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In this Nexxt exclusive, in partnership with TAtech, Chad and Cheese bring industry veteran Susan Vitale, CMO at iCIMS, on to discuss iCIMS’ recent job seeker survey, and any other timely topic they want. Included is a deep dive into employment branding issues. In their recent report, iCIMS discovered that Glassdoor reviews have a tremendous impact on recruitment. For instance, nearly half of Millennials surveyed said they’ve turned down a job offer because of poor reviews. Other findings are discussed too. Also highlighted in the survey is the importance of mobile and the impact social media and peer referrals have on the modern job seeker. The podcast also goes into questions of ATS platforms and whether it’s better to build a recruitment technology yourself or provide a platform similar to the iPhone’s AppStore where third party vendors can provide services. It’s a great interview, providing entertainment and education in equal parts. Would you expect anything different from Chad & Cheese? I mean, c’mon now. This podcast is sponsored exclusively by Nexxt. Checkout their product Text2Hire, and access an exclusive Chad & Cheese discount by clicking here. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Chad: This the Chad and Cheese Podcast brought to you in partnership with TAtech. TAtech the association for talent acquisition solutions. Visit TAtech.org. 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: Hey, what's up everybody? This is Joel Cheesman of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Today we're doing a special deep dive into a variety of topics. And our special guest today is Susan Vitale of iCims, popular ATS provider. Susan, how are you? Susan: Hi, I'm doing great, thank you. And I've got to say, I've heard that intro music many times before, but hearing it when you're a guest just makes it a little more special. Chad: Little special. Joel: It does, right. It's like hearing Springsteen live. We'll do kind of Jersey theme today since iCims is in New Jersey. Joel: The annoying laugh is my cohort Chad. Chad, how you doing? Chad: Well, hello. Excellent. Joel: Hello. Joel: All right. iCims did a survey recently where they talked about at least three main things. We'll probably dive into other topics as well. So, Susan has a safe word. If Chad and I hear it we will switch topics immediately. So, if that happens, you know why. Chad: Bridgegate. Joel: Yeah, Bridgegate, Chris Christie, Springsteen. Yeah, she'll say something and we'll change topics. Joel: Speaking of topics. Which one do we want to start with? Chad: Come on, Susan. Pick one. Joel: Come on, Jersey. You're supposed to have attitude and spunk. Susan: Sorry. I think we should start off talking a little bit about the branding and the referral side of things. Joel: Okay, cool. So what did you find in your report? Susan: We found that ... in some respects it's no surprise, but I think the numbers were the surprising piece here ... that employee reviews actually matter tremendously to working Americans. And actually about half have actually declined a job offer primarily because of the negative online employer reviews out there. Chad: Half? Susan: Yeah, 47%. Chad: Half? Joel: That's Millennials, right? Susan: 47% are Millennials. Nearly one in three full-time working Americans. Joel: Yes. And it's like 92% look at reviews before applying to a job? Or part of their job process? Chad: Yeah. Joel: So, it's safe to say that transparency is not going anywhere? Susan: No, it is not and I'm pretty happy about that given it's one of the core competencies at iCims. We hire quite a bit so we think it's really important. Susan: But I think, we talk about one in three full-time working Americans, about half of Millennials. But actually more workers in management positions versus nonmanagement positions have declined a job offer for the reviews themselves. So this is not just a generational thing. Joel: Do you have any sense for how many people don't even apply to a job because of bad reviews? Susan: We do. Hold on. Let me ... Chad: That's going through research. Joel: My point is like for so long with reviews, employers that I've talked to have historically put their head in the sand. Chad: Yeah. Joel: If it's out of sight, it's out of mind. If my CEO doesn't bring it up, then it doesn't matter. It's just sort of anecdotal and sort of ignorant. And the fact that you guys are actually putting metrics around what reviews mean, it's going to start building context and importance around, "Holy crap. We should actually care about what our reviews are because if we're actually losing out on people because they're not even applying to our job. Forget the fact that we're interviewing and then they're going to Indeed, Glassdoor, kununu, or any of the other dozen review sites out there." Joel: This is a real impact on recruiting, right? Chad: Okay, so, real quick and let's dive into that. But there's a much larger impact because these people are consumers as well. So if I actually bought products from this company and then I want to go and I want to work there and I go take a look at some of the reviews that the employees have put in, that could perspectively turn me off as a consumer. So, this isn't just losing great talent, which is obviously a big issue. But it's also losing perspective revenue. Susan: Yeah, absolutely. I think that piece is not just tied to the employee reviews. We've seen some stats outside of this research that showed that consumers were far less likely to purchase products from a hiring organization if they did not have a good or positive candidate experience. And certainly employee reviews are part of that. But that's also anything from is it a mobile-friendly apply process? Is it a miserably long apply process? Is it 508 compliant? Susan: When we talk about candidate experience, it's far more than is it a sexy, flashy, pretty career site. There's a much more holistic view of candidate experience that can absolutely hurt top line revenue. Chad: Right. Joel: Do you have examples of any companies that are doing a really good job through that process? Susan: We do. It really depends on which component we look at. To be honest, I don't think anyone is completely nailing it. But when we look at a couple of examples. Advantage Solutions is a client of ours who does a really nice job of making the process really short and to the point. They ask just a couple of questions and then they do a lot of Drip followups. Susan: Another client of iCims does a really nice job of being really transparent ... there's that word again ... throughout the entire process letting candidates know what the workflow looks, what those stages look like. Susan: Two of those clients come to mind right off the top of my head. Chad: So, in some cases, what I've been able to see, and I'm sure what you've seen over the years, is that on the surface you see all these companies who are using new technologies or new recruitment marketing platforms to be able to make the first layer of engagement really sexy and really awesome. But then you get into the actual application process and the interviewing process and then it all goes to hell. Because the process is horrible. Susan: Exactly, it all falls apart. Chad: Yeah, it's horrible. And they're using 1990's, early 2000's process methodologies and they're jamming those methodologies into advanced technologies. Susan: Yeah. I think the process is dated and many times, quite frankly, the technology is dated. That they might use something from an ERP or an HCM module that was thrown in as part of a larger package. Susan: Maybe they try and put something pretty as a wrapper around it, but it's a really superficial lay on. And it's not necessarily solving the true problem around candidate experience. Chad: So, jumping around a little bit. Let's jump back to employer brand. Those are some pretty telling numbers with regard to 50% of the people won't even go through with the application. Chad: What else do you have in that segment that just pops out at you? Joel: I want to hear some generation Z data. Just kidding. We said that for the first time on our show this week. Generation Z. Susan: Well, I forgot what the term is for those that are in that bucket of Millennials that are little too old to be Millennials. Do you know how many posts I saw of people in my peer group that were circulating that because they felt so special to be called not a Millennial but not Gen X. I'm like this is the problem you guys. Chad: You can tell you're a Gen X'er when you actually are genuinely pissed at those kinds of discussions. Joel: We're just angry about everything. Susan: Yes, I haven't heard Gen Z but ... Well, that's part of the style, right? Joel: What do you see or what do you recommend for companies in terms of improving employment brand? We have crappy reviews or we have some reviews that are negative. Companies that come to you about that issue, what are you sort of advising them or telling them at this point? Susan: Well, iCims doesn't necessarily offer technology to support with the employee reviews particularly. We do partner with a number of companies that help in that area. Susan: The first is actually pay attention and curate them. You mentioned earlier that some people don't really care. Out of sight, out of mind. But actually a lot of the organizations I speak with, the CEO's are all over employee review sites. Susan: They get the notifications, it makes them have a good day or a bad day. And that's something that I would strongly encourage people to curate. But also, take a minute before responding to some of them because they can be a bit personal and it's hard to not take them personally. But, obviously, responding to them and having employer accounts on some of those sites, I think, is important so that you can have a voice in the discussion. Susan: If there are reviews worth noting, absolutely include them on the career site. Having these different desperate destinations I think can be a pretty crappy candidate experience. So if someone's able to connect directly between Google and the career site and see reviews and not have a bunch of middle men, I think that's a fantastic step I the right direction. Joel: Do you think that they should show the negatives as much as the positives? Or do you recommend only the positives? Susan: I don't recommend just the positives. I think that's BS. But I do think that there are certainly some negative reviews that you can tell are not really the right ones to share. As an example, some people might complain about our organization that we're changing all the time. And that is a very valid concern for a lot of employees or prospects. But for others that's part of the gig. So I would absolutely share that one. I think it shows the kind of environment you're going to walk into. Susan: But other ones that are a little bit more personal or clearly it's a one-off, I don't necessarily think you need to broadcast. Chad: Yeah, I think the first one talks about transparency. And you want to be transparent about the change and what to be ready for before you actually hit the ground. Chad: It's really funny that the very first thing that you said was companies, talent acquisition, they need to pay attention. So, how many companies, I guess I would say, that you interact with ... percentage wise. Just kind of throwing a number out there. ... would you say aren't really paying attention. And they just really don't care. They just kind of think it will go away? Susan: At least half. Chad: Wow! Susan: Yeah, I really do. I think they would blame it on things like, "We don't have the team to do that. We don't have the time to do that. Or the resource." But the reality is I think some of them just don't want to know because then they'd have to take action. Joel: My guess is they wouldn't care but it's that CEO that you mention that goes into the office and says, "Have you guys seen this stuff?" And if it wasn't for the CEO's a lot more companies, I think, would not look or care about their reviews. Chad: Yeah. Susan: Yeah, it's polarizing. Chad: And once it starts to impact the bottom line. Again, we're talking about customers. And we don't look as candidates as customers. I just wish we'd stop calling them candidates, and just start calling them customers so that we treat them better. Because at the end of the day, whether you're a consumer brand or not, there's an impact on your brand. Susan: Yeah, it was interesting. I forgot who mentioned this at a conference maybe two years ago. Someone was talking about this very thing and it said, "We struggle to disposition our candidates and say, 'I'm sorry. You're not good enough to work here but you are good enough to buy our crap.'" And I thought that was a really interesting way of like, "Yeah, how do you balance that?" Susan: But that's really how we should all be looking at it. Certainly if you're in a consumer facing world more than anyone else. Chad: Yeah, no question. Joel: Susan, how important is the sort of corporate site for branding versus exterior sites like Glassdoor and Indeed? Is it even worth putting a lot of money and energy into your corporate site when people are probably just going to go look for the real nitty-gritty on external sites? Susan: I think it absolutely matters. When we took a look at the data within this research, it had shown that employer reviews are the most important bit of content. But that's followed by the content on the corporate website itself and the company materials, whether that's publications or products or what have you. Susan: And actually even to that end, when candidates are doing research, they're looking at social media sites. But sites like Glassdoor were actually number three. Linkedin and Facebook were number one and number two. Specifically for social sites. Chad: So, when we start talking about the candidate experience, we're talking about reviews. There's all these different ways that we have to engage, be transparent with customers. I'm going to start saying it. With customers. Joel: You're going to confuse everybody. Chad: What about the engagement, the outreach, the ability to actually have conversations with them? Our Nexxt obviously is a sponsor of this podcast. And we just did a webinar about text-to-hire and being able to actually reach out via text. The average open rate, it blew me away. It's like over 97%. Joel: It is 97%. And 15% reply within an hour of getting that message. Chad: So, again, if you're looking to, just from a recruiters standpoint, from a talent acquisition standpoint, have those one on one conversations with top talent, with customers, instant communication. It's what we do everyday anyway. It's simple, it's smart, it's easy. Not to mention there's a desktop application that your recruiters can use. Chad: You guys can go out to Nexxt.com. Joel: Two X's. Chad: Two X's. N-E-X-X-T.com Joel: Don't triple X it. Susan: I'm glad you said it. Chad: N-E-X-X-T.com/chadandcheese25. Joel shut up. I'm trying to get the URL in here. Joel: Chad, I'm texting right now. Chad: Nexxt.com/chadand ... spell out the and. A-N-D ... cheese25. There we go. Good stuff. But, again, that's a good piece of engagement that we have to focus on. Is how do we reach out and touch these consumers, these customers. Joel: Susan said she would actually say something nice about Nexxt because they're a trusted iCims partners. Chad: No? Susan: They are indeed. Yes, I like Nexxt quite a bit. They're a great partner. We have about a couple hundred partners in our marketplace and Nexxt being one of them. Because frankly things have gotten so complex within recruiting through the way you talk to them on text or otherwise, to have you advertise those jobs, to how you screen applicants that we have an entire ecosystem of partners that we integrate with make that a little bit easier. Chad: That is pretty cool. Joel: Can we take a left turn real quick? Chad: No. Joel: The ecosystem, the app stuff that you mention, Susan, to me is really interesting. And we had Howie Schwartz on Firing Squad this week from Crowded. Chad: Refresh. Joel: So, he has his product and Lever, a competitor of yours, has a similar sort of dig up the grave of past candidates product. And Howie's opinion is ATS's will not in the future, successful ones, won't make it themselves because they don't have the bandwidth, the development power, et cetera. That it's the ecosystem in the app store that's going to power innovation with the ATS market. Joel: Can you talk about that? Do you agree with it? Not so much? What are your thoughts? Susan: Yeah, I do. I think that's why we don't think an ATS is enough. To be totally honest, back in 2012 we saw a ton of consolidation in the market ... you guys were around for that ... where talent management providers and ERP's were gobbling up recruiting providers. And at that time, everybody was saying, "You need to be able to do everything in talent management." And at that time even iCims had started building out technology to support what we call post hire. And right around that time, very shortly thereafter, despite some success, we said, "We have to double down on recruiting or we're not going to be very good at." Susan: But if you just have an ATS module, absolutely that's not enough. I think Madeline Laurano just put out some research a few days ago that said that almost verbatim. So, I don't really consider iCims an ATS provider in and of itself. We really look at an entire talent acquisition ecosystem and try to be the unified hub for all of that. Some of that is through our own products and some through an ecosystem. Chad: So, it's choice. You're looking at choice. Joel: It's a platform. Susan: 1000%. I don't think anybody who provides a technology platform that has to worry about globalization, scale, security, compliance, configurability is also going be bleeding edge on everything. It would be almost impossible. Susan: So, allowing customers to choose those different spokes of that hub and centralize all of that with a provider they really trust, with a great reputation, et cetera is really what we're all about. But if one provider doesn't work and you want to swap someone else in, absolutely. That's part of the flexibility that a provider like iCims is here for. Joel: Chad, I think we got Susan on the record saying Lever sucks. Susan: That is not at all true. And I'm sick of your crap. Both of you. Joel: So, she's saying Microsoft sucks and now Lever. Chad: Yep. I think I have actual Tweets where she says at least some of that stuff. Joel: Can you clear that up real quickly, Susan? Susan: Both of you are worse than the Real Housewives of New Jersey in trying to stir up drama because I actually think very highly of Lever. And I actually think extremely highly of Microsoft because they're a client of ours and I'm really proud of the fact that they are. Chad: Bridgegate, Bridgegate. Joel: Moving on. Susan: You guys. It must be a sad day for you that this is the entertainment you have is trying to get me to be your pawn. Chad: What? Not ever. That would never be. It's just fun. Joel: Moving on. Chad: We were talking about social. You guys have some great surveys on the social side of these house, social and the mobile side? Susan: We do. Indeed. Yeah. Sorry, I'm just laughing now. Susan: Yeah, so the research also extended to social to mobile, I think especially as we see what things Google brings to the market mobile becomes that much more important because people start with searches. And, so, we're really proud of the work that we're doing with Google as it relates to searching on career sites, et cetera. : Essentially, when did we see. Why is mobile important? For one thing, 70% of the workers that we surveyed have looked for a new job while they're on the clock. Chad: Yeah. Susan: That's actually 83% when it's Millennials. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Yeah. Susan, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of search engines like Google? Is more traffic coming through? Less? About the same? Because with more social stuff and more tools I think the opinion might be that Google is less important. What are you guys seeing in terms of inbound traffic? Because I know you guys are also partnered with the Google for Jobs initiative. So you guys are probably seeing some really interesting data in terms of what Google's delivering. Susan: We are. We're really proud to be able to work with Google on two different sides of the initiative. On the search side as well as the Google for Jobs initiative. Susan: Following the launch, we did see a bit of a redistribution of traffic. Certainly more coming in from Google and a drop off from sources other than Google. I do think it'll take some time to normalize and see if that really sticks or if that was just a bit of a bump. But I'd be really surprised if it didn't remain in that distribution. Susan: So, we think it's fantastic. I think there are a lot of middle men who were able to make a lot of money for a period of time. And it's not necessarily the most experienced. Joel: Oh, now you're going after the middle men. Okay. Chad: Indeed. Susan: Oh, knock it off. Chad: Okay, we're talking about this two components. And I think this is a great conversation. We're talking about the API. We're talking about the job search and the API. And seeing iCims start to utilize Google Search within your platform. Tell me how's that going? How's it received? Are clients just ecstatic? What's going on with that? Susan: Yeah, so, the end of September we announced our participation in Google's Cloud Jobs API program. So we are the first provider in recruitment software invited to participate, which we thought was fantastic. They had sighted that it was really around iCims innovation in space, our attention to recruiting specifically in our scale. Susan: And so, customers are really excited. I think that employers in general are excited but still need a lot more information. So we're looking to introduce some search technology to our career sites for candidates. As well as a couple of other things that are still being examined really at this point to work with Google. Susan: So, I think it's a fantastic opportunity. It's something that we would likely allow as an option. Not everybody would necessarily want it so we like to give choices and that's the intention. Chad: I like the choices. I just don't know why. Other than perspective upcharge because there are API calls that are there. But I don't know why a client wouldn't say, "Oh, yeah. I don't want the best search engine. I want the jalopy in the corner." It makes no sense to me. But choice is nice. Chad: So, back to the Google for Jobs side of the house. This is also incredibly exciting because we believe, we hope, that Google will start to provide more preference to jobs that are coming directly from corporate career sites. So, jobs that you're pumping from iCims into Google for Jobs, we're hoping that they see those and weight them as originals. Because that's what they are. Susan: Yeah. You and me both. I think the original source makes a lot of sense. Joel: Is that what you're seeing? Are you seeing any kind of clues to that happening at this point? Susan: Not necessarily. But I can't yet say if that's a weighting thing or otherwise because we're seeing other recruiting software vendors not necessarily be prioritized who are not really doubling down in this arena. So I don't think it's that simple. Susan: iCims actually built a team just for this so it's something we're really committed to. So, our boosts might be more so around that than anything else. Chad: I think for Google it is simple from the standpoint of their supposed to hate duplication, first off. If I know that company ABC is coming from iCims that is specifically jobs that are coming from their applicant tracking system for their system of record. Anything else that has that companies name on it automatically gets batted away because it's a duplicate, or it's old, or it's spam. Chad: So, I wouldn't make any excuses for Google. They'd better tighten their shit up. Joel: Yeah. Hey Susan. Facebook also getting into the game. They recently partnered with the likes of ZipRecruiter, JobScore, a few others. Are you guys doing anything with them that you can talk about? What are your thoughts about sort of, "Hey, you post your job on iCims, we're going to automatically put it onto Facebook." Are clients asking for that? What are you sort of Facebook thoughts? Susan: We're in conversations with Facebook now. There's not too much I can share at this point. But overall, I'm supportive. I think it makes a ton of sense industry wide. To be honest, we originally got a lot of the Facebook questions right around 2011, 2012. And we were able to address that from an acquisitions iCims made ... a company called Job Magic ... at the time. Susan: This is obviously a bit of a different initiative so I wouldn't say the overall industry is well versed enough to know to ask for it. But it makes a heck of a lot of sense as far as I'm concerned so I'm supportive. Joel: So, it's your sense that more and more ATS's will be partnering with Facebook to distribute jobs onto their platform? Susan: It makes sense. For reasons that I'm not yet aware of why somebody wouldn't. Chad: Yeah. So getting rid of those middle men. Joel: So, when is the Snapchat job distribution happening? Susan: All three of us love Snap. Well, you know what, one of our conversations when we had been talking about Snapchat, I think Chad had mentioned, taking a picture of a resume and being able to upload it. So a step away from Snap but not that far. And actually iCims supports that. So we're able to do that today, which I think is great. But over all, Snap, I'm not sure yet. Chad: Told you, Joel. Told iCims would be on that shit. Susan: Well, again, we're not bleeding edge and I'm in that subgroup of Millennials. So maybe it's just my point of view though. Chad: Oh, now you're a subgroup of Millennials. Joel: Apparently they can't sell enough spectacles so they're going on deep discounts. So everybody's going to be Snapping on their glasses real soon. Just wait. Chad: Horrible. Joel: All right. Let's get back to the survey. What else do you want to highlight on that, Susan? Susan: The other piece I guess worth noting here is around referrals, which we've obviously talked about before. But about 20% of those that we talked with said that they were dissatisfied with the employee referral program. So, I do think employee referrals aren't going away. We've never really seen that fade. So that's worth noting, too. Joel: Do you have any good examples of good solutions for that? Because Chad and I, and probably you as well, have seen these guys ... Jobster, H3, even Indeed now with their crowd whatever product. It seems totally logical that you should have like, "Hey, share this job with your network and if someone applies and gets a job, we'll pay you $5000." Why doesn't that model work? Susan: I think for a few reasons. One is that people don't always know what their network can do and if they're a good fit for the job or not. Unless they actually work with someone who did that job before, it's really hard to know that my friend from middle school is good for this job that I'm connected with on some other social site. So, I think that's part of the problem. Susan: The other is that it's still a pain in the ass to submit employee referrals through most recruiting technology and process. Everyone wants referrals but they don't necessarily put the process and systems in place to make it easy for the actual people who need to go through it. Susan: And then the final piece, is that sometimes when you submit referrals the process and experience for those candidates is really crappy. And they don't want to put their friends through that. Chad: Yeah. Not to mention, we call this "The Friends of Bob" issue where we're talking about trying to create diversity and diverse talent pools. Well, if you're continually hiring Bob and Bob's friends, they're more than likely going to look like Bob or Brenda. So it doesn't quite provide the diversity that you're going to want from an organization. Chad: Yeah, it works. Susan: It does if you have a diverse employee population and they all participate equally. If you over index on Bob, then no. Chad: When does that ever happen? Susan: Right. No, I agree. Joel: You don't want a company of Chad's. That's for sure. Chad: Hanging Chad, pregnant Chad. Susan: Oh, God. Joel: Did you just say Hanging Chad? Oh my god. Susan: What's that safe word again? Joel: Okay. Chad: So, we're about - Joel: How about them Jets? I don't know. Susan: Yeah, I don't watch. Joel: That's right. Chad: That's a good idea. Joel: She has her handlers watch the game for her. Susan: No. If it's not HGTV or the Golden Girls it's probably not on in my house. Joel: Well, we know you watch the Housewives of New Jersey because you made a reference to it. Susan: I don't watch it. But I feel like Chad is one of them. Joel: Don't pretend like you stay at home and read books by candlelight. Chad: That was good. I like that. Susan: Chad, we have to think of what your line would be when you turn around at the camera and they all have some saucy line. Chad: I was going to say, I've never seen that before but, yeah, maybe I can work on that. Joel: Chad has all kinds of saucy lines like Hanging Chad. Susan: Lord. Chad: Pregnant Chad. You forgot that one. Joel: Pregnant Chad. Joel: We could talk about AI and automation. That's a popular topic. Susan: Yeah, coming off of HR Tech I think if someone drank every time they heard AI they'd be hammered nonstop. Chad: Oh, that's a hell of a game. Susan: Yeah. Joel: So, we had the CEO of TextRecruit say that there are only like four or five actual AI companies ... Google, Microsoft, et cetera ... and that everyone else is just a decision tree. Is that your consensus or do you believe that all these AI companies are legit? Susan: I actually probably lean in support of that. And I love those guys. They're another partner of ours. And I like that Eric is from New Jersey as well just bringing it full circle for us. Susan: Yeah, I think a lot of AI is BS truthfully. Chad: Now that's a quote we can use. Susan: Yeah, there you go. Joel: That is a quote we can use. And she's behind it too. I don't know. What else do you want to talk about, Susan? Anything? Susan: Well, no. I think AI is a legit topic. I think it's worth talking about. I do think that there's a lot of value in AI as it relates to automation of process. I think for what a lot of users think it could be in terms of show me the right candidate and let's just completely automate that. That is dangerous territory and it's one that I wouldn't necessarily get behind. Susan: But I think that's what people really want to see at these shows. So some of the ranking and that kind of stuff I'm not a huge fan of. I think there are some compliance concerns that are less sexy but still important. But in terms of leveraging AI for areas like chat bots on career sites and that kind of thing, I'm all over that. I think that's terrific. Chad: So, what's your favorite? There's so many "AI" types of organizations that are out there. And you don't have to name the product itself but what's your favorite? Is it engagement through chat bots? Is it reviving the dead with some of the AI and machine learning that's out there with the old candidates that are in the applicant tracking system already? What's your favorite? Susan: You know what, I like the idea of reviving the dead but I don't necessarily think AI has to do it. And I think then some privacy concerns come into play of the candidate and wanting you to know that they're ripe or not. Susan: I do think it's safer when we're looking at AI for things like search and chat bots and that kind of thing. I think there's true use there and it doesn't feel scary to me. Joel: Are you following the [High queue LinkedIn case 00:32:59]? Susan: Yeah, just a little. Joel: What are your thoughts on that? Where do you side on that debate? Susan: You know, for a long time iCims felt like we were in a bit of a David and Goliath war ... not against Linkedin but against someone else ... and so, in general, I'm usually a fan of the underdog. So I'll just leave it at that. Joel: Fair enough. I've got nothing else. Chad: Yeah. It's fair and I think we've all talked about the high queue David and Goliath kind of thing from plenty of pods here. So ... Joel: We know where you stand on the issue, Chad. Susan: Just a little. The one piece I think worth noting here is that the battle should not be between provider and provider on whose data it is because he who has the data wins the war. It's candidate data and there are true candidate privacy concerns and consent that absolutely needs to take place. And a lot of what some of these big companies want to do ... social networks as well as others ... with candidate data that the candidates need to have a voice in this and are often excluded from the conversation. Chad: Okay, so let's talk about the LinkedIn partner program with some of the applicant tracking systems. Because from what I've heard from little birdies is that there's the prospect of trading candidates back and forth. Susan: So, what I can say is iCims is not named on that partner program today. And it's because sharing candidate data that is not someone else's is not something that we're comfortable with. And frankly I don't think any technology provider should be comfortable. Or employer rarely probably knows what is going back and forth. Susan: So for the benefit of something like seeing which candidates in your ATS live in LinkedIn and vice versa, that seems like a pretty small benefit to give up in the right of candidate privacy. And I think it's a really important topic that people have not flushed out. They don't know exactly some of these big providers actually want to do with that candidate data. Susan: For things that extend beyond candidates who applied from LinkedIn, it's a prickly path and I don't think a lot of employers have done their homework on that one yet. Chad: And I think regulation, once again, has not caught up to this. Susan: Well, we have GDPR right around the corner. And while that might be European based, we should be taking some cues of that. That candidates should absolutely say, "Yeah, I'm okay with massive company essentially creating a card on me on when I might interested in quitting a job. When I might be interested in looking for another. Why I was rejected from a job. The interviewer, the notes." This is a lot of data that is really not to be traded outside of walls. That I don't think employers have asked enough questions about. Chad: No. Joel: Thank God for Facebook's closed ecosystem. That's where I'm putting my resume. Chad: Shut up. And I'm spent. Joel: Susan, thanks for joining us. We have wasted way too much of your time. We really appreciate you being a guest on the show. Chad: Thanks for listening and thanks for being here. Susan: I'm so happy to have been here. Joel: All right guys. Thanks Susan. Again, she's with iCims. That's I-C-I-M-S.com. To learn more through social networking, Susan, do you want to share your LinkedIn profile or your Twitter handle? Susan: Yeah. It's Susan_Vitale, V-I-T-A-L-E. And iCims as you spelled out. I-C-I-M-S. Joel: There you go. We out. Chad: We out. Susan: We out. Chad: Oh, wait a minute guys. Before you leave we need to jump into some numbers quickly. Almost like a reprisal around candidate experience and engagement. Because engagement wise, text has an average of 97% of an open rate. And let's face it, phone calls and emails can't give companies and talent acquisition leaders that kind of penetration or engagement. That's why Chad and Cheese are big proponents of Nexxt's Text to Hire platform. Chad: That's right talent acquisition. All of your recruiters can now be in the same system and Text-to-Hire can help you and your company have more one on one conversations with candidates you want to reach. Instant communication puts you in front of the right people fast. And a smart, simple interface to easily manage and track your campaigns, which is what you're going to need with all those texts flying around. Chad: So, you can try your first Text to Hire campaign from Nexxt for 25% off. It's a holiday gift from Chad and Joel. Just go to Nexxt.com. That's N-E-X-X-T.com/ChadandCheese25. That's Nexxt.com/ChadandCheese25. Chad: Okay, now we're out. Outro: This has been the Chad and Cheese podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single show. And check out our sponsors because they make it all possible. For more visit HireDaily.com. Oh, and you're welcome. Chad: Thanks to our partners at TAtech, the association for talent acquisition solutions. Remember to visit TAtech.org. #iCims #Google #Glassdoor #SnapChat #Nexxt #TATech #Marketing

Halloween’s hangover has the boys ranting about some trends that just won’t die: ‘Tinder for Jobs’ and video resumes. Startups Workey and O’Hire go keep going back to the future and treading where past companies have failed, and it’s got the boys fired up. Aside from the lunacy of dating apps as employment apps and 2-minute-long video resumes, more money keeps funneling into talent acquisition technology, as another companies gets more funding. Oh, then robots keep scaring the hell out of us, especially when they give interviews with the press and given citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Have fun while your earthly dominance lasts, humans. Go throw money at our sponsors. They rule! America’s Job Exchange, Sovren and Ratedly are the bee’s knees, yo! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash, and Joel Cheeseman, are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast. Joel: Mwah ha ha ha. What up peeps? Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your resident badass cohost, Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash, and I can't stop laughing. Joel: On this week's show, Tinder keeps swiping it's way into employment, bots are still raising truckloads of cash, and Sophia scares the absolute bejeezus out of Chad and me. Chad: Everybody. Joel: Stay tuned kiddies. Advert: Google. Lever. Entelo. Monster. Jibe. What do these companies, and hundreds of others, have in common? They all use Sovren technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our company to find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process, too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovren.com. For a free demo. Joel: Sovern. Did you survive Halloween? Chad: Oh, yeah. Not a problem, it was cold as hell, but other than that, it was good. How about you? I saw you had Axe all dressed up like a moose. Joel: Dude, we ran the gamut of just crazy costumes. The seven month old was in a Canadian moose outfit, compliments of my Canadian wife, and Stella was Dorothy, and Cole, my 11 year old meathead son was this crazy body suit of a clown. I can't even explain it. Chad: That was scary. Joel: It was nuts. Of course, he couldn't see, and he fell and ripped his outfit, and it was pretty bad. Halloween's great. It's a great time. The leaves are changing here in the Midwest, and it's cooling weather. We got Thanksgiving coming up which is great. Football season's heating up. We got the World Series going to game seven. Christmas is around the corner. It's a good time. Chad: You forgot the Ohio State Buckeyes win, cause that, overall, should be put up on a pedestal. Joel: I thought we were making this an abbreviated show. It was a good one. Go Buckeyes, and the committee screwed us by putting us at number six or seven. Chad: So far. Joel: Shout outs. Chad: Shout outs. One big shout out from me, to Dave Phoebus. He's in Talent Acquisition. He sent me a LinkedIn message on Sunday, and this is what it said. "Dude, I'm sitting in Starbucks, laughing out loud, listening to your podcast. Recruiting is marketing, is my rallying cry." He sent me this link to this video, which is awesome. You can check it out, just search recruiting is marketing on YouTube. It's an explainer video, and it hits many of the points that you and I talk about, it seems endlessly, on this pod. Thanks Dave, and keep listening man, because recruiting is marketing. Continue to use that as your rally cry, man. Joel: It'll have to...what's the word I'm looking for? Anyway, so I've been watching David Pumpkin's rehash videos on SNL on YouTube. I've been on YouTube a lot. I'll go check out recruiting is marketing, is that it? Chad: Recruiting is marketing. Joel: It's probably like, eight Chris Russell videos in there too. Chad: Probably underneath, yeah. Joel: I have one shout out, I guess. When we ask people to leave questions and comments through our really creative hashtag chadcheese on Twitter, no one says anything, except the Job Board Doctor. I'm gonna use a little reverse psychology this week, and say don't leave any comments or questions for us on Twitter with the hashtag chadandcheese, okay? Don't do it. It makes us mad. Chad loses sleep, I overeat. Just don't do it, okay? Maybe that'll change the tide and actually get some engagement with our listeners. Jesus. Chad: I don't know what it is. People like to reach out to us behind closed doors, like in email, or through the website, or through LinkedIn. It's like, nobody can see my shit, is what it is, so it's kind of fun. Joel: Nobody wants to be called out like your buddy from Adweek. Maybe they're all on Tinder for jobs, cause that's apparently a thing. Chad: Oh, you mean Workey? Joel: Yeah, let's get to our first story. Chad: TechCrunch. Joel: Workey. Let's spell it right. W-o-r-k-e-y. Chad: Work, e, y. Joel: Workey, Workey. Chad: From the TechCrunch article, and you said it before we were prepping for this. You said, "why does TechCrunch actually write about this shit?" It's a good question because, Workey says - Joel: If you're launching something, send it to TechCrunch and just make sure Tinder for jobs is in the title, and they'll write about it. Chad: It has taken the place of eHarmony for jobs in the garbage pile of technology that's out there, right? Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: So, Workey is actually a chat box that goes through a series of questions that asks you about your current job, blah blah blah, and then it uses AI, which I think is bullshit, too, because AI... I just don't think people understand the definition of AI, but anyway. The whole premise behind this thing is 85 percent of people that are out there are open to new jobs. 85 percent of people who have jobs are open to new jobs. But only twelve percent of them are searching for new jobs. Chad: Workey believes that if you download this app, you can Tinder your way, you can swipe your way to a better life. I don't get it, cause I don't know how in the hell you're going to get people to download this damn app. Joel: First of all, the news release has Generation Z in it. I'm just still pissed at the millennials to even start thinking about how Generation Z is gonna get jobs. Second thing is, we've done this, kind of. Jobr, creatively spelled was basically Tinder for jobs. You would look at a picture of a building, where the job was, they'd pull some random picture of a building. It would have the job, which initially, they hoped that recruiters would actually post jobs on Jobr, which so few did that they said, "Let's go get Indeed's API, and we'll pull the jobs in." Everything was not relevant at all, for the most part. Location was, but you'd just swipe through random jobs, and there was no context to it at all. Joel: Monster, being the idiots that they are, over paid for Jobr, apparently $12 million, or something like that. So, now, Tinder for jobs is back. Actually, it never went away. It's still failing, and my guess is, these guys are the next iteration of a failing app that claims that it's Tinder for recruitment. Chad: Here's the fun part. It says, "The Workey generates..." Just saying Workey, I'm mean, give me a fucking break. Workey generates revenue by charging per successful candidate. I don't even know what that means. Per successful candidate. Is that an application? Is that a hire? What the... is a successful candidate? Joel: Look, to make these things work, you need job seekers, and you need content. If you're taking the content from Indeed or ZipRecruiter, or wherever, making that stuff relevant for a mobile experience just doesn't work. Then you need the people to use it, but there's not enough native jobs. You're just pulling in this API stuff. It... just stop. Let's move on man, I'm over it. It gets worse. This is the rant podcast, apparently. Joel: We have a new app, O'Hire. I want you guys who are listening to envision an internet brand with an apostrophe in it. Chad: O'Charley, or O'Brien. Joel: Or, O'Hare airport, which, by the way if you type in O'Hire in Google, it gives you 20 related 20 related searches to O'Hare airport, but that's beside the fact. O'Hire, let's stay on the name for a little bit. How many internet companies do you know with an apostrophe and, guess what their url is? I'll give you two guesses. Chad: I think it's O dash hire, isn't it? Joel: It's O dash, or O hyphen technically. If you type in Ohire without the hyphen. It takes you to a page that says, "This domain is for sale." They didn't even have the wearwithal to go buy the domain, which by the way, Ohire is probably not that expensive to buy. Ohire is wrong, you have to have the hyphen. Thank God they didn't make it O hyphen hire dot IO something, because that's really hot right now. Joel: The idea of this thing is video resumes. Can we stop reinventing the resume for two days? Because, it's fine as it is. This site will let you post a video resume of up to two minutes long. When a recruiter looks at a paper resume, or something online. How long does it take them to decide whether it's worth moving forward or not? Chad: Preliminary scan's gonna be seconds. Joel: Seconds, like under five. A good recruiter, like, one, two, nope, one, two, okay. This company thinks that recruiters are gonna watch two minute videos, when they're used to scanning resumes in seconds to decide whether to move on or not. That's a major hurdle to this, and it's just not gonna work. Joel: The website itself shows people playing guitar. Playing guitar, dancing, painting, from a job... It's a bad dating app if it's a dating app. Chad: It's a dating app. Joel: It's the worst ever. I'm gonna hit on chicks saying I'm a recruiter wanting to "hire them." O apostrophe God. I don't wanna waste too much time on this, but recruiters aren't gonna surf these things. There's some level of search, where you have tags, and what not, but job seekers aren't gonna make a Hollywood presentation for this site that no one uses. Chad: Here's the most important piece. Companies are not gonna pay for this shit. Here's why, they can't. Companies are doing everything they can right now to fight bias, and also prove that they're trying to fight bias. That's why companies have adopted things that they... they call it blind recruiting. Here's an article, just an excerpt from an article from Fast Company from back in March. "Blind recruitment is the practice of removing personally identifiable information from the resumes, applicant, etc. So the name, gender, age, education, so on and so forth. The big question is, why is this necessary? These are the types of things that companies, like O'Hire needs to understand before the come out with shit like this. Chad: Why is it necessary? The National Bureau of Economic Research actually shows people with ethnic names needed to send out fifty percent more resumes before they get a call back from job hunters, unless you have a white sounding name. Actually white in air quotes. White sounding name. Joel: Chad. Chad: It's bad enough, yeah, no shit right? It's bad enough - Joel: Joel. Chad: When we can't even see a person, whether they're dancing, or any of that stuff. Then we can see them, then the unconscious bias goes through the roof. So, guys, this is definitely going on the hot, steaming pile of garbage. Joel: Yep, it's been a while. This one is a passionate chuck on the steaming, hot pile of garbage. Chad: If you're a company, and you're actually looking at this, and you're saying, "Wow, this is actually pretty cool." This is the reason, I'm sure you can probably see what's happening here. This is the reason why you need to have companies who know what the hell they're doing, to be able to shepherd you down the right path before you screw yourself and your company out of hundreds of millions of federal contract dollars. That's why you have companies like one of our sponsors. America's Job Exchange. Joel: We love our sponsors. Chad: Hell yeah, we love our sponsors. America's Job Exchange is focused on diversity recruiting, and to be able to try to get you past these roadblocks. Because, they are a sponsor of Chad and Cheese, you can go to americasjobexchange.com/cheese. We have discounts that are waiting for you. We talked about it last week, we talked about it the week before. This is an area where most companies just don't get it, and they don't have experts in house to really get help whatsoever. That's why you need to align yourself with a company like America's Job Exchange. Americasjobexchange.com/cheese. Everything's better with a little bit of cheese. Joel: Boom, that's what I'm talking about. Everything's better with a little bit of guitar in your resume. Let's put a fork in that one cause it's over. All right, from Tinder to Chat bots. Tell us about Spoke. Chad: Is it Spoke, or is it AskSpoke, because the URL is askspoke.com. Again, this is a marketing thing that I just don't think companies get right. Joel: This is very hot now. You can name your company a really cool name, and you don't need to be Spoke.com. You can be getspoke, or askspoke, or gospoke. It's askscope.com. Chad: Askspoke.com... I don't know if it's really that cool, but still. Askspoke.com - Joel: I gotta interrupt man. When you said Askspoke, I thought it was Ass spoke, and I'm thinking about the scene from Ace Ventura, when he bends over, and the butt cheeks, and he's like "Excuse me, do you have a breath mint?" Okay, go on. Askspoke. Chad: Askspoke, I will enunciate better. My apologies. They have a series... A, they landed series A of eight million, they got a series B of funding - no it was a series A of eight, series B of 20, so they've gotten 28 million thus far. Joel: I don't read these stories, obviously. Chad: I know, but it seems pretty interesting, because the premise is very simple. Once you get on-boarded into an organization, you have a shitload of questions. Even if you've been in the organization for a while, you wanna ask about your 401k or - Joel: May I ask you a question? Chad: Yeah, ask a question internally. Joel: May I ask you a question. Chad: What these guys have put in place with Askspoke, is that they have a chat bot, and you can ask, you are an employee, you can ask the company chat bot a question, and it'll pull back answers for you. More than likely it'll direct you to what you have to do, steps, and all that other fun stuff. It's really just a chat bot, so it's not - J oel: It's kind of like an intranet chat bot. When I join the company, I can go there, and say, "where's the bathroom," and the chat bot will direct me to the bathroom, basically. Chad: Possibly. I don't know that it knows geography on where you're actually at, unless you have microchip in your head, or in your thumb, or wherever the hell they're putting those things now. I think it's a very simple, very smart way to use chat technology. I don't think it's really AI as much, but it looks like 20 - Joel: How many coworkers are Browns fans? Does not compute. Chad: Zero. Then automatically, you get an email having to go to your manager's office because you're about ready to get fired. Joel: Seriously, do you like this idea? Chad: I do, I think it's easy, it's smart, and you're using technology. I think it's very easily used where you take all these goddamn FAQs, instead of making somebody scroll through the shit, they just ask, and the chat bot comes back at you. Joel: I'm sorry, is a search box on the FAQ page too much to ask? Chad: Sometimes, because, again, interaction. It's about engagement, right? I know old guys like you don't know about that stuff, but it's okay. Joel: I'm a day younger than you. Don't you forget it. Joel: Chad, employment branding has been in the news lately. Chad: You don't say. Joel: I do say. Your buddy Tim Sackett wrote an article recently. What did that thing say? Chad: We talked about it yesterday. We were talking about... there were many different aspects... not yesterday, but on the last pod, so if you didn't listen to the last pod, listen to that one, and then listen to this one again. It was focused on, really reviews, online reviews, and how Glassdoor reviews could perspectively, not just hurt your reputation on Glassdoor, but now Google is linked into those reviews. Guess what? They're starting to weight your company's reputation on those reviews. You could be getting, I keep saying this, firebombed by people on Glassdoor, and what is is, Kununu, is that the one? Joel: It is Kununu, yes. Are you saying that if I had bad reviews at my companies, my jobs might not rank as highly, and vice versa? Chad: Yeah. I'm saying that they might not rank as high, and also on other aspects of search, in actual Google search itself, you might not be coming up at all. Joel: Geez. That means that monitoring your employer reviews are more important than ever. Chad: Makes a hell of a lot of sense. Would you need a team of people to do that? Joel: You would not. You have bots, which are popular on this show. You have a company called Ratedly, that will actually be like your Lifelock for employment branding. Ratedly goes out and monitors your reviews. Brings it back to you in an easy to read dashboard, as well as alerts you via email when those alerts, or those reviews come through. Guess how much it costs? Chad: It's gotta be at least a thousand dollars a month. Joel: I know, right? That's what you would think. It's only $147 per month. No contracts. Software is a service, you can cancel anytime. Glassdoor just sent out a press release a couple days ago saying, "35 percent of employers will increase their employer branding investment in the next year." Chad: And they should. Joel: Well, I, for one, recommend that they go to Ratedly as part of that investment. Chad: Yes, and here's the thing. You don't want to have just one person on this thing. If I was a CEO of a brand, I would want to know what people are saying about us. You can have a bunch of different users. Obviously, it's $147 per person, which is still pretty cheap, and goes easy on that corporate credit card, but it only makes sense, especially again, how much Glassdoor and now, all these different review sites are actually starting to impact how job seekers are looking at possibly working at your company, or saying, "Go to hell, I'm not working for you." Joel: It's huge, and there's a discount. If you use, go to Ratedly.com, and use the coupon code Cheddar, you'll get to try Ratedly for only one dollar, yes, only one dollar. If you hate it, just cancel it. If you love it, just pay $147 a month after that. Chad: Sounds like a blast Joel: Awesome. Robots are scaring us a little bit, Chad. Chad: Dude, the whole Saudi Arabia, Sophia AI robot, just creepy, yeah. That could prospectively create nightmares. Joel: Saudi Arabia granted citizenship, as I understand it, to the first synthetic human being slash robot in history. This thing gave interviews to the press. It looks pretty human. It sounds pretty human. It answers questions pretty correctly. We don't know if these questions were seeded, or if this thing really can understand, which I don't know why it couldn't. My Google donut at home knows what the hell I'm talking about. I'm guessing it does. This thing scares the bejeezus out of us. Chad: Yeah. Joel: 20 years from now, this thing will look human, it'll sound it, it'll understand stuff. Chad: I don't think it'll take 20 years. Joel: We're done. It's end of days people, just enjoy the final, comfortable days of life, because Schwarzenegger's coming, and we're all done for. It won't be called Terminator, it'll be called Sophia. Chad: When Sophia knocks at your door, it won't be as terrifying as Schwarzenegger. No bullshit, man, she was freaky as hell. Joel: I wanna say she was one, she was the robot months back that said humans weren't worthy of living or worthy of existing. They have since updated her software, but, yeah, who knows. I don't know, from a work perspective, employment perspective, Sophia's gonna be behind every cash register, she's gonna sell you your pairs of shoes. I don't know, man. I wanna be hopeful and optimistic, but robots are getting smart. They look like us, they're smarter than us, they're gonna be faster. There are gonna be a bunch of six million dollar men and women, super speed. Joel: There's gonna be some random country that has a stockpile of these Sophias, and they're gonna unleash them on the world, and be the world's superpower for the next thousand years. Chad: Like El Machina. Joel: If Hitler had an army of Sophias, ooh, S, Sophia, I don't know there's a connection there, maybe... Sophia, we'd all probably be speaking German today. Chad: Yeah, we probably would. I'd ring the bell on that. Joel: Yeah, let's ring the bell and get this thing over with. It's been a fun week. Look, with the holidays coming, the shows gonna be a little loosey goosey. The news is gonna be a little less impactful, little more fun. Hope you like it. We're gonna roll with it and see how it goes. Chad: It's always fun. We're out. Joel: It's always fun. We out. #Tinder #OHire #Workey #Robots #AI #Sophia

On this Halloween edition of The Chad and Cheese Podcast, Chad and Joel welcome Howie Schwartz, CEO of Crowded to the Firing Squad. Howie believes Crowded Refresh will be a big treat because it can bring old and dead candidates back to life. That’s right ZOMBIES!?! Or maybe just a shitload of money companies don’t have to spend looking for new candidates. Howie believes Crowded Refresh will be a huge success and make the applicant tracking system black hole a thing of the past. Will Howie and Crowded Refresh receive massive applause, golf clap, or be laid to rest by the Firing Squad? No tricks only treats are going to get Crowded through this one. For newbies: Firing Squad is a ghoulishly raw podcast which focuses on showcasing recruitment industry startup companies, technology, products, and solutions. Just think Shark Tank with less billionaires and more snark. Listen to find out. Then visit sponsors Sovren, Ratedly, and America’s Job Exchange. #FiringSquad #Crowded #Refresh #TATech

Chad enlists Tim Sackett – from The Tim Sackett Project at TimSackett.com – to fill in while Joel sits on the beach, sipping margarita’s while wearing a speedo. (Try and get that picture out of your brainpan Anyways.. In this episode Chad and Tim venture into the Recruiter killing fields of AI (Artificial Intelligence for you non-believers). Can recruiters survive in an environment where they must compete with machine learning and technology that can perform tasks in mere seconds that takes recruiters days? Will recruiters evolve? If so, what will they become? SnapChat gets into the wearables business. What in the Hell is SnapChat doing selling those Spectacles out of a vending machine? Will anyone actually buy them? If so, are they stylish enough and do they make Tim’s butt look big? Tim brings his canary in the “recruiting coal mine” theory to the pod for further discussion. Has the tech bubble started to burst? Is TA blowing VC budgets and doing a course correction? Or is AI starting to make an actual impact on recruiting gigs? Too soon man! TOO SOON!? We also learn that everyone loves their ATS and hates their CRM. Wait a minute, they LOVE their ATS?? No that’s just Smashfly crying wolf. Although, do ATSs take a bum wrap from Talent Acquisition’s inability to leverage technology? What is TA doing with marketing platforms in the first place? Last but not least HiQ declares CrowdJustice!? A crowdfunding initiative to help defend against the eventual onslaught of LinkedIn and Microsoft legal dollars. Is the public internet really public? Will David be able to hold off two Goliath’s? All of these topics, questions, ranting, rumbling, and more on this week’s The Chad and Cheese Podcast – HR’s Most Dangerous Podcast. Don’t forget to visit: Ratedly.com, Sovren.com and AmericasJobExchange.com/cheese. They are the reason for The Chad and Cheese season. #AI #Robots #SnapChat #Smashfly #HiQ #Sackett

Welcome to another episode of The Chad and Cheese Podcast. This week the boys are coming at you on a Sunday morning (more on that in the podcast), which means they still may be a little drunk from Saturday. On this week’s episode, a job board owner get intimately acquainted with the pokey, Facebook keeps rollin’ through the ‘hood and tearin’ shit up, and Johnson & Johnson finds its sunny disposition. As usual, visit our sponsors, America’s Job Exchange, Ratedly and Sovren. Without them, Chad and Cheese would probably just be livin’ in a van, down by the river. Giddyup! #DavidKent #JnJ #Jibe #Google

What’s up, party people? On this week’s podcast, the plot between HiQ and LinkedIn thickens, the race to recruiting chatbot glory continues and maybe Microsoft’s ATS sucks more than we thought. “… imagine if a company that you’ve never heard of used automated bots to download your public profile (viewable via search engines such as Google), analyzed it to identify behavioral signals that you’re job shopping and warned your employer.” The boys discuss the state of web scrapers as various industries sound-off on hiQ vs. LinkedIn. Facebook quietly launches Workplace for Mac and PC chat apps, as well as integrating screenshare. It’s a nice product, but what the hell is Facebook actually doing in regards to employment. Are they a job board or a Slack assassin? Let’s dive in. The we move onto chatbots with Breezy HR’s new feature and iCIMS disses Microsoft and releases a very cool survey on job seeker habits. Hint: Employee anonymous reviews are really important. As always, visit our sponsors. They are kickass AF … Sovren, America’s Job Exchange and Ratedly. Boomshakalaka! #HiQ #Microsoft #Chatbot #Google #LinkedIn #Facebook #Breezy #iCims

What a week. LinkedIn’s annual event took place in Nashville, Tennessee and it was an opportunity for them to drop a big ol’ poop sandwich in the lunch boxes of job boards and ATSs everywhere. Listen to learn why. And speaking of ATSs, Chad thinks they’re all being royally stupid for playing nice with a certain professional network owned by Microsoft. At least Entelo is doing it right, and the boys discuss how this company is embracing A.I. to help put sourcers out of business. Agree or disagree? We don’t really care. Moving on. Slack – and is there ever a show where we don’t talk about Slack – has partnered up with Oracle, the granddaddy of softwares and it could be an omen of things to come for the messenger app valued at $5.whatever billion. By the way, Oracle and Salesforce are arch enemies, so that probably lessens the chance they’ll be in the market to buy Slack. The boys close the show with one of the oddest news items ever in the employment space. Furniture store IKEA has purchased TaskRabbit, which sort of reminds us of Best Buy buying Geek Squad back in the day. Someone’s got to put that furniture together! As always, visit out sponsors: Ratedly, Sovren and America’s Job Exchange. They keep the beer cold. #LinkedIn #Entelo #AI #Slack #Oracle #Salesforce #IKEA #TaskRabbit

LinkedIn’s CEO from Talent Connect 2017 discussing the state of the company. Raw and unedited.

On this week’s edition of HR’s Most Dangerous Podcast, the boys are getting geared up for their LIVE Podcast in Denver next week at the TATech conference. Speaking of Denver what’s the deal with all of these Cannabis Jobs? Nearly 150,000 Americans hold “jobs in weed” and the Vangst Group seizes the opportunity to help companies find good weed talent. TakeTheInterview hears Skype’s footsteps and becomes the Hubspot for the recruiting industry with the ConveyIQ pivot and a message to recruiters – “Recruiters who don’t embrace marketing will be automated.” I’m not sure I’d use that as a slogan.??. CareerBuilder loses more newspaper affiliates, while ZipRecruiter adds a newspaper partnership with New Media in 550 markets. Joel’s excited that we’re revisiting 2003 while Chad yawns… (add crickets here) Morgan Stanley uses Snapchat to target campuses and why is Indeed giving us “the feels” all the sudden? Big props for making Chad and Cheese possible go to Sovren.com, Ratedly.com and Wonscore from Wonderlic. We couldn’t do it without you… Dammit, now I got the feels…. #Newspaper #CannabisJobs #Vangst #ConveyIQ #SnapChat #Careerbuilder

Goodtime.io’s CEO, Ahryun Moon stares down the barrel of the Chad and Cheese Firing Squad podcast. Firing Squad is a raw podcast focused on allowing recruitment industry startup companies to strut their technology, products, and solutions or just fail miserably. It’s Shark Tank out of water, which means Chad and Cheese are loaded for grizzly. Goodtime.io feels they can change the face of interview scheduling for corporate recruiters all over the nation. Are they ready for primetime? Have they thought through all of the angles? Will Goodtime receive massive applause, golf clap, or get mowed down in a salvo of rounds by the Firing Squad? Listen to find out. Then visit all of our awesome sponsors: Sovren, Ratedly and Wonscore. #FiringSquad #TATech #Goodtimeio #Scheduling

As we hit the midpoint of September, the news stories are flowing fast, so the boys cover a lot of ground this week. First, Chad goes off on ZipRecruiter, Mayweather-style, dissing their loose definition of “integration,” among other things. Women also get some primetime this week as Google heads to court in a class action suit alleging Big G discriminates by paying females less than men for the same jobs, and Pinterest touts 200 million active monthly users, which puts it into LinkedIn and Twitter territory. Walmart shows a lot of love to Facebook by targeting job candidates on the platform, targeting users in little ol’ Seymour, Indiana. Employers who aren’t paying attention are doing it wrong. Then, the guys look at news from the week, highlighting a recent product release by Crowded that aims to help employers revive the dead in their resume databases. And CareerBuilder is hoping to help companies condense their various technology resources and databases, and manage them in one platform. As always, visit our sponsors: Sovren, Ratedly and Wonscore. They buy the beer. #ZipRecruiter #Crowded #Google #Facebook #Careerbuilder

The guys have given eHarmony’s Elevated Careers a hard time from the first podcast. With the belief that candidate matching is more pixie dust and unicorns than real science and a commercially viable product, both Chad and Cheese couldn’t imagine anyone acquiring this turkey. That belief was only strengthened when Elevated Careers’ website went on pause for about 6 mos. Then came along Candidate.Guru, a site neither of the guys had ever heard of, to sweep the business out of the jaws of certain death. With an unquenchable desire to learn more, the boys invited Candidate.Guru cofounder Steve Carter on the podcast to explain the deal and learn more about this mysterious acquirer. It’s one of their most entertaining interviews, and no punches were pulled. Enjoy. And as usual, visit sponsors Sovren, Ratedly and Wonscore. They help us pay the bills. #Candidateguru #ElevatedCareers #SteveCarter

The first show to follow Labor Day weekend finds the guys especially salty and feisty. They start the show with a rant about Dice that follows up one of their best interviews of the year. Then they bring it down a bit with some news from the pizza delivery space … delivery is about to get nutty and a lot of drivers are going to be unemployed. Monster has dropped a new commercial that has the guys reminiscing about the Bugs Bunny cartoons of their youth. Trumpasaurus got a makeover and a big-time Park Ave. budget. Moving on from commercials to video interviewing, the boys talk about news from the acquisition files as one of the original video recruiting sites gets gobbled up, all the while an 800-pound gorilla named Skype awaits to destroy them all. Lastly, remember how Google and Indeed turned job postings into commodities, starting about 10 years ago? Well, Google Hire is looking like it’s going to do the same to the ATS market today. SmartRecruiters is hunkering down for a world of free, and so should everyone else. As usual, go support our sponsors, because they rock: Sovren, Wonscore and Ratedly. #Google #Monster #Skype #Dice #Indeed #SmartRecruiters

This week, the boys broadcasted live from Hinton, West Virginia at PracticeLink‘s annual corporate event. We had a great time and loved visiting West Virginia and soaking up a little southern hospitality. Much love. We covered our recent interview with Dice’s CEO and give a few opinions on what the takeaways were. There’s a lot of good advice in here for niche job boards. We look at new advertising options for recruiting desktop users and women, both solid diversity strategies. And what show would be complete without a little bashing: This time we take aim at Monster and LinkedIn. Then we take a final look at Facebook and how they continue to march into job board land. If you’re not paying close attention to what Facebook, Google and LinkedIn are doing, you’re doing yourself a big disservice. Enjoy, and as always, go show out sponsors a little love: Sovren, Ratedly and Wonscore. They make it all possible. #PracticeLink #RoadShow #Dice #Google #KenAllman #Monster #Facebook #LinkedIn #LIVE

The boys were really excited to recently chat with Dice’s CEO, Mike Durney. As listeners will know, DHI, Dice’s parent, has been through an interesting year that saw the company look at strategic options for the business (a fancy way of saying, “We’re for sale”), then take the company off the market after no sale was realized. In addition to digging into that news item, Chad and Cheese dive into what’s going to happen to the entire portfolio of job sites, including eFinancial Careers, Biospace, ClearanceJobs and the others, as well as covering usability issues and mobile challenges of the business, and the companies nosediving stock price. It’s a must-see episode for industry junkies. And be sure to visit our sponsors while you’re listening, including Sovren, Ratedly and Wonscore by Wonderlic. #MikeDurney #Dice #eFinancialCareers #BioSpace #ClearanceJobs

One of the hottest stories in recruitment right now is the legal battle between hiQ and LinkedIn. If you’re not familiar with the case, here’s a good summary: A federal judge issued a huge setback for LinkedIn on Monday, ruling that LinkedIn can’t block the startup hiQ Labs from accessing public profile data. Many news outlets were calling this a test for the social media conglomerate in how much control it can exercise over data on its users and what it’s believed to be public. The primary question in this case, can a social media site control access to information its users post publicly? According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction request brought by hiQ Labs and ordered LinkedIn to remove, within 24 hours, any technology preventing hiQ from accessing public profiles. You can also visit hiQ’s website for more information. As always, go say Hi to our sponsors: Sovren, Wonscore and America’s Job Exchange #HiQ #LinkedIn #MarkWeidick

Startup Vervoe faces the Chad and Cheese Firing Squad. Firing Squad is a podcast which allows a startup company to either showcase their technology, products, and solutions or just fail miserably. It’s a Shark Tank-like podcast with 37 pieces of Chad and Cheese flair. Vervoe wants to prove they can change the Recruiting Industry so they stepped up to the mic, reached down deep, and have chosen to face the Firing Squad. Will they received massive applause, golf clap, or get mowed down in a salvo of rounds by the Firing Squad? You’ll have to listen to find out. #FiringSquad #Vervoe #TATech

Lots going on this week. Dog days of summer be damned. EHarmony’s Elevated Careers found a buyer in this company and a little crow has to be eaten. Is it a match made in matching heaven? We’ll see. HiQ gets a ‘W’ against the big, bad LinkedIn, but this fight isn’t over by a long shot. GoodTime gets some love from Chad, but there’s not total agreement on its future and how bright it is. Is it a feature or a product? Speaking of features, LinkedIn continues to roll out some nice improvements to its service. This time, they’re helping companies build some pipelines. Lastly, the boys analyze Facebook’s latest advertising option that should seriously appeal to brick-and-mortar employers, as well as recruiters who love poaching. As always, say ‘Hi” to our sponsors Sovren, America’s Job Exchange and Wonscore. They make it all happen. #HiQ #ElevatedCareers #LinkedIn #Goodtimeio #Facebook

Another big week. The boys cover a grassroots campaign by HiQ to fight-off LinkedIn. Are you in? Indeed has gone shopping, acquiring Interviewed and taking the company into ATS territory. Can Indeed build a platform to take on Google, LinkedIn and Facebook? They sure are giving it their best shot. HR is progressively becoming a mainstay in every company’s PR efforts. As PR gets more and more competitive, marketing teams are turning to the warm-and-fuzzies of HR to cut through the clutter. We discuss. Then, we look at a 500 Startups company, VCV, who automates the sourcing and much of the recruiting at employers. Is this the future of hiring? Definitely maybe. TheLadders is knee-deep in TMZ territory with their current content marketing strategy, publishing 5-12 stories daily to generate traffic. There are opposing viewpoints on this tactic and it gets a tad heated. Lastly, we look at a company called Werk that hopes to bring flexibility to the workplace. However, that’s not what the boys find interesting. You’ll have to listen to find out what got them chatting it up. As always, visit our sponsor America’s Job Exchange, Sovren and Wonscore by Wonderlic. They make it all happen, people. #TheLadders #Indeed #HiQ #VCV #Werk

The summer of love rolls on, boys and girls. This week, LinkedIn is out for blood, Dice hits rock bottom and there ain’t no party like a microchipping your employee party. But first, the state of Wisconsin is losing its mind or maybe overindulging on cheese curds as one company throws a party to celebrate the microchipping of its employees. There’s even a T-shirt. Then, rural communities are being disenfranchised by the automation of everything. This country, however, is starting to outlaw automation. Take that, free market capitalism. Then, Indeed, not to be outdone on the ATS front by Google Hire, has acquired a business to make it more competitive. On to LinkedIn, where after a quick rant, the boys talk about a current court case with HiQ and LinkedIn, which could have serious repercussions on the HR tech industry and companies who count on LinkedIn data to do business, as well as discussing further integration into all things Microsoft. And what show would be complete without discussing Google? This week, the boys discuss some of Google Hire’s shortcomings, and there are quite a few. Then, the boys close the podcast by discussing the disaster that is the current state of Dice, a public company that’s tanking, even though tech hiring is at an all-time high. As always, support our sponsors America’s Job Exchange, Sovren, and Wonscore by Wonderlic. They make this ridiculous podcast possible. Hallelujah! #LinkedIn #Indeed #Dice #GoogleHire #HiQ

Giddyup kids! Episode 19 is in the books. Chad and Cheese are hot on Google Hire’s exploding interest and latest product demo. Chad breaks it down like a math problem. CareerBuilder’s 15 year marriage to Gannett ended in divorce this week. You’ll never guess who was waiting in the wings as Gannett swiped right! JazzHR got $6 million in funding. Talk about great timing, as we’re not sure they’d get the same interest with Google Hire live today. The boys also discuss the variety of ATS execs and what stye think of Google Hire. Also, AI is still in the news and some company in Wisconsin is putting microchips in employees. WTF? As always, visit our sponsors America’s Job Exchange, Sovren and Wonscore. They make it all possible. #Careerbuilder #JazzHR #Microchip #Gannett #GoogleHire

