an easy one. Applause big applause. Chad (28m 18s): Okay, well, Jerry, I gotta say this is a very incredibly bloated space. It's not just bloated. It is noisy as hell and it's not incredibly focused either. There's so many chatbots that are out there that are trying to do everything for everyone, they're not being incredibly focused and or disciplined. And you're, you're a hundred percent, right? Many of them are also doing exactly what the client wants, which is not using their expertise, which is not focused on being able to drive more effective processes, which is why RPO needs to own the process. Chad (28m 57s): This is the way to move, killing the black hole and driving experiences. Companies like AMS need to be sending a flare up to the rest of the industry that RPO is becoming tech. RPO needs to become tech to be able to evolve. One of the biggest reasons is that first off it's more efficient. You guys are always looking to try to not really cut heads, but make them more efficient. Chad (29m 27s): AMS has a large client base, which allows for built in adoption. So overall, everything that I heard, especially with the incredibly laser focus of hourly workers, I got to give a big applause. Joel (29m 47s): Way to go, Jerry! 24 your highlight right here, baby. Two big applause! Jerry (29m 52s): Guys. Look, thank you. We've we've done some awesome work. We've got so much more to do, man. We have got so much more to do. This is just the start. We are hourly.com. Watch this space. Thank you. Chad (30m 4s): Thank you, man. We out, Joel (-): We out! Firing Squad OUTRO (30m 7s): 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.

Joveo's founder and CEO Kshitij Jain (aka KJ) turns the tables asking some profound questions on Chad & Cheese. What is this programmatic magic you speak of? Data point + volume = accuracy Focus on the 80/20, not the 20/80. The process is irrelevant, it's the outcome that matters Programmatic distribution vs. Programmatic targeting and so much more... PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your RPO partner for the disability community, from source to hire. Voices Intro (0s): Voices. We hear them every day. Some voices like mine, smooth and confident. While on the other hand, the Chad and Cheese podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You'd rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, y'all now listening to Voices, a podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential voices within the recruitment industry. Voices Intro (31s): Try not to fuck it up, boys. KJ (35s): We didn't do any rocket science about a year and a half back on that. It was easy. Intro (39s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad (1m 9s): Welcome back. We're continuing the conversation with a veteran of the recruitment tech industry Kshitij Jain aka KJ, founder and CEO of programmatic platform Joveo. Enjoy! Back in the days when SEO was like magic, it was like wizardry, right? Joel (1m 32s): And witchcraft. Chad (1m 33s): Nobody knew what the hell it was. And that's why they really didn't do it. In most cases, I knew it was really slow to adopt the same thing I'm feeling is happening with programmatic because people just can't understand what programmatic is. I know that if I go to Monster.com and I post an ad, or I go to Job Board, a College Recruiter and I post an ad, or what have you. I know my ads there. And I don't know it's there for 30 days. And I know what I know the thing is you're asking for kind of like a trust value volume that's hap happening here that you just don't get what talent acquisition ... Chad (2m 11s): how do you get beyond that? To be able to help them understand that there is this magic wisdom called Joveo that will help them better target. And how many data points do you guys actually go against? KJ (2m 23s): Two questions in this fight? I'll start with the second one and then go to the first one. So, data points. We focus on on one side that your quality is defined by you like your hires to find the quality. Of course not hires could mean that you want to have a lifetime value. Sometimes, a person who you hired stayed for three months versus the person who stayed for three years is a totally different ball game. So what are the line you draw? Right? So, so getting to that point is equal to do the match, right? So you define the quality. KJ (2m 54s): Once you define the quality, then the match has to happen between the job and the candidate. And I always look at the world. If you look at it noise, literally if you take it off three or four data points, you get the quality of the 70 to 80%. Is it 20/80 rule, right? 20% data points make an 80% impact on reduction. Reducing the, the lack of relevance. I'm not called quality for example, right? And I'm going to start with a very small thing. Like if you are looking for a nurse, let's say an ICU nurse in New York City. KJ (3m 27s): Now you're not looking for nurse from Philadelphia or Boston or Phoenix or, or like San Francisco for that matter, right. Even though the nurse will be completely relevant in terms of our quality applicant, it's not relevant. Or if you would get, if you were to get a staff nurse or a travel nurse in New York City, that is just a title location for the jobs where the title itself means the resume. The factor, itself signifies that if you're working as a nurse, you have a certain qualification, certain certification that you have. KJ (3m 59s): Get these two things Right? Right. So these are the two data points. Let's start out saying that. Let's get that right first. Right? If you were to take baby steps, can you get into me tomorrow? And I'm talking to the practitioners in the space and everybody out there is that at least your job is being shown to the right person in the right location with the right title. Right. That's how, hard? Difficult is that's two data points for you? Get that right! Right? Now, let's go further down the line right now, you're talking about key words. You're talking about latest job descriptions. You talk about the meaning of words, right? A business urban professional is closer to a sales manager, then a marketing manager, and then as compared to a business analyst, right? KJ (4m 33s): That, that relationship of a job with each other, which is more relevant. You're talking about. We look at about 30 odd data points on the job description side. Because we know the quality, right? The resume is already there. You can go deeper and deeper. It can be like as many data points, but I would say about 10 to 15 data points in resumes are good enough. It's easier to solve 90% of the problem. It's like in my mind, I would say 20% effort is required to solve 80% of the problem. 80% of the effort is required to solve 20% of the problem. KJ (5m 4s): So if you, if you were to look at just these 30 to 40 data points, I think you've solved 80% of the problem. And this is, these are the data points you look at. When we, you know, when we have a higher data, we have the application data. We have the, of course we have the job data, right? We have deep job data, right? That itself solves a lot of these problems. In fact, I remember there was a customer for us, which is which, and this is one of the largest companies. Like it's a company that has more than $20 billion in revenues. And in our space. They came in and said, okay, we tried everything. KJ (5m 35s): It ain't working. It is working. We've got probably 25%, 30% better results. You guys can do any magic on this? I said, I don't know. Maybe you did everything. All we did is just two data points. My friends, we basically said, okay, a certain job description of a nurse can be done as intensive care unit nurse, or ICU nurse, or intensive unit nurse or whatever it is, right? Or they have their own terminology just knowing that all of the jobs belonged together. And the campaign is run for that one single title, which basically all these titles meant that how can I assume those job going to the same campaign as an accountant that is either you're getting a right click for nurse and a bad for the accountant or the other way around that's doing that. KJ (6m 16s): Improve the results overnight. But 25%, I'm sorry. I'm not, we didn't do any rocket science about a year and a half back on that. It was easy. It was just again, common sense. Yeah. Few data points. Do a good job of it. We do about 40 data points right now. Chad (6m 29s): Okay. Okay. So one thing that has always driven my conversation when I'm, whenever I've been in sales has been outcomes, right? It's all about outcomes and that's what the organization should be looking for. And during this entire conversation, you've talked about hiring outcomes from the onset, right? So how hard is it to actually engage some of these big brands in the conversation of, instead of just eyeballs, we're talking about hiring outcomes, it seems to be a pretty easy transition. KJ (7m 6s): So how hard it is to explain this concept. And when, I go on customer calls with my team, so one thing the sales team talk about is holding back, right? He's going to, he's going to go so far ahead in terms of talking about tech and the message has to be simple outcome driven, and I think you hit it right there, right? Define the outcome, right? If you can define the outcome, people don't really, truly need to know the processes and the nuts and the bolts and how that works. KJ (7m 38s): Right. Listen to their needs and say, yes, we can deliver it and prove it. Once that is there, then you can start talking about what are the nuances of programmatic that, Oh my God, this, this has to happen in programmatic. And are you bidding it tight? I'm sorry, but bidding it right as good for maybe a person who is a creator. Right. I don't think our common manager even understand what bidding means right now? Now I started hearing people talk about real time bidding and dynamic bidding. I get it. I get it. I understand that. So I think the idea is to be able to always work with the talent acquisition professionals and address the needs. KJ (8m 14s): I had a customer which said that, Oh my God, I don't know how this works? And they're like massive customers. I want to see and know that your system knows how to do it on their own. And like, we do do that on our own, but we don't have to show it. They just need to know this. So, so, so to be able to, there's a, still a lot of learning curve. And as you said, right, a talent acquisition and HR adoption is the key. I think we need to do a better job of even communicating that message to the CEOs of the company. KJ (8m 45s): I bet you call any CEO in the world of large corporation. Getting the right talent is among the top three. Joel (-): For sure. KJ (8m 51s): So I believe if you, if you bought from the right and seeing the right things, you will get heard. I just think that we try to over complicate the messaging and industry. Joel (9m 0s): I want to back up a little bit and I love, I love Chad's example of SEO and, and being able to understand that, I mean, we're still, we're still making the joke of most employers can't even spell SEO, which still gets laughs, which is great. But for those who listeners out there don't know what programmatic is. So I want to like, just go to the basics of that. And then I want to know why Joveo was different or how any of these programmatic solutions differentiate themselves. Is it just the distribution, the technology, or both? Joel (9m 32s): And maybe really quickly Chris Forman, founder of App Cast, one of the first programmatic solutions out there said that 40%, this is a year or so ago that 40% of job postings were done programmatically. Is that true? You, if you're talking about distribution yes. Yes. Of course. If you are sending a feed and putting a job out there and without having to post a job, perhaps yes, that is true. Okay. So let's so let's, so let's define it. And then how is it different per like provider? KJ (10m 3s): So let's say for your large company or General Motors, or you're a Pepsi, or you're a T-Mobile right? You would not want to distribute jobs manually. Each of the job boards, you post it to, right? A you'd want a way to kind of post a job and kind of have data to back up that this particular job should go to this job board right? So that is a program or machine deciding which job to post to. So there are two levels, right? One is just the job distribution. So if you say that, that BroadBean and Equest on the job were programmatically posting jobs. KJ (10m 36s): If you say machine was posting it, that is true. Right. But, but is it programmatically optimized to post? It's a different conversation. I wonder how many jobs in the world are actually optimized to be posted programmatically. I'll be still spraying the jobs, just saying that machine is doing it. I think that data has to be looked at. How many jobs are actually being chosen to be posted to a particular source based on data is the question that I think I don't have the answer to. I think we need to find out the jobs that we do. We do know that we try our best to use our metadata across all of customers in terms of apart from the job board for this location, for this title has a highest likelihood of delivering a hire or even a most relevant applicant. KJ (11m 19s): And so we use that insights and trying to optimize the programmatic distribution. And to that extent, yes, there are jobs getting pushed like that, but I don't really know how many of these jobs out in the world are getting posted like that because enterprises represent only an audience, right? SMB customer, right. U S is known to be a place where small and medium enterprises have created this country what it is as much as large enterprises have. I don't think they even know the PO programmatic. I don't think they even post anything in the programmatic fashion. KJ (11m 51s): So we don't really know that data. And I, at least in my mind, I don't know that data right enough through programmatic Chad (11m 59s): So what makes Joveo different from everybody else at this point? KJ (12m 2s): Sure. So we started out with the philosophy, right? We said, okay, we'll not be, this will not be this right? We'll never be a job board. We'll never be a staffing agency. We will be married deep with the concept of putting the right job in front of everyone. And then for that, we have to focus on getting the entire, we call it the "breadth and the depth of data" Breadth is every single source. Right? So now if you stay true to that, one of the very first things we did is we gave the power in the hands of traders or advanced users who actually have what social search, slots, postings, a PPC, the entire breadth of it. KJ (12m 42s): They have everything, all the data sources, even the career site and native traffic, organic traffic that can be distributed and tracked at the job level. Now that's where I'm coming to the depth of data, right? We can actually, for that matter, right? If you have a single ad on Google AdWords, we can actually attribute that ad for that location, for that particular job. And how many clicks you got for that in the system itself. And then the depth of right? Fact to hire it should be built into the system. It should not be you charge extra for that, or is it is the depth of data because only when you get the higher data, which we actually call is the intelligence, right. KJ (13m 19s): That intelligence then feeds back the sourcing strategy. And that is what makes us different, right? That's the feedback loop, the constant learning, the constant investment, right? We have a team of a program engineering team is about 65 people right now. What do they do all day long? Right? They're a lot more behind the scenes, since we're launching new products. We only do one thing to do programmatic, but all that engineering talent and strength and the engineers that came from the likes of Googles and Amazons and Microsofts of the world, all they're doing is trying to get this better. KJ (13m 49s): Everything is driven to the mission of three to one. Can we get to a point where companies can get three clicks, two applies, and one hire without having to do it themselves? Applause (-): Clapping Outro (14m 2s): Look for more episodes of Voices. This Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted the stories and opinions of industry leaders, subscribe on iTunes, Google podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you don't miss a single show for more visit chadcheese.com.

This week HR's Most Dangerous Podcast welcomes TApod cohost Lauren Sharp to the mic and kicks Cheesman to the couch for another nap. Obviously, this means the show is going to have somewhat of an Aussie flare. This week Chad and Lauren talk about... - Indeed doubles down on shitty UX and Zaps back! - Careerbuilder playing the role of drunken college kid - Google, Facebook, and Tiktok get governmentally screwed - Victoria's 2.0 hotel sex COVID lockdown and Wild.ai plays the menstrual cycle angle? Huh...?? Don't be a few stubbies short of a six-pack mate, listen! This Dog's breakfast is brought to your by our mates at Sovren, Jovite, and JobAdX.. G'day! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions helps companies find talent in the largest minority community in the world – people with disabilities. Intro (1s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad (27s): Welcome to the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm Chad. So OSH accompanied by my guest host Lauren (33s): Lauren Sharp. Hello everybody, Chad (36s): Which means this is going to have an Aussie flair to it kids, but let's not get ahead of ourselves because we're talking today about the evil empire. AKA Indeed, who's doubling down on shitty user experience, CareerBuilder playing the drunken college kid and Google Facebook and Tik Tok are getting governmentally screwed from all angles. We're a few stubby short of a six pack. So wrap your laughing gear around that. And I have no clue what the fuck any of that means. Chad (1m 9s): You're welcome. Australia. Stay tuned. Sovren Promo (1m 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 (1m 44s): Okay. So I have no clue, Lauren, what any of that actually means, few stubby short of a six pack. I'm a thinking, it means that I'm stupid. Does that right? Lauren (2m 1s): Pretty much you got it right. Chad (1m 44s): And wrap your laughing gear around that. What does that mean? Lauren (2m 11s): That usually means ate something. Okay. Well, or something like that to wrap your laughing gear around that. Chad (2m 18s): Ah, gotcha. Okay. So what are, what are some of your favorite Australian saying slang that we don't really get here in the U S Lauren (2m 27s): Actually one of my favorite terms, I use it quite a lot is "wanker" it's more British than anything, but then again, Australia is very British in a lot of respects and being part of the empire. But yeah, you're a wanker pretty much. That's my favorite sums everything up. You just look at someone and you get that eye roll. You sort of get that little bit of a sneer and go, you're such a Wanker. Chad (2m 49s): Yes. So do you guys, do you guys use douchebag? Because I think that's very similar, Lauren (2m 52s): Yeah but no that's very American. Chad (2m 54s): Okay. So Lauren Sharp, for those of you who have been in the corner in the fetal position for, for, for a year or so, who are you? Who's Lauren Sharp. What is this TaPod thing we keep hearing about? Lauren (3m 11s): Part of Talent Acquisition pod is the brainchild of Craig and myself. Australia had no local content when it came to talent acquisition. There were a few podcasts around about HR and agency recruitment, but nothing really catering for in house that was specific. So we are listening to a lot of stuff out of Europe and the U S. Mostly you guys out of the U S. Chad (-): Awesome! Chad (3m 33s): You've got a following down here, believe me. And yes, we started it up a year ago this month. Well, happy anniversary. Lauren (3m 43s): Thank you. Thank you. Chad (3m 46s): So for those who don't know, we're actually doing a, a radical crossover. What that means is we were lucky enough to get Lauren on to Chad and Cheese, and we were even more lucky to get Joel's ass outta here for a minute. And he is joining Craig on TaPod. When, when is your podcast actually gonna drop? Lauren (4m 6s): Do you know, Next Monday we drop it every Monday morning, Australian time, which will be Sunday evening your time. So that'd be dropped Monday morning and yeah, so basically we've done the podcast version of keys in the vault. Chad (4m 23s): Okay. Let's go ahead and let's jump into shout out guests first. Who's your, who's your shout out to? Lauren (4m 28s): My pod husband. We're in lockdown. So I won't see him now for at least six weeks. Chad (4m 33s): Wow. Lauren (4m 34s): Yeah, it was Australia. We're in Victoria. So we've gone down to a stage for lockdown when we can't leave our houses without basically having a little permission slip, Chad (4m 44s): Which is where we should have been a long time ago. Lauren (4m 46s): Yeah. You guys are screwed. Really screwed, but we'll talk about that a bit later. I'm so yeah, my shout out is to my pod husband, who I will miss for the next six weeks. Chad (4m 58s): Well, excellent. Well, I'm going to start out with Laura Rendle, who is Clorox's newest CEO, that's 38 CEOs kids in the fortune 500. I'm giving her a big applause, but we're, we're going to give the, the fortune 500 a, a big one of these "boo" less than 10%, less than 10% of fortune 500 CEOs are female Lauren. Chad (5m 29s): Why the fuck is that the case? It makes no sense to me. Lauren (5m 32s): Well, we certainly have a lot of qualified women out there to do the roles. That's not an issue. We just need to get them to apply for the roles. I think some of it is that mummy shoe that has been discussed over and over again about when we take time off work, it is getting better, but it's still not where it needs to be. We have a lack of parity on wages. That's another one where why would we put our hand up for that role if we're going to get less? Just because we're female. Chad (5m 56s): Yeah. Lauren (5m 57s): Why go through that stress? Chad (5m 59s): Yes, I mean, just the, the parity overall, right? And I think that's, that's something that we talk about a lot here on the podcast. I also talked to shout out to Rena Gupta, who is the CEO of Mom Relaunch. I had a great discussion with her this week and hopefully we'll get her on the podcast for interview, but she has an organization that is focused specifically on like you, you were talking about the mommy tracking when you go off to have a kid. Again, we don't, we don't live to work. Chad (6m 29s): Right? Do we have lives? Right? So her a company, Mom Relaunch focuses on again. He rejected those females back into corporate life. So looking forward to connecting hopefully with her sometime soon. Lauren (6m 46s): That sounds like a good one. I might have to listen to that one. Chad (6m 48s): I hope you listen to all of them. What are you kidding? Big shout out to Roy Etnyre or this guy's a masochist guys. He's celebrating his 15th year at Monster. Can you believe that 15 years? Great time. 15 years now, get your ass back out there and sell something last. Last for me, Kylie Frank from Milwaukee and Peter Shelley over at Glassdoor in London. Thanks for listening guys. Chad (7m 19s): Really appreciate it. You also wanted to talk about what does that, that Hung Lee thing that was happening. Lauren (7m 27s): I did. I wanted to mention Hung. He sent out his schedule for August last night, lying in bed, reading a book ping. And it comes as usual along with your hundred million messages. And the 21st of August, he's doing a Comcast of the Beauty Bias Hiring in the Era of Video. And I think with all the bias and everything that we've got going on already, do we need to add this? I, yeah, obviously it's going to evolve. How are we going to eliminate this bias as well? Lauren (7m 57s): I'm always talking about diversity and inclusion. Chad (7m 60s): So why is this coming up now? Because just because we're seeing people on video, we've interviewed people face to face for years. I'm glad it is coming up, but, but why is this something that's coming up now? Is it, do you think that video makes this just a bigger perspective issue? Lauren (8m 17s): I think it does. I also think it's coming up now because we are all trapped in our homes and we're relying on seeing each other on zoom and teams and everything else. So I think people are now gravitating towards the use of video a lot quicker than what they normally would. And I do think that it's hard. We get so many buyers through name and cultural differentiation, that throwing this in, it's just another one that I think we can miss out on some good talent purely because of the way somebody looks. And by not looking at the qualifications, Chad (8m 46s): Some people would ask what's too far. Are we going too far? Is somebody being, you know, being born good-looking or hot, is that, is that too far? Lauren (8m 58s): You can't change genetics unless you are Kardashians. Chad (9m 1s): Well, but you can't change genetics with skin color either. Right? So I totally understand that, but I mean, it's like, is there a too far there might not be, but is there a too far? Lauren (9m 11s): I don't know. I can't answer that question. I think we're, it's going to happen and we need to work out how to get past the bias, but also it's a whole new revenue streams coming up here where media companies are going to be pitching to people to do their online CVs. And there's a whole new revenue stream