Replace your Recruiters with AllyO!!! No shit? Really?? Hell yeah says Ankit Somani, Co-founder of AllyO. A platform that calls itself an end-to-end solution for recruitment. Ditch your recruiters? Apparently it's not just another chatbot waiting to board the commoditization train, well, you might be right. Or wrong. You'll have to listen to see if this start-up survives The Chad & Cheese Firing Squad. Firing Squad is brought to you EXCLUSIVELY by Talroo. Our sponsors rock, by the way. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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, Jobs to Careers 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: (Laughs) No. It's a cross between talent and recruiting. But Talroo is focused on predicting, optimizing, and delivering talent directly to your email or ATS. Joel: Aha, okay. So it's totally 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. 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. 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. Gollum: Yes, me precious, yes me precious candidate, we wants it so sweet precious, yes. Announcer: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids, the Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: Ah, I'm a little bit salty, Chad. A little bit salty that the summer heat is wearing on me, you're back from Europe to be a pain in my ass. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: So I'm a little sad for our victim, or our guest today. But without further ado, I wanna introduce Ankit Somani. Did I say that right? Ankit: You got it. Joel: Of AllyO. So before your intro, I have to know, with a name like Ankit, spelled A-N-K-I-T, did you have a lot of fun nicknames growing up? Ankit: I actually was short enough that there wasn't many of them, but since I've come to U.S., people have pronounce it in so many different ways that I find them, you know, the right nicknames for me. Joel: Well, yeah. Chad and I had fun with it before the show, before we started recording. Like Spankit, Crankit. Chad: Crankit. Joel: Yankit. Chad: Yeah. Stankit. See, I mean ... Ankit: I'm glad I didn't go to school with you guys. Joel: Yeah, dude, we're public school. Chad: We're still just 12 year olds. Joel: So Ankit, welcome to the show. Quick introduction and then Chad will go into the rules and we'll get to it. Ankit: Thank you, thank you for having me on the show. So hey everyone, I'm Ankit Somani, I'm co-founder of AllyO, been in the U.S. for about 11 years now. Most of my time in Bay Area. My last job before starting this company, I was at Google for about five years, spending time building bunch of artificial intelligence and machine learning products, including my last job, which was in the Smart Replies Gmail thing, it was a fun thing. Joel: Shit. Chad just got real excited when you said Google. Chad: I hope you didn't hear the heavy breathing. Joel: So Chad, tell him the rules. Chad: It is very simple. Okay, Ankit, you will have two minutes to pitch AllyO. At the end of that two minutes, you'll hear the bell. Then Joel and I are gonna hit you with rapid fire Q&A. If your answers aren't concise, Joel's either gonna hit you with the bell, but I'd rather hear him hit you with the crickets. That means you need to tighten your game up and get moving. At the end of the Q&A, you're either gonna receive one of these three from both of us. A big applause, that means you've exceeded expectations. Golf clap, you're on your way but you still have a lot of work to do. And last but not least, it's the Firing Squad. Joel: You do not wanna hear that. Chad: Yeah, pack your shit up and go home at that point. So that's Firing Squad. It's time to buckle up and pitch AllyO. Joel, are you ready to go? Joel: I'm ready. Ankit, you ready? Ankit: I am. Joel: Two minutes starts. Ankit: Awesome. Okay, so AllyO is an end to end AI recruiter with a simple mission: make recruiting delightful and efficient for everyone, and I really do mean everyone. So let's take each stakeholder at a time. Candidates today have a poor experience filling out long applications and not hearing back often from employers, which leads to low-capture rates and high drop offs. For them, we have a deep work flow chart part that helps them go all the way from, "Hi, I'm interested in a job," to hired, and even beyond day 0, all over mobile texting or web chart. Ankit: And we see over 90% application completion rates and about 95% positive sentiment. On the other hand, hiring teams are overboard with administrative tasks, which makes them slow to respond and often leads to high cost of recruiting. We automate the ebb and flow in jobs, so it's cleaning, assessments, scheduling, onboarding, and as I had mentioned, post-hire check-ins, so that they see over 50% time, in some cases, over 90% cost or higher, while getting two to six interviewable candidates. Ankit: Finally, HR leaders often feel a lack of visibility and control in the recruiting process. For them, we bombard them with the right actionable insights around candidate quality conversions. 360 degree feedback between hiring teams and candidates in both process and retention, such that they can have the right strategic conversations with their operations counterparts. All of this over the past few years were proven with several large customers, like Hilton, Brinker, which is the parent company for Chili's and Maggiano's, Arby's, Sprout's, Farmer's Market, and many more. Ankit: Going back to where I started, we use AI to automate end to end process and create an experience for a system for all stakeholders. We are backed by the likes of Google AI fund, Randstad Innovation fund, and Bain Capital Ventures. If you wanna know more about ... Joel: Finish it, finish it. Ankit: I was just gonna say, if you wanna know more about us, check us out at allyo.com. Joel: He got the shot off. When he said, "Find out," and I said, "Just finish it. Finish it, for god's sakes." Chad: Okay, Ankit, if you could isolate one major problem AllyO solves for TA, what would it be? Ankit: I think it's automation of end to end process, combined with the right candidate experience. And both of them go hand to hand, because if you think about candidates, they are having a poor experience only because there are lots of steps in the process and it takes a long time for them to go through it. Chad: It sucks, yeah, yeah. Ankit: And so in that process, if you can automate it, give them a responsive experience and they get a good experience, and hiring teams get more candidates because they are having a better experience. They go through the process much more than before. Chad: Well, you're talking about process. So this is one of the things that Talent Acquisition I don't really think understands, is that there's so many different processes that a chat bot or texting or messaging can actually get into. Explain how deep AllyO goes into the recruitment process. So give us a step by step. What are you actually doing for the candidate, for the hiring team, and obviously for the HR leader? Ankit: Yeah, absolutely. So if you think from a candidate perspective, they start off with, "Hey, I might be interested in a job," and that might be looking at a job ad or it might be going on a career's page, or they've just been in the talent pool of some company. Chad: Right. Ankit: From that point on, you want to take them all the way to getting hired, and that involves helping them with the right job search, getting them screened, schedule the right reminders, onboarding. All of those processes are completely automated with our system for several companies, so much so that we have some customers where AllyO is the only recruiter in the entire organization. Chad: Whoa, stop, stop, stop, stop. Say that again. AllyO is the only recruiter in the entire organization. I wanna hear you say that one more time. Ankit: We have organizations where AllyO is the only recruiter in the entire organization, directly reporting to the director of TA. Chad: Holy shit. Joel: Ankit, I'm gonna back up a little bit. Your experience, while impressive, has no employment recruitment in its background that I heard. The dead pool in this industry is littered with people, from Silicon valley with nice degrees who didn't understand the space that failed. So what makes you and your company able to break that trend? Ankit: Totally, and you are absolutely right. But me and my co-founder, and we've been friends for like 15 odds years, we were both in professional space. Never done recruiting before. So what did we do? We left our job and we started a staffing company. And for seven months we camped out in restaurants, malls, hospitals, in front of ICU's, and whatnot, trying to really get people who were looking for jobs and hiring teams who were looking to hire candidates, and make that happen, right? Get people jobs, and that is how we wanted to learn what really goes on. Ankit: 'Cause you know, you can imagine in Google, it's mostly professional recruiting, at least where I was. And so for me to learn how 80% of America gets hired, what are their challenges, it was astounding. Like knowing that six out of 10 people do not show up for their on-site interviews after going through that harrowing process? Just astounding. And so that is how we learned, and then there were a lot of people who gave us good feedback as well. That's how we got ... Joel: So that's half the equation. Now how did you learn to talk to employers to sell your product? Because they are a unique beast to say the least. Ankit: You know, it's funny. For us, we literally went out to them, saying, "Hey, we have this idea, we think we can automate a bunch of your process and make the candidate experience better. I would love to get your advice." And it's funny, this industrious, so relationship-driven people are ready to give you advice. And you know, when people are giving advice, they're also thinking in the back of their mind, "Is this something that's useful for me?" So while you're making it a better product for everybody else, you're consistently being evaluated, too. So that's how we got our intro. Joel: Banks don't cash advice, the last time I checked. Are these companies actually paying for this service? Ankit: Oh, absolutely. We have not done a single free pilot or free deployments. All of our deployments, full our pilots, have been completely paid. Joel: Good. Chad: So when you're talking about, again, the process, okay, you've got pretty much pretty deep all the way into what it sounds like you go from the interview process and then you hand off to the hiring managers. Is that where you really stop? You've got the front end, with the candidate. Talk about that here in a second. Ankit: Yep. Chad: But you hand off really the at the interview process to the hiring manager, right? Ankit: That's right. In fact, you can think of AllyO as an assistant to the hiring team, where you can take the candidate all the way from job search to the first interview or the second interview schedule. But imagine the hiring manager goes through the interview, says, "Great, I wanna hire this person." Could go and say that to AllyO, and AllyO will take them through the full extension and collect background check. Now when the candidate gets hired, AllyO will go on further and do post-hire check-ins and whatnot. Ankit: So it's not really a process starts and stops and that's it. You can have multiple hand-off points at different points in the process. Chad: These points are generally when you're looking to gather information or provide information, right? Ankit: That's right. Yep. Chad: So on the front end, when we're talking about candidates, and I'm gonna generalize for a minute, but chat bots are usually reactive. Can AllyO be proactive against a requisition? Ankit: Absolutely. Chad: Okay, so can you open up a requisition? If I'm a company, can I open a requisition and have AllyO go out and engage old candidates, our silver, bronze medal candidates, so on and so forth, can you go and actually set the system off to do that as soon as I post a req? Ankit: Absolutely. In fact, there are two elements of that. Not only we'll go out to silver medalist candidates and have a conversation with them, see if they're interested, because it's not always about getting them into a job, even if you find out they're not active right now, they might be active in six months, great. Now AllyO knows what to do. But we would even go to Talent Pool and ask them for their reference. Like we would say, "Hey, you are not interested right now. Do you have a friend that might be interested?" And then get them into the process. Ankit: So both of different types can happen. Chad: So you're talking about engagements, which is pretty much what candidates and employees need anyway, right, to be able to feel like they're still part of the process instead of going into a black hole. Ankit: Yeah, imagine like playing a game of 20 questions or if you don't have any response after each question, their audio won't record, you just know at the end of 20 questions what's gonna happen. You'll find people dropping off at the 10th, 12th question. But instead, if you have a much more responsive version, write out every question you know, whether this is helping me or not, you'll get people engaged way more. Chad: Do you keep transcripts of these conversations so that they can be audited as well? Ankit: Yeah, absolutely. We have transcripts of conversations, and some employers want to see that directly. We definitely use it to train our system to become smarter. Joel: Ankit, you mentioned in your pitch that you have a 90-95% conversion rate or completion rate. Ankit: That's right. Joel: You know how that compares to sort of the typical applicant tracking system? Ankit: Yeah, so applicant tracking system, conversion rates, really a lot. Here's the challenge: most customers, when they look at completion rates, they look at people who start on an application after they have created a profile to when they complete an application, and that would be somewhere between 40 and 80%. What they miss out on is there are a lot of people who come to your career's page ATS, and the first thing they see is create this user name, password with five different special characters and there's a drop off there. So if you actually include that, you would get 3X to 4X right there in the next number of candidates going up onto even the screening process. Joel: So do companies even need an ATS if they have you? Ankit: Actually, they do. So we don't compete directly with ATS, because if you think about the ATS market, it is selling compliance and it is selling that, "Hey, if you get audited, all of the logs and everything is here exactly how it is needed." We think of ourselves as this experience for a system. We always saw a huge gap between job boards and ATS's, and found that both for candidates and for hiring teams, if you created the right engagement led, the right conversation led, then you will get more involvement happening, and the ATS's can be used as a system of record, just to store it, not where the action is happening. Chad: Yeah, so from Joel's standpoint, he knows nothing about compliance, so he doesn't even understand why somebody would use an applicant tracking system. Chad: Ah, okay. So AllyO, and you actually started off is, the end to end AI recruiter. And you guys talk about AI a shit ton through all of your sales collateral. What is your definition of AI? Everybody's using it, right? They're throwing it off their block chain, AI, machine learning. What is your definition of AI? Ankit: Yeah, I mean, I think AI today, if you look at the gurus of AI, they would tell you AI today is either automation on steroids or pattern matching on steroids. And the way we think about AI in our system is we use it in three different ways: one is during the setup process. The setup process of an AI system can be harrowing, where you need to give a lot of data. There's a lot of setup time involved. And instead, we would automatically go out, scrape job requisitions, applications, build the entire bot in a matter of hours or days, and it can be deployed in weeks. So I think there's an AI component there which is more around pattern matching. Ankit: There is an NLP component during the composition, which is natural language processing, and that is people can say open-ended things and we can understand that here's data that they're trying to give, here's a question that they want to ask, here's what they really want to do. And then the third piece is the intelligence aspect of it. Now that you have collected all of this data, and that's where the end to end aspect helps, because you have data across, is how do you use that to generate the right insights, not basic analytics. Ankit: So those are the three places I feel AI is involved. It's not the decision tree of the chat bot itself. That's not where most of the AI is. Chad: When you're talking about setup, this is a great transition, because when you get a new requisition, a brand new job, a new company, how long does it actually take to set that requisition up in the system because you have all these touch points, all these engagement points, with candidates, with obviously hiring managers, interview questions, all these different things. How long does it actually set? Because there's a lot of machine learning that still has to happen. How long does it take for that bot, the AllyO, to actually get up and running on that single req? Ankit: You know, this is probably one of the most important questions 'cause this is where rubber hits the road. Everything else is about a magical demo. And so if you look at a large enterprise, and when we are going and signing up a large enterprise, we would set up the entire conversation system, which is all the flows at the open requisition level, all the questions that need to be asked at 90% level, would be set up within hours. And we would give them a bot, a functional bot, the candidate side of it, within a day. Ankit: For us to get the remaining data around, hey, here's the interview information, if they are doing interview scheduling, or anything else that takes about a week to two weeks. So they can literally go up and running for the entire enterprise scale within two weeks. Beyond that, if you're turning on and off requisition, even if we automatically doing that looking at their careers page, it is just a matter of seconds, something that happens instantaneously. Chad: Again, we're talking about AI here. Can AllyO write its own interview questions? If you're starting to set this up and you have multiple clients, and in some cases you're gonna have very like types of requisitions, different types of jobs, job titles, things of that nature. Can AllyO write its own interview questions by because it's learned so much? Ankit: That's exactly right. I mean, if you think of a role, like, for example, let's take forklift operator. You'll find that role showing up with so many different customers, and job requisitions aren't always the best return pieces of art. And so very often you can look across different companies, you can look at what are the questions being asked. You can also look at where are candidates being stuck and where they are able to respond really well. And so not only you have what questions to ask, you also know the effectiveness of them in screening candidates. And so AllyO can do a really good job now, especially with lots of domains that we have deployed in, in coming up with those questions and the right format. Joel: Ankit, this is an incredibly competitive space right now. Super hot, right? You got Mya, Paradox, TextRecruit, Canvas. How are you guys different and how are you going to win? Or is it a winner take all scenario? Ankit: Yeah, so let me answer that question in four different parts. Or actually, two different parts. One, how are we different, and then I'll go into winner take all or not. So how are we different? We look at it in terms of three things. One is breadth. Breadth for us, and that's why we keep harping on end to end, 'cause we really believe in ATS's and deploying all of these other HR tech systems, it's been a challenge with integrating lots of different pieces of technology. And we wanted to be the single system of intelligence, which goes all the way from hire to hired to retire, or hire to hire or fire, right? Going past day zero. Ankit: So the breadth of our platform goes all the way from pre-hire to post-hire. The second part is going deep. So I'll give you an example. Interview scheduling. Most of the folks in this space will use things like Calendly to integrate, which is another system to deploy, more cost to the customer. And so we've invested a ton on our own and recruiting specific with all integrations, group panel interviews, planning your interview day, everything. So we go deep in our technology. And the third part of competitive differentiation, and I can't stress this enough, is the setup automation part that we are talking about. Because it sucks if you deploy this cool, if you want this cool new tech and it takes you four months to get it out there. It should take weeks, and you should know the results in a month or two months. Ankit: So that is how we think of differentiation. I don't look at it as winners take all at all. This market, it's so green field, which is why I don't worry so much about what competitor X or Y are doing. People find their own niches and they will grow. Right now, the encumbrance is where you are seeing the most of the value against, and so you see, VCR-wise, within three months. And so we don't see any challenge from a growth perspective. Joel: So this is not a winner take all? This is a winner take all? Are you gonna take it all? Ankit: Well, we wanna take it all. But it's a matter of getting out to as many people, the right kind of people, as quickly as possible. And I think it's good for customers to have choice, because there are different problems that people will solve. I don't see in the shot anywhere close to winner take all. I think for the next two, three years, the top two, three players who have all the data and can actually make the system much, much better compared to encumbrance, they'll see huge growth. Joel: So do you see the TextRecruit iCMS deal being a big obstacle? Or do you think that that actually just validates exactly what you're doing? Ankit: I look at it as part validation. I never thought of TextRecruit doing the same thing as we are doing. They are a texting CRM specific to an industry, and what they have done is they taken a 10 product but done really good execution, which is what got them this ultimate partnership that they are at. I look at it more as people are starting to think about it. Partners are starting to think about it, and it's getting really serious, which is a good thing. Because the growth should not only come from forward-looking customers, but partners who want to be innovative with the help of other new technology providers. Chad: Well, that being said, I mean you take a look at some of these systems that are just kind of pieces, parts of what AllyO is looking to provide or currently providing. Do you find it hard to be able to distinguish, especially when you're going out there and you're competing in the markets, between systems that are just subsets of what AllyO is actually doing? And what are you doing to be able to combat that? Ankit: Yeah, so it goes back to a couple of points I mentioned earlier. One, HR tech landscape, if you have to look at point solutions and you have to integrate them, it takes a lot of cost and effort to do that. And so it's better if there is one system that has the capability to run across, and it is especially true in the AI world because data sharing and really building on top of it is where the value comes from. That's where the two plus two greater than four comes from. So a single system that can cover all of my use cases today and future use cases that I want to get into as a single pane of glass for me and can use the data across to actually deliver the right insights I think has a ton of value. And that's where a lot of our customers really, really think of us very positive. Joel: Ankit, I think you'll agree that it's probably a matter of time before technology is Google's new Duplex, where you talk to someone, a robot, but it sounds like a real person. What are your thoughts on that versus a sort of chat bot solution? Are you committed to the text-base conversations that you currently have, or will you evolve into more of a conversation, like with a real person? What are your thoughts on that? Ankit: Great question. Let's break it down into two parts. One, chat bot is a technology itself. It's not even commoditization in future, chat bot is already available by so many different pro chat bot providers. The difficulty there is the depth of the conversation you're having and the domain specificity. So if you look at Google Duplex, in fact, they were working on it even while I was there at Google. It took three years of training odd and end with very specific conversation and gobs and gobs of data for them to produce a conversation very specific to our domain. Ankit: So the domain specificity is where it is becoming a different share to start early, gather the data, and make the conversation much, much smarter. In terms of how conversation is evolving, whether it's gonna be text-based or voice-based or completely experience-based/VR, I think everyone in this space, all they're trying to do is keep up with consumers. And consumers are so hungry, they're always trying new technology. So today, if I get a phone call on my phone, half of the time I think it's a spam, right? I'm not picking up my phone calls. But if I get a text, if you look at my text, I have zero inbox with text. I have like a thousand unread emails. So the engagement on text and the responsiveness on text is much higher, but that is something to constantly look out at and see if there are other ways in which consumers want to engage that would be better. Ankit: I'm not sure if it's phone call yet. I'm not sold on it yet. Chad: So Randstad right now I would say is AllyO's litmus test. You have funding from the Randstad Innovation Fund, the big question is, how closely are you working with them to be able to bring in new clients and how many have you actually brought in today? Ankit: I think working very, very closely with every operational entity within Randstad is, you know, it's a large conglomerate, and not just with Randstad. We're finding partners across job boards, ATS's, agencies. Everybody has a different angle to it, and the end to end in modular nature of our solution helps us work with them in different capacities. So I think there's a lot of value people are seeing, a lot of them are deploying, and we are able to show results. I think it's probably gonna take, I would say another six months to a year for a lot of those stories to become much more public. Right now we are in I would say deep deployments, trying to prove larger value. Joel: Ankit, talk to me about pricing and how that compares to some of the competition. Ankit: Yeah, absolutely. So pricing right now, because it's a shiny new toy for a lot of companies. It needs to be priced to value. And if you think about the auto I in this world, it comes from two places: one, if you are engaging that many more candidates, clearly you must be doing something in terms of reduction of source and cost. And the second thing is if you're automating processes, you must be doing something for recruiter productivity. And those two generally become part of our business case. You know, so we are easily able to show those two elements, a three-ish month auto I for many of our customers. And I was telling you, there was a customer which even saw 90% reduction in their cost to hire. Ankit: The way we think about pricing, beyond that is people will always come back to technologies that they already have deployed, and we tend to see pricing comparable more than sometimes people rather, whatever they invest in ATS's, because the value proposition is very different. So I think competition, it's not clear how everybody is pricing it, but people are trying to price based on value and it generally comes down to number of open requisitions, number of hires, or number of productivity hours that are increasing. That's how people are pricing it. Joel: And you did a very good job of dancing around that question as well as your competition, 'cause we don't know what anything costs at this point. Contact us now for pricing. Ankit: Yeah, I think that is the right thing. Honestly, I really want people what problem they're solving, whether that problem has a business value for them, and then look at pricing from that context, because otherwise it's just like, oh my god, this is so much or this is so little, it doesn't' really get compared against the right thing. ATS ... Joel: All right, all right, all right. We got your answer on pricing. Chad, you wanna take him the Squad? Chad: Yeah, let's go ahead and do this thing. Are you ready, Ankit? Ankit: I am. Chad: Excellent, excellent. Well, I might have to start off right out of the gate in saying that hearing that you actually have clients that are starting to, I don't want to say get rid of, let's say reprioritize what the recruiters are actually doing in allowing AllyO to go in there and start to focus on process efficiencies and just making the entire process that much quicker, because this all comes down to one thing. And we might talk about talent, we might talk about how much less time it works, whatever it is, but it's all about cost. It's all about how much can a company save, and that comes down then to the whole time to fill and all that other fun stuff. What you guys are doing at AllyO, and I'm a big chat bot fan overall, but just from the standpoint of what you're doing, not just on the standpoint of being able to engage, because I think engagement is something that we need desperately in this industry, but your ability to attract, which is huge. Chad: Screen, interview, onboard, and then constantly as you say on the AI side of the house, the machine learning, you're improving the actual system over and over. I think there's still a lot of work to be done with regard to the pitch and being able to keep it simple stupid for Talent Acquisition and the rest of us dummies that are out there, but at the end of the day, you're getting a big applause. Joel: Wow. Very nice. All right, well I will start off by saying I love Five Guys cheeseburgers, and Five Guys is a client. So automatically you guys are starting on the right foot with me. But I will second what Chad mentioned, but I just think that you're clearly a smart guy. I've met you and your partner before, the core competencies around your time at Google I think are gonna pay dividends big time in this industry. It's clearly crowded, but when there's a crowded industry, there's usually a ton of opportunity there. And I think that whether you think there's a winner take all or not, there will probably be at least a Coke and Pepsi in this space, and a few Fanta's and Dr. Pepper's after that. Joel: But I think if you're in the Coke or Pepsi realm in this space, you're in a very good position because this technology is going to save time, energy, the engagement that you're seeing with 90, 95% completion rates with candidates, that's all fantastic data. So I will second my colleague in saying that I think you guys have a high mountain to climb, but I think you have the tools, the funding, I think the current client base that you have to at least be that Coke or Pepsi when all is said and done. So I'll give ... Chad: What? What? Joel: This big applause is for you, my friend. Chad: What? Joel: I know, boo. Too big applauses, man, we gotta be tougher, Chad. So last one, real quick. How did you come up with the name AllyO? 'Cause it's not great. Ankit: Oh, you think so? What we did, in fact we actually tried different genders in there, we initially stared with Dave and then we had Ally. We want to leave it with something gender neutral and also something memorable, and we actually found good results with AllyO, and so that's why we stuck with it. Joel: Well congratulations either way. Thanks for your time on the Squad and congratulations. Chad: Congrats and good luck. Ankit: Thank you very much. Chad: We out. Joel: We out. Announcer: 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. #AllyO #FiringSquad #Talroo #Chatbot

On a slow week that saw us celebrating America's birthday, the boys are taking a break from the weekly rundown and chatting with The War for Talent's James Ellis. Chad cornered the poor guy at a recent conference and dug into a wide variety of topics. Enjoy, and be sure to visit our sponsors, JobAdX, Sovren and America's Job Exchange. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION: 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. Chad: All right. Hey kids. It's Chad from the Chad & Cheese podcast. We are here today with ... James: James Ellis. Chad: ... James Ellis. James: That's right. The most boring name in all of creation. I think there are about 1,000 of us. Chad: But you've got a podcast. James: It's true I do. Chad: Yeah. James: That doesn't make me any easier to find online. My name is completely SEO adverse. There is in fact a stupidly annoying fit dude who makes his money pushing pictures of his six pack abs names James Ellis. Not me. My ab is more of a keg shape. Yeah, that's not me. James: But I am James Ellis. I have a podcast The Talent Cast. Chad: The Talent Cast. James: Yep. And I'm on Twitter @thewarfortalent. That's kind of the best way to find me, or discover me, or annoy me, or poke at me, or tell me I'm wrong. Chad: The War for Talent. Kind of cliché. James: The War for Talent. Yes. But the feeling I had four years ago when I realized it was available. I was like, "Are you kidding me? No one's grabbed this already? Mine." Chad: Yeah. Oh, hell yeah. James: To be fair, Tom Peters, who is a personal hero of mine ... he's on my Mount Rushmore ... he has yelled at me on Twitter about my account being too much. "We don't like the war vernacular anymore." I'm like, "I get it. You're my hero. This is complicated emotionally but here we are." Chad: "But here we are, and I really like it, and it's mine." James: Exactly. "Suggest something better, how about that. Until you can suggest something better, easy to remember that connects to this idea, thanks for your complaints." Chad: "Not to mention, I think you're trying to push me off of it so that you can have it. That's what I think you're doing." James: You think that was a big strategy. Chad: That's what it was. James: "I'm in the middle of writing my last book ever and I'm going to complain to this guy ..." Chad: Yes. James: "... about his Twitter handle because I want it." Chad: That's exactly right. James: Who's to say? Chad: I don't know. So what do you want to talk about today? We talk about how tech stacks are stupid or what? James: Yes. That they're stupid, yes, absolutely. Chad: Okay. So, what is the tech stack? This is a new term, literally, right? James: Oh, yeah. Chad: So, over maybe, what, the last 18, 24 months or so it's like everybody has to focus on a "tech stack." James: Yeah. So for years, and years, and years, everything was about what's your ATS. And the ATS was the Christmas tree and companies would come along and hang their particular ornaments on that particular Christmas tree. You had iCIMS, or Taleo, or Workday, or whatever you had. "Blah-blah-blah is a great tool. Does it work in my ATS? No. Well, then it's not useful to me." James: So as the ATS's started to become less of the core of everything we do when you get CRM tools and you get communication tools, you don't have a single Christmas tree, you have a stack of technologies, hopefully, fingers crossed, pray to God that they work together in any way, shape or form. And that is not an obvious thing to say. You hope that they work together and that is what's called the tech stack. Used to be a marketing stack depending on what technologies you used to promote your product and push your message out there. But that idea of a technical stack comes from the developer side. James: It's like LAMP. So it's Linux, Apache Service System and two others I can't remember. [crosstalk 00:03:30] I think was one of them. It was just this idea of what's your ecosystem? Where do you live? And once you define that, okay. James: The reason we all have to define it is so other vendors can go, "Ah, you're a target. You have a tech stack I can sell to and you just put a target on yourself. And guess what, you're going to get nothing but emails, and phone calls, and pitches on LinkedIn." Cold pitches on LinkedIn. What are people doing? What are you doing? I don't know you. Yeah, I want to talk to you. Chad: Stay away from me. Stay the hell away from me. James: So, talking about the tech stack is like saying, "What's the weather like? Is it rainy or is it sunny?" It's like, look, you need to do a job. The tech stack is a resource but you can't run and funnel everything through your tech stake. There's so many ways to get something done. And I think we forget that. We focus so much on the tech stack usually because it takes up like 98% of our budgets ... Chad: Yes. James: ... and consequently we think about it. But the focus needs to be on what's the message? Who are you speaking to? How do you speak to them? What are the recruiters doing? How are they connecting people? If they're your people ninjas ... I hate when people use the word ninjas. Please find me another word that. I will refrain from rock stars. Chad: Is it on your LinkedIn profile? That's my criteria. James: Yeah, it's there. But if you've got recruiters who are all about being people people, the tech stack should enable, support and engender them. Or are you using it to limit them, keeping them from doing certain things? James: So, I'm going to say let's make up an ATS names Work night. And it's a really good tool for a lot of things ... Chad: But not everything. James: ... but not everything because no such thing is perfect for everything. The world's greatest knife is not a very good fork. But you are trying to sell me video. You're telling the power of video is you can show stories, and you can tell the stories, and they're amazing. So my tech stack says I can't embed video in my job post. So I guess I can't. James: So it's a way of telling vendors know. And I get that it's a defensive mechanism, but stop saying no to things. Start thinking about, "Okay, how do we do that? How do we get a video out to somebody? How do we focus on telling a message out there?" James: I'm a firm believer that your employer brand, your message, is just as powerful with $10 worth of sidewalk chalk and a well thought out quote as it is on your let's call it $300,000 tech stack. Chad: So, you talk about how some tech stack pieces just don't work well together. How and the hell does that even happen in the day and the age of API? James: Well, because most of this stuff so predates the cloud thinking and API thinking. So, for those of you who are younger than 30, there was a dead phase of time in which entire rooms of your office were very, very, very cold for a very reason. To keep the heater that you called your server rack from melting. Simply put. James: So 15 years ago, 10 years ago the cloud happened. Chad: Before the cloud. James: Amazon web services said, "Oh yeah, we'll just sell you bandwidth. We'll sell you cycles on our code so you can just shut all those server rooms down." So before then you've got to think of everything was in that room and HR being HR says, "Lock the door. Nothing goes in or out. We have a guard, we have a key, we have a passcode. You've got to do a retinal scan just to get in or out. So any information you can't get in or out." That's why. James: So they didn't want any interaction, they didn't that information getting out. They knew how to get in and out. That all that mattered. HR is not about marketing. And as HR has matured, recruiting has matured to be more marketing focused, it's realizing, it's butting up against the limitations of what the ATS could do and with how the ATS thought, and really how HR thinks. James: Now you are starting to see ATS's that have a lot of API's, and have a lot of hooks, and they can do a lot more. But they aren't open sourced, they're not connected very well, they are limited in what they can do. So you take that example of Work Night, and you say, "Why can't I drop HTML into my job description?" And you are allowed to drop HTML but very limited. James: Bold, a link, a header, bulleted list. And that is the end of that list. And I always go, "The amount of code that went into the backend that said I'm going to let certain things in but not all this other stuff like images." Images. What hurt could be caused by an image on a job description except, "Hey look, it's attractive. Hey look, it's an interesting building. Hey look, it's a cool office. Hey look, people doing interesting things." They've made choices from a technical standpoint to limit your ability to communicate. Chad: Which is one of the reasons why we have so many different needs for these layers of the tech stack. James: Yeah. So if you want to put a video an ATS like that and you can't, okay, how do you shoehorn that process in? You make a separate site and embed the video there. Chad: Right. James: And that's going to cost you something fierce. And that just became part of your tech stack too. Chad: It could screw your entire process. I mean, all the different hoops that you have to jump through, all the different pages that you have to visit just to be able to get to the start of the application process. James: Flip it around. How many steps does a recruiter have to go through to post a job? Literally, it is the one task every recruiter does. It is the most basic task in the world and every ATS goes, "You think that'd be simple but here you go. It's really like this." And you have to publish, and turn on, and turn off, and open up, and open up this field way over here, and a page way over here just to change the setting to go back and republish, rewait and see if it ... It's insane. James: If you look at any recontent management system ... WordPress or anything like that ... like the ability to edit, and change, and publish code is seconds. Chad: Boom, boom, yeah. It's quick. James: To just say, "Oh, I need a new image, I need to change that word, oh, there's a typo, fix it, boom you're done." Do that in any ATS and I'll see you at the bar in an hour. Joel: It's commercial time. AJE: America's Job Exchange is a market leader in diversity recruitment and an OFCCP compliant solution provider. We serve over 1,000 customers consisting of federal contractors to SMBs and Fortune 500 organizations. AJE: America's Job Exchange specializes in job distribution to over 6,500 state one stop career centers and community based organizations, ensures the creation and maintenance of state credentials, obtains veteran preference on job postings, robust outreach management, and supports effective positive recruitment efforts designed to recruit individuals with disabilities, veterans, women, and minorities. AJE: For more information, call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Chad: It's show time. Chad: So why do we have recruiters doing those types of tasks in the first place? There should be an, "I need button." You push that button. You have standardized job descriptions who were written by people who know how to write, right? James: Yep. Beyond that. Macros that say, "Look, of the 27 steps ... the HR step, the comp step, the writing step, the approval step ... macro that bad boy out." Chad: Yes. James: I mean, we've all seen if this, then, that. If this happens, then that happens. Embed that sort of thinking into a one button. Write the job description, publish, gone, next. You should measure that in minutes not hours for a new job description. James: You should get an alert saying, "Hey, I need you to approve stuff." You should be able to approve it without having to go to four different steps, four different pages, four different buttons. It's so convoluted. Chad: Yeah. So, the tech stack sucks. James: Yeah. And unfortunately, as long as we keep talking about the tech stack as the core of everything we're supposed to do, we're not going to change. If we think about recruiting as, "How do I use my tech stack to do X," instead of, "How do I do X? Oh, I get to use my tech stack to help support that," we're all screwed. Chad: So, in many cases when I talk to employers companies and employers about their system, they really don't understand the range of even their applicant tracking system, which they've probably had for years. So, therefore, they have an ATS. They don't realize ... James: They've had it for seven to 10 years. Chad: Yeah, and they don't realize how it can source. They don't understand many just different aspects. And we're talking about admins who are focused and it's their job to be experts on this platform. James: And in fact, they almost always are because you have to be just to survive in that [crosstalk 00:11:56] system. Chad: But the thing is they don't get it. They don't. So how do you survive and then start to just pull redundant pieces of tech into the scenario? That's the thing that pisses me off the most. How much money are companies spending today that are just redundant systems because what they have would work? Chad: I was actually talking to a company. We were at a conference in Minnesota and they said, "My current applicant tracking system won't allow me to actually apply a source to candidates coming in from all these different areas." And I know because I worked with that applicant tracking system before that it does. And it's probably one of the best sourcing applicant tracking systems. Chad: So I hook her up with one of my contacts and they're off and away. They've had this platform for five years. How does this happen? James: A couple pieces to that. So first off, look around. You're room's surrounded by technical HR leadership asks them, "Who's happy with their ATS?" And no one will raise their hand except for the person who got a new ATS in the last six months. Because they're in that service model. There's a lot of white glove helping out. James: The second that six month window closes ... Chad: And that honeymoon. James: ... "You're off on your own. Got to go. Bye." James: And have you looked at the documentation for any of this stuff. It's atrocious. It's a train wreck. Half the time they want to charge you for support. I'm like, "Wait a second. If I get an iPhone or I get an Android, and it breaks, and I have a question about it, there's a place I can go where they fix it because I just dropped $600, $700, $800 on this thing and it should come with some help." But ATS, you drop about six figures on it, and after six months, you're out of luck. James: The other part of it is how most large businesses work. If you are big enough to justify the cost expenditure of a good size ATS you have a procurement team. Chad: Yes. James: They will never, ever touch that ATS. So it may be literally electrocuting you as you touch the keyboard and they don't care. It's not a pain point for them quite literally. James: You talk to your HRIS team, they have to live with it but recruiting is a small piece of what they do. So if recruiters hate their ATS and it's embedded with a larger system, they're not going to listen. They've got much bigger stakeholders, I guess you'd say, who are focused on whether it's financed, whether it's organizational structures. There's all sorts of things a good ATS can do but if you say their all 80% good except for the 20% that are really bad, those components that really suck, you better not be in the recruiting space when that happens because that's the thing that feeds the rest of the company. James: If you don't have good talent, if you're making it harder to find good talent in this day and age and three percent unemployment in North America, you are asking for pain. But the person who makes those decisions doesn't know about it, doesn't care about it. James: On top of which, and having worked in the agency side that would sell software that would glue on top of ATS's ... who will remain nameless ... for six figures on top of whatever your ATS costs. Chad: You talking about TalentBrew? James: I didn't hear anything. I didn't say a word. I'm trying to be nice. Yes, this is nice as I get kids. James: It takes two years for a company of any size to switch ATS's. They're so matted. Chad: Oh yeah. James: The tendrils of an ATS are in so many different places and so many different processes are baked around them so if you have a work around that you developed as a recruiting leader just to kind of survive and live in this harsh environment that is your ATS, your ATS they all go out the window. So consequently it's easier to never update. Consequently it's better to use seven year old software than to use the best new software because you have to do change management. Chad: So, in many cases, not all, you see that there is just bad process methodology on the front end that companies insist upon for a new technology to be able to incorporate their process methodology, which is probably horrible. If they would take a look at the technology to be able to obviously start to use it more efficiently, they could probably chop their process in half, become much more efficient. Chad: So again ... James: But that's always been the fight with technology. Chad: ... it's kind of like the give and take, right? James: Yes. It's always been that fight of technology. How modular do you make it? How easy is it to take the recruiting part of the ATS HR system and focus on it and make it work, and still have enough API hooks back into the bigger mothership that you're still getting the data? James: Unfortunately, if an ATS and a recruiting module of the ATS sucks and is painful but it turns out you having to live with pain means that there's better data on the backend in terms of things like who gets promoted, what is the sort of those promotions, who is moving forward, and all new organizational structures, and how do you do change management, you are feeding into the river. You're not the river. You just have to find ways of monitoring a bit better. Chad: Which is why CIO's and CTO's are making the decisions and many of these ... James: Yeah, because they have to see the big picture. Chad: And they're forcing these organizations to actually go with whatever ATS is attached to that ecosystem. James: Well, that's unfortunately just as much a cost function. And I don't have to name any names because it's true in a lot of cases. You buy one part of it, they throw the recruiting system in for free. And if the recruiting leader, head TA goes, "Yeah, but I want this other ATS." They go, "How much is it?" He goes, "It's six figures or five figures." They go, "That's throwing money away." So you're out of luck. James: Yeah, the tech stack sucks. I just wish people would say, "Look, it's a thing ..." And I'm not going to tell you that you have no future of getting better any time soon. It's not going to change. This isn't a hope and change message. This is about, "Okay, if this is true," ... and by the way, spoiler. Totally is true. "... how do you live better in it?" James: You can't change this boulder in the road, so to speak, so how do you get at manipulating it, moving around it. Not just work arounds in terms of the code, or work arounds inside of processes. But how you think about the ATS is just, "Look, it's a tool I have to use. What else do I put around it? What is the messaging?" James: So, for example, if you think about ... and I'm a big marketing messaging person myself. I'm a big content marketing fan. If I had a message about why your company turned people into experts or made them feel secure in their futures and focused on their ability to grow themselves and I put it in the worst ATS in the world, I'm going to get clicks. I'm going to get some hits. James: The problem is that we used the bad tech stack to justify bad thinking and messaging on top of it. It's the same email you send out to every LinkedIn spam customer you have. It's what you're doing. It's the same headline, it's the same pitch. It's always about, "Do you want a job?" No. James: I was talking to a computer friend of mine and I said, "Look, you're out of Chicago and they're hiring for a VP level job." And then I'm like, "Where are you looking?" He goes, "Oh, the best people are in New York." I said, "Why isn't your subject line, "Want a free trip to Chicago?"" I'm clicking on that. Chad: Oh, hell yeah. James: You have my attention, mon frere. What are we talking about here? Oh, this is an interesting company that does this and this and it wants someone like me? I am in. Chad: It's marketing, it's advertising. It's the target market, right? James: Yes. Joel: It's commercial time. JobAdX: How many times has someone said to you, "We're the Uber of ..." Or, "It's the PayPal of ..." Maybe they're the Facebook of ... JobAdX: In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality or even the useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot on and it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google ad sense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, persistent and smarter ad unit for job related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPO's and staffing firms, realtime dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industries first truly responsive tool. JobAdX: All this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click or application. We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We're not set and regret. JobAdX: For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards higher web share than other partners through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30% to 40% greater and more through our scalable model. JobAdX: To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com or email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. JobAdX: Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent. JobAdX has just launched in the UK too. Chad: It's show time. Chad: And one the things that I don't think that we do enough in talent acquisition is understand what we are actually doing. It is advertising. James: Yes. Sales. Not it's sales. That's like sales and marketing are brother and sister. Chad: And that's what advertising is, right? James: Yes. Chad: You're trying to get your hooks into them to get through, get that that lead form, which is the application. James: And unfortunately, when you think of it like that the trick to succeed ... and I'm using bunny ears in the air here ... is to say, "Well, if I want more applicants, I'm going to leverage more ad units. I'm going to put my ad units here instead of there. I'm going to twiddle the dials of the magic thinking where that ad shows up is what the magic is. James: I'm going to introduce you to anybody who makes a Made for TV product and does an infomercial. Those things are 3:00 in the damn morning and they sell like hotcakes. It ain't placement folks. It's the message. It's the message every single time and then you augment it with the delivery. Not the other way around. Chad: I would definitely say, yeah, the delivery. Just from my radio background, message is everything and then being able to target the right demos. And being able to do it with the right channels. James: And that's transactional. I will introduce you to 1,000 people who are good at that and are paid to do exactly that. And can do it for you for very little cost. Chad: That's not happening though. James: But the person who can treat your company, and talk about your company, and talk about your roles as if this is the opportunity of a lifetime to help someone see a future in which they are the hero of that damn story, they are few and far between. And if they exist, they're sitting in your marketing team but you never talk to them and they never talk to you. Chad: Oh, yeah. So why is an employer branding and marketing? James: Okay. Now you've hit upon my favorite subject of all. Now, I'm going to put my teacher hat on. James: If you're a marketer and you are tasked with selling ice cream cones, tacos, call it ... I don't care ... anybody who's got $1 is an addressable market. Anybody. You don't care if they're tall or short. You don't care if they went to high school or if they have a master's degree. You don't care if they have felonies or if they're Hitler. You do not care. A $1 is a $1, a $1 is a taco. End of conversation. Chad: If it's a taco. But there are products that are demographically focused ... James: Yes, but you can still figure out anybody whose got the $20,000, or the $5,000, or the $20 in that demographic area, anybody in that space is addressable and useful. There's no qualifications beyond do you have the money. James: If you are selling tacos and you sell a million tacos you're getting a raise, you're getting a bonus. They're putting a picture of you over somebody's office going, "This is the guy. He did the amazing thing with the tacos." James: You bring 1,000 people to a job post, you're screwing up. You bring a million you're getting fired. Why? Because it's a quality, not quantity. Chad: Targeting, yes. James: You talk about it ... and I don't mean you, sir, but I mean in general ... Chad: It might be me. James: It might be you. Recruiters in general think about, "How do I get my 100, my 200 applicants because that's just about big enough a pool that one of them will be the needle in the haystack." Don't get a needle, make a bigger haystack, which is just crazy town. James: What you want really when it comes down to it is three qualified candidates. That's it. Any other application you get is wasted energy. So if you think about instead, "How do I get 1,000 candidates, or 100 candidates, or 1,000 resumes?" Or, "How do I build a pipeline and say I just need two or three people who are great at this." Then the conversation changes. James: And marketing doesn't think about that. Marketing thinks about total addressable market, how do we reach every single one of them? How do I extract my money from them? How do I go about my day?" You are thinking about, "How do I find the one person for that job?" The magical, perfect, exact fit. Perfect skills, ability to grow, fits in the culture. The criteria is insane. James: And I'm not telling you anything you don't know, recruiters. You know this but you don't think about it in that way. Chad: But that's crazy. From the standpoint of if I have a bunch of silver medalists that might be great for other jobs. James: Oh, silver medalists. Chad: No, stick with me for a second. These wonderful CRM/engagement systems who nurture candidates. Talent pipeline engagement, right? James: Uh-huh. (affirmative) Buzz word, buzz word, buzz word. Know where you're going. Chad: But the thing is you have this huge database of candidates that you've paid for over the years. James: Time out. Better yet. You've presold them on the brand. Chad: Yes. James: They know who you are. Chad: Right. James: If you've done any work at all caring, and feeding, and nurturing them. Chad: Right. James: They like you, they're waiting for the stars to align. Chad: Exactly. James: How many people ... you have 1,000 person ... Chad: And they might buy your shit, too, by the way. James: That's also completely valid and I think HR won't let you tap into that database. That's a separate conversation. I'm not getting there. Chad: Guess what, if there's money there, HR doesn't have a goddamn clue because, guess what, business is going to take over. James: Yeah. Money wins. Chad: Sales will always beat the shit out of HR. James: That's 1,000% true. But you're right. So, let's say you're 1,000 person company, which means you've got about 100 req's open at any given time. Fair number. How many people in a pipeline do you need? Chad: At that point? James: Yeah. Chad: We're looking for ... and again, we're looking at our old technology and processes versus new, right? James: Yeah. New thinking. Chad: New thinking. Being able to use the engagement systems and all these other fun things, right? How many do I need? I need what I needed before, right? James: No. Chad: It's the same ... I think it is. No, wait. From a hiring standpoint, that's what I need. But from a nurturing, keeping them engaged with the brand and happy with who we are, that changes because the experience changes. James: I think it's different. I think you would need a 1,000 people to hire this year, you need a talent pool of no more than 1,000 pre-sold on a brand who are good at what they do. Chad: Yeah. James: That's it. That's all you need. Instead of if you have 100 applicants in the current model, you have 100 to 150 applicants per req, you're talking about 10's of thousands, 15,000. Of course, we all know that two thirds of those applicants are crap. They're not qualified, they don't fit, they'll never fit. Chad: Today. Today, they don't fit. Joel: It's commercial time. 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 about Sovren AI Matching visit sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. Chad: It's show time. James: The trick on an engagement tool is that you start to help people self select out. "This is our culture. This is what we're about. This is what we care about. These are our motivations. This is our brand. This is EVP." And eventually someone goes, "Yeah, this isn't quite the match I thought it was. I was in love with your consumer product and maybe this isn't the place." James: And I think Google sees that all the time. Google does literally no advertising whatsoever. They don't have to. But they get 1,000's and 1,000's of applications every single day, 99% of which they throw out immediately. And so their really is to say, "Why you shouldn't work here." The kind of people who are happy and the kind of people who are unhappy. And that's the kind of conversation you want to have. Not about, "I have a req. How do I put a butt in the seat?" That's the difference. Chad: And I totally appreciate that. But those people that are self selecting out still should have a great experience. James: That's 100% true. Oh, my goodness. Because they [crosstalk 00:28:53], and they have ripples, and they have all that [crosstalk 00:28:56]. Chad: Yeah, they have ripples and they could buy products. James: Yes. But what happens, the way you get to that level is stopping to thinking about, "I have a req. I need 150 people for it." Which means, "Okay, clean, open req in the ATS. There's zero people in it. I know it's going to get pushed to my normal channels. I've got to go beat some bushes, I've got to go shake some trees to find as if it's brand new." And the second I fill that req, I flush the toilet, 99% of those applications go away with a "Thanks but no thanks" letter that was written by a lawyer. Chad: Pissing them off. James: Totally butt hurt. And justifiably so. That's the problem. And when you do that you're saying your talent pipeline needs to be 100's of thousands. Chad: And at that point, what you're saying is they're not in the black hole because we sent them a message letting them know. James: Yeah, exactly. Chad: And that's still bullshit. That is such a bad experience. James: They're not in the black hole. They're dead. Chad: Yeah. We shot them. James: How is that better? Chad: Yeah, we shot them in the back of the head, which means they're going to hate our brand they've got this bullshit ... James: And there's so many ways recruiting goes wrong, that can go wrong. Every business runs a gauntlet with every single candidate of all the different ways this thing can go wrong and all the different players who can screw this up. Your hiring manager is the number one culprit of screwing this up. Why? Because this isn't their day job. They don't hire and interview people on a regular basis. But they're absolutely going to say something. Chad: We don't look at this in the right way. This is impacting the bottom line, actual revenue. As soon as you start doing that, guess what, HR's going to get a knot jerked in their tail, the hiring managers are going to be trained appropriately. Chad: Take a look at ... and I use it all the time and I'm beating a freaking dead horse ... but the Virgin Media where they saw that they were actually losing $6 million because they were treating candidates like shit. And they could if they hopefully retain them. If they treat them better, they could perspectively retain that $6 million, who knows. And the opportunity to grow for individuals who weren't using their products was another $7 million on top of it. So net $13 million. Chad: So if I walk into my CHRO or my VP of Talent Acquisition and say, "You just lost me $6 million." James: Yeah. Someone's going to move. Chad: That's a different conversation. James: Yes, it is. Chad: And that's a conversation that should be had every goddamn day. James: And the best way to have that conversation is to stop using the phrase, "Time to fill." Chad: Yes. James: Because that says, "Time to fill," is the fuzziest, bunniest phrase. George Carlin would do five minutes on how stupid a phrase that is. "It's time to fill." James: The real number cost of empty seat. How long was that seat empty and how long it takes to onboard a new person? That is cost, that is money from having this person. Chad: Yes. How much money did we lose? That's a business conversation. James: That completely and radically changes the conversation. Chad: Yes, and that's a business conversation. James: And how often do you hear that number spouted? Never. Chad: And Talent Acquisition the seat at the big table. The reason why they don't get a seat at the big table ... not in all cases ... James: They don't speak that language. Chad: ... they don't understand that they are a piece of the business. James: Okay. Let's spin this conversation in a different direction. And I'm going to get myself in trouble. You're welcome. James: But it's the same idea. Diversity inclusion. Huge fan of diversity inclusion. I'm as liberal as they come. I want everybody to get their shot to being miserable at work just like everybody else. Have you met your average diversity inclusion person? Wonderfully people. However, they're assuming that it's an inherent good to make diversity a thing and they're asking people to eat their broccoli. James: How do you get a kid to eat their broccoli? You tell them it's going to help them grow big and strong. They're going to play sports better. They're going to have a better time at school. You give them a reason why or you hit them in the head. Either way. James: But you can't do that internally. And that's the trick is that if you talk about something like a diversity inclusion, which you can extend to all of HR. It's just good for you. You go nowhere. Chad: No. And it also feels like charity, which is total bullshit. James: That's my favorite. This is a business. Chad: Yes. Okay, so ... James: Even charities don't treat it like a charity. Chad: No. So, I've built veteran hiring programs. My wife builds hiring programs for individuals with disabilities. James: Which is why I knew this would click. Chad: Their focus is all business oriented. How we have better retention rate with our candidates than your current candidates. And what does that mean? It means less time you're having that butt not in the seat. Chad: So, yeah, you're 100% right. That's why we have to take a look at what we do in a much different way. If we don't, we're not speaking business speak. And I don't give a shit if you have a master's from wherever the hell it is with a BA or whatever. If you're not speaking about impacting the bottom line and how ... James: And you're starting to see this change. It's starting to trickle down. I think HR has finally started to get the message. Whether they're staffed appropriately to take that message, live and embody that message and turn it around and say, "Hey rest of sea suite, it's about this, and it's about money, it's about change, and it's about growth." That's not clear to me yet. But that sea change is starting to happen. The boat is starting to turn. I don't know how long it's going to take though before ... Chad: Titanic. James: Exactly ... before every CHRO, before every director of Talent Acquisition, every VP of talent or people or culture or whatever it was, every conversation has a dollar sign in it somewhere. Chad: Yeah. I use another example. SodaStream. So SodaStream they've got this new campaign that's going on. James: It's an atrocious [crosstalk 00:34:33] commercial. Chad: But it weaves its culture and it's product into, "Come work for us because we believe in our product." James: And that's the thing. I'm allowed to hate that commercial and it still be an insanely effective commercial because it's telling me, "James, you're not going to be happy here." I'm like, "Cool, I'm going to be happy some place else." Chad: Which makes it effective. Right. James: Exactly right. For every person you push away it's a win. Which is why when I was in the content marketing side, people would say, "How do you measure the value of content?" I'd say, "That's impossible because a good piece of content should repel and reject just as many as it attracts." You can't measure it. Chad: Targeted. James: There's no holistic number for it. It's always muddied water. Chad: Okay, so I'm going to throw a curve ball at you. James: Oh, good. Chad: What will AI do to your recruiter buddies? James: You and I ... Yeah. AI is going to be thing. Finally. Chad: It is. Have you seen the Google Duplex? James: Yes. Chad: Have you seen that shit? James: How many times do you think they made phone calls that fail before you have to turn on that screen? Chad: Oh, yeah, no, I agree. James: But anyway. It's good. It is really good. And you can start to see that the amount ... You have to know that that is not a tool they go, "Okay, now point it at a candidate." And it does it. It is completely 1,000% optimized around the idea, "How do I get a haircut? And how do I make a reservation?" Chad: But it could schedule interviews. James: I don't think the turnaround is quite that easy. Chad: I think it could be. James: I don't think it's that easy. Chad: Chatbots. James: Chatbots? Chad: See and that's the thing. The chatbot. There's really not that much difference between those two. You've got text versus voice. James: Yeah. You've got multilingual processing. Chad: Yes, exactly. James: Anyway. So, I was at ... what conference was it at ... Erie and it was the first time I saw bots that made sense. That I went, "I can see how this would work in the real world. It's not just a good idea or a proof of concept or, "One day, in the sci-fi future," which is what they've been for so long. If you squint real hard you can see how they'd work. No, it's not really going to work. James: Now they're ready. The thing is how do you point them? And where do you point them? And how do you apply it? Is it a sourcing things? Certainly possible. I'm surrounded by recruiters and I hear them say the same five questions over and over again. And I'm like these people are wonderful, smart, kind, good, intelligent people people. Chad: Routine, baby. James: And now they have to drive this routine. And anything you can turn into a routine, you can automate and you can kill that job. Chad: Yes, done. Too easy. James: And I don't that's a good thing. Chad: I don't think you're killing the job, you're killing the task. James: You're killing the work inside the job so that they can focus on finding the diamond in the rough, or building the relationship, or whatever it is. Because let's be fair. A good recruiter should spend twice as much time building a relationship with their hiring manager. Chad: Uh-huh. (affirmative) Yes. James: Because that's where the real friction is. And not sourcing candidates blindly. So you give that job to AI to say ... And I see the Pocket Recruiter is interesting. It's not quite a bot. It's interesting and I think there's a lot of value there. I think it radically changes the sourcing model. James: I think Allyo is good. I think ... what's the one that starts with a P ... Paradox is one I really, really like. Chad: Oh, yeah Paradox. Is that good, yeah? James: Yeah. And I'm probably not thinking of three that are on the tip of my tongue. There's a bunch of them. Chad: Oh, there's a ton of them, yeah. RoboRecruiter. James: Yeah, they're ready. You just have to decide. Chad: Well, here's the thing though. So we've got the sourcing technology that's out there. We've got the technology that will refresh your applicant tracking system. We've got all this that can all kind of take all this process ... James: And now you're starting to see the piece that says, "Instead of doing that routine 30 minute phone screen, here are the six questions I'm going to ask you. And now I'm going to listen for the right answer." James: Though I'm hearing that lawyers are very uncomfortable with a piece of machinery making yes or no decisions on some of this stuff. I think there are ways around it. I think there are ways of collecting that. But I think when HR points to legal that's always a sign of saying, "I'm terrified but they said I couldn't do it." They're using legal as an excuse to not do it. Chad: And legal's always going to say no. James: That's their job. Chad: They're always going to say no. James: That is 100% their job. That's what they get paid for. Good for them. Chad: Yeah. You've got great technologies that are out there. The technologies that like Honeit's of the world, voice interviewing, all that other fun stuff. Chad: But I believe ... this is just me ... James: There's seven people behind him. Chad: Yeah. I would shit. James: They're all voices in his head. Chad: Just seven? Chad: So I believe that recruiters really should start to turn into brand ambassadors. James: Yes. They should definitely add that thinking into what they're doing. Chad: Yeah. James: I think recruiters job is to make relationships. End of conversation. Chad: Yeah. And they are the face of the brand. James: For so many candidates, for so many people 100,000% agree with that. Yeah, completely agree. Chad: And also, they are the face of the brand to their internal hiring managers, right? James: So then the question has to be, "What do recruiters think their job is now that they're not doing that?" Chad: Well, all this busy work shit that they're doing now ... James: Ah, nailed it. Chad: ... when you start to sweep that away, right? James: Um-hmm. (affirmative) Right. Chad: Because right now, I don't know how many times I've talked to recruiters who are like, "Oh my God, I'm so busy. I'm scheduling this. And I'm doing that. And I've got somebody who called me about something stupid." James: If meet a recruiter who doesn't complain about being busy, check to see they've got a pulse. They're dead. They don't exist. Chad: Oh yeah. Well, there's so many stupid mundane tasks that they have to deal with that once you sweep those away, you can get really smart people doing a great job being the face of your organization. James: Letting them think. Letting them reason. Letting them come to a different conclusion. Let them not say, "The document said if this, then this, therefore this." Think you're a person, you're talking to people. Make an evaluation. That's what literally you're paid to do. And then you should then take that relationship with the candidate and use it to inform and leverage the relationship you have with the hiring manager about why this person who doesn't quite meet that size and shape box that they hiring manager thought that they were looking ... has to come from Harvard, has to come from a big four accounting firm, has to come from a blah-blah-blah. James: Yeah, no. That's filling a job now. If you start to look at working jobs and longitudinally, you hire someone and you hope to god they get promoted six or seven times. But the recruits job and hiring managers focus on today, which is wrong. You need to focus on what's the next three steps. James: So you say, "Look, you wanted someone from a big four accounting firm. This person did not go there, however, they've shown a propensity for entrepreneurship. They've shown a propensity for starting things, and starting projects, and launching projects, and making a direct business impact. Who cares if it was on the other side of the moon? Doesn't matter. If they have those skills, you can use them now and the business ... the whole organization ... can use them tomorrow." James: And how often do you hear that conversation? Like never. Chad: Never because we're playing checkers. James: Yes, instead of chess. Chad: Yeah, three dimensional chess though. James: Well, if that. Chad: So, sourcers. How long is it going to take for sourcers to be gone? James: I know where your thinking is. But I have mixed emotions because I still think there's still a place for human sourcers, which is really the question you're asking. Chad: Yeah. James: And AI will completely wipe out the sourcing population like their rodents on an island or something. I don't think they can. Chad: No, it's just that they have routine tasks looking for targeted types of people. James: So once you take the routine task out of it ... Once the autoworker got a robot, what was the autoworker's job? The job was there to evaluate, and measure, and to double check, and lower the fault rate from 5% to 0.2%. Huge business advantage. Chad: It takes a ton less of those people though. James: Exactly but their job radically changes. Maybe the job of the sourcer is to say, "Look, for all these other things we're doing ... going to events, going to universities, sending out in mail, sending out emails. All the stuff that happens for outreach, the sourcer's job is to say, "Make sure the message says this. Make sure it ties back to this other thing. Make sure, if they're not going to be happy, you have a secondary ask. Do you know anybody who might be really good for this because there might be a way for us to give you a present and say thank you?" Chad: I see that's what a recruiter's going to do. James: I don't think so. Chad: I think they will because all their tasks are going to flushed away. You don't think so? James: Recruiter's going to focus on thinking about the job itself, and thinking about the role itself, and thinking about work longitude and then saying ... Chad: Yeah, but from a business standpoint, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to look at the tasks ... I know what should happen, but what is going to happen? James: I've fallen into the trap of the Star Trek trap. Let's just fast forward 500 years and imagine it's all better. How did you get there? And there are interim steps. There's so many things you're like, "Well, when this gets better." You're like, "Okay, time out. How did we just make that better? Because there are some ugly, painful, messy interim steps to get us there. And in so doing there's so many places to fall off the edge of a map." Chad: Oh, yeah. Just from a business standpoint, you look at it and you go, "Yeah. We're good." James: "Lowered my cost. Win." That sucks. Chad: So, any parting words, Mr. Ellis? James: Are there any left? Chad: Where can listeners find The Talent Cast? James: So if you actually like the sound of my voice, and lord, knows I must. Chad: Good god. Holy shit. James: I know, right. I do a weekly a podcast. There's no interviews, there's no sponsorships, there's no money. It's just literally me saying, "I have a question, or I have a problem, or I have an idea," and I work through it while people listen to me, for some reason. It's called The Talent Cast. It's every week. James: We're taking a break in the summer but it's more to recharge my battery to make sure every episode says something and means something. I just happened to launch with a friend of mine, Brad Farris, who has a great podcast called Breaking Down Your Business. Hey, Brad. James: He's been doing this forever. And he says, "You know what? I've looked at business over the last 15 years. And I look at all the things that have changed in Google, and software, and mobile, and this, and this, and this. And everything has changed. Everything has radically changed except for invoicing. And if you think about it, why do I need to print a page, scan a page, sign a page, to rescan a page, to email the page. That's crazy. And hiring. The process of hiring looks exactly the same today as it did 20 years ago." Chad: Which is stupid as hell. James: But it's a huge red flag that says the table's about to get flipped. Chad: Oh, yeah. James: It's about to become a thing. And I think what we're seeing is the edge of that table flip and we can easily extrapolate how that turns into something. James: So, I think if you're listening to podcasts like this, and maybe even to mine, you can be more on the front line of what that change can be and get ahead of it. Have better conversations with your CHRO, president, vice president, TA, CEO, what have you, and say, "Look, talent's important. Talent is the root of the tree and if you don't water it right, tree dies. The tree's dead." Chad: Yeah. James: That's really what we're all about. I know that's what you're doing and I think it's fantastic. It's a great podcast and I'm thrilled to be here. Hopefully my podcast can add a little something to that. James: Otherwise, @thewarfortalent on Twitter. That's where you find me. Chad: Pretty cool. So if you're looking for smart, funny, check out The Talent Cast. James: Whoa. You get one or the other. Chad: It is totally the antithesis of the Chad & Cheese podcast. Okay. James: There's less sound effects. Chad: Excellent, man. Really appreciate you taking the time. James: So thrilled to be here. Thanks. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristan. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, The Chad and his goofy friend Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad & Cheese podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss out on all the knowledge dropping that's happening up in here. Tristen: 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. #JamesEllis #TalentCastPodcast #TheWarForTalent #EmployerBrand #Branding #TechStack #Marketing

Guess who's back.... Back again... Chad's back... Tell a friend... After a 3 week vacation in Europe Chad is back and ready to jump back into the Chad & Cheese Podcast fray by talking: - LinkedIn's assault on ZipRecruiter's SMB market - Pared focuses on Snag's hospitality peeps (and clients) - Google Duplex is scary and... in public testing - Step aside Blue and Watson IBM's "Project Debater" is here! - Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and Comcast invest in Tact.ai... Huh? - while Slack and Mike Wolford have a "Come on Man!" moment... Buckle up and get ready for the ride.... Provided by JobAdX, America's Job Exchange and Sovern AI. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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 opinions and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: All right everybody, our long national nightmare is finally over. Chad's back. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's Most Dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: Guess who's back, back again. Joel: Back again. On this week's show, LinkedIn takes aim at ZipRecruiter and the SMB market, humans take on robots at your local restaurant chain and Google will probably in the end make all this news irrelevant. Thank God robots don't podcast yet. We'll be right back after a brief word from JobAdX. JobAdX: How many times has someone said to you we're the Uber of or it's the PayPal of, maybe they're the Facebook of. In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot on that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google AdSense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, consistent and smart ad unit for job related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs and staffing firms real time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's flirts truly responsive tool. All this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click or application. We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste, we are not set in regret. JobAdX: For direct clients JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning, We also provide publishes and job boards, higher rev share than partners through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30 to 40 percent greater and more through our scalable model. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com or email us at joinus@jobaadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. JobAdX: Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent. JobAdX has just launched in the U.K. too. Joel: I thought the British accent would ease you in to coming back to the states. Chad: So many accents and so little time. Joel: All right, let's get this out of the way. Welcome back. Chad: Thank you. Joel: How was your trip? Chad: Wonderful. Joel: Favorite parts, funny stories, anything? Chad: Yeah. So go figure the beaches of Normandy were amazing. U.S. Cemetery. So many things that are just gripping from what we're able to do in Normandy. We stayed in Bayeux, France, it was just a little town south which is really cool. We're able to watch Germany beat Sweden with hundreds of other Germans in Weiden Square, little town in Germany. Joel: Better be careful, the Germans might blame you for their ouster from the cup. Chad: I had to leave some time, okay. Joel: Chad's fault Germany. Chad: I'll take the blame. No, no I won't because they really sucked. It was horrible. Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Prague Castle, The Louvre, The Ark, Eiffel Tower, Versailles, St Mark's Square in Venice. I mean dude, there was so much that we saw in such a compressed amount of time. Julie had us sprinting from place to place. She did an amazing job. And having three teenagers in tow, it was a pretty freaking awesome time in Europe. Joel: So let's get to what our listeners really care about. What were the best beers that you had on the trip? Chad: Yeah, anything that was Austrian or Belgian. I was really looking for good wit beers. France beer suck. They just did man. Italian beers were okay. Anything that I could get that was just legit and I knew would be out of Belgium, Austria or Germany, that's really what I gravitated to. Generally I tried something local but in most cases it just sucked. Joel: Well, my part dude, three weeks without you, there were advantages, disadvantages but I'm overall glad that you're back and that the show is again the Chad and Cheese Show. So with that, let's get to some shout outs if you have any. I'll start it off. Shout out number one goes to Dan Cross, Capital One. In my capacity at Ratedly, actually went out and pitched Capital One on the product this week and Dan Cross is a fan of the show and it was awesome, like to pitch a company and have someone in the audience like I love your show. So Dan, shout outs to you. Appreciate the love out there in Richmond, Virginia. Chad: Yeah, is he relation to Christopher? Joel: That would be awesome but I did not ask that so I don't know. Chad: He didn't have like the high pitch voice. Joel: He did have kind of a yacht rock vibe so maybe Dan is related to Christopher. Chad: Big shout out to Ed from Philly. He's always active, dude is always in fray. The big question is where the hell is Nancy from Philly? She's totally gone into radio silence. Joel: That's a good point. I bet Ed more than anyone is happy to have you back on the podcast. So Ed, there you go. Thanks for sticking it out for three weeks without him. Chad: Yeah, thanks man, I appreciate that. Joel: I got a shout out to Laura Barkeiwicz. Chad: Say that three times fast. Joel: Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. Did a little ditty on Beamery and their investment last week I think it was. And apparently the Austin office of Beamery is just massive fans and they're spreading that fandom throughout the company. So Beamery, Laura, everybody in Austin thanks for listening. Chad: Yeah. And not to mention Austin, I'm sure we have just so many listeners at Indeed as well. So yeah, you're making Austin strong. Joel: Don't forget Talroo, sponsor. Chad: That's right. Christine Shaw from Down Under. She was actually listening to the pod on the way to an event and we were talking about VERVOE, and no shit, one of the first people she meets at the event is Omer, the co-founder and CEO of VERVOE. So yeah, Christine, that is Chad and Cheese magic. Joel: Bringing the world together one podcast at a time. Chad: Shawna Williams. She loves the show. Says it's helped her stay updated in the ever changing world of sourcing and recruiting. Thanks Shawna, keep listening. Get all your friends and family listen as well. Give us some reviews, we'd love that. Joel: We actually have a lot of reviews. Chad: Oh, that's cool. Joel: That's just iTunes. You're the Google guy, I don't know what they're doing over there but at least on iTunes, and we actually have a pretty good set of reviews so yay for us. In fact so good hopefully that people that listen will go out visit chadcheese.com and see the link to vote for the show as the best I guess blogger/podcast at the upcoming TAtech show in New Orleans which we will be attending in September. So yeah, get out there and vote. Go to chadcheese.com and give us some love. Chad: Yeah, they're going to change the name of that because three out of the four who are nominated are podcasts. So I think the whole blogger thing's kind of going away. Podcasts are the future people, that's what it is. Joel: How dare you bash blogging, you bastard. Chad: Job or doctor, just so you know man, it's not and it will never be called a “jobby moon” full stop. Steven Rothberg, nice jib jab on Twitter, really appreciate you going the extra mile. And last but not least from my side of the house #TalentTalk. I'm going to be on #TalentTalk with a bunch of rogue recruiting sourcing CEO just talking shit I guess. We're going to talk about technology and how recruiters jobs, sourcers jobs, all that shit could be taken by AI. We'll probably argue a little bit about it. You know that animal guy is going to be on there as well so we're probably going to have to hit the mute button on him a lot. Joel: Yeah, have fun with all that. Is that a Candidate.ID sponsor thing? Chad: Yup. Joel: At least you'll have the nice Scottish accent to counterbalance the animal in there. Anymore shout outs? Chad: That's it. Joel: All right, let's start with the small companies as we always do. LinkedIn announced this past week that they are seriously getting into the SMB market and I thought it'd be worth talking about. It sounds a lot like Uncommon. You've read the story, basically, small business, post your job, we'll provide the candidates to you. One click messaging. You can thumb up or thumb down the person that you want to recruit. Joel: I have two thoughts on this is as I wrote about it in ERE and thought about it. Number one is like what this does to the whole sourcing business, if I can just post a job and LinkedIn or whoever magically just gives me the candidates that are fits for that, that sort of sources for me, as well as the distribution side of postings. What are your thoughts on that? Chad: I automatically thought it sounded more like zip than anything else. But the big difference and I can see kind of the similarities with Uncommon as well. But it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like they're doing it within the actual LinkedIn ecosystem itself, that's it. So, when you take a look at Zip and you take a look at Uncommon, they go out beyond I guess you could say their ecosystem. So they're doing things I think a much more aggressive, not to mention they don't have database the size of LinkedIn but still, LinkedIn doesn't house every piece of talent that's out there, period, they don't. Chad: So one of the reasons why Microsoft very smartly bought GitHub, when you take a look at what they're doing I think it's smart, there's no question. Being able to utilize the data that you have within your system. It makes a hell of a lot of sense. They should have done this a long time ago. Apparently they just didn't have the developers that could pull this off. Joel: Yeah. Ever since Microsoft bought them, the development is coming fast and furiously. Now they would argue yes, the distribution isn't the same but their claim is that, they have 57 or so percent of potential candidates that will never go to a job board or haven't gone to a job board any time recently. So I agree with you like the distribution they don't care about, they just want to leverage their 550 million or 600 million users to then plug into your job posting. I do think the GitHub purchase is going to be interesting because if they start crossposting or crossing the streams and having GitHub profiles come into your LinkedIn job postings, then that's a pretty interesting way to leverage the GitHub universe. Joel: Another think I wanted to point out was they're pushing this service as sort of a money back guarantee on the condition that you send, the only candidates are LinkedIn candidates. They have to use LinkedIn profile and you have to send them through your LinkedIn job posting page. So in other words, this is sort of a really subtle move to me by LinkedIn to kind of be the SMB's applicant tracking system. So in other words, they'll give you the money back guarantee if you don't flow the candidates through another service, which incentivizes companies to use LinkedIn as their applicant tracking system basically. Chad: Small business can do that right but your larger businesses they just can't do it. This also provides validation I believe for all of those companies that are out there that are looking at the same model but doing it within their applicant tracking system because they already know within their applicant tracking system if they refresh a lot of that data and then they start to target it, that those individuals in most cases are going to be more targeted toward the positions that you are opening up versus just going into a general database like a LinkedIn. Chad: Now, again, the ability to target within LinkedIn I think will be much better than most of the other job boards per se that are out there, job sites that are out there. But I really think this validates why companies should be focusing on their own applicant tracking systems, their own data. They've spent millions of dollars over the years to be able to pump up their own database just to let it sit there and wither and die away. So yeah, this is great stuff. But again, we can use this I think as talent acquisition professionals in many different ways. Joel: Yeah, and I think services like Crowded, what Google is doing with Hire in terms of oh, here are 10 candidates that are already in your database that are probably good fits for this. The issue is even if you had a million people in your database it still pales in comparison to the 600 million that LinkedIn's headed toward. Chad: Yeah it does but the thing is that in most cases those candidates that are in your database are going to be much more targeted to the positions that you have available than the huge general database that LinkedIn has. Joel: Long term, what do you think models like this do to the recruiting sourcing profession? Chad: I mean they kill it, that's all there is to it. The sourcing piece in itself it's starting to learn. I mean that's the machine learning piece of it. So you start to understand what types of individuals are perfect for jobs because you can see who's getting hired into those jobs. The system itself can start to cater toward those types of individuals with certain backgrounds and so on and so forth. So yeah, from a sourcing standpoint, this is going to start to cover that ground without having an actual human being needing to take days or hours per se because it will be done in seconds. Joel: And also shows the importance of, at least to LinkedIn to winning cases like the one against HighQ to help protect its data. Because if other companies can start accessing profiles, this service that LinkedIn has launched and other services it will launch become much less valuable because other services can just pull those profile. It makes clear sense why LinkedIn is so protective of this data because all their products are going to be revolved around the data that they have and the profiles that they have. Chad: Yeah, but they're public profiles. The defense of that is going to be interesting. The optics around what happened with Facebook obviously with Cambridge Analytica. There's so much that's happening right now that could sway a decision away from what we think it perspectively could be. It's going to be a very provocative conversation. Joel: Do you think stuff like this enhances the value of an Uncommon and will we see more of those? Chad: Oh God, yeah. Joel: Or do you think it squashes it? Chad: No, no dude. This validates right here because Uncommon once again goes out and it does more in a different way and so does Candidate.ID and Crowded and all these other, they've got different nuances per se to what the actual technology does. Now, if LinkedIn starts to turn this technology on corporate databases which I really don't see them doing, they might do it within the actual Microsoft applicant tracking system itself but going beyond that I'm not sure. They might prove me wrong. But being able to have those other organizations that actually, that do that, the Crowdeds, the CandidateIDs, so on and so forth, I think that just validates. Look, don't go to LinkedIn and do this for goodness sakes. You have all this data, this talent within your system that just needs to be refreshed, reengaged and that's really what I see the future being. Joel: Let's keep this thing going. Pared, spelled P-A-R-E-D got 10 million dollars this week in a Series A. They are essentially the on demand gig platform provider targeting restaurants. We've talked about Snag/Snagajob in the past. Snagajob historically known as sort of the hourly post a job, fill positions through sort of a traditional posting job platform has actually changed its entire brand and focus by becoming sort of an Uber for hourly workers. So, just to refresh everyone, it's an app system. Let's say a restaurant owner needs a couple line cooks and some waiters, they can go onto the Snag platform in this case, look at who are those workers that are doing that. They can post the opportunity. The worker can select to take advantage of it. There are badges that provide the restaurant knowledge of who knows what they're doing, who can actually make a hamburger etc. Joel: It becomes a win-win for both because for the worker when I want to work I just flip the on switch and I can get opportunities. If I'm the hiring manager I don't have to post a job, I don't have to interview, I can just, hey, I need a couple people, fill the roles and you're done. All the payments go through this platform etc. Joel: Basically Pared is that kind of business. They launched in 2015. They were focused primarily, exclusively actually on San Francisco market. This past April I think they launched in New York. So this money's going to help them scale this business, of course Shiftgig, Snagajob, Task Rabbit is probably in this category as well are pretty well funded and established already. What kind of chances do you give Pared to make it? Chad: It's anyone's ballgame at this point. I think Snag has the best chance just because they've been around longer. They have candidates in the database. They know obviously what the candidates have done over the years. They have that experience and the candidate database which is huge, huge positives and advantage on their side of the house. I was watching a video on the Pared site and it was really cool because the individual that was actually a restaurant owner and she said, hey look, I needed dishwashers, I just went into Pared and I was able to get somebody who would actually come and work a shift. Chad: It's incredibly interesting because we sometimes forget how unpredictable this line of work is, restaurant life, right? The turn and burn that happens, the individuals who don't show up for work. How can you have that kind of like Uber app per se to be able to say hey, I need a dishwasher, can I get them in an hour, two hours or what have you. I think it's incredibly smart. The hard part once again though for them I think and we've seen this maybe with the Shiftgigs and whatnot is scalability and being able to build presence in a market. Are you going to be able to go out there and do a shit ton of programmatic. How are you actually going to build presence in a market? Joel: Yeah, and how do you pay for that. Like how do you pay to access all the restaurant owners in a particular city. San Francisco and New York are ideal because they're so consolidated in a really close knit area. But if you go to middle America you have a much bigger problem to kind of get that done. I think ghosted which you mentioned people not showing up for work I think is a huge problem that not only with restaurants but probably every kind of job these days. There was an article this week about that. Joel: What I love about this system is that restaurants start rating workers so you know like who's a really good reliable worker and who isn't. Chad: It's like Uber. Joel: It's a self-policing kind of system that really works for everybody. So, I agree that this is where this space is going. I'd be really curious to see would this work with trucking, would it work with nursing or health care or other professions. I think it would, there might be regulations around some of that, but I see this as being a trend that we'll be seeing in the future and announced today I think, Amazon is basically setting up affiliates or franchises to deliver Amazon boxes. So anyone can go out and I think for 10 grand start the process to be an official Amazon distributor. So all these things are really interesting and happening and being driven by this sort of platform model, driven by corporations and vendors. Chad: Yeah. And again, market penetration is going to be key, that is hard. Scaling that is going to be hard to get candidates as well as getting clients. You really have to focus on what the strategy is to be able to get to that point where you can start providing the types of individuals that your clients are looking for. What I like about Pared is that they are hyper focused on restaurants and hospitality. That in itself makes it so much easier for them as opposed to saying we're just going to help small business. Oh, okay, well yeah, try to go ahead and herd those fucking cats for God's sakes. Joel: Yeah, if they can be the brand that is connected to restaurants, they're going to be way ahead of the game because Snag and everyone else has sort of brands of all kinds of gigs and jobs. So definitely that is where I would go. It reminds me a little bit of when Groupon came, the sort of daily deal emails. It was really popular and people loved it but then once people found out that oh, I can just, that's a WordPress plugin I can have my own little Groupon here locally, they popped up everywhere. I'd be concerned in this industry like, once it becomes sort of out of the box have your own a gig platform solution, these things are going to pop up like local job boards all over the place and make it harder for few players to be to be successful at least in the short term. Chad: You can see a staffing company buy this thing up. I mean seriously, because staffing companies that focus really heavily on these types of positions within hospitality and then being able to start to grow that beyond, because they have that penetration point. They have the candidates, the candidates are already coming in. They have the clients, they already have a Salesforce going out after the clients. See that's the big, it's building infrastructure, not just technical infrastructure but actual people infrastructure to get those candidates and to be able to get that business in. Chad: So yeah, seeing a company like Pared being bought by staffing, like Kelly Services or something like that I think makes a hell of a lot of good sense. Joel: Well it also makes sense that the founder and CEO of Yelp is an investor in this company. Pared is a perfect buy for Yelp in my opinion. Just start providing hiring services for all the companies on Yelp, all the restaurants on Yelp. Chad: Yeah, totally agree. Joel: All right man, let's hear a quick message from our buddies at AJE and we'll talk about I don't know, CRMs and Google and IBM and all kinds of shit. Chad: And stuff. AJE: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our 10th year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women and minorities and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community based organizations. Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Joel: So you're big on the story about CRM voice assistance. Tell us about that. Chad: I think it's pretty big. Hell, I mean, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and Comcast actually threw some money in the pot for a company called- Joel: Some small companies. Chad: Yeah, those small companies. Called tact.ai, another AI domain. It's pretty simple. In the actual article that I read, really just focused on two words, voice recognition and being able to actually take a CRM, which, you know, I've been in sales for most of my life and I know CRM is a pain in the ass because when you're on the phone or in front of somebody you always have to try to get that data, that call, that information, whatever it is into the CRM. And that's good for the company to be able to have history, not to mention it's good for you to be able to have that history so that next time you go back you can you can remember. Chad: So being able to do all that through voice recognition and really it's like a salesperson, just an account executive having their own personal assistant which I think is incredibly cool, and then being able to attribute all of that voice recognition, that data back into the system, to be able to set up calls, to be able set up tasks. All those different things. And you know as well as I do because we actually saw with Microsoft here in the last month or so when they started pushing out dynamics sales information and they were using LinkedIn data for their sales CRM. That is huge, big money for a company like Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, anybody who's out there. Chad: So I think this to me is incredibly exciting because using voice recognition like we talked about before for not just for sales but being able to start to do this for recruiting as well, setting up scheduling and things like that, isn't as far away as we thought it might be. Joel: How do you envision this service fitting into recruiting? Is it as simple as just recording the conversations? Is it like, hey, related candidates based on the conversation. How would you see this? In sales it makes sense because you're going to necessarily record the phone call on a sales call whereas like we talked to our buddies at Honeit who do interviews and they create transcription from that. Where do you see this exactly fitting in for recruiting? Chad: I think from an interview standpoint it's kind of like the Honeit. But also, again, we're talking about it being your personal assistant. So being able to set up tasks, being able to make calls, being able to do all these different things that a salesperson does on a daily basis without actually having to really lift a finger. Just saying tact, call so and so or call company or whatever it is. Set up an appointment for so on and so forth. That's on the sales side. You can do the same damn thing on the recruiting side of the house. So really having that personal assistant per se that's there for you to help you just facilitate the whole process. Joel: Now Tact.ai doesn't do a Google Duplex like calling for you, does it? Chad: Not that I know of, not yet. But that's a very good point. Joel: The names you mentioned were not Google but I'm sure they're looking at Duplex and saying holy crap, we better like spread some money around and figure out how we're going to compete with this. So Duplex we read this week is rolling out faster than Google expected I guess. They're already making it available to sort of the most valuable developers and friends of Google and things like that which is a very Google thing to do. Let it out slowly and get everyone all hot bothered. Joel: In light of the three new services or features that Google released last week in regards to click to chat, smart scheduling etc, to me Duplex probably faster than we think, probably next year, will start having hiring tools within Google Hire that it will call people for you to schedule interviews and things like that. Yes? Chad: Yeah. Well first off, let's get through this real fast because I think this is hilarious. Duplex and the actual Google CEO demonstrated obviously scared the living shit out of people. It really did. Couldn't believe that we had come that far that the Duplex system could understand as well, actually take in the information, reprocess it into context and then back out and communicate with a human being. Chad: So I think one of the reasons why they're getting this out into testing is to be able to start combing those fears. Jim Stroud actually talked about it, he did a little piece on whether, and people have been talking about this about whether the system should actually tell the person that you're talking to a robot or not which I don't get. Does that make any goddamn sense? Joel: Well, I remember we talked to Anoop at Seekout and he was a little bit skeptical around robotics having conversation with human beings and where's the transparency there. There are definitely concerns around Duplex and I think those will only become more and more. But for me just if it's a scheduling tool, it's hard to imagine in the near future that it will be something that actually interviews people although I think long term it will. But to schedule something or reschedule, make rescheduling calls I think that's something that can happen pretty easily. Chad: Yeah. I don't think that interviewing is actually that far of a moon shot for this technology. Joel: Technology no, but societally and culturally it maybe. Chad: It might be. But you know what wins every single day? Joel: Technology and progress. Chad: The all mighty dollar, man. And if a company can save money and they see headcount from the standpoint of how many people are actually making calls per day to actually do scheduling or emails. How much of your time during the day is allocated to these tasks, where we can have Duplex do this. That in itself will change companies' minds because it all comes down to the almighty dollar, you know it as well as I do. Joel: Yeah, efficiency, shareholders. I agree. I just think where our government is, sort of where we are societally in terms of government and privacy and what Facebook did and it's fake new, like if now there's just another thing that people have to deal with of like oh it sounds like a person you're talking to but it's actually a robot, like I could see a lot of people freaking out and government saying hold on a second, let's figure this out before that may trump, pun intended, any dollars that could be made from utilizing this technology. Chad: And if this didn't scare the shit out of them, the new IBM Debater Project did. Joel: No kidding. Tell us about that. Chad: We've seen blue played chess and obviously Watson has been on Jeopardy and so on and so forth. The new debater project that IBM has is incredibly amazing because it's actually on the debate stage and it's going against these different individuals who are debating different topics. So for a technology to be able to take in, obviously recognize voice recognition, taking in all this information, to be able to put it into context and then to be able to go into obviously all the different points of data that are available to it and then pull back data in arguments. And then to be able to articulate those arguments is ridiculous. It's cool and man it was scary to freaking watch. Joel: Would you call it a master debater. Chad: No. Actually I think you have a T-shirt that says that. Joel: Zing. Chad: Boom. Joel: All right. I got nothing to add on that. Let's hear from Sovereign and wind it down. Cool? Chad: You got 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. 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. To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. Chad: You don't have to think at all because we're doing all the thinking and the computer is smarter than you are, have a nice day. Joel: Yeah, they just need to speed up this virtual reality stuff so I can just sit at home and visit Europe instead of actually going to Europe. Chad: So Jack Ma, he did an interview and it was a couple of weeks ago. And he just pretty much told everybody you're not going to be able to compete with AI. These machines are smarter than you are, that's all there is to it. So just embrace it. Yes, we're going to lose jobs but obviously this is an evolutionary point. We will see other jobs created from this as well. But guess what guys, you're not as smart as the computers are, they're going to be faster and they're going to do things much more efficiently than you are so just get used to it. Joel: I love that you're the resident Jack Ma expert. I think that's the second or third time you've brought him up, the Ali Baba founder. Well in the news, Slack, the popular business messaging solution went down this week and Twitter freaked out. There was a big deal by a lot of people. I use Slack minimally with my consulting gig with ERE but I don't use it that often. I think the two things to mention on this are one is Facebook was probably happy about any sort of outages at Slack because they have a competitive products called At Work and it made me think about putting your corporate communications on to a third party provider. Good or bad? Chad: What corporate communications today are not on a third party provider right now? Joel: Email. Chad: No, it's not. Generally people are pushing that stuff through Google. The big corporations probably have their own servers but they're on the cloud somewhere dude. These companies don't own these clouds. We are dependent on other people's third parties, period. Joel: When AWS goes down the whole internet goes down. Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end of the day we don't have a choice. We're going to have to use somebody else to communicate, period. So it's all about who do you trust. And this is a big stab into the side of Slack. It happens. There's no question. We've seen happen to everybody before. But when you've got a, what was that nine billion dollar valuation, this is the kind of thing that you don't want to see happening. Joel: Yeah, and people don't like it when communications platforms go down. It's one thing to have your ATS maybe go down for a while or my career sites down, but if you can't communicate internally or externally, it kind of sucks for people. So, hopefully this will be a trend for our friends at Slack. Chad: Lost time, lost money, especially if sales is using it. Joel: No kidding, no kidding. Let's shift gears so this. You read an article by Mike Wolford this week entitled Sourcing is the New Recruiting that sort of got you bent out of shape. Chad: Not really bent out of shape. It made me laugh because you and I are talking about I mean really just the process methodology of how AI computers are going to start taking over the world on the recruiting side of the house. The first place is guess what, sourcing because we already see companies that are sourcing incredibly well efficiently fast. Mike is a sourcer and his whole article was predicated on the death of recruiters because of AI which I thought was pretty hilarious. Joel: Did it remind you at all about sort of the late 90s, early 2000s when Newspapers and radio were touting like their strength in the face of everyone knowing that the end is nigh for a lot of their business practices in future? Because to me when your business or livelihood is at stake or under threat, you start rationalizing how no it's not, we're perfectly fine. The burning building is nothing to worry about. To me sourcers are more at risk than recruiters because recruiters at least can use AI and automation as their tool to then filter out people from then on but if sourcing in terms of just finding people, dude, if we get to a place where the LinkedIn's and Googles and whoever else just on a silver platter find everybody that you need for a job, then sourcers become null and void. Chad: You're seeing it already. You talked about Uncommon. Their whole platform is predicated on qualified and interested. So, you don't pay unless the individual is qualified and interested, period. What do sourcers do? They identify and engage qualified and interested types of individuals. We just talked about LinkedIn earlier. They're trying to serve up qualified and interested candidates. So yeah, to be able to sit there, Nero, fiddling while Rome burns, that to me, it just, it was actually kind of funny because as I read down through it at first I was like this guy's got to be fucking kidding. No, he was not kidding at all. Joel: Yeah. I think privately you and I know a ton of sourcers who tell us, yeah, we're fucked. Chad: Yeah. And they understand and most of them are more broad than just being sourcers, they can do more and they understand they're going to have to. Even recruiters. Recruiters are going to have to change who they are because many of these tasks that they have to do on a daily basis are going to go away. Process is going to change, technology is going to change it and they're going to have to change and evolve with it. There's no question. But from a sourcing standpoint, that entire position, goodbye. Joel: Yeah. I mean recruiters, it's who's going to be the best users of tech, who knows the best tech etc. It's just like, it's similar to marketing. Marketing even though you have these tools, programmatic ad buying etc, it's just who knows those tools the best is going to be the one that's employable, not the one who's stuck in the old times. Chad: Yeah, you still need a liaison, internal liaison with these hiring managers. That's all there is to it man, you do. Technology is going to be able to do a lot of what recruiters do today. Just the task that takes up most of their time. So they're going to be freed up to do some really cool shit I believe from being more of like a brand ambassador to the actual candidates themselves to make sure that those candidates don't go into a damn black hole even if they're not qualified for the position as well as ensure that the hiring managers know exactly why they're getting the candidates that they're getting. Joel: I agree man, and again the good news is robots aren't podcasting yet. Chad: Not yet. Google Duplex, you stay the fuck away from podcasting. Joel: Chad, welcome back man and I guess we out. Chad: Good to be back. 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 podcast. And be sure to give buckets of money to our sponsors. Otherwise, I may be forced to take that home renting job I saw on monster.com. We out. #LinkedIn #ZipRecruiter #Pared #Snag #Google #GoogleDuplex #IBM #Microsoft #Salesforce #Amazon #Comcast #Slack

This week, Google keeps googling, Juju (who? who?) pulls the ripcord on Glidepath and rumors are swirling around Snag.co (better known as Snagajob). And the funding keeps flowing. Enjoy and show our sponsors some love: America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX. Transcription Where's Chad? Welcome to another solo effort by yours truly. This is the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman. This week, Google keeps Googling. Juju, or is that Huhu, pulls the ripcord and rumors are swirling around Snag, better known as Snag a Job for a lot of you. Let's dance after a word from one of our amazing sponsors, of course. Well, for those of you who like the solo team Cheese podcast, you'll be disappointed to know that this is the final episode of this show. Chad, Clark, Rusty, Ellen, and the rest of the crew are gonna be back from Europe, hopefully, for a show next week. So yeah, if you hate the solo show, though, then this is the last one that you have to deal with. And I apologize for sucking, if I sucked. Let's get to shout-outs real quick. Tara Carbert, hopefully I'm saying that right, it's not Carbert or something, Minneapolis recruiter, loves the show. Tara, thanks for listening. Adam Bogart, a recruiter from Apple living in Portland, Oregon, loves the show. Adam, thanks for tuning in. A couple Chicago dudes, Reagan Crawford and Chuck Loher, hopefully I'm saying that correctly, are fans of the show. Those guys are also former CareerBuilder guys, so it's amazing when you talk about sexual harassment lawsuits, how some of the CareerBuilder folks come out of the woodwork. If you haven't listened to that show I encourage you to do so. That was last week, I think, in the archives. Shout-out to Stephen Rothberg, college recruiter guy. He's just really funny. He sends emails and Tweets and all kinds of stuff that are funny. His latest Tweet was something about Chad going into ... I don't know, living in some convent in Europe instead of coming home, or that somehow I have had him kidnapped in some Mission Impossible flick over in London or something. So anyway, shout-out to Stephen, I appreciate the comedy, and we appreciate the listenership. Lastly, shout-out to Chad's liver. Dude is in Facebook posting more pictures of beer and alcohol than really should be allowed by someone his age. A lot more pictures of beer than family, wife, etc. so I can only hope that his liver makes it back from the Old Country. Shout-out to Chad's liver. All right, let's get to the abbreviated, efficient show. Well, Google Hire this week had a nice little announcement. They announced three new enhancements to their Google Hire product. For those of you who don't know, Google Hire is sort of their ATS solution. They are expanding it a little bit, bit by bit, as evidenced by the news from this week. So they launched three new features to their Hire/ATS product. One is smart interview scheduling. Essentially, you can easily schedule interviews with a candidate as well as the person on your team who will be doing the interviewing. They also allow, launched a click-to-call solution. So instead of looking up phone numbers or getting out your phone, you can just sort of click and call anyone on your candidate list. They also launched auto highlighting of resume keywords. Some of the studying that they've done, research they've done with users is that recruiters were spending a lot of time clicking control-F, which allows you to search basically your screen, and searching keywords or highlighting keywords. So they've launched an auto solution to highlight the keywords that you're searching, which, these are all pretty small little iterations to the product. And in fact, one of my friends in the industry, when I posted this, just posted a bunch of Zs as if he was going to sleep. Tech Crunch, who covered the story as well, said something around ... something along the lines of "This wasn't going to be a game-changer or anything that was all that exciting." Overall, I would agree with that, but I think there are two particular reasons why I think this stuff matters. Number one, first and foremost is, Google actually cares about this stuff. For those of us who are old enough to remember Google Base, when Google just sort of threw up a Craigslist type classified site up in the mid-'00s, they didn't do anything with it. They sort of threw it out there, I think they put a search box in the search results at one point, but there really was no effort to iterate the product, enhance it, evolve it. And Google clearly cares about employment. They launched three products in the last 12 months, Job Search, Job Search API, and then the Hire product. And they continue to iterate, they continue to ... I mean, there's outreach on this stuff. They're talking to bloggers and podcasters and press. They're giving firsthand looks, they're doing interviews, they're doing conferences. Google really cares about this stuff, so I expect, although the steps are small maybe, for a lot of people, that this stuff is going to continue to evolve and continue to be a force in the recruitment space. Number two, why I think this continues to be important, is that Google has some mad awesome AI tools. And even if you don't like the AI solutions that they have, it's the best out there, or at least on par with the best out there. And I can only imagine the executives at ZipRecruiter or Indeed or anyone that's competing in this space just gritting their teeth, thinking how jealous they are about not having the AI resources that a Google has. And they will continue to be able to scale AI in a real way, not only on the recruiting side of the house, but also everything else that you buy that's Google, whether it's Android phone or Google Home. This stuff is going to be a juggernaut, and most companies in our space will not be able to compete on an AI level. I will remind you of Google Duplex. We did a show about that a while ago. Basically, Google has a AI tool that will talk to people on telephone and it sounds like a person. It sounds like you're talking to a real live, flesh-and-blood, carbon-based being. And when you talk about putting these interviewing ... scheduling interviews and whatnot, and wrapping that into an actual voice assistant that sounds like a real person, then this stuff starts becoming really, really amazing. And I think that's where Google is going with this. So it's a bit of a snoozer, I guess, for those that expect the moonshots from someone like Google, but I think this is the continuing, soldiering on of Google sort of owning a big piece of employment. So keeping with the big boys, I won't shift gears too much. LinkedIn had some interesting news this week. They launched a small business solution. So I'll tell you how it works and I'll tell you after that why I think it's important. Basically, how the new solution works is, so a small business posts a job on LinkedIn. After they post the job they'll get access to a series of potential candidate profiles whose skills fit the recently posted job description. If the employer's interested in the candidate, they use a one-click messaging solution, then they can send a personalized inmail to the candidate. If it's not a fit they can simply click "not interested" and move on to the next profile card. With every message, every action that the employer takes, LinkedIn's AI, again with AI, and that machine learning algorithms, learn more about the job poster and what they're interested in, to then present better matches, better candidates over time. So obviously this is pretty cool from just an AI-related searches, automation, you know, continuing to just say "Hey, post a job and we'll just serve up candidates that work right away." I will add that this is very similar to Chad and Cheese sponsor Uncommon. So if you know about Uncommon, if you're a fan of the show, you've probably checked out the company, it's Uncommon.co. They have a solution very similar. You post a job and they deliver interested and qualified candidates. I'm not sure how interested the candidates are at LinkedIn. I guess we'll learn more about it as things unfold. But the AI part is sort of an obvious really cool thing. To me what really stands out in this news item is that it is targeted to small businesses. Historically, LinkedIn has been all about the enterprise, large company thing. Now, you could argue that anyone can use LinkedIn, and that's definitely true. You can definitely say "Hey, small businesses, recruiters are going into the database, contacting people with inmails." And that's certainly all true, but in terms of just straight PR, promotional language, targeting SMBs is really interesting, because I can't remember a time that LinkedIn really did that. And to me, it is LinkedIn's sort of first dip into the SMB pool. I think they're probably looking at what Google's doing with Hire and really focusing on initially the SMBs. I think that Facebook has a very good position with SMBs knowing that every small business has a Facebook page already. So to me, this is going after a logical extension of their business and saying "Hey, you know what, we don't want Facebook and Google to get all of the small business market share. We're gonna go after it as well." So I think this is a really good move by LinkedIn. Time will tell if they can go beyond their sort of buttoned-up, white-collar brand and really connect with small businesses. But I think the idea of "Hey, small business, post your job, we'll deliver candidates that are on LinkedIn, you can quickly inmail them and talk to them similarly to how Facebook has messaging with candidates." I think that's a good move, so we'll keep our eye on this. But LinkedIn going after small businesses, I think, is a pretty solid move. Let's take a quick break and we'll switch gears into some smaller companies that are getting some nice inflow of cash. Be right back after this message. So let's talk about Juju for a second, a company I don't think we've ever discussed on the show. I like to describe them as a poor man's Indeed, or a poor man's Simply Hired. No one talks about Simply Hired any more because they're basically gone. They're just a shell for Indeed content. But anyway, Juju has been around for a long time. I stop of saying they're a lifestyle business, but they're definitely not ... they've never made a move to say "Hey, we're gonna take over the world." They've been sort of a nice business charging lower per click than, say, an Indeed or another competitor. They've been pretty lean and mean, they've had some pretty good salespeople and continue to have pretty good salespeople in their midst. But anyway, I have to expect that the vertical job search business ... if we agree that it's tough on Indeed, and when we have people like Ism's CEO saying that he's seen a 30% decrease in Indeed traffic since Google for jobs launched, I have to think that it's really hell for a site like Juju to keep that traffic flow going and keep those clicks going. So in 2015, they launched a software solution called Glide Path. It was a small business sort of do-it-yourself, I think, solution to have a career site, have jobs distributed through a large network of job boards, etc. They brought in some decent talent, they brought in one of Beyond/now Next sales guys who's been around the industry for quite a while, just sort of run sales. They had a full staff at one point, or ... I mean, they had a CEO, I think, at one point, or someone managing the whole system. They had a sales team, etc. Anyway, about six months ago it looked like they pulled the whole thing. They just dumped the whole thing. People were being let go, social media shares died, it was just sort of on autopilot for the most part. I emailed their founder and CEO, a guy named Ewen, about what's going on. He said "Hey, we're switching gears, refocusing, sort of soldiering on." So anyway, I kept my eye on it. Six months later to today, I emailed back, said "Hey, it looks like this thing's really dead. What's going on?" And they finally admitted that "Hey, we're sort of shuttering Glide Path, but we're also releasing a site called Emissary." The URL is Emissary.AI. Those .AI URLs are incredibly popular, predictably, in our space. Emissary AI is looking to capitalize on the whole text recruiting phenomenon. I like to describe the solution as sort of text recruit meets Canvas. We interviewed Canvas's CEO a while back, I encourage you to look at that archive, as well as Paradox, who some might remember as Olivia, there's also Maya, there's also Allyo. So that's great, it's a technology solution, they're getting on board where that's going. So we'll see where that goes. There's not a lot of information about it. There's a website, but if you click "Learn more," I think it just opens up your inmail, or your email solution to email the company. So there's not a ton of information. There's no pricing that I saw. So we'll keep our eye on that, but for the meantime if you're paying attention to Juju news, then you know that they have dumped Glide Path and they've launched Emissary.AI. Keeping on the text recruit news cycle, TextRecruit launched drip campaigns recently. The news is a couple weeks old, but I thought it was relevant with the Emissary launching. Basically, if you're not familiar with drip campaigns, it's sort of a marketing strategy or term. What it is, basically, is you have messages drip out from the first time that you message someone. So you could put a phone number into the database. From that point they could get an email a week after that, they could get an email again if they reply, they could get a separate email or separate text message, sorry, from that response. So it's a further step from recruiting going into marketing. And as we look at some of the funding from this week, you'll see that the hub spot for recruiting, if you will, is becoming a very popular item. And to me, the TextRecruit drip campaigns are another element of marketing creeping into recruiting. Well, let's get to the funding real quick. There were two significant ones to talk about. One is Beamery. And again, this is sort of in line with the hub spot for recruiting phenomenon or trend. Beamery is essentially a marketing platform for recruiting. So we're talking about messaging candidates, we're talking about having a database of folks, segmenting them, sending messages, etc. Beamery, a London-based company, recently received $28 million to expand their service, hire salespeople, get into more markets. So Beamery, relatively new company, I think a year or two, maybe a little bit, maybe three years old. They look like they're making some real waves into the industry, so we'll keep our eye on them. The other funding news came out of Hired. Hired.com got $30 million in funding this week, an announcement. So Hired is basically, job seekers go to the site, they submit a profile, and then companies can message them based on their profile, and then there are a series of interview questions from those companies to those candidates. I don't know a ton about Hired so I did a quick little look before I came on. It's, I guess, sort of a version 2.0 Job Board. I mean, you're still posting a profile, you're still talking to companies, but they've added some quirky technology about answering interview questions and sort of messaging with employers as you do that. So $30 million to them, $28 million to Beamery. The money continues to flow into sort of the tech-based businesses, in this case marketing technology. And in Hired's case, sort of a newfangled way to interview folks. Let's take another break. Let's hear from JobAdX, our sponsor. And when I return I'm gonna talk about a new rumor about Snag that you don't want to miss. How many times has someone said to you "We're the Uber of ..." or "It's the Paypal of ..." Maybe better, "Facebook of ..." In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot-on, that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google AdSense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, persistent, and smarter ad unit for job-related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms real-time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. All this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click, or application. We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We're not [set in regrets 00:21:20]. For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates for the best in programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards, higher rev share than other partners, through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30-40% greater and more through our scalable model. To partner with us, you can visit or search JobAdX.com or email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX has just launched in the UK too. So midweek I get an email, Chad was included on that, about a rumor out of Snag, or Snag a Job, as many of you in the industry know. The source was legitimate and their source was, according to them, very legitimate. They wanted to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. So the rumor is that the CEO out of Snag, who I interviewed for a story for ERE, which you can check out, has been fired, or was fired, in exchange for an executive or former CEO from UpWork, I believe, was the official rumor. So I reached out to Snag's comm folks, and they said "That's news to us. We don't know anything about it, or we have the same CEO that's been here, he's still here." So it's a rumor. The sources are pretty solid, there's a good chance that people don't know that this is coming. We'll see. But it is interesting that Snag a Job appointed the former ... a former UpWork CEO to their board of directors in 2017. So there is at least one little puzzle piece there that would indicate that, hey, this UpWork former CEO is on the board. Makes sense that they would bring an UpWork, bring him into the fold maybe to run the company. What I've also heard from the same source is that revenue under the current CEO is down ... not down, but it's significantly lower. It's not in the negatives, but it's lower than what it used to be. I'd be a little surprised to see a new CEO come in so close after the company has started to change its brand and change its focus. A quick refresher, Snag a Job is a traditional sort of post jobs, get resumes, or candidates come in, and the new Snag.co, which isn't released everywhere, they're rolling it out as sort of a Uber-type platform, where let's say I'm a burger flipper. I can turn myself on for opportunities to flip burgers tonight or wait tables, and restaurants can use the platform to bring workers in for a shift. And then Snag a Job, or Snag basically handles all the payments. Which I think is a really interesting business model. But to have that and then switch up CEOs would really cause some havoc in the organization. So again, this is a rumor. We'll keep our eye on it and talk about it. If we find out for sure that it's not true I'll let you know, determinately, if it is false. But I just thought I'd throw it out there 'cause that's kind of what we do here on HR's most dangerous podcast. #Beamery #Hired #TextRecruit #LinkedIn #Snag #GoogleHired

This is a NEXXT EXCLUSIVE Podcast from ChadCheese.com - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Announcer: This, the Chad and Cheese Podcast, brought to you in partnership with TA Tech. TA Tech, the association for talent acquisition solutions. Visit TATech.org. Chad: Okay, Joel. Quick question. Joel: Yep? Chad: What happens when your phone vibrates or your texting alert goes off? Joel: Dude, I pretty much check it immediately. I bet everyone listening is reaching to check their phones right now. Chad: Yeah, I know. I call it our Pavlovian dog reflex of text messaging. Joel: Yeah, that's probably why text messaging has a fricking 97% open rate. Chad: What? Joel: Crazy high candidate response rate within the first hour alone. Chad: Which, are all great reasons why the Chad and Cheese Podcast love Text to Hire from Nexxt. Joel: Yeah. Love it! Chad: Yep, that's right. Nexxt, with the double x. Not the triple x. Joel: Bow 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 text to hire campaign for just 25% off. Boom! Chad: Wow! So, how do you get this discount, you're asking yourself right now? Joel: Tell 'em 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. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Just go where you know. ChadCheese.com and Nexxt, with two x's. 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, biased opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Welcome to a special edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheeseman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: On today's exclusive podcast we have Anoop Gupta on the show. Anoop, welcome to the show. Anoop: Hey, thank you so much Chad and Cheese. Joel: You bet, you bet. Give us a little bit about you and history because it is pretty cool. And tell us a little bit about your country ... Company before we drop into ... Sorry I was reading a Trump article before I [crosstalk 00:02:33]. Tell us a little bit about your company and we'll get into some Q&A. Anoop: Okay, so I'll start with the country. I came to the United States in 1980 to be my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Melon. And after that I spent 11 years on the faculty of Stanford University. I did my first start up there, which Microsoft acquired in '97. Then 18 years at Microsoft including some really fun roles as reporting to Bill Gates as his technology advisor, running all of the business communication services there. And then two years ago I decided to resign and start SeekOut with my co-founder who was one of the key movers and shakers behind the Bing search engine. What SeekOut is about is talent identification that helps talent acquisition teams hire faster and with higher quality candidates. Some of the things we really emphasize are companies that are looking for diversity and that have deep interest in tech talent. So SeekOut's unique algorithms and custom filters helps high tech companies identify diverse talent for those hard to fill roles. Anoop: We have something very special for GitHub. Our aggregated and enhanced to GitHub profiles and intuitive search helps companies find untapped tech talent. We have a unique insights feature that gives you insights on the competitive landscape and allows recruiters to become talent advisors in support of the hiring managers. So all pretty powerful stuff that I'd love to share more about as we go on. Chad: So let me get this straight, let me get this straight real quick Anoop. So you reported to, probably talked to Bill Gates on a daily basis. Then you move to the recruiting technology space and you're talking to a couple of idiots like us. Is that how this worked out? Anoop: No, not exactly. Joel: Did you confer with a psychiatrist or a shrink before making such a move? Anoop: So, you know, I did spend several hours a day with Bill during the couple of years I reported to him and it was ... I just learned so much from hearing the questions he would ask and how he would prepare and what he would do. Now my move into the talent space is somewhat circuitous. What we started with given my deep messaging background is how to make sure ... We are all going outside our immediate circles to find a better couriers or whatever else, so we created a messaging system that will let people who want to seek attention like recruiters and people who want to provide attention like candidates have a much more fruitful exchange than today. We look at LinkedIn as the middle man where they control who we can see unless we pay them. They control who we can message unless we pay them. And there is no fair exchange between the buyers and the sellers. So that's where we started with and then as we learned more we said, "This is such a noble mission." Anoop: Right, we spend so much of our lives at the workplace. And what we do, who we work with, what impact we make is deeply meaningful and it finds purpose for us. So what better to do to allow people to make better matches and get them hired in the right places? Joel: What activities did you do at Microsoft that you've carried over to the new company. Were you hands-on on recruiting or was it just sort of, you were there on the wall? Anything come from that experience in 18 years at Microsoft that is currently in the SeekOut product? Anoop: So what is relevant there is, my role was as a hiring manager and my team in Unified Communications when I was running that was around 1,600 people. So when you're a hiring manager, you want to say what are the things I am interested in that the recruiters are not doing? What are the kinds of conversations that should happen between a recruiter or a sourcer and the hiring manager? So a lot of the product and particularly this people insights piece that I've talked about is that hiring manager/recruiter relationship and how data can lead to much more useful conversations and productive conversations than just saying, "Hey, tell me more about this role." Chad: So now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and then you've got this side ... I would say somewhat of a competitor to LinkedIn, how does that work in the market? Do you see Microsoft trying to prospectively compete and/or create a SeekOut type of platform? Or are you really just possibly showing them a new way to go and prospectively get acquired? Joel: And have they offered to buy the company yet? Anoop: No, they have not offered to buy the company yet. See this is a huge space that is there on how we discover talent, how we communicate with them. We are taking a look at it from a broader landscape. The thing I like to say the CV as we put it with past position titles and education is a very limited representation of who a person is, who is a candidate is. So when we, in the case of GitHub, look across 60 million repositories and bring out the contributions that a particular person has made and the hiring manager can look at that code in an instant and decide whether it is good, bad versus just a 15 minute interview. So bringing this unique information beyond just a LinkedIn resume into the candidate's profile and making it very easily searchable and then being able to reach candidates, I think makes us special and in some ways complimentary. And something long-term we think even LinkedIn ought to be doing. Joel: Anoop, is it fair to put the Entelo, the Hiring Solved, Nameri, those companies, would you count them as a competitor? Anoop: Yes. Entelo is used in a similar way and Hiring Solved too. We think we bring some very unique capabilities compared to all of these companies, but yes we are in the same space. Joel: And what would some of those unique qualities be, for our viewers? Our listeners largely know who Entelo and some of these players are. How are you different? Anoop: We are different, one is in terms of how we do GitHub and how we let people find talent. So if you look at Entelo and many of these other search engines you look at a profile and then there will be the GitHub symbol so you can go to the GitHub profile. And very often when you go there you'll find nothing useful there. Instead we let you start from the GitHub site. We built an aggregated profile that has the public information that people often search with, current company, current title, past company, past title, skills. But we also bring in information from the GitHub profile. We bring in information from each ... We will tell you, this person was the number tenth contributor to the tensor flow Google, which is Google machine learning framework that is there. So we'll bring out their contributions. We will bring out their email. Anoop: So we bring together information that nobody else does. GitHub is a totally unique solution on how we let you source on SeekOut. Similarly, the people insights piece that we have, you can use 20 filters to control what is the competitve of a candidate talent pool landscape you want to look at. Nobody else provides that in that flexible and powerful way. Diversity we and Entelo are very similar. You might have seen a source gone paper by Phil Hendrickson, so we are pretty similar. But I believe Entelo and us are the only two people who are doing the deep analysis on diversity and letting you search and filter in powerful ways. Joel: So we'll get into diversity here in a minute, but when you take a look at the actual platform, obviously that SeekOut has, would you classify it more as a proactive where a recruiter has to jump into the system and actually do a search against skillsets and job descriptions and pre-reqs; versus a reactive system that reacts to what your needs are when you post an actual requisition into your system? Anoop: So it is a search tool primarily for passive candidates who may not be looking. So we are not like Monster or something where people have just said, "Hey right now I'm looking for a job or a position." Within that, there is a lot of judgment that is there on equal skillsets and so it is a place where people come to search. But we have built into some pretty cool AI machine learning capabilities inside that. For example if you were to say you're looking to hire a data scientist for Facebook. So what we do behind the scenes is we look at everybody who is currently a data scientist at Facebook, then we look at what were their past companies, what were their past titles, what were their universities, what were their majors, what are their skills and we cannot automatically surface people for you. And then with a single click you say show me African American candidates that will be suitable and we'll bring those up. It's very very powerful. We call this the position magnet in SeekOut. Joel: So that's where the diversity piece comes in. Where you can actually do a deep search against backgrounds per se, and then you have it broken out with, I would say gender as well as race and prospective Veteran status and those types of things? Anoop: Yes, exactly. That is true. And we do pretty complex things. Just so you know to use as an example our African American filter. We used historically Black colleges and universities. We use African American sororities and fraternities, if you're a member. We use membership in organizations like National Society of Black Engineers or National Black Accountants Associations. We also look at the census bureau and turns out that certain names are much more likely to be African American. We also use that information so these are fairly sophisticated queries that we look at index time to surface candidates. This is not a perfect filter or analysis by any chance, but it can be super helpful to recruiters. Chad: You talked some about AI, which obviously you have some experience in working at Microsoft. We talk a lot about on the show in terms of automation. A lot of companies out there are trying to create an easy button, if you will, for recruiting. I need a Ph.D. developer with five to eight years experience in Seattle, go. And it goes out to the web, searches people, bring them back, prescreens them with a chatbot. Your product does not do that. Are you against that piece of the business? Is automation going to be a part of the product? What are just some of your general senses on that? Anoop: So the first thing I would say is AI is a term that is, I believe, overused. It certainly has its space. It is important, but a lot of it is what I call data science, right? So if you say, "Hey I'm looking for a Python developer." So you can parse out and extract key terms from AJD. You can look at the previous developers who might be at the company who have a certain skillset and then you can get a lot synonyms. So all of that is AI and it is useful in surfacing candidates, though I would never de-emphasize the human additional initiative that might be required. Anoop: The second thing is when you are reaching out to candidates, I think it can be helpful, but my belief is smaller number of candidates, more personalized is always better. I'm going to take a, actually slight tangent, and talk to you about it. Google recently showed the duplex demo. Joel: Sure. Anoop: At the Google, right where the AI and bot is going and talking and making a representation. The CEO of the Allen Institute of Brain Sciences had a very interesting comment on that. He said, "This is terrible. Not because it's making it but it should self-identify as a bot. So when it starts the conversation, it should say, I am a bot, representing Anoop. I would like to make a appointment with the hairdresser." Because the consequences if you don't identify what is AI and what is human and what we might reveal, can be very very bad. Yes, automation can be useful, should be used. But how you ethically use it is very important. Chad: On the front end though, you can fix that pretty easy, right? Hi, this is Chad's Google assistant. Looking to make a hair appointment. That's a funny one. That's not a big change. It's not a big change, right? I mean, it could be something that would be implemented fairly easy. Anoop: Oh the implementation-wise it is easy. I totally agree. I think what people are trying to do is they're trying to fake. So nobody says when you, in Entelo, use their automation to send out 50 emails, "This is the Entelo bot on behalf of company xyz reaching out to you." Because the person will ignore it. They try and fake it as it's not a bot. Joel: Yeah, and there are some branding implications there too, right? Anoop: Yeah, yeah. So I'm all for technology and intelligence and automation. But I am also want us to be cautious about not trying to fake it and fool people because it can have very bad brand consequences. Chad: Yeah, transparency-wise, there's no question there. Joel: Anoop, you've probably watched or heard about the HiQ legal battle with LinkedIn and being able to scrape content, profile data, etc. Which I'm assuming will affect your business quite drastically if LinkedIn wins that case and sort of excludes spiders from getting data from them. I don't know much about GitHub in terms of how aggressively they are against bots. It sounds like they're not so much, but I'm just curious your thoughts on that legal battle, things that you're doing to sort of prepare if the worse case scenario happens, and what it means for the scraping profile business in general. Anoop: So what we as far as, this is an area you are trying to get jobs to candidates. This is your public professional profile that is there. And our belief that our data, and LinkedIn will claim so, belongs to the end-user and not really to LinkedIn and the same in a lot of other papers, what research papers they have published, what open-sourced contributions they have made. These belong to the end-user rather than to any company. I am very optimistic both where the courts are going to go and the availability of such information to allow recruiters to make more intelligent decisions to help find candidates and offer them great opportunities to find purpose and do great stuff and have impact. Chad: So we're talking about all of, not just LinkedIn, but we're also talking about Facebook, right? I mean, there's a lot of optics behind this right now and I appreciate the hope that HiQ comes out on top. But don't think from an optics standpoint right now, that the landscape is or the market is very hypersensitive to privacy? Anoop: I agree and I believe the market should be sensitive, but if you look at GDPR and your look at EU Privacy Shield, they have a number of clauses, the kind of information and the use of that information, the purpose for which that information is being used, actually they're being pretty smart about that. Every EU citizen has a right to employment. So to say don't use my public profile data for that is a very unreasonable thing and I don't think they will go for that. But if you're to use they're posts on Facebook to determine they had a certain personality type and they shouldn't be hired or some other implications, I think the EU and the American companies and citizens won't like that. Anoop: So it is a very nuanced landscape and I agree with the sensitivity part that you're saying. But I think we have to handle the nuance as it is and deal with it. Chad: Okay, so that being said, are you spinning SeekOut, is SeekOut actually going in the direction of being an engagement type of marketing platform as well since you've got so much data. You're looking at trying to have better interaction and experience, are you guys looking to go down that road? Anoop: So we are planning to ship in the next couple of weeks that if you organize people in a project, let's say for a particular job role, you can reach out to those candidates via SeekOut or you may decide to use a CRM system. But many people have very old CRM systems or no CRM systems at all. The reason is that sending just one email is not a way to get high response rate. I get so many emails and I have to ping Joel many times before I get a response. Chad: Joel does not use email well. Joel: Smoke signal only. Anoop: So being able to manage such a campaign and remind people, I think is a very useful capability that we will be providing in the very near future. Chad: So that being said, and knowing that email ... Really response rates on emails suck comparatively, when we talk about text messaging, those types of things, Facebook messenger. Are you looking at prospectively trying to wrap those into your communications system as well? Anoop: We have not thought much about it. The issue that comes up is more telephony. Should we be texting people, calling people? Just from my own personal experience I would be pretty annoyed if somebody just called me out of the blue and even if I would have been interested in will create a bad impression for me and probably true for many of the tech candidates. Imagine the number of calls and messages they get and emails. And if all those are texts and phone calls, their life would be hell. But we should be open to whatever is the way to respectfully reach them, we should allow them to do. Joel: Anoop, what should we expect in your space and your sphere of competition, right? Do you expect more consolidation? Do you expect more competitors to launch? What does the future hold for this sourcing software category? Anoop: I think both things will happen. Many new startups will launch and we will see consolidation too. You know, the small number of really have the deeper technology ... You get a lot of people who have very shallow stacks and just want to offer something. And I think those will disappear. People, I hope, like ourselves who bring deep technology and value and simplicity and intuitiveness to the product hopefully will get much wider an option by the community. And who knows, they may be consolidation then. Chad: So being new to this industry, what is really the most surprising thing that you've seen thus far. Coming, obviously, with your technology background, now coming into the recruitment industry, recruitment technology industry, what surprised you the most? Anoop: One of the things that surprised me is the emphasis on free and not wanting to pay for tools. I'll use an analogy: when I was in grad school I worked on CAD tools, how you design these VLSI Logic integrated circuit chips. And I wrote one of the programs that was very popular for almost a decade that was there. But at that time, we were designing chips for 10,000 transistors and now we design chips for 10 million transistors. So for ancillary, humanity is about tools and powerful tools expanding our capabilities. And people still want to say, "My time is not valuable. I want to spend 15 minutes trying to find an email for somebody else. Or trying to search or try to use 20 different things." So that surprised me a little that people are not, it seemed almost, they were not valuing their time. Anoop: I think being able to do stuff without the tools is a very powerful skillset that they should have. But investment in tools that empowers us increases our productivity, is something we ought to be doing. I was a little surprised by that in the community. Chad: So yes, and then this is what I've been saying for years, Anoop. Free is not a strategy. And that being said, I'm going to roll over into the next question, what's the price? What does it actually cost to engage with SeekOut and start to use it as a very powerful tool? Joel: And do you have any special deals for our valued listeners? Anoop: So we offer both monthly and annual prices. And there are three skews, we have a basic $1,000 for the whole year. A premium one, which gives you diversity and insights for $2,500 a year. And a premium tech, which includes GitHub for $5,000 a year and they're equal in monthly prices too. We think even if you make one hire using the tool it will cover the annual price. But I do have a very great special for this special Chad and Cheese audience that is there. If you buy SeekOut in the next month, in the next 30 days and you mention the Chad and Cheese Podcast when you reach out to us, we'll give you an additional 10% off. Chad: Gotta love it. Joel: I dig it, I dig it. Anoop, I got one more. I want to hear a funny Bill Gates story. If you don't have a funny story drop us a Bill Gates piece of wisdom on us. Anoop: So one is Bill is a really funny guy. You might think of him from everything that you see is a lot of serious stuff. But when you're in meetings with him he'll make you laugh and he'll crack jokes left and right. I'll tell you more though about a piece of wisdom in terms of his strategy. So once I was sitting with him and I think the foundation was just starting and I asked him, "You know it's really hard to decide where to spend money and what you're going to invest in." So his first thing is, "I don't invest in White men's ailments. And that is because there is enough incentive otherwise for the former companies to do it. What is important to me to make my money count is to invest in areas where the rest of the community is not investing." And that's why he chose vaccines. A lot of drugs already existed and just the economic incentives were not there to product them at volume and the Gates Foundation has done that and saved millions of lives. Anoop: So the big lesson is in terms of being very deliberative about seeing what are the gaps, what are wholes, what can your limited resources ... Because even Bill Gates' resources are nowhere near compared to what the nations stand and the former companies stand to say how I can make a big difference. Joel: So find a need and fill it, basically. Anoop: Yeah, find a need that is being underserved and then see if you have the right talents or the right resources, go and fill it. Chad: Excellent, awesome. Joel: Well, Anoop, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it. Chad: Please tell the fine listeners where they can find out more about SeekOut. Anoop: They should go to https://seekout.io. So that is our website. You can learn a lot about that and Chad and Joel, thank you so much for having me on the Podcast, it's been wonderful. Joel: Thank you, dude. Chad: Thank you, Anoop. You can tell he's incredibly technical. He started all the way at the https ... Joel: Make sure that secure URL is mentioned. We appreciate that. Thanks, Anoop. Anoop: Hey, thank you so much. Bye bye. Chad: Okay, okay, okay, okay. Before we go, remember when I asked you about the whole reflex and check your text messages thing? Joel: Yeah, you know all about reflexes. And then I brilliantly tied it to text messages 97% open rate, then I elegantly, elegantly tied it to a better experience for your candidates. Don't laugh Chad, I can be elegant. Can't I? Chad: Whatever man. I know it's redundant. You already heard about Text to Hire, but you're still not using Text to Hire from Nexxt. Joel: What? Chad: I know man. Joel: C'mon man. Chad: Since advertising takes repetition to soak in, I just thought I'd remind you again, this was all by elegant design. It's all about Text to Hire and it's all about Nexxt. Joel: And elegant design. So go to chadcheese.com. Click on the Nexxt logo and get 25, yeah I said 25% off your first Text to Hire campaign. Engage better, use Text to Hire from Nexxt, two x's. Chad: Boo yah. Announcer: Thanks to our partners at TA Tech, the association for talent acquisition solutions. Remember to visit TATech.org. 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. #Seekout #Microsoft #BillGates #LinkedIn #Sourcing #GitHub #Nexxt

Startup Hirevisor faces the firing squad. Will their warm-and-fuzzy, sharing-is-caring business model pass the test? Gotta listen to this Talroo exclusive if you want to find out. FIRING SQUAD is brought to you by TALROO - The data-driven platform to amplify talent attraction and job discovery Transcript Joel: All right. Time for another Firing Squad. I'm ready, Chad, how about you? Chad: I'm excited. Joel: On today's show, we have Patrick Hillstrom, co-founder and CEO of Hirevisor, which by the way if you don't have a tchotchke visor that you're passing out to people, I think you're really missing a prime opportunity. Patrick, welcome to Firing Squad. Give us the 15 second intro on you. Patrick: Well, thanks Joel and Chad. A quick intro on me, my name is Patrick Hillstrom as you folks mentioned. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Hirevisor. I'm based in San Francisco and ex-LinkedIn alum, and very excited to be here. Joel: Excellent. Chad, tell him what he's won. Chad: You've won the opportunity to stand in front of the firing squad. That's what you're getting. We're going to go ahead and set the format out for you. You're going to have two minutes to pitch us on Hirevisor. At the end of two minutes, you'll hear the bell. Then Joel and I will hit you with some rapid fire Q&A. If your answers aren't concise, Joel is going to hit you with either the bell or crickets. That means you need to move your ass on. Tighten up your game, be concise. Chad: Then at the end of Q&A, Joel and I will give you our honest feedback with regard to your pitch, answering of your questions, and you're going to get graded in one of three ways. You will either receive big applause, that means you've kicked ass and you've taken names, a golf clap, which is my favorite because it's so pathetic, but that just means you're not ready for primetime, and then the firing squad. You should probably pack your shit up, go home, and rethink this whole thing. That's firing squad. It's time to buckle up and pitch. Joel, it's all you. Joel: Are you ready, Patrick? Patrick: I am ready. Joel: All right. At the bell, you have two minutes. When you hear the bell again, you are done. Go. Patrick: All right. In a sentence, Hirevisor is a peer-to-peer talent exchange. Now, what that means in practice is our platform provides a way to invite their second place candidates to leverage all the efforts that we put into application process toward finding roles at our other partner companies on the Hirevisor talent exchange. Patrick: There's really two pieces to the platform. On the one hand, we're a candidate experience, candidate engagement talent branding tool that frankly will interact with most of the candidates who go through your application pipeline and make sure the vast majority of folks have a way to still feel like they had a great experience with your company. Patrick: On the other side of our platform, we're actually a sourcing tool. All of these candidates who accept their invite to join the Hirevisor platform, they're now searchable on the Hirevisor talent exchange. The main value here is these candidates who join, again, they can leverage their efforts in the process toward finding roles at other companies, and hopefully be able to find roles at other companies without ... Excuse me. Without having to fill out another application, without having to do more work than they've already put into the process. Patrick: This really comes from a personal place for me, because as a candidate, I've been second place more time than I can count, and we really wanted to build a platform where as a candidate you're able to, interviewing has been historically a parallel yet siloed process. It's the first time in our platform all of this work can help you land roles at other companies. Patrick: Two pieces of the platform. It's a candidate experience, candidate engagement piece, and also a sourcing tool that helps companies find better talent faster, and builds an overall better candidate experience. Joel: In 15 seconds, where would someone find more about you? Patrick: Hirevisor.com. You can sign up today, or you can request a demo. I'm happy to share more about it. Joel: All right. That's your first piece of critique. Make sure in every pitch you tell people where can you find out more. Patrick: Got it. Joel: Chad, he's all yours. Chad: Yes. Three part question. First and foremost, are you familiar with AllianceQueue? Patrick: AllianceQueue? No, I'm not. Chad: Are you familiar with Jobfox? Patrick: I've heard of them, but not terribly familiar with them. Chad: Okay. When it comes down to the actual pitch that you're trying to make, how are you different when it comes to going after active job seekers than all the other products and platforms that are out there? Patrick: The main difference about our platform is that we're directly integrated with your applicant tracking system. We're as much a sourcing and candidate engagement play as we are a systems integration play. It takes 10 minutes, you get up and running and integrated with your applicant tracking system, and candidates are automatically invited to our platform. The value of this being that we know for sure, hey, this candidate interviewed for this roll, and we have the date and timestamp of when that happened. Patrick: While there are plenty of platforms out there to your point that say, "Hey, we've got the best active job seekers," we know for sure in a data driven way that these folks are ready to go. Chad: This is a platform that is focused heavily on the active job seeker's side in an environment and/or landscape market that is very tight, so therefore, active job seekers are very low. Why are you focusing on active job seekers, when to be quite frank, most people are trying to re-engage with those passive job seekers? Patrick: It's a great question. The way we see it is almost as a philosophical difference about the future of the talent ecosystem. There's plenty of companies out there like Beamery, both Lever and Greenhouse have offered these sort of talent relationship management ... Excuse me, talent marketing tools that help you to your point re-engage with candidates who've been rejected and may or may not be interested in the company later on. Patrick: We see that as fundamentally inefficient. What we're offering is a true talent exchange that almost in a way is just-in-time recruiting where it's more efficient if you have this person who was just rejected from a role and they could be a great fit at another company who's looking for someone like them right now. Why not make that connection, versus introducing this additional, what we see as additional inefficiency in the process. Patrick: To your point, we see it as almost a difference in world view. Joel: Patrick, I'm always interested in the genesis of an idea. You mentioned your LinkedIn past. I'm interested, what did you do for them? Was this idea of this company born out of LinkedIn? Tell us about the lightning bolt that hit you that made you come up with Hirevisor? Patrick: Sure. I was at LinkedIn for two and a half years, and I worked on the business operations team and worked very closely with the product teams as well, specifically on content products like SlideShare, Pulse, the publishing platform, Groups, and then also when LinkedIn acquired Linda.com, I helped lead the BizOps effort for that integration. Patrick: A lot of what I was doing was working with product teams and understanding how different users were using LinkedIn products and services, and how that was incorporated into the overall growth of the company. I would say what my time at LinkedIn really did was give me a sense for how the 800 pound gorilla in this space thinks about the talent ecosystem and what their sense of how the market is shifting, where it's heading, and product strategy, et cetera. Patrick: That definitely informed some of the things that I'm doing right now with Hirevisor, but really the lightning bolt for this idea came after two and a half years at LinkedIn, had a great time there, but really felt this itch to try something on my own. LinkedIn's a fantastic company, I would've stayed if I didn't have this itch basically. The original genesis, even more so than from working at my time at LinkedIn was just born out of personal experience. Again, as I mentioned, I'd been a second place candidate more times than I could count, and coming from a ... Joel: You're barely into your 20s. How can you have so many second ... Patrick: Welcome to the Millennial struggle Joel: There we go. The Millennial struggle. Patrick: I had to throw it in there. I had to throw it in there. In all seriousness, I graduated with a history degree, right, and I managed to weasel my way into finance first, and then from there, weasel my way into LinkedIn. There was a lot of learnings that came from branding myself and how do you actually understand and navigate this job market. The process sucked, frankly. That core sort of feeling about the candidate experience married with my time at LinkedIn helped inform the genesis of this idea. Patrick: Do you want me to get into the specifics for this, because this particular idea is actually a pivot. Our original idea was more of a core candidate experience piece, but this is more of a pivot. I'm happy to get into that if you want as well, but that sort of, that core genesis. Joel: Typically people a little bit more grizzled or they have some experience in employment, which you do, but not that extensive, or people who've had startups before. Their story is a little more cut and dry. To me, yours is a little less so, so I wanted to just have you sort of create some color around your story. You're also I believe a Penn, a Penn grad? Patrick: Correct. Joel: So Ivy League kid, LinkedIn, now doing this. Got it. Patrick: Correct. Correct. Chad: When it comes down to a silver medal candidate- Patrick: Quick question. Do you guys like that term or dislike that term? I've found it's polarizing. There's people who love it and there's people who hate it. Joel: Hey, we're asking the questions here, pal! Patrick: All right. Chad: I don't think it matters. Second, I'm a company, and I have silver medal candidates, it's a tight job market. There's no way in hell I'm giving you my silver medal candidates. How are you getting companies to actually come on board and say, "Oh yeah, I'll give you all my great talent into your shared resume database"? Patrick: Another great question. I will admit, there is a profile of company that is much more excited about this idea than say other profiles of companies. They're typically high growth, mid market, call it 100 to 1,000 employees sized companies, folks who basically, they needed to fill a req a yesterday. Whereas, if you talk to say much larger enterprises, you're getting some of that reaction where they say, "Why would I ever share my candidates with you? Our talent pipeline is bigger than yours will ever be." Patrick: There definitely is a sweet spot in terms of profile of company we're working with. To directly answer your question, the way the pitch basically works is we say, look, you need to find better talent faster, active candidates. Our platform provides you a way to do that where you can see candidates who have been interviewed by other top companies on our platform. Patrick: If you buy this hypothesis that hey, if I'm looking for a software engineer, this person made it to the final round at Facebook or final round at LinkedIn or you name it, if I know that company has a high bar for talent and this person just recently joined the platform, chances are I want to talk to them and potentially fast track them through the process. Patrick: At the same time, the other piece of the puzzle is the candidate experience, candidate engagement piece around closing the loop with all of these folks who don't ultimately end up getting hired at your company. Frankly, we've actually had a number of emails come from candidates and from our customers alike saying, "Thank you so much for this opportunity, I really appreciate it." Joel: Patrick, you said something earlier that really I think struck a nerve with me, and it was Millennial. Aside from saying get off my lawn, your business feels so Millennial to me. Like, let's all share candidates, hold hands and sing kumbaya. Are your clients Millennial-driven, are they Millennial ... Do you have Toms Shoes? Is there something in the DNA of these customers that you have that screams Millennial, and does that create a ceiling for your business? Patrick: First of all, I threw Millennial in to be sort of tongue-in-cheek. I more see what we're offering as, it's just ... it almost feels like a no-brainer. We see an inefficiency in the market where just the numbers game, supply and demand, you have a finite number of openings at X number of companies and you have vastly more number of folks who are applying for these roles. Patrick: For any given req, you have 100, 200 people who are under consideration, and you hire one person. Chances are, the top 10% are still pretty good. If someone makes it to the final round only to get rejected at the 11th hour, it's not because usually they lack skills or qualifications, it's timing, budget, commute, salary, some other factor that comes into play at that point. Patrick: Again, the core genesis of this platform is well, it seems inefficient that these folks who got this far in the process aren't able to leverage all that effort toward a role somewhere else, versus having to start all over again. Patrick: Again, I said Millennial to be tongue-in-cheek, but really it's just a looking at the numbers game of the market. Joel: But my question is genuine and not tongue-in-cheek. I'm really interested to know if this business is a uniquely Millennial strategy. Patrick: It was, maybe just by virtue of the fact that people are switching jobs more and more, there could be that, especially in the "Millennial age group". That could be part of it, but it's not, nothing in our marketing or advertising- Joel: Customer wise, you're being embraced by Boomers, Gen X-ers, and Millennials? All of those decision makers are deciding to buy this product? Patrick: I would have to check and see the age group of all the folks we're working with, but I would say probably more Gen X-ers/Millennials. There are some Boomers who've been interested in the product as well, but again, it sort of comes with the territory of some of the companies we're working with in the Bay Area that do tend to have more Gen X/Millennials in these heads of talent roles. Chad: Okay. Patrick, what we're seeing is, we're seeing a good amount of companies, new vendors who are actually trying to help companies re-engage their applicant tracking system, their database and their applicant tracking system, because some companies have spent millions and millions of dollars to create that database. They haven't done anything with it, but these new technologies are allowing them to do something with it. You on the other hand are going the polar opposite way and saying, "Hey, look, why don't you share those resumes and those candidates?" Chad: Why are you going really the polar opposite of some of these other technologies that are out there? Patrick: I would just look to the data. I would say what actually is the hire rate off of the re-engaging candidates that have been in your database for six months, a year, two years. At least what we've seen anecdotally is you're not really getting any meaningful return off of that until a few years later. Patrick: You may, you have touch points with candidates in terms of their reading the marketing emails you send out to them, but really at least what we've heard anecdotally and speaking with other recruiters is, you're not getting a meaningful hire off of resurfacing someone in your database unless they've actually had a meaningful title bump. Like say originally if they were under consideration for a software engineer and now they're a senior software engineer, it might make sense to re-engage and talk with them for another role and potentially hire them. Patrick: Besides what I was saying before earlier about this different world view around just creating efficiency in the talent ecosystem, just looking at the data as well, we haven't seen, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but at least anecdotally, we haven't seen meaningful hire rates off of reservicing folks beyond say one or two years out of the original application date. Chad: So, you're really creating a shared community-like database that is fueled by the attraction strategies of these employers over the years. Patrick: It's really in addition to how I answered the question earlier around this different worldview of is it really efficient to "recycle" candidates versus actually try to help them find other roles and find candidates who've been invited by other companies, and just looking at the data, at least what we've heard anecdotally, candidates are only really resurfaced and rehired, at least, this is what we've heard from the recruiters we've spoken with, when a meaningful amount of time has passed beyond their initial application. Patrick: If you're marketing to someone for six months after they've applied, chances aren't super high they're going to get hired for a role at your company, but say one or two years later after maybe they've had a meaningful title bump from say a software engineer to a senior software engineer, that's when we've seen it make more sense at least for some of the folks that we've talked with. Patrick: At the end of the day, it's, we just see it as, our worldview as being more efficient around why not help this person who's looking for a job now find a role at one of our other partner companies. At the same time, you can find these candidates that weren't a fit at our other partner companies. Joel: Patrick, do you think PR is a big issue and privacy and things like that? Are there any issues with your business in terms of sharing candidates, what kind of control do they have in terms of their data, how long is it stored? Talk about that for me. Patrick: Fantastic question. I just had an hour call with our attorney yesterday about this- Joel: Boring. Patrick: May 25th, right around the corner. Joel: That's for you, that's for the attorneys and the conversation that you had, I'm sure. Patrick: Yes. Privacy by design is very important, GDPR is obviously top of mind for folks not just in HR but across any industry that collects data. The way our platform works, when a candidate accepts their invite to join the platform, first of all, they can always choose to accept or ignore an invite, but when they do, they accept our terms and conditions and our privacy policy, and they affirmatively consent to what they're actually sharing with us on the platform. That's one. Patrick: Two, within the actual user profile itself, candidates have toggles where they can say, "Hey, I'm searchable," or, "Show my profile," toggle that on or off. That determines whether or not they're searchable on the platform. Patrick: They can also determine whether or not they auto accept connection requests from recruiters. If it's on, basically, when a recruiter requests a connection to a candidate, it will automatically connect them over email to start a conversation. If it's off, the candidate needs to basically say, "Yes, I want to talk to this recruiter before I do that." Patrick: In addition, candidates have complete control over how their profile appears in search results. Patrick: As I mentioned, we get information about how well a candidate fared in a process from the company that invites them to the platform, but the candidate is able to control how they want that to appear on their profile. What that means in practice is, let's say a candidate made it to a final round at company A but bombed the interview at company B, they'd be able to say, "I want to show company A my profile but not company B." So they have control over that. Patrick: Lastly, if a candidate does say, "Hey, I want nothing to do with your platform. I'm off it," they can email us and we can delete everything about their profile. Joel: Have you guys taken funding? Patrick: Only friends and family so far, so we're bootstrapped. Joel: Is there a plan to raise money? Are you actively looking for money? Patrick: Right now, yes, we are. The reason behind that is just, well, one for the two years that we've been working on this, neither myself or my co-founder has taken a salary, so it'd be nice to get paid at some point. Patrick: More practically for the business itself, we need the team, we need to scale the team to actually meet the goals we've set for the business, and actually really create a meaningful presence in the market, not just in terms of marketing, but also in terms of the size of our customer base and the continued growth of our candidate pool. We need capital to do that. Joel: Aside from keeping bologna in the fridge and mac and cheese in the pantry- Patrick: Ramen. Joel: And adding some team members, what's sort of the vision in terms of features that we should expect in the future? Is the business primarily a sales and marketing organization? Is there going to be more development behind this? What does the future hold? Patrick: Great question. At the highest level, where we would love to go with this is actually, almost a social good angle, where you say, you have candidates in Silicon Valley or you have candidates in companies in Silicon Valley, candidates in companies ... I'm from Florida originally, a small town called Bradenton in Florida, and there's plenty of companies in that area who are looking for great talent, but no one from Silicon Valley knows about these companies in Florida or elsewhere in the country for that matter. Patrick: It would be great to expand and get the platform to a place where you can actually connect these disparate markets and have talent actually move to different geos and areas where there's high demand, it's just folks don't know about it or don't know the opportunities that exist there. At the highest level, that's somewhere we want to go, and really connect these different geos and regions who are looking for great talent. Patrick: On a more practical product level, there's also an interesting thing that we're exploring around this idea of how is there a way that we can actually Hirevisor meaningful for in-house recruiters, right? What we've seen is that as a recruiter, the only real way to really make a name for yourself and build a brand is to go out on your own and have an agency or a consulting business in that way. If you're in house, it's sort of hard to do that, let alone carrying your book of business with you so to speak. Patrick: Stay tuned for some of the interesting things we're going to do around building your reputation as a recruiter on the platform as I mentioned, say, we know, hey, Jane Recruiter at XYZ Company referred these candidates, and if we can say for example, hey, the candidates that Jane Recruiter refers tend to get clicked on the most out of anyone else, or at a 10X higher rate than other recruiters and you build your clout and professional reputation on the platform. Patrick: It's an interesting avenue that might help us break out of this frame of being just another sourcing tool. We're exploring different ways to do that, in addition to moving towards this vision of actually connecting different communities and supply and demand of talent. Chad: How much does it cost for me to give you my silver medal candidates? What's the pricing on this thing? Patrick: Sure. Joel: Is there a bronze pricing and your thanks for participating pricing? Chad: Participation medal pricing. Joel: Participation pricing. Patrick: Our primary applicant tracking system partner is Greenhouse. If you are a company that uses Greenhouse, it's actually free to join. It takes less than 10 minutes to set up and get integrated, and then you're squared away to both send invites to candidates and automatically push folks that you source out of the platform to your ATS. You would only pay us on the back end if you do end up hiring someone out of the platform, and our list price on that is 12.5% of the candidate's first year salary. Patrick: If you don't have Greenhouse, there are obviously plenty of companies that don't have Greenhouse, what we do is provide, you can still access the platform, but there's a subscription fee to access the platform. Again, the idea being that since you're not actively submitting, sharing candidates with us, you can pay to access the pool of talent that have been invited by other folks. That pricing is $3.99 per user per month, and then there is a success fee for folks that do you hire out the platform as well. The same 12.5%. Chad: So if you're not sharing, you can still access the database. That's the millennial side. You still have access to the database, but you have to pay for access to the database. Patrick: Correct. Joel: Patrick, you mentioned in terms of growth looking at different geos, to me, and you live this every day, I don't, but to me, it seems like this is a business that may really take off in the association space or the government space. Has that been a target for you? If not, why? Patrick: Fantastic question. Our different sales channels obviously are direct companies, but that only has so many legs. The other channel that we're looking at is exactly that, associations, groups, venture capital portfolios. In fact, one of the groups that we're working very closely with is the Collaboration for Talent, which is an umbrella ... Are you folks familiar with Collaboration for Talent? Patrick: It's an umbrella org and a bunch of nonprofits, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, a few other folks. One of the things we're exploring is, okay, for groups like this who are looking for nonprofit talent and are always starving for that talent, is there a way that our platform could be used to actually help these folks share talent and find great folks within that community. Patrick: So yes, that's definitely something that we're looking at as well. Joel: I'm getting the signal from Chad that he is ready to go and I think I'm done with my questioning. Are you ready to face the firing squad, Patrick? Patrick: I'm ready. Chad: I've got to say, Patrick, you've got a big heart, man, and that's a big Millennial heart you've got there. I also have to say that some really, really smart guys have preceded you. I asked about AllianceQueue, Jason Kerr actually headed that up and then Jobfox, Rob McGovern who actually was the first CEO of CareerBuilder, you've got to know history before you recreate it in any industry. Those are two glaring platforms that, to me, I saw come and go very quickly because they were in this exact same niche. Chad: We've seen it over the last couple of decades. The model won't stick because you're trying to share candidates in a very tight labor market. I know, you see that was an obstacle, but I believe that you're not going to see it to be big enough of an obstacle unless you start to pivot out of this. Chad: These companies have spent millions of dollars in creating these applicant tracking system databases, and they are learning how to re-engage them, because they understand that they're not just candidates, they're also customers that are impacting their bottom line, actual sales bottom lines in some of these brands. Chad: Which is a reason why, if I was a VP of global talent acquisition, I wouldn't be giving away any of my candidates. I would be treating them better, right? I agree with you. You have to be treating them better. Chad: I believe you're on the wrong side of demand in both cases, which is one of the reasons why I've got to open up the guns on you. Joel: Ouch. Patrick: There we go. Joel: My turn, I guess. Patrick, Chad mentioned that he sees a big heart in you, and I agree with that, but I see a big brain as well. I've met you personally, just from a small sample sizing of being around you, I can tell that you're a smart dude. Joel: You're also very young, which I know from your statement of you've been in so many interviews and you've gotten so many silver medals, doesn't necessarily ring true with me, because you are a young guy. Your experience, education sort of proves that out. Joel: To me, you are going to find that great idea. This is actually a pivot, we didn't talk much about that. There may be another pivot in your future. I don't even know if the employment space is where you will end up. I do say with some assuredness that I think you will do great things in the entrepreneurial realm and create something great. Joel: This business for me, it's just really hard to get over a lot of things Chad said. Get off my lawn, but get out of my database, leave my candidates alone. I spent so much money to get them into my pool of candidates, sharing them is just, I think, a concept that Chad and I can't get our head around. Maybe it's a product for younger folks or younger businesses or startups who don't give a shit. A Boeing, a Walmart, I don't see them embracing this in a way that a startup in Silicon Valley would. Joel: Where Chad's gun was just put you out of your misery, my gun is more of a mercy killing and saying this idea, to me, isn't the idea that you're going to end up with. It's going to be the idea where we look back five or 10 years from now and go, "Man, remember when Patrick did that, and it's so close to that one idea that he's doing now that's really successful?" Joel: So, Patrick, you're a great dude. I think you're really smart, but the business idea, I think there's another one in your future, and this one, to me, isn't it. Patrick: Fair enough. Joel: Balls for being on the show, kudos for that as always. If you have any comments or feedback, that's great, otherwise we appreciate if you just want to get the hell off the show and throw darts at our faces. Patrick: No. Thank you so much for having me. This is great, and I appreciate all the feedback. I'm still standing even though I'm not on the firing post, but yeah. Chad: Awesome, man. Joel: Enough said. Chad, another episode. We out. Chad: We out. Speaker 4: This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, so you don't miss an episode. If you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at ChadCheese.com today. That's www.C-H-A-D-C-H-E-E-S-E.com. #Talroo #HireVisor #FiringSquad