coming up there Chad (9m 31s): Before I get myself in trouble. Some are to evolve. I was online today with Elaine Orler and Peter Clare. That's the Jobvite event. And we were talking about pretty much, I guess you can say paraphrasing how to make sure that you're on onboard. Doesn't suck. And my question to you is have you ever been onboarded to accompany and it not suck? Lauren (9m 54s): No, absolutely not never happened. Chad (9m 57s): I think we are starting to understand from an experience standpoint that HR sucks at experience and really we're taking way too many shortcuts. Yeah, Lauren (10m 7s): Pretty much. That's it? That too many shortcuts nothing's prepared on the first day, giving someone a laptop and a log-ins not exactly saying, Hey, welcome. Chad (10m 15s): Exactly. So if you want to check out how to make onboarding not suck much like everything else that we talk about with regard to experience like applying for a job, go to summertoevolve.com. You can see obviously the content that we did today, video content, and there are weeks of content from before free of charge. I don't know if I said that before, but people like free. Lauren (10m 41s): They do like free. Actually. I'm just writing all of this down because I want to go and see this. Chad (10m 46s): August 27th, I'll be speaking and moderating a panel at a digital event. Go figure COVID times it's called Recruitment Hackers. And it's by our friends over at Talk Push. Or are you familiar with Talk Push? Lauren (11m 2s): Particularly? You said before that their Asia pack, but I think they might be more Asia than PAC. Chad (11m 6s): Okay. I think they might be more Asia than PAC and might be because that's where the money's at. I don't know. It could be? The event is focused on optimizing recruitment for a remote workforce. Go figure? I can go to recruitmenthackers.events. All right, Lauren. So you have a tease for us in the events area. Lauren (11m 29s): I do have a couple actually what a couple. I know. He knew I would come with the goods today. Well, I spoke with Andrea Kirby yesterday from the recruitment events company here in Australia, New Zealand. And she does have a webinar coming out on the 13th of August here with smart recruiters. And it's a Build a Business Case for TA Transformation and Jerome Tunic is actually hosting it for us. So that will be a great one to jump on with, but she's also got some really interesting news coming up next week that she's going to announce she's keeping her cards close to her chest on this one. Lauren (12m 8s): So I think we're all waiting with bated breath to see what Andrea comes out with next week. Chad (12m 13s): I won't tell anybody, just go ahead. Just tell me, whisper, Lauren (12m 17s): But I know that this is recording. So no piss off, Chad (12m 21s): dammit Lauren (12m 23s): It's gonna take more than a news article. Text to me in the middle of the night to get my answers. Chad (12m 28s): There was more than one news tax. Okay. At the middle of the night, I said several. Okay. So that's the kind of romance I bring to this relationship, winning business, insider articles, right? That being said, let's go ahead and hit those topics. Lauren (12m 42s): Oh, whew. Wow we're gonna go big today. Aren't we? Bells (-): Ding, Ding, Ding Chad (12m 48s): Indeed virtual interviewing this site. It was funny. Somebody sent this to me and it was in Business Insider and I thought, okay. I thought indeed already had this. Lauren (12m 58s): But last week we were talking about indeed quote unquote, and doing air quotes, partnering with glass door and by partnering, we mean suffocating this week, indeed launches virtual interviewing to their events product. Again, it doesn't seem like much to me because it's just on their hiring events. Are you guys familiar with In-, I know you're familiar with Indeed. Lauren (13m 29s): Cause they're like the number two site in Australia, do they, are they pushing the hiring events really hard in Australia? They are pushing a little bit and not as hard as you guys are getting it as we were having a chat earlier off air, like they are number two in Australia and coming up quite quickly. The number one site here is our Local Job on Seek here is the biggest one. But as we were chatting off air before we went live here, it's just, I can't see Seek remaining on top for much longer. Lauren (13m 59s): This is my prediction, it's this they changed their pricing model at the start of the year and bought some of the pricing for the bigger agencies up to level where everyone else was paying as they were paying some amazingly cheap price when they first began or when time began, whichever was first. and yeah, they are now twice as much to put an ad out on seek than it is on Indeed. So I think Indeed or overtake them here in Australia very soon. Alright. Message to Seek: "Don't be stupid." If you give Indeed a window of opportunity. Lauren (14m 30s): You might want to ask Monster and CareerBuilder how that worked for them? And glass door? Chad (14m 36s): It didn't, yes. Oh yeah. So here's a little, a little insight from their website quotes "Indeed hiring events. So virtual interviewing technology combines a video conferencing capabilities with a virtual lobby or waiting room for candidates that mimics experience of an actual event for job seekers." Now. So what they're saying here is let's take that whole, the horrible part of in real life hiring and replicate that suck online. Chad (15m 5s): Masterful, way to fuck up the whole prospect of a great experience Indeed, good job. Lauren (15m 10s): I it's going to carry that on over to their on-boarding experience. Chad (15m 16s): Exactly. Right. But they did do something. I think that could work hopefully on their side, more of a pro this week, they're on the road to acquiring ZAPinfo. So luckily that new sucky UX is not the, the big story. I think for indeed this week, are you familiar with ZAPinfo at all? Lauren (15m 35s): I'm familiar with them and other products like that, the whole scraping of info and everything off the internet, which is, I'm quite curious. I was looking at ZAPinfo yesterday and how are they going to work with their partners out there now if they're going to be very much well owned by Indeed? Chad (15m 54s): That's, that's always the hard question, right? I think we're seeing that with click IQ. I think we're seeing, Oh, I'm sorry. Indeed IQ. Yeah. I'm not sure. And I think, you know, overall, this could be a short term fix to a longterm problem. Indeed, I mean, and this is well known is an island. I mean, they pretty much do their own thing their own way and fuck everybody else. The problem is the whole deep integration to getting contacts and information from a database into their applicant tracking system or CRM. Chad (16m 30s): So I see Doug Berg, who is a serial entrepreneur, friend of the show, CEO and mastermind of ZAPinfo. He's sold companies like techies.com jobs to web my alerts. And then he got back into this space and now he looks like he's, he's selling zap info, which is a recruitment automation tool that, you know, again, I think this was a good time for him to sell Lauren (16m 56s): Timing, actually sell up in COVID and go buy an Island. Chad (17m 1s): I know, I don't know if he made that much off of it. I mean, Doug's a smart guy, not to mention, he has plenty of other acquisitions to be able to work off of. Lauren (17m 10s): Branson might sell his island cheaply. Chad (17m 12s): He might. Yeah. Or one of the islands to his island. Lauren (-): Hahaha Chad (17m 17s): Okay. So let's wrap this up. I know indeed says ZAPinfo will be provided as an added value to recruiters using indeed yet, but we've also heard inklings of recruit holdings, wanting to focus on what they do best and that's staffing. I would say ZAP integrated into higher their staffing product behind the scenes as well. So to end this whole ZAP acquisition, rap, I believe privacy laws and the economy force Doug into this move and good for him, man. Chad (17m 49s): He's smart. And he knows when to sell. Lauren (17m 53s): Pretty much. As we're talking about acquisitions, we've got to gloss over this one real quick career builder sold Kareira.gr. And I'm probably saying that wrong, but it's K A R E I R A.gr here's the quick and easy of the story. And nobody should be surprised. CareerBuilder's Kareira.gr it's a Greek job site that was sold back. Chad (18m 19s): I believe to its original owners. As I was reading this, it felt like, you know, this is one of those college kids trashed and Airbnb. And then the owners come back to a wreck. The original owners sell it to these college kids at career builder. And then they come back. It's like, ah, I got to clean this shit up. It doesn't seem like much other than CareerBuilder, trying to get rid of shit that they really don't need. What, what do you think? Lauren (18m 47s): I think it's pretty much that's it, it's a garage sale, Chad (18m 51s): But something that's not a garage sale. And it has been big as we've talked about it here in the U S is Google for Jobs and they've added a markup for work from home jobs. Are you guys seeing Google for Jobs do anything in Australia? Lauren (19m 6s): Not really. It hasn't really come to light here because we're such a small market population wise. It's the two big job boards being Seek and Indeed a really got a hold on it here. And we're not going to be a much of a big money spinner for Google jobs down here until they sort of finished fighting out and see who's going to be winner. I think. Chad (19m 25s): It's interesting to see what Google does as they kind of tip toe through antitrust. Let's go ahead and take a break. We'll come back. We'll be talking about the, how the Aussies are setting the content benchmark with Google and Facebook. We will be right back. JobAdX Promo (19m 44s): Nope. Na! 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You're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team, help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing. JobAdX Promo (20m 55s): Joinus@jobadx.com. That's join us at jobadx.com Attract, engage, employ with JobAdX Chad (21m 10s): Aussie Aussie Aussie. Oh wait. So, so Reuters. And this is, this is, this is your story. You want to take this one? This is a great story. Lauren (21m 21s): This is an interesting one. Isn't it? Yeah. So Australia will force the U S tech giants, Facebook alphabet, Google to pay for Australian media outlets, but news content in a landmark move to protect independent journalism! God we're fighting for independent journalists aren't we? Oh gosh we're such leaders in the pack here. Chad (21m 44s): Apparently, Lauren (21m 45s): Apparently we are. So I don't know how this has come about. To be honest, I've got a fair inkling that a couple of weeks ago in the media down here, we are Bauer media who own quite a few magazines. I've actually shut printing of eight magazines permanently in Australia. Wow. So we're not going to have an Aussie edition. So I'm wondering if this has come off the back of that because we are going to be losing our additions of Men and Women's health. I think Harper's Bazaar, Elle magazine, InStyle, New Weekly, Good Health a lot. Lauren (22m 18s): So there's quite a few there even Okay. Magazine. We will no longer have Australian specific editions of those. We will be looking at the UK and us stuff from now on. Chad (22m 28s): So that's, I mean, those are physical magazines. What about the online versions? Will they still have online versions with content? Lauren (22m 35s): They will have a few online versions of that, but it's going to predominantly not be Australian content. So I'm wondering if our government have just jumped on to the back of that? Wondering if we try and keep a few things alive down here, because so many people in marketing and journalism cut their teeth on some of those magazines? Chad (22m 55s): Right. We've seen this before, because this is a royalty file system. This is content being provided by media companies and Google and Facebook are using the hell out of it. This quote is coming from Politico. "There is a fundamental bargaining power imbalance between news media, businesses and the major digital platforms, partly because news businesses have no option, but to deal with the platform, AKA monopolies, and they have little ability to negotiate over payment for their content or other issues." Chad (23m 33s): I, I see this as definitely a content play. There's no question, but Google made a very good point in saying that the regulation ignores that they send billions of clicks to Australian news publishers. So if Google and Facebook remove the content, or if they, if they actually drive it down in the organic content or what have you, isn't that going to hurt Australian publishers, online publishers? Lauren (24m 4s): I think you're right. It probably will hurt them, but let's see how this plays out because I think our communications and media authority usually do have a pretty onto this sort of stuff so no one can actually dominate. So we don't have too much of a monopoly on one area, but it'll be interesting to see how they're going to do that. It's like they're trying to make the pay tax for years and they haven't. Yeah. Chad (24m 27s): Well, in, in Germany, Axel Springer actually decided to allow the firm to publish their content for free. After a drop in traffic with the snippets no longer showed in Google news. So I think what's going to have to happen. And what sounds like it's happening in Australia is that Australia is not going to allow the downgraded search results, the D listing to happen if they're going to operate in that country. Chad (24m 59s): So we'll definitely pay attention to this. I think this is there is that power imbalance that they're talking about is true. It is there in this case. I mean, government is, is, is really coming hard to try to force balance. That's true. Lauren (25m 15s): Let's watch this space and see what happens. Chad (25m 17s): I want to know as an American, your experience with the Trump presidency. Lauren (25m 26s): Oh, okay. From an outsider, looking in, you guys are fuck your Supreme leader, Donald he's. Oh my God. I can't believe it's out of want of choice. People refuse to vote for Hillary and this decade got in. It's just we watching what's going on over there. You guys are totally Natalie screwed, denying what's happening with the pandemic. You don't have universal health care. Your poverty line for a first world. Nation is just unbelievable. Lauren (25m 57s): Really unbelievable that that gap between the one percenters and the rest of the Americans is just growing by the day. Can you, I just urge everyone out there in America to go out and vote, please, because what you do affects the rest of the world. Chad (26m 12s): Well, that being said, I'm going to take it back to something that is with less social impact. Tick tock. That's saying if you've got a millennial here's here's, here's my point though. Here's my point. Everything you just said is exactly where we should be focusing. Okay. We should be focusing on all of these inequities in, in the broadening of the wealth gap. Right. And trying to redistribute funds so that, you know, like 15% or so of our working population is seen as the working poor, which that is ridiculous. Chad (26m 48s): How can you be a working poor? You should be able to live if you are working. Exactly. But, but, but, but Donald wants to, he wants to ban tick talk. And again, these are the things that we're focusing on in this country, instead of the things that you brought up right out of the gate, right? The things that actually matter to impact Americans every single day. And it's not just impacting Americans. Let's, let's be real here. It's impacting the global economy. Oh yeah. Hell yeah. Chad (27m 19s): The whole balance of power in the last three years, nearly four years has globally has shifted. America is no longer the leader. If you're looking at Europe, they're moving away from data centers that are owned by Amazon and everything like that and keeping it local. Now I love the European governments are doing that. You're looking at everyone, looking at different resources around the world that they don't have to go to America for. It's time that you're coming back to an equal standing America. You're no longer the leading superpower cold war is dead. Chad (27m 52s): And Dan, again, what I'm hearing, not just from Australia, but from all over the world. And a lot of that has to do with optics, right? Whether, whether people are talking about the amount of money that's actually generated or made here, it's a huge difference between the social disparity, et cetera, et cetera. But it's interesting that Microsoft in this whole tick tock conversation jumps in, and this is, this is from tech crunch. And one of the crazier news stories, Donald Trump said during a media availability event, that in order for the U S government to sign off on a potential, Microsoft TechTalk deal. Chad (28m 30s): A very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the us treasury. Can you imagine mafia standover tactics? It is a mafia bribe. Yes. Dictator. Trump is basically saying, if you want any business to happen here, you need to pay the government off. What banana Republic do you live in again? Exactly. So again, kids don't forget to vote in November and we're going to take another break because I have to, I have to take a deep breath and we'll come back and we'll talk about wild.ai and how you can leverage your menstrual cycle. Jobvite (29m 16s): This Summer, Jobvite wants you to join hundreds, thousands, million, okay? Maybe just thousands of recruiters, HR, and talent acquisition professionals for a summer. You won't soon forget it's Jobvite's summer to evolve. The summer to evolve is a 12 week series of free content to help recruiters brush up on their skills. Learn from industry leaders. Jobvite (29m 43s): See how technology can help them improve, automate, and evolve their recruiting efforts. There will be a chance to share tips and ideas with your peers. And we may even have some surprises for you along the way. I love surprises. So visit the summertoevolve.com to register for the summer to evolve sessions that suit your needs, peak your interest or your vote. If you're just starting June 16th, it's the summer to evolve the way you attract, engage, hire, onboard, and retain talent, recruit with purpose, hire with confidence. Chad (30m 16s): That's right. So before we talk about wild.AI, you live in Victoria, right? Lauren (30m 23s): That's correct. I live in the lovely city of Melbourne. Chad (30m 26s): Okay. So we've heard obviously New Zealand is like the standard, but we've heard nothing but good things about how Australia is handling COVID, but you're locked down again. What the hell is going on? Lauren (30m 42s): Okay. Well, we had a bit of a balls up actually in Victoria, the security companies that were hired by the state government to manage the quarantine hotels, as people were flying in, decided that they were going to outsource their security. Once they got the jobs and they outsourced it to some quite low level security companies that didn't really go through in Dutch and didn't really enforce anything. And it was a bit of a joke. Lauren (31m 12s): It's actually quite a scandal here because apparently one security guard exchanged sex for a trip to seven 11. Chad (31m 21s): Somebody who was in lockdown. Lauren (31m 22s): Oh yeah, yeah. It's it's laughable. It is like a Benny Hill comedy sketch and telling you now it's just, and people here are shaking their heads. Of course, then it started a transmission wave here in Victoria of person, which we never had because all of our cases had come in from overseas. So we are now in lockdown. 2.0 in Victoria, borders are closed state borders. The army is out. It is quite, quite severe. Cause we should be open up as a country right now, if this hadn't have happened, we're probably gonna estimate a quarter of a million. Lauren (31m 57s): People are gonna lose their jobs in Victoria over the next six weeks. Wow. We're going to have quite a few businesses go bankrupt. It's a real wait and see moment. I wish I had thought of it earlier, but I came up with the idea last night. I should have left the bloody state a week ago and just moved to Sydney for a couple of months. But anyway, a bit late on that brighter. Chad (32m 18s): So is Victoria the only hot spot right now in Australia? Yeah. And they're in their contact, tracing it back to this issue where they allowed a bunch of hot COVID people to just kind of roam around and yep. Lauren (32m 36s): Okay. From that one thing. So of course then we've got some bright anti maskers. Yeah. We've got some foil hat, whereas here as well. Not as many as you guys have, but I think your guys inbreed a lot more than ours, but we do have a few of those dickheads are because they were fragrantly flaunting and being stupid on social media about it all. It's pushed us into stage four lock down instead of a stage three and a yup. Well done to those minority people out there who have fucked it up really for the rest of us. Chad (33m 8s): Oh well, yes. So in Victoria, it sounds like a mini United States. Hopefully you're not going to have the per capita kind of death toll that, that obviously we're experiencing because we want to focus on how freedom works, which means I can choose not to wear a mask and be a Dick head. Lauren (33m 29s): I haven't looked at your numbers today over there, but I think you're going to be about 160,000 deaths now in America. So that just amazes me that the anti mask movement, everything that happening over there, that people are not realizing. And at a federal level, it just, the world is sitting back going, what the fuck? It's leadership? Yeah, I did read about five or six, your state governors sort of banding together to buy bulk tests and try and get on this sort of stuff and try and lead a state-by-state testing regime because there's nothing coming. Lauren (34m 5s): No leaderships coming out of federal Chad (34m 7s): Little guidance, let alone a little guidance. Lauren (34m 10s): I'm wrong here. But I was reading like a couple of months ago that your medical system really can't cope with any more than about a million people getting sick before. It'll totally not leave. Chad (34m 23s): I'm glad you brought this up. So when you're talking about healthcare in a capitalism or a capitalist type of infrastructure, what capitalist type of healthcare is built for is day to day without the big blow up of emergency pandemic. So on so forth, the reason being is we are incredibly efficient man, to an extent, we only have so many beds because we know how many we need, but we don't know how many we need when there's a pandemic. Chad (34m 56s): Right? So when we think about capitalism, the way it works in corporate America and how efficiency in zero to no waste, well, zero to no waste in healthcare means no open beds, right. And making sure that we have just enough beds and then not too many because that's, that's an overage. That's a major fault of capitalism, which is another reason why we need to look at more government control on the healthcare side. Lauren (35m 26s): Oh, absolutely. I think your nation would have to be one of the only first world nations that does not have some form of healthcare for their people. Yes. The mentality of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The confusion of socialism and communism, which is I think a cold war era overflow. It just, I just can't believe it can not believe it. Like hell it would be a ride as a taxpayer, like roads and water and electricity as a human being, whether it's a taxpayer or not. Chad: But yeah, it's hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you don't even have boots. Okay. Last story. This is, this is for you. And it's not really a story. It's just basically a question I have to set you up for this. Chad (36m 10s): So freaking funny, Matt Bucklin was on Twitter and he posted a job for a company by the name of wild.ai in. And I looked at the URL and I'm like, that's pretty fucking cool. I want to check it out. I've never been to the site before. So I jumped on the site and it's a training app for women in my parting question to you is, does their slogan work for you? And their slogan is turn your menstrual cycle into an unfair advantage. Does that, does that work for you? Does that make you want to download the app right now? Lauren (36m 40s): Now I know where I'm going wrong in life. Well, I think that tagline is yeah. Interesting tagline. It doesn't really say well, okay, I'm going to take on that one. What happens after I go through menopause? I have no clue. I have no clue, but I had a look at the website and saying something about 3% of sports is only a sport medicine and debiting is spent on women. Lauren (37m 12s): The rest is spent on men, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I think that that's also showing a wage disparity in a different sector, but really I can't, it'd be interesting to see how it unfolds. I think we're on top of this and I don't need an app to tell me how to do it. Chad: So I want to know we have to dive in and do a little bit more research, but we have to figure out who actually developed this app. I bet it's a couple of nerdy dudes and on that we out. Lauren (37m 44s): Yeah, we're out. This has been way too much fun. Chester (37m 49s): Thank you for listening to podcast with Chad and cheese brilliance, they talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Any anyhow, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.