With Chad in Europe for the next 3 weeks, Cheese pulls a Lionel Richie and goes solo, talkin' news and opinion on Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. Who are the winner and losers? Additionally, Facebook and LinkedIn are in the news with new tools aiding recruitment, CareerBuilder keeps bleeding executives and Vermont wants you. Enjoy, and visit the show sponsors: America's Job Exchange, JobAdX and Sovren. I'm on a roll, it's time to go solo ... Transcript Hi-de-ho, boys and girls. Welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast, lovingly known as The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman, flying solo with Chad on a three-week bender in Europe. On this week's show, Microsoft just bitch slapped the whole industry again. Facebook isn't taking anything sitting down, and the dominoes keep falling at CareerBuilder. Stay tuned. I'll be right back after this word from JobAdX. How many times has someone said to you, "We're the uber of," or, "It's the PayPal of," maybe, "We're the Facebook of." In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality, or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot-on that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google AdSense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, consistent, and smarter ad unit for job-related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms, real-time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. All this is down with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click, or application. We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We are not set in regrets. For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards higher rev share than other partners through our smarter programmatic platform, in many cases, 30-40% greater, and more for our scalable partner. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com or email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Oh, you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX has just launched in the UK too. Jolly good, JobAdX. Yes, everyone. You heard me right. In the opening, Chad is not on the show this week. That's either- Woo. ... applause or- Boo. ... a big boo, I guess, depending how big of a fan you are of Chad, but yeah, Chad is on a three-week vacation in Europe. Yeah, even Chad takes vacations. That brings us to our shout-outs, and my first one goes out to Chad, who I know is listening over in Europe probably over some beer in Germany or a pint in London or something, probably hoping that I fall flat on my face and realize how much I need him on this show every week to get it right. The good news is that, well, if you don't like Chad, that's the good news, but the good news also is this should be a much abbreviated show because I know how much Chad likes to talk on and on and on about usually nothing, so we'll cut out a lot of the fat in this podcast, hopefully, and cut it down for you guys so you can enjoy your summer a little bit quicker. Also in shout-outs for me, Colin Day, CEO and founder and chairman over at iCIMS. Shout-out to him. We did a great podcast late last month and published it on Wednesday of this week. If you haven't heard that interview, go out to the show archives and listen to that interview. Colin's very honest, very transparent. He's very opinionated as well, so we got some great feedback on that podcast. I encourage you to go listen to that. Another shout-out to Christine Shaw, an Australian listener who heard us for the first time, and we were talking about [inaudible 00:04:32] on the show. She ended up running right into [inaudible 00:04:34], the CEO and founder of the company at some event in Australia, apparently. Shout-out to Christine and our Australian listeners. I love making those connections through the podcast. It's always great. Lastly, on my shout-outs, we haven't been getting a lot of love on the Twitter account #ChadCheese lately, so I encourage you to leave some notes, particularly if you miss Chad, hate me, or maybe you hate Chad, don't want him to ever come back on the show, hashtag on Twitter ChadCheese. Leave a comment. Say hi to Chad. The good [inaudible 00:05:11], I'm sure, will give him a shout-out to make him feel loved. Those are my shout-outs, and with much ado from there, let's get into the news from the week. Well, there was a huge bomb that dropped. If you heard an explosion, that was Microsoft buying GitHub for 7.5 billion, that's with a B. If you're not familiar with GitHub, you're probably not a recruiter. GitHub, for those who don't know, is, I guess, sort of a meeting ground for developers, programmers, tech talent to write code, share code, share ideas, connect, et cetera. It's a hugely popular platform for recruiters to source talent. If you're keeping score at home, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for 26.2 billion last year, 2006, and now they own GitHub. There's not really much argument. They own the two most popular professional networking sites in the world. That's kind of a big deal. We talk quite extensively about Glassdoor going for 1.2 billion to Recruit Holdings, which also owns Indeed. We're talking about $7.5 billion for this deal. This deal kind of laughs in the face of the Indeed-Glassdoor marriage. These are real big companies with real big resources making real big moves in our industry. I got thinking about this move and who exactly were the winners, who were the losers, who were the "We'll see what happens." My short list of winners in this deal, number one, goes to LinkedIn. LinkedIn now adds GitHub as a partner, a platform, potential partner in terms of sourcing. The key here really in terms of recruiting that I see is, a lot of people on GitHub are not on LinkedIn. I hear recruiters all the time talking about "I can't get tech people on LinkedIn because they hate LinkedIn. All they do is get calls from headhunters." From that perspective, I think that's a huge win for LinkedIn. I think at some point the platforms will bleed into another. Maybe you'll go to your LinkedIn account and be able to source people on GitHub [inaudible 00:07:31]. I think LinkedIn is a big winner here. Facebook as well I think is a winner. This further proves that people are where the value is in these deals. [inaudible 00:07:39] when you see [inaudible 00:07:40] really small numbers compared to what we were seeing out of what people pay for profiles and active users on our website. If you connect the dots there, Facebook has most people on the planet Earth that are online using its site. If Facebook ever decides to get really serious about employment and professional profiles and connecting with those people through searching whatever, which a lot of those pieces are already there, I think they'd become a winner in this trend of connecting with professional talent. I think Dice is an outlier winner of this. Ironically, Dice should've been the headline in the story. Ten years ago, if we would've said who's going to build GitHub, it would've been someone like Dice; however, I do think there's an opportunity for Dice in the fact that a lot of people on GitHub, the open source developers, aren't real big fans of Microsoft. If Dice can build a, provide a GitHub competitor, something similar, I would go out and pay the top 50, a hundred GitHubers that are open-source folks that aren't real happy about this deal and pay them to come over to Dice and build maybe an open-source only product or something similar. I think there's a window here for Dice to take advantage of what just happened with Microsoft coming in and taking that property. I also think that Stack Overflow is a beneficiary of what's going on with this deal, primarily because they're the Pepsi to GitHub's Coke. They have profiles. They have somewhat of the same things going on over there, so $7.5 billion price tag really only means that Stack Overflow should be a much more valuable properly. In terms of the losers of the deal, I mentioned Indeed and Glassdoor. I think they're a big loser in this. I think they continue to add pieces to this Indeed platform. I think they'll add all of Glassdoor. They just bought resume.com, workopolis, the Canadian mega-site. I say that sarcastically. All these pieces they're putting together seem way too little, way too late. The resources, the Microsoft, the Facebooks, and the Googles have are just going to be really, really challenge, so I think they're a big loser in this deal that GitHub joins Microsoft. Another loser in this I think is anyone who provides technology for sourcing candidates where it creates profiles from information on GitHub and LinkedIn, et cetera. A couple ways that that, that this is why I think these guys are losers. Number one is the HiQ case is still out there. For those of you don't know, there's some interviews. An interview we did with a HiQ CEO, we've talked about this case, but basically, LinkedIn is in a lawsuit battle with HiQ over being able to scrape content, profile content from LinkedIn, put that profile data into HiQ's own system, et cetera. There are a lot of sites to do this. The SeekOuts, the HiringSolveds. You guys probably more than even I do if you're a recruiter out there. I mean, there are a lot of sites that make their living on scraping GitHub and LinkedIn data. You can rest assured that if LinkedIn wins the case, then there's a good chance that GitHub and LinkedIn get shut down for anyone trying to access their site as a third party. Even if that case doesn't happen, you're going to have double resources, you're going to have LinkedIn coming in and saying, "Let's create technological ways to keep the scrapers off, let's do things that make it harder to scrape GitHub content and LinkedIn content." I think regardless of what happens, it's going to harder to go in and get GitHub and LinkedIn data following this deal that Microsoft did. I think Google's a loser in this deal. I think that Google would've loved to have had a site like GitHub in its ranks, and I think Google would've been a better acquirer of GitHub because I think most Githubers, if that's what they're called, probably are more amenable to Google as a buyer than they are Microsoft. So for Google to lose this if it was a bidding war, I think is a real negative. I also think that if Google, as part of it's higher product/ ATS, if they want to be able to source the web for profiles and have those profiles accessible to it's users, that just got a lot harder. There's a really good chance that LinkedIn was not going to play ball if Google was trying to build that. There's a very good chance now that GitHub will not open itself up to a Google ATS sourcing search people tool. If that's in the offing. I think we mentioned when Indeed bought resume.com that resume.com resumes would also be closed off to Google in response to this defensive move. So there are three sites right there that probably won't be available to Google if they want to build a sourcing tool in LinkedIn, GitHub and resume.com. So Google is a loser in this. Lastly, sort of fringe, but I think Monster and all job boards continue to be a loser in this game. I picked on Monster a little bit here because they passed on buying LinkedIn a long time ago, over a decade ago. They bought Tickle instead. They shut down Tickle, which could have been all kinds of stuff in terms of networking, professional networking. They had BeKnown when sort of the branch outs of the world were leveraging Face Book to build communities. They tanked that. So they've had multiple times to try to build something social networking wise and they just continue to drop the ball on that. I also think that Job Boards in particular continue to lose footing in this battle of resources and big dollars. So job boards in addition, I think are a loser here. On the I'm not sure yet list, is going to be consumers. Consumers particularly being employers. On one hand, you have the fact that by being purchased by Microsoft, GitHub is going to have a lot more in terms of resources, money, new features, things that will go on. In that case it's good. I think if you're an employer and you love Linked In, I think eventually those two properties will bleed into the other. Will you be able to use LinkedIn and then also advertise on GitHub as well, or source talent in GitHub while you're in the LinkedIn platform? I think that's probably good from a user's perspective. You're not bouncing back and forth and a lot of those tools don't exist now on GitHub. For example, posting jobs in mass on GitHub. It hasn't been real easy. I suspect that to change. You could probably post a job on LinkedIn, you can upgrade that listing to go onto GitHub if it's a tech position. So that will be easier and probably more user friendly. However, I think on the other side of it, it will cost more money to use LinkedIn and GitHub services. So they'll be pulling more and more money away from what you're already using to recruit. If you can't add more dollars, if you can't add more dollars, God bless you. Most people aren't in that position. So, money is going to flow out of the traditional players that we look at now because you're going to be spending more money with LinkedIn via GitHub and that whole platform. I also think that a loser in this might be Innovation. As business as we know it sort of condenses or consolidates into three, four, five major players, a lot of the start ups out there are going to have a tough go at it because companies use one or two platforms to recruit. So I think in that aspect, it does kill Innovation a little bit, which does obviously impact the consumer long term. So, that's a negative as well, but the jury is still out on how bad this will be or how good this will be for consumers. Moving along here and I'm a little slow with the sound board because it's just me and I can't look at it while Chad's talking. But our second story here I wanted to talk about, speed kills. In the news this week, both LinkedIn and Cornerstone on Demand released new features, products to basically make it easier, quicker to apply to jobs, sort of the one click apply notion. Now historically, one click apply hasn't been hugely popular with employers, they like to pre-screen. They like to add steps that keep out the undesirables or the most aggressive job seekers, make their job a little easier. The Amazon'ing of things won't let that last for very long. People want to quickly apply to jobs, they want to get to that application, move on with their life and I think that moreover, this is more of the Google for jobs effect. In other words, if you go search for a job for Google today, you will see apply to this job through usually ATS, or the company page and you'll see a variety of job boards. So you'll see Linked In, which may or may not be a job board, but job sites. So Zip Recruiter, Monster, multiple sites. I think that, ultimately, Google will algorithmically start showing only the ones that people like to use, continue to click, don't click and then come back and use another service. Google will eventually learn where users want to go and they will slowly filter out the sites that, frankly, aren't very user friendly. So if I click on a site and the application stinks and I've got to put a bunch of stuff in and I don't have an account already, I might go back and say, "All right. I noticed LinkedIn was on that list. I have a LinkedIn account. I'm just going to go to LinkedIn and apply that way. Ultimately, the sites that have the easiest, frictionless ways to apply are going to win in a world where Google for job sort of owns the space. So, for vendors out there, if you're not making it super easy to apply to jobs, you're going to be losing out in this battle and you're going to slowly fade away from the landscape of Google. So I encourage you to do that. Also, if you have an ATS, how quickly and easy is it to apply to your jobs? If it's slow and it stinks, you may start losing out, ironically, to job sites that are easy and quick to apply. I think LinkedIn, by far, has the pole position on this, the advantage. Most people that are searching for a job, or a lot of people already have a LinkedIn profile. So if LinkedIn is making it easy to apply, it's real easy to just go to LinkedIn, apply one click, go back and search for more jobs and apply that way. So I suspect that LinkedIn will continually be a winner in this move to create a one click apply. It really helps them out in that space. Without further ado, let's hear a quick message from America's Job Exchange. Then I'll talk a little bit about some moves by Face Book and some departures by CareerBuilder. America's Job Exchange is celebrating our 10th year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment, designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women and minorities and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community based organizations. Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284, or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. So I've talked a lot about Facebook on the podcast today and sure enough, they are in the news this week. Facebook announced early in the week that they were opening basically their job component, job postings employment in three countries, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Germany certainly being a very impactful country, a big economy, lot of jobs. So that was a big move for them. Facebook has stayed primarily in the Americas until now, so branching out into Europe is obviously a show of strength and a show of the fact that jobs must be working for them. Users must be going to job postings. Engagement must be pretty high. This is something that Facebook is not sleeping on. I think that ... I wrote a post on ERE recently about not falling asleep on Facebook. We talked about it on the podcast as well, but 800 million users per month on their marketplace products. Those are people that are not only selling used bikes and furniture, but they're also posting jobs, looking for jobs and whatnot. So that's a lot of people. If only 10% of the people that go to marketplace search for jobs casually, that makes them one of the biggest job sites in the world actually. If you're not paying attention to Facebook, particularly if you're a smaller business, which is where I think Facebook is really targeting their employment efforts, you should definitely keep your eye on and start playing around with Facebook. Start putting some budget toward it because it is an important platform and will continue to be. If the news of growth and how many people are on Facebook jobs platform isn't enough, the news that they are now allowing users to boost or advertise their marketplace postings, should definitely get you interested in viewing and looking at what's going on at Facebook. So the news that came out recently is that if you ... they're starting to beta test I think in US and Canada, the ability for users to, let's say, "Hey, I have an old bike for sale." I post it on Facebook. Hey, there's an option now where, for a minimal cost, I can boost my listing, my classified basically. And by boosting it, not only I assume it's boosted in the marketplace, but we do know from the news reports out there that the item will be promoted on the newsfeed of Facebook users and I assume as well the Instagram users which Facebook owns, Messenger which you're starting to see more and more ads show up on Messenger. Also the stories, putting stories on Instagram and Facebook, now we're starting to see ads there. You will start seeing, more than likely, more and more used furniture and bikes and things like that advertised on Facebook. They do have the advantage of knowing where you are based on your mobile phone. So you'll get stuff that's near to you, maybe stuff that your friends have clicked or shown an interest in, we're not quite sure what the algorithm will have, will filter these things, but it is a foregone conclusion that Facebook not only will allow you to promote that treadmill that's for sale, but also allow you to boost job postings as well. So I definitely expect that to be something in the near future. I think that in their partnerships with Zip Recruiter and Job Score and some others that they'll probably go to them first and say, "Hey, let's do a bulk deal and let's promote a certain percentage of your jobs, or all your jobs," and then we'll have those employment opportunities promoted within Facebook's news feeds. So expect to see postings in your news feed that are sponsored here in the near future based on Facebook's new advertising option. That should be fairly powerful if they do it right. Also in the news this week, recently I guess, a couple CareerBuilder departures to note. CareerBuilder as you know, if you listen to the show has been going through some challenging times to say the least, it looks like Apollo, their private equity firm that came in and bought them has made some tremendous changes. I encourage you to listen to past podcasts that we've talked about this item. But, a couple of veterans apparently have left, as well as some of the handful of those, the Richard Castellini's, the guys that have been there since the head hunter days in 2000. Rosemary Hefner, who was head of HR at CareerBuilder has definitely left. She has a new LinkedIn profile and a new company. She was at CareerBuilder for 14 years. The story that I heard, again this is alleged, but allegedly, this was in the tech department, that a manger or someone high up had done something that HR didn't really like. So Rosemary came down on them fairly hard. I think called him out on his bullshit was the quote that I got. I just put an expletive writing on the show, sorry about that. Called him out for his bullshit and the next day, she was let go from the company. So, not sure if that's true or not. If you know anything, feel free to head on to chadcheese.com, send us a note, or you can reach out to me directly. But Rosemary, after 14 years at CareerBuilder, is gone. Another resignation that we heard about, Kyle Brown, who was President of the staffing and recruiting group there at CareerBuilder. His LinkedIn profile is still CareerBuilder, but we've heard that he has resigned from the company. More on that later, but allegedly, Kyle Brown, President of the staffing and recruiting group is gone. The soap opera at CareerBuilder continues. Let's take a quick break, hear from Sovren and then we'll talk about HR blogging and potentially moving to New Hampshire. 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. 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 to think like the engine. To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit sovereign.com. That's S_O_V_R-E_N.com. So I said moving to New Hampshire. It's actually Vermont. We'll get to that story at the end, but I get those two states mixed up. Politically, they're super different, but geographically, they look the same. So I apologize to anyone for offending that. I wanted to talk about, sort of get off the news feed for a second. There was a post by Mark Vogul at Fistful of Talent. If you're not familiar with Fistful of Talent, the blog, I encourage you to go visit. It's basically a group of bloggers, recruiters, thought leaders that occasionally blog about certain topics. Anyway, Mark wrote recently a piece called Did HR Blogging Jump the Shark? If you're not familiar, number one with jump the shark, you don't remember Happy Days and Fonzie more than likely. That was an episode where Fonzie, in a leather jacket, water skis over a shark and by most calculations, that was the end of the popularity of Happy Days. So when anything is sort of dying or dead, we call it jumping the shark. Most of you probably knew that, but those who didn't, I wanted to just bring that up. Anyway, Mark writes that in the early days of HR blogging, it was sort of risky, it was sexy, it was like that new band throwing TV's out the window of hotel rooms. It was really sort of a cool thing to do. I speak from a position of uniqueness in this for the fact that I started blogging in 2005. I continue to blog today for ere.net. I encourage you to read some of my stuff if you haven't. And I also podcast, so I have a pretty good understanding of what Mark is talking about in regards to blogging had a heyday, social media came out, podcasting now is sort of the hot new thing. I assume at some point video will become as big or just as big as podcasting, although I think podcasting has a unique place in sort of the lives of people. If I'm working out, I go for a walk, I'm hanging out laying in bed or whatever, like audio books. Audio has a uniqueness about it that's really cool. But the gist of the story is blogging was cool. It's not cool anymore. Companies are blogging. The corporations are blogging. It's not cool anymore and you see people like Chad and myself, he mentions Laurie [inaudible 00:30:12] in the story, are gravitating towards podcasting. Vogul said, "Some of the outliers who introduced us to blogging and social media in the HR and talent space have gone heavy with audio. Can you say Chad and Cheese or Laurie [inaudible 00:30:28]? These folks led the charge in HR social media a decade ago and have switched gears in their content delivery. Podcasts, which have been around for years are finally starting to be adopted in the HR and Talent space. And HR blogging, which was once a place for those that were innovative and on the edge of HR has now gone mainstream. HR tech company blogs and [inaudible 00:30:51] bloggers are now at all the major conferences. Like music that goes from edgy to popular, the rough surface and the creativity gets watered down as consumption goes up." I agree with most of that. I will also add that podcasting is way easier than blogging. I write roughly three stories a week for ERE. I do an hour to two hour show during the week. We do firing squad. We do monthly podcasts, but I'd say by and large, the time that I spend blogging is probably three to four times longer an investment than I take in podcasting. I can say that podcasting, from a financial rewards standpoint, is equal to what I do writing. From that perspective period, would I rather ... it's much easier to podcast than it is to write stuff down. Blogging can be really frustrating because you could spend a lot of time writing a well thought out article and nothing happens. You can also put something on LinkedIn or Twitter that's really ridiculous and silly, or meme, and get tens of thousands of engagements. So, blogging is just ... I think there's just so much more competing with it that fewer people are doing it. Corporations and publicists do it just because that's what they do. But blogging really well is hard. Podcasting and speaking into a microphone for an hour or two, not that difficult. So that's where I see a lot of the trend in terms of blogging versus podcasting. Anyway, I wanted to throw that in there. It's something Chad would not probably care to talk about, so I wanted to throw that in there. Lastly on the show, Vermont is in the news, going back to them. Vermont is offering to pay people who move to the state up to $10,000 to move there. This is quite an interesting move to get talent into your state and it would be certainly interesting if a lot of other states started offering bounties for people to move to their states and increase their tax rates and everything else. There are some caveats here. To be eligible, workers must be full time employees for an out of state business. So right there that becomes challenging. I'm assuming that if you're a gig'er, if you're a freelancer, you're out of luck. You actually have to work for a legitimate business full time and move away from where they are in order to get this deal. You must work primarily from home or a co-working space within Vermont and you must become a full time resident on or after January 1, 2019. Based on the budget that they have for this program, it looks like they can accept roughly 100 people per year. I think this stretches out until 2022, this program. So anyway, if you fill those eligibility standards and you want to see really beautiful foliage in Fall and go do some skiing and you're a major Liberal, maybe Vermont is the place for you and you heard it here first maybe. That's all I got. Listen, this was a lot of fun. It's a little more challenging to be on your own, but it does allow some freedom to talk about some other things. Chad, I know you're listening. I hope you're having a great time in Europe. I'd like to say I miss you, but I don't really. But, three weeks from now, maybe I will miss you. Regardless of that, have fun and I'm out.

This is a UNCOMMON EXCLUSIVE Podcast from ChadCheese.com - HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad: This The Chad & Cheese Podcast brought to you in partnership with Tatech. Tatech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Visit tatech.org. Joel: Chad, why do recruiters spend money on unqualified or uninterested candidates? Chad: Dude, I don't know, because they're recruiters. What in the hell are you talking about in the first place? Joel: All right, stay with me here. PPC campaigns mean you're paying per click and the person who clicks could be qualified or unqualified. You don't know and you're still going to pay for that click. Chad: Hell man, a subscription model is even worse because you're paying for all of the candidates, not necessarily qualified ones. Joel: Bingo. So the answer is current pricing models suck, duh. So what if you handed over cash for only interested and qualified candidates. I'm talking about candidates that are actually qualified. The ones that meet all of your job requirements from years in the industry to specific skills. Chad: I gotcha. Now you're talking about Uncommon. Joel: Bingo. Uncommon is where the model does not suck, and right now Uncommon only charges 14.95, that's $14.95 per interested and qualified candidate. If you do volume hiring you'll get bigger discounts. Chad: Man, that's cheap. So yeah, Uncommon is simple. You set your monthly budget and Uncommon only charges you when you get an interested applicant that meets or exceeds your job requirements. Joel: And to sweeten the deal, just create your free account and get your first five qualified and interested candidates for free. Just go to uncommon.co to create your free account. That's U-N-C-O-M-M-O-N.co and get those fresh five free peeps with mega skills. Chad: Haha. 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 & Cheese Podcast. Chad: Hey kids, it's the Chad of the Chad & Cheese podcast and today we have a special guest. Colin Day, C.E.O. of iCIMS, founder, stud extraordinaire. Joel: Pump him up before we break him down. Chad: That's what we have to do. We have to lift him up, lift him up before we break him down. Colin, give the audience a little bit about yourself for all of those who've been in a corner in the fetal position for the last 20 years for goodness sakes, tell a little bit about yourself and about iCIMS. Colin: Yeah, sure. So again, yeah, my name is Colin Day. I am founder and C.E.O. of iCIMS and really this has been my entire career. I came out of college, I started a job as a recruiter. I was a tech recruiter working at a staffing firm doing a lot of hiring for Bell Labs which headquarters in New Jersey so I was hiring for AT&T and for Lucent, for Telcordia. The company I was with had build the beginnings, they weren't even calling it an applicant tracking system. They called it, their name was Comrise's Information management system or CIMS. Yeah, just sort of figured I loved recruiting but my heart was in trying to start a business and wrote all these different business plans and sort of had these moments of eureka where I would be up at night writing a plan thinking it's the greatest thing in the world and then finally get a good night's sleep and wake up and think what the hell was I thinking there. There is no way I'm pulling that off. Colin: I think they typically say the real opportunity is literally staring you in the face and for me quite literally I was waking up and logging into CIMS and using it and that really became the genesis of the idea for iCIMS. We actually bought the rights to that company's software. We spun it out, we funded it with loans from the parent company which I say thank God always. If we'd gone the VC route we'd be a tombstone because we had to go through the dot bomb era. We have been focused on recruiting ever since. Colin: Started off as just kind of a pure applicant tracking system. Chad: What year was that? Colin: So, we officially sort of spun it out in '99 and then we incorporated it in 2000. Perfect timing, right, right before everything blew apart. So I had a near death moment in the dot bomb but very thankfully because of the organic beginnings came out of it and was stronger for it. And I've been fighting ever since. Chad: So did you start out as a client server applicant tracking system or were you always, how did it actually work because obviously there were the RecruitSofts of the world where you had to do an installation on your servers or was it something that people just used the web to interface with. It's funny because that's how we do everything today but that's not how it started. Colin: That's not how it started. The other thing I think they always say is timing is everything. Man, we just nailed the timing, we got so lucky on that. But to give you a sense of kind of how long we've been around, yeah, we were around in the days of Webhire and Recruitmax and all these other names. We were very lucky. Most of the existing competitors were having to make that really difficult transition from client server over to, it wasn't even called SAS at the time. I think they were calling it ASP. Colin: We started pure web and I'd like to think that we even started pure SAS. What we were seeing is that as people made the conversion over to like a web format, that basically we're still doing what we would call the no-nos of SAS. So even though it was web delivered they were customizing it, they were putting people on different installs of it. They were letting people put it on their own servers and then a host it via web. We went in saying we are going to go pure SAS, literally one code, one version, we will never customize it for anyone. We're going to kind of build for the good of the platform and if the platform is configurable enough over time it should be able to service all customers via one code. Colin: I think you just talk about that moments where you came in, we didn't have to make a hard transition and then I think we just got the philosophies of SAS right early. Joel: Colin, I'm really curious and I've always wanted to ask you this. The name. Tell me about the genesis of it. You had a perfect opportunity to brand it something other than iCIMS. Have you thought about changing the name over the years? Has is it been a hindrance? Do you think it's been a positive? Just talk about the name for a little bit? Colin: You haven't been talking to our marketing department, have you Joel? Joel: Oh, oh, we might have a scoop here. Everyone's rebranding. Colin: I think what we like to say now is if you can make it with the name iCIMS you must have a really good product and service. It is a mouthful. For us again it was a name that we inherited as we spun out of a company. We rebranded the acronym as kind of Internet Collaborative Information Management Systems. We didn't actually see it at first as just a recruiting application. For that company, it was more of an ERP because it was a staffing firm. So they used it for work flows. So think of like a service now today. Much more of like a workflow management engine. Colin: So we liked having this very generic name Internet Collaborative Information Management System versus, all of our competitors were recruiting this and hire that and they all had exactly the same name which is great. It said what they did, but the irony is is when they started to diversify and come out with other offerings, you must remember every single one of them had to go through a rebrand. RecruitSoft to Taleo and Recruitmax becoming Vurv. Absolutely everyone had to change their name. Colin: We got asked all the time, hey, would you consider changing the name, it is a bit of a mouthful. Sometimes we have to explain it's not 'icims' or it's not 'I-C-I-M-S,' it's iCIMS. But I think at this point we have gotten to significant enough scale, significant brand exposure that the name is here to stay. We really think that we'll build a brand around it. Joel: Thank God the video game The Sims has sort of faded. That must have been a hard, hard time for your sales people. Colin: There was Sims and then ISIS didn't help for very long. Chad: Throughout the growth we've just seen here lately you've acquired a little company by the name of TextRecruit. So going from back in the days of ASP to jumping forward, several what, about a decade, more than two decades for goodness sakes, to be able to talk about TextRecruit. So what did that mean to the organization and what does that mean for the philosophy of iCIMS as you guys move forward? Colin: That was a really interesting one. I think maybe to give it a little bit of background, our viewpoint was that, call it seven, eight, nine years ago, maybe even before that, when ADP bought VirtualEdge and it was the first time that we saw okay, maybe there are going to be companies that aren't just going to try to do recruiting. They're going to try to pull together everything in H.R.. Our viewpoint was let's be the contrarian here. We don't want to look like everyone else. Recruiting just too damn important, it's too hard, you don't want to break it, you don't want to jam it into an H.R. suite and make it sort of your worst offering. Colin: So we stayed focused on recruiting. We kind of built the ATS to have the CRM so that you could do the passive candidate kind of marketing and sourcing. We put the onboarding in to close the transaction. We're actually coming out with an offer management model. So we're trying to make sure that we're always building the core componentry of sort of end to end recruitment. But along the way we realized that, and I guess it's just a good thing about our industry, we are not it. The average customer uses god, it can be anywhere from a dozen to two dozen different tools to get their recruiting job done. So typically they sort of fall into sourcing tools where you might hey, we use Entelo, we use LinkedIn, we use CareerBuilder. Colin: The screening tools is absolutely enormous. You can have companies, particularly at the enterprise level that are using two, three, four background checks, different assessments, WOTSI tools, video screening tools. We kept asking ourselves, our customers were saying, guys, we want you to do all of this, when are you going to build it all. I think just had a moment where you have to take a look at what did Apple do with the iPhone, what did obviously Benioff do with force.com. We do not need to necessarily own it all, we don't need to build it all but we do need to basically pull it all together in one core platform. Colin: So we launched UNIFi which is really our sort of version of force.com for the talent acquisition industry. And literally we categorized about a thousand companies in the ecosystem. We just went through and figured out what everyone was doing and we sort of put them into a periodic table of elements and write, okay, these ones do sourcing and these do screening and then what we did is build API's and what's called S.D.K. software developer kits and really did the hard work over four years of reaching out and saying guys, we're one of the largest and fastest growing kind of recruitment software providers and we really want you to build off of our platform so that we can bring everything together that the customer needs in the world of recruitment. Colin: And really happy to say that we got 600 different companies integrated in. 215 of them have formally gone through this program. I mean, literally writing their products to our API's, now beginning to use our S.D.K.'s to build a rich user experiences in the platform. It's a long winded way of coming to TextRecruit which was one of the companies that had done this. I think one of their first customers was actually an iCIMS customer in Cracker Barrel. They were able to essentially build a tool that worked really well for that customer. They built it in our marketplace, they used our API's. They kind of followed the prescription that we'd set out and then they started killing it. They were just the right player at the right time which was saying the way the candidates want to be communicated with is radically changing. Colin: We knew we were very good and hey, it's the recruiter who wants to do the phone call, the recruiter who wants to do email. But candidates now they want to be texted and they're much more responsive to texting. They're expanding beyond text obviously into messaging, Facebook Messenger and WeChat and other mediums. And then what was really interesting is they were going even beyond that to a subset of candidates who literally just don't even necessarily want to talk to a human being. Chad: Joel Cheesman. Colin: They just want to go to a career site and say hey, I hope you have a bot, I want to have a discussion with the bot in order to help find jobs and learn about your company and your culture and your benefits before I even get on the phone with a recruiter. Colin: So, we were watching them and that was the beauty of the UNIFi play is we got to watch them. They were pretty stand alone so there are some categories in our ecosystem where it's just ultra competitive. There's just so many background check providers. But TextRecruit was really unique and we thought this seems like something that almost belongs like [paz 00:14:38] infrastructure in our UNIFi program. That if we do this right, we can build it not just as a product, I mean, it is a great product but almost as paz componentry that can be extended out to any products or to anyone who wants to build a product off of our UNIFi framework. Joel: Colin, talk about the decision to buy TextRecruit as opposed to just build a text messaging platform within iCIMS. Colin: Sure. We do strategic planning every single year. We sit down and we take a look at just everything for the business. What markets are we going into, what geographies are we going into, what verticals. Obviously when we get to what product we try to lay out the product roadmap. I will tell you and I think it's the good thing about recruiting is we've been at this for 20 years and I could legitimately say I could probably line up at least another 10 to 20 years of things we would love to build. And so, it's just always for us going to come down to priorities. Colin: Our biggest priority was to really continue both our TA suite and our TA platform. So we wanted to come out with the TA suite. We've been going upmarket signing larger and larger companies like now Intuit and Microsoft and Amazon. So making sure that we're building in everything at a very large scale multinational would need. So that was taking a lot of our attention, coming out with the offer product was taking a lot of attention. And then building in the UNIFi framework everything that the vendors needed to kind of start creating rich experience in our platform. So it was just one of those things that we knew we needed to do it but it was very hard to try to figure out how to de-prioritize anything on our existing list. So acquisition just made a lot of sense for us. Colin: Culture was huge too. We were out there, we were co-selling with them. Once we saw how successful they were, we wanted to fuel and that's part of UNIFi. We put marketing resources behind these companies that are doing very well, sort of selling their wares to our customers. Chad: So you talked about Microsoft and then it just automatically came to me, Microsoft's competition for you guys. They're creating this Dynamic 365 including talent, but yet, Microsoft from an enterprise standpoint uses the iCIMS platform, right? Colin: They do, yeah. The classic sleeping with the enemy which we've gotten very comfortable with in this industry. I think it's the way obviously software goes particularly as you play up at the high level. So yeah, Microsoft is a customer and they are obviously working on relaunching Dynamics. Our view point is we see opportunities there. We really do think as long as we remain really, really good at what we do and sort of above some of the others, then there's typically good opportunities to play in other people's ecosystems or become part of their go to market strategy. Colin: Honestly, Chad, the thing that we have, the benefit of being around for 20 years is we've just seen this play over and over and over where it was a bunch of point solutions fighting each other. Taleo versus Vurv versus VirtualEdge versus iCIMS. Then ADP launched the first shot. Everyone told us hey, you're dead because you just do recruiting and now this amazing sort of H.R. payroll company is going to have recruiting. I think we know over time they did not get that right. Monster, when they were the LinkedIn of industry decided that they were going to build an ATS, they just could not get it right everyone told us we were dead. The number one sourcing tool is building an ATS. Colin: CareerBuilder bought their way in and everyone thought okay, another great job, boards getting in, that's going to kill everyone. They couldn't get it right. The list just goes on and on. I mean obviously Workday's thrown a product out there. We're not so sure they're getting it right. So I think it's a long winded way of saying, yes, the advantage is this is an enormous industry. It's a huge spent and everyone does want to get into it, but you've got to focus on it and you've got to go deep. You can't just sort of come out with an H.R. platform and say hey, we've got a basic kind of post and pray applicant tracking system and that should be good enough for you to do your job. Joel: So what I'm hearing Colin is you're not afraid of Google. It's Past Prologue with big G. Are they not going to get a ATS right? Are they not going to get job search right because Chad and I are seeing a ton of reaction in the job board space where Google is clearly making an impact on the jobs side of the house. Are you not seeing that or fearful or see Google as a threat right now on the ATS side? Colin: Maybe I'm a little bit of a contrarian here. I see Google as a savior. I really do. I see Google as a potential savior in the industry. From being around in 20 years there's always been two problems. Number one, candidates say, hey, finding and applying for jobs just sucks. I mean it just sucks. Sometimes the ATS gets the brunt of that because we're the end of the transaction but no one wants to talk about like hey, I started at Google, Google ignore me. They sent me off to some sort of middleman. I had to sift my way through, find this thing called Indeed, register with Indeed, put in all my data. Then it turned out that the link that Indeed had on a job was a dead link because they'd scraped it off of an ATS a week ago and they hadn't updated it even though the company had shut that job down. Colin: So I went to that career site, started my search again, found another job and then had to basically start all over because Indeed had all my info but it wasn't transferred over. And it shouldn't necessarily be, it's just a horrible experience. And so, we are fantastically optimistic about what Google for jobs can do in terms of saying right. Let Google become the world's job boards, let them, 80% of candidates, I don't know if you guys hear a different stat but the most common I'm hearing is 80% of candidates start at Google. Chad: It's behavior. Colin: Yeah, it's natural behavior and Google just hasn't focused on it. They've been thinking about how do we build smart cards for restaurants and for travel and for shopping. I think the fact that they're finally turning their attention to the candidate, the job search and getting them directly to jobs is absolutely fantastic. I think we are very, very optimistic. We're working very heavily with them. We see an opportunity to do a direct connection of where the candidates starts the search to where they apply into the company. In my mind, if we can wipe out the middleman and I think that's what Google's got a long history of being able to do, we are doing something right for the candidate. Chad: Well, and what you've seen or at least tell us a little bit about the actual attribution, so attribution. You work with a bunch of different job boards, job sites, sourcing sites, so on and so forth. Those sites are really scared what's going to happen with Google for jobs. So there's some moves that are happening out in that land per se where there's source attribution being stripped in some cases. Is that the case? Colin: Yeah. I guess I would start off by saying that I would be afraid if I existed anywhere between the Google search and the point of application right now. I would be rethinking my model. It's pretty clear when Google came out with this and everyone sort of, are you going to embrace it, are you going to work with Google for jobs, are you going to get the jobs over to them in index and according to the data they need and the time frames they need, the algorithms they need. If you do, traffic goes up for us because we were one step away. We have the middleman in between. It spiked heavily. It went up I think about 90% the traffic for us. Colin: What we're seeing is that the middlemen, the boards who sort of sit between the ATS and Google, if they're playing nicely with Google they're going up too to the tune of about 30, 40 percent and these are good candidates. These are candidates that as far as we can see from our data are a higher quality, which means that they stay on longer, they do apply, they have a higher application rate. What we are seeing is there are one or two out there. I think indeed being the biggest is decided not to play well and the traffic has gone down. Our data seems to show it's gone down about 30% since this. Joel: Interesting. Chad: Yeah, imagine that, right? Colin: Yeah. Then last but not least we're really interested to see who's doing this, as a middleman who's opting to work with Google for jobs. There's a short term spike in traffic which obviously looks good. I think you only have to look at Indeed's clay. When they started as a company they sort of had the same thing which is hey, Monster, CareerBuilder, everyone else, let us be an aggregator, we'll get the traffic, we'll win Google SEO, we'll get the Google traffic, we'll sort of sift it over to you, you'll win until we decide not to sift it over to you. It seems like Google is playing Indeed's playbook here. Chad: And the thing about it is when Indeed was playing their playbook, Monster and CareerBuilder could have squashed them in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, there's no way in hell Indeed is going to be able to squash Google. But that being said, going back to iCIMS and user experience, you guys have actually adopted the Google jobs API. So the job search, the Google job search within your platform. Is that a standard, is that something that one of your clients has to ask for? How does that work within your platform and why did you make the decision? Colin: Yeah, so good question. We're treading lightly. We always believe in kind of crawl walk run. What Google did, I don't think anyone realized. They launched three things all at once which I think maybe confused the market. Like okay, Google's in but what is Google for jobs versus Google Hire, this ATS that they're putting in the G-suite versus Cloud Discovery, which seems to be this sort of AI machine learning matching engine. Colin: It is a very cool combination but we're having to do a lot of education with our customers, that guys, this is in fact three totally different things. Google for jobs is just going to completely change how people advertise their jobs and how candidates find and apply for your jobs which we're huge fans of. The Cloud Discovery, the sort of AI job matching, we also think is very interesting. Colin: So if you think about those two problems I was alluding to, the two biggest issues in our industry over the last 20 years. Number one, finding and applying for the job sucks and that's Google for jobs. Number two, the ATS seems to be a bit of a black hole which means that thousands of candidates can apply in but only if you're so lucky to sort of make it to the next rounds and not get the formal ding letter. You sort of feel like hey, I'm not sure what's going on. Colin: Cloud Discovery has an opportunity to kind of do some pretty amazing things for large databases like ATS's and sort of talent CRM systems which is to surface matches much faster and much better. So on one side yes, when candidates come to our career sites, we want that to be able to be powered by Cloud Discovery so that they can get the absolute best matches. No frustration in sort of having to sift through with manual searches looking for the right jobs. But on the flip side, when the recruiters in the ATS and you might be sitting on and some of our customers quite literally are sitting on millions of candidates in their applicant tracking system. To be able to have an AI machine learning engine just immediately service up some of the more interesting matches that exist in your database is sort of like finding gold that you didn't even know you had. So we are big fans of those two things. Colin: You start to think about, as Google comes out with more of this kind of paz componentry. So I think they think of that AI machine learning, that cloud discovery as paz componentry that can be embedded into software out there. I'm sure you guys saw the duplex. Chad: Voice assistant. Colin: But if you think about that, there is so much of recruiting which is very simple calls in. Hey, I'm calling in. I just wanted to know if you got my application. I wanted to know if I'm still in consideration. Begin to think about some of the really cool things that can be serviced up by some of this kind of AI machine learning paz componentry that they're building. So we're we're pretty excited. I think the big question was always great, they've come out with Google Hire so that makes it now look like competitive. So instead of these two amazing things that we want to work with, they've launched out an ATS. Colin: In our mindset, we see ourselves as in two very, very different markets. I think iCIMS services the enterprise market. So we go from typically a company that can be about 500 employees all the way up to well north of 100,000 employees. I think Google Hire higher will be a great ATS lower end of the market. Put it in the G-suite, people that are very comfortable using sort of docs and sheets and hangouts. We've got a high degree of confidence that getting enterprise recruiting right is a huge endeavor. And so we see ourselves as kind of with Google Hire playing in two different markets. Joel: Colin, in most technologies we see commoditization and certainly in our industry it's been similar even with the job posting market as well. Are you seeing that in the ATS market? How are you going to combat commoditization? What's sort of your take on that for the future? Colin: It's a tough one. We've been told for, I don't know, the better, I keep getting told that I'm dying. I don't know if it's something about me but for 20 years people have loved to tell me that what I do and what my company does is dying and commoditizing and- Chad: Is that why you cut out caffeine? Colin: That may maybe why I cut out caffeine. We'll see if it helps. I think at the end of the day, listen, I think commoditization is the wrong word. The ATS is still fundamental, it is the fundamental building block. You cannot exist without an ATS, I'm sorry. I think people are going to say, hey, we can just build a talent CRM or whatever. That's not going to be a compliant, GDPR compliant. It's not going to interface properly with kind of the job, location, dynamics of your HCM system. It's not going to have the EEO, the OFCCP. Like all the regulatory components that you need. Colin: The ATS is certainly not dead. I think I've heard a lot of people who want to say it's dead. It is not the sexiest part of recruiting. Recruiting has just moved on. So what you sort of believe is hey, your fundamental building block despite not being the sexiest part is the ATS. We say it's for the ABC's of recruiting. It's not sexy, the ABC's. The automation, the branding, the compliance. You got to put it in for those three reasons. Joel: I'm not necessarily building your tombstone but we're seeing trends where smart recruiters had a free product forever then they went paid only and now they have sort of a freemium model sort of post Google Hire. We see Indeed sort of launched their own sort of free ATS, I'm sure LinkedIn. I'm not calling you dead, I'm just saying, like are you seeing, it seems to me like there's pressure on ATS now to sort of reduce the pressure, reduce the entry into their product. So you're saying you're simply not seeing that, you're not concerned about that. Colin: No no. I would say I'm seeing it Joel. So definitely. But I think that pressure believe it or not has come from the HCM industry. That came a long time ago when ADP bought VirtualEdge and started throwing it in their bag. That then came when Ultimate built a very basic ATS and threw it in their bag. When Workday built a basic ATS and threw it in their bag. When Oracle acquired Taleo, kind of throughout the pricing sheet and said, hey, you can take it down to zero as long as we're getting some of the surround services from Oracle. Colin: So the ATS became sort of the punching man. That is why we diversified. So it's not dead, you have to have it. It's just you can get it from low cost from just about anywhere. So obviously that's where we focus on, well guys, RTA suite has the CRM, it has the offer management. It has the onboarding, it has the entire ecosystem so that literally you'll never have to worry about integrations with background providers, assessment providers, video providers. We've done all that hard work. So, I think it's just forced us to say that the value and the innovation doesn't necessarily lie in the ATS. But what I will tell you Joel is these free ATS or these ATS that are getting thrown in by HCM systems, there is no other way to tell you, they are just bad. They're just bad systems. Chad: They just suck. Colin: I heard the boo, I thought I'd get a cheer for that. Joel: All right, I'll cheer you. For your comment and for them the boo. Colin: You can get a low cost or a free or a freemium but you're going to get what you pay for. And so the question is do you value recruiting. So what we see is the entire market has bifurcated into two. If you value recruiting and it's quite obvious when we're meeting with customers and they say hey, we're growing rapidly, getting talent is the hardest thing, we've got to do it, then they tend to go best and breed. They will choose a sort of full TA suite. If they don't value recruiting then they're either going to go to this kind of free one coming out of their HCM provider or really out of their payroll provider or anyone else out there. Colin: So our viewpoint is we're building the best tools for people who value recruiting. But that is not the entire marketplace. There are those who just don't. Chad: So, we start talking about some of the sexy things that are happening out there obviously, going out and buying TextRecruit, that was sexy. We're seeing obviously finally companies starting to focus on their applicant tracking system database and being able to mine that in a very smart way obviously because companies have spent millions of dollars on creating this database that is just withering away. My question to you, knowing that Google Hire now is using the, I think they're calling it the Google Candidate Discovery kind of process, that's going to turn into an A.P.I. much like the jobs A.P.I. did. Are you working with Google or are you in the early kind of stages of working with Google and being able to help them prospectively integrate or create one of those A.P.I.'s so that iCIMS can benefit from it as well? Colin: We're definitely looking at it. We're very interested in it. So I do think you're right, that sort of the next phase. We kind of see two next phases. One is hey, with Google for jobs programmatic advertising is going to get a hell of a lot more interesting and then number two, mining your own database particularly with what's coming out with Google but not just Google. There's a war at the highest level for AI machine learning matching engines. Amazon will have one and Google will have one and Microsoft will have on and Watson will have one. This will all just become paz componentry and you'll sort of, just like you choose right now am I going AWS or Azure, you'll choose which one that you're going to your kind of matching engine. Colin: We're big fans of Google. We really like what they've built. I mean obviously they got a leg up because they built it for themselves and they've built it for Google for jobs. Our viewpoint is yes, we will ingest A.P.I.'s and whether it's from them or we can let the customer control. We see a day where you might be able to go to our marketplace and say what engine do you want to use to turn your talent acquisition platform into a smart talent acquisition platform. And we might have three or four options. We'll say hey, Amazon, again, they're a customer but we can be sure that they're building things in this industry too or Watson or Microsoft or Google. Sorry. I don't know if that got directly to what you were asking but we're very interested. Joel: So Colin, you dropped some futuristic terms and we talk a lot about that on the podcast. What's your sort of sense of, in five years what does the ATS market look like. Are we looking at more consolidation, are looking at more growth, more people getting into this. What does this space look like in five years? Colin: The interesting thing that we've taken a look at. People always assume hey, iCIMS, you're a recruiting platform so you must compete with like a Greenhouse, a Java, a Lever, SmartRecruiters. We actually internally we just don't see it that way. When we look at the data, so we can take a look at our market, the enterprise market. When you take a look at the enterprise market the top five players are, there are four HCMs and iCIMS. And then in the majors, so what most people call the low enterprise mid-market. And then in the high end of the enterprise it's four HCMs and iCIMS. Colin: The point that we're trying to make is at the enterprise side of the market there's a war where people are saying like if I value recruitment hopefully we'll go with an iCIMS. If I don't value recruitment we might take the throw in that our CTO has negotiated in the workday contract. So I think you'll still see this classic kind of full suite versus HCM battle and I think it's or viewpoint to out-innovate them and continue to show that recruiting is just too damn important to break. It can't be the worst part of your offering. It's the front of the funnel. I mean who cares what your payroll system is if you've got the worst recruiting software. Colin: I think that's number one. I think the second trend that you'll see and you're already seeing it is the low end of the market's going to get decimated. Literally, the second Google announced, every single recruiting competitor we saw put out press release like we're going enterprise. Chad: Run to the hills, run to the hills. Colin: It took us 10 years to even start to get somewhat good at the enterprise market so I don't think a press release necessarily should be the thing that announces it. I think you will see at the low end there's just so many options. I mean there really are. At the very low end you don't even need an ATS. Just go get a zip recruiter and have them blast you candidates and like put in a spreadsheet. Maybe you'll get it out your payroll company, something very basic out of a paycheck, a pay com, a Paycom, a Paylocity. You'll get it out of the Levers, the Greenhouses etc. Colin: It really is at the high end. And so again, I just think you'll see this, there's just a myriad of offerings and many of them are free. But at the high end I still think it is a value play. You just can't afford to break recruiting if you're an enterprise organization. Joel: So speaking of the future, when are you guys going to file for I.P.O.? Colin: We get asked all the time. I think the beauty of our company is it's all organic. So I'll give a little bit of explanation to that. We do have an investor but it was all liquidity secondary. So we always like to say that everything we've built in the company came from the company's money. We're not a classic raise money, burn it as fast as you can in marketing and sales grow as fast as you can. Run out of money and then go public when you're out of money. We've done it all by ourselves. We've never spent anyone else's money and we're very profitable. We're buying companies through profitability right now. Colin: So there isn't a huge need to go out for public market money and I gotta say sometimes just being under the radar and private thinking about the long term and not necessarily kind of quarterly results just seems like the way to go right now. Joel: So you're saying there's a chance. Colin: My favorite Dumb and Dumber quote. Joel: I had to throw that one in because you are talking to Chad and Cheese. Chad: So Colin, we appreciate you taking all the time this morning to talk to us. I have to say in working with iCIMS since I think like around 2004, so you guys have been incredibly easy to work with, probably one of the easiest organizations to work with when working with talent acquisition and technologies. But we appreciate you coming on and sharing your story and definitely would love to have you again. Colin: It's been my pleasure. I'd love to come again. Joel: Thanks Colin. Colin: All right. It's a pleasure. Thank you guys. Joel: Remember to visit uncommon.co. Chad: Where the candidate model doesn't suck. Right now Uncommon only charges $14.95 per interested and qualified candidate. Plus, if you're into volume and I know you're into volume, there are bigger discounts. Joel: And to sweeten the deal Uncommon allows you to create a free account and get your first five qualified and interested candidates absolutely free. Chad: Uncommon.co, do it. Chad: Thanks to our partners at Tatech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Remember to visit tatech.org. Chad: This has been the Chad & 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. #iCims #GoogleJobsAPI #GoogleforJobs #Google #ATS #Uncommon #BadAss

Indeed keeps building-up that moat against Google, but the latest acquisition of Resume.com has the boys shaking their heads. Plus... - Dice still has a pulse - sells HCareers to... Virgil? - Facebook fights total bullshit claims - Walmart is sending the blue vests to college - ZipRecruiter flexes it's R&D muscle - GDR bites Facebook & Google in the ass - SEEK & Indeed battle! Enjoy, and show sponsors Sovren, JobAdX and America's Job Exchange some love. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT 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, splash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Joel: Summer's here, and the time is right for podcasting in the streets. See what I did there? Welcome to The Chad & Cheese show, HR's most dangerous podcast, I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week's show, the Indeed mote gets a wee bit bigger. Someone swiped right on Dice's parent company, and Wal-Mart is sending the blue vests to school. It's gonna be a hot one. Stay tuned. Sovren: Sovren AI Matching is the most sophisticated matching engine on the market because it acts just like a human. You decide just how our AI matching engine thinks about each individual transaction. It will find, rank, and sort the best matches according to your criteria. 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 Sovereign AI Matching visit Sovren.com, that's S, O, V, R, E, N dot com. Chad: It acts like a human; it can even tell you what your favorite drink is. Joel: We laughed about the Sovren ad before the show, thinking it's our shortest add. It's basically, everyone uses us, S, O, V, R, E, N dot com. Thank you. Chad: Hey, I'm matching. We kick ass. Here you go. Joel: AI, all the buzz words, S, O, V, R, E, N dot com. Let's get to shout-outs. Chad: Dude, first, I've gotta stretch here for a minute. Getting ready for a three week family vacation in Europe in June. Joel: And I'm clapping because I don't have to deal with you for three weeks while you're in Europe because your wife has read the riot act that if you contact me at all, your ass is grass pretty much. Chad: Yeah, I think I might be able to throw a few Facebook messages over to you or something like that, but that being said, we do have a killer line-up of podcasts coming up in June, so that's where I wanna start my shout-outs because, first and foremost Colin Day, CEO, founder, chairman extraordinaire of iCIMS is going to be on the uncommon exclusive in June. Joel: It's a great interview if that's enough of it to use, but it was good. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: He's very honest, which is nice. Chad: Oh, dude, you cannot get a CEO who can be that honest. I love the interview. Anoop Gupta, this dude has a crazy amazing background. He actually reported directly to Bill Gates. Joel: Yeah, he rose the IQ level on this show by about three X, easy. Chad: Yeah, knowing that, we take it in the negatives. Elena Valentine--let me get that right--CEO of SkillScout, and I'm actually wearing her shirt right now. She was a real groovy, funky interview. It was a good time in Nashville. Joel: Co-founder, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: She's Co-founder. Chad: and CEO Joel: To a woman named Cheesman, by the way, I just had to put that in there. Chad: Yeah, so Elena and I, we are the other halves of the Cheesman group. Not too bad I guess. Joel: That's cute. Chad: James Ellis AKA Talent Cast Podcast. We actually had a great time talking about employer branding, tech, all this shit that we're hearing about tech stacks and shit like that, so he was fun. Joel: Another overly honest guest on the show. Chad: Love overly honest guests, and this next guy, Dan Sirk, who's the CMO over at Kununu, that's one of the companies that you really wanted to interview. Joel: Yup, yup. That was interesting as well. They're making headway here in the States doing a lot of cool stuff on the employment branding side. Chad: Yup. Last but not least, you're not gonna wanna miss the firing squad this month. Great firing squad, great young company, and it is a Talroo exclusive. Joel: It is a Talroo exclusive. I'll send out a shout-out to Kaia Pesano, I'm saying that wrong for sure, but she is the content person at Smart Recruiters, who we know and love. She quoted me for a story, which was pretty interesting about American Apparel. If you know anything about them, they have a real sleazy former CEO, barely legal advertising campaigns. The story was, can they come back from that horrible brand and come back from the dead and be successful? So, shout-out to her for the story as well as quoting me for the story. I appreciate that. Chad: Yeah. I would say you should appreciate that. Joel: Yep, yep. I also got Russ Herl -- I think I did say that one right -- Fan of the show; he's a Google guy at the higher API cloud component, big fan of the show. Appreciate you, Russ. And my final shout-out this week goes to a former classmate in college. This is a non-recruitment shout-out because we like to educate on more than just employment. Shout-out to Tiffany Anton. Tiffany is a sex therapist, and she just launched a podcast. Came to me for some advice, not sexual but podcast. Chad: Duh. Joel: And so, it's called Tiffany, Turned On. So, if you're interested in this topic, go check that out. I've listened to a few episodes. Pretty intriguing stuff, so Tiffany, shout-out to you. Chad: Joel is now the number one subscriber to that podcast. Joel: Hey, a lot more people are listening to her topic than our topic. Chad: I'm sure. No, I'm sure. Joel: She'll have more listeners by the end of today than we have in a year and a half. Chad: Yeah, instead of HR's most dangerous podcast, it'll be HR, Turned On. Joel: We could have her on the show. Chad: Exactly. We could do the show, HR, Turned On; that would be awesome. Joel: All right. Are we done with shout-outs? Chad: Yes. Topics. Joel: Big news: Dice. How often do we start the show off with Dice? Wow. Well, they sold off one of their shitty job boards that they've been trying to sell off. Chad: HCareers? Joel: HCareers, hospitality careers. A hot sector. You're intrigued by who they sold it to: your cousin, Virgil. Chad: Yeah, my cousin, Virgil, actually bought it. I thought it was interesting. I'd never heard of Virgil Holdings. I had no clue who this entity was. And then found they had a career site, virgilcareers.com, and it was interesting and interesting from the standpoint of, it really at this point is just a shell. Chad: So, it has like six jobs on a ... Four of those jobs are pretty high level jobs for Virgil Careers, so they're eating their own dog food; that's awesome, but yeah, there's career pathing elements and some of those video elements, which from UX standpoints looks pretty cool. Joel: It's like career assessments, so you're out of school; you're in school; what the hell am I gonna do with my life? You go to Virgil I'm sure. I hope to God Virgil turns into HCareers because Virgil is a horrible brand. So, you go there, you do this assessment, you pay for it, so I'm assuming that now they have a database of people to sell this assessment to, now they have jobs that they can get traffic to get people to take the assessments. So, I'm sure at the bargain basement price that they got this thing for that it was a good deal for them, and they'll do well with it. Joel: My comment was that this space is changing so fast. We've talked about Snap before and interviewed him with their gig-economy work for multiple gigs. So, to me this whole hospitality, restaurant. This whole sector is going gig, so how Virgil reacts to that or does it with TaskRabbit and Shiftgig and all those guys. To me a job board for hospitality careers is sort of passe to say the least. Chad: We spoke with Doug; I think it's Doug Johnson at Jobalign, and that is more of one of the high volume types of platforms, and we talked to them about some of the hospitality side as well, and again, that is more, I think, of a fashion forward type of a platform versus what we're seeing at the Virgil Careers. It doesn't see kind of a decade old or so. It looks nice; it's got a nice little UX on in, but still, that doesn't mean it's gonna get used. Joel: Yeah, and I'd like to say that we'll keep our eye on this, and we'll update our listeners to what happens, but we probably won't. Chad: Yeah. Joel: This thing'll probably just fade to black, and we'll be done. However, Dice also in the news--probably more exciting for their shareholders--A letter came out late last week about a hedge fund that has a 10% stake in the company, and they apparently have written a letter saying that there is an intent there to buy the company. What does that mean for the company that has been trying to sell itself since 2016? I guess that's good news. Joel: If you bought in at $1.25 at the beginning of this month, your stocks are now worth $2 and 30-something cents as of today I would believe, so you've made a killing, and it looks like someone's finally going to buy Dice. Chad: Yeah. You've upgraded the junk stock that you bought. I think it'll be interesting, though, for individuals who are working for Dice now knowing that a hedge fund could actually come in and buy them. I mean, at this point I would be looking for that eject button on my desk. Joel: Yes. If you're at Dice, working at Dice, DHI, you have a new CEO, who I assume is making changes. You have companies being sold off; you have a hedge fund potentially coming into the mix. And from what I know Dice has a really good culture. They're sort of Midwest; they're based in Iowa; they have this Midwest values vibe. That could all go away really quickly with this buyer, so don't get too excited yet. Chad: Yeah, we saw that with CareerBuilder, but take a look at what they're doing, though. They're chunking off, obviously, these different pieces, parts, and they're selling them off, which they said they were gonna do, so good on the new CEO to actually get that done. Joel: Yeah. If he sells this thing, which I'm sure was in ... This has been a long process, selling this thing. And it probably took the stock getting down to a dollar basically before someone actually came in and showed interest, but yeah, we've been talking to Dice for a while. They're an old player. Looks like changes are coming for them just like it did at Monster and CareerBuilder. Chad: Agreed, agreed. Joel: All right, lawsuits, one of our favorite topics. Facebook is in trouble for, I don't know what you'd call it, racism or prejudice in advertising ... Chad: Ageism. Joel: I don't know. This is one of your hot buttons. Chad: Yeah. I think that Cambridge Analytica is really screwing with everybody's minds at this point, which I understand. I mean, the optics behind that and how you can use data perspectively to do different things, but in this case, I think it's something that we have to step back, and we have to better understand as an industry. Chad: So, the actual article actually said the Communications Workers of America is suing on behalf of union members and other job seekers who allegedly missed out on employment opportunities because companies used Facebook ad tools to target people of other ages, okay? Chad: So, let's break this down real quick, and let's understand this is not Facebook's fault, okay? This is on the actual company who is using that targetability within the actual platform itself to look for younger workers. They need to be more diverse. Totally understand that, but if you think about it, companies who are heavy, and there are some very large companies who are heavy in college recruitments and being able to pull college graduates into full time positions. We don't look at them any different, right? But do you think we're gonna find old white men on college campuses? No, we don't, and that's how we've done things forever, and this is the same thing. It's just ... We're blaming the tool as opposed to the individual actually using the tool. Joel: I mean, if anybody should be in trouble, it's the companies, I guess. It's definitely not Facebook's fault. You mentioned job fairs, right? If you go to a college job fair, there aren't gonna be 80-year-olds looking for work at the college job fair. They're gonna be young people looking for jobs. Joel: If you advertise in an African American magazine or a women-centric magazine, you're targeting that demographic. This has been going on forever. Chad: It's no different. Joel: I'm not sure why, unless they think it's just gonna be an easy buck to put Facebook in the headlines about a lawsuit, that Facebook should be in trouble there. I think if you have a company that you suspect is only targeting young people, you can audit their advertising and say, okay, why was your ad dollar on Facebook only towards people that were 25 and younger? Chad: This is a deeper rooted issue than just somebody using Facebook. Again, Facebook is one tool. If you're just using these other vehicles that are focused on specific demographics, and you're not being more diverse ... This is not a Facebook issue, although, from my understanding, Facebook might also be looked at by the EEOC for these same types of recruiting tactics, so using their own tool to be able to target more of a younger crowd. So at the end of the day, it might be Facebook's fault but not because of the tool. Joel: Yeah. I agree. I think this ageism is a real thing. Chad: It is. Joel: I really do believe that companies are laying off people over 40 because they're too expensive, and they could get the same work cheaper. Now, I think long term, a lot of it's gonna be contract. So, whether you're 40 or 20, if you can do the work, we'll contract out. I just think when you have full-time employees it becomes really hard to justify paying them twice as much when you get two people that are more tech savvy, maybe, or have newer skills to do that. So, it's a real problem. I'm not sure how it works out, but I wouldn't blame Facebook for the issue. Chad: No. Well, and there are some people who are quote, unquote, "over-qualified", who will take those positions maybe because they wanna scale down, and they don't want to big responsibility of the bigger salary and/or positions of having a ton of director reports. Who knows? There are different reasons. If you're actually filtering them out because of that, that's wrong too. Joel: Yeah. A lot of companies do the opposite; they'll hire more experienced workers to do more experienced jobs or come in for train- You know, whatever the job may be, just like on your side, you see veterans, right? There are companies that just are committed to veteran hiring, and that's what they do although a lot of companies shy away from that, a lot of companies don't just like with older workers. Chad: What it comes down to, talent acquisition and anybody out there who's in the vendor space, it's not about the tool; it's about the process; it's about the intent. And I see the EEOC and perspectively OFCCP down the road, using this date to be able to prove that your practices, your practices, not Facebook's tools, your practices are the reasons why you have the workforce that you have, which is not a diversified workforce. Joel: Yeah. So, if you or your agency are targeting ads on Facebook towards a certain age or race or any of those things that'll get you in trouble, you better make sure there's some diversity there that you can prove, yes, we did target them, but we also targeted a diverse candidate pool, or else you could get in trouble. Chad: Oh, yeah, and what do you expect a company to do if we've got nothing but old white dudes programming or doing a specific job, right? You have to be able to build for the future, and you have to be able to diversify, so if I am, I look at my current talent pool population, and I want to be able to diversity that. Well, how in the hell am I gonna do that just by sending it out generally to everybody. And as you'd said before, there are job boards that are specific to just women, job boards that are specific to just black female engineers, right? This is the same exact thing. Companies are trying to diversify their talent population, their talent pool, and this is how they do it. Chad: Now, here's the key, though. Don't trip yourself up by getting too much of that talent in one place and not diversifying; that's the big key. Joel: And speaking of diversity and tools, let's here from AJE, which ... What a great segue to our sponsor that covers this just sort of thing, right? Chad: That's exactly right. AJE: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our 10th year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our 1,000 plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, and minorities; and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community based organizations. AJE: Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Chad: Yeah, Gary Cowan over there at AJE, that's the guy who actually used to work with the OPCCP. You need to have experts that you can reach out to when you have these types of questions. When you have an oh shit, moment, who the hell do you reach out to? That's why you wanna be able to engage with an organization like AJE because they have the Gary Callens of the world, who are experts and have great experience in this. Joel: Yeah, it's a complicated world. The Europeans aren't making it any easier with GDPR, which we'll talk a little bit later, but yeah, governments are getting a little bit squirrely, and you need to be prepared for it as an employer. Joel: Speaking of feeling a little squirrely, Indeed buys Resume.com this week. Chad: Huh. Yeah. So, we talk about building a fortification, right? And dude's gonna build there, and this feels like they're building it a pebble at a time, doesn't it? Joel: Well, okay, for those who don't listen regularly, Indeed and their parent company, Recruit Holdings, have been on an acquisition buying spree lately. Workopolis, in Canada they bought recently. Before that, Simply Hired, they sort of gobbled up, Glassdoor, which was huge. If you haven't heard that podcast, go back and listen to that one. This is just another acquisition, and both of us I believe feel strongly that this is a reaction to Google for jobs, inch by inch killing their business or gobbling up their market share, and this is a way to sort of, let's buy a bunch of stuff; let's get a lot of friends to fight the bully on the playground, and hopefully it'll work out for us. Chad: Well, what does this do? What does this do for them though? That's my question. Joel: Well, okay. So, Google has yet to do resumes really, right? Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Joel: So, to me it's like ... So, it's a good URL. I don't think we can debate that. Resume.com is a pretty good URL. Chad: Yes. Joel: According to the news that I read, they're getting 40,000 resumes weekly. So, if your thought is, okay, Google will eventually have a resume component to their Google hire employment system platform, which I think we agree they will. They can't have an ATS really without that. Then you're looking at this going, holy crap, what if Google is the platform for posting a resume, and they're not gonna come and post a resume on our site? Or Glassdoor or any of our other parent sites, but if we have this thing called Resume.com we could brand that thing as the central resume platform to combat both LinkedIn as well as Google. That's the only thing that I can come up with. If you got something better, I'm open to it. Chad: Yeah. I mean, again, I see that not as a long term strategy because if Google starts to pull resumes in, it's what they do; they index, and they already have so much data as it is. I'm wondering if part of this is not a short term play for just adding revenue and perspectively exploding revenue around the job seeker side of the house and actually building resumes and charging for the build of resumes. Monster does it, and that's something that they're promoting now on some of their little 15-second funny ass videos. But 40,000 a week, I wonder how much they have to pay for that kind of traffic because that's not happening organically; there's no way. Joel: Well, I'd have to do keyword research, but I'm sure a lot of people are searching resume writing tips, resume writing, how to write a resume, and they probably have pretty good rankings for that stuff, and those are also searches that aren't related to job search, so that is a way to flank Google searches that are job related to get traffic to your site for resume writing traffic. Joel: I also think if Google is interested in going in and scraping or getting profiles from sites, if this was a potential site that Google was gonna rely on to get resumes, Indeed just cut that off. So, it is a source of ... Google could've gotten resumes that they won't have anymore. Chad: So, building that mote around these resumes, but still, there are so many goddamn resumes out there as it is, not to mention, I wonder how much information Google has from LinkedIn. Joel: Yeah. It's speculation from us at this point. Chad: It is. It is. I gotta say, man, they're making the buys, the Workopolis, I mean, yeah, it's Canada. Glassdoor, that's big, no question. It's just, this one was really interesting because I just don't see much there. Joel: So, not interesting but a little bit intriguing? Chad: Yes. Joel: Okay. Yeah, I mean, maybe they know something we don't, what Google's gonna do. This was maybe a smart move to outflank them on that. I guess we'll have to see. But yeah, I love the acquisition binge. I can't wait to see who they're gonna gobble up next. Chad: I enjoy it too. I enjoy it too. I'd like to see them take somebody bigger though. Again, I really would. I'd like to see them ... The Glassdoor thing was really cool. I see that again; we were talking about StepStone Universum; that's almost like a parallel, but being able to go further. What's next? And this, to me, was just like, hmm, okay, yeah, whatever, what's next? Joel: I am also hearing a lot of people in the practitioner space more so than usual talk about Indeed face to face meetings. So, they're building a more personable face to face thing I think, and they think that's probably another way to counteract Google's technology face. I don't know if you're hearing the same thing. Chad: I've actually heard from some salespeople that, that's being forced, that the actual in-person meetings, they're starting to really ramp those up and force that to happen, which I don't see as a bad thing, although, from an overhead standpoint, again, it's one of those things. I agree; you have to be in front of the customer, but if they're not qualified and ready, then what are you doing other than wasting overhead? Joel: Totally, and you look at going, you know, back to the future. I mean, back when Indeed started, it was very in vogue to have face to face meetings locally with people. Chad: Didn't happen. Joel: And you had local job boards all over the place, and of course, the recession happened, which doesn't help, but that model is incredibly expensive. You gotta pay for people, and they're out of the office and blah, blah, blah. Indeed succeeded because they were tech focused. All their call centers were out of one place. They did lean and mean, so it's sort of ironic that they're becoming what they killed 10 years ago by becoming a heavy focused face to face expensive organization to combat Google. Chad: And CareerBuilder is going the entire opposite direction. They're not doing face to face. It's one of those things where we're seeing with Apollo, they're squeezing, right? They're squeezing as much as they possibly can, and it looks like Indeed's doing everything they can to spend money, so good for them. Let's see how that works for them. Joel: Yeah, and they've spent a lot of time pissing off a lot of employers over the years, which, let's be honest, they've had really aggressive salespeople that have ... There's a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths, so hopefully for their sake, they can smooth that over and make nice, but at the end of the day people want results. The bottom line is important, so I'm not sure how important face to face meetings are when it comes to dollars and actual results. Chad: Yeah. I just don't see the nice as a part of Indeed DNA. Joel: Yeah. I agree. Their DNA is tech, and they've done that really well, so ... Joel: Well, another company that they probably won't be buying is in the news. One of your favorites: ZipRecruiter. Tell us what they've done. Chad: Yeah. I mean, they're expanding; they're actually ... They've had an R&D team in Tel Aviv, which I think is probably bigger than some of the bigger names that we know that are actually out there that are actually focused on machine learning, AI, and doing what they do incredibly well, doing it better, right? Chad: So, they're expanding, new location in Tel Aviv, and I think this is really just a shot across the bow to everybody: Indeed, Careerbuilder, Monster. It's like, look guys, we're takin' this shit serious; we're not ... We're hunkering down, and we are putting money into our R&D. And again, going back to Careerbuilder, I hate to make Careerbuilder my whipping boy for this. Joel: That's okay. Chad: From my understanding and talking to some of their engineers, that group is shrinking dramatically on the R&D side, so again, to see Zip do something like this and to really show strength, I think is pretty frickin' awesome, and they are investing in the future. That is cool. Joel: Yeah. I mean, where so many companies in our space are lookin' to get sold or scratchin' back from the depths of hell, whether it's stock price or just market share. Zip is one of the wild cards to me. I mean, they're sort of stand-alone. They've only made one acquisition that I can think of, which was JobBoard.io. They haven't done anything since then, but they continue to be a force. Traditional marketing, they crush it globally. Joel: I don't think they have a real huge presence. We do believe they made a play for the Workopolis deal in Canada, so yeah, I think it's awesome. ZipRecruiter could be that underdog that we don't really pay attention to that really comes out swingin' and makes a lot of waves, and this move to me also says, yeah, we're not goin' away, in fact, we're bigger and better than we were yesterday, and this is a show of strength on a global scale to Indeed and everybody else. Chad: So, how big to you think Monster's R&D team is? Do you think it's as big as Zip's, or do you think it's smaller? Joel: Right now, it's smaller I would say for sure. Chad: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think Monster. I think CareerBuilder, a lot of the names that are out there; they are not really building for the future like Zip is building for the future. Now, don't get me wrong. I know that they do have R&D out there, and they're trying to stitch together some of the technologies that they've acquired over the years, but this is something entirely different, and I think this is cool. Joel: Yeah, and it's also interesting because Zip has traditionally been a online job add, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's sort of ... It's lowest common denominator; it's your service provider; it's your retail space, and so, to have an R&D tells me that they have a bigger vision for what they're going to be than just an SMB or your local mom and pop hiring solution. Chad: Yeah, there's no question there. Joel: All right. Well, let's take a quick break and hear something from JobAdX, speaking of high-tech, and when we come back we'll talk Wal-Mart, Google, Alexa SEEK, and GDPR. Chad: Rapid fire. JobAdX: How many times has someone said to you, "We're the Uber of ..." Or, "It's the PayPal of ..." Maybe they're the Facebook of ... In many, many cases these comparisons fall short of being close to reality or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot on that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google AdSense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, persistent, and smarter ad unit for job related advertising. As the best job tool in the industry JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs and staffing firms, real time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first, truly responsive tool. All of this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click, or application. We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We're not set in regret. JobAdX: For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards, higher rev share than other partners for a smarter programmatic platform. In many cases 30 to 40% greater and more through our scalable model. To partner with us you can visit or search Job A, D, X dot com or e-mail us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX: JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX was just launched in the UK too. Chad: So, does that mean, every time they launch in a new country they're going to have a new accent? I think that's what they're saying. I think that's ... We're getting set up for all of these new accents. Joel: We have to push 'em on that. Yeah. Totally. Totally. I want some eh's when they're in Canada. Yeah, I definitely want a little French thing going on when they go to a French ... Ze Germans. Joel: All right, Dude, we haven't had it in a while, but let's do a little ... Little rapid fire and get on with our lives. Joel: Wal-Mart is paying for college for their workers for a dollar a month that a worker has to pay, which I guess you have enough workers that Wal-Mart has, that can be a little bit of money, but they have three colleges, one that I knew of. The others are online based colleges, so you can get your college education by working at Wal-Mart, which I think we both agree is a great retention and recruiting tool. Chad: Yes. Amazing for attraction; amazing for retention, and if you're looking for ... I mean, it's a big brand, and for a company to say that they care about your career, no matter where you start ... I think this is incredibly smart. We talked about it last week. This is a strategy every company needs to take a look at, and they need to add more to it, but this is a great start, I think, for Wal-Mart. Joel: Don't you just love the warmer and fuzzier Wal-Mart? 20 years ago Wal-Mart was going to destroy the country, and put every little mom and pop out of business, and just kill everything, and then Amazon came along, and now Wal-mart is the underdog. Paying for college, and increasing minimum wages, and giving maternity leave and all that good stuff, so good for you, Wal-Mart. Keep it up. Chad: Yay, Wal-mart. Joel: Let's talk about Google, one of your favorite companies and topics, voice assistance. You're really bullish on Google in this aspect. Chad: Yeah, so Alexa was kicking ass and taking names, right? On the Amazon side, but Google last quarter shipped 3.2 million Google Homes and/or the new mini speakers that they have versus Amazon shipping 2.5 million Echos, so we talked about this. We've talked about really how Google just takes a market, so first off, obviously, there was the iPhone, and then Google came out and said, we can do that better. We're gonna do the software; we're gonna be on more phones, and now they're killing, obviously, IOS with Android. That's exactly what's happening here, not to mention, foreshadowing Duplex, right? We talked about Duplex and being able to use it as your actual assistant. This is cool shit. It really is, and somewhere that Alexa hasn't gone yet. Joel: Yeah. Duplex, which we talked about ... By the way, our interview with Seekout was interesting because he had some thoughts on Duplex that were sort of negative, but yeah, the day where we just have conversations and not just order this thing to do something, Google, I think is probably way ahead of the game in that. And also, I bet the story didn't mention much about Siri and HomePod, but Apple is way behind in terms of people using it or buying it. And part of that is because it's like a $350 device when everything else is under 100 bucks now, so I assume that will change. Joel: But yeah, this whole voice assistant thing, it's evolving quite interestingly. I don't know how it's gonna impact our industry. We've had Tim Sackett on, talked about, hey, find me a PHP developer within 10 miles of me and set up some interviews for next week, not like that will happen. We're not there yet, but how this will affect recruiting and employment ... You know, we'll see, but it will be interesting. Chad: There are many companies in our space right now that are specifically focused on the formula to create a solution to this for recruiting. I know that for a fact. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of my predictions was that this voice assistant thing will happen this year. We'll start seeing seeds planted for voice assistant recruiting. Chad: Yup. Joel: VAR. I just made it up; there ya go. Joel: SEEK out of Australia versus Indeed; you like this story that came out this week. Chad: Yeah. It's interesting because we always talk about Indeed building a mote, right? Well, SEEK has been building a mote for a hell of a lot longer than Indeed has. I mean, SEEK didn't take ... They didn't play the game with Indeed like everybody else did. They focused on their own little island, pun intended ... Joel: Boo. Chad: ... And they've been doing business differently, so in this case, we're taking a look at the Indeed interview assessments piece versus SEEK putting money into Vervoe, who is actually our first firing squad, and I think that is incredibly interesting because in going down parallel lines I see with two entirely different types of technologies. Joel: Yeah, and you look at voice from a job seeker's perspective. How soon before you have your resume on Google, and you see an ad for a company you wanna work for, and you say, hey, Google, send my resume to ABC Inc., and that's your resume. To me that could be a future that happens. I think the Vervoe side of it with the automated video interviewing stuff, that's definitely interesting. Joel: Whereas Indeed tends to be sort of old school with their resumes, which a lot of people support as well. A lot of people say, don't change the resume. I'm probably one of 'em. I mean, we both are bearish on video resumes. No one's gonna sit through a three minute video, maybe a six second video, like Snapchat or something like that, but yeah. I do love the fact that SEEK turned off Indeed early on. Craigslist was smart enough to do that as well. I did not know that, so good on SEEK for having the wherewithal and the knowledge and the vision to shut off the aggregators early on and keep that mote in Australia strong. Chad: Yep, and it's good to see Vervoe, I mean, a startup holding hands, I guess you could say, with big brother SEEK and being able to build that interviewing type of technology. It's not just video, I mean, they're tests. It's a pretty deep kind of a platform that I think, like you'd said, you could perspectively use one day with voice assistant as, you know, the voice assistant is actually asking you questions, and you're answering it, it's going into the system, which is really cool. Joel: Yep. Lastly GDPR, which, have we talked about on this show yet? I don't know. Chad: In passing, I think. Yeah, Facebook and Google, I mean, they got nailed with lawsuits on the very first day--go figure--which accuses both companies of coercing users into sharing personal data. Now, Facebook was a hit with 3.9 billion, Google with 3.7, so right now Facebook is leading Google in the lawsuit side of GDPR. Joel: To me GDPR is a total big company money grab. I got so many e-mails, and I'm sure you did too last week ... Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: ... About our new privacy policy. We're GDPR compliant, and these are pretty small American based businesses. Europe is not going to come after those companies; they're gonna go after the big guys that can write big checks really quickly to get the European Union off their backs. Chad: Because it's resources. Joel: And this exemplifies exactly what I knew what gonna happen. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Everybody that's a big company is gonna get pinched. Chad: So, I'm mean, the resources that the EU has to actually enforce this, is spread amongst all of the EU. It's not just one force, and they're trying to sew this together, so yeah. They're not gonna have the resources to go after everybody. They're going to focus on the big names where they see they can perspectively get those big winds, and that's where it's really gonna sit to be quite frank, but yeah. I agree. Joel: Yeah. They might go after a small company just to keep people honest and scare people, but your odds of that are very, very small. And if it happens, it could happen in our space because a lot of resumes are out there that are really old, and so if it does happen, it could be our space that sees a little bit of pinching by the EU. Chad: It could. It could. Joel: Are we out? Chad: We're out. Joel: We out. You have a show next week, right, and then you're done? So, I don't wanna say goodbye if you're here next week too, right? Chad: No, I'm not. I'm not here next week. Joel: Oh, so you're gone. Chad: I'm gone. Joel: All right, Dude. Have fun in Europe. I'll have fun holding down the fort. Chad: Enjoy. Joel: We out. Chad: Later. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristan, thanks for listening to my stepdad, the 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 droppin' that's happenin' up in here. Tristen: They made me say that. Tristen: The most important part is to check out our sponsors because I need new track spikes. You know, that's a shiny gold pair that are extra because well ... I'm extra. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Indeed #Resumecom #Dice #DHI #Facebook #GDPR #ZipRecruiter #WalMart #SEEK #HCareers #VirgilCareers

If you thought an upcoming holiday weekend would mean a slow week in the recruiting industry, then you're gravely mistaken, kiddies. Chad & Cheese bring da noise and da funk on a episode featuring: - Indeed sets up for an EPIC collapse - Phenom People gets PAID - Vervoe gets PAID - Debut.Careers gets PAID - Job.com gets Blockchain? Really? - Microsoft teases their Indeed killer - Do you really the degree and debt? and Millennials getting smacked around by their Boomer parents. Enjoy, and visit our sponsors: America's Job Exchange, JobAdX and Sovren. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION: 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. Joel: Welcome to the birthday edition of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. More on that in a second. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week's vomitous episode. That's vomitous. Indeed says, here we grow again. Millennials still suck, and so much cash is being handed out to TA tech start-ups that Oprah would be impressed. Your check is probably in the mail as I speak. Chad: You get funding. You get funding. You get funding. Joel: Stay tuned. JobsAdX: How many times has someone said to you, "We're the Uber of," or "Is the PayPal of?" Maybe "They're the Facebook of." In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. JobsAdX: In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot-on, that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google Ad Sense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, persistent and smarter ad unit for job-related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs and staffing firms, real-time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. All of this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click or application. We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We're not set in regrets. JobsAdX: For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best in programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards higher rev share than other partners through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30-40% greater and more through our scalable model. JobsAdX: To partner with us, you can visit or search JobAdX.com, or email us at joinus@jobadx.com, to get estimates or begin working together. JobsAdX: JobAdX. The best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX has just launched in the UK, too. Chad: Every time I hear that ad, it makes me crave Guinness. Joel: She's English, dude. Not Irish. Chad: It doesn't matter. They brought Guinness to our interview. Joel: That's true. Okay, now I'm with you. Now I'm with you. So, literally as the ad was playing, a news release came across my phone. Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Joel: Hcareers, owned by DHI Group. Owners of Dice and a few other ones, has sold to Virgil Holdings. I've never heard of. So, here's the quickie release here. Virgil Holdings recently announced it has acquired Hcareers, the premier North American recruiting brand and platform in the hospitality sector from DHI group. The investment serves as a growth engine to expand Hcareers' capabilities as the next generation blah blah blah. Joel: So, we can go on with the show, but that just came across. I thought I'd mention it. Chad: Yeah, Dice selling off their shit. There's going to be more of that, right? Joel: Yes. New CEO. I'm sure his first order of business is to dump all the fat from the organization. Joel: So happy birthday. I wanted to get to that real quick. A few people know this. Chad and I born in the same year, one day apart. Him on the 27th, me on the 28th, which makes him always older than me which I like, but we're both celebrating birthdays this weekend. So happy birthday, dude. Chad: Well happy birthday, and, older, yes, but also wiser, of course. Joel: And more follically challenged as always. Chad: That's just all the testosterone. Joel: And it's the Indy 500. It's a big weekend here in Indianapolis. Chad: It is, it is. Joel: Memorial Day. Chad: I've got seven tons of rock in my driveway that need to make it to the back for landscaping for a high school graduation that's gonna be coming up here in about a week or so. So, I've got shit to do around the house as well. Joel: Do you include the two pounds of rock in your head when you count the weightage of that? Chad: Oh, no. I don't count that at all. Joel: Let's get to shout outs. Chad: Shout outs. First shout out goes to Chris Curran from the Podcast Engineering School. Joel: The Podcast Engineering School? Chad: Yeah, dude. Yeah, no shit. This is a guy and go figure because I've had a ton of people actually reach out to me and say, hey, you guys do a pretty clean ... sounds good podcast. What do you use? Well, Chris, that's what he does for a living. So, if you're interested in podcasting and not really sure what to do and how to do it, just visit podcastengineeringschool.com. There are a ton of podcasts and whatnot and he actually featured me on this week's Podcast Engineering School. Chad: I've got a radio background, but still I'm an amateur when it comes to this stuff. So, if you're thinking about it and you wanna throw a pod out there, we had our stumbles and found a couple holes to drop into here and there. Do your research. Do your research and check these guys out. Joel: You can also just pay Chad and I to teach you how to do it. We'll accept checks right now as well. You wanna save yourself from the pitfalls that we had. I got a shout out to my Ratedly webinar attendees. Ratedly, as we mention a lot, had a webinar yesterday about the Glassdoor and Indeed marriage. Had about a hundred plus sign ups, so it was a good show. So, thanks to everyone who showed up. It was a good showing. Chad: Very nice, very nice. Those two just snuggling up. Kuba from Microsoft reached out and said he just found the podcast and is gonna be binging this entire weekend. So, Kuba, just crack open a cold one and let the knowledge flow, man. Joel: We get a lot of bingers. A lot of people mention, yeah, I just binged all the episodes this weekend. That's very odd to me, but hey, if we're in the same category as Orange is the New Black and House of Cards, then so be it. I got a shout out to Kelsey Gee I hope I'm saying that correctly. It's either Ghee or Gee. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal is a fan. Chad: Oh, nice. Joel: So, Kelsey, we appreciate you tuning in. Love it. Chad: Keep listening, Kelsey. Ed from Philly. He's loving the Firing Squad. Here's from Twitter, , "Really hammering their guests on Firing Squad." That's right Ed. Joel: That's right. Suckas beware. I got a shout out to Omer I hope I said that correctly. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: His company is in the news, but I wanted to just give him a shout out as the first ever Firing Squad guest. He's seeing some success there. His company, which we'll talk about later, but long-time fan, first-time victim. Omer, thanks. Shout out to you. Chad: Love him. Ivan Vega gets a shout out for tagging us or maybe he was just trolling us on LinkedIn, I don't know. Anyway, all these damn lists that are coming out. Top five podcasts, top five bloggers, influential people, all this other bullshit, but anyway there was one that was top five great recruitment marketing podcasts. We weren't listed on it, so he was sad that we weren't on it, but Ivan, we weren't listed because it wasn't the top five badass podcasts, which we would've probably had the top three positions at least. Chad: Firing Squad, our exclusive podcast, and our weekly podcast. Not to mention I'm gonna tease this. We didn't talk about this, but stay tuned because here in about a month or so, a new segment's gonna be coming out called, "The Shred." Joel: Nice little tease there. I like that. How are we not mentioned on these top lists for podcasts? One, there aren't that many. Two, we're awesome, but three, no one is cranking out content like we are. We're just churning this stuff out. Anyway, F-you if we're not on your best podcast and HR lists as far as I'm concerned. You ready to get to this or you got more shout outs? Chad: Let's do this. Joel: All right. Here we grow again. Chad: Oh, Jesus. Joel: Indeed announcing this week they're gonna be hiring 3,000 new employees as well as adding two new locations in the Austin, Texas area, which is where they call home. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I say this is pretty cocky considering Google's knocking at your door. Chad: Yeah. Shoot, I see this as show of strength. We've got the money and we might as well use it to be able start trying to fortify and that's with a ton of salespeople, engineers, so on so forth, but Indeed has a quadrupled global headcount in the last three years alone. So, this addition ... they've just been growing on a steady pace. The thing is throughout that growth before, they didn't have a Google for Jobs, Facebook, and Microsoft/LinkedIn looking down the barrel at them. Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). To me the hires are one thing but the expansion in terms of real estate is really ballsy. Apparently the total of square footage is 615,000. Apparently, this is in the quote, "block 71" area of Austin. I don't know what that means, but it's apparently really cool, high priced, upper scale type area for commercial real estate. So yeah, they're making some pretty big bets. I hope that their product can cash the checks that their real estate investments are buying. Chad: I think you actually put in our Facebook group. This sets up for an epic collapse. Joel: Yeah. It feels like a lot of all these industries where the times are great, they've had tremendous growth, they ignore the writing on the wall and they're buying real estate or they're building huge skyscrapers. They're having ... it kind of reminds me of the end around the world com stuff where people where having Roman themed parties and crazy ... or even the dot com period where everyone was having parties, they were giving away cars. We take these huge bets then life has a way of slapping us around when we get really confident. Chad: Yeah. No question, and now that being said, you take a look at ... so there was this really short teaser commercial that Microsoft put out with regard to its dynamics product, which is more of a holistic type of product than just recruiting and the entire video pretty much really focused on how LinkedIn will help your sales, not recruiting. So this is, from my stand point, this is where Indeed is really just gonna get slaughtered because Google, Microsoft, Facebook ... these are lifestyle platforms that we use for more than just recruiting. Chad: So, being able to actually seep into every little aspect of an organization, especially when it comes to sales, that's pretty fucking big. So, it was a pretty cool tease. Joel: I'm glad you said that. LinkedIn is pushing this sort of sales tool. Sales harvesting, sourcing, managing, product really, really hard, and somewhere there is a sales podcast with two idiots talking about sales force shitting in their pants because that's having the same impact on the sales. The CRMs as their recruitment products have on in our industry. So, I think when we talked about the acquisition initially, it was a huge sales force flank movement and we're seeing that now with the sales tools that LinkedIn is pimping out pretty hard. Chad: Right. It's just being able to execute. That's what it all comes down to. We've seen companies over the years that have had applicant tracking systems and they've been pulled into a much larger type of ecosystem, different technologies. Over time the ATS in itself just went to shit. So, the question is, will they be able to focus on all of these different areas and do it right? The gamble is, well yeah, they're gonna be able to do it right because of these platforms liked the LinkedIns. They already have that dedicated force that's there to ensure that it's being done right. Chad: So I think, from a Microsoft, LinkedIn, holistic standpoint, that's going to turn out much better than what we've seen in the past. Joel: Yeah, and I think ... we talk about platforms. Google and Microsoft, they're creating the ultimate enterprise platform. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: It's not just hiring, it's everything. It's your docs, it's your PowerPoints, it's your sales, management system, now it's your recruiting and employment platform. That's an area Indeed isn't even gonna go. Chad: No. Joel: They're not gonna do sales tools. They're not gonna do word processing and shit like that. So, these are massive platforms and companies are gonna make decisions like, okay, we're a Microsoft house or a Google house and whichever one we choose is gonna be our front to back solution for just about everything. That's what these guys are building in my mind. Chad: Yeah and in many cases, HR or recruiting isn't even going to have an opportunity to weight in because, oh no, we're already using the Microsoft Dynamics Platform for sales. It has a recruiting component that's automatically a part of it, so yeah, we're either a Google house or a Microsoft house. Whatever it is. We've seen that in the ATS space. It hasn't, again, worked out incredibly well, but we'll definitely see how it works out this go around. Joel: Won't that be interesting if HR doesn't even have a voice with what their solutions are? Chad: Dude, as soon as HR and town acquisition starts to understand how to spin what they do into how it impacts the bottom line, actual business, how do you do that? Then, that's a conversation that business and CEOs, COOs, CMOs, CROs, they all understand. As soon as you can start to speak their language, which is business and bottom line, that's what matters. All these terms that we have in our industry are all bullshit terms that mean nothing to the big C suite. That's where we stare to hone in on and focus on those things and then we start to make up ground. Joel: Yeah, and I'll give you another. We talked to CEO at iCims this week. A podcast that's coming out. Chad: Colin Day. Joel: Yeah, he's very confident that the ATS enterprise market is super safe for him and I'm not so sure when I read stories like this that he shouldn't be super concerned long-term about Microsoft and Google getting into his market because I do believe there will be a time where the CTO just says, hey, we're running everything out of Microsoft. All your sales stuff. Get rid of sales force, whatever hiring stuff you're using, get rid of that because we're gonna use 365 for everything. Chad: Yeah, and that's happened already over the years. We'll throw in the ATS for free so therefore, HR doesn't even get a chance because the CIO or the CTO made the decision. Joel: Yeah, exactly. Well, we've talked about Google for a little bit, but they are a little bit in the news. Here, before we go to a quick break, Google, the "Don't be evil," mantra has been with them for almost the beginning of the company. How it happened has been sort of folklore, but apparently someone ... they were looking at writing the mission statement for the company and someone jokingly said, "How about 'don't be evil,'" and they embraced that and has been their thing for a long time. Steve Jobs famously, before his passing said, "Don't be evil is a bunch a bullshit." Joel: I'm paraphrasing, but he basically said Google is very evil and they should stop using that. Well, this past week the "Don't be evil" has been crossed out or eliminated from any corporate document. So, it sounds like they have officially moved on from that, which, for me is ... an old Google guy, I know you're a current Google guy, it's sort of sad. It's sort of a days gone by internet kumbaya ... those days are apparently over at the big G. Chad: We're getting into the age of transparency. They know that they can't bullshit anybody. Joel: But they are sure gonna try with their crappy phones. Alright, so let's take a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about, oh God, Millennials. AJE: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our tenth year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, and minorities, and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community-based organizations. AJE: What to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: Millennials. Okay, we have three items here that are in the 35 and under range of relevancy. So, the first one we have here is more and more companies are paying off student loans as a recruiting tool and a retention tool. Chad: Yeah. Joel: How do we feel about this? Chad: It just makes good God damn sense. They should be doing that as a way to pull in candidates, to be able to get them on, let's say three-year contracts or something like that, but I think they should actually go further. If you take a look at the best recruiting machine that is out there in the world, US army or, really, the US military, they bring you in and say, hey, we will actually pay X-amount. $100,000 in some cases. $100,000 in your four-year education. Come in, give us three years, give us four years. Whatever it is, you're on contract and boom, here we go, right? That's a great way to be able to get somebody pipe lined into, obviously, your organization. Chad: It doesn't have to be four years. It could be, obviously, much less time, but this is I think like a stair step into getting to that. That's one of the reasons why I joined the military. They had the college fund for goodness sakes and my parents couldn't afford college, so why not? It makes good sense and if you've got a great brand and somebody wants to come work for you, you're actually recruiting them coming out of high school then there you go. Or, coming out of college. Again, there are several ways you could actually engage talents, but get them on contract. Why not get them on contract? Joel: I think it's an incredible recruiting tool and probably even a grow-your-own strategy, but how do you feel about it as a retention tool because my experience although limited in corporate world, has been, oh, you're gonna pay front my MBA. Great, are you gonna pay for ... whatever education is that you're helping me get, and then guess what? I'm out of here. So, I agree it's a great recruiting tool. I just think companies ... it's getting to be something that companies have to do, but it's incredible risk because once you get somebody an MBA or you pay for education, once you've paid and they've done it, then they're gone. Chad: That's why you need to be on contract. There's gotta be a contract that works for the employee and it works for the employer. So, yeah, I agree, but that's gonna happen. Not to mention that's also your charge as an employer to be able to focus on retention, but I think one of the things that we're really missing here is that the problem is that we're treating a symptom of the actual disease. The disease itself is education is more expensive in this country than anywhere else in the world and that's form David Pratt who's a professor at Albany Law School who actually studies employee benefits. Chad: We're paying more money here in the United States sending our kids into debt and we're asking, obviously, the employers to pay for it. I think the employers should pay for it, but I also think that it is ridiculous. We've had this discussion before that Stanford has a $25 billion endowment. Harvard has a $36 billion endowment. That is ridiculous. They are pulling in cash, sitting on cash, that they can't spend and guess what? They're not giving back to the community and being able to get some of those low-risk individuals who wouldn't be going to college who are incredibly smart and pulling them into their programs. It's ridiculous. Joel: Well, they're private institutions. They can do whatever they want. I agree that public institutions should have more and I think that they are. I think that the whole thing's a racket, dude. Chad: It is a racket. Joel: The government will ensure the payments so colleges charge more because they know that loans will be there to be had. It's a racket for sure and you're right about other countries. We don't have the answer, we're not gonna get to the answer, but I think companies are trying to get their head around how do we recruit the best by obviously repaying loans? I think companies also at some point, will be the educators at many levels. Chad: Yes. Joel: I know that the high school where my sister lives, their auto shop department is run by O'Reilly or whoever. So actually going from high school teaching these kids how to fix engines or whatever, and then they graduate and they just pull them right into the workforce. So, at some levels, colleges will probably start educating these kids. Why not go to Microsoft University? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Why not go to Google U and learn coding? Chad: So, my point when it comes down to these colleges, I don't care if they're public or private. They still have tax exemptions, right? That's bullshit. They need to give back to the communities. I don't care if they're private or they're public. They still have tax exemptions as non-profits. They need to give back to the communities. That's all there is to it. Now, back when we went through high school, and it still happens to day just not as much, we had the quote-on-quote "vocational wing" or even different schools that individuals went to, that kids went to, to become electricians, become plumbers, carpenters. I think we've gotten into pretty much a snobby culture in the United States where it's like you have to have a four year degree and to be quite frank, not everybody needs a four year degree to have a great career, to make incredible money. Chad: You've seen some of the money that these individuals are making and NPR put out an article that focused on, do you even need college, because high-paying trade jobs are sitting empty today and these kids are coming out of high school right out of the gate making $50,000 and that's just starting. Joel: I'm really torn on the issue of do we really need traditional school anymore. I think for sure certain skills or certain professions definitely do. If you're gonna be a lawyer, doctor, the traditional degree profession, to be a professor, you have to go to college, but technology ... it changes so fast. A four year degree, ten years later it's irrelevant because technology has changed. I do think that college ... the best thing about college is learning the ability to learn if that makes sense. College should stretch your mind to the degree that you say, okay, if there's a problem, I should be able to solve it. Joel: I should be able to figure out how to whatever, right? Marketing, for instance, SEO did not exist when I went to school. Banner ads did not exist. Social media marketing, mobile marketing, text messaging, none of that stuff existed. I didn't go to school for it. I had to learn it on the fly. So, I think you're always learning. So I don't think you have to go to college, but I also do think it is something you'll have for the rest of your life that you can say, hey, I achieved this goal. Now is that goal worth $50 to $100 thousand dollars? I think that's a total debate that's healthy. Joel: My college education 80 years ago was much less of an investment than it is now and I think that's a tough decision parents have to make. Chad: As an individual who's hired before and what I look for, obviously, is definitely the willingness to learn. There's no question there, but the biggest piece is I want somebody who's a troubleshooter. Somebody who's a problem solver who has that just instinctively where they're not constantly coming to you asking questions. They're trying to figure it out and they've done a ton of research before they come to you to be able to say, here's what I've done, here's what I've seen, and then start to collaborate on what the perspective outcome might be or what maybe the actions might be. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Those are things that you can learn in college. There's no question. I agree with that, but you could also learn that in the military. You can learn that in trade schools. You can learn that volunteering overseas and dealing in different cultures and different climates with different populations of people. There's so many different ways to do that and tacking a Bachelor's degree on every God damn job that a company has makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Joel: Yeah. Degrees tend to fluctuate in terms of how much demand there is for certain positions, right? So when there's a lot of workers, it's like, oh lets pre-screen people by saying they have to have a Bachelor's degree or X-amount of experience, but when they really need people, they kind of dismiss the degree question. Chad: Yes. Joel: Well, one guy that probably did not have a degree in our next story here. Parents who their 30-year-old son moved out. Yay, Millennials, and the parents won. Now, you know more about this story than I do. Chad: Well, they sent him several eviction notices, right? He just wouldn't leave. He wouldn't leave and forcibly ... now, he was much larger than his father. That just wasn't going to happen unless his dad would've been more like me and got a couple of buddies and said, hey, we're gonna throw your ass out on your ear unless you're out in two hours, but it was something he had to go to court for, which was ridiculous and the judge actually said yeah, get your ass out of your parents house, but it was funny 'cause I was watching a video of it. Even after the decision was laid out, this idiot still approached the bench. Chad: Not asked to, he approached the bench of his own volition and tried to continue to argue with the judge and the judge said, look, my judgment has been passed and he got up and he walked away. It was ridiculous. Joel: I'm gonna take a bit of a devil's advocate on this. Let's point a little bit of the finger at the parents. If they've raised him up to this point to be a bloodsucking leech of a deadbeat, some of that's on them. People should raise independent, self-sufficient, successful people and if they don't a little bit is on them, right? Chad: The expectation definitely needs to be set, but for a grown ass man to pretty much who doesn't have a job, to be able to say, yeah, no, I'm not getting out. I'm not gonna go put my application in at Lowe's or somewhere, which is good work and they need people for goodness sakes, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna pay rent. They even offered him $1,100 to leave, which he took and he paid some of his bills with and he still didn't leave. What an asshole. Joel: On that note, let's here from one of our sponsors and talk about all the money that's been thrown around lately in our space. 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. 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 sovern.com. That's s-o-v-r-e-n dot com. Chad: Okay, I've gotta nail this one home before we got to the next topic. Joel: Nail it. Chad: So, back to this 30-year-old asshole, he was asked whether he was hurt by his parents drastic measure of taking him to court and kicking him out and this was what he said. So, I think this really exemplifies what we're seeing in this generation. Here's his quote, "They're very much a moot point to me. Right now, I'm just worried about what's best for me." What the fuck? Joel: Selfishness. Alright, let's move on from the 30-year old deadbeat and talk about people who aren't deadbeats getting crazy money. Chad: Booyah. Joel: All over the world. I say we rapid fire this and tell which one are we most impressed with or which ones stands out the most. How's that sound? Chad: Let's start with Phenom People. Let's start with those guys. $22 million and overall $31. So, they've gotten $31 million. That's a ton of cash, right? Joel: Not to shabby. Formally, iMomentous. Arguably the worst name ever in our industry. iMomentous. Chad: So this is interesting in talking to Colin Day and we asked him several questions with regard to why they stayed private and didn't take VC. This is one of the things that rang true with me was you gotta watch how much money you take because what are you gonna have to sell for? Let's say to be able to come whole on something like this. Joel: That was something that Eric from TextRecruit at the TA Tech meeting in Vegas. He backhanded Maya the chat bot saying something like, do they really need $40 million. What exactly is there that is valued at that? So, yeah, I agree that basically when you get money in investment, it's not free money. It's a loan that has to be repaid usually 10 times what you get. So, there is a lot of burden in that, but Phenom People ... the platforms, I call it the hub spot for recruiting players, they're in that space and Ed Newman who's a friend of ours, long-time guy in the industry doing their sales initiatives, apparently they're getting some traction. Joel: I know they just signed Microsoft, which is a huge win, I'm sure, for them, and they have some other big enterprise companies so yeah, it can happen. The more and more recruiting and marketing bleed into each other, these companies are gonna find some interest in what they do. Chad: And the more money that's being thrown out there is kind of like Oprah. You get funding. You get funding. You get funding. This is one of those kind of scenarios and I think this is definitely, once again, one of the big players that they deserve some money. $22 million, man, that's gonna be a lot to pay back. Joel: I think $2 million of that was just to change their name from iMomentous to Phenom. Vervoe, who we've mentioned their founder in the opening, they got some money this month to the $2 to 3.5 million. Now, most interesting to them is who it came from. Seek, who we rarely talk about here in the states, but if you're in Australia, they are it. So to have Seek, an Australian gorilla fund your Australia startup is a pretty big deal and I think Vervoe may be their brand that they use to break into the States because to come into the States and say, hey, we're a job board in Australia called Seek is a lot harder to get traction probably than to say, hey, we're a startup called Vervoe that does video interviewing. That's probably a lot closer to get some traction on. Chad: Oh, well yeah. Joel: I also found out from a news report that Seek does not let Indeed scrape their content. So they're one of the big players in a country who's told Indeed we're not gonna play and that has worked out for them in holding their market share. Chad: Well, and as we see with StepStone buying up Universum, we're starting to see these job board-esque, job site-esque types of companies buying up different types of technologies or funneling cash, obviously, into those types of organizations to be able to, perspectively who knows, create a much more full product suite. Obviously, just pushing a few million to Vervoe isn't that step yet, but I think it's a step closer and if you see Seek who is, I mean they are really the Goliath in their market, what are they gonna do next, though, because Google for Jobs is coming their way, too, and everybody's gotta look for that. Chad: Everybody's gotta look for that next threat. So, that next threat is going to be what and what the hell are they gonna do about it? To be able to hook up with Omer and the team over at Vervoe, I think, is a good first step. Joel: I think it makes a ton of sense if you're a currently established job site or anybody that's established to make bets on these startups that are all over the place and let's be honest, $3.5 million to Seek is probably nothing. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So for them to keep the money at home in Australia, to have someone nearby, but any company the next to the world, the TaRoos, the ZipRecruiters, that makes a lot of sense to place little bets around the marketplace to see what hits and what's your next multi million dollar company or growth engine. Chad: Yeah, and I think it's smart for Vervoe. Obviously getting some cash but not getting $22 million worth of cash to be able to start to really build that out, so good on Omer and his team. Joel: Couple others I know nothing about debut out of UK, an App]. They got $6.7 million dollars. I have no comment on them. Chad: Looks focused mainly on interns and graduate student jobs. Joel: Their claim to fame in this investment are that their team is the English version of Shark Tank. It's called Dragon's Lair or Dragon's Den. He was on that show, so that's the news where they part of debut, but other that I got nothing. Chad: So, he was on the show as a contestant trying to get cash or he wasn't? Joel: No, I think he was a judge. I think he's one of the investors, yeah. So, it'd be like Mark Cuban or one of those guys investing. It'd be a news event in our industry, for sure. Chad: Yeah, I think any of those guys actually getting into the job space it probably wouldn't do much. Joel: And Adzuna, I guess I wrote that down right, got £8 million, which is like $10 million, right? If my pounds to money, dollar is any good. Chad: Pounds to money? Joel: I know zip about them, so good for them. Chad: Job search engine and they're more, I would say, global as opposed to just US. So, yeah I think they're going to be in the crosshairs of a Google for Jobs so I think it is interesting that this kind of money would flow to them unless they're looking to try to spin off into something more than just being job search. Joel: Anyone else get money? Chad: Yeah a company called Hopscotch. Hopscotch.work, which is ... .jobs, .work, new one coming out .realestate, but hopscotch.work. They've received seed funding, undisclosed seed funding, but I thought this was interesting because it's another female specific platform for jobs. More like a community oriented ... it looked like more of an app than it was anything else, but just being able to look at instead of the general types of job sites who we know have really dominated over the years, these niche sites I think are definitely going to weather the storm. The Google for Jobs types os storms that are happening much better than the general job sites so that was an interesting headline. Joel: Chad, I want you to make up a random startup business and I'm gonna give you a dollar and we're gonna put out a press release saying you've got an undisclosed amount of seed money as investment and watch how many people write about it. Chad: I'm sure Tech Crunch was on this ASAP. Joel: I hate when I get releases about undisclosed money. Don't waste my time with that bullshit. Speaking of waste of time, job.com. I was trying to wrap my brain. Didn't CareerBuilder own job.com at one point? Chad: I think they owned jobs.com. Joel: Did a big player used to own job.com or have they always been job.com? Chad: Jobs.com, my bad, is owned by Monster. Joel: Yeah, Monster and CareerBuilder is job.com, wasn't it? I thought for sure it was a total SEO play back in the day. They had nothing branding of CareerBuilder anywhere, but it was all CareerBuilder jobs and I think they sold it to these cats a few years ago. They're crap, basically. They have a great domain, but it doesn't mean anything now because Google doesn't give a shit anymore about that. Some people might type in job.com, but I doubt it. Anyway, they've repositioned the company as Blockchain. Joel: I still can't get my head around why that's good. So, you have my data in a Blockchain-like multiple places, who cares? It's still searching for jobs and applying for jobs. Blockchain just feels like, oh, people write about it so if we say we're Blockchain just like AI or deep-learning five years ago. Chad: Yeah, so let me clear up a couple of things real quick. CareerBuilder is jobs.net. Monster is jobs.com. So, they might've possibly bought this from somebody a time ago or maybe not. Maybe it's just been hanging out there, but here's what I saw. So, they've got an interesting video that's pulled together and none of it looks like it's Blockchain to me except for the smart contract. Something else that's different is that employers will pay 6% of the fee so instead of paying 20% of a placement fee, it's 6% of a fee. The employee after they make it through a probationary period, receives 5% of that 6%. Interesting, and job.com is only gonna get 1% out of that. So, that to me was kind of mind blowing. The actual job seekers themselves are gonna get the bulk of the cash. Joel: Yeah, that's kind of interesting. That's kind of interesting. It all feels like a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks for a fledgling job site, basically. Chad: We should definitely get their CEO on and talk to them about what the hell. All of this seems like the job agents, oh, we're gonna match you up with this. Okay, well, shit, they've been doing that via email for years. What makes this different? Is it AI versus ... what is this and how does that even have anything to do with Blockchain? From my standpoint, it's all AI, AI, chat bots, chat bots, oh wait a minute. Blockchain. We've gotta throw Blockchain in there, too. I don't know. Joel: To go back to the iCims interview, Collin Day, but one thing that stuck with me was he tells his salespeople, our competition isn't ABC job site or ATS or whatever, it's confusion in the marketplace because so many options breeds non activity and to me when I hear about these sites to just throw stuff in the messaging, I think consumers just go, I don't even know anymore. I'm just not gonna buy. I'm just not gonna look at this stuff anymore. Chad: No decision is the worst. Joel: Yep. Well, sometimes. Lets end on this note. Automation who we say is the end of the world and revolution and all the jobs being gone. Report out of Wall Street Journal this weeks says not so fast. The story, quote, says, "Robots seem to be creating as many, if not more, jobs as they're killing," according to the Wall Street Journal. "Companies such as BMW and Electrolux are turning to robots to handle repetitive tasks that could put humans in danger all while hiring and training works to preform duties that require creativity and judgment, today's machines do not possess," and then goes on to talk about Germany's industrial workforce as one example who are expected to do 1.8% by 2021. On the wings, go ahead and cue the songs, of such automation. Joel: I think we all agree that automation is gonna displace the monotonous stuff, but if you don't have a brain, you're still screwed. Chad: Yeah, that's step one and I agree. That's the easy step and that's how you get them hooked on the heroin, right? Oh yeah, it's great. It took all this shit that we didn't wanna do off of our table, but guess what? It's just going to progress. It's gonna get more, so yeah, I see it to autonomous vehicles where right now we don't have enough drivers for semi trucks. So, this is a great window for autonomous vehicles to actually make their entrance into the market and we're seeing autonomous level four at this point. Chad: Five's the last step where there's not driver. We're already at four. So, yeah, I totally get that it's gonna create more jobs so on so forth. We're looking at things right in front of our nose. We're not looking into the future and I think that's where we really need to be spending our time. Joel: Yeah. 2021 is not that far away. Chad: No. Joel: And I agree that automation will augment initially than it will replace workers, but I think what we're talking about is 2050. What's the world gonna look like, and that's gonna be a much more scary place, probably. Chad: It is and if you haven't, go to YouTube, search for "Wall-E dystopia" and that little video that'll show you exactly what's going on. Joel: Or just go look at some of Boston Robotics videos to not sleep ever again. Chad: Yikes. Joel: Anyway dude, happy birthday on that note. Enjoy it until the machines take over. We out. Chad: We out. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my step-dad, the 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. He made me say that. 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. For more visit chadcheese.com. #Indeed #Microsoft #Google #College #Millenials #Blockchain #Jobcom #Hopscotchwork #DebutCareers #Vervoe #Adzuna #PhenomPeople

PRESS PLAY >:P News and opinion from the show highlight this week's episode. - Indeed gives Glassdoor a... ummm... - Indeed also rolls out an old-timey assessment add-on - KRT snuggles up to Indeed/Glassdoor - Google for Jobs referral traffic looks awesome - Uber, Wells Fargo and Facebook are "Sorry" - .jobs is .gone for DirectEmployers Association - RecruitLlama is unveiled - and Starbucks is a real shit-show, literally. Enjoy, and checkout sponsors JobAdX, Sovren, Ratedly and America's Job Exchange. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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. Joel: Hey, hey, hey boys and girls. Welcome to another riveting episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, Hrs most dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad "Rickey Bobby" Sowash. Joel: On this week's show, everyone's sorry, dot jobs get dot dumped, and the shit is flying at Starbucks. Literally. What the hell are we talking about? You gotta listen, sucka. We'll be right back. 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. 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. To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N dot com. Chad: You think Sovren's matching engine can run chat bot, too, with their AI? Their AI could do chat bots as well? Joel: I'm just glad that I don't have to think like the engine and the engine thinks like me. Chad: That's what I'm saying. Joel: Sure. I think after a demo with Sovren about six months ago that I think they could probably do about anything. Chad: Yeah, that's what we need to do. Get a demo. Joel: That place is a cash printing machine and so few people know about it. Much more now that our show is live and pimping them, but man. Sovren is the real deal. Their client list is ridiculous. Chad: That's pretty awesome. You know who else is the real deal and we actually got some gear, was Uncommon. They provided us with some uncommon and very high-quality gear, which is pretty awesome. Joel: And hoodies. Chad: Yeah. Joel: No one gives hoodies out. Chad: That's right, yeah. It is the summer, but don't worry it'll be worn all the way through autumn and winter, I promise. Joel: It's nice. American Apparel. It was, yeah. Shout out to them for sure. I'm gonna give a shout out to another one of our favorite vendors, Aman Brar at Canvas. If you haven't heard the Canvas interview, go back and listen, but they're doing the text message thing. They have some pretty cool cozies that Aman teases with. Hopefully we can get those things in our hands pretty soon 'cause summertime here in Indiana does get a little warm. The pops can get stale quickly. Chad: Yeah, no kidding, so it's funny because we're starting to be trolled by our very own listeners. I think it's freaking hilarious. Some of our listeners are in Vegas this week for Unleash and they caught the Career Builder booth empty and it's funny because it doesn't look like the monitor's plugged in, it doesn't look like anybody's home, but we're getting all these pictures of an empty Career Builders booth. We're like, what the hell is going on there? It seems like we're just being trolled by our listeners, which I think is funny as hell. Joel: So, were the Career Builder employees actually at the booth or was there really an empty booth because the pictures I saw, the lights were on and there were people in the exhibit hall. Chad: Right. Joel: It could've been a trick by a competitor to make them look bad. We should maybe confirm whether or not they had some travel troubles or what was going on there. Chad: Yeah, I think they might've been late to the booth to be able to get some of the things plugged in, but it was funny and I think one of the pictures was taken around lunch so everybody was out away from the booth during lunch, so I think it was all kind of posed, so I think it was funny so trying to troll us into trolling Career Builder. Nice move, guys. Very nice move. Joel: Do we know the show that was? Chad: Yeah, it was Unleash. Joel: It was Unleash? Okay, so if you're at Unleash and I know a lot of people were probably listening, hashtag us at #ChadCheese or go to chadcheese.com and let us know what was going on with the Career Builder booth at the show. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I got a shout out to Daniel Woyke I'm not sure, it's W-O-Y-K-E. from our friends at Madgex over the pond. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: He's a big fan of the show, gave us some love. Daniel, thanks for listening. We appreciate it. Chad: I am also being trolled by the people over at Monster. It's funny because as we give Monster shit it's like they give us shit back which is like the polar opposite of Career Builder. We start to give Career Builder shit and they go and hide in a corner or they get in the fetal position or something. Joel: Call the lawyers, call the lawyers. Chad: Call the lawyers. Send some letters. So, what did Monster do? I've been making fun of this stupid, purple, Bugs Bunny rip off monster that they've been using, and what do they do? They send me and you both a couple of these furry, fluffy monsters plus some mousepad and also a squeezy monster as well. So, good on you, Monster. That's exactly what we're looking for. We're proving snark and then you're just sending it right back at us. Gotta say we love it. Not sure that I'm 100% on your job search yet, but this is funny as shit. Joel: My eight year old daughter loved the stuffies, so I'm not gonna hate on them too much for that. Shout out to Sarah Brennan, a long time industry participant. She gave me word that she's leaving Cornerstone on Demand and going out on her own again. Chad: Good for her. Joel: Writes a lot, she goes to conferences, she's a thought leader, speaker. So, I'm kind of happy that she's out from under the corporate thumb and on her own again. So Sarah, thanks for being a listener and good luck to you. Chad: Yeah, good for her. I've got a couple of programming notes. First and foremost, we did our very first demo, video demo. Chad and Cheese video demo and we did it with Teg from Uncommon. We did it yesterday. It's gonna be dropping on the websites. We're gonna be pushing out on social media. It's really cool. Obviously, we wanted to dig in deeper into the guts of Uncommon because we heard a lot on the podcast. It got pretty much double applause from us and we thought, okay, how can we take this further? Let's see what you got. Chad: So, Joel and I sat back with a couple of beers and Teg took us through it so it was pretty awesome. Joel: Yeah, for anyone who doesn't want to actually talk to a salesperson or schedule a call, just check out the video if you're interested in Uncommon and get the demo and we'll be your Q&A for you. It's a nice little thing that we've done, I think, for the community. So, you're welcome. Chad: You're welcome. Last but not least, we also did a new firing squad which you've gotta listen to. Woo.io CEO Larin was on firing squad and we have another one already in the can for next month, but some really, pretty cool start ups that are joining in and they're taking the shots from the Chad and Cheese. So, good on them. They've got the balls to actually come on the show. Joel: No spoilers, but I'll say that we weren't all wooed by woo if you know what I'm saying. Chad: So bad. Joel: Alright, lets get to the news. It was Indeed's week in addition to Unleash. Indeeed had their annual meeting which things are just starting to trickle out from what was going on there, but they had two releases. The first one was Indeed assessments. So a few months ago, they bought a company called Interviewed, I think, which was assessments. So now they finally integrated this service. It seems a bit antiquated at this point and manually put all this stuff in, particularly when you talk to people like Uncommon who uses AI for that stuff, but it's a step forward, I think, for most of their users. It's a fine little addition to their service. What are your thoughts? Chad: Do you know if the actual interview itself, like the interview process, if it can be done by text or is it just an old timey going through answering questions on your browser and going on that? Is that pretty much what they've implemented? Joel: Yeah, from the look of it, it's the pre-screening questionnaire. How many years do you have, are you a U.S. citizen, do you have a college degree, basic questions kind of like that. So yeah, it is what it is. That kind of stuff's been around for a long time. Indeed is just now starting to catch up to that. Will it become more AI focused and automated in the future? I guess, but for now it to me looks pretty cut and dry. They do have an advertisement apparently that's pimping the Q&A. It looks really focused at the small business side of the house. Joel: Someone hiring waiters or whoever. Do you have wait service? Do you have your own car? Do you have a driver's license? Can you get to where we need you on time? That kind of thing. So, yeah it's fine, but I don't think it's earth shattering news whatsoever. Chad: Yeah and then the SNB market. I think ZipRecruiter's kicking their asses as it is and if they would just spend some cash on buying ZipRecruiter's, maybe that would solve it for them. Who knows. Joel: I will add, we talk a lot about Facebook, but in little different variances like with their slack product and thinks like that, but F8 happened a week ago, I believe, which is their annual developers conference. So, Zuckerberg revealed that 800 million people per month globally are in their marketplace section using it. I think one in three Americans are using marketplace on a regular basis. Chad: That's pretty sweet. Joel: So, I just did a post for ERE that isn't live yet, but they're enhancing their job search component for, this sounds really archaic, but for them they're catching up so they have alerts on your mobile for jobs that you're looking for. You can actually segment your search now. It already does a localize your search, but when you go to the post job section now, in addition to putting the job description and basic information, it does allow you to ask questions, which I assume are going to be part of their Instant Messenger, so when people reply they'll get a message or pop up that says, hey, answer these questions. Almost in a chat bot format, which will also serve, I assume, as a pre screening solution. Joel: So, don't fall asleep on Facebook in the SMB section. I think that they're doing a lot of these things as well and they're already integrated in most of everyone's life as it is. Chad: Yeah and you take a look at GoogleHire. Right out of the gate it was very antiquated, very boring, very, "what the hell am I doing here" kind of a product, but that was the foundation. They had to start with something and they had to start with a foundation which is what I think you're seeing with the Facebook and Google and Facebook can get away with that. Especially on the SNB side of the house because they're gonna start genning up much quicker. So, the new Google Hire with the matching pieces, we're starting to see them making some pretty big moves and I think, also, we're gonna start seeing Facebook doing the same thing. Chad: Now on the Indeed side, which is, obviously, where we started the conversation, being able to take an old timey interview-y platform, they don't have the same time that Google and Facebook does. They don't have the kind of resources, they don't have the kind of tech. They don't have all of that. So, if Indeed's going to start making moves, it should be with organizations that do have more mature tech so that they don't have to try to catch up because on that side, they're gonna be catching up. Joel: Well, further evidence of where Indeed might be going in terms of fending off Google and Facebook and others, they also released this week their Indeed transparency report. We know from last week that Glassdoor and Indeed are basically married now. They have the same ownership. We speculated that they would become one brand at some point or at least have the same content, both job search and employee reviews. So, Indeed putting out something like this is pretty new. I've not heard of them do this before. Joel: So, they're asking people how important are reviews, what do you think about poor reviews and things like that. Some of the things that were highlighted from the report that caught my eye were the fact that no reviews is worse than bad reviews because people look at if you have no reviews, are you even real? You don't even exist if you have no reviews so if you have bad reviews, take some heart that at least you're better than no reviews and people actually think the job postings that you're putting out there might actually be fake if you don't have actual reviews on your site. Joel: The other thing was for Gen Z, reviews are ... if you don't have them you're not even in the game. If you wanna hire a Gen Z and you don't have reviews out there, just forget it. You can still recruit boomers and X'ers and some millennials, but Z will tune you out totally. Chad: Yeah, we're getting intro the behavior. Restaurants and products and so on and so forth. We're looking at reviews for quality for whether we wanna go there or not 'cause we're making a decision to buy and in this case we're making a decision to buy and actually buy into this company and work there. So, yeah, that makes hell of a lot of sense, and last week we actually talked about this and I had said that Google, not Google, Indeed is going to start beating the hell out of their employers and clients with the Glassdoor stick because they're looking to diversify their areas of revenue and if they do come under one umbrella, GlassDeed, InDoor, whatever the hell, they're gonna have to get better at diversifying the model, and take a look at the employer branding and things of that nature, which is, once again, you point back to the Stepstone Universum acquisition. Chad: So, this is happening and I think it's smart. I think it's good and it was funny because we ere on a call with Peter Weddle earlier this week and he asked us is the Recruit acquisition of Glassdoor good for the industry and what do you think of that? Joel: Is the Glassdoor-Indeed acquisition or marriage good for the industry? Chad: Yeah. Joel: I think anytime that you have another strong competitor, competition is good for business. The ultimate winner in all of this is the consumer, whether it's the jobs seeker or the employer. Probably more the job seeker than anything, but they don't have to go through multiple sites to post, apply for jobs. Applying for jobs is easier, they have more information about a company in terms of choosing the right now. So, I think, ultimately, more competition is better. I think the question is exactly how much of a competitor is Glassdoor-Indeed going to be to these gorilla-esque competitors in LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google. Joel: I'm of the belief that Recruit Holdings, who owns both of those two, are gonna have to continually acquire more and more job boards to compete on this level. I think ZipRecruiter should be on their radar. I wouldn't be shocked if Career Builder is on the radar or Monster. That could happen. Dice and their family of sites. These are all for sale for sure. Now, does Recruit Holdings backup the Brinks truck and buy all of them or buy more of them? I think more of them, but I don't know which ones. I don't think Glassdoor and Indeed by themselves are gonna compete long-term with the big three. Chad: Right, so you're looking really up. You're looking up. Let's look down for a second. I think that some of the smaller brands believe it or not, the Career Builders, the Monsters, and all the other vendors that are in the space that are not the behemoths like the Googles and the Facebooks. This is going to challenge them to be able to innovate, quicker, faster, harder and to partner because they're not gonna have the acquisition dollars to be able to keep up with a Glassdoor-Indeed type of acquisition. So, I think it's good for the industry overall. Joel: Yeah, and I think, you and I talk about this all the time, is that AI and automation and deep learning and who has the most PhDs. Ultimately, AI is gonna scale across everything from the stuff we buy to our homes to our work-life balance, to job postings and employment. And the companies at the forefront of that are the bigger companies and if they could scale AI to all of their product offerings, then it's game over. Chad: Right. Joel: Then at that point, Indeed and Glassdoor and everybody just looks like Craigslist at that point. It just looks like online job postings. So, I think the kind of acquisitions they should be making are probably in who are doing really cool AI things that we can integrate into our brain trust and start competing on that level. Well, instead of looking at going to Google and I really think that they're, obviously, gonna smoke everybody in the end, but right now if they're not going to integrate Google Jobs API and if Google actually finally comes out with a people or candidate API, who do we go integrate with? Chad: We start looking at other brands, smaller brands like Opening.io or some of the other Brilent or what have you. Who do we actually integrate with that could be maybe a little bit more cost-effective for us from a margin standpoint but still be able to compete. Joel: Yeah, and I'll add on the transparency report. Part of that was to also unveil sort of enhanced profile pages that are currently on Indeed. So, the offering that they're starting to create is a very Glassdoor type offering. Most of the whole post was sort of a hand job to Glassdoor and we're gonna be more like Glassdoor. Sort of paying homage to what they're doing. So, I still believe at some point they'll be one site and part of these changes are to make sure that the data sets that they're gathering are equal and the metrics and the people who are on Glassdoor, they easily transition over to Indeed and all their content and data all comes over as one major data point and I think, probably, this was a step in that direction as well. Joel: So, if you don't have a profile page on Indeed, you should be noticing. Or if you do have a profile on Indeed, you should have noticed or should be noticing some enhancements from that side at least in the US coming forward. Chad: Yeah, so you saw there was actually a post put out by Ryan Christoi from KRT about some of this. About this marriage. Joel: Ya boy. Ya boy Ryan. Chad: So tell me because you've got some pretty strong opinions about this one. Joel: I do. In his post, he sort of framed it as, hey, Glassdoor and Indeed are gonna have a real chance at competing with the big guys at Google and et cetera. He was very non-committal in his quote which is basically quote, "The combination of Indeed and Glassdoor will give Recruit Holdings," who's the owner of those two, "the firepower to try to compete with Google for Jobs." Now, I love that he put the word "try" in there because you and I could try to compete with Google, but it doesn't mean we're gonna win. Joel: So, that was a nice little diplomatic wordplay there for Ryan, but I think the key here is, you and I talked about it, is every agency on the planet in recruitment should be rooting for Indeed and Glassdoor because if they become the employer brand juggernaut that they could become, it's a goldmine for agencies, right? Chad: Oh, yeah, and the focus on, really, the experience and the story and all those different things, the warm fluffy things, that matter. Don't get me wrong, that matter, that agencies have always been good at. Content, being able to create all those types of things and really getting back to those areas of what agencies are good at as opposed to creating technologies that are going to be outpaced. Joel: I would bet a lot of employers out there have already gotten calls from Indeed reps, Glassdoor reps, agency reps, to talk about, how do we enhance your brand on these sites, and agencies are probably foaming at the mouth thinking about all the campaigns that they could run on Indeed and Glassdoor to make that happen. Chad: Yeah, well talking about brands and ones that have taken some hard hits, they've got some- Joel: Can I interject? Chad: Go ahead. Joel: Let me inject real quick. Shameless plug, next Wednesday, Ratedly, my little side company, I'm doing a free webinar on Glassdoor plus Indeed and what it means to employer branding and what you should do to prepare for the impending doom of what's coming on, so for listeners who wanna join in on that webinar, you can just go to ratedly.com/glassdeed and I'll spell it out for you. If you're having trouble, just go to ratedly.com and check out our blog post and you'll find the post about the webinar. Chad: So, how come I wasn't puled on as a guest to heckle you? This is bullshit. Joel: You can register and I may unplug your mic. Who knows? Chad: Such an asshole. Okay, so we've seen some of these big brands like Wells Fargo, Facebook, and Uber with these "so sorry" campaigns. We're so sorry that we fucked up. Joel: Yeah and this started, at least for me, with Domino's. So a lot of people remember Domino's used to be wet cardboard with cheese on it. Chad: Bad pizza. Joel: And they went out and had a whole ad campaign with a CEO saying, we know we suck, we had some real chefs come in, we've improved our pizza, we're gonna get better, and then no one said sorry for a long time and then now everybody's saying sorry. Chad: Yeah, dude. Joel: You like one in particular better than others. Talk about that. Chad: So, Wells Fargo. They did some pretty shady, nasty shit and you can look it up. I'm not gonna delve deep into it, but Wells Fargo's a name that's been around since back in the stagecoach days. So they've got this awesome ad that actually sets up what they've been doing to earn the trust of their customers for so many years, for decades, and then it says, "It's how we earned your trust until we lost it." It's this point where it's like they say, look, we know we fucked up and we're sorry and this is how we're going to earn your trust back at Wells Fargo. It was done incredibly well. Chad: I don't know who the advertising agency was who did this, but they did an amazing job. I saw it on the TV. Very first time and at the end of it I was like, kudos, man. That was well-spent money. Joel: I like how you said I saw it on the television. Chad: I saw it on the television. Joel: I saw it on the moving picture box. One of the things that got to me is all of these ads are sort of employment related subliminally. They're all saying, we're good people, we treat our employees well or we're focused on building a better world, we're getting it right. I think Wells Fargo in particular, it's a pretty quick cut but an employee at Wells Fargo who's in a wheelchair as part of the ad. There are lot of different faces, male and female, lot of different shades that you see in the ad. Was that your takeaway as well 'cause you're sort of our go-to compliance diversity guy. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Or was it more pandering? Chad: There's all of that, but it fit within the actual context of we're here to help everybody and earn your trust back. We know this big group. We've gotta earn the trust back. So, again, it's all about actions, but that story was incredibly impactful and that's what advertising should do. Especially when it comes to somebody who screwed up this bad. Joel: Now, for me I'd say Facebook was my favorite. I think with the Russian stuff and the hacks and the fake news. Chad: Too soon for me. Too soon. Joel: Facebook has way more penetration than Wells Fargo does. A lot of the country doesn't even have Wells Fargo including here in Indiana. There are very few Wells Fargos. Chad: Right. Joel: If any in our neck of the woods. Even though they have investment services, so I'm sure people use that and mortgage services et cetera, but Facebook, huge penetration, and it made me remember my first experience with Facebook. That first time, add a friend or add as a friend and to me that was more impactful and I think from an employment standpoint, I think that Facebook and Silicone Valley has taken the toughest hit because from what I understand is people, developers, are a little gun shy to go work at Facebook because of the Trump connection and the Russians and the blah, blah, blah, and they're choosing other employers instead of Facebook. Joel: So, for me that was the most important employment ad even though it wasn't an employment ad because it was saying to job seekers, hey, it's okay to come work for us. We're fixing this problem. We're gonna get it right. Maybe you could be one of the ones who comes on board and helps us make sure we keep it right. Chad: I think it's important to understand that companies, I believe, are starting, especially these sort of companies because we're talking about Wells Fargo, Facebook, and Uber, who ... they're all service oriented companies. They know that people who perspectively might work for them are also are their customers. So, at the end of the day, I think there's more of a holistic understanding of what employment means that candidates aren't candidates. They are customers, too, and these three companies actually go it and it's one of the reasons why I'd really like to just see the employment brand, let's say, kind of fade because it's so important to understand there's more of a holistic feel. Chad: Yeah, you gotta be able to talk about how it feels to work there, but it's more than just that. It's about the product, it's about the mission, the objectives, the culture, and I think these ads did a good job, but that was because they were service oriented or product oriented. Joel: I agree, and you know who else is service and product oriented? Chad: Who? Joel: Our next sponsor. AJE: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our tenth year as an industry leader and diversity recruitment in OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, and minorities and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community-based organizations. AJE: Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Chad: Compliance is mandatory. Diversity is essential. I love that so much. I gotta say it over and over. It just makes good sense. You've gotta be compliant. Have a nice day, but being diverse is totally essential from a business standpoint, from a success standpoint. Joel: Is this the tagline or is this your own? Chad: No, this is their new tagline that's on their homepage americasjobexchange.com. Good stuff. Joel: Yeah, I like that. Like that. Let's go a little dumpster diving in our next talk in the irrelevant category. Your old stomping grounds. Directemployers and .jobs. USNLX. What's up? Chad: So, it's interesting. I had an email forwarded to me and it seems like this is about the time frame that the Employ Media, which is the company who owns the .jobs domains, the entire top level domain of .jobs, and Direct Employers ... they had an agreement going. Joel: Can you give us 10 seconds on the history of that because you were a part of it. Chad: Yeah. So, Employ Media really wanted to focus on driving really, corporate content through a, corporate content meaning jobs, through their .jobs domain because it just made sense and they felt like if you could get pure, good, non-duplicated, non-spammy content, that Google would love it. So, we had starting out 40,000 domains and we spun up 40,000 .jobs domains. Boston.jobs, indianapolis.jobs, sales.job, indianapolissales.jobs, et cetera. Joel: Employ Media, by the way, has the license to sell .jobs domains. So when you're buying a .jobs domain, their licensing that to you, right? Chad: Yep. Joel: So they partnered with Direct Employers to basically do what you just said. Chad: Yeah, and it seems like it's probably around the time where the agreement is over because I've just seen an email that was forwarded to me that says that Direct Employers is moving their job site us.jobs, which is ... that's a pretty damn good domain, US, United States, .jobs. Joel: It's been around a while if nothing else. Chad: Yeah, it's been around for a while, and they're moving it to usnlx.com. We always give organizations shit because the .io and the ai.io.ai, whatever, but in this case they've had that job site on that domain for at least five years, around there. Probably even more. Joel: Probably. Chad: So there's history and trust that they're just blowing out the window when it comes to google and SEO and obviously search engine ranking. Joel: And also, we talked about find.jobs, right? Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Which was sort of their own Indeed backfill thing. So, there has been divorce, I guess, happening gradually here on some levels. Would you say that's true or not? Chad: It looks like it. I don't know that it's true, but I would say from all of these different moves that we're seeing. They're moving from an awesome domain that they've had for years entirely, completely, brand-spanking new domain that's gonna take a very long time to be able to earn trust and, obviously, to have history, but we're also seeing privateservice.jobs, landing.jobs, we're seeing all of these job boards popping up on the .jobs domains, which didn't happen before. Chad: So, it seems to me that everything is happening around the severing of a relationship and they're going their separate ways. Joel: So, USNLX, just for those who don't know, is US, United States, National Labor Exchange, correct? Chad: Yes. Joel: Which is so intuitive. It's just so obvious. I wouldn't agree with you that us.jobs was a great domain. I doubt that if you went to a thousand people in the street and said, have you ever heard of us.jobs, that they would say yes, but I'll defer to you on terms of SEO and search because you we're seeing the metrics back in the day and you could gradually see where it goes ... where it would be today. Also interesting, we got wind of a new site or service that Direct Employers launched. I don't know if we heard about it at their annual meeting that happened recently. I love the logo. The name not so much. Recruit Lobster. Recruit Chicken. What was it? Recruit Rabbit? Chad: Recruit Llama. Joel: Oh, Recruit Llama. Chad: Recruit Llama. No, it was Recruit Rooster. Unveiled that at the annual meeting and Direct Employers Association is a nonprofit. It's a 501C4 or 5, one of those, and this is a for profit that is being launched underneath that umbrella, which is interesting to say the least. It's a marketing platform and that marketing platform was actually created originally like a jobs to web SEO platform, but since that had to pivot into more of a marketing type of a cosmetic platform to be able to sell, that's what happened, but it's a marketing platform. Chad: There's analytics behind it. The hard part is, how do you stay up with all these kick ass startups and also Google who is feeding APIs to these kick ass startups with a new little start up yourself that has old technology? Joel: Don't these career sites feel antiquated to you? Chad: Oh, no. They're totally antiquated. Joel: We're moving into ... I feel like 1998 to me. If you wanna know about a company, you go to Glassdoor, you go to FairyGod Bot, you find the real nitty gritty on Yelp, not the restaurant's website. Chad: Right. Joel: Which are antiquated as well, but then we have chat bots and text messaging and it's all about ... the brand to me is the experience that someone has in finding a job and getting it. Getting the resume information to you in a quick, effortless, painless manner. Are people really, I guess they are, going to our culture page and pictures of our company picnic? Chad: It's content. It's story. There are definitely those things that they want to have that they really need to have an experience on their website, but I don't know. The thing that they're gonna have to do to be able to compete at all is they're gonna have to partner a ton with chat bot companies, AI companies. They're gonna have to do a ton of work either one or two ways to actually build it, which is not gonna happen. Or partner to be able to provide a product that is going to be on par with things that are already out there and just knowing from pretty much the culture that they're in, what they'll try to do is they'll try to provide something that's halfway decent at a bargain basement price. Joel: Yeah. I'm done talking about them. Chad: Recruit Llama. Joel: Recruit Lobster. Recruit Pigeon. Anyway, some of your favorite names to hashtag #ChadCheese. Google for Jobs continues to roll on, but we're getting numbers now from people we know and people in the job board industry about what exactly it means to traffic numbers. So, last week, Chris [Russell 00:37:18], who a lot of people know in the industry. He's quote-on-quote "The mad scientist of recruiting" because he launches a new business every week, but one of his more interesting businesses is his consulting with job board industry and he posts his findings from job boards. Joel: In his latest posting, he revealed that one third of his organic traffic in one of his boards was all generated by Google for Jobs which is pretty impressive. Chad: That's a shit ton of traffic. I don't know what that looked like before and if there was some switches from Indeed to Google. We'll have to get Chris on and talk to him a little bit more about what he's seeing especially on the smaller job board sites because that's really his forte, but that's a hell of a lot of traffic. The thing that they've really gotta focus on, job board owners, job site owners, is how they interface with Google to make sure that they're not trying to game the system or at least seen like they're gaming the system because Google's actually put out notices that they will manually penalize your ass. Joel: What I thought, too, was there's a pretty good chance that those jobs that Chris is getting are not original jobs. They're probably posted elsewhere. So, I would love to see some numbers around what impact Google for Jobs has on traffic if you are the original source of the job i.e. the ATS. I know Susan Vitale at iCims has talked about this before. I know that we'll talk to their CEO here soon. That'd be one of the questions I'd really love to know if they have that data because to me, they are the original source and the source that Google is going to give preferred treatment to in the results and in the posting. Joel: So, my idea is that'll be way more important than the job boards as we go forward, so I wouldn't be surprised if a job board that was really doing a good job of getting its postings into Google for Jobs wasn't seeing a 40% to 50% spike or percentage of their job or traffic depending on what else they're doing money wise, but in terms of free traffic, I bet Google is a huge percentage for a lot of them. Chad: Yeah, I think if its original content, that's what it all comes down too, right? The duplicate jobs thing are gonna be kicked out. So, being able to drive, and again, small to middle market in most cases, i.e. ZipRecruiter, you're gonna see a good amount of traffic because you're going to have more content that you can actually send over and isn't going to be kicked out. So yeah, as we start to see what's happening on the Google for Jobs side of the house, you'll see that you can apply to several different, like Glassdoor or what have you, but those are more of the trusted sources in Google for Jobs. I don't see that list growing to 10 different sources that you could perspectively apply to. Joel: Hey, if you're listening, if you're at an agency or a job board and you wanna share some of your traffic data, from Google for Jobs, hit us up at chadcheese.com. Lets here a quick sponsorship spot and we'll talk about shit hitting the fan at Starbucks. Cool with that? Chad: Alright, yeah. JobAdx: How many times has someone said to you, "We're the Uber of," or, "It's the PayPal of," maybe, "They're the Facebook of." In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short to being close to reality or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot on, that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX is Google Ad sense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, consistent, and smarter ad unit for job related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms real-time dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. All this is done with he flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click, or application. JobAdX: We offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. We're not set in regrets. For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards higher rev share than other partners through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30% to 40% greater and more through our scalable model. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com or email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or being working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your means. Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX has just launched in the UK, too. Joel: Jolly good. Chad: Jolly good, yeah. Joel: Are you gonna watch the Royal Wedding this weekend? Chad: No. Joel: My wife has set her alarm for 4:00 am or some crazy shit. Chad: C'mon. Joel: I'm just saying. Well, she's Canadian, so she's basically English. Chad: Okay, yeah. Well, hopefully you'll still have your little sleeping mask on and you'll be good to go. Joel: Oh, for sure as long as my one-year-old stays quiet I'm fine. So shifting so something entirely different, Starbucks went loco this week. Chad: Yeah, there's been a lot of stupid shit happening at Starbucks lately and this, I think, tops it all. Joel: Yeah, so there's a video of a crazy woman who, I hope to God she's on drugs, 'cause if this is just her normal state, then she's got some real problems. So, the video has no sound, which really cheats America out of enjoyment, but she's yelling at this barista, berating this barista, and then she pulls back, drops trow, and takes a dump in the Starbucks right by the register and then she picks up her shit and throws it at the barista. I got nothing else, but that's just crazy. Chad: Yeah, no. That's beyond crazy and to be able to think that somebody would be trained to know how to deal with that is ... that's a new level of training that Starbucks' baristas are now going to have to go through. That is ridiculous. Joel: That's new latte I don't wanna know how to mix, man. That's something I want no part of. Chad: I got nothing. Joel: But I feel so bad. That's probably a 20-year-old kid making coffee and this crazy bitch walks in, high off her ass, and throws shit at me. Chad: Being at those types of jobs and actually having to deal with all types of people every single day, that is a big, big skill because you're taking, and pun intended, you're taking a lot of shit all day from people and this is just a new way. Joel: Now the question is, when robots are taking your order, how is this woman going to respond? Chad: She won't have an option because if she does that, then the robot guardian will actually come out and kick her ass. Joel: That's when robo-cop comes out and tazes her ass. Alright, I got nothing else after that. I say we out. Chad: I'm with you. 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.