Like the Oscars, Emmy’s or Razzies, employers around the world await Glassdoor’s ‘Best Places to Work’ with great anticipation. Ehhh, not so much, but we’ll discuss it anyway. We’ll also dig into - Hire by Google candidate matching launches out of beta - Facebook falls from grace - LinkedIn’s salary data is sneaky good - Jobiak’s AreMyJobsOnGoogle.com campaign - Dice CEO Art Zeile is dodging the pod - and (serenity now!) the rise of Gen Z. Enjoy and visit sponsors Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdX turns ONE, PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions partners with our clients to build best-in-class inclusion programs and reach qualified, talented individuals with disabilities of every skill, education, and experience level. Announcer: 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: Alright. Joel: Hell yeah, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers. You're listening to Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week's show, straight outta beta. Hire by Google unleashes candidate discovery for the masses. Glassdoor's out with it's Best Places to Work, and Facebook is not number one. And if you thought millennials suck, and I do, wait'll you get a load of Gen Z. Mom's clickin' chicken and collard greens. We'll be right back after a word from JobAdX, who's celebrating a birthday this month. JobAdX: With JobAdX's first birthday almost here, we are proud of all we've accomplished with advertising clients, publisher job sites, recruitment marketing agencies, and staffing firms. Thank you for all the support and trust you have placed in us. Since 2017, JobAdX has used the best of consumer ad text bidding, and ad delivery, to build an incredible programmatic job advertising exchange, and continue to rapidly grow our network of partner sites. We've also launched a feed inventory management platform called Switchboard, effectively offering our dynamic technologies to all job board partners. And, we've developed our revolutionary live alert, which eliminates latency and expired job ads via email. No more dead clicks or overages from job links whether open today, next month, or next year. For more information about our solutions please reach us at join us at JobAdX.com. Chad: Happy birthday. Joel: Well hopefully my audio's better this week. Chad: You sound better, at least from my standpoint you sound better. Joel: Do I sound sexy though? Chad: You always sound sexy. You sound even more sexy. Joel: That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, dude. Happy birthday, JobAdX celebrating one year. Obviously still around because they advertise on the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: Well yeah. Duh. Joel: (laughs) Joel: Give me your Dice rant real quick. Chad: Okay, so, this is pretty funny. I reached out to Dice just to be able to see if we could get Art on the show, because when we saw him down in New Orleans he pretty much ran from us. We were like, hey dude, we want to get you on the show, we want to do an interview with you. And he was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I think he just hit the eject button, got the fuck out. Joel: Didn't he jump out of a window? No? I think I remember seeing that. Maybe. Maybe not. Chad: He could have. But I reached out and I was like, hey, look, we'd like to get Art on the show, get an interview. Obviously we had Mike Durney before, who's the old CEO. And got the very prompt response that says pretty much, thanks but no thanks. Joel: Yeah, that's pretty weak man. We've interviewed some decent folks, including, as you said, the former Dice CEO. I thought we were very respectable. Obviously we didn't come with softball questions. Chad: No. Joel: But yeah. Art, dude. You should come out, man. It's all good. We'll be nice, we'll be fair, we'll be a little bit tough. But it's all good. The only thing I can think of is they're in the midst of a sell or something, a sale. Maybe don't want to rock the boat with some weird interview on some weird podcast with two knuckleheads. Chad: Yeah. It's still, it's all about transparency, right? If you're afraid to actually come on a podcast where you know you're gonna get hard questions, and we're not just gonna throw fluff at you, then your game is pretty fucking weak. Joel: Part of your job, I believe, as a CEO is to be out in the public. To be the voice of a company, to justify the vision, to frame the activities that are going on. To me, CEOs that don't do that fail in their CEO roles. Chad: Weak man, weak. Joel: I'm gonna give a shout out to Gap. Chad: Okay. Joel: I'm a loyal Gap user, buyer, customer. I probably joined their email list back in the early 2000's, I still get emails. But for the first time that I can remember, I got an email from them saying basically, love Gap? We're hiring. With an email of sort of branding message, why it's a great place to work, click here to link to jobs. Joel: I bring this up as a shout out simply because, retailers in particular who don't take advantage of their fans to promote jobs, I think are really missing a grand opportunity. I can only imagine how many people are in Gap's database, and how many applies they probably got from this campaign. I know what you're gonna say, you're gonna say like, likewise, anyone who applies for a job for Gap should be getting marketing messages in some fashion if they opt into them from Gap. So it kinda works both ways, but kudos and shout out to Gap for at least taking that step of saying hey, you're on our list as a buyer, we'd love to have you as an employee. Or hey, forward this to someone who might be. Kudos to them for doing that. Chad: Yeah. Well you could see in the email, I would assume they were live links, that you could obviously go and take a look at jobs, or you could shop. So it was like, hey, lets go ahead and hit this from both angles because it is the brand that you obviously like. Yeah, pretty cool. Joel: It all took me to Gap. Chad: All about the Gap man. Joel: That's for sure. And I probably got a pair of socks while I was there. Chad: (laughs) Chad: Okay, so dude, we have to talk about one of the funniest things that just happened. So, Joel and I were prepping for this call, and Joel received a call from his pre-op nurse, to talk about his colonoscopy tomorrow. And it was the funniest fucking call, ever. Joel: The thing is, if you work in the endoscopy industry, you've gotta have a pretty good sense of humor. I will also highlight the fact that there's nothing wrong with me, knock on wood. I'm going up for my annual or whatever, not annual, but my checkup, shout out to my anus. I guess we'll bring that in there as well. This is virgin territory so I'm praying for a gentle doctor tomorrow. Otherwise, yeah, everyone goes through this particularly males that are aging in the realm that we are, I'm sure you'll be up for your inspection soon as well. And we can make fun of you when that day comes up. Chad: (laughs) Chad: Soon to be your monthly visit for your monthly colonoscopy. Joel: Yes. By the way, we're recording in the morning, which we normally do anyway, but at two o'clock I take about a handful of Dulcolax. I will be in the toilet for the rest of the day. Chad: Okay, too far. Joel: On Thursday or Friday, Thursday, yeah. If you called me Thursday by the time this comes out and I didn't answer, this is why. Chad: Too far. Lets go ahead and switch gears. So shout out to David, an engineering nerd herder at Amazon who loved Chad and Cheese chat bot episode with Quincy. Shared a picture of him listening to Chad and Cheese while walking his dog, so a double shout out, a Chad and Cheese pod fan and a dog lover. You gotta love that. Joel: Yeah, that was a great picture. And by the way, you shared his Twitter account. Did he share it on Twitter, I believe? Chad: Yeah, it was on Twitter. Joel: And his Twitter bio pretty much read like the ideal Chad and Cheese fan. So aside from being the engineering nerd herder at Amazon, he's a fan of 80's hair bands, he likes the Giants, Fender guitars, and he's fueled by cookies and chocolate milk. If that doesn't say Chad and Cheese demographic, I don't know what does. Chad: That's targeted right there. Also, talking about the chat bot episode, it almost killed Ed. For all of you that are out there, if you don't know about the chat bot drinking game for Chad and Cheese, whenever we say chat bot, that's when you're supposed to take a shot. So, I think it took Ed a week to get through just that podcast, and it nearly kill him. Joel: If the Eagles won't kill him we probably will. Joel: Shout out to Jobiak, a firing squad alum, recently launched w w w aremyjobsongoogle.com. You can plug in a URL of your job posting and see if it's on Google or not. The drawback of this is you have to submit your email address, which obviously becomes a sales lead for them, so be sure to prep yourself for emails and calls if you do find out if your jobs are on Google on not. Chad: Yes. My last shout out is to Tim Sackett for thinking that his hugs aren't forced. I like how Tim is up front about how he wants to get a hug from just about everybody, but if you get in range you're getting a hug. So everybody who's out there, if you've never met Tim and you want to be able to obviously make eye contact and wave, you need to quickly wave and turn the other way and get the hell out of the AO because, you're gonna get a hug if you're not looking for one. Joel: Yeah. I'm starting to think that this is why he wears bow ties, that he can sort of put you in a trance with his bow tie and next thing you know he's got you in a bear hug. So, we're on to you Tim, we're on to you. Joel: Shout out to SmashFly, who just announced with Tim, speaking of Mr. Sackett, Transform Live, SmashFly's annual conference is coming back. So in 2019 they'll do it again, Sackett is gonna be the MC. I've heard rumors that Chad Cheese might show up to some degree, but shout out to SmashFly and Josh Lane whose also been an interviewee on the show did a great job. Shout out to those guys. Joel: And also, lastly, Chastity Melvin, the first female and African American coach, well female African American coach, at the Charlotte Hornets and the ... I'm spacing on it. Was it the WNBA team as well? Anyway, shout out to her for making another step up the ladder. Chad: Yeah, she was on the WNBA team, but she's actually going to be coaching an NBA team, correct? Joel: Yes. Chad: Yeah. Joel: The Hornets. Chad: Good job. That's ... Joel: Or the Bobcats. Chad: I don't fuckin' know. Joel: Yeah, it's a bad city for basketball unless it's North Carolina or Duke. Good God. You wanna get to the show? Chad: Yeah! Do this. Joel: Do this. Google, straight outta beta with their candidate discovery tool. First talked about this in March or April. Basically, they put Google search capabilities into your own ATS. Now when you post jobs they sort of let you discover candidates that are deep inside your database that you've forgotten about. They also allow you to mass email, I'm sure through Gmail, those folks that are in that database to contact them and I'm sure, from that point, they go through the screening and the scheduling and the whole Google-y experience. Chad: Yes. So, this is a warning flare for every recruiting platform in this space. Not just applicant tracking systems. Obviously for the applicant tracking system that don't have any type of matching technology, AI matching technology, you just allowed an upstart SMB applicant tracking system to provider better tech than you can provide. An upstart, they're not even two years old yet, are they? Joel: No. Chad: Yeah, so Hire has better job search, number one, from the Google talent solutions cloud, whatever the hell that thing's called. API. So from the candidate side you're getting better job search, better matches there. And now, better candidate matching in the search. So, applicant tracking systems, if you don't see that you need to actually help companies leverage their candidate database you're gonna get your asses handed to ya. Chad: Now for job sites, here's another thing. Job sites need to think about this as well. Anything with a candidate database. The day of CPC and CPA are really fucking over because it's all about qualified candidates. Focusing on the qualifications piece, doing this matching piece, that's where everybody needs to start stepping, because if they're not and they're just focusing on apps, then they're already behind. Joel: You know this is a trend. You're way behind if you're not into this. Google isn't necessarily blazing a trail, UnCommon we've talked to, has sort of this automated sourcing. Ex Recruit partnered with Next to build in a sourcing tool for what they do. Crowded we've talked about, they're sort of on the forefront of some of this stuff. Leper and ATS, this is part of their stuff. Joel: The trend is definitely going in this direction, and if you're an ATS that isn't providing this or even a job board, you're really behind the times. And LinkedIn as well, we reported a similar S and B tool where you post the job and they pull people from the LinkedIn database that are potential candidates for the job that you just posted. It's a trend that's gonna happen. Joel: What I'm waiting for, and I think what you are as well is, when is Google gonna open this thing up to the whole internet? Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Or at least internet, as much as the internet as Google can find and deliver to you as possible. Because Joel: As much of the internet that Google can find and deliver to you as possible because that's going to happen it's just a matter of what it looks like and how much the global bureaucracy and the governmental hands can mess this thing up. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That's going to happen certainly at least in North America Chad: Before you even get there though, I mean this is for all the talent acquisition professionals that are listening, you've paid millions and some of you tens of millions of dollars over the years to build candidate databases in your applicant tracking system that you never leverage . I mean that data is just there, it's going to atrophy so this is the time to start demanding that that asset is used because you're spending money every single day to buy the same damn candidates over and over and over, so if you're not talking to the Entelos, Hiring Solved, Uncommons obviously then you're doing it all wrong, you're spending a bunch of money to try to obtain candidates that you already have, that makes no fucking sense what so ever. So obviously your search in your applicant tracking system in most cases sucks, totally get that that's why you need these matching technologies and these APIs to surface qualified candidates and help your sources and recruiters get to qualified people faster. Joel: Yep, the lines between marketing the recruiting continue to blur, that's why we're seeing drip campaigns from folks like Texture Crew, we're seeing these sort if wake up the dead, keep your databases active. This is all good stuff it's just recruiting as behind at the times and needs to catch up. Chad: Yeah and Candid ID is doing that waking the dead kind of a thing too but that's more marketing centric so, yeah there's so much that's out there today that can help you leverage the money that you've already spent in building a foundation of can't qualified candidates. If you're focusing on, "Where am I gonna post my jobs?" Dude you are so fucking far out there, you're not even close to focused on what you should be targeting in on and that's your candidate database. Joel: We're talking about waking the dead and I had deleted all of the Halloween sound bytes from our soundboard and I'm very, very upset by that. Or Glassdoors, speaking of branding and experience and all that good stuff, released their best places to work list, this is a very exciting time for many companies cause they can put little logos on their sites and advertisements and talk about how great they are. The top ten list reads as follows, this is sort of a broad list of big companies that you know probably, Facebook is not number one any more, they dropped from number one to number seven. Chad: Ouch Joel: 4.6 is number one, Facebook is 4.5 so it's not like a huge drop that they've done from a overall standpoint but Bain & Company comes in at number one, I don't even know who that is, Zoom Video Communications, don't know who that is, number three is In-N-Out Burger, definitely know who they are, I'm craving them right now but I can't eat for the next 24 hours, number four and they're not in Indiana, number four Procore Technologies, nope don't know them, Boston Consulting, do you know them? Number six linked in the first I guess Job Site employment related company on the list, number seven is Facebook like we said, number eight is Google, number nine Lululemon which is your favorite yoga pant from what I understand and number ten South West Airlines. SO the first five are a little bit bizarre even In-N-Out Burger like to have high ratings for Glassdoor from a burger joint is kind of interesting. Chad: Yes. Joel: They've got that going on there but any thoughts from you on that top ten list? Chad: Yeah I mean I think Zoom is like video conferencing, I think that's one that is, I could be wrong but yeah it doesn't really surprise me especially seeing Facebook take a tumble I mean it wasn't that big of a tumble I mean Facebook rating is now 4.5 among US worker is still a full point higher than the rest of the average companies and were they really gonna be number one forever? Facebook pays top dollar, this is from one of the articles that I was reading, but the employees increasingly don't want to work for a company that runs it's business without any ethical barometer, so obviously Cambridge Analytica happened, that's still bad and yeah it might have been a while ago but it's still hurting and then the recent articles like delay, deny and deflect that came out in the New York Times that again are starting to expose that look, leadership knew that bad shit was happening and they didn't do anything about it but yet they've been preaching to us that we are the savior of the internet right and they're finding that a good amount of that's bullshit and obviously that's gonna hit their ranking. Joel: Yeah, Facebook is kind of a mess right now, not only the stuff you mentioned but people are leaving the company, Facebook employers are really aggressively asking around who's hiring and applying to other companies around Silicon Valley which is an incredibly competitive environment, you've got the African American employees of Facebook coming out and saying that the company is very sort of unfair to African American employees to the point even I remember a story of some of the white employees would sort of put their hand over their wallets when they'd walk by, this one African American is suing the company, but that's some messed up stuff and if you have that kind of reputation people don't wanna work for you like there are a lot of other options out in Silicon Valley that aren't named Facebook that people would love to work for. Chad: And it sounds like Facebook is turning into the career builder of the social media marketing side of the house. Joel: It's not that bad. So anyway here's their top ten list of like what employees said they need to have in these great work places, I'll go from ten to one Letterman-style number ten is the ability to have work life balance, number nine challenging and exciting work, number eight transparent senior leadership, we just talked about that, number seven opportunities for career advancement, number six that the company has a clear direction, number five great perks and benefits, number four competitive compensation, got to get paid, number three smart collaborative colleges, that's kind of interesting, number two employees need to feel valued, well yeah, number one a mission driven company culture. No big surprises on that list but so few companies do it well. Chad: Yeah, I think that list in itself talk about transparency, talk about hiring the best so that you don't wanna be the smartest guy in the room because if that's the case then you're probably not in the best company in the world, so yeah that's a good list when you're building a company, it's not easy to obtain obviously but the biggest issue I would say because Facebook does pay well and they've got great benefits is that they have individuals who are coming there that really are focused on the altruistic peace of Facebook and now that has pretty much been shattered. Joel: Yeah, it's also interesting to see Google over the years fall from this list, they used to have a pretty solid grip on not necessarily Glassdoor cause Glassdoor is not that old but I remember in the 2000s Google was consistently number one in terms of the best place to work, I mean they were the first one to sort of trail blaze free food and volley ball pits and gyms and they really set the tone for a lot of companies to improve their workplaces so to see them sorta drop is interesting I guess. Chad: Inevitable. Joel: Yep, let's hear a quick word from our sponsor Canvas and we'll talk about linked in salary data. Canvas: Canvas is the world's first intelligent text based interviewing platform empowering recruiters to engage, screen and coordinate logistics via text and so much more. We keep the human, that's you, at the center while Canvas spot is at your side adding automation to your work flow. Canvas leverages the latest in machine learning technology and has powerful integrations that help you make the most of every minute of your day. Easily amplify your employment brand with your newest culture video or add some personality to the mix by firing off the bitmoji. We make compliance easy and are laser focused on recruiters success, request a demo at gocanvas.io and in 20 minutes we'll show you how to text at the speed of talent. That's gocanvas.io, get ready to text at the speed of talent. Chad: I love the, "We keep the human, that's you" Joel: I love that. Chad: That's you just in case you didn't know, you're the human and we'll be getting rid of you soon. Joel: You had a nice ride human beings, enjoy it while it lasts. Linkedin, I think this was a link shared by James Ellis our buddy Groupon employment branding expert and fellow podcaster, Linkedin is now starting to request salary data and provide salary data to their users, so if you go to the link that their promoting the salary information it sort of locks you to saying, "Tell us about your role in salary to unlock free in sites for the year, see salaries for various role, companies and more" so you have to sort of give to get with Linkedin here, they're not just going to like I don't know payscale.com or something in getting that kinda data, they're looking for sort of real time data from their users. I think this is valuable information, people want it and Linkedin is tarting to do it whether you agree with how they're doing it is up to debate but certainly having that data is gonna be valuable for them. Chad: It doesn't matter what you think, they're getting the data because they're asking individuals to be transparent and that being said of being transparent, I don't think that James is at Groupon anymore. Joel: Oh really? Chad: Yeah, so salary transparency when companies aren't posting it, that's one of the issues that we've seen over the years is that companies have really kinda scaled down the information that they wanna share with the public and one of those pieces is salary and that's a pretty important piece and even Google and Google for jobs has said that that is a piece of information that they want and they need so if you're providing that information you could perspectively rank higher so there's reasons that this is happening is because we need more transparency in this industry. Chad: So where can you get it? You get it from the employees and I went through the process, it was pretty cool, there was just a button that said, "Enter your information, enter you salary information" to get to a page that said, "See if you're being paid like other professionals" and that's how they draw you in, it's like, "Okay, are you getting screwed, why don't you see, check it out" so you go through this process and you put the information in and then it obviously gives you an average top end and bottom end of what that job title is actually getting paid in your area, so it's providing more information to the employees so that they know if they're getting screwed or not and I don't think there's anything wrong with this, I don't care if you're in town acquisition and you want to try to keep that salary away from the public, it shouldn't be, it should be a part of the process, you should know that information before you apply for a job. Joel: And by the way we know that providing salary data is going to be good for you and Google for jobs which we talked about earlier and that companies that are more transparent, more informative, give more data are gonna just perform better on Google so you might as well do it, get used to it, get comfortable because that's what the market wants and you are correct, James is no longer at Groupon, I'm not too late on it, he left in September but he's got a lot of stuff going on man. Chad: Busy guy. Joel: Proactive talent, professional speaker, board member of Talent Brand Alliance so yeah, good for you James, sorry I didn't know, I didn't get the memo hat you left Groupon, apparently I'm not on mailing list. Chad: Yeah just follow him on Twitter @thewarfortalent he's got a podcast, it's all good, he's a fan, he's a Chad Cheese favorite. Joel: You interviewed him a while back so if you wanna know more about James check out that episode. Chad: Yep. Joel: So you're kind of mad at the muse in digi.me, talk about that or their new name, what is it? TS49 or something. Chad: Okay so help me understand this, we'll get into all of the whole naming and what not but help me understand this, so if I got to the muse and I want them to create video content for me like job previews, company overviews you know like culture videos whatever well they create the content, they charge you for the content and that seems pretty standard right? But here's where it gets weird, they own the content, the employer doesn't own it so you know I've been kind of on some boards Facebook groups. Chad: Oh you know, I've been kind of on some boards, Facebook groups and things and doing a little research back and forth. And it's interesting because I know that JSTN, which is what they used to be called, they're now called Digi-Me, used to have the same kind of practice where it was like, "Hey look, we'll create content for you, Mr. Customer, but guess what, you don't own it." Chad: What the fuck is happening out there? Joel: That's so like 2003 when you would get videos. Like before YouTube you would get videos created about whatever. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It could be culture, "Hey, we want to sell some stuff." And then the company that would provide the camera and the studio and the video and then they would edit the video and provide the final product. And then they would host the video. Then they would charge you like a monthly fee to host the video. Joel: And then YouTube came along and was like, "Oh you can just put it on YouTube for free." And we've even seen this in our industry back in the day with a ... like Jobing did it, I want to say whoever did Monster's original videos I'm blanking on the ... who did that, but that was their kind of model, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: It wasn't so much making it and the creation of the video, but it was like hosting was like huge money that they were getting just consecutively month after month. That's some old stuff, man. If you're using a provider like the MUSE and those guys and they're doing videos for you and charging you for like ownership and they're hosting it or they're kind of keeping it under lock and key, that's pretty messed up, man. And they're actually ... I know like Firefox's browser ... there are ways you can go and like grab a video so you don't have to like mess ... like you can grab it from, directly from the site and it's yours and you can have a file and do whatever you want with it. That wasn't necessarily available to do back in the day, but the video should be yours. I don't know if they're having something in the contract that says, "Hey, we own this video. We own this content." But that's some ... that's garbage. Chad: Yeah. I think it's licensing, but companies are having to negotiate for ownership of their own content. Hearing about this just pissed me off right out of the gate. And that companies would kind say, "Oh yeah, well you know I had to negotiate for my video." It's like bullshit. That's your content. If you want to put it on YouTube, it you want to ... it doesn't matter where you want to put it. This is your brand. This is your message. This is your content. Joel: Yeah. Chad: So if you go into a conversation, "Oh, I have to negotiate for my content." Turn the fuck around and get outta there. There are many other video content providers who can do this without this crazy, stupid, 1990s early 2000s bullshit ransom. Joel: Don't out think the room. Like I'm serious. Go to your local Craig's List site. Look at videographers. Talk to them. Super cheap, super professional. You don't have to fly them in. You don't have to like ship their equipment. Get a nice video produced. Have your marketing team you know produce the content, the script, storyboard it out. Like this is not rocket science. I know that it's easier to just hire you know an industry vendor, but don't think in terms of that. Think in terms of like, who's local, who's a videographer, who can do this professionally. And by god, I mean Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, like the platforms are out there to put these videos online and get exposure. Don't get a headache over the actual production and professionalism of the video. Chad: That being said, I did an interview the same time, the same timeframe that I did with James Ellis with Elena Valentine over at Skill Scout and I believe Skill Scout, "The content's all yours." I don't think they play those games. So if you wanna go local, that's cool. If you wanna go with somebody's who's more professional, that's cool too. But I would say look for companies who aren't playing this bullshit, "You don't own the content." Game. Joel: Yep. Totally agree. Totally agree. Well let's take a break here from Sovren and good god, we'll talk about Millennials and Gen Z and some Japanese extensions. I dig it. Sovren: Sovren AI matching is the most sophisticated matching engine on the market. Because it acts just like a human. You decide exactly how our AI matching engine thinks about each individual transaction. It will find, rank and sort the best matches according to your criteria. Sovren: Not only does it deliver the best matches, it tells you how and why it produced them. And offers tips to improve the results. Our engine thinks like you so you don't have to learn how to think like the engine. Sovren: To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit Sovren.com. That S-O-V-R-E-N dot com. Joel: Chad, are you ready for the Gen Z experts? Chad: I am not. Joel: Just when you were getting over the Millennial experts ... now comes the Gen Z experts. So CNBC has a story about a kid named Jonah Stillman, who's a 19 year old Gen Z expert. He's worked with companies like LinkedIn, Intuit, the NFL and others to give Gen Z insights on how to market and hire this pesky new generation. Joel: Quote, from Mr. Stillman, "I'm one of the few Gen Zers talking on the topic of Gen Z. And there are very few that actually have data." Joel: He's from Minneapolis, which we have a lot of friends there so if you know Mr. Stillman, give him a high five for us. Joel: Quote, "It doesn't take much to share an opinion, but numbers don't lie." Joel: So this kid is lucky enough to have a father who has a business that sort of looks at data and trends and does sort of this big business, high level information for companies. And it sounds to me like the father has taken advantage of the son and the fact that he's of this generation to pimp him to companies. But either way I'm not really ready fr Gen Z. Chad: Yeah, so you realize the market is dictating this shit, right? I mean Xers, we just joined the workforce and the Boomers they led the way. It wasn't a great market. I mean when I first jumped in, so you know you had to conform to what was going on, to an extent, right? Chad: So today there are more jobs than there are people. And Millennials and Gen Z don't have to conform because they walk across the street and find another fucking job. Or they'll just run a portfolio of side hustles, right? Because they can. Chad: But yeah, this dad who's an Xer, saw an opportunity. And he has a very charismatic son ... and Gen Z kid and he thought he'd make a buck while the market's good, so you know, good for those guys. But really I believe the market is dictating all of this. If this was a tight market and it was really hard to find a job, then the Gen Z and the Millennials they would either continue to live with mom and dad until they kicked them out, obviously, or they would have to confirm into some type of corporate type of gig. Joel: I'm just not ready for the onslaught of consultants and experts speaking at presentations and conferences, talking about the differences of the generationals, the generational gaps. Joel: Matt Charney, who we give a hard time ... we give him a hard time ... fellow blogger, personality I guess in this space ... had a really funny tweet the other day when he said, "Thank god for Gen Z. Now I can just find and replace all my posts about the Millennials and have a whole new stock of blog posts for the next decade." Which is pretty clever and pretty funny becasue he's kind of right. Like the things that we're talking about with Millennials will probably be very similar to Gen Z. But I'm just not ready for it. Chad: Again, I really think it's because of the market. The market starts to tune up, that'll change. That'll definitely change, but right now it's like there're ... again, there are more jobs than there are people, so ... there you have it. Joel: It'll be more like stories of universal basic income and what these kids are doing with the money that the government's giving them. Chad: 2118 happens now, and so if you haven't listened you should listen to our interview with Peter Weddle on the ... his new book, 'Circa 2118.' And then this'll start to put some things I believe into perspective because we're on the journey there now. Joel: Yep. By the way we just released that interview with Peter Weddle, so it's live now. You can go to our archives and check it out. Joel: Let's end this miserable podcast on a new Japanese chrome extension I'm guessing, that makes Twitter look like Slack. So you can Slack ... no pun intended ... at work making your boss think that you are on Slack when actually you're checking out the Kardashian sisters on Twitter. Chad: Just another way to get over ... I mean it's interesting that you know individuals have enough time to come up with these great extensions or what have you, but they can't make them work for like work productivity. I mean this is like anti-work productivity. It's like, yeah this isn't going to help you get your project done, right? But we're going to make it look like you're busy. And at the end of the day your manager's going to look at you and say, "Man I see all the activity that you have going on, but your shit's still not done." Doesn't matter. Activity means nothing. Productivity means something and if you don't get your shit done, then guess what? You're out the door. Joel: Oh, that's pretty deep. It also doesn't deter the fact that your boss can go to the IT department and say, "Hey, what websites are you know, Jo visiting on a regular basis?" And Twitter is still gonna come up even through it looks like Slack, so I think this is a strategy of Slackerdome that is bound to kick you in the ass. Joel: It also reminds me of the story from a while back of an IT manager who hired out Upwork engineers to do his job for him. And the boss got suspicious when all the work was being done like late, late at night because that's when India is up and he got busted for that. Joel: So anyway like you can look at workarounds and ways to get around the man, but it's becoming progressively tougher. Chad: So was this guy actually paying out of his own pocket to get the work done out of India? Joel: Yeah. Chad: Okay, so he's getting the work done. Joel: But if you're the company and you're paying this dude 100K to be an engineer and he's paying out you know 10K a year to India to do the job like you're fine with that as a company? Chad: That's one of the smartest things I've ever heard. If he's getting a project done and it's a ... that's all I care about, it's the project. Meeting the needs of the company, which is apparently what he did, how he got that done, now he's just being micromanaged. That's bullshit. Joel: Now I will say he's a trailblazer whether he knew it or not. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Because the world is moving to ... let's just have somebody manage these folks. Now they won't pay him what they're getting now, but yeah the future's probably managing folks around the world through platforms like Upwork and the high priced engineers of this country, at some point may have a hard time getting a job because they are so costly. Chad: That's a good point. Joel: We out? Chad: We out. Ema: Hi. I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, the Chad, and his buddy, Cheese. This has been the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Glassdoor #LinkedIn #Jobiak #HirebyGoogle #GoogleHire #Dice #Facebook #TheMuse #Digime #AI #Matching

Take a deep breath people... The U.S. economy just posted its worst quarterly economic output on record so it's all rainbows and unicorns this week as the boys cover: - Modern Hire buys Sonru... Son-who? - Stack Overflow is swimming in cash - LinkedIn's search rivals Google? - Density $51m to count people... and what else? - Amazon's Alexa is asking the questions - Burger King brings us Christmas in July ...and the Brits have one helluva sense of humor. Enjoy, and as usual, we're powered by Jobvite, JobAdx, and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities. Intro (1s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. CHAD SOWASH and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (20s): Oh shit. The us economy just posted its worst quarterly economic output on record. So how's your week going? Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast, everybody. I'm your cohost Joel GDP Cheeseman and Chad (35s): I'm Chad Lafayette Sowash Joel (37s): ...and on this week show Modern Hire does its best Pacman impression, LinkedIn tells Google to hold its beer and the Brits have a special take on what it means to mask up Cheerio, hip hip. And we'll be right back after we pay a few bills. Sovren (54s): Sovren Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry, the more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren software. So human you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel (1m 21s): Basketball's back, baby. Chad (1m 22s): Yeah, but for how long? Joel (1m 25s): If it's anything like baseball four days. Yeah. Chad (1m 31s): What we'll do as humans, just to think we're we're back in normal. And that being said, we had a 1.4, three, I don't know where the three came from million file for unemployment. And then the GDP shrinks 32.9%. Now if, if, if we're not feeling it say, Hey, if you're not feeling it now, you know, get out of your ivory tower, open the curtains and check it out because people are, are having issues right now. Chad (2m 3s): And fucking unemployment is going to be running out. Joel (2m 6s): Thankfully yesterday was national chicken wing day and today is national corn dog chili day or our chili dog day. So, so I'm drowning my sorrow in bad food and calories. Chad (2m 20s): You do do whatever you can to keep away from the news cycle. That's all I got to say! Joel (2m 26s): I'm staying in my bubble. I'm in my bubble man. Bubble it. Stay in your white man bubble my suburb bubble shout outs. Chad (2m 33s): Shoutouts! That's right. Newest addition to the Brain Food Tribune. That's right. Kids, Steven O'Donnell and James Ellis. Joel (2m 43s): You have say it with a Scottish accent. Chad (2m 46s): Yeah. I can't, I ain't got one. Joel (2m 47s): Steven O'Donnell Chad (2m 49s): I'll fuck that all up. They, they have been entered into the Recruiting Brain Food Tribune section. So go to recruitingbrainfood.com. You can see the Tribune click on it. Some great stories. I have about 10 people in there now. Joel (3m 5s): Yeah. Explain what this is cause you've done it. So I assume, you know the reason of it and what's what's going on. So for those who don't know, Recruiting Brain Food Tribune. Chad (3m 15s): Yeah. So Hung Lee's a genius go figure. He wants to be able to really dig into the people that are in the industry. So that again, as a community, we know some things about others, maybe just from their Twitter feed or a little conversations that we've had here and there meeting them at events. But we really don't know the people. So he has different formats that he's put together. Elaine Valentine chose the hardest, I think, which is a letter to your 13 year old self. Chad (3m 48s): I picked one of the easier ones that I think James and Steven did as well, where we picked 20 questions and we answered those and Hung actually challenged us to talk more deeply about what some of these answers would be to some of the questions. So when you go to the, the Brain Food Tribune, you're going to be probably seeing a lot of faces that you already know, and maybe some faces that you don't, but you'll be able to get some real in depth information and just about those people themselves. Chad (4m 22s): And I thought it was a, I thought it was a genius idea. Overall. He's going to be adding I'm sure every week. Joel (4m 28s): Just want to, I just want to be on record to say that if you're involved in this, then calling him genius or this thing genius is, is under suspicion to say the least Chad (4m 38s): You're just mad because you haven't been included. Joel (4m 40s): Yeah. Yeah. I know. I'm totally jealous. Shout out to Pine who raised 2.2 million this week. They're a corporate messaging solution founded by one of the dudes from Atlaseon who many, many people know from the Trello app popularized by this show to have Chad and I communicate with each other, but 2.2 million to take on Slack and Facebook at work. Good luck with that Chad (5m 6s): Seems like a Yammer. What happened to Yammer? It was bought and then nothing happened with it, right? Joel (5m 11s): Yeah. Microsoft kind of dropped the ball on Yammer, but yeah, the people who, who did it got pretty rich from it. It's still around. Believe it or not. Yeah. Chad (5m 20s): Yeah. No. And nobody uses it. I received James Ellis's book this week. You should be happy about this. The talent chooses. Joel (5m 30s): One other one I got left out of. Chad (5m 32s): So you were, you were in this one, you just, it was more toward the back. And I think you, you and Charney like shared a section or something, right? Joel (5m 40s): I didn't get a free copy. Let's put it that way. Thanks. Chad (5m 43s): It's cause he knows you don't read books. Joel (5m 45s): It's gotta be an audio book version, right. Or his, his annoying voice. Anyway, could you imagine him doing an audio book? That would be fucking hilarious. Chad (5m 55s): No, he has a podcast for that. Yeah. Joel (5m 58s): The ADD audio book by James Ellis. Shout Out to, to ZipRecruiter. Who's hiring. After laying off 30% of their people, they got ads all over the fucking place. Those laid off. Can't be too happy about it, but Hey, hiring again. Chad (6m 14s): Okay. So two things I think they, they definitely, they dropped 40% first and foremost, around 40%. That was a huge cut. Number one, number two, this was something that they should have done a long time ago. They were, they were in part, I believe, using COVID-19 to be able to, to do what they should have done. Right. Joel (-): Cloud cover Chad (6m 36s): They should have. Yeah, they should have Joel (6m 38s): Cloud Cover Chad (6m 38s): Yeah. They should have focused on being able to diversify and not just focus on SMB, just being in the SMB space and not seeing this coming obviously, but just being in the SMB space, not diversified, really fucked them. And now they're turning, as you can see with this job posting toward Enterprise, which is what they should have done a few years ago. Joel (7m 1s): Agreed, agreed. Shout out to Daniel O'Neill. Listeners will remember him as the Tik Tok guy who shout out to boomers said, Hey, why aren't more employers on Tik Tok anyway? He's left his, his old gig. And now he is the enterprise sales and agency partner manager at Resume Library. So Daniel shout out, man. Chad (7m 25s): Good job. Joel (7m 25s): Good on you. Chad (7m 26s): Good job there, buddy. Last week we talked about a job case and the 30 million and the, the change of, of equity and all that other fun stuff that was happening. Joel (-): So confusing. Chad (7m 37s): Yeah. And, and Fred actually reached out and said, Hey guys, would you like to talk about it? So we actually talked to Fred Goff, the CEO of Jobcase this week. Amazing dude. And we'll be putting that out next week. Joel (7m 50s): I think his exact words were, Hey, donkeys, let's get on the phone and I'll explain this to you. Something, something like that, something like that. Shout out to SMS. A they're having a good year. So far. It came out from info BIP research that messaging grew 8.5% from February to March and another 20% in April. So to all our friends out there doing the SMS text recruiting thing, our friends at Emissary Rec Text, Text Recruit Canvas Slash Jobvite, keep on, keeping on people are still using those things And that won't stop kids. Chad (8m 30s): Shout out to Lauren Saunders over at Circa in Brookfield, Wisconsin, Els Schafer, director of TA at FGF brands in Toronto, Canada and John Ambrosino, chief employment officer at Employing Us in Chicago. They all love the podcast and they connected with me on other socials this week. So appreciate you guys listening and thanks for the connect. Joel (8m 28s): Joe AM-bruh-CiNO is how I pronounce it to Ambra-CinO. A shout out to Facebook Reels, a actually fairly smart strategy here. The Wall Street Journal had a story. Reels is essentially the Facebook Tik Tok competitor. Facebook has decided that they're just gonna backup the Brinks truck and pay Tik Tok's, most influential accounts and get them to come over to reels and leave Tik Tok behind. I thought this is something Microsoft should have done 10, 15 years ago when they made their first smartphone, they should have paid off all the successful apps from the iPhone and Android to come over and exclusively developed for Microsoft. Whereas they might still have a phone, whereas now they don't. So I like the strategy. I don't know how you feel about it, but Hey, if you're going to make a competitor, write some checks and get the content over in your neighborhood. Chad (9m 49s): Yeah. I think most of those people are on Tik Tok because they hate Facebook. And if Facebook's name's on something, they might not come. But for the cash, who knows they might Joel (10m 1s): Money talks, baby. Chad (10m 2s): Yeah. I don't talk about money Circa last week, they had a great fucking week. You remember Circa used to be LJN Local Job Network, a very old and stale brand. They rebranded as Circa. So they refresh the brand. That was pretty awesome. We talked about it last week and then they did do what we said would happen. The acquisition of America's job exchange happened earlier this week and an endorsement from the NFLs first female coach, Katie Sowers. Chad (10m 33s): She's an offensive coach for that, for the Niners. Now this to me is really cool because we're talking about diversity. We're talking about inclusion and she is the first NFL coach. And to be able to get her as an endorsement with a brand refresh and an acquisition, I mean, they had a good fucking week. Joel (10m 54s): This was a cameo video, correct? That I saw. So you, so you pay actors and famous people and semi-famous people to say good things about you say happy birthday, et cetera. So Cammie or whatever cameo is paid by Circa to say nice things about the new launch. Chad (11m 12s): It's kind of like Michael Jordan drinking a Gatorade. Joel (11m 15s): Yeah. Kinda, although you pay $50 for this chick to do your ad, like they could have at least got James VanDerBeek or somebody to do a, to do a shout out for them. They could have spent a little money and got Troy Aikman to do a, to it, to do a shout out. But anyway, Chad (11m 30s): You really don't understand diversity. Do you? You really don't get diversity. Do you? Joel (11m 36s): And I get capitalism, baby. Okay. So I will say this, that, that Cameo seems to be like the marketing, the marketing device of choice for people now. So I'm starting to see these things pop up all over and it's probably a good, a good use of a couple hundred dollars to get someone that people know to about your product. Just to make sure it's someone of color or has a vagina. So Chad approves of it. Chad (11m 58s): So, so everybody understands Circa is a diversity network. Joel doesn't know what diversity means because he's balled up in the fucking fetal position in a white man fetal position. And doesn't understand what that actually means. So therefore guys, let me go ahead and help him out. First NFL, female, coach = diversity. There you go, kid. So a competitor of Circa came out and their response to this whole thing was eQUEST. Just get ready. Chad (12m 29s): We have something coming soon. It was like, that was the worst response. Joel (12m 34s): That was the week. That was the weakest flex in history. That was really weak. Chad (12m 40s): What the fuck are you doing out there eQUEST? Oh, Hey, we're doing cool stuff too. We're not going to tell you what it is and it might not happen. Joel (12m 52s): Yeah, that was a weak ass flex. All right. Last shout out for me goes to Herman Cain just came across the news wires this morning, former GOP candidate for president back in 2012. I believe former CEO of Godfather's pizza, died of coronavirus complications. So our, our heart, Chad (13m 12s): No fuck. He died. Oh, Holy shit. Joel (13m 15s): Yeah. Announced a this morning. So Thursday morning is when we record. So Herman Cain rip, baby, if you didn't know him or like him, you hopefully liked his pizza. Cause that shit was good. Chad (13m 27s): Well, and that being said, I mean it as my, my, my last shout out, but John Lewis, obviously there's no question. He is going to be missed big, ah, big inhale, big exhale, who not, not a way to go out a shout out. So let's go ahead and just ease into events shall we? Joel (13m 47s): Events. Chad (13m 48s): We have a summer to evolve happening with our friends at Jobvite, August 5th at 2:00 PM, I'll be joining Elaine Orler and Peter Claire to talk about how not to make onboarding suck because onboarding in most cases sucks guys. It's dehumanizing at times. And so we'll be talking about tech experience and how to be more human in the onboarding process. You can register@summertoevolve.com, right? Joel (14m 14s): Automate that shit. Chad (14m 18s): Don't you have one of those coming? Joel (14m 19s): I do. It's after yours. So I have not, I, they haven't contacted me to coordinate that. Maybe they just forgot about it and I've been scratched from the sheet, but yes, I am doing one of those. It's it's something about content marketing for recruiting. So that'd be fun. Chad (14m 37s): Okay. Then August 27th, I'll be speaking in moderating a panel at Digital Recruitment Hackers event about optimizing recruitment for a remote workforce that connect to connect with me on LinkedIn, or follow me on Twitter for more info on how to register. Joel (14m 58s): Very nice. Chad (14m 59s): Yeah. Nice. Not too bad. And we're we're, we've dropped the first FeatureRama podcast with Andy Katz last Sunday. Got great response from that. Joel (-): Katman Chad (15m 8s): Yeah. Andy, Andy actually said, you must have dropped the podcast cause cause people are emailing me and messaging me. It's about Nexxt talent community product. If you have a talent community, you should definitely be listening to this podcast. And then this Sunday, we're going to drop the next Featurama. We have three more to go. Joel (15m 28s): I see what you did there. You started with Nexxt. And then the next one that's right. I like that. I like that. Modern Hire our favorite rebrand from 2019. Yeah. You, you may remember acquires who modern hire from the acquisition of Montage and Shaker International. Not to be confused with Shaker Recruitment Marketing. So this happened late last year, rebranded went to HR tech made a big deal. So they've made an acquisition of what I would call sort of a VRBO competitor. Joel (16m 1s): I won't say want to be, cause they've been around a lot longer than VRBO, but they acquired a company called Sonru. I assume I'm saying that correctly out of Ireland who does sort of automated video interviews. So they'll, pre-screen do all that good stuff. Interestingly, they've been around since 2009. So I don't even know if they've started doing, you know, automated video or they just sort of pivoted into that. At some point they, they only raised like $339,000 Chad (16m 29s): and that was in 2010. Joel (16m 31s): Yeah. So they've just, I guess, been chugging organically. You and I kind of questioned why would they sell? Maybe they just got tired of running the business after 11 years. I don't know, but yeah, good on them. I hope they hope they got paid and Modern Hire gets into the automated video interviewing game, which is sort of interesting. Chad (16m 54s): They were already in that game. The thing is that this is more of an, a Mia and APAC expansion or at least that's what they're saying. If you take a look at, when you look at Australia, that Australia makes up most of their web traffic on similar web on Sonru, meaning that that's obviously where their, their customers and candidates are accessing the system. The thing is, I don't see anything Asia in those traffic numbers, the UK is their second most trafficked. Chad (17m 25s): And it is in single digits followed by France, New Zealand and Ireland. So I'm not feeling their Asia vibes, I'm feeling the Aussie vibes obviously. But yeah, I think this might be a scenario where it's like optics for more, more than anything, maybe picking up, picking up some portfolio. I mean, there, they had over 50 employees and I think six or seven different locations Sonru did. And a modern hire is like in Cleveland, in Deerfield, Wisconsin. Joel (17m 59s): Beautiful locations, by the way, beautiful locations. Yeah. They really, really played up the, the global expansion angle on this one. The only quote from the press release from Brian Stern, president of modern hire was quote, the combination with Sonru was compelling due to our tremendous alignment and culture and values and sunrise success in the E M E A and APAC regions. This will increase our InMarket market presence in major growth geographies and enable us to better anticipate the changing needs of our global buyers. So they really played up the global reach of this acquisition. Chad (18m 32s): Again, Sonru. Why sell now when remote is so big and video interviewing and remote interviewing is so big. I mean, this is, this is when they should really be pressing the pedal to the metal. And then the question back to, you know, Modern Hire, why, why acquire now you have what you have in the biggest market in the world. To me, it doesn't make sense. I'm glad they did it. Good for you guys. That's awesome. Chad (19m 2s): But to me it doesn't make sense. You double down, especially right now in the biggest markets, you kick the shit out of everybody else here where the money is. And I mean, I would think that Sonru would want a bigger price right now because there's much more of a need. I just, to me again, it's just, it's kind of weird. Joel (19m 20s): Yeah, It is tough. But you mentioned Fred Goff in our shout outs and you know, Fred talked a lot about how the M and a market is heating up. And the number of calls that he's getting, you know, for acquisition and partnering and whatnot is, is, is scaling up for sure. We are still in a global pandemic. People aren't hiring layoffs are still happening. So if you're a smaller company with a lot of, not a lot of money, good money could have run out. I mean, this could have been a, a fire sale. I don't know Jack about Sonru I can't say, but, but we are, we aren't, we are in strange times. Joel (19m 53s): So it's not, it's not crazy to think that, you know, Hey, financially the pandemic, the bad, bad timing, like we need to, we need to get out of this. And a Modern Hire was a logical buyer. Right. Chad (20m 5s): And I tell you, the funding is stack overflowing. Joel (20m 12s): Pretty good, man. I like that dude. You are on with the zingers man. Yeah. What happened to stack overflow? They raised a little cash, apparently. Chad (20m 22s): Yeah. 85 million in series E 153 million in total funding, which is reported by Crunchbase. Stack Overflow for teams, which is really what they're pushing now. A knowledge management platform that allows developers to collaborate with one another with, with other departments or within your department, or obviously with other departments, it's really been interesting because they're going to use this, this money to broaden into new markets. Now, when we spoke with Hacker Ranks, CEO, Vivek they're heavy, have HackerRank is heavy in India. Chad (20m 60s): I remember Vivek actually saying in our interview that we have plenty of tech talent. Because we were kind of pushing him, you know, Hey, tech talent is short and he's like, no, it's not, it's not short. Not if we look at this in a global way. In India, we have plenty to be able to fill the gaps that we have here. I'm wondering with stack overflow, the kind of broadening what that actually, what that actually means. They're not like a Hacker Rank to an extent they're more of kind of like a Help Index type of a system. Chad (21m 35s): But I mean, I don't know how that works and if they're really just pressing the teams module, because that's really where they're seeing revenu. Joel (21m 41s): Yeah. I think, I think all that is opportunity stack overflow also has a job board component to it. So, you know, I have to think that part of the money is going to be used to