Liran Kotzer steps in front of The Chad & Cheese Firing Squad to test his Woo.io pitch, his nerves, and ultimately his mettle. Woo.io claims to automatically match jobs to candidates who are discreetly exploring new opportunities. That sounds good but will it be enough to keep Liran out of the line of fire? Thanks to our Firing Squad sponsor Talroo... That's right Talroo, not Jobs2Careers you silly beast. Visit Talroo today and find out how to get better candidates for less cash. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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, Jobs to Careers 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: (Laughs) No. It's a cross between talent and recruiting. But Talroo is focused on predicting, optimizing, and delivering talent directly to your email or ATS. Joel: Aha, okay. So it's totally 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. 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 . 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. Gollum: Yes, me precious, yes me precious candidate, we wants it so sweet precious, yes. Announcer: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put their recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest, and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Announcer: Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids, the Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: My trigger finger is a little itchy today for the Firing Squad, we'll see how this goes. What's up, gang? We've got Liran, which is like Lebron without the B so it's easy for me to say as a Cas fan, but anyway Liran is a CEO founder I guess of Woo.io. Liran, welcome to the show, and before we start give us the fifteen second intro on you. Liran: Hey guys, first thanks for having me, I'm really excited. And so I'm Liran, I'm the CEO and founder of Woo.io. I'm a techie, I live in Israel and I'm excited for what we're building and for the reason we're building it. We'd be happy to share what we're doing. Joel: Very good, about 15 seconds exactly. Liran: Boom. Joel: Chad, tell him what he'll win on this show, otherwise known as the Rules of the Show. Chad: Well first off, before we even get into this, Liran, I'd like to say kudos on having the high school picture of Joel on your home page. Dude, that is amazing, I never thought that I would see Joel Cheesman on the home page. Joel: Are you referring to the orgasmic guy on the home page? Is that the one you're talking about? Chad: Oh yeah, like with the Vic 20 or the Apple, or whatever it is, yeah. It's awesome. Liran: We read about the show, so we took a few pictures. Joel, we want him to know and how he is a famous guy. Chad: Good job with him. Okay, we're rolling on. Here's the format of the show, Liran. You will have two minutes to pitch Woo. And at the end of two minutes, you will hear the bell. Then Joel and I will have our way with you with a little Q&A. If your questions aren't concise, then Joel's gonna either hit you with the bell or some crickets. Means you need to tighten your game up. Joel: Keep it moving, baby. Chad: Keep it moving. At the end of Q&A, we're going to pretty much give you our opinions on the pitch and obviously on the Q&A, we're either gonna give you big applause, that means you have exceeded expectations, golf clap, you're on your way but you have a lot of work to do or last but not least, nobody wants this, it's the firing squad. It's time to pick up, go home, get the drawing board back out, and do it again. Chad: So that's firing squad. It's time to buckle up and pitch. Joel: Are you sweating yet, Liran? Are you regretting this? Liran: Guys, please be gentle. Joel: All right, all right. Liran: I'm far, far away from Israel, please be gentle. Joel: We're typically nice to our international guests, so you've got that going for you. All right, on the bell you've got two minutes. Are you ready? Liran: Sure, let's do it. Joel: Go. Liran: All right, so Woo is basically a technology-driven marketplace where we connect between district job seekers and companies that are ready to offer them the opportunity they truly want. The reason we built Woo is because we met so many people that are comfortably numb in their job, which means that from one hand they have a lot of ambitions and inspiration regarding what they want to do next in their career, it can be new technologies, relocation, working with big company startups, whatever, but when we come to reality most of those people don't do anything regarding their inspiration because they don't want to go through the hassle of getting a job, which is a risky process, you don't know what you can get out there, and people don't want to put these efforts. Liran: So we basically created the platform to give them no excuse, because the way Woo works is it's dramatically simplified the way people can consume job and turn the job consumption from a one time event into an ongoing exploration where we serve as your agent, which means that when you're get into Woo you put everything about yourself. It's totally discrete, but we know everything about you. And then we help you to set up your wish list regarding what kind of opportunity you would define as interesting for you. Liran: Of course, we help you with using our information so you won't ask working on the moon, which means that we make sure that you're asking for realistic things. And from that point, once you have the wishlist and we know everything about you, from that point we start showing you opportunities from companies that we're working with that you qualify for on one hand, but also meeting your preferences. Liran: So once you get an opportunity from Woo you know that it's very relevant, you can see who's the company, what they want to discuss about, how these opportunities meet your expectation, and from that point you can ask Woo whether you want to be introduced to that company. If we introduce you to that company, one out of two of those interaction will turn into active interview. Chad: (Bell rings) That's the first one. Liran: I'm the first one to pass the two minutes. Joel: Although you did say comfortably numb as part of your pitch. Chad: Yeah, it's very nice. Pink Floyd. Joel: Which I thought it was interesting. Chad, you wanna go first? Or do you want me to take the first? Chad: No, I'll go, I'll go first. Joel: All right. Chad: So the pitch in itself, right, is focused on being able to solve a problem. The big question is at this point, what was the problem? What's the problem that you're trying to solve, Liran? Liran: Yeah, so the problem we basically trying to solve is the fact that people today has no control regarding what is their next step, how they're getting to their next step. Meaning that there are 20% people that actively go and pursue job when they don't have any job, but most of the people the way they see job is very sporadically. Meaning that one of their friends calling them, say, "Hey, I have a great position for you." But what if I want to control my career, meaning that I want know I'm dreaming about relocating to Boston. What I'm going to do about it? I need to invest a lot of efforts in research and see who is ready to take me in Boston. Liran: So Woo is a new alternative where you quickly in the platform, meaning you're not putting yourself as a job seeker. You set your wishlist, meaning for example, I want to relocate to Boston and work as CEO and earn 160K annual salary, and you know that Woo is going to find you that opportunity because we're working on the other side with companies, and only company that can offer it to you will be able to approach you. Liran: Now, what is the other solution? You LinkedIn, you don't have any control in LinkedIn regarding what kind of opportunity you're getting, so you're getting a lot of stem. You can go to job boards, but in job boards when you apply to job, you don't know on the other side who is there and if you are qualified, so you're gonna waste a lot of time sending your CV. Or you can sit with agencies, which is very limited operation ... Chad: Okay, so wait, wait, wait. So this so far has been all candidate side, right? You've been talking about the candidate and helping the candidate and the candidate, candidate, candidate. So I'm gonna jump right to one of my questions that I generally go after last. Is this something that you price out for the candidate? Does the candidate pay for this? Liran: No. Chad: So since the candidate doesn't pay for this, can you tell me as an employer how are you going to solve my problem? Liran: Yeah. Excellent question. If you would give me four minutes for the pitch I would probably get into the employer. But you are giving me only two minutes. It's only one side in two minutes. Liran: So let's talk about employer because I think that what we are offering today for employer, nobody can offer them. So when we speaking about employers, employers basically what they want, they want to hire the relevant candidate in a minimum efforts, right? That's what they want. And what we do to them is exactly doing this exact facing this exact challenge, which means that the way it works from employer's side, we eventually understood that if you want to build a healthy marketplace, you cannot open the marketplace listing to each of the side. Liran: For example, in LinkedIn where employers are getting and seeing a list of candidates, they can decide who they want to approach, right? This is a problem in scale because they are getting more and more candidate, getting more and more stem. So we said, employer cannot see any of your listing. Which means that we need to come up with the technology like a recruiting agency but with a robot, that understand the requirements of the employer, and from that point go and try to approach the relevant candidate, the qualified candidate, and offer them the opportunity. Liran: And all the candidate that says yes will be introduced to the employer. So from the employer's side, we are the only company that today giving them, we call it QIP. Q-I-P. Qualified candidates that already interested and are passive, which mean they are not in the market. And it means that this is the best thing that you can get as an employer in order to save your time, because think about it for example, in job boards you're getting interested candidates, but they're not qualified. In LinkedIn, you see qualified candidate but they're not interested. Or in agencies you're getting qualified and interested candidate, but they're not passive, which means that you can invest a lot of your efforts on interview them, but eventually you're going to compete with other, three, four offers they are going to get just because they are in the market. Liran: So the ability to give the access to candidate that are discrete, which mean they are not in the market from one hand, and only introducing with those that are qualified and show interest, creating a very powerful mechanism for employers to work with. Joel: Liran, from my perspective you have a traditional problem, which is the chicken and egg issue of the job board. In other words, if you have candidates but no jobs, then what's the point? If you have jobs but no traffic or candidates, then what's the point? So my question to you is, how are you driving candidates and how are you driving job content for them? Liran: This is a very good question. I think that the chicken and egg is the number one problem in any market, I say mainly in the recruiting space, where people come in for a very specific need and then leaving, like in job boards. So in our case, that's the true game changing that we make, is that because we approaching candidates that are not looking actively for job, we basically creating a pools candidates that don't have any urgency, which means that even if they will get the first opportunity from Woo after two months, they are still going to be in the system. Liran: I can tell you that a very, very important number we have today, we are only focusing on software engineers, so we have around 60,000 software engineers. And what we find out that 87% of the software engineers that we have in the system are engaged with opportunities they are getting from Woo after two years in the system. And that's what I told you at beginning, we change the job consumption from a one time event into an ongoing exploration. And this is how we solve the chicken and egg, basically when we open a new territory and first going through the candidates, say, hey, here is the agent that will eventually be your agent for the long run and will always show you your demand based on the things you want, and then we started bringing the companies. Liran: We made it in San Francisco, in New York, also in Israel, and in San Diego. And we sold at these ports. Joel: So you're targeting specifically developers in San Francisco, New York, and whatever other markets, and then going after companies in those markets. So if I'm a developer in Miami, you're not really for me yet. Liran: I'm for you if you're ready to relocate to one of the locations that we have companies in. Joel: (laughs) Liran: By the way, we do a lot of relocations. 20% of the inventory that we have are people that are not in those locations but ready to move. For example, we made around 10 relocations to Israel engineers to U.S. companies. Think about how easy it is, because today if a U.S. company want to hire an Israel engineer, what are they going to do? You need to go to what, to LinkedIn and try to see who is ready to relocate? Liran: So in our case if they say I'm ready to relocate someone, all I need to know is that there is an engineer in Israel that is qualified and ready to be relocated to the U.S., and then here is a new match. Right? The layer about what candidate ready to do or what they want, allowing us to create a new kind of match. Chad: So who out there is doing what Woo is doing? Who's taking this really angle at the problem? Liran: Well, I can tell you the closest entity our company that is doing similar thing today is recruiting agencies. Right? Because in recruiting agencies, the only place where you go and get a premium service off only qualified and interested candidates. The difference between us and them is that we are online platform driven by technology and not a bunch of recruiters. I will be head ... Happy to tell you about the technology. And the fact that we are user-based is mostly candidates that are not in the market and feeling very comfortable with using a platform [crosstalk 00:15:24] Chad: So it's more like an agency type of stance, although I've seen where you guys say more H ... I'm sorry, more AI, less humans. Liran: Exactly, exactly. By the way, we started with fully manual, meaning human-driven operation, and then we switch it by our robot, our recruiter robot, which called Helena. And this was an amazing journey on how you develop an AI in that type of system. I know there are a lot of companies speaking about AI and you know, but it's really tough to create an AI in the HR space. And you know why? Because AI is like a baby that you're trying to teach, right? So when you try to teach a baby, you need two things: You need to give him a lot of information from one hand, and you need to give him the ability to make mistakes. This is how you basically building a brain and how you teach people. Liran: So the problem in the recruiting space is first there are no books, meaning there are no pre-defined data sets where you can take and train your AI. You basically need to build your information ... Chad: You need to learn all that data and from that point you go on, right? So we actually talked about Helena earlier this year, and it was specifically pointed to Helena is going to take the place of recruiters. Is that really what you see technology doing? Especially like Woo technology, taking the place of recruiters. Liran: I would say that yeah. Helena is basically practically took the place of recruiters in our company. But I would say that if we're looking at recruiters, the next generation of recruiters will be people that know how to implement those Helena's and make out of those robots the maximum. Because even if it's in AI, there's still like in advertising and every other economy where the operation is automated, there are still human touch where you want to make sure that the robot is understanding and doing the right job, right? Liran: So I would say that the recruiting is going to be more technology-driven profession that will eventually be able to implement and deploy an execute those kind of technologies in order to get the most out of it. Joel: Liran, I'm going to go back to the job seeker. What's the unique proposition to them to use your site? Because developers are hit up all the time, they have a lot of services to choose from. Why have those 60,000 people entrusted you with their job search? Liran: Right, so it's a combination of three things. One is discrete, you can keep doing what you're doing and nobody know that you're there. Second is that relevancy, meaning that only opportunities that meet your preferences, only companies that can meet your preferences will be able to approach you, so you know that every opportunity is super relevant. And third, is the efficiency, which means that once you said yes, 50% chance that you're starting the process. Liran: And this is something that nobody can get out of today. You don't have a place where you can keep doing what you're doing, say the next thing that you want, I want to work for Google for 150 or whatever, and you know that once we alert you, you're going to get exactly what you wanted. And this is nobody giving you. Sure, we give you also insides regarding how you collaborate your expectation to meet reality so we can help you to understand your demand, but the main offering is that ... You know, number 1 stress point in career is the unknown. People don't know what they can get out of. And they don't want to do this proactive in order to understand. Liran: So using a tool like Woo, you know what your opportunities. You know that in any given moment, you can click on the make me an introduction and here you go, you move on to the next thing. So it's simplified ... Chad: So I'm gonna switch gears on you real quick. I did a little research on you guys and it seems like Woo believed that interviews really stem from lack of candidate information, and your vision in the next five years or so is to eliminate the job interview entirely. Is that correct? Liran: Yes, so regarding our vision, basically once we have Helena fully deployed, the first challenge that we gave Helena is the ability to create the right connections. And now in the place where 50% of those connection during interview which is very high conversion. The second thing that we look at is we're saying okay, what about the rest of the process? Because the rest of the process is also time consuming for both sides. If I need to get interviews in five companies, that mean I need to share the same information pretty much for those five companies. So they spend time, I spend my time, and this can be reduced or even spared once you have the AI. Liran: Which means that Helena keep learning more and more about their uses. We keep discussing with them, eventually what we want is to give them a professional assessment and so on. So eventually the way we see Helena is that Helena is going to be so smart that both sides is going to trust her. And meaning that we can spare the technical interview, we can spare many of the other thing, and maybe even eventually the culture interview regarding your character and personal interview. Those kind of things by AI eventually will be sold. Liran: The reason I'm saying is because the way we envision the market in five to ten years from now is you're going to sit with your wife in the living room and say how about we relocate to Boston, and then you're gonna open the iPad or whatever it's gonna be in five years, and you're going to say to Woo, "I want to relocate to Boston and work in that industry," and whatever you want. And Woo gonna offer you two to three positions. You're gonna select one, and then bam, it's gonna say you're going to start next week, 9 am, good luck. That's it. No interviews, nothing. Liran: It sounds a bit science fiction, right? It sounds a bit science fiction. But this is how envision the market. This is how we see people switching job in the future. Of course, for us right now we are only at the beginning of the tunnel, but once we put technology and it's not a human-driven marketplace, we have more capabilities to do those things rather than give it to each side to filter out each time. Chad: No interviews is really the vision of your ... Liran: No interviews, exactly, no interviews. [crosstalk 00:22:08] Or you think interviews is important? Joel: Hey, we're interviewing you, pal. Liran: Yeah, sorry about it. I forgot about it. Joel: Hey, it looks as though email is the primary way that you communicate with job seekers, is that correct? Liran: Email right now is the primary way we communicate, yeah. Joel: Is messaging, native apps, is that stuff coming, or is it a business decision to stick with something as sort of old-school-y as email? Liran: Yeah, I got your feedback, thank you, but we're doing a lot of discussion about it. And right now we under the impression that the best way to communicate in that aspect of career and job opportunities is probably through email and not through mobile phone. We did some research with our users. It's feel less secure once you have an app calling Woo that you're basically getting opportunities. So we find out that because the high engagement of our users opportunities they're getting through email, we don't need to do this layer at that point. Liran: Maybe in the future, we're planning to do an inside tool rather than an inside app that will help you always understand your market value and things like this, but not necessarily show you opportunity through this app. Chad: So and just to ask one more time, and I'm sorry for the redundancy, but email is the primary mode, not Facebook Messenger, not texting, not actually using the mobile phone other than a phone call? Liran: Exactly. This is the most private channel that you can get opportunities from. Joel: Liran, you've raised 9 million today, is that correct? Liran: Yeah. Joel: So what is ... You got around a little bit late last year I think. What's the millions going toward? Is it development, is it growth globally, is it salespeople? Tell us about what the investment that you've gotten is being used for. Liran: Yeah, so the main things that we invested so far the money on is of course building the technology that will help us scale in a way that we're not affecting the marketplace performance, so we invested a lot of efforts on Helena, we have a brilliant dean here of machinery and doctor scientist, people who can build those technologies. And now we are in a phase where we feeling very secure, very confidence with our product and with the technology and everything, and we're working with very high rents that are very satisfied and making hires from the system like Uber and Lyft and Microsoft and recently Amazon and many others that are using the tools. Liran: And now we are in the phase of start extending the marketplace and open Woo in more territories, mainly in the U.S. and at the end of 2018, we want Helena to start working with other profession, which mean that we are going to extend it to at the beginning to marketing and sales, and eventually we want to be able to help everyone. Chad: Okay, so how's this priced out? I went to the website and I really couldn't find anything else out other than a lead form. Liran: So the costing of the ... We have two basically two models, one model is that you pay success fee, which is highly discounted, you pay 10% of the annual salary. And the second one is what we call a hybrid model, which is you basically think about a subscription, you're basically paying a fixed price and from that price we derive the volume of leads that we gonna generate for you. Joel: Are there exact costs that an employer can expect to pay through? Liran: Well, if they're taking the success, they will pay 10% of the annual salary of the candidates. If they're taking the performance base, they will have to pay based on how many leads they want to generate from the system. Joel: So what, if we're looking at two and three years if we sit down for another interview, what are gonna be features that should expect, what are gonna be new markets that we should expect you to be in, etc.? Liran: So we got in the markets, it going to be ... We gonna open for all the cities in the U.S. from one hand, and we're going to also open Europe, we're talking about three years. And on the other side, we're gonna, I assume that in two years we're going to support all the professions out there, but the most important thing that in three years people will be able to switch job much more efficiently than today. Even today, we took the experience to a new level where you just need to click and 50% that you are in the interview. In three years, you basically once you do the click, 50% you got hired. Or even 70% you got hired. Liran: So this is for us the main goal, is from the moment that will bring derived opportunity, how can we make the process shorter and more efficient, and this is where we expect to be in three years. Chad: (Bell rings) There it is. Joel: The questioning is over and the day of reckoning is at hand now. Chad has passed it on to me to take the first shot, so to speak, at Liran and Woo.io. I ... So we started off on a pretty poor note. You had two minutes to give us the pitch, which you couldn't do, so you need to tighten up your pitch to people like us. Two minutes should be plenty of time to explain what you do and why it's different or important. Joel: I asked you what's unique to a job seeker, you told me three things. One of them is actually maybe unique, I don't think anonymity is unique. Maybe telling you, hey, I only want to work at Google, maybe there's some uniqueness there, but I didn't see anything that was really sticking out to me as something that was gonna play, and I think you still have a really tough mountian to climb with convincing not only developers but anyone to join the site as something that's really unique to anyone else. Joel: Now, you may have an AI secret sauce down the road or even now that I'm just not seeing that will be a big plus for you in getting job seekers engaged and aroused. Technologically, being email, I appreciate the argument that email is ubiquitous, it's everyone, but for someone, a company particularly trying to appeal to a tech-savvy audience being developers, I really would have loved to have seen text messaging, even Facebook messaging like Chad said, which is pretty private because no one's gonna pinch you for being on Messenger on Facebook. Joel: So I would have loved to have seen more of that stuff down the pipe. So in short, I think you have a long way to go. You're in a really tough market. I think you're probably moving slower than I would like to see as well. I mean you guys have been around for over a year and you're still in San Francisco, New York, some of the markets that you've been in, particularly with the investment you've had, moving faster on that front I think would be really appealing to me. Joel: So for me, a long way to go, apologies, but ... (firing squad) Liran: I appreciate the feedback. Chad: Very good feedback. I'm gonna go ahead and go after I listen to that hail of gunfire. Yeah, so first off, no question, tighten, tighten, tighten. Tighten up the message. Know who you're pitching, quicker and on the candidate side especially. You know there's a problem on the candidate side, but the thing is, that has to be tight so that you can actually focus on solving the problem for the people with the money. That's what it comes down to. It comes to the revenue. It comes to how are you going to help those companies to be able to get those individuals, and obviously taking the candidate experience and being able to be anonymous, to be able to not fear going into a system and all these different things that Woo can do, they're all great pitching points but not to the candidate, to the employer, because the employer's obviously the one who's going to be paying for this. Chad: I like the idea of no more interviewing and the concept does make some sense. But just making sense won't guarantee sales and revenue, right? We've seen that over the years. I believe you have a wonderful vision, although I don't believe HR will really embrace that. I believe you're not leading the target enough in trying to change a fundamental part of hiring, right? I love the AI to be able to really enhance recruiters, I believe in that entirely, but you have to be able to focus on also how you're reaching and engaging those individuals. Email is pretty much passe. If you're trying to reach guys like Joel and I and our demographic, it might work, but from the research that we've seen, texting and messaging has much higher engagement rates. Chad: We actually see platforms like yours, not exactly like yours but much like yours, that are getting amazing engagement rates and they're getting quicker turn arounds on hires from high volume standpoint. So two things: Focus heavily on the message and who you're actually messaging to. And start to focus on obviously what you can do with this amazing AI and engaging with perspectively chatbots, that makes sense. Chad: So from my standpoint, I'm not gonna go full guns, I'm gonna go with the golf clap. Liran: (laughs) I'm not sure what is better. Joel: Buddy, regardless you have the balls to be on this show man, and kudos to you for that. Any last words before we close the show? Liran: Yeah, first thank you guys for the feedback, I really appreciate it. I think you made some really important points and of course we are in a tough journey and we working on implementing and fixing a lot of things and I hope that in one year if you invite me again, we're gonna change it to other sound at the end. Chad: We hope to see that. Joel: Sounds like a deal, man, we out. Chad: We out. Liran: Awesome, perfect. Announcer: 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. #Wooio #FiringSquad

Well... what started out as a pretty slow and boring ass week gained some steam by Hump Day. So what happened? - Glassdoor see acquiaition dollars from Indeed's parent company for $1.2 billion - Monster lands a new CEO (Get it? Travel... Lands?) - CareerBuilder goes down - Oprah is giving everybody a FREE job board (Ok it's not Oprah) - Google's demo of Duplex tech (AI) is a jaw dropper - FairyGodBoss loves them some VC Glassdoor-for-women site raised $3 million. Enjoy, and checkout our sponsors America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION El Chapo: Evidently, when El Chapo was incarcerated, the code of ethics that he instilled in Cabo and throughout Mexico has gone away. There's no code of ethics, there's no code of honor. All of a sudden, there's a war for power. So you're seeing things happen that you haven't seen in the past, where people, gangs, drug dealers, will actually go into restaurants and shoot up the place. That never happened before. 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. Joel: Hey hey hey kids, welcome to another week in the wild, wonderful, whimsical world of recruiting and HR. This is the Chad and Cheese Podcast, HR's most dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Chatbot Sowash. Joel: This week, that'd be much more fun to work with. This week, Careerbuilder goes down, Monster finally gets a fearless leader, and, oh yeah, Glassdoor gets acquired. Buckle up, everybody. We'll be right back. JobAdx: How many times has someone said to you, it's the Uber of, or it's the PayPal of, maybe they're the Facebook of. In many, many cases, these comparisons fall short of being close to reality, or even a useful illustration of what organizations actually do. In the case of JobAdX, our example is so accurate, so spot on, that it's synonymous with our work. JobAdX: JobAdX is Google Ad Sense for jobs. That means we're an efficient, persistent, and smarter ad unit for job related advertising. As the best ad tool in the industry, JobAdX offers recruitment marketing agencies and staffing firms realtime, dynamic bidding and delivery for client postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. All this is done with the flexibility of JobAdX's cost per impression, click or application. We offer unique budget conservation to effectively eliminate spending waste. We are not set in regrets. JobAdx: For direct clients, JobAdX delivers superior candidates with the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. We also provide publishers and job boards higher web share than other partners through our smarter pragmatic platform. In many cases, 30 to 40% greater and more with our scalable model. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com or email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or begin working together. JobAdX. The best ad tool providing smarter pragmatic for your needs. Oh, and you've been wondering why the British accent? JobAdX has just launched in the UK, too. Chad: Very nice. Joel: We symbiotically became classier and global with hat ad. That's nice. Chad: Thanks JobAdX, for making us more classy. I don't know that you can do that though, really. Joel: And they show up with Guinness for live shows. Chad: Oh yeah. Chad: Classing the joint up, JobAdX. We appreciate it. Chad: Well, let's talk about classy. Let's talk about throwing axes. Let's talk a little bit about that. You got a shout out for Nexxt, right? Joel: Oh, a double axe with two x's. Now I showed up with the incorrect footwear which was a major mistake because I would've enjoyed kicking your ass in competition but that will have to wait for another day, apparently. Chad: Yeah. First off, never gonna happen, and second, who shows up to an axe throwing event in flip flops? Joel Cheesman does, that's who does. He shows up and doesn't get an opportunity to throw like the regular people who have appropriate footwear, meaning like, tennis shoes, but he did get a couple of throws in and luckily we got tape of that. Joel: Hey, a burly bearded man comes in barefoot. I don't know what's more ax throwing than that. Chad: Like I said, you're like a younger version of Santa, so don't play the viking role. Joel: Everybody loves Santa, alright? Everybody loves the fat jolly man in red, alright, but thanks to Nexxt, they have an office here in Indianapolis which some people don't know about. They had some of the Philly crew come in. We had pizzas, beers, moonshine, for God's sakes, and we threw axes. What's cooler than that? So, thanks to the Nexxt crew. Double x. Joel: That was awesome. That was awesome guys, thanks. Shout out to Chris Pickle. She gets a shout out. She said something pithy, something funny on LinkedIn. I can't remember what it was. Do you remember what it was? Joel: I don't know but I love her last name and she loves us, so that's enough for me. Anytime you get food last names on the show, you get props. Chad: Well, if you know Chris Pickle, you don't call her Chris or Christina. You just call her Pickle. That's what she goes by, by Pickle. Joel: Now we just need a burger to comment on the show and maybe a tomato and some onions and we gotta full meal. Chad: Oh, Jesus. Joel: I got a shout out for Lindsay Sanford. A Ratedly customer with network. She was at a Career Crossroads event recently and we both know Jerry and Chris very well. If you don't know Career Crossroads, you should, but anyway they were asking about cool tools that companies are currently using and Lindsay gave Ratedly a thumbs-up to the audience there, so we appreciate you, Lindsay. Not podcast related, but certainly from me, you get a big shout out. Chad: Good stuff, good stuff. Well, I am here today at Recruit Con in Nashville and I had another drive by hugging by Susan Vitale. Now actually, we had a chance to sit and chill. She gave an amazing, I don't wanna say speech per se, but presentation on millennials and Gen Z'ers so the Joel Cheesman aura was in the room. Also, talking about Google for jobs, texting, does any of this sound familiar? Joel: Yeah. Joel: So, good stuff. Good stuff from Susan and another shout out to Elena Valentine from Skill Scout. Thanks for the awesome T-shirt. Yep, nope. She gave me an awesome T-shirt. It says, "your job post is as boring as this T-shirt. Skill Scout." Good job. Joel: I'm glad Elena doesn't work for Lever because we'd have a whole issue with that big time. Thanks for the T-shirt, Elena. I appreciate it. I'm still waiting on line, by the way. My last shout out is to Nicole from Thompson Creek Window. Now, this is sort of random, but when we were at SHRM Talent, I ran into Nicole. Never met her before, but we started talking about pragmatic solutions. She started talking about hating Indeed because it costs too much. Salespeople are paying the ads, blah blah blah, stuff we've always heard. I said, Nicole, you need to get on the pragmatic bandwagon. I pimped out JobAdX, our newest sponsor. She contacted them, they got a deal in the works, so it looks like we're gonna make a match here in Chad and Cheese dating land for customers, so shout out to her and JobAdX. Go make some money and go get some great candidates. Chad: Dude we're like the Tinder form pragmatic. Joel: I like that. Chad: That sounds good. Joel: It doesn't quite ring as well as HR's most dangerous podcast, but it could work, it could work. Chad: Can we do the show? Yes. Chad: Oh my God. A little bit of news came out in what was a pretty slow week until Wednesday. Glassdoor gets acquired by Recruit Holdings out of Japan, who if you don't know, also owned Indeed. A little job site here in the states. I could go a lot of different ways with this. Do you have any preference with what we talk about first? Chad: No, hit it. Hit it. Joel: Alright, $1.2 billion. Chad: Nice. Joel: They actually published the amount which was sort of, I don't know, odd, because when they bought Indeed, there wasn't a published number. Chad: Right. Joel: The whispered number was about $1.6 billion, which would put it in line with the Glassdoor acquisition. I'd like to talk about pricing first because some people think it's a great deal, others think it's not a great deal. I tend the side on the not so great deal. Glassdoor had $200 million in investment money. They had been rumored to go IPO, which I think Google for Jobs probably put a little bit of a damper on that and typically you want 10 X out of your investment cash, which would've put that at a $2 billion dollar event if my math is right. So, to me it was almost a half price on what they should've gotten based on their investment cash. What's your take? Chad: So, again, going back looking at Google for Jobs, don't you think it was one of the tactics? Hey, we've gotta take a good price and that price isn't gonna be 10 X. We've gotta take something. Take it now before it drops even more. Joel: Yeah, I think this was on both Recruit Holding's and Glassdoor driven by Google. I think Recruit Holding, I would say if a bully goes on the playground, what happens? The weaker kids get friends fast and to me, Google is the big bully that showed up on the playground and Recruit Holdings with Indeed said, holy crap. This shit's going down. We need some reinforcements. Let's look at Glassdoor who we know going public, they're looking for a cash out event. That spurred an easy conversation, I'm sure, with them. Joel: Now on Glassdoor's side, I'm sure looking at, oh yeah, let's go public and as we are a public company, let's watch Google for Jobs grow and keep biting at our market share and valuation and watch our stock price go lower and lower. I think that's the future that they saw in their IPO and Google drove that deal, I think, big time. Chad: Yeah. Joel: For both sides. Recruit and Glassdoor and I don't think Recruit Holdings is done. If you look at the small list of who they would buy, who would you put on that list? Chad: ZipRecruiter was thrown out there pretty quickly and I thought that was very interesting especially from the SMB side of the house and I think that would be a smart addition. I don't know if they could get that done, but I think that would be a smart addition. I don't know. What other names did you hear out there? Joel: Well, the list is sort of straight up job sites is dwindling. I'd throw Talroo slash Jobs2Careers in there, although they are pivoting more toward technology solutions. I'd look at Nexxt, but again, same thing. Traditional job board pivoting out of bad business into more technology-based solutions. So, the list isn't very huge. I would definitely put ZipRecruiter at the top of that list and I'm sure they could be bought, but to me right now, if you put Glassdoor and Indeed against Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, are they even in the ballpark at this point? To me that's not even strong enough to tackle this trifecta. Chad: No, it's not and I think a lot of this has to do with really corporate buying behavior first and foremost because for years companies were buying big names like Monster and CareerBuilder and their ROI wasn't even close to what it should've been to continue that buying. A lot it had to do with optics and having to do with those big names. So, being able to pull another big name in is big from an optics standpoint and when we're talking about not really focusing on our spend on statistics and analytics and those types of things, we're doing it more on how our recruiters feel and the big names that we van bring to the table and talk about. Chad: That's our industry, man. That is our industry. We don't focus enough on statistics and all of our analytics and ROI. We don't do that and when we do bring it to the table, we still hear, yeah but we've been with these and this is something that's a part of our culture. Just bullshit, dude. So, I think just from my standpoint, Glassdoor and Indeed cannot, by themselves no question, stand up against any of these lifestyle platforms that we've been talking about for years. Facebook, LinkedIn, which is obviously now a part of Microsoft, Google, so on, so forth. Chad: They do need to do more, but they are gonna have to pivot into being something that is more lifestyle because it doesn't matter what they do. They're gonna have to continue to plonk a shit ton of advertising dollars into the market constantly to ensure that they can keep their name out there and it's not sustainable at that point. Now, turning on the SEO juice from Glassdoor because Glassdoor's jobs are in Google for Jobs and the reviews- Joel: For now. Chad: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You depend on the life's blood of your traffic and obviously, the ability to get those eyeballs from a perspective competitor who could easily flip that switch. Keep you in the search rankings, but push you further down into page two, three, so on so forth. That to me is just a very bad strategy. Joel: We gloss over it because they've been bought and things we're going on there, but CareerBuilder's gotta be on the table at some point. I'm sure Apollo would love to talk to Recruit Holdings. Monster at some point. Dice has a new CEO. All these companies are probably gonna be looking for exits and Recruit Holdings might be sugar daddy to a lot of those companies as well. What do you think this does to the employer review space and the branding space more broad? Chad: Yeah, and I think it's more on the branding side of the house. I think, again, it's an optics thing for employers to now see these too big brands that they know coming together and now Indeed, depending on how these things actually transform between Indeed and Glassdoor, Indeed's going to be talking more and they're gonna be pounding the living shit out of all their prospects and clients about employer branding now and it might actually be a bigger subject because one of the bigger names will do nothing but use a sledgehammer to be able to do so and they need to. There's no question. Chad: We talked about, last week, StepStone buying Universum and doing that because they needed to become something more than just a job board. They need to have that ability to focus on employer branding to look for more revenue streams. This is a new way of doing that. There's no question, but again, that's short-term changing, pivoting, versus long-term getting smacked over the head with the Google stick. Joel: Yea, SHRM had called me, Roy Mauer, they're doing a story and what I told him was, do Indeed and Glassdoor become the employment branding brand? Is that their thing going forward? If jobs don't have a ton of value, then what do you hang your hat on? They already had a headstart on branding if you look at reviews and company profiles and CEO ratings. That is definitely one area where they are far ahead of anybody else in this game and if they turn off aggregation on that on Google and anywhere else, that becomes really tough. Joel: I see where LinkedIn, with profile pages and I think they've been tinkering with reviews as well. I think that's the biggest threat to that, but I don't see Facebook or Google really caring about the branding piece anytime soon. What about you? Chad: Now that's a good question. I think you're right with regard to Microsoft and LinkedIn. There's no question they have the upper hand. It doesn't matter where these companies are positioned today from a Glassdoor's standpoint, because that could switch very quickly if there's an algorithm change. Just a slight algorithm change. Indeed, Glassdoor focusing, more on, again, being more of a platform that's not just jobs-oriented. It's more candidate experience-oriented and again, heard Susan Vitale speak earlier and it was mainly about candidate experience and taking care of these people. So, if Indeed and Glassdoor can make something like that happen in a symbiotic type of platform, then yeah I think they've got a good product on their hands but again, it's gonna be hard to fight these other organizations what are out there that do, I think, I should say a fighting chance to stay and fight in the employer branding space. Chad: Look at all these agencies. That's what they do. They're creative, right? So, you get a TMP who was just bought and they partner with these other organization's review sites or even employer branding, candidate experience sites, platforms or what have you. There's a good war to be had in the employer branding space and I hope we see that. I really do. Joel: Yep. So, In five years, what does the future look like, and I'll give you three scenarios that I envision. Number one, probably least possible is, these guys stay the same. Glassdoor and Indeed. Nothing really changes. They stay as is. The other one is they cross-pollinate each other. So, reviews go back and forth. You find the same reviews and the same jobs on both site, essentially, and the third one, which I think is probably most feasible is one of them goes away and basically consolidates the reviews, the jobs. It's basically one destination site. Chad: Yeah. I think the latter would be easier to be quite frank, but I- Joel: Meaning destroying one of the brands would be easiest? Chad: It's one of those things and I think it's in Indeed's nature almost, but that's a good question. I really believe that if Indeed and Glassdoor, Recruit overall, understands that there are these systems pieces that need to be put in place and that's the Indeed side. The process being able to pull people under the applicant track with just one click apply, those types of things, and then the nice, warm, fuzzy review piece as well. The story-telling piece as well. Glassdoor, I think there is an opportunity to run two brands and to do it efficiently because you do have two pieces that are coming at you. Chad: One is a more technical piece. The other one's more of an experience type of story-telling and branding piece. Joel: I'm gonna go in five years. We're talking about one of them and whether they maybe change their names to InDoor or GlassDeed, but to me that's the future. I do think that Indeed will be the flagship. I think that renting out big buildings in Austin and building that out sort of tells me that they're really serious about building the Indeed brand and that is the bigger brand of the two, but I do think that Glassdoor's founder, CEO, is serious about sticking around whereas Indeed's were not. So, I think you'll see Indeed as the flagship, but I think you'll see a lot of leadership from Glassdoor come over to Indeed and basically run that one brand in five years, if I had to predict. Chad: I think they're gonna stick with two brands. Again, this is the outside chance, it really is. I'm really leaning toward what you think, but the outside chance is they're gonna have two brands. Joel: Alright, if will definitely be fun watching. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: We will be watching. Let's hear from Sovren and we'll come back and talk about Monster and CareerBuilder, those two companies we never talk about. 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. 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. To learn more about Sovren AI Matching, visit sovren.com. That's s-o-v-r-e-n dot com. Chad: Who is this cat? Joel: So this was announced before we went on air. I read the press release. So, Monster finally has a CEO. I'm not even sure it took. Sal left after Randstad, right? Chad: Yeah, I think it was before that. Joel: So, it's been over a year. Chad: It's been a while. Joel: It's been a while. It's been way longer than a big company should wait. Chad: Oh, hell yeah. Joel: And it's also interesting that the CEO is almost the last piece of the puzzle. They brought all these other executives and now they have CEO, so let's hope to God that the CEO gets along with everybody in the C Suite because if he doesn't, it's gonna be bad news. It's gonna be like the Browns with the new GM when they kept the coach. It's not gonna work. Chad: They still need to pull us in as co-presidents, and we'll make sure that everything's- Joel: That's right pull us in as co-idiots to really get this thing back on track. So, he does follow the trend like a tech. He went to MIT, he's a technology, big picture guy from what I can tell. Similar to Dice. So, these guys historically have almost CFO type CEOs, right? They know the dollar figures, they know how to run an organization, how to run teams, but they don't don't really know grandiose, what's next, how do we look around corners? So, to me Dice and Monster their new CEOs are both attempts to get those guys that can look behind the corner and see what's coming to develop products and services that sort of compliment that as opposed to what they've in the past. Chad: Yeah. So, Scott is the CEO of Amadeus which is a nice size company. 15,000 employees, so it's not like he was a little, small time CEO. The company really focuses on the traveler and travel provider marketplace in proving technology to them, and what we're seeing here is, is Monster looking for parallels in the market and saying, hey look. We need to see something that has happened in the market. Not our industry, but in a different industry. This being the travel industry, and hopefully steal a person, pull them over and have them recreate the magic that they had in travel. Yeah, it's interesting. Chad: Guy obviously has done things, no question, in travel, but it just doesn't have the industry chops on our side. I don't know if that matters or not, especially from a Monster standpoint, but really what I think what we're looking for, at this point what they're looking for, is really the Expedia for jobs. Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We're gonna get him on the show and find out exactly what's going on. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I think we can get Monster's CEO on the show, do you? Chad: Yeah, I think we could. Especially we could do this as an interview. We can interview him because we wanna talk a little bit more about being co-president of Monster just to make sure that we deal good working with him on this endeavor. Joel: We can quiz him on the history of the industry to see how well he does. Chad: Well, and he needs somebody. He needs a couple of idiots like us who have a couple of decades a piece of industry- Joel: We'll play a little industry jeopardy. I'll take failed start-ups for $500. I was founder of Jobster. Who is Jason Goldberg? Ding ding. Good stuff. Well anyways, Dice and Monster both have tech-heavy CEOs who have no industry experience for the most part. We'll see how that works. We'll pay attention. One CEO with a ton of industry experience and not much tech industry experience probably wishes he had some more tech experiences because his site went down this week. Tell us about that. Chad: Last week, I start getting ... my phone blew up literally. I had so many texts and messages via LinkedIn, Messenger, and it was just this picture of a site that had pretty much gone offline, and I'm like what the? What the fuck is this? Well, it was CareerBuilder and they were dead. It was well over an hour at least from what I saw. Joel: It's one of those little orange pylons like in construction, right. That's great. Chad: When you are a brand the size of CareerBuilder and you're trying to claw back and you obviously were just acquired, we hear all these things about being squeezed, which is again, what happens after acquisition, but to be able to squeeze enough where you don't even have the engineers or the bandwidth or whatever it actually took to keep your site up, this to me seems like a bigger problem than most people probably think it is. Joel: Well, when you close your doors because you're going out to lunch, that's obviously a bad thing. I literally have photos that engineers, former and current CareerBuilder folks, have sent me of empty offices, empty cubicles as far as the eye can see of places where that used to host engineers and development folks. I instantly, when I saw that, just laughed to myself thinking I wish they had a few more of those engineer back in those cubes because something went very wrong. If someone the size of CareerBuilder in the middle of the day goes down, it's bad and I loved that the message on the screen was, "We're down for basic maintenance," or "general maintenance. We'll be back up as soon as possible," and I'm thinking, no one goes down for general maintenance at 2:00 P.M. on a workday in the employment industry, Chad: Not a brand like CareerBuilder. You're doing maintenance behind the scenes and you're not pulling this down. You're not doing that. So, yeah it's interesting, and I've definitely heard a bunch of engineer stories on the CareerBuilder where, again, many of them have either left or what have you and it's funny because one of the engineers that I was talking to actually said when you go into really the big space where all the engineers sat, it is literally a ghost town and what happened was that everybody that was on over by the windows who were leaving, they left and obviously, everybody migrated toward the windows which is away from the actual entrance. Chad: So, it's like you walk in and it's like, cricket cricket and there aren't any people. Joel: Hold on. Hey everybody. Live from CareerBuilder's design and engineering department. Chad: So, we also received an email that was originally sent from Jason Gold. He's the CareerBuilder director of client services and support he pretty much was saying, hey guys. Quit sending tickets to us. We know this is going on. We're already overloaded. Seriously, it was like this. Number one, please do not submit any more cases around this issue. Number two. Check. internal.Careerbuilder.com must be the internal, the intranet, for what we've got going on. If customers call, they can always route these issues, so on and so forth. Chad: So, this was obviously such a big deal that there was a broadcast message out to everyone saying, don't submit anymore Goddamn tickets. We know there's a problem. Joel: By the way, for the listeners, Chad made me take down the baby crying sign, but this would be perfect for that crying baby, so I'll just, wah. Yes, again, lets breve this that the engineering department at CareerBuilder. Chad: In the wild. Joel: Wow. It's just too much fun. Alright, should we move on or beat a dead horse some more? Chad: Nah, I think we're good. Joel: Alright. Okay. From Back to the Future news releases, something that should've happened in like 2008. Chad: Yeah, no shit. Joel: There's, and there probably was free WordPress job board software back then, but there's a new one out and we're not so much touting that as much as why. Chad: Yeah, when I saw the actual article or the write up about it, I was like, who cares? Free job boards. It was almost like Oprah. You get a job board, you get a job board, but who cares because job boards are getting killed right now. They're not getting traffic which means even though this job board platform has Indeed backfill, which pretty much everybody would just start it up and use Indeed backfill, if it's not getting any traffic, it's not getting any clicks. So, if it's not gonna get any clicks, it's not gonna generate any money and all you are is noise on the Internet and nobody's gonna care. It's ridiculous. What is happening? Joel: And on the other end of the market, you have the jobboard.io. There I said it, right? They're the ones helping out the association sites, the education sites, the government sites, et cetera, who already get traffic and just wanna throw up a job board to make more money. Those folks don't care or have the resources to work on a WordPress theme and URLs and blah blah blah which seems easy to a lot of people, but to the head of an association, no freaking clue. I'm just gonna call this jobboard.io or job mount or whatever and I'm just gonna let them do it and do the processing of the money and yadda yadda. Joel: This board probably gives you the ability to via PayPal, buy job postings, right? How many people really in the real world are using PayPal to buy stuff? Not a ton. Chad: Not at all and take a look at history one more time, people. So, we're gonna go back to the .jobs thing, okay? DirectEmployers had 40,000 domains in which there were job sites. In which there job sites, and if that was a complete fail, then how in the hell are you going to just take some free job board technology, plug in who knows what the hell it is, and actually make it successful? Seriously guys, don't waste your time. Quit screwing with this shit. Joel: I'm adding to my heaping pile of hot garbage. Chad: There it is. Joel: I'm shooting this idea down. Let's hear a quick word from America's Job Exchange and talk about mind-blowing new technology from Google. AJE: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our tenth year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our thousand plus comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, and minorities, and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community-based organizations. What to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com Chad: Diversity, baby. Joel: Let's talk about Google Duplex. Chad: Dude. Joel: The name sucks, but I have to tell you my mind is rarely blown at 46 years going on 47 soon. My mind was blown watching this Google Duplex. Chad: Dude, Google Assistant has Duplex technology I think is what they're calling it. Joel: Sure. Chad: Google Assistant kicks Alexa square in the fucking face on this thing, dude. It is amazing. The natural language process that they have this goes to incredibly new heights. Now, if you haven't seen it- Joel: A lot of people have no idea what we're talking about, so tell them what duplex is and what it does. Chad: So, if you haven't seen it, you've gotta go check out. Just go to YouTube or something like that and look for Google Duplex and Pinchai, the CEO of Google, goes through this amazing, stupid demo of what we're talking about and here's what it is. So, I ask Google Home, my Google Home, to set, and this is gonna be funny, a haircut appointment for me. It actually goes, makes the phone call behind the scenes. You can't hear it making the phone call. Makes the phone call behind the scenes, and like a real human being, it sounded like a real damn human being. Chad: It made an appointment and it wasn't just a straightforward, we would like to have a 5:00 appointment, it actually collaborated with the person over the phone to find out what was better for the schedule, had great real pauses and "um's" and things like that and it was freaking amazing and after that appointment was made, and there was an affirmative action at the end of that then, guess what? It goes straight to your Google calendar. It was ridiculous, and there was another one that was making an appointment at a restaurant. Joel: It was a reservation. Chad: Yeah, right? And the lady had a very thick Asian accent which was really cool just showing natural language processing and the technology went back and forth with her several times because they only had four people and you have to have five to make a reservation so you had to be a walk-in. So, there was the understanding of that and it was really cool. Joel: So, I have two thoughts on this. First is, this is going to alter the world of sales, recruiting, and customer service. Chad: Yes. Joel: In a major, seismic, asteroid hitting the industry way because this goes beyond. My other point is this may kill chat bots particularly in recruiting, but my first point is, imagine being able to sell a product without a salesperson or at least not as many salespeople. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Or have an entire customer service team where the voice on the other end isn't, hello. Please press four to ... he's right. It sounds like a person. They have "um's" and "mm, yeah, okay," and I'm sure at some point we'll figure out what is automated and what isn't , but customer service, sales, and recruiting are gonna change drastically because of this and my second point was, yes. Does this make chat bot solutions obsolete because this is essentially chat botting with an actual voice? Chad: No, it doesn't. What I think it does is it could prospectively make that experience more rich because not everybody wants to have a conversation on the phone or a voice conversation, so I think using that technology, this just demonstrates how far Google has come and they can use that same type of technology, exactly the same type of technology just in straight-to-text and that was one of the things that he had actually outlined, that they were also on the voice text side of the house. So, I think that you were 100% right. This is going to impact us in a very real and crazy way especially for recruiting, sourcing overall standpoint. Scheduling, all those tasks, but I really believe it will enhance the chat bot side of the house. Chad: Just the messaging side of the house, and how we do things. How we do things. It was truly amazing to watch and they had said that they had just plucked a couple of examples and these were real-world examples. These weren't just something that they had staged. These were real-wolrd and they said they have hundreds of them. It was. Joel: I think it was an actual call. I think it was an actual call during the event, yeah. Chad: Yeah, I see that there's going to be a huge swing in the market and when we start to talk about AI and natural language processing and those types of things, the world is going to look at Google for these types of things and again, I go back to the Indeed, Glassdoor conversation. This is why you're going to get your asses handed to you, guys. Joel: Yeah. Google, Microsoft, these guys are going to be API-ing all this stuff. There's gonna be cool products and services created from it. It's very interesting and exciting and I do think it's a no-brainer to build this stuff into Google Hire. Chad: Yep. Joel: This will take a while to happen, but let's agree this is happening and this is where the road is going. By the way, I hate to go back to the last story, but for the people who were like Chad and Cheese are idiots, they don't know what they're talking about. Indeed had their best year ever, they're making more money than ever, their traffic's going through the roof, you know what? This is proof that we're right because their own company knew enough and saw enough to say we need to get reinforcements to go out and buy Glassdoor. So, for me it's a little vindication that we're right about what's going on and their holding company saw the same thing. Chad: Dude, I don't care how cocky they sound. They are waking up with the night sweats. Joel: Let's end on a lighter note. Chad: Yes. Joel: FairyGod Boss, basically Glassdoor for women, I guess that's fair to say. I won't get in trouble for saying that, and apparently the employer review space is a profitable one with $1.2 billion exit. FairyGod Boss, not even two years old I think, got $3 million to build out their Glassdoor for women website. So, I know their comment with that, but good for them. I think you're gonna see a lot more start-ups in this space because Glassdoor just proved you could make a billion dollar company out of reviews and we'll probably see more money flow into not only FairyGod Boss, but in her site and comparably in probably some new ones that start up, to me this is just the start of this industry in where the transparency and branding and reviews will go from here. Chad: Agreed, and having these types of specific kind of tribal sites, review sites or what have you, just specific for women or what have you, being able to better understand how your brand impacts that group is more than important, right? Especially, not just form a recruiting standpoint, but also from a branding, sales, revenue standpoint. So I think there's some really good upside, obviously, for companies like this. Joel: Alright, man. Good show. You're in Nashville for the RecruitCon conference, so get us some good content, some good insight for next week's show. 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 Cheese podcast. Make sure to subscribe on i Tunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss a single show. Make sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more, visit chadcheese.com #Glassdoor #Indeed #Monster #Careerbuilder #Google #AI

The Chad and Cheese sit down with Doug Johnson, CEO of Jobalign, to talk HIGH VOLUME HIRING. Why? Because it's hard shit and as Doug says "There's a bunch of pain for employers in the high-volume arena." So I guess it's time for THE PAIN TRAIN! Chad: This, The Chad & Cheese Podcast brought to you in partnership with TA tech. TA tech, the association for talent acquisition solutions. Visit tatech.org. Chad: Okay, Joel, quick question. Joel: Yep. Chad: What happens when your phone vibrates, or your texting alert goes off? Joel: Dude, I pretty much check it immediately. I bet everyone listening is reaching to check their phones right now. Chad: Yeah, I know. I call it our Pavlovian dog reflex of text messaging. Joel: Yeah, that's probably why text messaging has a fricking 97% open rate- Chad: What?! Joel: Crazy high candidate response rate within the first hour alone. Chad: Which, are all great reasons why The Chad & Cheese Podcast love text to hire from Nexxt. Joel: Love it! Chad: Yep. That's right. Nexxt, with the double X, not the triple X. Joel: 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 & Cheese Podcast, you can try your first text to hire campaign for just 25% off. Boom! Chad: Wow! So how do you get ths discount, you're asking yourself right now. Joel: Tell them, Chad. Chad: It's very simple. You go to chadcheese.com, and you click of the Nexxt logo in the sponsor area. Joel: Easy. Chad: No long URL to remember. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Just go where you know chadcheese.com, and Nexxt, with two X's. 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. Joel: [00:00:00] Doug Johnson definitely not a made up name is a CEO of Jobalign Doug welcome to the podcast. Doug: [00:00:09] Thank you very much. Chad: [00:00:09] We're here at SHRM Talent don't forget about that. Joel: [00:00:10] We're here at SHRM Talent who fascinatingly let us come and do this podcast. And we haven't really broken much. We're still allowing us to set up shop. Chad: [00:00:22] So far Joel: [00:00:24] Doug, a lot of our listeners don't know Jobalign couldn't spell it if they were you know in a spelling bee like give them the elevator pitch of what you do. Doug: [00:00:32] All right well if you are hiring hourly candidates you have pain today and we are there to solve that pain and take the pain away. Hourly candidates. So you know the workers who are landscaping and cleaning the rooms and maid services the warehouseman those people are the people that we address that we connect with and align with employers. Joel: [00:00:59] Clever I see what you did there. These folks don't have resumes right. That's sort of your sweet spot. How do you know that you're with no work experience. Me as My first job is there site is your site for them. Doug: [00:01:11] So we really bridge the gap between these employers who are hiring high volumes. You know one of our biggest customers literally is hiring over 10,000 workers a month on our platform. Chad: [00:01:24] A month! Doug: [00:01:24] A month. Right. So we're producing for them... Joel: [00:01:28] Chad gets really excited when we're talking high volume hiring.. So he's chomping at the bit Chad: [00:01:32] Yea, this is hard stuff. Doug: [00:01:34] And we're super proud of the fact that we literally our Jobalign is putting to work roughly 20,000 people a month. So we're proud of that. So we feel like we're doing something good you know for that worker but at the same time solving a problem for the employer because the employer's ability to reach in this marketplace those those workers those job seekers is so difficult. So our technology just bridges that gap. Chad: [00:02:01] So bridging how do you how do you get candidates so do you have programmatic outreach do you use their database the company's database. Because generally made a music site as well. How do how do you get those candidates. Doug: [00:02:14] Yes yes yes. So everything is quite directly. I mean first of all we have a network millions of candidates and we present those. So you know that's that's able ready to work. Candidates at the same time we work with all job boards. We sit between if you will the the job board world and the ATSI. So we communicate and we disperse and distribute rather to job boards 100 job boards and then pull that talent along with the talent from your career page because in any other organic know texting technologies that we present to employers that they'll use to source candidates and then put them to our superintelligent apply process. Joel: [00:02:59] Some super fascinated by the space and part of it is driven on the fact that I did a story about snag a job recently who is rebranding. They're essentially going for an Uber for hourly model where the platform you sign up for hey I want to do shifts in multiple restaurants the company brings in multiple people for a shift and then they're gone and snag handles the payments so you know the Craigslist I assume still works for a lot of companies like just post a job you have job boards and indeed you have you guys. Then you have the shift gate the snag a job like where are we going to end up in 10 years with the hourly workforce. How are they going to find jobs. Doug: [00:03:40] I think I think both apply. I think that there's there's some markets far go back to the employer and the worker and their needs. There are especially in the restaurant hospitality space that shift solution that snacks to mix. Thomas says there are other places where a full time or rather a a a 40 hour week hourly worker makes a lot of sense in the janitorial space services space. That's not necessarily. So I think that that both will exist coexist in that world. I think what's Snga's done makes a lot of sense. Chad: [00:04:19] So more like is a strategy to these types of positions and some work better. Yeah I enjoy the quote unquote Uber kind of app versus really the traditional more. I would say hyper automated platform like you guys are trying to pull together. Doug: [00:04:34] Exactly. Exactly. And so my my strong belief is that you're going to end up with both experiences. Joel: [00:04:43] You see a lot of big players getting into the employment space that didn't really play in it before. You see Microsoft that linked and you see Google when we talk. We talk about a lot and you see Facebook as well. Do you see any of them being a more major player in the Aurelie space than others. Or do you think they're not even interested. Doug: [00:05:00] I don't think they have their eye on it. Yeah. Fortunately I don't think there's. I think there's a tremendous opportunity. But I don't think right now that that's being addressed. I think we talking about a lot about Facebook being in the sort of the pole position like every company has a Facebook page and posting jobs is pretty organic and then having candidates come through there and the messaging system but how that shakes out. Yeah I agree with that. Chad: [00:05:24] So when a candidate applies say they do that I'm assuming through their mobile phone what's kind of the time frame between somebody actually getting in touch with them and how would that actually happen on the employer side. So we've got candidates come in. What's that. What does the platform do. What. What sets it apart from everything else out there. Doug: [00:05:43] So first everything that we've done has been designed for rolling out. So literally AB testing the you know the text saying to apply for smarter process is done in a fashion that we can do when we're looking at the advent of abandonment rate right now this is a dirty little secret. The endowment rate in the hourly world of applicants leaving the process at avocations 80 percent on average. So whatever you're spending... Joel: [00:06:14] So does that mean from the time that they start applying to a company to finishing 80 percent don't finish . D Doug: [00:06:20] Don't finish. Joel: [00:06:20] Really fascinating. Chad: [00:06:22] It's what I call ejection rate Doug: [00:06:25] Abandonment has two this there's the data. You know again we've got millions of points of data that look at two places where there's a minimum occurs. The first is just enough in the processing of the application. Doug: [00:06:37] So what we've designed is a what we call smart application that is largely text based but it has this very quick design template structure for particular jobs in particular markets. Then we take that data and we push it into a resume format because the recruiter wants to look at a resume that's how they work knowing the answers worked so well represent that to them on our platform weren't there 80 hours and then put a canot what we call Candidate Messenger. But it's a texting tool right up against that resume. So when the candidate comes in we'll give you a quick story. National Retailer launched our product last week. We were training the senior director nationally just to show this woman how it was going to work. She posted a job within three minutes a candidate happened to pop to the window. Now we were just in the process of explaining how the system kind of she'll tell. All right. Chad: [00:07:41] Kinda show and tell. Doug: [00:07:42] I'm telling the candidate pops in are our account management person Chris says. We'll go ahead and this text just text the candidate Chad: [00:07:51] And they're doing this and you do this through your platform which is really what it is. Doug: [00:07:57] So she says Hey Charlie appreciate you sending in your resume by the way. We only. We only present qualified candidates so unqualified candidates we screen out based upon knock questions like you because of all the conventions she's qualified and texts the person and says hey would you like to get on the phone? So they say up within five minutes interview and she sat back in her chair and said like wow that's that's the power. So everything. I mean start everything designed for hourly engineer for hourly scale. Chad: [00:08:32] So we start talking about things like that and my brain starts going haywire because you you take a look at the types of candidate flow that comes in for some of those positions. And you know is there the prospect of automated replies going out? Doug: [00:08:48] Sure absolutely so based upon you know the position and how you want to communicate with deploying your recruiting pool of talent and the availability of them we need to be able to respond you know the fashion with that candidate and keep them warm. So we do a ton of it. Another interesting thing there is there is the difference between good texting and bad texting. So is remarkable. So if you if you have a candidate that pops in and in our model we know we by the way it's an important thing to note that we have a model where are our product is is fee based based upon the applicants. Right. So you only pay per applicant. Our motivation is completely together to you successfully. Chad: [00:09:49] We're talking about qualifed. Doug: [00:09:50] All right. All right. So you don't pay us anything but for qualified applicants. So you know we are studying constantly how to improve this process because it's in our best interest as well. That was my point. Chad: [00:10:02] Serve qualified candidates get paid off qualified candidates. Doug: [00:10:05] Exactly. So the you know we're we're constantly looking at you know into those that test texting dialogue to see what are the right responses. Right and we can you know we measure the time of response to see. So interestingly the more bot like you sound the the unfortunate reality is that that is if you can smells that they abandon. Chad: [00:10:33] Really? Doug: [00:10:33] Yeah but if you're if you're warm and you're in human need to real in your authentic people will continue to engage. And so we're studying that now you know where that's kind of on the front burner. Joel: [00:10:43] So carrying on with the automation robotic message omlet I'm going to bring it from another angle. It's pretty clear to me from you know eating out and just things in my regular life that there's an extreme shortage of talent for people who are willing to work at restaurants and grocery stores etc. and it seems to me like robots inevitably will take on a lot of the duties of cooking food serving food... Chad: [00:11:12] Flippy... Flippy! Joel: [00:11:13] Flippy... We talk about what to be like what what's your sort of insight on that based on your work at Jobalign. Doug: [00:11:21] I don't think there's any question that that's an inevitability. We from our perspective however you know we serve the customer whether out today. We keep a keen eye on what the future's going to hold. But the reality is today that restaurant needs you know the pain that our customer feels today that is look am I going to ship. I've got to cover. You know I've got a room that needs to be cleaned. I've got some food that needs to be cooked and I'm in business myself turn my utilities off. I'm not in business. If they're not working so that's the pain that we're really dealing with today. Doug: [00:12:03] Not withstanding what's going to happen because really you know we're our eyes are on it today but our solution addresses the pain that they feel today. Chad: [00:12:11] Well why couldn't why couldn't this platform also be adapted to engineers. Or any. I mean because it's its process methodology and it's its engagement. So I would assume that your outreach obviously would have to change dramatically. But other than that I mean it's really just the core of the process that happens and the engagement piece right? Doug: [00:12:31] So one of the pieces that we really value is that network that multi-million population network of hourly workers. And we. Yes. OK. OK. Yes. Yes you're right that it could it could for a variety of purposes but but there's 77 million workers in the U.S. and underserved today. Now employers are in pain and so we don't don't cook too many don't see that Italian restaurant that cooks you know Chinese and American and Thai at the same time because it's not going to do well. We are nailing that part of the puzzle right. We're about trying to make sure that we solve the pain of hourly hiring. Chad: [00:13:15] So you are focused focused focused on... Joel: [00:13:17] Nothing wrong with that. Chad: [00:13:17] No.. on the in the room with no way. And that's one of the things that we hear and I'm glad that I appreciate the candor on that. One of the things that we hear is Well yeah well we'll look to grow and oh yeah that's a great idea which we should definitely do that. And to understand what the opportunity is and to be able to go after that opportunity especially in that market because again it's not it's not a small opportunity at all. And you have. What percentage of that today. Right. Doug: [00:13:45] Totally. And the other part of it is that our company and every employee in our company has a very real desire to help that hourly worker. And it's not it's not just talk it's the culture of who we are a part of how we were founded was around this notion we want to do well of the company but we want to do good at the same time that we can build something that hits close to 20,000 people who work last month. Dang that's you know that that's important. So it's important work.. Joel: [00:14:18] In the fields Chad: [00:14:20] In the fields that's some impact right their. Look at him he's tearing up a little bit. Joel: [00:14:24] It seems to me like you're on the forefront of a younger and in many cases younger audience... Doug: [00:14:33] Not me personally. Joel: [00:14:33] Nobody at this table personally. And so this is such a sweet view more than a lot of people in this industry see you know trends that are before they're mainstream so you probably saw Snapchat being used by your audience before snapchat came in. So what what technologies do you see coming up that we should be paying attention to. We have voice assistance we have we are wearables like what are you saying. Doug: [00:15:01] I'm not sure about wearables. I mean I think that the profound technology you already mentioned which is just the name of the company that you take AI you take what's happening in being able to really understand how to predict behavior. And then you look at what's going happen with the whole robotics industry and the change there. That the combination of those pieces are going to be radically change the game. But I don't think it's going to happen today. So again... Chad: [00:15:40] There's a huge need now. Doug: [00:15:41] Yeah we you know your thought leaders in this space we have to stay ahead but at the same time the need is so profound. This hourly market has been underserved and bridging that gap of that need the job seeker helping them find a job that's 20 minutes closer to home. So they can pick up their child after day care and helkping that employer who truly has you know it's like utilities going in the building you know that's that's important work. Chad: [00:16:17] So do you work with like big like Marriott like big HQ Marriott or do you work you know from hotel to hotel or I mean how does it actually work from my clients standpoint. Doug: [00:16:28] In that particular vertical that we have a number of hotel rooms that are manageing 9o to 150 hotel projects and there's a whole industry that's fascinating. So but they have Marriott Hotels in Courtyard hotels right. That is very much a target market of ours. You know we so in the verticals where you can imagine those 77 million people working we are serving those verticals. Joel: [00:16:56] Are you global. Or just strictly just the U.S.. Do you have plans to go global. I assume that's a wholw ball where you have huge plans to take over the world at some point. Doug: [00:17:08] So right now we're just we're just focusing on this. Joel: [00:17:11] How does your how does your pricing work and I assume you make money in a traditional sense. Doug: [00:17:16] So we. So today you're probably spending outside of your in HR and the recruiting side of H.R. you're probably spending 30 40 percent of your money on sourcing. So probably 10 15 percent on technology. There's a big spend there that we will reduce that sourcing spends materially because we're just more efficient. We charge on a per applicant so there's no contract we make we make it easy for each person to buy our product because we don't ask them to sign long term contract and give us fifty thousand dollars up front so it is actually pay as you go pay for performance pay by candidate. So it's. And the price is what you are going to spend insourcing anyway. You're just going to get four times a throughput. So that's the that's the promise. And then we just try to you know try in a few markets straighten a couple of hotels targeted to the restaurants. Chad: [00:18:25] So when you get so many applicants does the system automatically shut down is there like a threshold ninety five applicants. And I guess I'm going to pay for all five of those applicants right. So there's a threshold for that. Doug: [00:18:36] Right. Then the risk on our side is that we have to go and get those out again. And they have to be qualified. Yeah right. So. So we work with you in design and designing with that template looks like making sure that we want to pay for qualified applicants so we take a little bit of a loss. Chad: [00:18:52] Right. Doug: [00:18:52] If we are sourcing intelligently so one of the one of the other pieces of technology that we've built is really how to be brilliant at sourcing a janitorial job in Memphis Tennessee versus New York City. What job were to go to this Craigslist let's work here. So we're constantly looking at and managing this spend against jobs to get that get that qualified talent. Joel: [00:19:17] So how do you market to the job seeker and which was the market or the most effective. Doug: [00:19:22] So there's a couple of different. There's a couple that just click collateral of the hold up cameras and audio. So it's a test. So it depends on your brand whether or not you have natural draw to your brand and if you do there's a lot of what we call organic traffic that we can optimize that we charge pennies because we're going to take that and put it into our system. Chad: [00:19:56] And if your brand sucks you're going to pay some money. Doug: [00:19:58] If there is nobody coming to yout career page. Joel: [00:19:58] Or it's not well known. I t doesn't have to suck. Doug: [00:20:04] Thank you. Thank you for helping me. Joel: [00:20:07] No problem. Doug: [00:20:08] So if you're not well along and you don't have any organic traffic then you're going to rely on us to source that of course is going to be based on our best efforts around job boards and the like. Joel: [00:20:22] So you basically customize a marketing program each month. Doug: [00:20:27] And they come in these kinds come in with you knowledge, their experience some here. They know that you know there's a there's a very large business in the auto space that will be launching a texting platform because they have a lot of a lot of brick and mortar stores. So text jobs to this number will be considered an organic play because they have to walk into their door but we text into our platform and creating opportunities you know that is really inexpensive but a super smart thing for them to do is that they have that presence. Right. So many cities in America. So if you didn't have that then. So we design again we just decided based upon them. Joel: [00:21:24] Well for listeners who want to learn more about jobalign and maybe sign up where would they go to learn more. Doug: [00:21:29] Well of course they come to Jobalign.com spelled J-O-B-A-L-I-G-N DOT com job and have ability to connect with us there. Joel: [00:21:41] Thanks for your time today Doug. Doug: [00:21:42] Thank you guys. Chad: [00:21:43] Thanks Doug. Chad: Okay, okay. Before we go. Remember, when I asked you about the whole reflex and check your text messages thing? Joel: Yeah, you know all about reflexes. And, then I brilliantly tied it to text messages 97% open rate, then I elegantly tied it to a better experience for your candidates. Don't laugh, Chad, I can be elegant. Chad: Whatever, man. I know it's redundant. You already heard about text to hire, but you're still not using text to hire from Nexxt. Joel: What?! Chad: I know, man. Joel: Come on, man. Chad: Since advertising takes repetition to soak in, I just thought I'd remind you again, this was all by elegant design. It's all about text to hire, and it's all about Nexxt. Joel: And, elegant design. So, go to chadcheese.com, click on the Nexxt logo, and get 25 ... yeah, I said 25% off your first text to hire campaign. Chad: Whoo! Joel: Engage better. Use text to hire from Nexxt. Two X's. Chad: Boo-yah! Chad: Thanks to our partners at TA tech. The Association for Talent Acquisition solutions. Remember to visit tatech.org. Chad: This has been The Chad & 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. #JobAlign #Nexxt #TATech #HighVolume #SHRM

On this week's show, Joel always says "NEVER GO FULL GOOGLE!" Well... CareerBuilder went "FULL GOOGLE" but wait there's more.... - We find out why Microsoft really bought LinkedIn - Monster's ad strategy goes full GEICO?..? - Monster loses the NASCAR ads - Stepstone swallows up Universum while Joel takes a nap - Facebook is focused on @Work - Russians launch Vera the HR robot - Chips, wristbands and now brain sensors take over employee insights and PrivateService.jobs launches right into the steaming hot pile of garbage Wait for El Chapo after the final credits... While you're listening check out out sponsors America's Job Exchange, Sovren and JobAdX! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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. Joel: We're back for another week, bitches. Welcome to Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm El Chapo. Joel: On this week's episode, it's a tale of two cities with Monster and CareerBuilder job search. Monster goes all Geico or gecko with their new ad strategy and China companies are putting a motion sensor headgear on employees to gauge happiness. Chad: What? Joel: You have been warned, Glassdoor. Here's your new competitor. It's another fun-filled week in the recruiting industry, kids. Stay attuned. Announcer: 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. 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. To learn more about Sovren AI matching, visit sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. Chad: Smooth. I love it. Joel: Silky smooth. Chad: Silky smooth. Shout-out. Joel: Let's go to the show, man. We got shout-outs. Chad: Shout-outs. Joel: You first. Chad: Right out of the gate, Steven Rothberg of collegerecruiter.com fame, he loved the interview that we did with Thad over at Talroo and Amit at JobsAdX. If you haven't listened to that pod, it's very simple. Just go to chadcheese.com. Click on podcast in the upper right-hand corner and you will have plenty to listen to. Not to mention also, for some reason and I don't know, maybe it's 'cause I can't read, people love the transcripts. Joel: I know. Chad: People love the transcripts. We hear people that actually listen and read the transcripts at the same time. Thanks to our transcript people over at Disability Solutions. That's good stuff. Who do you got? Joel: Does anyone have a better sponsorship lineup than our show? Chad: Never. Joel: I don't think so. Chad: Not ever. Joel: I don't think so. By the way, as long as our main navigation on chadcheese.com says podcasts, I can cope with you calling it a pod on the actual show, but if the navigation changes, you and I are going to have a problem. This shout-out goes to John Frazier. I recently wrote about CareerBuilder's trials and tribulations for ERE and shared it on LinkedIn. John was kind enough to comment. John is a former CareerBuilder salesperson. He currently works for Build Trust. He's also an Iowa grad, which is neither here nor there. Let you read into that however you'd like. Quote from John, "Cheesman, it's time to grow up and get off the HR tabloid train." John, John, thank you for reading. By the way, when you comment on my post, it means your network gets wind of it and they learn about my post as well. I appreciate all the love that John Fraser is giving us out there in the internet. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Okay, John, that was sweet. Ed from Philly has a new podcast drinking game. Apparently, every time I say chatbots, he takes a shot. I'm going to have to amp up my use of the word chatbots, Ed. Chatbot. Joel: Drink up, Ed. Chad: Chatbot, chatbots. Joel: Drink up, baby. Can he do that at work? Does he listen to us at work? That could cause problems. Chad: I don't know. I don't know. He might just be doing this on the weekend, which is a great chatbots game. Not to mention, props to Job Board Doc. This guy tweets as he listens to the show, has comments about the things that we're saying, likes it, doesn't it, it's all good, but props to the Job Board Doctor. Joel: That dude needs to get a life in a big way. I think all he does is listen to us. Chad: Stop it. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. Joel: I'd like to also introduce maybe a brand new game. Chad: Uh-oh. Joel: I'd say every time we say CareerBuilder ... Chad: Lastly, trip. Yes, there will be a trip. I just don't know when and where yet ... Joel: I don't know, just an idea. It might be some good comic relief. Chad: Oh, shit, dude. Joel: We might need to shorten that to just El Chapo, whatever that quote is. That sound bite was pretty good. Chad: Yeah, I'll work on that. Last for me, the Joel Hates Baker Mayfield, the draft night video received over 5500 views on LinkedIn. That shit was hilarious. Joel: I could not believe I'm still seeing likes and comments from that video. It was a very dark moment for me so I'm glad that the world can revel in my misery and the rest of my Browns fans. Chad: Dude, how can the Browns just screw stuff up constantly, constantly. Anyway ... Joel: Yeah. I'll also add that they passed up on the best defensive player in the draft at number four. Yeah, I hope that works out well for us, but I'm not real hopeful after almost 20 years of misery. Chad: They did pick up a who they can put on an island. Joel: They did. They need a corner. We'll see. We'll see. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Corners are hard to come by. Joel: On that note, I'll say we get to the show. CB goes all Google. Tell us about it. Chad: Yeah, CareerBuilder is going full Google, which I think it was you that said- Joel: Not just the tip. Chad: Yeah, I think it was you that said never go full Google. They put out a case study with Google and apparently now, CareerBuilder is 100% job search on the Google platform, which is that's saying a lot, man. I mean they've been around since 1995. They're a huge name in our industry and they realize that Google is going to do search better than they are, period. Doesn't matter, right? So 40% increase in users viewing jobs on their talent networks, which is big because the talent networks are actually the pages that they've created for their clients and they're more of like the cosmetic pages, more of the SEO types marketing pages. So they're getting 40% more on those pages, the talent network pages alone, which is pretty big. Joel: Can I be a little devil's advocate on this? Chad: Yeah. Joel: I'm keeping with this. Now ... By the way going full Google is fine, but going full Monty, I always recommend to anyone. There is a little danger here in getting totally in bed and married with Google for your job search. Isn't there? Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: I mean Google can turn that shit off. They can start charging an arm and a leg. I mean there are pitfalls to this, although the fact that we apparently know that most of the engineers at CareerBuilder are leaving. It is saving a hell of a lot money on the overhead and the technology piece, which makes things more profitable, which we know their private equity firm does love, but I do want to point out there is some danger in getting fully in bed with Google, Facebook and others like that. Chad: Agreed. Agreed, but those I think are the risks that you have to take because if you know that you are not going to out-Google Google I mean from a search standpoint, then I mean why waste money in trying to put your horse and buggy up against their Ferrari? To me, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Plus, they've also seen a lift in the number of users viewing jobs sent via automated alerts, 15% up on that. I mean it's more than just search. It's improving qualified applicants across the different major job categories like close to 20%. To your point, the chief product officer, I think his name's Humair, he pretty much said that the Google team, the Google team of engineers, incredibly responsive with his team. It's almost like they didn't need to have all those resources. Chad: Yes, some of the engineers that are definitely leaving on the search side of the house, that's only a portion of what CareerBuilder does, this I think will definitely alleviate that pain, but yeah, I mean it seems like that has been a good move for them to be able to move to this type of a search. It's a better search. There's no question. Then selling off, what we talked about last week, selling of Emsi. I mean they didn't know how to sell it. It was less than 1% of their revenues and if you don't know how to sell it, you don't know how to leverage it, shit, get rid of it. Those are a couple of good moves that we've seen by CareerBuilder. Joel: Can't touch this. I had to say that. MC Hammer. Let us not forget the lesson of BranchOut who was very successful on Facebook's platform until Facebook decided to change things up and destroy the company. I will tell you one company in the job board space that's pretty well known that is not getting on the Google train and that's Monster, who we know and talked about changes at the top, which have already been made. Most of their positions are filled, minus president/CEO, which we're still in the running for that obviously. They've decided to enhance job search as sort of phase 1 of their site recalculation and they're doing it on their own. They're increasing speed. They're increasing what they think is the matching component, jobs to candidates, and most importantly, my jaw dropped on the floor when I read this, they're getting rid of banner ads on both the website and the email alerts. You and I are old enough to remember when Monster looked like a NASCAR race. Chad: Oh, dude. Joel: They were asking for Social Security numbers and interstitial ads, pop ups. Yeah, that to me was crazy. Chad: Treasure Island, I think it was 2007, Jason Goldberg and you actually caught it on tape and put it on Cheezhead that is when he really blew that up and called Monster a crap product mainly because of these different interstitial ads, these different types of banner ads, this NASCAR-ing of Monster. Yeah, I know it's great to see that they're focusing on the usability. There's no question there. Here's the thing though. You can still do that and not have to plunk a bunch of money into search because when it comes down to it, you are still going to have to compete with the best search in the business, which is going to be Google. Joel: I agree. I just think getting in bed with another solution is dangerous and I think Monster is probably, although they're spending more than they'd probably want to, and some of these changes aren't crazy like speeding up your site, getting rid of crappy stuff like banner ads. These aren't insane changes that require a lot of people. But anyway, I think it's interesting how you have two sort of old time-y players. One's like, "Cut it all out, cut every resource and overhead that we have and get in bed with Google." The other's saying like, "Let's get a new executive team on board. Let's get some new resources thrown at this." Ultimately, I think they'll both lose to Google in some way or another and all the other bigger players, but for this point, it makes for interesting podcast topics. Chad: We've also heard that the API from many of the job boards that are out there, the API is pretty expensive. If you're a big site, it looks like you're going to be able to prospectively afford it, but they might have to take a look at it for smaller sites and the actual pricing for API calls. Joel: Yeah, right. Google gets you hooked on the heroin, right, the first few bits are free or cheap and then wham-o, we're going to increase the prices on you. Guess what? You can't do anything because you laid off all your resources and engineers so you're kind of screwed. Chad: Yeah, totally get it. Joel: You know how that goes. All right, we love talking about advertising and Monster, who continually gets it wrong with advertising we think, maybe got it right this time. You like the new ads. Chad: Yeah. I really feel like Monster's going Geico where they've got this monster, this little fuzzy, instead of this little nice little fuzzy monster that they can use in some- Joel: What do you call it? The Bugs Bunny- Chad: Knockoff, yeah, that's a rip off. Joel: Rip off. Chad: Bugs bunny cartoon. But it's almost like they're going the whole Geico route where Geico has the cute little gecko and that's for one demographic. Then the other demographic have these very smart, really brilliant kind of ads. I see Monster starting to do that and I think some of this is because they spent so God damn much money on that stupid freaking monster in the first place. From what we've heard from ad agencies and what not, kind of estimations and what not, that that one ad that they did was over $1 million. Joel: Does that monster have a name? The old one was Trumpasaurus, which I'm sure Donald sued them for that. I don't think the new one has a monster ... Yes, Monster takes Manhattan was a pretty bad ad. These new ones are quick 15-second ones and it's like yeah, I'm looking for a job on Monster. It'll never happen. Then they're switched with the new employee because Monster is so fast with the hiring process. My takeaway from the ads is I think advertising should work really hard to differentiate yourself from the competition. All the Indeed ads look really anti-Google. They're anti-technology, faces, a lot of human stuff, don't let algorithms destroy us kind of thing. Chad: Yeah, I still think they're trying to find their way in who they are, in who they're trying to message to be because none of it really gels at all. Joel: Are we talking Indeed or Monster? Chad: Yeah, Indeed, Indeed. The Monster ads I think are great, 15-second ads. The One Foot Out the Door campaign that they put out first and they have three or four different ... One Foot Out the Door, a doctor who had one foot out the door, I mean those are really cool. They're really smart. They were funny. Then this newest one called Boxes where, as you'd said, it's really cheeky and they're pushing the mobile app. I think it's really cool. I was talking to somebody earlier this week and I think they had some great advice. Run that first Super Bowl ad again. It's cool. Now because it's a throwback and you don't have to spend a dime on recreating it. It's a classic and maybe some of those people can fall back in love with the Monster they once knew before Sal's dumb ass came and screwed everything up. Joel: It's akin to rehashing the old Coca-Cola commercial of "I'd like to teach the world to sing." Chad: Really? Joel: I want to get back to my differentiation point before you interrupted me so rudely. Chad: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I do that. Joel: To me, the differentiator of Indeed is like we're human and Google is a machine, right, but no one has really thought about mobile first job search, like we are the mobile solution. In a generation that's really mobile in terms of millennials and people who don't remember Monster ads back in 1998 and personally think Monster is an energy drink, to me, the differentiator in this ad is that Monster is positioning itself as the mobile solution to find jobs, which appeals to a younger audience I think, but also most people, particularly on a television set where they have their mobile device, but I would really like to see Monster sort of push this mobile thing and really create solutions for the watch, which we know from quarterly reports from Apple, people are buying this watch and they're buying smart watches. I think voice stuff, they should get big into that, leapfrog this whole internet search thing, Google thing and really be above and beyond what we typically think of job search. Chad: It has to be lifestyle, right, and if you can embed yourself in the lifestyle, in the wearables ... I'm still not a big believer in wearables just yet, but I mean being able to talk to Google Home, to turn your lights off, to be able to get reports on jobs and things of that nature, I think there's no question, it's smart and I believe again, that's where instead of spending money on your search and making your search better, right, don't do that shit, dude. Just spend the money on being able to evolve in these different areas. Joel: I also think ... Have you seen the new Facebook ad? Where they talk about how Facebook started. It connected everyone and then it got bad with hackers, Russian shit. Then now we're going to change that and be back to what we used to be. Have you seen this ad? Chad: I haven't seen that ad, no. Joel: Which is a great ad and it sort of goes in line with the old Dominos ad that we used to talk about where they said, "Hey, our pizza sucks. We're going to change it." I'd love to see Monster come out with an industry ad, even if it's just a YouTube video that says, "Hey, HR person, we know we lost our way. We forgot about the job seeker, blah, blah, blah, but we're under new management now. We're going to change that and here's what we're doing, the change that we're making." I think that would be a really genius move by monster. I don't know if they're going to do it or not, but I certainly think that they should. Chad: They could do that. They could do that with that old Super Bowl ad, right, and say, "The Monster that you knew and loved ... " Joel: Yeah. I mean going back to your roots, "Here's when we were good. Remember when you liked us?" I don't think that whole ad should be that 'cause again, I think there's a whole generation that can't connect with that ad, particularly on the job seeker side, but to sort of reconnect with that like, "Hey, here's how we evolved. We were on the forefront of job search on online. We lost our way. Now we're back and we're on mobile. We're doing all these things." Anyway, we're basically doing Monster's marketing for them and we probably should not do that for free, but this is what we do on this show. Speaking of not for free, unless you have any more point to make on the ads, I say let's hear from one of our awesome sponsors. Chad: I would just like to say that you said Indeed is trying to be more human and knowing how they've been interacting in this industry, they've been probably the coldest, hardest brand to work with. That's to me is rich. If they want to change and become more human, they should act it. Joel: Damn. All right, we'll end on that. Announcer: America's Job Exchange is a market leader in diversity recruitment and an OFCCP compliant solution provider. We serve over 1,000 customers consisting of federal contractors and subcontractors to SMBs and Fortune 500 organizations. America's Job Exchange specializes in job distribution to over 6500 state one-step career centers and community-based organizations, ensures the creation and maintenance of state credentials, obtains veteran preference on job postings, robust outreach management and supports effective positive recruitment efforts designed to recruit individuals with disabilities, veterans, women and minorities. For more information, call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Chad: Yeah, looking for outcomes, want a more diverse workforce, give AJE a call. Joel: You just love you some compliance and diversity and [crosstalk 00:20:47]. Chad: Dude, research shows that a more diverse culture in your organization, it drives success. I'm all about success. Joel: Okay, Donald. Chad: Thank you. Joel: Let's about a story out of Microsoft LinkedIn and why they paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn. You love this story. Tell us about it. Chad: Dude, it's huge. Really, we're talking about ... Joel: Huge. Chad: ... looking to kill SalesForce with Dynamics 365 coupled with LinkedIn and I think ... We'll go through this, but at the end of it, there's some shining hope possibly for talent acquisition to be able to use these same processes and the same Dynamics 365 type of platform. Right out of the gate, the 365 actually will power products pages for companies, which allows lead forms and those types of things. When you start to get the cookies and the actual information from lead forms, then you can start to re-target. This is all sales focused, but still it's engagement. It's much like talent acquisition. We're still trying to get that individual who has the skills and obviously, the experience that we need. They know your browsing history. They can hit you with obviously email engagement with different sales triggers. It really gets deep into engagement from a customer standpoint, right. Chad: This is where they're turning their guns with LinkedIn toward SalesForce. Here's a really cool piece that they're putting into this and this is very Big Brother. If a buyer really seems disengaged, what the system will do is prompt you to through LinkedIn ask one of your shared people in your network to get an introduction to this person. Joel: I need to stop you because for the guy who gave me such a hard time for "drinking the LinkedIn Kool-Aid," you, sir, sound like you're enjoying a nice cold glass of LinkedIn right now. Chad: From a talent acquisition side of the house, it's all about engagement. If we in talent acquisition start viewing the candidate as a customer and use these powerful engagement systems, the business will better understand us and then, we will better understand them. We will be able to start getting candidates the way and engaging candidates the way that we should have for years and get rid of the black hole. It's not just about LinkedIn doing this. We see other companies like the Candidate.IDs, we see Crowded, we see all these companies. I'm big on being able to ensure that we get rid of this God damn black hole that we've had for decades. Joel: I'm just glad that you're finally agreeing with me on some of these points. Chad: Fuck off. Joel: I think that SalesForce is an obvious target for Microsoft paying for this. I think Google is another and maybe less so Facebook, but Google had to be super pissed that they lost social to Facebook and then, they lost LinkedIn to Microsoft. That has to rub them in all kinds of the wrong way. I agree SalesForce is upset and ticked off, although, I think it's a much smaller player than what we're talking about with Google and enterprise stuff and software, but yeah, the 26 billion at the time made a lot of jaws drop and I think when all is said and done, the LinkedIn acquisition by Microsoft will go down as one of the more savvy acquisitions by a major company in a long time. Joel: Speaking of acquisitions, let's keep on that for a second. You're also really excited about the StepStone acquisition of Universum. Tell us who those guys are for those who don't know and why you're excited by it. Chad: Yeah. StepStone, they have job sites in 21 countries. They have a ton of job sites, over 25, 26 million different CVs, 15 million active subscribers. StepStone is a huge network of job boards all across the world. It's global. Universum, on the other hand, is a Swedish data company that focuses on branding, building stories, slogans and market insights. All these things, all these warm and fluffy things are focused around engagement, right. You've got this hard line job board provider in a StepStone and they don't have anything that's really there to pull people in and engage them. That's what Universum is there to help them with. Joel: I think we both agree in talking initially, this is driven by Google. What do we mean by that? Chad: Yeah, no question. Google is making companies. Now let's say for instance, StepStone, without Google getting into the market and showing their hand that hey, we're going to push Google for jobs everywhere, StepStone has to be something more than just a bunch of job boards because they are not going to be able to compete with Google in many of the different countries that they're in. Now obviously, there are going to be high priority countries that are more susceptible right out of the gate, but still, it makes a hell of a lot of sense that they start to diversify the portfolio that they're going to be providing so that they can diversify revenue streams because the one revenue stream, jobs ... Joel: Yeah. Bye-bye. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's so interesting how companies, how job boards are deciding to fight Google for jobs, right. You have Indeed saying, "To hell with it, we're not playing. We're building a moat and hopefully, the Huns will stay at bay." We're looking at CareerBuilder who's saying, "Screw it. We'll get in bed big time. We'll cut overhead and have Google just run all of out shit." You have Monster sort of playing, but we're going to keep our own search. It's ultimately making job boards look in the mirror and say, "The future is Googles in terms of job postings and how do we combat that?" In StepStone's instance, and I think you're right that it was driven probably by Google and looking at the future, and maybe even seeing traffic numbers with any state side or [stalking the 00:27:11] state side companies and what Google is doing and we know that they're launching in Canada and India and soon to be in a country near you. In this case, they're saying, "Hey, let's get on the branding train. Let's help companies with that." Joel: We've talked about the impact that Glassdoor reviews and employer reviews are incredibly impactful. They affect recruiting. They affect people turning down job offers so branding is going to continually be a major important part of company's outlook whether its job's on Google or not. I think it's a good step. We don't know how much they paid for it. That wasn't disclosed, but one job board's strategy to combat Google we're sort of on board with for the most part. Chad: Yeah, yeah, no question. Wait, we still got ... Joel: Facebook. We can't have a show without the big three. Chad: We got more StepStone stuff because totaljobs and Jobsite became one. There's more news out of StepStone. To be able to ... First, you buy Universum. Joel: Sorry. Yeah. StepStone, what'd they do next? Chad: All right, dumb ass. Two of their sites, TotalJobs and Jobsite are now under one platform, but that seems like an amazing waste of money. Dude, this is the business side of things. I know you have problems understanding it sometimes, but this makes sense. Joel: Sorry, sorry. Are we on to the next story yet? Chad: You don't think it's important that these business models, about these business models and we go back to the Monster board and OCC business models and how that actually came up, right. What happened under that? Do you remember? That was kind of big at that point, right. These are two of the biggest job sites in fucking England, the UK, and you don't think it's a big deal. Are you kidding me? Joel: Dude, calm down. Chad: You're the one snoring and shit. Joel: I'm sorry. I apologize to our UK affiliates that I found that not too exciting. Sorry. You're salty today. I should be the salty one. I got the Browns to root for. Anyway, are we on to the next story? Chad: Yes. Joel: It's a simple one. Facebook, we can't have a show without talking Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Indeed and Facebook. They continue to focus on their Slack competitor AtWork. This week announced they've integrated with 50 SaaS solutions and they've launched a bot directory or they've partnered with a bot directory or integrated with a bot directory so Slack needs to sell fast. I don't know what is going on with them, but Facebook continues to be focused on this piece of their business. We haven't heard much from the job search stuff yet, but I see ads for work all the time and news alerts come across my desk fairly frequently about their messaging system. Chad: It's scary because now are we going to have to worry about Russian bots trying to engage us and get data from us that way, too? Facebook doesn't have this shit figured out yet, but yet we're looking at bots in different ways to actually engage users to prospectively pull more data out of them. Is that what I'm hearing? Joel: As long as they're not integrating with the KGB, I guess that ... Chad: They didn't know that before. Joel: That's true. I mean Facebook Connect is still a thing. A whole bigger question is do people really give a damn about their privacy on Facebook? I don't know. I don't think you're seeing mass exodus from Facebook, but they will play the game. They'll play the PR game. They will do some security updates and checks, and they'll make sure this doesn't happen again, but the fact that they want to put work in as many integrations as possible, I think that says they're serious about employment. I don't think they've ever not been serious and I expect to see more stuff from their job posting/classifieds/we-want-to-kill-Craigslist strategy, but for now work seems to be a real focus for them, which is why Amazon will buy Slack this year. Chad: You're still banking on that one. You're still banking on that one. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Chad: Yeah, again, I don't think they're going to buy them for $9 billion or whatever the valuation is right now, but yeah. No, to watch Facebook move more toward business, I just hope they do it in a very sensible way. Joel: I agree. Let's hear from new sponsor, JobAdX and then, we'll talk about real fun stuff. Chad: Oh, Jesus. Announcer: JobAdX, as the best ad tool in the industry, we provide publishers and job boards higher rev share than other partners through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30-40% greater and more. We're like Ad-sense, but with a better split for you and added relevance for your audience. JobAdX also offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs and staffing firms, real time dynamic bidding and delivery for your clients' postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. Not set and regret. Announcer: All of this is done with the flexibility of cost per impression, click, or application. We also offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. Finally, JobAdX delivers direct clients, superior candidates through the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com. You can also email us at joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com to get estimates or to begin working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Chad: And a case of Guinness. Joel: Love the background music on that by the way. They do know our audience a little bit. Although, if you knew their executive team, you wouldn't necessarily equate that to hair metal. Chad: Dude, I'm the one who put the background music on that. Joel: Oh, did you? Chad: Yeah. Joel: There you go. That's why. All right. All right, we love to end the show on the most important topics of the week. We have three here. I don't care which one we start with. Chad: Private service, let's do privateservice.jobs. Joel: Okay. Chad: They tout themselves as the very first six-figure job board. Is that the case? Is that the case? Joel: Yes, yes. For those of us who remember the original The Ladders, now they're just Ladders, their thing was 100K jobs like we only have 100K jobs. They stuck it to the job seeker by making them pay to access these six-figure jobs. The model went away basically after 2008 when there were no jobs at all, let alone $100,000 jobs so they've changed their ways and whatever. It was inevitable that somebody would come along and do this 100K thing and in this case, it's 100K for celebrity service jobs I guess, right? Chad: Interesting the type of employment that they're ... Again, private service, but first off, I'd like to say that The Ladders is still The Ladders because take a look at their domain. It's still theladders.com. They want to pull this whole, "We're Ladders bullshit." Now, look at your domain. But back to privateservice.jobs, they're trying to do kind of what The Ladders did in charging job seekers. You can search jobs as a job seeker and just see what they have out there, but then you have to sign up for weekly, monthly and/or annual subscriptions. They're looking to game that. Joel: I don't know if you know something I don't, but on their site, it basically says launching June 26th. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Joel: As far as I know, we don't know who they're going to be charging ... Chad: Oh, no, we do. It was in a press release. It was in a press release. Joel: Oh, it's a press ... Chad: Yeah, yes. Joel: They're going to stick it to job seekers as well as employers. Chad: Yes, yeah. Joel: This is more predatory crap. They're going to sell the promise of be Kanye's private whatever for $100,000, right? People are going to be like, "Yeah, I want to be Kanye's private valet." I'm going to pay them $19 a month to try to be Kanye's valet. Chad: Yeah, they're going to stick it to job seekers and employers get it for free. Let me make that correction. Employers get it for free. Job seekers have to pay. Here's the big problem in that whole model itself, The Ladders. There you go. It's already been tried. It failed miserably. The money is with the companies, first off. That's who's going to pay for this, not to mention, why are you trying to stick it to somebody who is looking for a job? Joel: Because people will pay to work for Taylor Swift or whoever ... I'm serious. They're counting on people to want to do these jobs with celebrities. Chad: You know it's going to major C listers and shit like that. There's going be no Taylor Swift on there. Joel: I have no clue. Kanye West isn't hiring people. It's probably his agent or his ... Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joel: This is total crap. Chad: Garbage pile. Joel: They should be ashamed of themselves for doing this. You thought it was interesting that they are a .jobs domain. Chad: Yeah, because .jobs did not allow ... The actual top level domain, .com, .org. So .jobs did not allow job boards to buy their domain. They actually did a ... When I was with DirectEmployers, they did a deal with us and we launched 40,000 different domains, which really pissed off a bunch of job board companies, but from my understanding and our sources is that was an epic fail and they're going to start pulling those .jobs away from DirectEmployers and this to me looks like they're going to start selling those domains to job boards. If you are a job board and you're looking for a better domain, which some of you have shitty domains, there might be a .jobs domain in your future so go check them out. Joel: If you'd rather pay 129 for a domain instead of $12, then have at it? Do you want to talk about brain sensors or Vera next? Chad: Yeah. No, let's do the brain sensors. Joel: Brain sensors, company in China or companies maybe in construction I believe are putting brain sensors on hard hats to gauge the happiness of their workers. Now on the surface, this is a funny story and it's kind of amusing to think of a bunch of construction workers with sensors on their brains. I'm sure there won't be any health issues with that whatsoever. Is there a day when Glassdoor and sites of their ilk are irrelevant because through facial recognition, cameras, through body temperature, through voice recognition, through just technology, employees know what their workforce feels like because of all these technologies and they don't have to count on them going to a random website and typing in, "I hate my boss and my life sucks," right, because I know that from technology and I think amusing as it is, technology will eventually give employers a gauge on how their employees are feeling. Chad: I think this is totally enemy of the state stuff, right. They're trying to get every aspect of you so that ... Hell, they don't even have to talk to you to find out how you're feeling. The camera on your laptop or PC or what the hell ever, they can do the facial recognition. They've got microchips that they're putting into people. They've got these hard hat sensors. I mean it's just so fucking weird. Joel: I forgot about the microchips. Thanks for ... Chad: It's so weird that we are really supposed to be focusing on the people, but yet, we don't want to engage the people to see how they're really doing. We want technology to engage them instead. Joel: Yeah. Governments will do this, right? Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: Governments will have sensors and facial rec and they'll know how their voters feel. That's pretty scary shit. Chad: It is. Joel: Equally scary is Vera, the Russian HR robot. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I love that she's the HR Robot and not just Vera, the Russian robot. Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: As if HR makes it less threatening. Chad: Again, there are Russian companies out there that are totally legit. I appreciate that. I don't know who they are, but just the whole landscape right now with everything that we're dealing with, with data and information and so on and so forth, if I'm a company and I want to actually go buy a chatbot, then guess what? It's probably not going to be a Russian chatbot because I don't want my data sucked into whatever the hell they've got going on over there. Again, a lot of it has to do with optics I think, but obviously, it's reality as well because the shit's happening and we've seen it. Joel: How many American companies are going to get in bed with a Russian robot to hire people? It's funny stuff. Chad: Dude, total optics. No. Yeah, it's crazy. Joel: Yeah. But according to the story, people like talking to a robot. They find it enjoyable. This is apparently some big companies are doing this. PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, HBC, etc. yeah, and whether it's Russian or not, robotics and automation, we talk about this almost every week, this stuff is perpetrating the HR hiring recruiting process and it's not going away, right. The HR Russian robot will eventually be the American HR robot and they'll hire your service people and your hourly people and everything else. Yeah, here's to Russia for HR robot trailblazing the path to better hiring all over the world. Chad: And scaring the living shit out of us while you do it. Joel: Are we out, dude? Chad: We out. Joel: Out. Announcer: This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, GooglePlay or wherever you get your podcasts 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. El Chapo: Lastly, trip, yes, there will be a trip. I just don't know when and where yet. As soon as I will know, you will know. And know this, we're not sleeping on this. It's not like ... Chad: We're not sleeping on this. El Chapo: We actually had a trip done and sold out three weeks ago. Chad: We had a God damn trip. El Chapo: We had a great hotel in Cabo. Chad: In Cabo. El Chapo: We had dates confirmed. Problem is Cabo has become completely destabilized. Literally, this holiday season, they've had over 50,000 reservations canceled. Evidently, when El Chapo ... Chad: There it is. El Chapo: ... was incarcerated, the code of ethics that he's instilled in Cabo Mexico has gone away. Chad: Code of ethics from El Chapo. El Chapo: There's no code of ethics. There's no code of honor. All of a sudden, there's a war for power. You're seeing things happen that you haven't seen in the past where people, where gangs, drug dealers were actually going to restaurants and shoot up the place. That never happened before. Bottom line is this, I wish I could sit here and tell you we ... #Careerbuilder #Monster #TheLadders #StepStone #Facebook #Robots #LinkedIn #GoogleJobsAPI #Google

An Uncommon.co EXCLUSIVE... It's Tony Lee and it's time to get your recruiting industry GEEK ON! That's right the boys sit down with industry icon Tony Lee for a jaunt down Memory Lane, an update on what's new at SHRM and even talk a little Cheap Trick. What's in this episode: - How the WSJ got into the "job board business" - It was Jung Lee not Junglee - Seriously? - The birth of Adicio - Cheezhead antics - An Online Career Center (OCC.com) insider story - "huckster extraordinaire" - MonsterBoard before it was reborn as Monster.com - PURE RECRUITING TECH HISTORY BABY! Visit Uncommon now and gain access to this red-hot start-up's free trial now and receive 5 FREE candidates! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Chad: The Chad and Cheese Podcast, brought to you in partnership with TAtech, the Association for talent acquisition solutions. Visit TATech.org Joel: Chad, why do recruiters spend money on unqualified or uninterested candidates? Chad: Dude, I don't know , because they're recruiters? I mean, what in the hell are you talking about anyway? Joel: Okay. Stick with me here. In a PPC campaign when you're sourcing, you're paying per click and you don't know who the click is coming from, it could be a qualified click if you're lucky, but most likely it's an unqualified click, you know? And you're still gonna pay, regardless. Chad: Yeah and it's pretty much the same in a subscription model. You're paying to open the door to any candidate, not necessarily qualified ones. Joel: Exactly. So the answer is, current pricing models suck. Chad: Duh. Joel: So what if you handed over cash for only interested and qualified candidates? And I'm talking actually qualified. I mean candidates that meet all of your job requirements, from years in an industry to specific skills. Chad: Okay, I gotcha, now you're talking about Uncommon. Joel: Bingo, Uncommon is where fantasy comes true, and right now they only charge $9 and 99 cents for interested and qualified candidates. Chad: Seriously dude, do you fantasize about this stuff? Weirdo. So Uncommon is simple, you set your monthly budget and Uncommon only charges you when you get an interested applicant that meets or exceeds your job requirements. To sweeten the deal they're offering a 5 free candidate trial. Just go to uncommon.co to make your free account. That's uncommon.co. 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 recruitment 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: SHRM, talent, Vegas, who's excited? Pretty much after this interview it's all downhill so we're basically peaking at our first interview and it all goes down. Chad: So much bullshit, he's like "me". Tony: I have to talk to these two idiots, are you kidding me? Joel: So this is the highlight of your day [crosstalk 00:02:47] Tony: Career. I mean come on. You know I actually woke up this morning from a dream about this, I was so excited it was in my dreams. Joel: You weren't like sweating [crosstalk 00:03:02] we weren't in our statue of David outfits were we? Tony: I actually have one of those on my Caesar's Palace [crosstalk 00:03:11] Joel: Nice, nice. SHRM Tony: I'm like, "I think you gave this to the wrong guy." Joel: Let's interview, or let's introduce our guest before we get too much further into this. Tony Lee. Tony: Tony Lee. Joel: VP of editorial at Shrm. You can find out more at Shrm.org. We are at the Shrm talent show. Tony: Yes. Joel: Tony is a long time industry person. Tony: Yes. Joel: Give our listeners an elevated pitch of your experience and where you've come from. Tony: Holy cow, so I started at the Wall Street Journal in the early 80s and covering job hunting and career management. I ran a publication that few of your listeners have ever heard of called the National Business Employment Weekly which is a 100 page tablet. Joel: NBU. Tony: NBU. Are you ready for this? It cost in the early 80s, it cost $3.95 and we sold 100,000 copies every week. Joel: Holy shit. Tony: It was a huge, huge profit maker. Joel: Yeah. Tony: The idea was, the Wall Street Journal had 22 regional editions and each one had different help wanted ads in it. Joel: Yeah. Tony: We put 'em all into one publication and then had four or five articles every week about how to interview more effectively, how to whatever. So it was for job seekers. And it was hugely popular because it was pre-internet. Joel: What was the advertising cost? The $3.95 was the actual job seeker to buy it. Tony: Right. Joel: But if I wanted a full page ad in that sucker, what was I gonna spend? Tony: A million. Joel: Holy cow. Chad: No way. Tony: It was a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal and then that got you in. Joel: Ah. Chad: So is that the way we could get in? Tony: Advertise in the journal and you gotta- Joel: Wow. Tony: We broke the rule for Jeff Taylor. Joel: Wow imagine that. Tony: [crosstalk 00:04:47] "I want full page monster ads in the back cover" and we said, "OK." We gave him some crazy price, never expected him to take it. And then David Price then threw a shoe in. Chad: Dude. Tony: Anyone old enough remembers what [crosstalk 00:04:54] Joel: So in 2018 dollars that's like a billion dollar ad. Tony: That's right. Chad: Oh dude. Joel: It's crazy money. Chad: Yeah. Tony: And we had, at that point we had blimps, we had Superbowl ads, we were a money making machine. So doing that kind of shit was nothing. Not to mention he loved to just throw it out there. Chad: Yep. Tony: It was pretty amazing. Joel: God it took us all of two minutes to get onto Jeff Taylor. Tony: All right so I'll keep going. So I did this for a bunch of times, moved over to Wall Street Journal and wrote a bunch of columns. They used to have a column called "Managing Your Career" on Tuesdays, so I would write that column a bunch and then moved to the team that created and launched WSJ.com. And from that I became publisher of all the Wall Street Journal sites other than wsj.com. So Career Journal was the big career site and we also had College Journal for college students, Start-up Journal for entrepreneurs, Real Estate Journal, Opinion Journal. Tony: So I did that for a bunch of years- Joel: That's a hell of a lot of content. Tony: Oh it's a ton of content, we had a big content team, we were writing stuff every day. Joel: Are they still doing that much content in those spaces? Tony: No, it changed. Joel: Yeah? Tony: Yeah, this was pre Rupert Murdoch so- Joel: Were you working the Gutenberg Press as well? Tony: Let me stroke my long beard to see. Yep. I mean when the internet came in we embraced it big-time and made a lot of money. Joel: Yeah. Tony: Yeah and you know from 99 to the early 2000s the money just poured in. Because Venture Capital was part of my deal was I helped launch Future Step, remember FutureStep? Joel: Oh yeah. Tony: Korn Ferry. Joel: Uh-huh Korn Ferry. Tony: Corn Ferry Wall Street Journal product. And the money that came outta that we helped launch something called freeagent.com. I don't know if you remember. Chad: Yes. Joel: What year was that? What year was that? Tony: 2002. Joel: Yeah, oh shit. Tony: The money was great [crosstalk 00:06:44] brand with somebody who would help them advance their brand and bring in folks. Joel: Yeah. Tony: So we went out to the journal audiences and said, "Here you need to sign up for this." And they did. It worked and it was effective- Joel: Where are they now? Tony: FutureStep's still going. Joel: Okay. Tony: Futurestep still has that as part of their portfolio. So did that for a long time and then in 2006 moved to Adicio, needs a little back story. So in 97, 98 Rick Miller, the guy who created Adicio, Careercast.com at the time, we needed a new platform. We had launched an online job platform through Wall Street Journal. With a company out of Seattle called Jung Lee. Chad: Jung Lee? I always pronounce it jungle-ee. Tony: It's Jung Lee. Tony: J-U-N-G-L-E-E. Chad: Really? Tony: So their first client was [crosstalk 00:07:36] Joel: That is way back. Tony: Yep. There first client was the [crosstalk 00:07:40] so they laid out all the stuff how great it was gonna be and we signed up as a client. And we immediately started getting requests from companies, you know, "We need to customize this, we need to be able to post ten jobs not eight jobs." You know, whatever it was and they were like, "Yeah the next release and the next release." And then next release never came and we just kept asking for it. So one weekend the two founders of Jung Li created automated shopping cart. Within six months they sold it to Amazon for 30 million dollars, they then took the recruitment piece of their business and sold it to a company in Canada for 3 million dollars. So that shows you how much investment they had made. Tony: So at the same time, when that became obvious, I went out and found Rick. And he was doing data aggregation. He was doing it primarily for defense contractors. You know, Lockheed Martin, [crosstalk 00:08:23] people like that. And I said well, "Can you do the same aggregation for commercial job board." And took about six months and he built it. And at the same time there was no such thing as wrapping, created wrapping, we could go in, we'd come and grab all the jobs, import them in, all that kind of stuff. Tony: So we launch our job database, Wall Street Journal, on this Adicio platform, and within weeks the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Orange County Register they're all like, "We need this." And so he came back and said, "Well it's just me I need money to go out and hire developers to build all of this" so put together a business plan, put it up the flagpole at the Wall Street Journal and it got approval. And we bought a 40% equity stake in Adicio, and he had the money to go hire programmers. And it boomed. Started adding all these newspaper clients and association clients and all sorts of different clients. Tony: And it was great. Joel: Were you guys competitive with career building newspaper relationships, Hot Jobs and Monster at the time? You were sort of another competitor in that space? Tony: Well what it was was that the career building newspapers were kind of stuck in the career building platform and they never liked it - from the beginning. The Monster papers, initially Monster was just going to partner in [crosstalk 00:09:36] do it. Adicio's sweet spot turned out to be the independent papers, that weren't part of big chains. So you got like, Seattle, you know Boston and different who were more independent. And they ran on the Adicio platform. And then we did a partnering with Monster. So Adicio and Monster had a long partnership where Monster couldn't handle all the back end work so Adicio was actually the technology behind the Monster Newspaper Partnership Program for years. Joel: [crosstalk 00:10:03] was that after they went, bought Hot Jobs and acquired all those newspaper relationships? Tony: It was actually before. Joel: Okay. Tony: And then extended. Joel: And then extended. Tony: Beyond. Joel: Okay. Tony: Yeah, so I left. So they had gotten really growing, I had gotten on the board of Adicio while working at the Wall Street Journal. And they had gotten to the point where they had just added two big East Coast clients, Advance Internet and New York Times. And both of those papers said, "you need somebody" and so I had been working with them and they said [inaudible 00:10:31] so we worked it out and I joined Adicio full time continuing to manage the Dow Jones investment. And it was great. So did that until three years ago when I came to Shrm. Joel: Yep. So we're seeing a lot of, you mentioned Career Builder and they didn't like that relationship. Well Career Builder has recently gone from their relationships and Real Match slash [crosstalk 00:10:55] whatever the called. Tony: PandoLogic. [crosstalk 00:11:00] Joel: [crosstalk 00:11:01] yeah. Tony: Connection and he's here too at SHRM [crosstalk 00:11:07] Joel: Recruitology is sort of heading head first into the newspaper space, is that a smart decision. Are those guys still getting tons of traffic, and is that something yeah, he's shaking his head for the listeners [crosstalk 00:11:20] Tony: You know what's the long term future of the newspaper business? In the job board space, probably not great. Joel: Okay. Tony: It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense but I think there's a long term future for online newspapers. There's no question because of the local community aspect. They can put feet on the street, can do what nobody else does until the Politico or somebody else makes that kind of investment, you gotta rely on anything you can get. Joel: That's content though, right, [crosstalk 00:11:46] Tony: Content but the question is, if you live in Dubuque, Iowa do you need to go to a Dubuque, Iowa newspaper site to find a job? Joel: You're going to Google. [crosstalk 00:11:55] Tony: You're going to Google- Joel: And then- Tony: Thank you that's right and then going [crosstalk 00:11:59] Joel: Not any more. Tony: Just so they can get branded search and I mean that's just not sustainable [crosstalk 00:12:08] Joel: If we had Terry here I think he would say something like programmatic- Tony: Right- Joel: Is gonna make that so much better, and they're gonna integrate with the content. Tony: Well you know, and everyone does it. It wasn't invented there. I mean Adicio's been doing it, essentially Programmatic and niche networks from day one. Joel: Yeah. Tony: I mean that's always there and it's still there. And it still works. I mean if you were looking for, build up university hiring and you don't know where to go, Programmatic's gonna put you in front of a diverse audience wherever it happens to be. And frankly, I'm not sure it matters who you buy in from because it's gonna get [crosstalk 00:12:42] everybody's sharing the same source it's gonna end up the same, whether it's Jobs To Careers or whatever they're now called. Same thing, I mean they're all putting in front of that same audience- Chad: What are they called now? [crosstalk 00:12:47] Joel: Which I think I why you see like Job Boardio, or Board IO. Whatever we're calling it. Are getting caught because the distribution is so important. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: I mean it's a commodity, I mean jobs are everywhere, they're all on google, everywhere, so how do you differentiate yourselves and put eyeballs on your jobs that aren't necessarily gonna be found. Tony: And you know the key ends up being who has the audience. And from our perspective sure, and we've got HR people, there's no question. They go to SHRM.org, they trust shrm.org, we stick job postings contextually targeted into whatever it is they happen to be reading on shrm.org. Joel: Right. Tony: Then they're gonna see it, they might not be actively looking but they'll see it and apply for it. We've got one of the best response rates of any job board I've ever seen. Joel: Well it's target, it's targeted. Tony: That's right. Joel: It's that niche HR talent acquisition. Tony: Axy. Joel: And the way through, right? Tony: And it's not necessarily the keys,. It's not necessarily the active job seekers, which makes no difference whatsoever. Joel: So what you're talking about is, so. I mean we talk about on the podcast a lot is, we've turned into lifestyle beings when it comes to technology. We get out feeds from certain areas and we use Google to do search. And we see these things pop up on our feeds, whether it's on Linked In or whether it's information that's been provided by Sherm, it's just part of our normal day. Tony: Yep absolutely. Well it's no different, I can't remember his name, the CEO of WebMD said, they do this intense research of their most loyal users and said, "I trust WebMD, everything you put on there's great, I would make medical decisions based on them." And the last question was, "So you have this medical question, where do you go?" "Google." Joel: "Google." Tony: Got it. And then when they see WebMD in the results they're like, okay. Chad: Brand recognition. Tony: But they see someone else, that looks like it's good, well they're gonna come up there too, they're gonna read that. Joel: Where are you guys seeing the most growth? Is mobile booming for your audience, is it still email? Where are you reaching most of the HR folks these days? Tony: Yeah mobiles, everybody's got a mobile device so we're platform agnostic, we publish for whoever wherever. It's almost to the point where it doesn't matter [crosstalk 00:14:52] Joel: Is there a SHRM app, like a native app? Tony: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Joel: Do you know how to get downloads? Tony: We have apps for every- this conference has an app that you can't do anything without it. If you wanna get feedback on any of the sessions you must use the app, there's no alternative. So now we've embraced that from day one. Joel: That's great, you were through the newspaper, the high times, the beginning of the low times anyway- Tony: The low times, yes. Joel: And I think, we talk about the job boards a lot and how they're reinventing themselves and getting bought, do you see a lot of similarities between what the Monsters, Career Builders, Dices are going through today that the newspapers dealt with 10 years ago, 15 years ago? Tony: Yeah I guess so. If you were to ask me, "Is there any way Workopolis would be bought and shut down?" Until a year ago I'd say, "No way, that is such a robust business, they own the market." And yet, here we are. Joel: Wow. Tony: You know. So it seems very similar. And I don't know what the job boards are doing to prevent it from happening. How can the build a- it's all about brand and brand loyalty. Chad: Yeah. Tony: Unless they've got that loyalty. I think Indeed kind of proved- [crosstalk 00:16:04] Joel: Is it though? If jobs are commodities does it matter [crosstalk 00:16:07] where we get them? Tony: That's it, if Indeed blew up the model and said, "Who cares, we've got everybody's jobs." Joel: Right. Tony: The brand model is just completely gone. So unless you've got, again I'll come back to us, or any niche site that has a loyal audience that's not just about a job board, I mean that job's [crosstalk 00:16:26] Joel: Yeah. Tony: Rest his soul. Did a great job of promoting our website. Because he had [crosstalk 00:16:32] I mean he was embedded life with various associations. But they're not all like that. You know there aren't a lot where you have this incredible loyalty to the site, where you know you're gonna get your audience. And without that you're done. Joel: Well that makes sense, so we're talking about job board, job board, job board, there are tons of start-ups that are out there that aren't job boards. They're focused on process. We heard about chat bots and AI and whatnot. What are some of your favorite start-ups that are actually out there today. Name 'em if you want to, name Process or what have you, but what are your favorites? Tony: I'm not gonna name names. Chad: Boo. We need the sound guy. Joel: It's not for you. Tony: Whatever is making it much simpler for seekers to get what they need immediately. And that extends to video, that extends to making it so that any candidate can make themselves known as quickly as possible to all the logical places. So I think there're a number of folks that are playing around in that space. On the flip side the thing I'm most nervous about are all the people who seem to claim that they're at the AI solution. They're got it down pat, don't have to do anything, it's all been automated and then you actually start playing around, poking in ... it's not. To put it bluntly. Joel: So are you not a fan of AI at this point or [crosstalk 00:18:04] we just haven't figured it out yet? Tony: It's not there yet. I mean look there are so many redundancies in Hr that you can automate, there's no question about it. Joel: Right. Tony: But that's not necessarily AI to me. I mean I think it's just, it's automation for the sense of creating efficiencies, that frankly you could have one five years ago if you thought about it. Joel: We throw AI around I think personally, too loosely. Because machine learning has to work first. And to be able to get machine learning in your culture and in your environment? That's the very first thing that you have to, that you have to do, right? And then AI can start to work from there. If the learning's not there then AI just can't happen. So I think we jump to AI way too fast and we're not talking about machine learning. And that was one of the things that, you know from the panel discussion that we talked about today, was jump right to AI. Tony: Right. Joel: And I don't believe, and you tell me what you think, I don't think talent acquisition even understands what AI is versus machine-learning. Tony: I think you're right. Chad: I don't think most of the public at large understands AI and what it'll be let alone- Tony: [crosstalk 00:19:09] see it demonstrated in front of them, I'm not sure they see it. But real AI, and we're talking about motion picture stuff here, you know we're talking about [crosstalk 00:19:15] really cool, exactly. Chad: There's like six companies in the world that actually do it. Tony: Exactly. Chad: And none of them are in- Tony: And none of them are in the recruiting space, right. Joel: Google's getting there. Tony: Yeah but to the point, give it a year or two and they will be. And the question is, will any of the current players be the ones that are doing it or will it be a new entrant who takes up and developed for universities and say, "You can apply it here, here you go." Chad: Yep, yep. Joel: Before we hit record you talked a lot about Amazon and how they've automated the recruiting, talk about that. Tony: Sure. So Danielle Monaghan from Amazon called my panel today. And she's always great, we've worked together a lot. One of the things they've done, which I think is brilliant, is they've basically eliminated the interview process. So if they've got a position, and it's not just engineering positions, they're doing it for a lot of positions. Where you go online, you see the description of the position, if you have an interest you apply. And application is basically saying, I wanna be assessed as to whether I'm good for this position or not." Tony: So it's not a resumé based thing, your basically filling out the key requirements for the position. Joel: Ah, okay. Tony: Assuming you fill it in and you match what they're looking for, they then may come back and say, "Can you please complete this exercise." Whatever it is. So if it's engineering it might be a lang exercise, whatever. If you then scored a certain level of that, you're still not talking to anybody, you get an email that says, "You're hired." And you start, "When can you start?" And that's the process, there's no recruiter involved [crosstalk 00:20:45] Joel: And when is Amazon releasing this to everybody? Tony: Exactly. And they're using this now, this isn't pie in the sky it's implemented. Joel: It's like when you talk about Google's ATS and it's like, "This is the best ATS in the world, why don't they release it?" And they finally did 10 years later. But Amazon could probably release that and make a lot of money. Tony: Although by the same token, I don't wanna speak for Danielle, but they're competing for candidates with Target and Walmart and everybody else, why give them the ability to use this [crosstalk 00:21:12] Joel: We'll take their money. Tony: They'd rather have the people. Joel: Yeah. Tony: They'd rather have the pl because they've got so much hiring to do, so it works. Chad: Yeah I mean we talk about the big names in our industry now, right, that are coming into the industry now. It used to be Monster, it used to be Career Builder. Tony: Sure. Chad: Indeed, right now we're talking about Facebook, talking about Google, talking about Linked In because of Microsoft, right? But amazon, I mean the thing that literally struck me kind of weird when she was talking about all these things and talking about predictive and whatnot. It's like, "you already do that, Amazon. Why don't you apply that to the process method- I need the decisions that you're making every single day, because you could have this thing whipped before you know it and then respectively sell it." Joel: Which is why they're gonna buy Slack based on my 2018 predictions [crosstalk 00:22:06] Chad: Nobody's buying Slack for, what was it? Nine billion dollars? It's probably more than that now. Joel: Bezos has that they're in his couch. Tony: They have been a leader from the beginning [crosstalk 00:22:23] if you haven't seen it, and if your listeners haven't seen the video of Amazon explaining their new delivery process, it's fricking' unbelievable. I mean you go to this, they have it in Seattle they're building another place where- Chad: Is it on YouTube? Tony: Where, I'm not sure if it's out there, they showed it at our conference (SHRM) last year. So you're in a facility right, and round the corner there's this huge baking operation and they're baking bread and they're baking all kind of things. And this side over here's the grocery op[. It all comes together that their designers spent however much time to design this container that keeps the ice cream frozen, it keeps the bread warm out of the oven, it does all this. The whole thing goes to a little cart that goes out with a drone, picks it up and takes it to the house and drops it off in front and calls you as it's coming down to land and you come out and you take it. And they're doing it, it's already being done. Tony: So- Joel: Where is it being done? Tony: They're doing it in test markets. Chad: Now they just have to drop the perfect candidate on the doorstep of employers [crosstalk 00:23:17] have something. Tony: They're gonna start hiring drone recruiters. That candidate there, zap him back in. Chad: "My name is Bob, You're hired". Joel: So we're getting a little bit away from way out. What are people at the show talking about in terms of services, features that are exciting to them? What's the buzz? Tony: AI. Except I'm not sure most of the people know what they mean [crosstalk 00:23:41] Chad: They don't, they don't. Tony: You know what they mean? They mean that, so I'm this recruiter and I have 80 hours of work to do a week and so I'm looking for something that makes it 40 hours a week and AI must be the solution. I think it's more in that vein. How can I do this and be efficient and effective? With the resources I've got. Other than that, pay equity. Huge issue. The amazing thing right now is that workplace issues are in the news every day. It's what the whole country is talking about every day and HR's in the middle of it. Chad: So if Starbucks can reach and close that gap and they have 1400 stores or more than that- Tony: More than that- Chad: Locations, just in New York, just in the US. They have figured it out. What in the hell is the problem with the rest of the companies? [crosstalk 00:24:28] Joel: Well wait a minute, they have the arrest in the news of an African American [crosstalk 00:24:34] Chad: That means nothing. Joel: Oh, it does. Tony: Starbucks is the one who called the police. Joel: If you wanna recruit a diverse [crosstalk 00:24:40] Chad: I totally get that, right, I totally get that but right now we're talking about pay gap. Right now we're talking about pay gap. Let me get to that. Joel: People don't wanna say, "I work at Starbucks if- Chad: We'll get to that gimme a second. Joel: All right. Tony: And what branding- Chad: And that's something entirely different. So anyway, so the pay gap thing that is, why can't companies figure this out? Tony: All right so here's a perfect example, Walmart and Target go out and they raise their minimum wage, 11, 12 dollars depending where you are. There's a catch. How many of those positions are full time with benefits? And I think you'd be surprised, few are. Chad: Not many. Tony: And how many have, how many people who work in those jobs know exactly what their schedule's gonna be next week? Very few. Chad: Right. Tony: So are they really closing the pay gap there? Or is it more of a short term fix? I'd argue it's more a short term. Chad: Got you. Tony: And Amazon and many other companies that embrace the higher starting salary, do it and then offer a full, full-time job behind it and that's a very different strategy. Chad: Gotcha. Tony: So, and then pay equity's the other issue, you have to go back and look at your entire workforce and say, "are we paying you illegally?" And if not, what are you doing about it? And so that's a huge issue, and it's not just Me Too and harassment, it's just fair equitable payment for board and stuff. So HR's the one who need to be leading the way here. And they need to be. And in some cases they are, and in some cases they've got some work to do. Chad: So then you've got an important- Joel: Well speaking of Me Too and the branding I think even Facebook to a certain extent in the valley. It's toxic in terms of, "I work at Facebook." No-one wants to mention that. Are you finding that the employer review sites, the Glass Doors, Indeeds, are they getting more attention in light of this news in the public eye? Tony: I think their attention's already incredibly high. One of the points we just talked about on the panel is, "are you managing your brand?" Because if not, others are doing it for you. We had Kristen DesPalmes from Davita which is a huge operation, they hire, can't remember what she said 20,000 or 30,000, they put their Glass Door reviews on their career website with a stream, so every time there's a new review it updates. complete transparency. Joel: Transparency. Tony: Because it's the only way that they can deal with the candidates honestly. So if you can't do that, if you're afraid to do that then you got a problem. You got something you need to address. Chad: So this really is the age of transparency. Why are so many companies having problems being transparent. Tony: It depends on the company. Chad: Culture? Tony: It's all culture, it's all about company culture. If you got a board of directors that understands the value of transparency and puts it to fore, it's not an issue. If you've got a CEO or a board that doesn't, it's a huge issue and then you start to see cries for change- Joel: Priority shift. Tony: And you see change. And that's what- we're in an environment of protest, right? And so that extends to everything everywhere. And so if you've got employees who feel like the CEO's earning 10,000 times more than what I'm doing is that really fair? And that's gonna extend to this too. So t's across the board, people feel the power to say something and try and make a change. Joel: Hmm. Tony: And you know, I think that's a good thing. Are coz ready to deal with it~? That's another story sometimes. Joel: You got a couple announcements that you're making this week and I didn't want to let you get away without discussing that. So talk about those two items. Tony: Cool. So the first one is, SHRM has certification for HR professionals, SHRM CP and SCP. We are creating specialty certificates within this. We've already launched one for California, you can be a specialist in California, which is its own world. Its own laws, its own everything. So it take a huge body of knowledge. We announced today a special certificate in talent acquisition. So it's the first one out there that exists. It's rigorous, you do not have to have SHRM CP or SCP to get it, so if you're a talent acquisition person, the reason we did this is that we talked to a lot of HR departments, a lot of people who are recruiters within Hr departments, who feel like they've gotten this great expertise in talent acquisition. They think they're doing great. Joel: Right. Tony: But they're responsible for other HR things. So they might just be an HR generalist who know how to recruit. And so they want to then apply for a job somewhere as a recruiter, and they're told, "Well, you've never been full-time recruiter." By doing this they can say, "Look, I've proven that I know what I'm doing. I know how to recruit, I know how to handle talent acquisition, I've got the certificate showing it from SHRM. So give me a chance." And so that's what we're doing and you know, it's not an easy thing to do, it takes a lot of work and an exam to get the certificate. Joel: What's the investment, money and time, what would someone expect coming into the program. Tony: You know, time's a little trick- the money's not much, I don't know it off the top of my head, but we're not talking that much money, hundreds if that. The time is you know, how much time does it take you to study for an exam? Some people are good at it and some people need more time. Joel: Right. Tony: But. Joel: Do they need to be a SHRM member? Tony: Nope. It's a certificate that anyone in talent acquisition can study for and pass. Chad: Now what's the name of the certification? Tony: It's the Talent Acquisition Specialty Certificate. Joel: Got yeah, okay. Tony: And then the other announcement is little more out school. We're actually doing our first university job fair. And I know job fairs people are like, "Oh [crosstalk 00:29:56] how 1990s of you, woo!" But this one's a little different. This one's a little different. Joel: How so? Tony: We have our annual conference in Chicago this year. So on our last day of annual conference, Wednesday June 20th, we have an all suite setting in Chicago and it's a diversity and inclusion fair. Chad: Cool. Tony: So these are companies that are dedicated to making sure that they are diverse, and that extended beyond just race, it's race, it's gender, it's diverse thought frankly. It's a lot of different groups that are represented here, we're doing it in partnership with Thurgood Marshall College Fund and Hispanic Lives for Career Education and a number of different groups. And so it just gives companies an opportunity to make sure they're seeing really good diverse candidates in a setting where they can extend, they can give first interviews, second interviews and extend offers. It's not a big ballroom with a lot of people standing around, you know it's a much more professional setting. Tony: so our members, and it's not just HR it's for any job. And this came outta member requests. They said, "Look, we wanna hire diverse candidates, we can't find them. So you can help us identify these folks by partnering with organizations who can bring them to the event." So that's what we're doing. Joel: And I'm assuming shrm.org I can find information about both of those? Tony: Yes sir. Joel: Now, few people know Tony Lee is the number one cheap trick groupie. Tony: Yes he is. Joel: Male groupie [crosstalk 00:31:20] in the world. Tony: Among many many bands but yes they are at the top [crosstalk 00:31:22] Joel: So I want you to give me a memorable Cheap Trick concert moment and your favorite Cheap Trick song. Tony: So I went to undergraduate school in Denver, small place called Regis College. And we had a field house that held 300 people. And I promoted concerts there in my junior and senior year. In junior year I got Cheap Trick. Chad: Damn. Tony: I just kinda liked them at the time [crosstalk 00:31:47] Joel: And what year was this? Tony: You really gonna make me? Joel: I'll, [crosstalk 00:31:50] my point is it was probably the height of- Tony: 1979. Joel: Pretty close to height of Cheap Trick's coolness [crosstalk 00:31:56] Tony: [crosstalk 00:31:57] which was their biggest selling album. Joel: Kay. Tony: And I got to meet the guys and hang out with them and they did the show and they were incredibly nice and it was one of those moments. So I got to meet them multiple times since then and chat and there's a big Cheap Trick fan club and then I had to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony when they were inducted a couple of years ago. So that was fun and I ended up sitting with all the relatives from this day. Joel: If only Facebook and selfies had existed back then. Tony: Back then I know. Joel: So, favorite song is it a common one or you go out of bounds [crosstalk 00:32:31] Tony: Tell you what I'll come up with a song everyone will know, Dream Police. It's got a great riff. It's like a [crosstalk 00:32:37] Chad: Yeah Joel will start singing in a minute. Joel: The dream police [crosstalk 00:32:41] Tony: None of us can sing. Chad: No but he loves to. Joel: Anything we didn't ask you that we should have? Chad: Ooh I know, I know. So you've been in the industry for a long time. Tony: Say that one more time. Joel: Yeah we have established the tenure of Tony Lee. Chad: Joel and I were talking beforehand and I asked him this one question and we came up with this one person. Who is the biggest huckster that ever- Tony: [crosstalk 00:33:14] answer for this but I'm gonna get sued [crosstalk 00:33:16] Chad: No you won't, you won't get sued. Tony: I'm gonna tell a story instead. Chad: Okay. Joel: All right. Chad: And we'll give him our answer. Joel: We had the same person and you can probably guess who the person- Tony: [crosstalk 00:33:27] I think it's a different person but I'm not gonna mention any names. So I was at the Wall Street Journal and there was this great site called the Online Career Site, OCC. Uh oh, is it the same person. Chad: No. Joel: Keep talking. Tony: So in Indianapolis and so I reached out to them and we were just building our job board online and said, "Wow, this is really cool what you're doing." And we were talking and all this stuff and he said, "Well you know we're for sale if your interested." And I said, "Wow, you know sure, what do we need to do?" So I flew out to Indianapolis, met with him, all the stuff, it was great- Chad: What year was this? Tony: It would have been 98. Joel: Okay. Tony: 97 or 98, (i think it was 95 or 96 actually) somewhere in there. And so I go out there and it's great and we have a great visit, everything's great. So I come back again to Dow Jones and say, "okay, we need to buy these guys, you know they have all these employer members, it's employer owned, non-profit [crosstalk 00:34:18] Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Chad: Yeah. Joel: Great technology at the time. Chad: Yeah. Tony: Yeah. Price was a million bucks to buy, so put together the whole plan. And a senior guy, a very well respected guy who's still very involved a lot at Dow Jones and other journalistic stuff, flies out to Indianapolis to meet and they have a nice conversation and he says, "okay, let me see your operation." And the response was, "This is the operation." And he says, "Well, we're paying a million bucks, what are we getting?" And he gets up, he goes to the closet, he opens up the closet and there are all these servers. He says, "This is what you're buying." So the guy flies back to Dow Jones, we don't want these guys, this is nuts. Tony: Monster buys it for a million bucks six months later and it doubles the size of Monster overnight. Chad: Well what happened was, the Monster board was dying technologically. Tony: Right. Chad: And OCC had far superior technology. So what Jeff did as not the huckster but - he was a huckster - he was very good at it. Joel: Carnival barker. Chad: Yeah he was carnival. But anyway he knew that they were on the down and their sister company OCC, because they were both owned by TMP was kicking ass and taking names. Tony: Right. Chad: Not that I was there or anything (I was). So anyway it just made sense. Let's go ahead and merge these together, killer technology, put the Monster brand on it and away you go. Joel: Do you wanna take a guess at who we said, the number one industry huckster? Tony: No. Go ahead. Joel: I'll give you a hint, Jobster. Tony: Oh, okay, there was a gun involved. Joel: Jason Goldberg. Tony: The gun. Joel: I miss that guy. Tony: I miss reading about him on [crosstalk 00:36:05] Joel: Yes. Chad: Or listening to his explosions. It actually happened just down the road at Chester Island [crosstalk 00:36:17] Joel: One of the more famous videos. Monster is a crap product. If you go Google that you'll see the highlights of his speech with Direct Employers. Tony: So I gotta throw out a prop. The only place you could go to get information about this industry was Cheezhead - oh I'm pounding the table, sorry. They had the best information before anybody else. Joel: Cheezhead was the shit. Tony: It sure was. Chad: Then he sold out [crosstalk 00:36:44] Joel: Where'd that guy go? Chad: Sold out to the man. Tony: Well he lives large now with all those [crosstalk 00:36:49] Chad: That's why he's doing a podcast. [crosstalk 00:36:59] Joel: Yeah you guys are gonna come to see me to buy, I got a closet full of stuff [crosstalk 00:36:59] Tony: We could have had it for less [crosstalk 00:37:02] Joel: Yeah. Chad: It's mainly dirty socks [crosstalk 00:37:04] Tony: I don't wanna know what dirty stuff he has in his closet. Joel: Well Tony, we know you have a life and stuff to do here, we appreciate you taking time out and rehashing old times and new adventures. Yeah, we appreciate it. Tony: Thank you it was a lot of fun. Joel: Don't forget Uncommon.co is where your recruiting fantasies come true, and they only charge $9.95 per interested and qualified candidate. Chad: The important part is Uncommon's trial where they're offering a 5 free candidates. Just go to uncommon.co to make your free account. That's uncommon.co. Chad: Dude, why are you so fricking weird? Joel: Uh, I don't know. Chad: Thanks to our partners at TA Tech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Remember to visit TATech.org 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. #SHRM #Monster #OCC #JungLee #Adicio #MonsterBoard #WSJ #TATech #Uncommon

The boys are still working through hangovers from a week in Ireland for TAtech, but our pain is your gain. We were able to secure a handful of interviews at the Guinness Storehouse. For this week's episode we spend "five good minutes" with Terry Baker, President of PandoLogic and Adam Gordon, CEO of CandidateID. Enjoy! And don't forget about our sponsors: America's Job Exchange, Sovren, Ratedly, Nexxt, Jobs2Careers and Catch 22 Consulting. #Pandologic #RealMatch #CandidateID #TATech