sort of build out geographical footprints in terms of a hiring angle. And you mentioned HackerRank, we talked to a human predictions, founder Elliott, his last name escapes me, but he, he talked about, Chad (-): Garms Joel (22m 6s): yeah, he talked about how, you know, the hiring and engineering and software and everything else, everyone else that got furloughed from that period is all hired back. So when you look at like where's hiring, going to still happening and happened sooner rather than later, right. And only get hotter. I mean, the, the tech hiring is where all that stuff is. So I got to think this is going to be a multipronged approach in terms of where they're going to spend that money, but they'd be stupid not to build out some of the employment, the employment features of the site. Chad (22m 36s): I think this segment is really missing an opportunity still here in the U S. I think that that corporate America is still going to want local talents, maybe not a hundred percent, but they're still going to want the lion's share of that to be the local talent. Those organizations really need to tap into and start manufacturing talent pipelines. I mean, these are the perfect types of organizations who could turn a huge void into a huge opportunity, especially in the diverse segments. Chad (23m 11s): When companies are looking for diverse developers, any type of, of tech talent whatsoever, they could be doing that instead of trying to go out there and find the same person over and over and over. So it is interesting. Broadening might be the key, but I really think we need to look a little bit more local for many of these issues. Joel (23m 34s): Agreed. Well, let's take a break and we'll talk about, we'll talk about LinkedIn, wanting to compete a little bit with Google. Jobvite (23m 42s): Johnvite wants you and you to join thousands. Millions, okay? Maybe just thousands of recruiters, HR, and Talent Acquisition professionals for a summer. You won't soon forget. It's Jobvite Summer to Evolve. The summer to have all of this is a 12 week series of free content to help recruiters brush up on this. Learn from industry thought leaders. Technology can help them improve, automate, and evolve their recruiting efforts. Jobvite (24m 13s): There will be a chance to share tips and ideas with your peers. And we may even have some surprises for you along the way. I love surprises. So visit thesummertoevolve.com to register for this summer tool evolve sessions that suit your needs, Peak your interest or float your boat. Starting June 16th, it's the summer to evolve the way you attract engage hire. Onboard and retain talent. Recruit with purpose, hire with confidence. Chad (24m 42s): Go learn something. People go learn something, float your boat, float your boat, learn something. Summertoevolve.com. Joel (24m 50s): So, so they've been fairly quiet in this pandemic, but Google's hot. You know, Google's March unemployment still continues and you and I have always been big fans of their search API. We did an interview with Steven Rothberg some months ago about how, how it's positively impacted his business. And we kind of wondered like, well, Google kind of owns the game and you could certainly have that perception, but I for one was, was sort of happy, pleasantly surprised and, and sort of happy that Google is going to get a little bit of competition on this side of the house. Joel (25m 29s): Announced this week by LinkedIn via their, their corporate blog. They're going to open source D text, which is their deep text learning framework for the NLP or natural language processing tasks. So basically LinkedIn said it is made it's detect D text or deep text, natural language processes technology available in open source. One of Dtext features is how it allows AI. Researchers use multiple NLP models, train on their own specific language data to power different tasks via one system. Joel (26m 3s): So in plain speak the same technology that LinkedIn is is using for its sort of job search it's people search it's recommended searches. You can now start looking at an open source and potentially plugging into your apps and sites. Chad (26m 20s): So in using LinkedIn myself, I'm always perplexed on why their search sucks so bad. So they're actually saying that they're going to use this same search that I use all the time and, and that they're going to open source it. And I'm I, so why it's like, I can get shitty search anywhere and you can say it's deep learning, but if it's not giving me what I'm actually looking for, if it's not, if it's not recommending per se, then I, I don't care. Chad (26m 52s): I mean, Joel (26m 53s): okay, Chad (26m 53s): Just, just from my usage of the platform itself, I think it sucks. So this to me, this is a, so what now I do like the competition model and we also have to remember that the AI and deep learning process doesn't happen overnight. This isn't overnight. Obviously they've been doing it for a while, so I don't want to give them a pass when they're coming out saying that they're going to make this open source. Because again, I wouldn't want to use that code. Joel (27m 23s): Fair enough. But I do think it has a long way to go, I think, know, open sourcing this stuff. They're going to learn a lot from, from developers that are building on top of the code. I still think Microsoft is a formidable opponent to anything that Google or Amazon or anyone else is doing. So for me, this is simply a step in the right direction. And I like to see LinkedIn sort of slowly open up things that it's doing because they've been such a closed system for so long. So we'll see. Joel (27m 54s): But to me, it's a, it's a positive first step in, you know, in the ecosystem. Chad (27m 59s): Well, think of this. We had four tech giants on Capitol Hill this week, right? Yeah. Guess who wasn't there? I mean, Microsoft, Microsoft was not there. They were there. No, they weren't. We had Zuk, we had Cook, we had Pennchar, we had Bezos. Those were the four You're. Joel (28m 25s): Right. And what does that tell you? Chad (28m 28s): That's telling me something. They're either, they're either incredibly fucking stealthy and nobody's paying attention or they're starting not to matter as much anymore. Joel (28m 39s): Yeah. They've also fought their antitrust battles a couple of decades ago, but that's an interesting point. Chad Sowash. Chad (28m 47s): Well, one thing that is scary that I hope does not fly under government radar. Yeah. But it seems like it is, is Density raises $51 million to help count employees in offices. A social dense distancing is perhaps one of the most prominent guidelines for the CDC and prevention to combat COVID-19. So when companies look to reopen their offices and buildings limiting the number of people in a room is key. Chad (29m 20s): This is, this is from Crunchbase news. Yup. Density was actually growing 30% quarter over quarter, last year, but did more in business in the first 75 days of COVID 19. So my question is, what the fuck were they using this technology for before COVID 19? Because this company has been around since 2014. Joel (29m 46s): Yeah. I mean, and I don't know much about the whole counting people business. I mean, I'm sure there's, there's elements like foot traffic. I mean, cause it's, it's, it's used in a variety of industries. Right. So casinos use it, schools use it, other businesses use it. So for me, it's, it's, it's probably originally more of a, just a data point to say, you know, what's the traffic coming into our Walmart and how much does like what's our overall revenue based on how many people come in and how does that, how does that revenue fluctuate based on, you know, who's coming in and how many people are coming in and leaving the store. Joel (30m 27s): So to me, it was more of like a data play. And now it's more of a policing monitoring play to say, Hey, we're at capacity. Don't come in. Or to tell someone in the business, you know, control the crowd here because it's, it's, it's in red. Chad (30m 44s): Well, whenever I, I hear any of these types of technologies, I automatically think will Smith and Enemy of the State having access to knowing and identifying where people are at all times. I know this is more of a measurement type of scenario, but I should probably dig into this Density technology a little bit more. It's just from my standpoint, it is incredibly weird. And off-putting all at the same time. Joel (31m 12s): Don't you find it That they counted Pinterest as a client in the new story. Like I can see, you know, factories and bigger companies, but it seems like Pinterest was an odd one that would use a technology like this. Chad (31m 25s): Yeah. Meat, packing plants and Pinterest. Joel (31m 28s): Yeah. Schools. I get school. Totally get some casinos. I get churches. I get like those all make sense to me. Pinterest is a little bit curious. I'm not sure Chad (31m 39s): That is odd. That is odd. What also is Alexa asking questions? And this is a story from CNET. If you use Amazon's Alexa, voice assistant with any regularity, you might have recently noticed something new. Alexa is beginning to ask questions. These are called hunches. I call it, what the fuck are you doing? Talking to me, Alexa? Joel (32m 4s): Well, you've seen 2001 a space Odyssey, right? I mean, Hal has a conversation with you? And to me, this is sort of where they want this to go. They want you to have conversations and not just order, you know, voice assistance around for questions and turn off the lights and whatever else. I mean, I think that the end goal is that you wake up and have conversations with your computer. You know, I think one of the things I was talking to my wife about this week was, you know, I would say that our relationship pre COVID was probably at least 50/50 podcast stuff. Joel (32m 36s): And then just dude stuff and just people stuff. Right? Yep. And since the pandemic, I would say that 90 plus percent of our interactions are podcast stuff. Right? Yeah. So I have to think that we're not alone in that, right. Like relationships that you would have had at work now are simply zoom meetings and you're doing work. And then you, you, you say goodbye and you go onto something else, like the human interactions are missing. And so part of the reason of why we wanted you guys to come over this weekend at a distance of course, was to just get some human interaction. Joel (33m 11s): So when I think about me as a, you know, a middle aged guy, you know, craving sort of this interaction, imagine being, you know, it's a five year old or a 10 year old that does this become their interaction, their, their sort of their mentor, their, you know, shoulder to cry on their, whatever information source. Like, it's not hard for me to imagine that the world of the future, like we have this best friend and it's Alexa or Siri or it's Google or whatever, I think it's strange to us, but I could totally see the future where you interact with, with computers on a regular basis. Joel (33m 50s): And it's not weird. Chad (33m 51s): This is definitely the movie, Her and I just saw a trailer yesterday for a new TV show coming on Fox called Next where it is the Alexa it's called something different. It is the Alexa. And this little kid is, is, is asking this Alexa, like product questions. And then the Alexa asks questions back in the dad comes in and says, who are you talking to? And she said, well, I was talking to Alexa. It's like, it doesn't ask you questions. Chad (34m 23s): Right. And then behind it, there's this data gathering AI system. I mean, it goes further into it, but it just like, it's this whole conspiracy theory piece where much like Density what's what, what are they doing with that data? And then much like, Alexa, what the fuck are they doing with that? And Amazon is testing out more proactive behaviors for Alexa having the assistant prompt users on occasion and the company can track in real time and rate the success in those predictions. Chad (34m 55s): Remember Alexa listens to you all the time. Joel (34m 58s): Yeah. Imagine having a friend that you've had since birth that has stayed with you, your entire life is with you all the time and knows every little detail about you and the events of your life. If you're a company that sells shit, how, how crazy good would it be to have that kind of data on somebody? And to me, that's kind of where Amazon and all those guys had their, their druthers. That's where the world is going. And I think that's that, that's where they're hoping things go. Chad (35m 28s): I mean, target ability. Joel (35m 29s): I mean, here at home, I mean, we have a Google home and we're like, Hey, Google lights on. And my three year old replicates that behavior and says, Hey, Google lights on. So it's a very intuitive system that kids or anybody, you know, can understand pretty easily who Chad (35m 46s): deep breath exhale. Joel (35m 49s): Our next segment will make you feel better. I think, thank God. Thank God everyone else feel better. Let's take a break. JobAdX promo (35m 55s): Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company, culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video. JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off, you're spending thousands of dollars on beautiful, informative employment branding videos that just sit on a YouTube channel begging to be discovered why not feature them across our network of over 150 job sites to proactively compel top talent to join your team, help candidates see themselves in your role by emailing. JobAdX promo (36m 38s): Joinus@jobadx.com. That's joinus@jobadx.com attract, engage, employ with jobAdX. Chad (36m 54s): Ooh, I'm ready for an impossible whopper. Joel (36m 58s): I could go for a chicken sandwich right now. Chad (37m 3s): So you remember Ellie Dodi Chili's cause she sent you food. Joel (37m 9s): She sent me a gift card, which is as good as food. Cause I, I spent that thing within 30 minutes after getting it, but yeah, when she was at Chili's, which I love of course, chips and salsa still great. We interviewed her, she, she could feel my affection for the brand, sent me a credit for some shit and I used it, but she is now at Burger King, which we talked about, I think last week on our shout-out switch. What better place to be for a marketer than the number two player in a space as big as fast food. Joel (37m 43s): And she's obviously having a good time. Oh yeah. Chad (37m 46s): Now Ellie Dodi, the C M O of Burger King starts this, this new promotion. So with the health crisis and high unemployment rates, many consumers are wondering when things will improve and a new normal will emerge. Well, obviously burger King has an answer. Burger King is tapping into this sentiment with a new campaign, including a video that shows customers admitting that they are done with 2020 and desire to be in happier times like Christmas. Chad (38m 20s): So the ad also tries to offer hope in reminding viewers that the things will change. This is a Christmas in July thing where it looks like, and I hope this, do they do this at every Burger King? They're going to turn the entire Burger King into like a, a winter Christmas Wonderland, because that makes everybody happy. Yeah. Joel (38m 45s): And by the way, Christmas is at the doorstep of a new year. So in addition to just bringing Christmas joy and holiday joy depends, you know, I know there are different religions, but clearly Christmas time for most people is a time of joy because I Mr. Diversity, Chad, it's a time of joy for people, but also the new year, a new start. I know everyone is, is itching for 2021. Although the way that it's going, it might be a lot more of the same. But anyway, from a mental standpoint, it's obviously a positive. Joel (39m 15s): If they do replicate this everywhere around the country and the world, I do hope that they bring the snow machine because that was a special level of Christmas joy for me when I watched the ad. So Ellie Dodi, good job. And, and keep those, keep those good vibes coming. Chad (39m 32s): We all, we all need it. I had a Christmas vacation vibe to it. Joel (39m 37s): Oh yeah. No cousin Eddie, which would have been a nice touch. The shitter's full. But yeah, it definitely had a Christmas movie. Christmas story. Big. Yeah, it was, it was good. It was good. And the people they interviewed for the, for the ad, which I assume were not paid, actors were equally joyful in the, the Christmas lights at Burger King. So yeah. Kudos. Chad (39m 60s): Yeah. I liked the guy. Boy. I hope they keep this up the rest of the year. I mean, it was like, he was a yearning for something good. It's like, can we just have this for the rest of the year? Please? Can something go? Right. Joel (40m 13s): Right. Amen. Amen. So the Brits, they have an unique set of humor, I guess. Chad (40m 22s): Yeah. This didn't go right. That's for sure. Joel (40m 26s): Well, it depend on where he got up in the morning anyway. So news out of the New York post we'll end on this, thank God in London, Tim Shieff or chef 32 year old, former Ninja warrior S UK decided to fashion a G string out of a mask. Although this is very funny and the pictures were hilarious. He was wearing it mocking a new law in that country that mandated mask wearing in public. Joel (40m 56s): So it's good to know that the U S aren't the only idiots in terms of when it comes to masks, the Brits on some scale are equally stupid. Chad (41m 5s): Yes. We're all human. We all have in our communities, idiots. And this is just another demonstration that the U S even though we are killing it, when it comes to stupidity right now, a nice, nice choice of words, the Brits have it as well. Joel (41m 24s): We're killing it. Outro (41m 25s): 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.

Your "Why" is important. The "How" just as important and harder. Douglas Atkin, fmr Head of Global Airbnb Community talk about how to unveil your company's core values. Real core values, that will actually shape your culture and organization. Douglas takes us through his journey of recreating the core values wheel at Airbnb. How do you keep that culture and insist new hires embrace your mission and purpose? Listen to find out. Thanks to our friends at Symphony Talent for supporting the Cult Brands Series of podcasts. This podcast is a companion to Douglas' series authored entitled Purpose Must Come First on Medium. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions connects jobseekers with disabilities with employers who value diversity and inclusion. Intro (1s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. CHAD SOWASH and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (14s): Hahaha!. Aw. Yeah. The Cult Brand series rolls on boys and girls It sure does. Douglas Atkin is back Douglas (33s): He's back Chad (33s): I'm giddy like a school girl, right now I'm telling you! total Douglas withdraw right now. We had the whole holidays without Douglas. I'm feeling a little excited about that! Douglas (36s): Thank you are very sweet, Chad (36s): If you don't know who Douglas is, first off, you need to stop right now. Go back to the first of the Cult Brand series and get yourself educated. But Douglas Atkin, he actually wrote the book. I have it right here in my hand. Yeah, The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers. Wrote the book! Chad (1m 8s): He was the global head of community at Airbnb, held a position as partner and chief community officer at meetup.com and literally, always one of the smartest people in the room. Once again, I'm a fan boy. That's all you got to say, man, Itty, bitty company, Airbnb, most people have probably heard of it . Douglas (1m 8s): Well it was when I joined. I mean, it was, it was any 150 or so people in an office when I joined in San Francisco. That was, that's the kind of exciting, weird and crazy thing about the whole journey. Chad (1m 44s): Yeah. You were there for the whole ride. And what I think is great is you've introspectively written a series of posts on medium.com that we talk about here on the, on the podcast. And we're now at, at, I guess post number five, which is your longest post. So you have a lot to say about this topic, the title of How to live your Purpose #5: You need Core Values. They’re the ‘How’ of achieving your ‘Why’ Yeah. So what was the inspiration on this one? Douglas (1m 44s): This is a longer one because it's actually full of full of some very practical advice about why you need core values and then how to get them and how to make sure that their core I found out since we did this whole exercise at Airbnb, the very people are very, very interested in this. So I decided to sort of lay it down. It's only takes like 18 or so minutes through the article, but there's examples pitches of what we did and so forth. So anyway, yeah, so this is core values are taken extremely, extremely seriously at Airbnb. And in fact, when you're interviewed for a job there, you make it like sort of six or eight interviews like you normally do anywhere else to assess your skill on the job, whether you're a good engineer or a good marketing person, all those kinds of things, but then give them two culture interviews, two core values interviews by people that have nothing to do with your discipline and they have a veto power. So you may be the best software engineer in Silicon Valley or New York or Shanghai or wherever it is. But if you don't pass the core values or culture interviews, you are not hired. It doesn't matter how good you are. That's how importantly Airbnb treats core values. And the kind of critical idea here is that is a couple of things. One is that you're being interviewed to see whether your own personal core values, the values that make you tick as an individual that sort of drive who you are, are aligned with those core values that we all share at Airbnb. If you, if they are aligned, then you're accepted in and you're a part of that larger family. If they're not aligned, then it would be better for you. And for Airbnb, if you find a place where you find, you know, you find a company or wherever you're going to work, that has similar values to your own, right? Joel (3m 57s): Where were these interviews typically regimented with the questions that were asked or were they more of sort of a smalltalk situation and getting to know each other? Douglas (3m 57s): neither? I mean, it's, they, they were very written that there is a sort of an interview guide and the interview has a form basically that they have to fill in. Well, what they're trying to find is evidence from your personal life of what your core values are as an individual and see whether they align with those at Airbnb. And so there's like for every core value, there is a space on the form that the interviewer must fill in to say that there is evidence that they share that value and they'll write down what it was. And so the way the interviews are conducted are it doesn't feel regimented, like they're ticking boxes. It will feel more like a sort of conversation, fun conversation, but also earnest parts because you should be talking about what makes you tick, what your values are. Joel (4m 52s): Real quick Douglas, we've talked to individuals about culture and how, you know, culture is, is big when it comes to actual actually hiring. And we've heard some companies say, yeah, but that can also lead to bias because you can just say, well, that that person didn't fit our culture. And because they didn't feel right, you know what I mean? And, and that feeling to an extent can really be embedded bias. It could be. So that's why it's not just based on the feeling. Joel (5m 24s): That's why the, there are now 500 culture or core value interviews at Airbnb. And it's about 5,000 people there now. Wow. Yeah. Douglas (5m 36s): Right. And you have to apply to be a core values interview and you yourself are interviewed and you're sort of record and reviews and everything are consulted to CBRE that you truly do understand there being these values that you do share them yourself. In other words, you know, you have to be a sort of an exemplar of them. Then you have a training session that trains you how to do the interviews. And then as I say, you have this form, you have to fill in where you have to give evidence for your decision and you get that evidence from the person they'll find out whether this person has, you know, sort of has an entrepreneurial streak, for example. And then they'll ask that person to give examples of how they were an entrepreneur entrepreneur, and then those would be put in the form. So, you know, I'm sure like in any field in life, you know, there is unfortunately unconscious bias can, could slip in, but they try and do as much as they can to make sure it's completely eliminated by, by making it very, it's not just, Ooh, they're not going to fit. Not really like us. It's actually evidence-based, you know what I mean? Joel (6m 33s): Gotcha And I love that you interview the interviewers. So it's not just picking random people off the floor to talk about. Douglas (6m 39s): So you, the reason why the article is also quite long is because core values are really, really, really important for any organization. It doesn't matter whether you're a company or a church or a whatever, you know, political party are. The core values are important because they are the guidelines. If you like the kind of, or as Brian used to call them the "rules of the game", on how you achieve your purpose. So in Airbnb's case, Airbnb's purpose, as we've discussed is creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere, which is ridiculously ambitious as it should be. Douglas (7m 15s): And we're going to be discussed why in previous conversations. And so there are now four core values that basically govern the behavior of everyone in Airbnb too. So that, that insanely ambitious purpose will be made real. That's what they're there for. Basically they are there, they are the "how" to make sure you deliver your, "why". The why in Airbnb's case is creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere. So you really need them. And it's, if you don't have them, then it's, it's very dangerous because, you know, you're going to say to people, we've got this amazing inspirational, "why" Douglas (7m 51s): this amazing, inspirational "purpose", and then you're giving them no tools and no guidelines about how to deliver it. Joel (7m 56s): Right. Douglas (7m 56s): That's so that's what they are basically they are. And the way I think about it is they are the sort of the rules of the game or the, well, they define how everyone should behave with each other, relate to each other and decide things together in order to achieve their collective purpose is all about behaving and relating and deciding things together, what we do basically at work. Joel (8m 18s): Yeah. Right. And don't most companies you feel today, they're trying to put out a "purpose" and their "why", but there's really no how attached to that whatsoever. Douglas (8m 18s): Exactly. There is. There's, there's not enough "how" I mean, there are great, there's some good authors like Simon Sinek, who, you know, writing about how important it is to have a "why." Right. But there's very little about "how" to get there, where idealistic at Airbnb, but also very pragmatic. We're very, you know, okay. So the next question was, we've got this great purpose. How the hell are we going to deliver it? And so that came down to the core values. Now, the, so what happened was, this was sort of interesting. Douglas (8m 49s): Oh, actually, before I tell you about how we changed them, cause there were six core values, originally. They were created in 2012 just before I joined in the summer of 2012. And they were created basically by the founders with some of the sort of longer tenured people, which meant like bond year, two years, there were people in the company, this company that had been going properly really for two, it'd be basically it was the founders realized they couldn't be in every meeting and they couldn't interview every recruit, potential recruit. So as I used to do. So when they interviewed them and Brian told this to me several times, you know, they spend a large part of the interviews, making sure there was an alignment of core values between this person and the founders themselves and the culture they are created in the company. So they couldn't do that anymore. So they said, okay, we need to create some, some core values that sort of articulate what we were looking for when we were doing those interviews ourselves and then train some people we trust who live the core values themselves to do the interviews. And so that's, it all started in 2012 and they came up with six core values, which they did sort of how most people normally do that process of creating their core values. If they do it at all, which is getting the founders or the senior people in the room and sort of hammering out what it is that they collectively stand for and what they believe in and all those kinds of things. So it was, it was done, you know, pretty well, but not as rigorously as I would have liked. At least they did it, Right? And they ended up with six core values. So I'm going to give you, first of all, an example of one of them and then how, and try and give you an example of, you know, how, how this call value helped achieve the purpose of creating world, where anyone can belong anywhere. Chad (8m 18s): Okay. We'll get back to the interview in a minute. Symphony Talent (10m 48s): Building a cult brand is not easy, which is why you need friends. Like Roopesh Nair CEO of Symphony Talent on your side, okay. Ok, Roopesh hiring companies can't hire diverse candidates. If diverse candidates aren't applying for their jobs, what should hiring companies do differently to attract a more diverse candidate? So for diversity, specifically, companies should think about why do they want diversity in their organization and ensure that they are bringing that into the conversations about hiring diverse candidates, because that's how they can be genuine about diversity. Symphony Talent (11m 29s): Because just checking a box saying, I want to be hiring diverse candidates is not going to help. So the first thing is thinking about why do you want diversity? What are the different groups we are targeting as you think about diversity and then bringing those messages, which basically is going to resonate to that particular group of diverse candidates into your engagement, whether it is kind of, as you reach out in the mass media and target specific diverse groups, as you basically nurture these diverse groups, once they have connection with you is very important because to your point, you won't get it. You won't get a diverse candidate till you get in front of a candidate. And the only way you can do that is by figuring out what is the connection point between you and the diverse candidate. And it is very, very easy to kind of cast a netting. I want diverse candidate, but the truth is there are many, many groups of that diverse candidate and you need to be really clear on who exactly are you targeting, Let Symphony Talent help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your talent strategy for more information, visit symphonytalent.com. Douglas (12m 45s): So there's, there's a, there's a core value called be a cereal entrepreneur, be a cereal entrepreneur, very important. Joel (12m 45s): And the way that you spell serial, I love because of the backstory. Douglas (12m 45s): Well, yeah, yeah. So cereal is spelled like breakfast cereal. And the reason why is because I think it was about 2008 or 2009, the three founders had been going for a little while a year or so. And they'd just maxed out their credit cards. There was no money to be had. They had no investors, all those kinds of things. This is before they joined Y Combinator, two of the three, which is, Brian and Joe are designers. They were at University together. I'm doing product design. So, and also it was too, it was quite off. Exactly. You know, exactly when it was, it was 2008, the general election when Obama was ultimately elected and they, God knows where they got this idea from, but they said basically, why don't we design cereal boxes well called one Obama Rose? And the other one was, Oh God, I forgot what it was called. The McCain McCain's squares or something. Joel (12m 45s): Yeah. Imagine that McCain's squares. He was a pretty square cat. Douglas (12m 45s): Exactly. So they designed these really cool cereal boxes and then spent weeks basically ripping over packs of Cheerios and pouring them into these cereal boxes, they designed! Sealing them up again and then selling them on, on eBay. And they made 35 grand doing that, which was enough to make Airbnb continue to exist until they got to Y Combinator. And you know, it all went upwards from there. Joel (12m 45s): And that is an entrepreneurial Cool story if I've ever heard. Douglas (14m 29s): Well, exactly. That's why it's called the, be a cereal entrepreneur. So there's be, I mean, there are many, many examples of them doing crazy stories like that in extremists when you're really having to be creative and take a huge risk, but that's the one that's sort of defines that quality. And so, yeah, so there's be a serial entrepreneur and a good example of that, of how that is sort of used to achieve the purpose of Airbnb is in 2014 business, the core business of homes in people's staying in people's homes was because this is the point in about 2013, 2014, 2015. Douglas (15m 4s): That was really, really, really taking off. And Airbnb was beginning to be a household name growing at between 200 and 300% a year, from that business. So, you know, on the, I know it's insane, but most people would be happy ten percent growth, but this was 200 to 300% into somewhere in between there. At massive scale! No, it wasn't like a little company grow. That's a huge rate. It was a big company growing at that huge rate. So, you know, you could have, they could have rested on your laurels and said, well, you know, let's just enjoy this massive growth and make it and keep it going. Douglas (15m 36s): But that wouldn't have achieved the goal and the purpose of creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Because we had, we realized that there was more ways and more opportunities of creating belonging in when you're traveling then simply the accommodation. And so Brian put together, you know, as well as being the CEO and running the company, he also ran the sort of skunk works little unit in a, in a little garage in the office called Magical Trips. It was nicknamed at the time. And their goal was to basically reinvent travel, to be the ideal rather than the kind of sometimes great sometimes terrible experience it is right now. And so first of all, they had to do to, you know, basically what they had to do. And they, they knew they had to do this because there is this culture at Airbnb, which is expressed in a cereal entrepreneur value, which is don't be incremental. Don't do a little 10%, 15% improvement on what you already have. Imagine what the ideal it is. No imagine that's the world as it should. And then work back from that, figuring out the steps from that to where you are now and therefore what you have to do to make that ideal a reality. So they basically spent the first few months as this sort of a close knit group, they were a mixture of know software engineers and partnerships, people, marketing people. It was a whole mixture of people, product people, designers, and they, the first part was imagining what an ideal trip was. That's it, that's a common phrase in Airbnb at the moment. This is ideal trip and they defined it eventually through iterating to coming up with many ideas of what the trip could be like, getting strangers to take the trip. Yeah. Interviewing, finding out what it was like for them and then yeah, improving and iterating and improving and iterating. And so eventually realized that the ideal trip is something that is of course fun, but also meaningful and meaningful trip now is a very important catchphrase at Airbnb. Something you come back from that trip and you're slightly yeah changed or maybe changed in a big way, sort of may more meaning to your life in a way. I mean, this can still happen when you're, we're on the beach. You know, it doesn't have to be wild and crazy, but the goal was basically to reinvent travel and to make it as the ideal. Douglas (16m 6s): And the ideal they realized having come up with these ideas and interview people was to have some kind of meaningful trip, as well as the fun and the new knowledge and everything else they're doing. And so that's exactly what the cereal entrepreneur Valley is about. It's about imagining the ideal and then figuring out the steps from that ideal backwards to where you are now. And then basically that is your that's. What you have to do over the next six months is follow those steps until you deliver the ideal. And they did. And then there's a basically there's going to be, have been, and there's going to be a series of product launches that will reinvent travel. Basically. The first one of those was experiences that came out in 2015, 16, which is staying in Airbnb, but you can also go and join a different host in the town you're in, who might be, you know, fanatic and love disco. I'm just remembering it. There's a host in LA who does this great experiences where you go to the market, you buy all the seventies disco clothes, and then he takes them out to the discos in LA that night. Joel (15m 36s): Chad loves Disco by the way, Douglas (15m 36s): Oh, me too! Me too! I grew up with it. And so, yeah, so experiences basically are about, you know, you're, you're, you're doing something interesting with someone who's passionate about it and who's local and with other people who are also passionate about it. So, so that's sort of, that's an example of a core of value cereal. Being a cereal entrepreneur was the way this group works. As I said before, just to recap, is that it, they didn't seek to find modest improvements on the status quo, cereal entrepreneur Valley, forced them to behave and think and decide in a way that imagined any ideal and then work back from that to set the path that they would take to get to the ideal. Joel (19m 22s): Was that a hard leap to get employees to make? Because I think in your post, you talk about the typical conversation is, you know, how do we make incremental advances in the product or features that we offer? And, and this is really inviting them to think like a small business or an entrepreneur, was that a really tough job to do? Or do you find, did you find that most of the employees found that a natural thing? Douglas (19m 45s): In fact, it was a natural thing because they had been interviewed and got through the core values tests where people had already sort of probed to see whether these people were entrepreneurially inclined. And so that, so there's that. And then the second thing is, you know, it's just basically in the atmosphere at Airbnbs, certainly when I was there, I think it still is where there's this huge urgency to, to get, you know, big stuff done. So incremental. Isn't just, I mean, I, I joined Airbnb when I was 58, I think. So I've worked in many other companies and with many other companies of all kinds, car companies, banks, and all those kinds of things. And we're incrementalism, it's the norm, you know, and I always found it depressing and Airbnb was so intoxicating because there wasn't any, not in anything. There was no incrementalism there was reinvented and, and figuring out what the ideal is, reinvent it. And that's what we're going to do. There is no status quo that we're, you know, unless it's really proven, and we have to use it, but basically we're going to reinvent everything to do with travel and the way you run a business, even. So that's why I loved it. It's also extremely exhausting, but in the best possible way. So as we talked about in our previous conversations about the culture and so forth, the culture was getting a little bit wobbly in 2015, we were worried about it. And I did a whole exercise to diagnose why it was getting wobbly. And one of the three important reasons why the culture that was getting wobbly was that the core values were good, but not good enough. The six core values that they had to come up with in 2012, and that people were telling me, employees of all backgrounds, ages, every department, every tenure location in the world, et cetera. I said that we love that there are core values and we love that Airbnb takes them so seriously, but they're not always great. You know, they're, they're sort of freestyle, there's too many of them, the six. And I found every day, every single person I interviewed about the Core Values is I want you to remember five, but always forgot to set. And that was a different six. So it was, I mean, that's pretty impressive though. Five out of six, that's not too bad. Right? Right. So, so part of the problem was the way that we diagnose is that it was, there were many that they were too cutely written and weren't straightforward and actionable enough. And some of them, they felt weren't real, that they were aspirational, not truly core. So, and I got this information from them because when I sat them down, I both interviews. And in a group, I said to them, think of any core values, what do you think their ideal characteristics are? You know, should there be lots? Should there be few? Should they be aspirational? Should they be reflect, you know, like a mirror reflect their status quo. What's, you know, what are the ideal characteristics of, of, of COVID like to write them down on the card. Douglas (22m 46s): And so they said things like they want to few, less is more. It was easy to remember. They wanted them to be real, not corporate bullshit, someone wrote. Self evident so their real. Feel like truth and indisputable unique to us concise. They wanted them to be clear and self-explanatory, you don't need, you don't need to decode them. So there was, there were a couple of core values that we had, like embrace the adventure that were open to too much interpretation. Douglas (23m 15s): They weren't definitive enough. And in fact, they were being abused sometimes. So like a manager might say, I'm sorry, you've got to work the weekend to get this done. Hey, you know, we'd be saying, embrace the adventure. You know, that, that is definitely not how the core value of embrace the adventure was meant to be used, but it was. Joel (22m 46s): And that's not the adventure that right. Douglas (22m 46s): Exactly. So, so the fact that they could be misinterpreted or, or, you know, badly interpreted was not good enough, they needed to be small, straightforward. It was another thing and actionable for the day to day, as someone said, Actionable concrete, fewer clarity, examples in action. So they wrote all these ideal characteristics down on cards. And then I said to them now thinking of our six core values, I want you to rate them or Mark them, you know, against these, these ideals that you've had. So our core values self-explanatory Oh, the just a few of them, are they actionable? Are they real? And so there's examples in the article on medium, you can see where people put the check marks and cross marks, but basically we didn't do too well. Douglas (23m 19s): I mean, there was, there was a couple that, that were really well. We had one really important core value called be a host in reference to Airbnb hosts, but basically be a host was be human, be caring, look out, make sure help other people succeed, make them feel welcome, make them feel like they belong. You know, basically like an ideal host in Airbnb, if you are a guest. And that was really, really clear people totally understood it lived it. There was no debate about it, but there were others like, like, you know, embrace the adventure. As I say that we're too vague. So I went back to the founders and said, Oh, Dan, we're going to have to, I'm afraid change the unchangeable. You should never change your core values because you know, they are the, the, the things that sort of the guideposts, the foundation of how you behave, relate and decide to achieve your purpose. They should reflect who you are. So they shouldn't really be changed. But I said, listen, meet me. You know, much as we don't want to change them, it'd be worse if we didn't, because we may end up with these values that aren't ideal or great. Joel (22m 46s): Or real! Douglas (22m 46s): You may end up in a place where they're good, but not good enough. Right. We ended up with a culture that doesn't really reflect what we meant about the values. And that's a much worse problem to be in, in say three or four or five years, time better to change them now than have a, have a culture that's drifted into the wrong direction later. And so they agreed and we like literally held hands and said, okay, we're going to do this thing. Douglas (23m 16s): And I said, I'm going to go back out and zero base everything and find out exactly what Airbnb's true core values are. Put the ones we have currently aside and just go back to basics. And, and I also made it really clear to them what we should mean by core values. They need to be who you are as a person naturally, with a bit forcing it. They shouldn't be aspirational, which by the way, most so-called core values in companies and other organizations are they call them core values, but actually they're aspirational values things they wish they would be actually where there's a, I guess for having an aspirational values can be okay. As long as you're clear about that, though, as long as you're saying, we're not this way now, but we want to be, we want to be, and we want to try. The trouble with aspirational values though. Ones that real is that over time, when the employees see that they're not living them, or they're not being lived by their bosses or whatever, or the decisions are not being made, according to the core values, cynicism comes in, it creates a toxic culture and it could be really, really bad. So this is why you need to have core values. Core values are reflective of who you are and remind you who you are and how to behave and relate and decide things together. So I do use this to try to try and get to that. I use this very simple technique that people really like actually outside of Airbnb. I think other companies are using it, which is I asked each individual. And again, this is done with people of every department, senior junior, all over the world, draw two circles on a piece of paper and a Venn diagram. And they will probably overlap. One circle is called Airbnb. And the other circle is called me, which is you. And what you need to do is to write down your personal values, your personal core values that define who you are as a person, as a personality, the things that drive, how you behave and relate and decide things with other people. And you split those between the ones you think you share with Airbnb and the ones that are just unique to you that you don't share. So, so in the overlaps with the circle should be your personal values that you happen to also see, being lived in shared by other people at Airbnb. Then on the, on one side is outside the shared area is going to be the he not shared with Airbnb, but still unique to you. And then I asked them also to write down the values they thought they saw at Airbnb, that they didn't share at all. And so to give you, I can show a couple of examples in the article, but for example, the bit that the ones in the middle, I had words like authentic, caring, human, passionate, proud, entrepreneurial, disruptive, bold, not afraid to stand out, values driven, care for people as people, those kinds of things. Joel (22m 46s): And I love this. Yeah! Douglas (22m 46s): And so what was great, this I, this I had about 300 of these sheets. Joel (22m 46s): Wow! Douglas (22m 46s): I know it's s. So, and by the way, this is only half of what I did to get to our core values. This is what I did with the people. If you like of Airbnb, not the founders, just the everyday workers. And so what was great is that there was basically put people were putting the same things in the overlaps more or less. And just to make sure that I wasn't just hoping for that. Douglas (28m 55s): And it was truly true. I went through every single of these sheets and wrote down every single value that they had written in the middle and the shared part on a huge spreadsheet and totaled up how many times had it been mentioned? And what I found was that basically there were three big areas that everyone felt they shared with Airbnb. And it was that one is that they were sort of, they were mission driven. They were purpose driven. They were, they wanted to work with something beyond their salary and they totally bought into belong anywhere. The second one was that there was this caring idea, this hostingnesss looking after other people not being, you know, horrible and toxic and competitive, like it is in some other companies, but actually helping your colleagues succeed. And then thirdly, the other one was which I called caring. And the third one was daring, which was this boldness, this non incremental ism, this thinking of the ideal, that's thinking outside of the box, kind of, of entrepreneur. Joel (22m 46s): You have in this sheet. I just want to make sure that we, we, we say this, fuck the status quo, disrupt rebel. Rule-breaker embrace. I mean, so I mean that in itself, I mean, these are the things that you're actually pulling out of your people and you're finding what that real culture is. Totally. Total Honesty Yeah. Douglas (30m 35s): So under the whole forge your own path and conventional daring heading or things like that, they wrote, they wrote open-minded, fuck the status quo, rule-breaker pioneer, disruptive, bold, courageous, daring, fearless, confident, entrepreneurial, scrappy, and so on. Joel (30m 52s): And I love the one that's just like one circle, like they're all the same values. Douglas (30m 58s): It's interesting is that everyone started, they drew the circles and started filling the, the three areas in. Then they always said, Hey, you know, I've done this one. Can I redraw them? I said, yes, of course. So they throw that away and redraw always with the two circles with more overlap than they had before. Because they realized that when they thought about it, that there was a huge amount that they shared in common. Joel (31m 19s): Oh, this is a great exercise. Yeah. Oh, it's awesome For you again, because you're, you're trying to figure out the whole wobbliness of the core values, but I think it's also great. Just an interspective for the employees who might not realize this much, this really is more of a realization of the things that you do have in common, right. Douglas (31m 40s): It was helping them realize how much we had in common, but what is the reason why I was doing it though, was I was zero basing everything. I wanted to find out exactly what our core values were. Cause I had a, I had a hunch and also I heard it from people that there were a couple of values that weren't, that we had of those six, that weren't Core that weren't real. I mean, people had complained to me about this, that some of them were aspiration and not real. And I wanted to find out what was real, so that we could then go to those values that weren't real and make a decision about them, whether it be should keep them or not. Douglas (32m 12s): So that's what we did. And so, so that was very, what was hugely encouraging. And I'm sure you might get this at some places is, as I say, there was a huge amount of overlap. The things they wrote in the overlap were more or less the same across all 300 people. So that was great. And then the other thing that I did to, to figure out what our core values were, was I did a separate exercise with the founders because if you're lucky enough to have founders, that's great because you know, they, they, they have a disproportionate influence on the organization about how people behave and relate relate and decide. Douglas (32m 47s): And it all started with them. Anyway, you know, it kind of started from there three personalities and the way they wanted to operate together and build this company. So I didn't do the Venn diagram with them. I did a totally different exercise. Now, the exercise that's normally done by most people and I've seen other people use is put the founders in the room and get them to brainstorm, you know, what they, what they think the values should be. I think that's the wrong approach personally. I mean, it's fine. It can provide some information. The problem with it to my mind is that if you're a leader, especially a leader in Silicon Valley, you are prone to idealism and wishful thinking. Douglas (33m 25s): And so what you're likely to get out of that exercise is wishful thinking, not reality. And I wanted to pin the founders down in reality, I mean, as characters they are, you know, of our, all these things, they are all openminded and brave and idealistic and creative. So I wanted them though to, I wanted to get out of them surface from them, their core values that is based in reality, not wishful thinking. So what I ask them to do is separately, we had this, it was a Sunday afternoon in March, I think 2016, I got them into the office. And, and by the way, in the office, every meeting room has an exact recreation of a host home, somewhere in the world, whether it's in Bombay or Cairo. Chad (33m 25s): That's Awesome! Joel (33m 25s): That is awesome! Douglas (33m 25s): So what I did is I called them, put them in the meeting room of the very first Airbnb, which is an exact recreation of the own, their own flat that they shared in San Francisco in Rush Street. That's it, that's one of the meeting rooms in Airbnb, the very first Airbnb. And I said, just as a good environment for them to think back to what it was like when that was their office. Joel (33m 25s): Too Cool Douglas (33m 25s): And I said, okay, so I want you to think of all the meaningful moments in the history of the company so far. And I defined meaningful moments as those moments where you made a decision or did something that on principle that express your fundamental beliefs. And they're probably moments that had a large amount of risk attached because they were on principle. So, right. All right. Just write on or down notes on all of those events. So they did that and it was great. I got three separate sheets back each reflective of their personalities. Brian had huge sheet covered with like 40 or 50 events in a meaningful moments, which I'm going to give a little plug here, which one of these meaningful moments was hiring Douglas and Chip. Chip was one of my colleagues at Airbnb. He was a, he was a founder of a successful hotel chain in San Francisco. And by the way, when he had that there, I said, why is that a moment meaningful moment? Because we, because we're old, bald and gay whites or what? Joel (33m 25s): Laughter and applause Douglas (33m 25s): Cause we were we are the oldest people in the company, but both have shaved head and both white, what it is, laughed and said, no, no, no, no He said, he said a really nice thing. He said, you're unorthodox people and do things differently, For hiring people at a senior, in a senior position at that point, apparently that was meaningful him. So that was cute. Symphony Talent Promo (36m 6s): We'll get back to the interview in a minute, building a cult brand is not easy, which is why you need friends. Like Roopesh Nair CEO of Symphony Talent on your side. Chatbots are all the rage, but how are they actually helping companies drive better and authentic engagement? Yeah. Chatbots, especially the modern generation chatbots, which basically is, there's more of a conversational platform than a, than a chatbot. I would say, which basically kind of uses NLP and natural language processing and machine learning effectively helps ensure that the table stake conversations that are happening automatically as much as possible. So where it's like, Hey, tell me more about yourself. Let me capture as you may, Hey, can you work over the weekend? Can you basically work overtime those simple conversations, which basically can be automated and in a very human way can be taken care of by the chatbot slash the conversational engines so that the recruiters and the sources are spending most of their time on those complex emotional human conversations needs to be done as part of that whole process. Right? So I think that's where composition engines are making a huge difference. Let Symphony Talent help activate your brand and keep relationships at the heart of your talent strategy for more information, visit symphontalent.com. Douglas (37m 39s): But anyway, he thinks Joel (37m 39s): that's great. Douglas (37m 39s): And then, you know, Joe put his down, it was all very nicely art directed. And then Nate, who's the most logical thinker of the more put everything down in order of importance, which was amazing. So then I, we discussed each of them to go through each of those events or discuss the more the other two, which they did a, what was gratifying to see was that they shared the same meaningful moments. They've all fought them, same moments, but as meaningful basically, then I went back and said, okay, now this is the reality. Douglas (38m 10s): You've written down the reality here. This is stuff that actually happened. Now. I want to do, to go back over those meaningful moments and extract the meaning from them. What was the principle that you stood by when you made that decision? Well, did that action? And so they went back and did that, and I asked them to read out the show me the meaning behind all of those events and those moments. And again, what was also gratifying to see was that they had the same meaning, basically the same. And it was the same as the people I've been talking to the employees. Douglas (38m 42s): Once I got the, to sort of narrow it down to a two, three or four key meaningful keep key meetings, key core values. It was in the exact same areas of being purpose and mission lead of being Hosty or human and being, and caring, and also being daring and entrepreneurial and creative and out of the box. All of which was great. So now I had both from the founders and from the employees, some data that was based in reality, it was the founders core values, basically that had been subtracted from an drive from actual things they did. Douglas (39m 19s): Not wishful thinking, but things they actually did. And on employees, same thing. I had values that they felt they actually had seen shared between them and the rest of the company. Joel (39m 19s): I loved the grassroots approach to that as opposed to top down. Douglas (39m 19s): Right. Exactly. As I say, top down is fine. You can do that. But if you just do that alone, you're likely to end up first of all, with, you know, the point that the point of view of some leaders who may well be distant from a lot of people, but secondly, you may well end up with a wishful thinking rather than reality. So you need to do both, you know, you need to do both the people and that. So it was, I went back a little bit later with a big presentation with Dave O'Neill, who is my partner in crime, on this, someone who still works at Airbnb. And we basically presented to the founders and then to, to the whole company, what we found. And we basically said, yay, it's good. We are, we do share a lot of values. And we, we all think they're the same values, basically these three things. And they also, the founders, I showed all the sheets that I use to the whole company. Douglas (40m 24s): It was in a big presentation to thousands of people in their broadcast around the world. And one of our world meetings, you know, I showed them their own forms, their own cards. They filled in the spreadsheets, the form, the, the, all the worksheets that the founders had used. And so on and said, we've already made some conclusions here. There are two of the six values aren't core, they're aspirational. Then we had one value called Simplify and another value called Every Frame Matters. But anyway, I said, none of you put that in the middle. You didn't share it. It wasn't a personal value of yourselves except for a few of you and you didn't see it shared and the rest of the company. Joel (40m 59s): So we should dump them. They're not real they're aspirational. And so I, first of all, agreed with the founders, and then you sort of announced to the rest of the team, that's, those are no longer our values, but now down to four, and in the end, what we ended up with is four core values that use the original expressions that we had on the original six. But they were real. I think, you know, this was a bit of a compromise to be frank, because I actually wanted the values to be something like, put the mission first, number one, number two, caring, number three, daring. Douglas (41m 30s): That was it. That's what I wanted, you know, but actually, well, the founders felt was that we should keep for the original expressions that were in the original six of those four, and then add behaviors that really spelled out in black and white, exactly how you should be. Chad (41m 30s): And that's the how! Douglas (41m 30s): And that's the how yes, exactly. So it's actually, it works very, very well. So one of the original ones was champion the mission, which is this whole mission, first idea. And underneath it are the three behaviors. For example, it says, prioritize work that advances the mission and positively impacts the community build with a longterm in mind, actively participate in the community and culture. So what is saying, there is a again, no incrementalist them, you have to make, you have to do a check, is what I'm working on today, going to advance our mission. If not, then maybe I shouldn't be doing it. Or at least I shouldn't be prioritizing it. Chad (41m 30s): Right. Douglas (41m 30s): The other one. And the one is be a host and the three behaviors are care for others and make them feel like they belong, encourage others to participate to their fullest, listen, communicate openly and set clear expectations. So it's again, very specific setting up the behaviors. And then another one is embrace the adventure, the problem with embrace the adventure and be a cereal entrepreneur, but really embrace the adventure is that it is a little obscure. You need to explain it, but we do explain it with the behaviors. So that one is be curious, ask for help and demonstrating the ability to grow, own and learn from mistakes, bring joy and optimism per work, and then be a cereal entrepreneur has three behaviors, which are be bold and apply original thinking. Imagine the ideal outcome, be resourceful to make the outcome a reality. Douglas (42m 0s): So that was that thing I was talking about where you imagine the ideal, imagine the steps backwards and then figure out how you're going to get. Joel (43m 12s): And do you bring, I mean, were, were people like bringing these to meetings and whatnot to make sure that you were in line and you were prioritizing the right way and you're really focused on what the mission or really the, the, the why and how was? Douglas (43m 28s): Yeah. I mean, even before we did this exercise, but certainly afterwards people would say in a meeting. Yeah. But that's not being host, you know, that's not hosting that's we do this or that's not going to achieve the mission. That's just like, I mean, in fact, in, in some of the sort of larger meetings, we had some of the complaints that were brought forward, which I've mentioned before. And some of the articles and the interviews is that some of the big decisions weren't living some of the core values of the purpose, like there was a decision to go off to vacation rentals, which are largely managed by professionals, original hosts. Douglas (44m 4s): And people said, that's, that's not going to help us create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. That's cause they're just in it for the money. They're not like most of our hosts doing it because they love it and want to make people feel at home. So that, that was a very active debate and open and out and transparent. No one was whispering it in corridors. It was sort of out there. So yes, it was always like that as Airbnb, but it's even more like that now. And one of the last things I mentioned in the article about this values is you can launch the core values once you've got them. You know, if you use, if you have to use these techniques and you haven't turned up with your real core values that are actionable and few and so forth, what do you do with them? How do you actually operationalize them? And I make people live by them? Chad (44m 4s): Right? Douglas (44m 4s): So there's one thing I say is you can launch them, which in fact Airbnb did in early 20, 2017, February, 2017 at one of the big Airbnb one Airbnb meetings where they bring all the employers from all over the world to San Francisco for a week or of belongingness, basically where we just form relationships and get to know each other and have fun. They, The theme of this, this one in 2017 was the new core values or the revised core values. We've got, went from six to four and there were big speeches up on stage with the founders, bringing on teams who, who gave examples of being a cereal entrepreneur that they had left or being a host or championing the mission. And then there was a sort of awkward but necessary moment on stage where Brian brought up the other two founders and the leadership team, and they had a mayor Culper about how they had fucked up basically in many ways and made decisions or behaved in ways that didn't live the values and what steps they were going to take to, to change that going forward. Chad (45m 51s): I mean, that really had to be cathartic for not just them, but everybody. I mean, just somebody you see, I mean, your founders up on stage saying, Hey guys, you're really kind of fucked some things it's like, Oh, you know, that's, that's awesome. Not to mention it automatically pulls them in to the conversation. Douglas (46m 9s): Exactly, exactly. And it's, but they had to do that also because you know, this was also partly answering that the problem with the wobbliness of the culture was that not only were they, the, the core value is not usable enough, but they felt that people felt a lot of the leaders weren't embodying them. Weren't using them to make decisions themselves. And, and some of them in fact had been mis-hires that they just did not share Airbnb's values and shouldn't have been there in the first place. And so it was necessary to kind of lay all that out and admit it and show how they were going to change, which they did in this, this huge poll in San Francisco in early 2017. Douglas (46m 48s): But so that's not enough though. That's good. What they did. We've had a launch of it and the mayor culpa and showed examples of how they were going to change in the future, but also things they had done in the past that lived the values. All that's fantastic, but you have to do it every day. You basically have to launch the core values every day, launch the mission every day. So that's what they do. So we've already talked about how all candidates for all jobs are given these two core value culture interviews. But the other thing that happens now is that in everyone's reviews, you know, their performance reviews, 50% of the marks, if you like are for what you did, like, you know, how good you were at your job, your skills, how you manifest your skills. Douglas (47m 28s): The other 50% is though, is how you did it. Now, did you launch this amazing product while living the four core values? And you have to give examples of how you did that. And so everyone knows that whether they stay in the company or not, or how, whether they're promoted or not, or given a raise or not is also dependent, very dependent on how they behave relate and decide together, according to the core values. So it's built into the review system. The other thing that happens is that every week, Brian Chesky, the CEO cofounder does a live Q and A and answer any questions submitted to him by any employee about anything. Douglas (48m 6s): And he nearly always frames the answers in a way that demonstrates the use of the core values and the purpose. So, you know, he's constantly reinforcing it. What else? Oh right. All new hires go through a week long onboarding experience called check-in. And the very first session is 90 minutes covering the founding story, the mission, the purpose of belong anywhere, and the core values. And the new hires aren't given their computers until the end of the first day, so that they are actively paying attention and, you know, not getting digressed. Douglas (48m 37s): And then there's biweekly. Well that meetings where again, all the new product launches and works in progress, team updates, all framed in terms of the core values and purpose. So as being continuously launched, if you like continuously referred to, it's not something that sits on a PowerPoint or on the company mugs in the kitchen and is never mentioned again, it's used and mentioned by everyone every day about everything, Chad (49m 1s): Which is amazing because that provides a framework for how you do business. Joel (49m 5s): Yeah Douglas (49m 5s): Yes, yeah. And the other cool. The very cool thing is that there was one of these other one Airbnb meetings. I think it was in 2014 or 2015, right. At the end. There's these all staff meetings that happen once a year, the founders got up on stage right at the end of the week and said, some of you have been wondering what we do. I joined when I joined the CTO was Nathan, one of the founders, you know, and, and Joe was head of product, you know? Douglas (49m 37s): So gradually over time they hired people to do those jobs. So people saying, well, okay, Nate, what do you do every day? Because you you're no longer the CTO and Joe, what do you do every day? So that was good. So they basically got up and said, our collective job is to make the purpose real, is to make sure that we deliver on the purpose and we use the Core Values to do so. And then, so we went on, they said, ma our prime job that we own is to champion every Airbnb's belong anywhere purpose and the core values. Douglas (50m 12s): And then Brian went up a step further and he said, this is a quote from him, "hold me accountable. Ultimately, if the founders are caretakers of the vision and the values, then a CEO, I'm really responsible for executing on the, and the vision." So if our vision is to create a world where all 7 billion people can belong anywhere, whether we're on that path or not, that's on me, right? Because the CEO, you're the one, you're the key executer. You're the one who executes everything or responsible for how the company executes. Douglas (50m 43s): So why execute some whether to execute. So you're saying the three of us are responsible for this, but basically it's on me. And so people do people do hold them accountable on by the retrieving, the mission or not, or whether he or any of the other leadership team, or are living the values or not. It's very healthy. It's very a good thing to say on this overall again, you know, we've heard, and everybody is, has sat and watched videos of Simon Sinek, talk about the why, the golden circle and all those other things. Chad (51m 13s): And it's wonderful to be able to bring awareness, to really understand purpose, but there's no question without the "how" to execute that purpose. It's, it's really just bluff and it's air. So we really appreciate, again, you being able to provide us with context and also the ability to, to get to that, "how" right. And not just focus on the purpose, the purpose is incredibly important if it's real, but also how to get it done. Chad (51m 46s): So again, Douglas, we appreciate you taking the time, my friend. (applause) Joel (51m 46s): Thanks, Douglas. Douglas (51m 46s): Thank you for having me, man. It's a pleasure to talk about this stuff. I'm passionate about it. And I feel very, very fortunate and lucky that I was actually able to do it. You know, I'd seen basically purposes and visions, not executed or being badly executed in other companies. And so it was a, it was a joy to be in an environment where I could go to Brian and Joe and they say, Hey, the cultures wobbly, we need to fix it. Douglas (52m 17s): Or, Hey, the core values are good, but they're not good enough. Hey, we need a purpose and we need to focus on figuring out what it is and do it, the spec. And they'd always say, yes, you know, they were always up for it again, they didn't deal in incrementalism at all. They were all going for the ideal we're going for the best it could possibly be. Joel (51m 46s): Well, thanks, Douglas. You know, you're a busy man and it's a happy hour where you are so you to your wife and have a great weekend. Douglas (51m 46s): Talk to you soon. Cheers! Outro (52m 52s): Yeah. 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.

Joveo's founder and CEO Kshitij Jain (aka KJ) turns the tables asking some profound questions on Chad & Cheese. Craigslist's "Take The Pain" strategy that worked Mountains of data and we're still making stupid decisions Why are Talent Acquisition professionals not moving fast enough? The future is hyper push targeting and so much more... Brought to you by Chad and Cheese - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Subscribe at chadcheese.com. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by: Disability Solutions is your bridge to the disability community, delivering custom solutions in outreach, recruiting, talent management and compliance. KJ (0s): Why are we not moving fast enough into that world where things will be much better for everyone? Chad (5s): There's a risk versus reward issue in talent acquisition. They're not willing to take the risk because... Intro (13s): Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HRS most dangerous podcast. CHAD SOWASH and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad (42s): Welcome back. We're continuing the conversation with a veteran of the recruitment tech industry. Kshitij Jain AKA KJ, founder and CEO of Programmatic Platform Joveo enjoy. So I'm curious sometime around 2006 or seven Craig's list cut themselves off or their content from Indeed. Did you have any thoughts at the time when they did that? And I assume that Craigslist wasn't mentioned much at <onster. If they weren't talking about aggregator Other competitors like LinkedIn. KJ (1m 15s): So that was a time Craigslist. It's actually cut most of the people off and they were very clear. We want no mass postings. In fact, they got a job posting API access to pretty much overnight to everybody. They want the experience to be, if I really want to hire someone, I will take the pain, go online, fill up the job. We'll sit there because all the, all the job boards can have like a millions of jobs, right. Or a hundred or thousands of jobs. And so I guess that was the reason. And second is there is a very little quality control on the job ad content, right? KJ (1m 46s): There's so much spam. Like people are alerting people to click to a job, but really in reality, it was either a Legion or it was more like, Hey, pay me this much before you get back. So it was kind of scam. So I believe that that was the motive behind Craigslist doing what they did. And I think given the kind of technology we have, we have tried to solve the Craigslist problem. You guys got me started on something that is close to me is, is companies are sitting on the mountains of quality data and, and they don't use the intelligence from that data to optimize the sourcing funnels. KJ (2m 20s): And it's like, you go through the cycle, but you don't take out part of the cycle to improve the next cycle. That you're. Why do you think that is the case? Why, why kind of scratch my head sometimes that this whole world of machine learning and see data and intelligence that you build in right offers so much of money. You spend a million dollars, you got like a million applications or whatever, right. A hundred thousand applications. And you don't use that knowledge of ... I've seen cases where the same job posted in two different locations on the same job board has totally different results. Chad (2m 54s): I think the biggest issue that talent acquisition has today in, in everybody in is that ... We gather so much data and behaviors and outcomes and information, and we don't use it. That the thing that we have to get away from is continuing to spend money to acquire the same candidate, five, six, 10, times over. We shouldn't be just posting jobs for the hell of it. We should be like you'd said, matching against the data in the database that we have now. Chad (3m 29s): And perspectively, let's say for instance, programmatically targeting those individuals and inviting them to apply or reapply for a job. Again, talent acquisition, not incredibly fast on the adoption curve, but there's no question. I agree. We have, we have mountains of data. We should be using that to be able to at least advise us or recommend candidates so that we can make the decision to get better quicker hires. Joel (3m 56s): I was just going to add that, you know, Chad and I are big fans of, of marketing and recruiting, getting more and more together. And I think that, you know, products like Joveo and Programmatic, I mean, that started in marketing, right? Like getting the most out of your advertising. And so how do you take that data and build the best marketing case for your recruiting? And I think that is, that's kind of where we're going. And we'll eventually probably talk about in this interview of how technology and marketing and recruiting are coming together to fix that sort of problem. That's been haunting recruiting for so long. KJ (4m 29s): Exactly. And you don't have and as Chad was saying that the future is putting an ad in front of the person. You know, that's the other thing I keep on thinking that bothers me personally. And I guess it does to you as well, because you're all saying the same thing that the industry has existed from the day Monster board was launched full model. You pull a person into a job from a job site. What is a push model? The consumer one has gone to a push model, you know, who to reach out to who's the best guy for the job to be hired. Just put that job in front of that person and save him so much of an agony of having to look at hundred jobs, getting confused, not knowing which one to apply or not. KJ (5m 7s): And you know, seven out of 10 jobs people apply to in a company within a company, they apply to a wrong job. They will not get hired, but there is a job in the same company, they have a higher likelihood of getting hired, right? Like I get a solid one problem in the right way, put the right ad in front of person. You already know three, do simple look like audience for like a lookalike audience and just find those people and put some money behind it. Do AB testing on that. I'm sorry, you guys, but I think that kind of occupies my mind a lot of times. Why are we not moving fast enough into that world? KJ (5m 39s): Where things will be much better for everyone. Chad (5m 41s): Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, there's, there's a risk versus reward issue in talent acquisition. They're not willing to take the risk because that could perspectively. They feel mean their job and their, what they're not doing unfortunately, is tying what we do in talent to the actual business bottom line. The organization does not run without talent. It does not run with, without HR. We are the epicenter of why every company on planet earth does what they do. Chad (6m 15s): Period. We have to be able to tie that to business analytics and being able to impact the bottom line either negatively or positively. And as we're talking about the candidate experience, how many of those candidates are customers? And we've negatively impacted them with their, our brand. Not only would they never work for us, cause they hate us, but they're not going to buy our stuff. Right. If we can make that into a narrative, the CEO will definitely want to hear that the CFO, the CRO, the people who are making these, these decisions. Chad (6m 50s): So overall I believe a hundred percent that we need to start figuring out that we need to take risks and we need to do that. R and D we just, we just actually got off an interview with the individual, Jen Terry Thorpe, who, who ran a town acquisition for AT&. Now that brand knows what the fuck they're doing. They spend money and they, and they do R and D and they get it. But most brands won't take risks. Like they will, we need to work like a business and stop being afraid of our own shadow. Chad (7m 25s): That's our biggest issue. KJ (7m 26s): You know, I'm glad that you mentioned Jen Terry here, right? Because you know, I, I remember meeting, they were one of the first customers in mobile and, and what was amazing is she was a risktaker. She sets up a certain amount of a budget of site to put money on startups as a bat to see if they work out or not. She would understand what fits the idea. What is the future for us at this company? She did all that. She acted like a VC. If I were to call it this way, does this company has the right goods. Right talent. Right team by technology, can they deliver the promise? And if they did, she'll be at the forefront of it. KJ (7m 57s): And I think they have gone so far ahead in the sophisticated use of whole Programmatic and how that is done. And, and, and I was like, I guess that has to be propagated a lot. And she's, she's a sharpest mind, I guess in the talent acquisition maybe, you know, among the, definitely among the top 10 that I see out there. Joel (8m 16s): That's why she's on our show. What percentage of companies would you put in that AT&T bucket of innovation and risk KJ (8m 24s): In the entire industry. I'm sorry guys. I would say single digits maybe. Yeah, Joel (8m 28s): Yeah. Us too. Probably. Chad (8m 30s): Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, AT& T has a lot of cash. There's no question ever. And everybody wants to point to that. There are a huge brand. They have a lot of cash, but if you take a look at the amount of individuals who are being hired, and we actually had this discussion on stage with Intel in Yeti, Yeti looked at Intel and said, you guys hire so many people, you must have so much money. And the real fact is per hire. They have Less money than a company like Yeti. So overall it's about what your focus is, again, the risk versus reward. KJ (9m 4s): Yeah. And I think it's very interesting, right? If you, if you see this ecosystem Chad and then this is something, I, again, another question for you guys is 80% of the dollars. So maybe I'm actually a little less goes into media and that spend gets spent every year and only a quarter or less is actually going into the tech part of it. Whereas you get the same results. You can actually have only 50% of the media spend happening. And you know, I've had a customer and I will not take the name here, but they were seeing about just the drop title as wrong. KJ (9m 38s): And through technology, we understood that this is not the right title for this job. And we changed it, lick something as simple as that, you don't have to be a rocket scientist and talk about air able to do that. What about friend, if you have a driver job, but product that was a good to come to it. If you want a piece of delivery, let's call it pizza, delivery driver and completely two different audiences. Joel (9m 58s): Common sense. Isn't that common? Isn't it. KJ (9m 60s): And, and the, the cost per apply went down by whooping 75%. And the relevant supply went like mighty force! Right out, like completely relevant off of that. So Joel (10m 12s): This sort of brings us into the tech and the idea to start Joe VO and get into programmatic. So you're at, you're at Indeed. How did this idea come to you? I know you're an idea guy. So what was it about this idea that really sparked you to, to move forward and do it talk about the Genesis of Joveo and, and getting into Programmatic? KJ (10m 29s): Sure. I've again, like kind of, you've been talking about this. I have always believed there is nothing like a bad quality applicant and that it hurts me to say, this is bad quality. This is good quality because guys, we're talking about people, your number one, Joel (10m 42s): exactly. KJ (10m 43s): All of these are right job, everyone in the world, you just have not put that right job in front of that person. So I kept on asking myself, and I know that every job board, every technology company in our space kind of looking for right job the right person. But if you look at it this way, right? If you look at, for push angle, right, Chad, you were saying about that job for everyone. So we started out think, Hey, this is the month of the company. Can we put a right job in front of the person? And that was the name of Joveo came in. It's not exact acronym, but a job for everyone is where I guess Joveo got formed. That was the, at the heart of it. KJ (11m 13s): That's what it is. We're in this to get to the point of that through data, through learning, through constant learning, through constant learning loops, I would call. Based on high data, improve sourcing and back and forth to be able to know that this is the one right job to be put in front of person. You know, one of our customers, we actually showed a recommendation of jobs they should apply to that company. Commendation just recommendation. These are jobs, you are highly likely, you're getting a higher, you know, what is the click to apply conversion rate 85%, just that just making a person feel like you have a better likelihood of getting hired here. KJ (11m 48s): This is where my belief gets even more strengthened, right? That Craigslist, you know, less job applications, but more hires. And this is what drove me that, you know, and I, and the way I put it across this is my problem is that I'm solving, trying to solve for. And I think all of us should at least gear for it. If not try to solve it. I don't, I don't want a lot of people trying to solve it by the way. So Joel (12m 9s): I wonder why? KJ (12m 13s): If you put the right job in front of person, the person will actually get hired and the person gets hired. His life is better. He may find a better job because maybe it's not a good fit in certain job. His manager is not good, is not happy with the salary or the location or, or, or whatever that is, right? That ecosystem. And if you do that, you actually impact humankind. You impact the happiness index of this world, right? If, if we can deliver 1 billion jobs to people, we'll never be the laptop company. We'll never be Microsoft. We are the Intel inside you. We don't want to be a brand out there. KJ (12m 43s): We don't have desire. I don't think. We got to do one thing and one thing. Right, right. But my, my philosophy and I think our vision and the entire team is unified on that is once we get to that, we make impact on human lives because they will get a better job. Their families will be happier just overall. It's going to bring goodness to the world. And that's kind of where this whole philosophy of Joveo is. And something that, that I'm in it to just prove out this concept, to make sure that it works. Joel (13m 7s): You're going to make Chad crying a little bit. He's getting choked up right now. I can tell now that was just drinking bourbon. That wasn't all that bad. KJ (13m 15s): And, and, you know, like we took a very bold effort, right? At the time of colon. COVID, everybody's saying, Hey, I, I got to save my dollars. I wouldn't make money. All of that stuff. He said, you know what? We're going to help people get the jobs or get the employees who need essential workers during the Covid time. And again, just being Intel inside, we know that we would have delivered more than 60,000 hires in the ecosystem. And that for me, is looking back and saying maybe perhaps, perhaps we are doing something right. APPLAUSE Chad (13m 47s): Look for more episodes of voices, this Chad and Cheese podcast series devoted to stories and opinions of industry leaders, subscribe on iTunes, Google podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you don't miss a single show for more visit ChadCheese.com.

OMG is it over yet!?!?!? Another million+ Americans filed for unemployment and some of them probably came from our industry. LinkedIn is certainly one, and the boys cover the news in detail Glassdoor employees might want to start looking for a new job Indeed inches toward overtaking the company for good. LJN gets a needed rebrand w/ rumored AJE acquisition? Gem is ringing the cash register Walmart is throwing workers crumbs ...and dildo theft. Say what?! Yup, you just gotta listen. All of this HR's most dangerous podcast goodness is powered by Sovren, Jobvite, 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 HRS most dangerous podcast. CHAD SOWASH and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel (10s): Alll right all right, 18 straight weeks in the U S with initial jobless claims totaling more than 1 million. So how's your week going welcome to the chat and cheese podcast, boys and girls. I'm your cohost Joel, let's play ball Cheesman. Chad (41s): I'm Chad "Hercules Mulligan" Sowash Joel (43s): and on this week's show Glass Doors' future is so bright. They gotta wear Psych! it's better to be a job case in gym right now. And dildo theft. Chad (54s): Wait, what? Joel (56s): Sit back and get comfy. It's going to be that kind of show everybody. Sovren (1m 1s): Sovern Parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's SOVREN.com. We provide technology that thinks communicates and collaborates like a human, Sovren software, so human you'll want to take it to dinner. Joel (1m 28s): Nobody's going to dinner now. Chad (1m 29s): Yeah, this is actually week 23 for us. We did the Corona virus edition first podcast on February 27th. And that was the week that we locked down here at the Sowash residence. Joel (1m 46s): And when did we officially retire The it's Corona time soundbite because of insensitivity, a little tone deaf with the coronavirus soundbite. Chad (1m 58s): So what's up on your end. It's it's fricking hot as hell outside. Joel (2m 1s): I got a cat taking shits in the house that I'm not real happy about right now. So that's what I'm dealing with animals. Chad (2m 9s): Oh, thanks for that shout outs. Joel (2m 15s): Shout out to Indeed. Yeah. They haven't gotten a positive, a shout out from us lately. They announced this week that they are not reopening their offices until July of 2021. This is a big move, considering that they've been gobbling up real estate all over the world for the last five years. That's that's gotta hurt the pocketbook. Chad (2m 34s): It's a fucking layup dude. They're in Austin, Texas right now. Have you seen the, you've seen the news? I mean, have you seen the cases in Texas? Jesus, shout out to Bill Borman. Who said I should try to work the word of poppy cock in during the podcast there. I did it. I think I'm going to go one further and try to substitute poppycock for all my F bombs. This a, this episode. I'm going to try. I don't, I can't promise anything. I'm going to try. Joel (3m 0s): Yeah. I'm going to tell bill, fuck the fucking fuckers. Shout out to Serial. Not the stuff you eat at the morning, but the podcast just announced the New York times bought up the popular podcast. The whisper number on that was $50 million. Chad and I are still waiting for our payday, but for, for Joe Rogan and Serial ring, the cash registers, baby. Shout out to you guys. Chad (3m 28s): No shit. So Kyle, the chat and cheese podcast, mascot, millennial just got engaged. Joel (3m 35s): Wow. Oh, Whoa, Whoa. Chad (3m 40s): Good stuff. Right. I guess, you know, you got to get out of mom and dad's basement somehow. Joel (3m 46s): So good. God, I could, I could go, but Kyle dude, go for it, man. That's awesome. I hope he's not going to get married in the, in the, the lockdown. I mean, how's that going to go? Chad (3m 57s): I don't know. I think that's the, the, the harder part is saying we don't have to do it right now. I think actually that's the easier part, right? Yeah. Joel (4m 4s): Assuming he probably met this girl online anyway, so maybe they could just keep it that way. Chad (4m 9s): He's known Corey for a while. So that's a, there's no chance. No chance. Joel (4m 13s): Shout out to Matt Miller. He's a huge fan of the show. He's a senior manager of town acquisition at Caliber Collision there in Texas. He says he listens to us every day, tells all his, all his coworkers to take a listen. So Matt man, super fan. We love you buddy. Keep listening, Chad (4m 31s): We got a new listeners, Chris Hanson over at Avature. Where have you been man? Casey Finch at SMC Corporation of America in Noblesville. She's over in your area and Alex Herr who said he heard great things about the podcast, Alex. They lied, man. They, they lied. Joel (4m 54s): Chris Hanson. Isn't that? The, to catch a predator guy? Chad (4m 57s): No, I think he was the, the one Hanson brother that didn't get into love. Joel (5m 3s): Hmm. Shout out to your boy. Jeff Bezos, who became $13 billion richer this past month. I know you love seeing him ring the register. So shout out to that rich motherfucker and Elon Musk equally rich as well. It's a good, it's a good time to be rich in America. Chad (5m 26s): Yeah. Rich white dude. Imagine that shout out to Melody Chung over at LinkedIn, she loves the podcast. Love you listening melody, but still think LinkedIn is the lesser form of a devil versus a Facebook who is the full devil, Joel (5m 42s): The full devil combo. Shout out to Snap and TikTok. So Snap shout out for walking the walk. They were, they had allegations of sexual harassment and all kinds of naughtiness going on there. And they said that they were gonna do an internal investigation, which they have actually hired a law firm to come in and actually question people and dig into the company. So shout out to them for that. They had kind of a shitty quarter, but have usership of 32 times per day as the average user of Snapchat, which is, you know, y'all need to get a life out there. Joel (6m 18s): And TikTok, you said there'll be a, there'll be hiring 10,000 folks here in the U S and also announced that they're close to spending a million dollars a year in lobbying. And what better way to not get pinched by the government and to employ a bunch of people who also hopefully vote. So they're doing the right things strategically as a Chinese company, looking to be banned by our country. Chad (6m 43s): Yeah. Well, they're just going to do an a U.S. IPO and by Snapchat, that's gonna, that's my, that's my call. Yeah. Big shout out to Alicia, Scott Garrel over at TMP, man. We haven't heard that much from TMP or AIA XB, expialidocious over there for a while. Good to hear from you. Alicia, tell everybody, keep listening. And we'd like to hear some stuff what's going on. Joel (7m 9s): Nice, nice shout out to Jobsync of death match winner, alumni celebrated their 500th day, I think in business or 500. I don't know. So we, I got a, I got a little gift box. I think you did too. They sent me a little like tall boy, Yeti, little thing that, that keeps my beer pretty cold. So shout out to you guys at job saying, keep, keep trucking, man. Chad (7m 34s): You know, you need a little Yeti thing for your beer when you're not drinking your beer fast enough. So I gave mine to Julie. She uses it for a wine, It's hot outside. a shout out to Portland. Moms Joel (7m 49s): Is one of them, the naked woman that was protesting this week. What did you, did you see this in Portland? They have, they have naked women, protesters. Chad (7m 59s): You're watching a different channel than what I'm watching. You've got the foreign channel on. I'm actually watching the news where mothers are coming out in droves to be able to, to support their, their town. But yeah, but shout out to Portland moms and last but not least shout outs for me is to Hung Lee and the new Recruiting Brain Food Tribune he had about about eight to 10 individuals who he gave assignments to. Chad (8m 33s): And we were actually able to, to pick our assignment, Elena Valentine she picked the hardest assignment. I picked, I think one of the easiest ones, where I answered 20 questions, but yeah, it was really cool. And if you haven't checked it out, if you're not already subscribed to Brain Food, go to recruiting Brainfood.com, check it out and check out the, it gives you an opportunity to get a little bit more in depth about other people in the industry. And if you want to know more about me, check mine out, Joel (9m 4s): Shout out to a Unwoke.hr. I've got to talk about these idiots. They got pretty shifty. They got pretty chesty this week, calling out the fact that they are a real site. We talked about the vice article. They sort of went after them. And then sort of generally that the industry was in a tizzy. I don't know if we were included in that or not, but if you're going to get real chesty boys or girls and girls, I suggest taking off the mask and showing yourself. Show yourselves is what I say. Joel (9m 34s): You ready to do the stories? Chad (9m 36s): topics, Joel (9m 38s): glass done. Chad (9m 40s): Welcome. Welcome to Indeed's version of a Glass Door, snuff film. This is just affirmation of what we talked about over the last few weeks. Indeed's going to be piping jobs into Glass Door. Joel (-): We called it Chad (9m 52s): They're going to be taking the Glass Door reviews. And the ad/job posting platform is going to be strictly through Indeed. So those are, those are some of the, some of the areas. Joel (10m 6s): Yeah. I love the way that they spun it though. They spun it as to benefit our customers. Yeah. We're going to let you access the power of two instead of have to buy both of them. So nice try on the spin there, but you know, it's, it's pretty clear that Glassdoor is going to be a filler site for Indeed jobs. I don't, you know, I mean the brand of Glass Door for reviews is so strong that I, I can't really imagine them messing with that. Joel (10m 36s): I think you'll still be able to post reviews that are fairly exclusive to Glass Door. I mean, they get so much PR out of it every year, the top companies, the top CEOs, I mean, still people still think about them in terms of seeing what it's like to work at a company, but anything that's duplicitous, like job postings is gone. And if you're still employed at Glass Door and you do stuff like, you know, has no effect on reviews, you probably want to go look for another job at this point, Chad (11m 7s): Glass Door's, obviously much, much different platform than Simply Hired. I mean, Simply Hired has been a dead brand for a very long time. I mean, pretty much as soon as in Indeed bought them. But I mean, this is just a colossal waste of brand. It's going to be a waste of the business model itself. The resources that they have there, I believe are just going to atrophy. And instead of using Glass Door to really create products, I mean, Glass Door was the brand that they could have used. I think more so than Indeed to focus on CRM, nurturing experience, those types of areas. Then Indeed. I mean, Indeed's really just, all their other focuses is getting a shit ton of traffic to you. They talk about targeting they're full of shit, but from a Glass Door standpoint, you had a brand that you could have, I believe could have used really to focus on the experience side of the house and building platforms that made you a brand for tomorrow. Chad (11m 38s): And Indeed obviously working in concert with that, but this whole quote unquote partnering thing is just a load of shit. It's, it's our poppycock. It's just not, it's not, yeah, it's not going to be a partnership Joel (12m 26s): Fuck the Fucking fuckers. So, so it's pretty easy to take away the job posting component. Like that's easy to change. I wonder, I wonder now how Indeed is going to let companies manage their brand or their profile pages on the Indeed platform and have that all transfer over to the Glass Door site. Cause that's sort of is the next step for me. You can't have the companies use two platforms for branding. You'll have to somehow cross those together. And that I assume is the next phase. Chad (12m 56s): We haven't heard anything around, you know, the Click IQ and Indeed IQ acquisition, other than the name change, you know, are there programmatic integrations that are going to happen here? I mean, just, it's one of those things where we see some big acquisitions happening. This is one point $2 billion to be able to create now a really a dead brand. It's just this to me just blows my mind. Joel (13m 23s): It's the era of COVID man. The shit happens, happens fast. Chad (13m 26s): It happened before that with Simply Hired. I mean, they, they, Joel (13m 29s): That was easy. That was easy. They didn't pay a billion dollars for simply hired either fuck LinkedIn layoffs. That was a story this week. Yeah, I'd do the shred on that one, a 960 employees gone, the company's newly minted CEO said that there would no, there would be no other layoffs at the company. Most of the people laid off were in sales, marketing Biz Dev type folks. You know, 6% is not a whole lot of people. Joel (14m 2s): I mean, my guess is they probably could, they could have cleaned out five to 7% of the people anyway for performance issues. They did obviously blame the current environment for the layoffs lack of advertising. I know from their, their cue, their quarterly report yesterday, which was filed, they had a 10% reduction year over year, I think in, in revenues that might've been quarter over quarter, but so 10% reduction in revenues, 6% laid off. That probably makes sense. Joel (14m 32s): My question is my God. If, if something as sort of mandatory as LinkedIn is laying off people and seeing that kind of reduction in revenue, imagine what Career Builder, Monster, and a lot of the nonessential sites you have to be on, what kind of reduction are they seeing in revenue? It's gotta scary shit. Chad (14m 53s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've got to say the new CEO, you know, Roslansky , he's getting smacked around. I mean, his first week as CEO, which was just a few weeks ago, he, he had the, that, that all hands call. Yeah. He had an all hands call that unearthed a bunch of racists that were within LinkedIn. So hopefully now he was able to identify some of those fuckers and get them out. Joel (15m 18s): Yeah. Wiener, Wiener got out at the right time. That's for sure. That's for sure. Wiener got out at the right time. Local Job Network. Here's one a blast from the past. They're doing a rebrand this week. What do you know about that? Chad (15m 33s): So, yeah, well LJN has a new CEO and now they're getting a new look and I, and here's why I liked this. The old name totally limited the brand, but the look and the feel of the website was 20 years old. I mean, it was stale at best, you know, it needed something new. I just hope we finally have a vendor that focuses on outcomes. Listen, Circa that's their new name? Circa listen, circa focuses on outcomes instead of the, the same old poppy cock and fluff, most diversity sites pedal, they talk about, Oh, you know, let's do diversity training and all this other stuff, and that's all well and good. Joel (16m 13s): But at the end of the day, if you're not driving outcomes, then what the fuck are you worth? Really? So hopefully Circa we'll, we'll be doing that. And I have it on good authority that they are closing an acquisition with America's Job Exchange. Whoa, Is that official or is that Chad scoop? Chad (16m 36s): That is Chad scoop. So right now it's on the rumor wires, the acquisition of America's Job Exchange, which, you know, between these two companies, they have thousands of customers in the OFCCP land and EEO and diversity land. You know, those are medium size and, and, and enterprise types of organizations. So I think, you know, trying to, trying to actually get that portfolio that, that AJE portfolio, which was somewhat a remnant of their partnership with CareerBuilder is, is not a, it's definitely not a bad move. Chad (17m 15s): We're getting a competitor out of the market, direct employers. I mean, all they really focus on is fortune 500 companies. So they are incredibly limited in the, the pool of companies that they really can go after. So these guys, they, they have, I think, a good opportunity to really refresh. And who knows, maybe there'll be the diversity name in the, in the segment. Joel (17m 40s): Yeah. For a lot of companies that this is really big news, by the way, it's Circaworks.com. We've seen worse domains. I don't know how, how much Circa.com would have cost them, but it's a, it's a decent name and local John job network, man. That is, that is some blasts from the past fucking old school job board shit. Yes. I remember working with them in my SEO days, Scott monitor. He probably knew Scott in your time at direct employers, but sold the company. Joel (18m 10s): It's sort of been on cruise control for awhile. Obviously being a job board is not the future. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I feel like it's less of a marriage of two dinosaurs that can cuddle and try to, you know, try to try to survive the, the, the media as opposed to like, it's probably a pretty good relationship and diversity and what-not is going to be something that people care about. So we'll keep our eye on, on circa circaworks.com and just see how they, how they progress and whether this thing will work or not. Chad: Yeah. See if they can get that deal closed with AJE or if it goes up in smoke, who knows. Joel: That'll be huge, huge, almost as huge as our sponsor JobAdX. JobAdX (18m 41s): Nope. Not for me. All these jobs look the same. Next! This is what perfectly qualified candidates are thinking. As they scroll past your jobs, just have heartedly skimming job descriptions that aren't standing out to them face it. We live in a world that is all about content content content. So why do we expect job seekers to react differently while reading paragraphs and bullets in templated job descriptions? Stand out in a feed full of boring job ads with a dynamic enticing video that showcases your company, culture, people, and benefits with JobAdX. JobAdX (19m 31s): Instead of hoping that job seekers will stumble upon your employment branding video JobAdX seamlessly displays it in the job description while they're searching, building a connection and reducing candidate drop-off. 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It's gotten worse guys During the first quarter, demand has been so brisk that Walmart has had to hire more than 235,000 workers since mid-March according to the CEO, Doug McMillan, all 5,355 of the companies, U S stores have remained open during the pandemic. Chad (21m 8s): They are so proud, but Walmart and Amazon, I mean, they've got to stop giving workers the crumbs. When are we going to stop demonizing migrants for taking work that we won't do instead? Why don't we demonize these bastards who are making people live paycheck to paycheck? They're there giving them 150 bucks or $300, which you know, as well as I do, especially in these times, that's not going to go very far. Joel (21m 37s): Yeah. It comes out. It comes out. It comes out to a little bit over a hundred dollars per employee. I think if I looked at the math correctly, Chad (21m 46s): Some were going to get full time are going to get 300 and part time we're going to get 150. Yeah. So, I mean, overall, it doesn't matter. That's a pittance. That's the, those are crumbs. Let's take a look at actually raising wages to make people feel good by calling them heroes and essential. But those companies are not willing to pay hero and essential workers with essential wages. I mean, it blows my mind, dude. Joel (22m 14s): Yeah. And in all fairness, we've been nice to Walmart in, in years, past weeks past, they do a lot in terms of education and, and benefits and things like that. They're going to be taken over by robots at some point, just like Amazon. But I, I feel like what they need to do is an environmentally friendly commercial. Like Amazon has done to take your mind off of the shit that they do. That's bad. Have you seen Amazon's new commercial about carbon neutral by 20 whatever. Joel (22m 43s): It's a real, it's a real heartwarming commercial Chad (22m 46s): By 2030, they're looking to go 2030 carbon neutral. Walmart has some amazing commercials that we've talked about on this podcast where they actually, they, they highlight the other employees. You know, they have a, an employee who does up home, like a most, you know, wrapping it, which is really fucking awesome. Pay those people, essential wages, pay them what they're worth. And you know, good point that Julie made. I bet the dude who was actually on that commercial didn't get paid for it. Joel (23m 20s): I bet he got paid for it. Chad (23m 22s): I bet he got his salary wage for it. He didn't get paid paid for if he was an actor who was actually asked to do something like that. I bet he didn't get that kind of cash. Joel (23m 32s): Well, you know who else didn't get paid or isn't getting paid are real estate agents that need to lease office space, a story this week about how many companies are going to be exiting office space in the future. Thanks the work from home experiment. That is COVID 19. Yeah. Thoughts about this? Chad (23m 50s): Yeah. This is a topic that we need to press forward past. COVID we're doing this now because we are reacting to COVID. What happens next? Is this a planned strategy to be able to reduce footprint overall? Or is this just reducing footprint until we can get everybody jammed back in offices? That's, that's the biggest questions. I, I believe some industries will be focused on just moving people out. They're seeing that those individuals will get just as much done if not more from their home office, which means they'll be able to, to obviously save cash. Chad (24m 29s): But others, I think like some of the financial types of organizations, they won't, I think they just, that's just culture. Everybody gets your asses back into the office. I know some banking professionals today in Indianapolis who are sitting in their fucking offices for no reason, Joel (24m 47s): Just because that's the way it is. And that's the way it's always been. And that's the way it always will be Chad (24m 51s): Welcome to the 1950s. Joel (24m 53s): Yeah. I think, I think this is one of the most sort of interesting experiments that we're doing amidst the COVID pandemic. And I think that you and I have talked about in terms of age ages, right? Like when we were in our twenties, we kind of wanted to go to the office. Cause there were other young people doing stuff. There was happy hour. There was, you know, concerts after there was socializing, you know, at, at an age now where kids, suburbs, you know, the office doesn't seem like that appealing. Joel (25m 24s): Some professions will never go back, right? Like technology folks that can do it from home. That's gonna, that's gonna stay. I think ultimately there's going to be less business office space in 10 years than there is today. It's going to be housing. It's going to be like a communal space. I don't know. But I think, you know, what the world looks like 10 years from now in terms of what these almost pyramids of office buildings and major cities look like and how they are utilized will be really, really interesting. And, and for cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, just, you know, huge, really densely populated office buildings and spaces, how they transform will be truly fascinating. Chad (26m 6s): Yeah. I think, I think we'll also see a migration of people out of those areas because they are so expensive. If you don't ... if all I need is a good internet connection, then I can work from anywhere. Right. And that just makes sense. But yeah, I think you're, you're right there, there are, let's say for instance, cohorts, per se, who might be perfect, you know, entry level, you want to get them together, you need a manager to be able to take them through and then slowly release them out of the nest. Chad (26m 40s): Right there, there might, might be some of that. Joel (26m 43s): Yeah. And I know that this scares the shit out of sort of brand folks and, you know, one of, one of our good buddies Douglas Adkin. So I know for example, Douglas Adkin, our buddy loves, loves the idea of getting people together and, and rubbing them until they get sticky and keeping culture and, and engaging employees. And that sort of goes out the window when everybody's working from home. So I know this, you know, stuff like that scares the shit out of culture, folks and brand folks. And it probably should. I think that stuff takes less of importance, you know, in environments like this, I think that there's a real opportunity to spend less time at an office, you know, and I know a lot of people in the new England area talk about, you know, living in Florida and commuting to New York, which seems kind of crazy to somebody in the Midwest, but that's something that's sort of normal. Joel (27m 33s): Yeah. Alright. Let's hear from Jobvite Jobvite Summer To Evolve (27m 37s): Jobvite wants you, you and you to join hundreds, thousands, okay. Maybe just thousands of recruiters, HR, and talent acquisition professionals for a summer you won't soon forget! it's Jobvite's Summer to Evolve. The summer to have all, this is a 12 week series of free content to help recruiters brush up on their skills. Learn from industry thought leaders and see how Technology can help them improve, automate, and evolve their recruiting efforts. Jobvite Summer To Evolve (28m 7s): There will be a chance to share tips and ideas with your peers. And we may even have some surprises for you along the way. I love surprises! So visit the summertoevolve.com to register for this summer toolbox sessions that suit your needs, peak your interest, or your float your boat starting June 16th. It's the summer to evolve the way you attract, engage, hire, onboard, and retain talent! Jobvite recruit with purpose, hire with confidence. Joel (28m 37s): So at the top of the show, we talked about hard times on a lot of companies, but yeah, it's not tough for everyone, Jobvite, we just talked about them making acquisitions last week and two companies, one near and dear to our heart raised quite a bit of money. JobCase, our buddies raise $30 million. Chad (28m 57s): Well, it wasn't a raise. They sold a majority stake for $30 million. So, I mean, is that considered a raise? Is that what happened? Yeah. So JobCase, a Cambridge startup that runs an employment and networking focused on blue collar workers said Thursday. It is selling a majority stake to one of its big investors in a deal that would help it expand its offering. The deal gives JobCase 30 million in new capital. Chad (29m 27s): Overall, they have raised a hundred close to 150 million. Joel (29m 31s): Does this feel like a lifeline? Chad (29m 34s): I think if it would have been another investor, then we could have definitely said, Holy shit, you know, what's happening. But JobCase is dealing with one of their current investors. So they already have a huge stake. You know, they already have a huge stake in JobCase as it is. So to be able to do a deal, to turn over an additional $30 million in capital might be a smart move, especially in this COVID era. Joel (30m 2s): It sounds like it might be a good time to get Fred back on the show for some explanation about what's going on with the company as well as the race. Chad (30m 9s): I agree. I agree. Great. Joel (30m 12s): Gem also raised a 30 million, Chad (30m 15s): I believe as well, 37 million jam. And we talked about Gem. They used to be Zen sourcer, just a shitty name. Luckily they, they, they were able to get their hands on gem.com have no clue how they got a chance to do that. But it's an, it's an interesting play. They focus heavily on integration with LinkedIn. They say that they are the complete sourcing stack. There's a, there's a huge transparency piece to be able to see how your team is sourcing. Chad (30m 50s): And I would assume the different types of platforms they're sourcing with. They have a CRM, RMP, Chrome extension diversity hiring modules with analytics. I mean, from my standpoint, they definitely need the money because they are shooting broad. This is not something that is laser focused. Joel (31m 11s): Yeah. They are. They're looking to kill a big elephant to say the least. And first of all, look, the name is awesome. And if you're going to try to kill an elephant to have a name like Gem, no, it's not just a cartoon character from the eighties. Some of you remember Gem anyway. So the name first of all is great. And I want to just point that out really quickly, but they are trying to S to basically solve the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel challenge. They're probably one of the most, we talked about HubSpot for recruitment, sort of the entire management system, top of funnel, work them through the funnel relationship, building, tracking, all that stuff. Joel (31m 50s): Nurturing. Yeah. They're trying to, they're trying to solve that very big problem. And having a lot of money to that is a, is a very good thing. So I applaud them for, for the raise and the vision and what they're doing. I don't know a lot of companies that use them. I don't hear a lot about them, but they have a pretty, pretty stellar list of clients that they name and, and their release on this raise. So they must be helping quite a few companies. And I assume that we'll be hearing more and more about them. Chad (32m 21s): I almost wonder why their play for acquisition to LinkedIn, because they are trying to do some things that LinkedIn wants to be able to do. That maybe their talent hub can't quite get done. So it would be interesting. And I think that, you know, any type of partnership and or platform that kind of caters to a specific platform, I mean, that's a laser focus. There's no question, but there's just so much for a young company to be able to talk about, you know, being a complete sourcing, stack CRM, they don't say RMP, but a lot of what they're talking about is recruitment, marketing platform stuff, the diversity piece. Chad (33m 0s): I mean, there's just so much, they're trying to bite off on the outside. It's almost like they're trying to sell to LinkedIn. Right. So I don't know. It'll be interesting. Yeah. Joel (33m 11s): They're certainly grooming themself to be a tasty target. If not for a LinkedIn, a Salesforce, maybe a Workday, I mean a much bigger fish to come in and, and grab this. But if we, if we agree that recruiting and marketing are starting to blur into each other, these guys are on the right track, Chad (33m 30s): Could be that big dildo in the small pond. Joel (33m 38s): Chad, this is a hard story to talk about. I have to say Chad (33m 43s): What dude, what is, I mean, you know, something is wrong. I mean, we have been locked down for way too long, and this is on HuffPost. So a mass thief was still at large after he casually exited a Los Vegas adult store in broad daylight with a three foot 40 pound dildo on his shoulders. I mean, is there, is there a black market for this kind of stuff? Why would anybody even want to take something like that? Joel (34m 16s): Yeah, there, there is actual footage on TMZ of this. If you want to check it out, it won't, you won't translate into a podcast, but so this, this sex toy nicknamed, or it's named mobi, obviously the whale is the inspiration for that retails for $1,250. So, you know, you could maybe get some money for it. Otherwise, I don't know what you would do with a three foot 40 pound dildo. And by the way, the visuals of this guy hoisting it over his shoulder and running out of the store are, are pretty, pretty impressive Chad (34m 50s): Reported that the man stuffed the soul, the stolen phallus into his car and made a clean getaway. Joel (34m 57s): Yeah. Whatever happens is he's going to be a, he's going to be totally subject to whatever a penal codes are, are relevant in his area. Outro (35m 6s): Yeah. This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast, subscribe on iTunes, Google play or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show and be sure to check out our sponsors because they make it all possible for more visit chadcheese.com. Oh yeah. You're welcome.