The mergers and acquisitions market is heating up this week starting with Careerbuilder's first foray of sales under Apollo with the selling of EMSI. Oh yes there's more: - TMP acquired by Gemspring - Adecco acquisition positions then to grow talent - PeopleFluent gets a pathetic pricetag - Google for Jobs gets busy in India - Google for Jobs will penalize your ass! - Work180 velvet ropes their female community - ONLY qualified employers allowed - Buy stocks in Sex Robots and VR now! Enjoy, and visit our sponsors: Sovren, America's Job Exchange and JobAdX. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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. Joel: Hi-de-ho boys and girls. Welcome to the Chad Cheese podcast. HR's most dangerous. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week's show, TMP gets gobbled up by a private equity firm. Chad: Another one? Joel: We know how this one turns out, don't we? CareerBuilder dumps MC and if you thought job boards were worthless, wait till you hear what someone paid for old-timey ATS PeopleFluent. It's the mergers and acquisitions episode. Stay tuned. #ElChapo: Lastly... Yes. There will be a trip [crosstalk 00:01:02] Joel: Oops. Wait. #ElChapo: I just don't know when and- Joel: That's not the ad. Chad: That's the El Chapo ad, dude. Joel: The El Chapo visit Mexico ad that we have. No. Sorry. Let's play the real ad for our listeners. JobAdx: JobAdX as the best ad tool in the industry. We provide publishers and job boards higher rev share than other partners through our smarter programmatic platform. In many cases, 30-40% greater and more. We're like Ad-sense, but with a better split for you and added relevance for your audience. JobAdX also offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs and staffing firms. Real timine dynamic bidding and delivery for your clients postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool. Not set and regret. All of this is done with the flexibility of cost per impression, click, or application. We also offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. Finally, JobAdX delivers direct clients, superior candidates through the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. To partner with us, you can visit or search Jobadx.com. You can also email us at joinus@J-O-B-A-D-X.com to get estimates or to begin working together. JobAdX. The best ad tool. Providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Joel: If people think we have fun. Our sponsors have a lot of fun. Case in point. The JobAdX crew from Vegas, showing up with beer for an interview and peeps, by the way. A little Gordon Ramsay dinner. So, shout out, I guess, first, to those guys. Isabelle, Tim, the whole gang. Had a great time with them at SHRM Talent. Chad: Don't forget Amit because we have a podcast with him, so if you haven't heard that one, you don't know about JobAdX or even Talroo, used to be Jobs2Careers. Check out our last podcast. Joel: It's a one-two punch of knowledge and insight into two really interesting companies in our space, for sure. Chad: Yup. Joel: We're not just saying that because they pay us. Chad: No. Why the hell would we do that? Joel: It doesn't hurt, either. Chad: Other than bringing us beer, maybe. Joel: The beer is probably more valuable than anything else. But, anyway. Shout outs. We've had feedback that they're too long, so we're gonna try to tighten them up. I don't know if I can reel Chad in. Chad: Good luck. Joel: But, let's get to an abbreviated, hopefully, shout out. Chad: You first. Joel: Okay. Number one, Jack Russell. Chad: The dog? Joel: It's not a dog, I swear. Jack Russell is a former CareerBuilder intern, who was very insightful and a story that I did for ERE he's not real keen on the deal, for whatever reason, you'll have to read the story to find out exactly. Jack is ... let me get his ... he's the strategic recruitment analyst at Advanced Group in Chicago. Thanks for listening, Jack, and thanks for having such a cool name like a dog name. Your parents much love you. Chad: Yeah. So much. Joel: Mac Pritchard, who we met at TATech in Vegas, a job board owner in Portland. His site is called, “Macslist”, which is very Craigslistyish and Angie's Listyish, but Mack is a really nice guy and, hopefully, a new listener. Mack, a shout out to you. Lastly, from me, Blair Cheeseman, from Fusion Academy for no other reason, than he has the best last name in the world and he attended this week's Ratedly webinar. Blaire, thanks for joining and thanks for listening. Chad: Since you were the only one on the webinar, Blaire. We appreciate that. Joel: Now, see, that's bullshit. That's bullshit. Chad: Can I go now? Joel: Yes. You may. Chad: Okay. LinkedIn loves us. Sara from LinkedIn. Tom, I'm gonna screw your last name up, Preziose. He's out there pimping the pod to his friends on LinkedIn, which is awesome. Ed from Philly, who's hating on TATech audience. Good job, Ed, we love you for that, man. Nancy from Philly tweeted us a pic. Joel: From vacation. Chad: From vacation. Joel: What's with the vacation pics? We're getting pictures from the beach, from airplanes, first class cabins, like, what is the deal? Chad: It's good. Angela Payne from Monster, for the Google for Jobs intel coming to Canada soon. Last, but not least, Ed Newman from Phenom People for his HR's most interesting man video. Dude, seriously. Just because we've coined the phrase, “HR's most dangerous podcast” doesn't mean that you can just go ahead and take “interesting”. Joel: Yeah, I assume, go to YouTube, search Ed Phenom People, interesting video and it's a funny take on, obviously, the Dos Equis commercials. And these sort of gorilla ads are interesting. Chad: Yeah. Joel: You remember [Lena's 00:06:12] from ... Chad: Leela Joel: From Lever, Lever, whatever it is? She had a nice Christmas video that blew up, so we're seeing a little more of these gorilla-type homemade, raw videos and I assume we'll see more of these. Maybe we should make one. Chad: Yeah, don't get crazy. Joel: Yeah, sorry. Chad: Let's talk a little bit about the trip, though, man. We were in Vegas for a whole damn week. Joel: Yeah, my liver still hates me. Chad: I've gotta say, I've gotta say, Tony Lee, always thought he was cool, but he is much cooler than I ever thought. What do you think? Joel: Big Cheap Trick fan. Yeah. Tony's like ... he's a child of the '70s, I assume, in terms of, he came of age in the '70s, so he has some really cool rock stories, concert stories. If you ever can corner Tony over a drink, ask him about his concerts portfolio. Chad: We've got an interview with him that should be coming out in the next week or so, so check that out when you see Tony Lee. Guy's been around this industry for a very long time and he's got chops. Thanks to Susan Vitale for the drive-by hugging. It feels like, she's off all over the place, but appreciate the quick hug, as in, you were on your way out. Joel: Yeah. She's a popper-inner. She pops into shows and then leaves. Chad: Great interview with Sackett on Indeed “jail” and the two CEOs that we've got going on right now. We did find out that our listeners are pretty damned cool. Joel: Yeah, we continue to be humbled by our fans and that people actually listen to this crap. So, yeah, it's awesome. Totally awesome. If you haven't heard the Sackett interview, it's really, really good. It's only about 14 minutes, but very insightful. Chad: And Erik Kostelnik, he was at ... He actually gave the keynotes at TATech. Erik, you straight stole our shit, dude. You've been listening to the podcast and that was a Power Point version of our show. Congrats. It was great, but you stole our shit, man. Joel: Apparently, he rattled of a whole bunch of companies that stole his shit, so there's a whole lot of stealing going on in this ecosystem, if nobody knew that happened, it does. But, yes, Erik, love is candor, love is openness, he was great as the keynote and we're interested to see what's next for him, as he cashes on iCims, excuse me. Chad: Last, but not least, to Armando from HireMatch, dude, this is advice, man. If you need to- Joel: are you throwing ... Are you gonna do this? Chad: Yeah. I'm gonna do this. Dude- Joel: This poor guy. Chad: He's gotta hear it. Joel: Okay. Chad: He's gotta hear it. Dude. If you need to read from a script, while presenting and, legit, can't run a Power Point, I don't trust your blockchain knowledge, man. I don't trust your blockchain knowledge if you can't do those very simple things. So, get your shit together, dude. Joel: Yeah, don't give a Power Point where it still says, “Click here to add text” on the Power Point. Chad: There's a tweet out there. Joel: I did it. I did it. I drew first blood on the poor guy. Yeah. Don't do that. Otherwise, #chadcheese for more shout outs and more love. Check out our tip line at chadcheese.com. We've been really surprised at how many people are coming out of the woodwork with stories about vendors and lay-offs and mergers and acquisitions and whatnot. If you got a tip for us, go to Chad Cheese and hit us up. Chad: Cool, let's do the show. Joel: Alright, following the private equity playbook to a T, CareerBuilder looks like it's starting to sell off it's crappy businesses that aren't making money, starting with Emsi, I'm saying that wrong, probably, MC Hammer, they sold this week. Yeah, I don't know much about Emsi, they do analytics. Chad: Yeah. Joel: They do predictive stuff. They were bought by a company called, “Strada” who does education stuff. That's about the extent that I know about this stuff. You had, actually, some insight from an insider, though, didn't you? Chad: Yeah. I mean, Emsi, so it's E-M-S-I, and it's labor market information, it's got jobs data, profile data, and they pump a lot of that information into talent discovery for CareerBuilder. In a message to CareerBuilder employees from Matt Ferguson, we actually got a copy. Joel: CEO. Chad: Yeah, it was pretty much just trying to tell everybody at CareerBuilder, “Yeah, we're selling Emsi off, but it's same as it ever was, same as it ever was,” although, I'm not sure that it's going to be the case. The messaging says, “All connections will stay the same. We will still keep CareerBuilder, we'll still keep selling Emsi products,” and Andrew Crapuchettes that's one of the worst last names I've ever ... Crapuchettes. Joel: That's worse than Cheesman, geez. Chad: At Emsi, is still happy to hear that. Although, you go further into the message, and the email actually unveil that the Emsi representation of CareerBuilder revenues is less than 1%, so you understand why they're getting rid of this. They're looking at the bottom line saying, “You know, this isn't doing anything for us.” But, there are really two things that CareerBuilder, I don't think gets, and I don't think Mr. Crapuchettes gets, is that CareerBuilder wasn't selling that product anyway. If you're going to hope and pray that CareerBuilder sells it now, that it's not actually owned by CareerBuilder, you're gonna have a problem, dude. Less than 1%, if you believe that's going to grow, you're wrong. Chad: Number two, CareerBuilder didn't know how to sell it. The data, all that information ... One of the biggest issues, and we've talked about this last few months, but CareerBuilder's biggest problem is, using what they have in their portfolio to create kick-ass products. They're not doing that. Developing concise branding and messaging and, most importantly, how to monetize those kick-ass products. Joel: Yeah, and for all we know, this thing was bleeding the company, in terms of, resources and headcount and everything else. I'll go back to Apollo Global Private Equity firm that is majority shareholder of the company, this is part of their maximizing profits initiative and this is what private equity does. We'll talk about it more in depth with TMP a little bit. Look. We know that they're laying off people, we know that people are leaving from executives on down, engineers, salespeople, probably glad that people are leaving to a certain extent because they can just increase the bottom line. This is the second phase, and they've probably been working on this just as much as they have headcount. Chad: Right. Joel: Is, what businesses can we dump to increase profits? Emsi, in my opinion, is the first of many companies that are gonna be dropped by CareerBuilder in the coming year. Chad: Yeah. Or just tech that they're going to really just eject. After talking to more salespeople at CareerBuilder, more engineers at CareerBuilder, the big focus that they've really heard, is EBITA, EBITA, EBITA. CareerBuilder was slammed into a tight EBITA culture and they are not an EBITA company. Joel: Not historically. Chad: Not like Randstad and I think they're sliding Monster into that direction, but they're not slamming into that direction. It's all about margins. If you understand EBITA and you understand overhead, they're cutting a bunch of hubs. Joel: Yeah. You said something that is really telling in that salespeople, typically, are really good about focusing on a few products or one product that they can really understand and if you have a salesperson that's used to selling job postings and now they have to sell analytics predictive whatever, that's a really tough leap for a lot of people, let alone, salespeople to make. My guess is, this product probably wasn't being sold, like you said. Chad: Right. Joel: So, let's get rid of it. It's an expense. We're not getting it anyway. The revenue isn't there anyway. So, get it out of here. My question would be, what of CareerBuilder's portfolio, would you categorize as a challenging sell to get, to understand? Right? That's so far out of bounds for job postings that it's probably gonna be next on the chopping block. Chad: Well, here's the thing. I'm gonna take it the other way. From what I've heard, CareerBuilder's focusing heavily on the job posting piece because the margins are so high. Joel: Sure. Chad: And all their solution architects. So, when you start talking about building these dynamic solutions, you see this in RPO, they have what you call, “solution design” or “solution architects.” That's where the big dollars come from. Actually sales come from is when you can pull together those different types of technologies. Well, all those people are actually gone and they pushed them back into sales roles. That's the focus of, again, trying to maximize where they see their biggest margin. To answer your question, anything that is not core, that has high margin, has a lot of EBITA ability there, they're all low hanging fruit, dude. Joel: Agree. Let's talk about TMP, the most recent victim, well, I shouldn't say victim, maybe I should say victim, of being gobbled up by private equity firm, in this case, one called, "GemSpring", which I have never heard of. Chad: No. Joel: Thoughts on this? Chad: See, CareerBuilder, they have a ton of technical assets in their portfolio. They have all these different products, they have these different companies, that they earning that they can sell. So, from an asset standpoint, CareerBuilder, I can see where you can look at it and say, “Oh, there's money to be made there. If you squeeze tight enough and you start selling shit off.” From a TMP standpoint, the only ... They have technical assets, but they're around TalentBrew, in most cases, and I think they've really pushed hard to create a platform that has also created bias for them because they're supposed to be an unbiased purveyor of knowledge and spending money. I'm not really sure that they can keep up with all the start ups that are happening out there as it is. Chad: So, I think it's gonna be harder for a TMP in this scenario, unless they really start to boost the hell out of products or boost the hell out of sales through what they normally do from a traditional standpoint. That's just selling a shit ton of ads, using everything that's out there. Instead of trying to build up a TalentBrew, which is a competitor to most of these people in the market. Joel: Yup. You know, historically, people that are new to the industry, don't appreciate the fall that has occurred with the agency business. The days of when agencies could just answer the phone and put display ads in Sunday newspapers, life was really good. Getting 15% of a $5-10,000 display ad and doing that a lot was very profitable. The job board industry created commoditization, so the 5,000 display ad is now a $99 ad on HotJobs. Then, there was a phase of like, “Well, let's create our own technology and try to get a hundred percent of the profit. Try it. So, let's make a jobs to career, a jobs2web-” Chad: Competitor. Joel: “Competitor.” You saw that on the direct employers end and create all these social, like, “Have a page on Facebook” they offered that for a while. That really hasn't worked out. They're a skeleton of what they used to be. I commented at the SHRM talent show. All the SHRM shows used to be half of agencies. Chad: Right. Joel: Tons of agencies. Now there's two. There's a small number of agencies. I agree with you, they are consultant. I think there's a need for them, particularly with all the AI, automation, Chatbot, deep big data stuff that's out there. There's a need for companies to say, “We don't really know what the hell we're supposed to do or buy or use. Help us do that.” But, that's less some of the advertising situation because you have the programmatic end coming in, which is gonna be a thing, right? Chad: Yes. Yes. Joel: So now, it's like, “Who's the best programmatic?” This becomes a really challenging industry, although, they make a lot of money, TMP has some really good clients, the private equity firm is probably gonna replicate what we saw at CareerBuilder, what we're seeing at Monster. It gives an opportunity to the boutique agency. I think you and I both, in Vegas, heard stories about people dumping the bigger type TMP agencies for the smaller, more personable ones. I think that's gonna continue. I think a lot of companies that use TMP are gonna look at this acquisition and see people leave or see people see things go away that they're used to and look for alternatives. Joel: We'll see what happens, but I don't think this is probably a great thing for the future of TMP. I don't see them hiring people and growing this thing out, but I guess we'll see. Chad: It'll be interesting to see the direction, as I had said, with the technology. Are they going to try to continue to compete in the realm of technology? I don't know. That's hard. Then, also, like, you'd said, on the programmatic side of the house, everybody's doing the ad buying piece, so there are so many different, as you said, boutique types of agencies that are really specialized, competition is high. Very high. In all flanks for them. Joel: Yeah. And what did we hear at the conference from the programmatic guys? That's ultimately a commodity, too. Chad: Yup. Joel: Right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: I just don't know where a lot this stuff goes. In private equity, it's not in their DNA to say, “Let's build out products.” Chad: No. Joel: “Let's enhance, let's evolve, let's throw stuff at the wall.” Like you said, maximize profits, sell stuff, sell it off to whomever, and that tends to be the history of what happens with these guys. If you're at TMP and stuff goes on, hit us up at chadcheese.com and let us know what's going on. Chad: Where's the bell? Joel: You want the bell? You like the bell. 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. 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 S-O-V-R-E-N.COM. Joel: Google, we gotta talk about Google every week. We need a theme song. Chad: A Google theme song, yeah. You'll be definitely be hearing it in India, right? Joel: Google for Jobs is coming to a neighborhood near you and all around the world. Chad: Yeah, yeah. There's really not going to be an area that Google for Jobs is not going to try to penetrate. Europe, Canada supposed to be coming, supposedly. Joel: Yeah. We both heard, the country up north is getting Google for Jobs. Chad: Yeah. Yeah. It's coming. The big question is, how do you work with it? How do you leverage springboard off of it? That's the big question. As we've actually talked to job board owners and job site owners and whatnot over the last month and, especially, last week at SHRM and TATech, the question is, where do you pivot? Where do you go? You have to find something different than just being a damn job board, unless you're super niche and you've got a community that people really need. Unless that, you're gonna be struggling. You're gonna be struggling. Joel: Yup. We, again, going back to Vegas, it's great to get out and see presentations and different points of view and updates, but one of the things that really struck me, was someone said, someone presented and said, “What is the scariest page on the internet?” Of course, I said, “You're LinkedIn profile,” but that was the wrong answer. The right answer, according to this presenter, was, Google for Jobs, search results page. Chad: Yeah. Joel: One of the things that I thought was interesting was, Google has stopped putting the ATS URL as a apply option and their putting in the company name as the option, which, I think, is part of the taxonomy, or whatever, when you submit jobs to the site. But, to me, I think we've talked about this before, is that, look, if you're a job seeker, and you see, okay, here are the ways you can apply to this job, either the company or CareerBuilder or ZipRecruiter or Monster or whatever. You, as a job seeker, which one are you going to pick. Even though the others might be easier, you're probably gonna think that your best chance to get into the company is by using the company website. Agreed? Chad: Yeah. I would agree just from what I know over the last decade, or so, but I think that's changing because some of these services are offering a better experience. That's what Google's looking for and that's really what, I think, Google is trying to find out. Is ZipRecruiter a better experience than the actually corporate website? Is that site? Is this site? Chad: I think that's something that we're gonna figure out. This is really the key. When I talked about these different job boards or these different job sites, or whatever, recruitment companies, trying to leverage Google for jobs. This is what I'm talking about. If you have a better experience for that customer coming through to the job, you're gonna win. That's the beautiful thing, or you're not, so you better focus on being great. Joel: Yeah, we've talked about it is you gotta Amazon that shit. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's gotta be one click, good to go, done, and effective. I think what someone asked in the presentation was, “How does Google decide which job boards show up on Google for Jobs?” Certainly, there's some relationship things there, at least initially, but over time, Google's gonna know which sites people click on and come back to Google and click something else, because they do this with their search results. In their search results, if you click on a result and then you're back on Google within five seconds, they know that the result that they gave you sucks. So, eventually, that page, in this case, is going to start slowly going down the search results page or rankings and, eventually, not show up. Joel: I agree with you, if Job Board X is horrible and people click on it and go, "This sucks" and goes back to Google and clicks on something else, that initial site is going to disappear in my best guess, over time. You need to work on your apply stuff and make as Amazon as possible. Chad: Right. Again, it's about experience. Google cares about the user. That's the person searching for the job. Your content really doesn't matter to them because it's shit. Guess what? It's gonna be kicked to the curb. Joel: Also, it's a red flag, or wake-up call, for ATSs to make applying really easy on their site because if you can make your apply really easy, so the point where, I, as an employer, don't have to put my job on all these job boards that also show up? Then, guess what? I'm gonna save a ton of money, if I'm not using half or a percentage of the job boards that I'm not using or I'm using today, because my ATS got it right with the apply process. Chad: Yeah. I think a handful of ATSs really give a shit about the user experience. Just a handful. The rest of them, they don't give a shit. You can go out and you can go buy a cosmetic apply partner to be able to do that. Joel: I agree. Joel: Adecco and PeopleFluent. We got more mergers and acquisitions. Chad: Oh, man. Adecco. I think Adecco, out of the two is much more interesting. Just from the standpoint of, we're talking about a people company, a staffing company, it's their job, it's their money to be able to get the right people into right jobs. Then, you've got General Assembly, which they're more of a credentialing, skilling up type of organization, so if I needed in-demand skills, whether it's coding or something like that, I could actually take courses through General Assembly. This makes sense. Obviously, from the standpoint of, Adecco being able to go out after these different clients and say, “Guess what guys, whether it's just staffing, RPO, whatever it is, we can actually, not just go out and find the types of candidates that you're looking for, we can take what you need.” Joel: "We're gonna grow them." Chad: “We can grow them.” This is what an actual fucking talent pipeline looks like, guys. You don't just go out and steal and find, you grow that shit, too. This, from my standpoint, for $412 million is genius for Adecco, if they pull this off right. Joel: Yeah. Yeah. I think we feel about this acquisition sort of like how we felt about IKEA buying TaskRabbit. It was such a normal and natural and organic marriage. Chad: It made sense. Joel: This is the same thing. We place people, let's grow the people ourselves, let's get them right off the tree, and then place them. That makes a ton of sense. This isn't a private equity deal, where there's no synergy, really, at all. It's not just, “Hey, let's just maximize profits, cut out fat, and then sell this thing off.” Chad: Yeah. Joel: This a real acquisition and kind of marriage that we like to see happen, so kudos to Adecco for seeing that and making that happen. Chad: Well, here's the thing, and I say this all the time, If you want to look at what is more efficient and smart, look at staffing companies, look at RPO, definitely look at RPO because they are focused on the EBITA on efficiencies, and that's where dollars come from, from efficiencies. If they have a competitive advantage in the market, they're going to squeeze the hell out of it. Companies can do the same damn thing without acquiring another company. They just have to be smarter about it. But, unfortunately, they're not, so you might as well go ahead and just plug into Adecco. Seriously. Bullshit. How stupid. The people are out there. You can skill them up. Go do it. “No, we're just gonna go ahead a pay really high fucking fees.” Okay. Have fun with that. Joel: Fun with that. Our insight into the other acquisition of PeopleFluent is a little less optimistic, but we're both really shocked by the price tag. Chad: $150 million and this is an applicant tracking system. It's gone through a rebranding, but it's been around for well over 10 years, 15 years, maybe 20 years. Joel: Yeah. It's old. Chad: It's (PeopleFluent) technology. It has assets already. It's huge on the compliant side of the house. I know that, which is always something that federal contractors, who have huge dollars, need. So, they've got that from an asset standpoint. Then you take a look at the sales side, which I have no clue what their sales is, but with this low-ass ticket number, what do they have, like two or three clients for goodness sakes? This is pitiful. Joel: Let's put this in context, a little bit. Okay. LinkedIn sells for Microsoft for $26 billion. Chad: With a B, yes. Joel: With a B. CareerBuilder and Monster, from what we can tell, about 500 million. At their peak, $10 billion valuations. Okay? Chad: Okay. Okay. Joel: Dice and their network valued, I think their valuation's around 200 million, or maybe that's ... yeah, I think that's valuation, so, 200 million. You have an ATS, which like you said, okay, you have low unemployment, you have clients, you have revenue, you have a technology, you have a brand, and, from what we can tell, that's not worth a whole lot. In fact, it's worth less than most job sits that are prominent in this business. Joel: We talk about commoditization, we talk about value. What in the world is going on that an ATS is valued so low? I don't know. That does not bode well for its competition. Chad: I had to read that snippet twice. I think they're going through the process right now; it hasn't actually finalized. Joel: Yeah. Chad: But, still. That's a pathetic price tag for somebody who's been in the industry as long as they have, that should have enormous amount of technical assets and enormous amounts of fucking sales. Joel: How much of selling, do you think, is potentially fear of the big guys getting into this? The Googles, the LinkedIns, those guys. Is this just, “Hey, it's time to sell and we better get 150 now or our asset's gonna be 75 in a year, it's gonna be 25 in two years.” Is that part of the thought process, you think? Chad: Oh, yeah. I definitely think it is. Not to mention, you're looking at all these other un-ATS types of technologies that are popping out all over the place. A lot of the older platforms, they haven't evolved as fast as they have needed to. Joel: Yeah. Chad: They see these newcomers coming out and it's like, “Look, we gotta get out of this now, because we're gonna get out with zero after a while.” I think it's definitely pressure on their side, not just from the big names, but all these small up and comers who have better tech. Joel: I agree. Let's hear a quick word from AJE and we'll talk about our favorite topic: Sex Robots. AJE: America's Job Exchange is a market leader in diversity recruitment and an OFCCP compliant solution provider. We serve over a thousand customers, consisting of federal contractors and subcontractors to SMBs and Fortune 500 organizations. America's Job Exchange specializes in job distribution to over 6,500 state on-stop career centers and community based organizations, ensures the creation and maintenance of state credentials, obtains veteran preference on job postings, robust outreach management, and supports effective, positive recruitment efforts designed to recruit individuals with disabilities, veterans, women, and minorities. For more information, call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Joel: So sex robots is on a part of branding commentary. The first one, I guess, we should talk about is a pivot, by DCC, I've never heard of these guys. DCC jobs raises one million seed round led by Skip Capital and rebrands itself as Work180. Sexy. Chad: Yeah. Work180.co. Yeah. This is interesting, just from standpoint of, this is a women's search network, pretty much. Here's the key. It's a velvet rope type of platform/community, let's say, where you have to be endorsed to be able to use the platform. So, if your policies don't actually meet the policies of Work180, then you can't use it. We're talking about policies with regard to equal pay, the, obviously, equality types of policies within your organization. From my understanding, they vet you for all of those things before you're allowed to come and speak with their women. Joel: Velvet ropes are nice, but this sounds a little bit discriminatory, to me, in the reverse. No? Chad: Yeah. You could say it's discriminatory. Here's the thing, though. This is what I don't think people actually get. It's kind of like the idiot who said, “I couldn't see an ad on Facebook because I was a while male and they only put it out there for females.” The reason why they do that, the reason why these sites exist, the reason why disability hiring sites exist, is because companies suck at actually getting those people to become more diverse. What do you do? Seriously, what do you do? Do you just go to a general population site, throw jobs out there and say, “God, I hope women apply.” Or, do you smartly target and go after those types of individuals in these types communities. I say the latter because it just makes good sense. If I know my culture, if my culture sucks, when it comes to females, or it sucks because I don't have veterans or individuals with disabilities, or what have you. What do I do? I go after them in a targeted fashion. Chad: I think this is smart. I just think the velvet rope piece could be a little much. I guess we'll find out. It's an interesting play, that's for damn sure. Joel: Historically, diversity is one of the biggest rackets in our industry. I will say it because, traditionally, companies need to target diverse audiences, right? Chad: Yup. Yup. Joel: So, the model of like, “I'm gonna create a job site and call it, “Diversity Jobs” or “African American Jobs” and get money from companies” because then tell the feds like, “Oh, yeah. We're diversity because we're on Diversity Jobs” or “we're on African American Jobs” “Women Jobs” dah, dah, dah. But, all the while, these vendors that are getting money aren't that interested in being diverse, they're interested in leveraging the power of the law to make companies buy into their product. Chad: And their brand's saying [crosstalk 00:37:31] “we are diversity.” Joel: Yeah. To me, this is like 2.0 of what we saw in the early 2000s. Chad: Yeah, but, here's the thing. It's all about outcomes, now. Before, it was like, “Oh, let's be warm and fuzzy and let's say we love women and we love veterans and individuals with disabilities, so on and so forth,” all these different ... “Let's say we wanna hire them all, but yet, we don't effectively do it because our outcomes show that we're hiring a bunch of white males or we're hiring a bunch of Asian males,” depending on where you're at in the country. Chad: It all comes down to outcomes. Many of those sites, those old-timey sites like you're talking about, where, really, just there for that word, “diversity” it didn't matter. Now, smart companies, not all of them because they're not all smart, I'm talking about talent acquisition, they are focusing on outcomes and they wanna see business cases that are focused on outcomes for specific companies to get women into these types of jobs. How can you help me actually diversify, really diversify, my culture? If you can't show me that, hit the bricks, pal. Joel: Fair enough and you know who else loves women? Chad: Oh, Jesus. China and India. Joel: Yes. The discrepancy of male to woman ratio in these countries, apparently, you've got an interesting story here. Chad: Actually, Julie sent me this story and she was like, “This is gonna flip your lid.” Out of China ... China's population is 1.4 billion and there are nearly 34 million more males than females, which is actually the equivalent of the population, closes to the population of California or Poland. This is the big ... Obviously, we're talking about diversity. This is gonna be hard for them to have diverse organizations. But, we're talking about guys- Joel: Oh it's gonna be hard, alright. Chad: They'll never find wives and they will rarely have sex. Joel: Come on, dude. That's funny. I made a joke and you didn't acknowledge it. It's okay. Chad: Oh, I didn't hear it. Joel: I said it's gonna be really hard. Anyway. Chad: Oh, God. Joel: But, we know the sex robots are coming and they're definitely coming to China and India because there's a lot of horny dudes without women. Chad: Yeah, India's worse than China, so those numbers that I just read to you are China and India's actually worse. So, yeah, from an industry standpoint, we joke about sex robots, and we joke about all these types of things with automation, but seriously, this is a real thing and I think I'm gonna start looking at stock. Joel: Dude. Yes. Virtual reality. We're human beings. We still have needs and shit. Anyway, yeah. China made this problem. Right? Chad: Yes. Joel: Culturally and legally. They're in this problem that they have now. Chad: Yes. Not thinking about the long term impact of only having male children. How's that gonna impact all the other countries that are around them? Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Chad: Not just their own country, so this is actually kind of scary, especially when we're talking about diversity, we're talking about culture, that's a hell of a lot of men that outweigh women 35 million in China and I think 37 million in India. Joel: This is, historically, when governments say, “Let's just start a war.” Things happen when there's an imbalance in nature and I'm just saying war is sometimes the remedy for that imbalance. Chad: Obviously, governments start wars for far less than something like this. We're talking a huge difference in population, not just in that country, but globally. I'm talking about the size population, almost of California. That is ridiculous. Joel: And Poland. Chad: Had to throw that in there. Joel: I think we out, dude. Chad: Sex robots, we out. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad the 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 heading up in here. They made me say that. 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. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #Careerbuilder #EMSI #Adecco #PeopleFluent #Google #GoogleforJobs #Work180 #SexRobots #VR

Live from SHRM Talent in Las Vegas! The Chad & Cheese sit down with two of the most exciting companies around today, in two of the most talked about technologies. Thad Price, CEO of Talroo, formerly Jobs2Careers, talks rebranding and the future of job distribution. Amit Chauhan, CEO of JobAdX, discusses how they are looking at programmatic ad buying from an entirely different - and better - angle. Enjoy. and give our sponsors your wallets. Because, we said so. Lots of love to America's Job Exchange, Sovren, Ratedly and JobAdX. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Chad: Hey it's Chad. Joel and I were in Vegas all week this week. I know, it's hard being us, guys. But guess what? We've got some amazing interviews and if you didn't know, if you didn't hear, Jobs2Careers is now Talroo. That's right. So we're gonna talk to Thad, the new CEO over at now, Talroo, and also, if you don't know about JobAdX we're going to talk to their CEO, Amit, and the dude is awesome. So, take a listen, learn more about this industry and about these new names that are coming out. Whether they've been in the market and they're pivoting, or they're entirely new. Enjoy. 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. Joel: What's up everybody? We're back with our series of SHRM talent interviews. We're real excited to have Thad Price, newly named CEO. Congratulations, by the way. Thad: Thank you very much. Joel: That's quite an honor. When I met you, you were sort of slogging in the trenches with Shelly Mudd and company, so good on you, man. Wanted to really get you in ... You have a big announcement here at the show. Why don't you just tell us what you've unveiled here at the show and we'll dig into the whys and the whats. Thad: Yeah, great question. So we've unveiled our new brand. Our new brand is Talroo. And from our perspective, Talroo is the unification of the Jobs2Careers.com destination and also our growing employer suite of services. So back in October, we launched On Demand Talent, which is a product that we built under the Jobs2Careers.com brand. Chad: ODT. Thad: ODT, that's right. Chad: Yeah, you know me. Thad: On Demand Talent. So we launched it and got a lot of great feedback, and so now that product is actually Talroo Attract. And so now we're bringing in the brand together around our new brand that is Talroo. Joel: So what's going to happen to the Jobs2Careers brand? Because right now I believe, if you go to Jobs2Careers, the logo is still there, powered by Talroo. Are we looking at a multi-brand situation? Will Jobs2Careers go away and everything will be Talroo? Will Jobs2Careers be a separate thing and Talroo will be a tech arm? Tell us exactly what the future holds. Chad: What's going on? Thad: You guys really want to know this. Joel: Chad and Cheese want to know. Thad: It's a burning question. Joel: Jeez! Thad: It's a great question. So from our perspective, it's basically the technology. Talroo is the technology, Jobs2Careers.com is the job seeker destination. That's how we look at the world right now as really unifying around this idea of software and technology that helps power how employers attract talent. Joel: So consumers should think of Jobs2Careers as a job promotion, distribution arm, correct? Thad: Consumers, or ... Well we- Joel: As employers, HR people should look at distribution of jobs, pimp my jobs, get exposure. And they should look at Talroo as a technology arm solution? Thad: As a platform. Joel: As a platform, okay. Thad: As a data-driven platform to essentially find and reach unique audiences that we can uncover to help uncover quality candidates. Chad: So are we talking programmatic? Thad: It's not so much programmatic in that ... In our world, as you look at the definition of 'programmatic', it's really ... in some cases, it's kind of muddy. Right? Because at the end of the day, a job site should be programmatic in their own ecosystem, right? They're being a great marketer. So if you look at what we do is we read ... All of the programmatic vendors are actually great partners of ours. We actually amplify how we work with programmatic vendors with our system. So the programmatic vendor serves as the rules engine, then we read the rules engine and we provide access to our unique audiences. So as Talroo continues to gain traction and we power more, then there's more audience data. So right now, we're powering about three billion job searches a month. That's actually e-mail alerts, in some cases SMS, site searches, all these things together. Joel: So why Talroo? What does it mean, and what other names did you come up with that you didn't go with? Thad: That's a great question. It was fun. We looked at a lot of different things. We looked at On Demand Talent being ... There wasn't a lot of mystique in On Demand Talent. There wasn't a lot of intrigue in On Demand Talent. So when we started looking, we were like okay, what is important for us? And really what was important is we wanted mystique and intrigue. Because there've been aggregators and job boards around for so many years, and from our perspective it was really important to bring this mystique and intrigue. Thad: So when we looked at it, we said well, what do we really do? Right? And we connect talent and recruiters, and so how can we build a brand around what we do, and what's the connection that's there? So how we look at the word is we say we're bringing jobs seekers together with employers and we're attracting talent. So when that happens, there's this intersection, and so it's been great for us. Thad: So that was kind of the how we looked at it, and we're like, let's create a word that really speaks to what we're looking to do and what's interesting. Joel: Any other words that you created that didn't make the cut? Thad: There were a couple. But that was the one that really stood out that we worked on. Cause- Joel: Nice sidestepping that question. Chad: We wanna know the names. Name names, Thad. Name names. Joel: We'll have to go see what domains they've recently reserved. Chad: So you said it was fun. But there had to be some like back and forth argument. Tell us about the height of that, because branding, this is like for lack of better terms, like birthing a new child, right? Thad: Yeah. Chad: So- [crosstalk 00:06:07] Joel: Let's be honest, Jobs2Careers is not the most innovative name, imaginative name. So- Chad: Jobs and careers- Joel: Talroo is a little bit out there, so there must have been a nice conversation? Thad: Yeah. That was in the conversation, we were saying okay, again this idea of mystique and intrigue. How do we showcase this? And there was a lot of conversation around okay, who do we want to be? How do we want people to receive us as a brand? And that was a lot of fun. Thad: What was really interesting is that we all rallied around it. So Cindy, who heads up our sales team, she's had a lot of experience in the industry, she was like, "I love it. Let's do it." Tony, our new VP of Product who's like, "This is great, I love it. It feels good." And then we have a new VP of Marketing and Brand that joined us, Keith, about almost two months ago. And he was like, "I love it. It's great." So it all resonated. And then explaining about how we created it, and the intersection of talent and recruiting, and how that's so powerful was really important to us. Thad: And you know, what's interesting about our story is, we fully believe that great people grow great companies. Because you guys have seen all the turmoil that's happened in the industry over the last 10, 15 years. All the highs and lows. And so- Chad: We just did a podcast. And I don't know if you saw the Careerbuilder's a Trainwreck podcast. But yeah, it's happening all around us. Thad: Yeah. And people make all the difference. And so, if we can attract great people for companies that work with us, we can provide a great value and service to them. And just like we've attracted great talent to help grow Talroo to the next level. Joel: So let's talk about the jobs piece for a second. And you're in a unique situation, and a lot of people don't know that you ultimately share this same space, office-wise, with Indeed. They're in Austin. I mean, you literally could throw a rock and hit Indeed's office. Thad: We probably did. Joel: So you have a unique perspective on job distribution, the job board industry, the players. Google For Jobs obviously has been a meteorite into the whole industry I would think. What are your thoughts on the present state of the job board, job distribution industry? Thad: Great point. So my ... And great question. I agree with you all. I think that the idea of Google For Jobs is bigger than jobs. I think it's all about tapping into a B2B audience, and I think the clickstream data behind Google is what they want, is what's important to them. I think that's very big. When this first announced, I asked myself, I said, this is a big industry, right? 10 to 12 billion dollars worldwide. But it's Google. Is that exciting enough for them? Right? Is a few billion exciting? I don't know, I can't answer that question. Thad: But I do know that the whole idea to reach a B2B audience is much larger. I think it's like 80 billion. Joel: I'm pretty sure that 26 billion LinkedIn got their attention as well. Thad: Yeah, absolutely. Especially with Microsoft and how they can integrate a lot of that. So I think it's changing. And I think it's interesting to see how all of this is moving. With Indeed, we call our office the center of the job search universe. It's like this funny little thing we created, cause it's like literally there's Talroo , Indeed, and we're right there and have the same address. We're Building Two and they're Building One, right? So we do call it the center of the job search universe, which is pretty funny. Thad: But it's definitely changed a lot in so many different ways. But it's all moved to being data-driven, like any marketing. We talk about what's different about Talroo. We say we're bringing a marketing approach to job advertising, right? And it's not an emotional buy anymore. It's like, does it work? Are the hires in my ATS? And if it does scale and invest. And I think that's the big thing that's happened. Chad: So, on the employer's side, are you providing that scale of data? So that they know ROI is here, here? And how are you interfacing with applicant tracking systems? These aren't all easy questions, right? Thad: No. And it's an ongoing process. Chad: Yeah. Thad: So as we looked at it today, our first real mission was okay, how can we provide transparency and how much opportunity is there? What's the labor supply look like? Right? So if I open a wreck in your marketplace in Jobs2Careers, what does that look like? That was on demand talent. The predictive nature of it, right? I think I can drive 300 clicks at a cost of X price, we saved budget this, right? That's the first step. Thad: Where it gets really interesting is then taking that down to the additional steps. Into the higher data as well. So that becomes really interesting. But the other thing that's changed in the industry a lot is that the stat that is looked at is the source of hire stat. And the source of hire stat is about volume of hires, where do all the vital hires come from. And so there's a strategy that says I'm gonna be the number one source of hire. And that's a strategy that has worked really well for some. Then there's the other strategy of saying well, I really need to provide efficiency. I need my app-to-hire rate to be decent. Because that's time I'm wasting- Chad: Plus, it's a candidate experience, right? Thad: Yes. Chad: So if they're ejecting out of it, I mean, you want to make sure that it's nice and fluid. It's going to that ROI piece, right? So how do you really help them focus on being able to get that efficiency? And be able to focus on price? You're talking about transparency. Transparency is not easy to get with this. How do you do that? Thad: Yeah. It's a tall order. It's a tall order. But it's exciting for us, because there's steps. There's steps in the process. It's first, okay, what's available for me? How do I make that work? How do I become more efficient? Number two, I'm building a career site. I'm leveraging one of the platforms that are there. I'm using a recruiting marketing platform. Or I'm taking people directly to my ATS. How do we bridge that? How do we reduce friction, right? And then how do we ensure that there's a great candidate experience? Thad: So those are the things that we really focus on. And the next step is what are the other data attributes that we can help make decisions for our customers and for our employers? That's where the opportunity really is. Joel: From an outsider's perspective here at the show, you've got a nice booth. You've got the 20 by 20, it's probably the fanciest booth here at a relatively modest show. You're ramping up hiring. I noticed you brought on Mark Anderson, who has sort of long history in this industry. Cindy's been around forever. Like, a lot of new people, a lot of new energy. What are those new people going to be doing? [crosstalk 00:12:58] In other words, are there global aspirations here? Are you sticking in the US? There's just such a hunger for the products that you're ... I mean, in other words, it's a vast change from some of the other companies, CareerBuilder, that we talk about, that aren't growing and sort of scaling up. So I guess, just talk about what are these people going to be doing? Is it global? Are you sticking in the US? What's going on? Thad: There's massive upside in the US. Like that market, there's a huge opportunity in the US. So from our perspective, we're focusing on embracing the relationships with the advertising agencies that we work with. We bring on more enterprise business. That business could come through some of the programmatic partners that we work with, or it could come direct through companies that want to work with us direct. And largely when companies work with us direct, there's one key thing that they're yearning: service. Who would have thought that service as a software? Right? You know, the reverse, right? If you think about it. Joel: Huh. You need to trademark that. Thad: Yeah. So but I'm serious, right? If you think about what people are yearning for. That level of service is so important for so many different people. And I think that that becomes very important. You look at all of our testimonials from customers, it's great service, great service, great service, great service. So a lot of that is just focusing. And there's so much opportunity here in the US. That there's tremendous upsides. So we have no plans today look international. Joel: Okay. Chad: Is that kind of service scalable? Thad: Yes, with the right people. Chad: Okay. Thad: Right. With the right people and the right customers. Right. You mentioned Joel you wrote an article about our product that we launched, Ipply, that was focused on small businesses, and we shut down that product. And it was a great learning lesson for us. And what it told us was that small business isn't something that is in our DNA at this time. So we learned a lot from that. So we retooled a lot of what we do, and we said okay, this is our focus and this is where there's a lot of opportunity. Joel: So in light of personal service et cetera, some other tech that we talk about on the show pretty frequently are Chatbots, automation, AI. What are your thoughts on that in terms of your own business or just the industry in general? Thad: I think it's the future. But I go back to this whole idea of humanizing HR. Like Chatbots ... This is what we do. We have a relationship with people. We're in human resources. Chad: But we got a black hole problem and- Joel: If you're a job seeker [crosstalk 00:15:23], I'd rather talk to a robot than nothing at all. Chad: Yeah. Thad: That's a terrific point. That's a terrific point. I think there's an opportunity with it. It's just a very specific opportunity. It's how to become more efficient in what you do on a daily. It's not gonna solve all the world's problems. It's how you use it. Thad: I think one of the tracks, there was an individual director in town, I think was from Amazon, looking at how do they automate the entire hiring process. So I think that there's- Joel: Basically drones delivering candidates to your door I think is [crosstalk 00:15:53] where Amazon's going. Yeah. Yeah. Thad: Dropping them. So it's pretty wild. So I think there's definitely a use case for it. So, we'll see. We'll see. Joel: Ipply was built sort of on an app. Any aspirations to just sort of revisit the app, sort of native app world, and create anything around that? Thad: Not at the moment. Joel: Okay. Thad: No. Not at the moment. No. It's been interesting seeing from an app perspective. There are a number of things that have to happen and to reduce friction for it to be truly valuable for job seekers. So our thesis has been we're gonna invest in products and services where there's added value. So in the case of, like, we've looked at creating a job seeker app, and we're like, well, there's a lot of work that needs to be done with applicant tracking system integrations. So if we don't have the applicant tracking system integrations, then would an app be that powerful for us? So ... Chad: So how does a customer actually interact with you now that's you've turned into Talroo, versus the old ODT product? And certainly not the old ODT product, just really rebrand ... Is there a different mechanism in which they're just gonna buy something that's rebranded? Thad: Yeah, they're buying it rebranded as a product. And as a new company. And a lot of things we're adding into the product as we continue integrate. But as it stands right now, there's no difference in the core product. Chad: So what is the actual core product? And what do you see as next steps, road map-wise, on being able to evolve that product? Thad: Absolutely. So today, there's really kind of three pillars of the original product is: how do we predict? And how do we optimize? And how do we deliver? So the whole idea was, how do we predict how well we think your job is going to perform in our ecosystem? How do we optimize it for you? How do we scale up what's working and scale down what's not working? And then how do we deliver right into your ATS or into your career site. Thad: So a lot of it is how do we make that kind of predict area, how do we make that more robust? What are the other signals and signs we can use of whether people click or they don't? What's the brand like? What's the employer brand like? What are all these types of things that are really powerful? And then more importantly, what are the other areas to make that experience rich for people? What are some other things that people are interested in? Thad: So data. Going around it. The idea of data. Right now, if you look at our system today, and in most systems ... And I hate saying this, cause we're in the business of people, we're not in the business of clicks, right? But there're clicks in the system, and they're reported. But what do you do next? These are people. How do we bridge that gap? Chad: Well, how do you bridge that gap? I mean, that's the question. Because- Thad: You'll have to wait and see. Chad: Come on, Thad! Joel: He talks so much about Talroo's mystery. Chad: Yeah. Sam made us wait, she couldn't even tell us- [crosstalk 00:18:57] Joel: The Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Chad: And now you're making us ... ah. So, into my next question. So you have a vision really for process and for employer brand. You're talking about experience, right? Thad: Experience is very important to us. Chad: Okay. Thad: Absolutely. One of the things when you look at how we interact is, we would rather drive a candidate directly to a career site that's mobile optimized, right? That's not a Jobs2Careers.com experience. I mean, that's a big differentiator, how we look at the world. So if we were saying, hey, we're a job site, we're gonna be focused on okay, how do we keep these people in the ecosystem and have resumes being posted? Chad: To your ecosystem, as opposed to the employers? Thad: Exactly. Chad: Okay. Thad: Exactly. So we look at the world a little bit differently from that perspective. Joel: Your founder Bruce Ge is a pretty interesting cat. Thad: Ge. Yeah. Joel: Or Ge, sorry. Thad: That's alright. Joel: What's he up to? Cause it's kind of an interesting story for people who are geeks in the industry. What's Bruce up to now that he's sort of passed the CEO baton to you? Thad: Yeah. He's having a lot of fun. So he's spending a lot of time being a Chinese entrepreneur. A successful Chinese entrepreneur. He's spending a lot of his time thinking about how he can help Chinese entrepreneurs be more successful in the US, and that can also mean how he helps Asian companies come to the US in a lot of different ways. So it's a very unique trait. Thad: And it's very interesting now of course, with what's going on politically. But he looks at it and says it's a very different market. The US is a very different market. How did I succeed, and how did I build a great business in the US, a profitable business in the US? And then how do I help Chinese entrepreneurs be more successful? So there is a lot of great opportunity. So that company is with us. There's a conference that focuses on entrepreneurship, it's called F50. It's where he spends a lot of his time. Joel: What are some of your takeaways from the show so far? Either the Expo Hall or just the attendees, what are some of your takeaways after a day and a half? Thad: So it's really interesting. There's a lot of focus around changing. I see change, right? I see change in every corner by a lot of the different products and services that are there. People are looking for something different. Joel: Do you think they know what they're looking for? Thad: No, I think they need to be told- Joel: Educated. Told. Yeah. Thad: Educated, right. Told probably a horrible word. Chad: Literally, I think they- Joel: I don't know, I need a Chatbots. Yeah. Thad: You know, it's interesting because there's just so much opportunity there, cause it's such an important sector. So important. Joel: Any vendors that catch your eye up to this point? Or from the show- Thad: Talroo. Joel: Well, obviously Talroo. Chad: Got this huge tower- [crosstalk 00:22:14] Thad: Talroo [crosstalk 00:22:16] Joel: Drink the Kool-Aid for God's sakes. Chad: Talroo Kool-Aid. So what can you tell us about what's next? Come on, Thad. Thad: How about next episode? Joel: Wah-wah. Okay. Well, where can we find out more about Talroo for our listeners? Thad: Talroo.com. Joel: Thank you, Thad. Thad: You're welcome. Thanks, guys. Joel: It's commercial time. Announcer: 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. 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. To learn more about Sovren AI matching visit sovren.com. That's sovren.com. Chad: It's SHOWTIME! Joel: With our SHRM Talent Interview Segment. Chad: SHRM Talent! Joel: SHRM Talent! Chad: Hoo hoo! Joel: Talented people. We're joined today with Amit Chauhan, I hope I said that- Chad: Is that good? [crosstalk 00:22:55] Joel: CEO of JobAdX and also Recroup, which some people may know as your previous company, it's still going, but the first company you launched. We're gonna focus on JobAdX here today, which you launched fairly recently. So for those that don't know, and probably that's most of our listeners, tell us about JobAdX, the genesis of it, and what you hope to accomplish with it. Amit Chauhan: Absolutely. And I'd really like to thank both of you for having me here today. Big fan of your podcast. Joel: Aw, thank you. Amit Chauhan: Just putting it out there. Chad: He's sucking up already! Joel: The question, though, are you Team Chad or Team Cheese? Chad: Oooh. Amit Chauhan: I'm Team Chad and Cheese. Chad: Ohhhhh! Joel: Ohhhhh! [crosstalk 00:23:41] Thank you for listening. Amit Chauhan: Absolutely. Coming back to your question. Originally we're an ad tech company. My background is from consumer Ad Tech, manage PPC counting for some big companies. No programmatic, not the programmatic we seek in our industry, but what programmatic is in consumer streams. Amit Chauhan: And the focus has been for us, when we got into recruitment industry, was to bring the consumer Ad Tech into recruitment technology. We did that with recruit, where we brought in ... retargeting more generalized analytics platform as well. And some social advertising and everything. And then, when we saw an opportunity when we started to learn about programmatic in recruitment space, which a lot of companies are doing, and we realized that they're focusing on one specific part, which is the buying side. And it just struck to us that why just buying? How can not you make the delivery that I make? Because when you make delivery programmatic, you don't have to worry anything else, because that takes care of all the rules that you have to set. Amit Chauhan: And that exactly is how the idea evolved, and we started working on it not too long ago, just maybe mid-last year 2017. An idea was to build the first real IDP-powered job advertising exchange. So the idea was we go to publisher partners, claim dedicated slots on their search results. And whatever topic their search is, we can in real time dynamically deliver a job based on what criteria they're searching. And that just gives us so much control. Amit Chauhan: Same thing if you to auction you see an ad. That ad is a response off of real time action that happened microseconds before the page was loading. Now the reason you see the vertical ad may be because of the data ad exchange. We as an industry have a lot more power. We have invented base advertising. We know exactly what ad a candidate wants to see. We know what they're searching for, where they're searching for it. And if you're still not delivering that way, like how good are we as a technology platforms. That's exactly what we'll bring you with JobAdX. That intent-based job advertising with real time delivery and real time direct. Chad: So, talent acquisition. Programmatic sounds good. It's almost like AI and machine learning, and it's like, oh, it's programmatic. It's like I can say it but I don't know what the hell it is. So, you guys talk about smarter programmatic, and you talk about bringing consumer Ad Tech in, right? How's that so different from recruitment Ad Tech? Are we talking about like the horse and buggy versus a Porsche? What are we talking about here? Amit Chauhan: Yes. So traditionally, we see the recruitment advertising exchanges that are being existed for quite some time now. What we are doing is, we created a network where they will rely on their publishers to show their jobs when they have to. So like, publisher job one X will get a feed from one of the exchanges. They feed from everywhere. And that even becomes like a responsibility of a publisher to show the jobs. Amit Chauhan: Now in that case, as the exchange itself, as the platform itself, they have no visibility of when the job will be shown, whom it will be shown, and how it will be shown. That doesn't make any ad platform powerful. Now, what makes Google so powerful? What makes Ad Techs so powerful? Their ability to see through other exchanges, through other networks, and place an ad based on what data they collect. And that is the same thing that we're doing. We see everything that is happening in our exchange, we see what keywords job seekers are searching. When they're clicking, when they're not clicking. The ability to turn on a job and turn off a job in real time. So it's not like a publisher has to refresh a feed every three hours or one hour just to make sure there are new jobs. We don't have to do that. Chad: So it sounds like it's more transparent throughout the network, and just fluid. It just flows, as opposed to you waiting and having to click a button to be able to get into a slot. The system it just works more fluidly than what you've seen in recruitment Ad Tech over the years? Amit Chauhan: Absolutely. And like we have access to those dedicated slots. It gives us more power that again, how we can locate more jobs. Like one of the more common concerns raised when I'm talking to a lot of agents and clients, that with traditional ad exchanges, especially job ad exchanges, they will give you the budget and the way they're set up, you'll spend your budget within an hour or two. And then you'll have to spend more. We don't do that. Because we understand that okay, if you give us less than a thousand dollars, we can spend it out over the whole period of your campaign. It can be ten days, 20 days, 30 days. So we do the budget continuation for our client. And we do it the same way ... we have been seeing that happening in consumer Ad Tech. Amit Chauhan: We want to run a cam ... like your job is on page one for a publisher today. Now, it might be on page two or page three with a traditional way of job posting. That doesn't mean that no new job seekers are coming. One thing we also need to see that we are so spoiled by Google, especially like millennials, that we don't want to go to second or third page on any searches. Like, I don't remember like when I went to my second page on Google search. For me, those results are irrelevant. Amit Chauhan: We think the same behavior we're doing the job search. We don't go to second or third pages. That's why like we see that negate the traffic for any job posting, it drops significantly after a couple of days. That I think is solved by having the placement. Our jobs are where the candidates are. So it's not second or third page. It can be any page where job seekers are. And we have a belief to make sure that if that candidate has seen this job x number of times, hasn't clicked on it, don't show them this job again. So that just gives us more ability to locate jobs more efficiently, conserve the budget, and just make sure that all advertisers get more access to unique candidates. Joel: We're seeing a lot of activity in this space. Pandologic. Appcast. A lot of ... Joveo. A lot of competition. How do you guys differentiate yourself from the others? Amit Chauhan: So we do overlap in some way or another. But I think our core focus, which is the technology side of it, is completely separate. Like for example, you talked about Pandologic or Recruitics, Clickcast, that's where they are the buying side of the platform. Which is a Google base and that has been the programmatic in our space for like previous couple of years. Amit Chauhan: We're not focusing on that part. Because what we have seen from consumer Ad Tech, if you make the delivery dynamic, you don't have to specifically set the rules. Because then, algorithms and then the exchange itself take care of the whole rules that you have to face. Be it okay when to stop a campaign, like when to run a campaign, when to show a job and not to show a job. So all those key factors come in play, but they have just done automatically. That's where we are focusing on, and that's where the core differentiator for us is. At some cases we do work in conjunction with them. So like some of our clients. But from the technology part, I think that we are very separate. And the vision is very separate as well. Chad: So on the analytics side of the house, do you have an analytics platform that you provide to them? Do you just plug into their analytics platform? How does that work? Amit Chauhan: So that's where we have capability of doing it both ways. But we do have an analytics dashboard for our clients to use. And like if our clients are using an existing programmatic platform, then we can send it out there as well. Like from technology, I think we have taken care of every aspect to make life easier for our clients. And any advertiser or anyone that comes to us we have seen the challenges of traditional programmatic platforms, the complexity of it. And it happens. Whenever industry evolves and brings you technologies from other industries, the complex part is actually addressed first. And that's exactly what we've seen. So the platforms that are out there, they're complex. They're good, they're performing well, but still. And the end user and talent acquisition manager is not the one using them. That's where our focus has been, to simplify the process so much that even if an end user, it can be like one person shop, can use programmatic to advertise one job or 100,000 jobs. Chad: So, in most cases, talent acquisition, they feel like they have to go an agency to be able to get this done. Because it is just so complex. What you're saying is with JobAdX, that's not something that you really have to worry about. You can plug into it, it's simplicity, and really the platform does the work for you. You don't have to sit there, watch your budgets, any of that other stuff. You get into the platform and it works for you. Amit Chauhan: Absolutely. And that's like that is the same thing that we have seen happening almost in I think in every industry around the world, whatsoever. So from consumer ad tech, what we have learned initially, is when you build a platform, if it's too complex at least these price lines, they will go through the agencies. Now the smaller market SMBs, they don't have budget to go to agencies, so they have to either learn themselves to do it, or they just don't do it. Chad: Mainly the latter, right? Amit Chauhan: Exactly. And that's exactly where even today's recruitment programmatic market is, where it's always focused on the high-priced client or the big companies, which can either afford an agency or which can have someone to really manage. Like who can hire someone to manage the programmatic side of it. Which is very rare, though, because most of them actually just go through the agencies. Amit Chauhan: We want to make sure though we have a platform accessible to anyone. It can be smaller companies, companies with two people, HR department or [crosstalk 00:33:47] department, and they want to advertise their jobs. They don't know if they want to go into Jobbook to do it, or they want to go to one particular place. Just like want it done in a way that it's optimized automatically. So we are building a platform that's accessible for everyone. Not just for special needs or just for enterprise clients or the big agencies. Joel: One of your big pushes when you launched was to get publishers onboard. In other words, sites where your jobs could be seen. Which I saw as a pretty big challenge. How is that going? You're smiling, so I assume it was. Talk about that, and where you are with that today. Amit Chauhan: So we're receiving really good response from the industry. I'll say the launch timing was off because we launched in December last year, and all the publishers that want you to Q1 Q2 for their product. And they like, we all understand that. A majority of the companies, publishers in our industry, they have significantly small tech teams. So like squeezing in even a small sprint can take a long time. Amit Chauhan: What we were able to achieve, working with even the handful of publishers, we were able to achieve something important indeed. Now that we've come to you to share with world perspective of publisher and client. That how, not just be adding our slots there, maximizing their on their revenue, which they will get from many of the job exchange. But also, if they're replacing our unit with a Google Adsense unit, they're actually starting to see more engagement for their other jobs as well. Because now their job seekers are seeing more relevant ads. They're not distracted by a Domino's Pizza ad from Google Adsense, just because someone do it. I've seen those happen myself. Chad: Unless you're Joel. Joel wants to see the Domino's Pizza. Joel: I'm good with pizza. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Here's pizza guy. Now, here's pizza. Amit Chauhan: But yeah. You don't go to job boards to search jobs there, right? Chad: No. He's looking for jobs and pizza at the same time. He's a very niche customer, though. Amit Chauhan: Okay. Chad: Yes. Joel: Super niche. Super niche. We talk a lot about on the show the challenges maybe what we think of as traditional job sites have from the top. So you have LinkedIn with Microsoft. You have Google and Google For Jobs. And even Facebook getting into this game. It seems like a challenge that we don't talk about enough maybe is the programmatic buying side. Do you agree with that? And if so, what do you feel like is the programmatic impact on the traditional job site? Is it good for them or bad for them? Or good for some, bad for some? Amit Chauhan: It's good and bad both. There's no real answer to it, like it's definitely good, or it's definitely bad. The players that you mentioned, like with Microsoft or Facebook, Google. Those so far, they've been staying away from actually entering into the market. But the core of powers that they have, like all of their ad exchanges, they're not doing it just yet. But when they do it, programmatic will become the norm. Because like they're not going to do it like the usual way of how the ad exchanges work in our industry. They will come with the same data bank hosting and like how everything is more real time and everything. Amit Chauhan: The sooner we adopt to it, it will be a better transition for the industry. So that when these players come in, we'll know where we fit in and where our ... either by the business models or the technology specs are fed, because they will come in eventually. They are very aggressive, like Google especially is very aggressive. And all the publishers, and that's where we think, all the publishers are really using Google Adsense. So sooner we realize that how and where we fit in as technology, as market, as companies and partners, it'll be an easier transition for the industry. But- Joel: I might have asked the question incorrectly. Do you think programmatic ad buying is good for sites like Indeed, Monster, et cetera? Or good, bad, like what's your opinion? Amit Chauhan: Oh, it's definitely good. Joel: Good? Amit Chauhan: It's definitely good. Joel: For all of them? Amit Chauhan: For all of them. And the reason I'll say it's good. If they can translate that results to their customers. Because in the end, what's good should be good for industry. What they're doing with programmatic, if they're doing with their job distribution- Joel: But if I'm Indeed, and you're putting ads on all my competitors as well and I'm in a free marketplace competing with the results on other pages, then that's bad for me, right? I'd rather have all your money on my site, and not compete with the other job sites. Amit Chauhan: But that happens either way. Even if you- Joel: Not if Indeed doesn't play. Amit Chauhan: Like in the end, you would have to, at some point. Joel: Okay. Alright. Amit Chauhan: When the market will growth. Like you can say okay, I don't want to, we don't want to do it just yet. Yeah, we begin to say that a lot of job boards or exchanges are denying adopting to programmatic, just because they don't understand it. And that happens with every industry when there's a new thing that comes which people don't understand, they want to stay away from it. It's okay for now, but there will be in maybe a couple of years or so, you will have to adopt to it. Even for like bigger players like even Monster, they will have to agree to the point that okay, programmatic is the way to go. Chad: It ain't. Think that really the short term loss per se, the click dollars versus the posting dollar, is really the issue right out of the gate. It's like, well, I'm gonna lose this concrete $500 or $200, whatever it is, to post a job versus I don't even know how many clicks or what dollars I'm going to get from there. So do you see that as a long-term kind of win versus a short-term kind of, hey, this is the dollars we now, you gotta let that go and you gotta evolve? How does that happen? Amit Chauhan: Well, without actually naming out, see like- Chad: No, name, name, name! Amit Chauhan: No names! No names! No names. I think that we have seen from the bigger players, they are industry, that they're very concerned about the short-term impact rather than the long-term strategy. Because they are companies who should be working with Google rather than not working with Google. Because you need to understand that Google is the destination for job seekers. And when we're in market where there's so little, especially like unemployment where it is historically low, so we need to understand that if you want to play with the most important search engine in the world, and if you just want to go against them, it's not going to help us. Like you have the traffic right now, but you're not gonna have it for long. Chad: Could you hear that, Indeed? Amit Chauhan: I didn't say Indeed! Chad: No, I didn't. Joel: He didn't mention names, but Chad will mention names. Chad: Chad mentions names - Joel: No fear on doing that. Amit Chauhan: But in the end, whenever you have these companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, entering this space, because they have all the resources, that they can make big changes. It's better to play with them rather than against them. That should be the focus for ... These are the bigger players in our industry. It also opens doors for the smaller ones. Because once they start to adopt to the newer changes and the evolution, it makes it easier for the smaller techs to get in. Chad: So these smaller Nit sites, and we've actually received comments and emails from smaller Nit sites saying hey, look, what do I do? Job boards are dying, what do I do? This would be your answer for them is like, hey, you need to go programmatic. You need to be a publisher. Amit Chauhan: Absolutely. But when someone say job boards are dying, and it's a challenge to see how you can save a job board. Because it's a very different topic altogether. Chad: Yes. Amit Chauhan: But how you can work with everyone else can really make a lot of difference. Okay, do you really understand your audience? How can some other technology can activate your audience better? Programmatic can. Programmatic, that's the whole power of programmatic in general that how it activates the audience, to capitalize, to really maximize your [inaudible 00:42:19]. A lot of time you post a job when they actually see they're getting keywords, clicking or not clicking. Just see when it comes to tracking the results, tracking the convergence. Job boards haven't done a great job 'til now. There are some that are adopting to it, but largely not. Amit Chauhan: When you go programmatic on a higher level, you start to see those things. Even if you don't have a huge audience, it can make a lot of difference, because you'll see that your jobs are located more frequently. You can see people are applying, people are clicking. They're really just engaged and the convergent rate is starting to go up. And everything translates end up later on. Joel: You mentioned the world of marketing, and I appreciate your statement that if you want to make a successful HR business, just look at what's working in the sales and marketing world. And we're five years behind. So just do something- Chad: At least. [crosstalk 00:43:13] Joel: In the world of marketing, programmatic ad buying is a huge percentage of what's being bought out there. What percentage are we at in penetration with HR and recruiting? And how big do you think that number of percentage will be in the future, like how high are we gonna get? Where is the ceiling? Amit Chauhan: Well, the numbers that we're seeing in the industry are very different. So some places I am reading it's five percent, some places I'm reading it's 80 percent. I think- Joel: You agree there's no chance it's 80 percent? Chad: No way. Amit Chauhan: No way. Chad: No way it's 50 percent, let alone 80 percent. Amit Chauhan: I think the answer to this is, when we're talking, you respect all. So when we're talking to the job boards, job boards they're going programmatic. And there's a really good percentage of that. If you're talking in terms of agencies, there's a really good percentage of that as well. But if you just talk about employers in general, it's a very small percentage. Joel: Right. Amit Chauhan: And it will also remain a very small percentage until we realize that we really open it up to SMBs, which we aren't yet. Because platforms are more focused on further enterprise. I'll say for the direct employers is definitely one to five percent, at max. Chad: So, with a platform being easier to access, utilize, kind of go on autopilot per se, how do you really penetrate that SMB market? Joel: And do you care? Chad: Oh yeah, they care. Amit Chauhan: Oh yeah. Chad: Look at Zip. Amit Chauhan: And actually that's a very good example. For us also. The motivation to build JobAdX was not just for enterprise, it was for SMBs. And like for example, a lot of time we like to talk, also things like Google Adsense for jobs when we talk to people. And that's exactly what the motivation is, that from the consumer Ad Tech, we have seen that if you don't have a platform that can sort of do smaller spaces, which is like I'll say 85 percent of the market, which is the small and medium size companies, you're missing out big. Amit Chauhan: DMPs, DSPs, the big companies that came in and they focus only on the agencies, and very soon they realized that if you really want to make big dollars, you have to have self-serve platforms. You have to have easier self-serve platforms which anyone can use. Even if they have a hundred dollars or $500. Amit Chauhan: The programmatic platform that we have in our industry right now, they're not fit for one job, or two jobs. Or even ten jobs. If you give them anything smaller than maybe a hundred or 200, it's not really worth it. It's not worth for it employers, it's not worth for even the platforms. That's where we are focusing. That's where we want to take it. That even if you have one job, even if you have a hundred dollar budget, you can create a campaign the same way someone will create it with thousands. System is designed to save in a way that won't leave you spending more. You get more visibility and more visibility. But even for the hundred dollars, we get the best value. And that's exactly what the focus is. That's happening in any advertising technology. It's about how much you're spending, how much work results you can get, and just translate it into that. Joel: So talking about spending, tell me about pricing. What can someone expect to pay if they have a thousand dollar budget to put towards JobAdX? What piece of that do you get? Amit Chauhan: We get? Let's not talk about that! Joel: 50 percent! Amit Chauhan: To be honest, we don't know how much we get. But I'll say it this way. I like traditional exchanges where it's a flat out share between publisher and advertisers, like sometime 50-50, 70-30. We haven't done it that way. Because that just makes, from my developmenting, they just say that makes their life easier. But like whatever we are trying to do, that makes their life so much difficult. But the idea is how we can maximize the returns for publishers. And so- Joel: So customer doesn't say I'm paying you a thousand dollars to push my jobs? How much of that is actually going toward buying ads? And how much is going to you? Like you don't let them know that? Amit Chauhan: Not right away. And the idea is, because what happens is, there's some jobs which are less competitive, where the CPCs are lower, and we want to make sure that if the CPC is really low, say it's hovering around 20 cents a click, in that case a really big chunk of that CPC goes to the publisher. And that has been the focus for us. The vendor the CPC starts to increase, that's when our shares start to increase. Where it goes, it fluctuates. But- Joel: So you're not a non-profit? Amit Chauhan: Oh, no- [crosstalk 00:48:11] Joel: You're a for-profit business? [crosstalk 00:48:13] So you don't just say, hey, 15 percent off the top is going to come to our platform? We're gonna get 15 percent? Amit Chauhan: No. It's like, it's programmed ... the system is designed to see that how it can maximize returns for publishers for good quality. It also does a couple of things from like quality traffic. So for example, we don't do the traditional partnerships in nature that'll give 50-50 from publisher partnerships. We just keep it open. We say okay, the system will analyze the traffic you are sending. If you send, let's say, your convergence rate is anywhere from 10 to 11 percent, you might actually get 80 percent of the click. If your convergence is five percent, you might get another 60 percent. If it's below five, you might 50 or lower. But it's focus on the quality, so that just makes like both sides meet even. And a lot of time it slows down the traffic for job delivery for one just to make sure that they're okay. It's balanced out. It's like there's no friction. Joel: Tell me something cool you're development team is working on right now. Amit Chauhan: Well, if I tell you that, those guys will freak out. Joel: Really? They'll freak out? Well, they don't listen to us. They won't hear this podcast. [crosstalk 00:49:29] Amit Chauhan: I've told them. I've told the whole team to listen to it [crosstalk 00:49:35]. But the better reason I think is- Joel: So speak in generalities. Is it new features? Is it just grow out the platform? What's sort of the major direction from that standpoint? Amit Chauhan: I think right now, our focus is performance more than features. Joel: Okay. Amit Chauhan: And something we have learned from Recroup generally, we all built Recroup. We build so much. I used to come up with the stupidest ideas and my dev team never said no. And they would just go and build it. And to realize, we're the only ones using those features. So this time, we're not focused on features that much. We're focused on how, what we have so far. From reusing some prototype one, prototype two, prototype three. And we're going to be until prototype 23. And focusing on what do we have, how we can improve the performance. How we can improve the search matching, job matching, click through rate, impressions, deliverability and all of that. Amit Chauhan: Right now, more focus is on the job search, so from where we were a month ago 'til now, we have seen significant improvement in our search matching. And now we're actually implementing what we're learning in that, because what we saw was, job seekers searches are really random. Can you guess what is the most common search parameter that we get? Chad: Jobs near me. Joel: Jobs. Amit Chauhan: It's actually no strain. People just come and search. Joel: Just browse, basically. Chad: Yeah. Amit Chauhan: And they obviously see where it comes. So now how do we address that? That's where the candidate profiling provider comes in. And if that candidate has an important strength, let's show the man his job. And try to see if they click on it, if they don't click on it. Chad: Learn from it. Amit Chauhan: Learn from it. Chad: Yeah. Amit Chauhan: And that's where the emotional learning is coming in very handy. Joel: Where can our listeners find out more about JobAdX? Amit Chauhan: Well, they can log in at www.jobadx.com. I just pulled up the spelling for some reason. Or they should reach out to our amazing VP of Sales Tim Hawk at tim@jobadx.com. Please don't email me. Chad: Yeah, yeah. Tim's in the room, so he's amazing. Joel: Yeah, he's ... yeah. Thank you Amit. Amit Chauhan: Thank you. Announcer: This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Subscribe on iTune, 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. #JobAdX #Talroo #Jobs2Careers #SHRM

Could you be going to "Indeed Jail"? -- Seriously, WTF? The Chad and Cheese spend some time with industry veteran Tim Sackett as he discusses the trials and tribulations of being sentenced to Indeed "jail." You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll long for an alternative to Indeed. Enjoy. -- Straight from America's Job Exchange! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Announcer: America's Job Exchange is a market leader in diversity recruitment and an OFCCP compliance solution provider. We serve over a thousand customers, consisting of federal contractors and subcontractors, to SMBs and Fortune 500 organizations. America's Job Exchange specializes in job distribution to over 6,500 state one-stop career centers and community-based organizations, ensures the creation and maintenance of state credentials, obtains veteran preference on job postings, robust outreach management, and supports effective, positive recruitment efforts designed to recruit individuals with disabilities, veterans, women, and minorities. For more information, call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. 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: SHRM Talent. Hey, this is Chad and Cheese and- guess what? Yeah, we got Tim Sackett in the house. Joel: The Sack-man. Tim: -before? Am I the biggest guest you've- Joel: I guess you are. Tim: Like, the most frequented guest? Chad: I think so. Joel: Yeah, it's an illustrious list of all-stars. It's like SNL, where if you do five shows, you get a jacket. So you're well on your way. Tim: So close, so close. Chad: I think it's gonna be a Jobs2Careers jacket, because they're trying to get rid of those now. Joel: They're on clearance. Chad: What's the new name? Talroo Joel: Something like that. We're gonna get him on and get to the- Tim: So the marketing firm where they fired him after he came up with that? Joel: Oh, ouch, you're feeling salty today, Tim Tim: I got something that's on my nerves. Joel: So Tim is on the couch. Chad: He is. Joel: He's gonna vent a little bit. Chad: And he should, he should. Chad: Because from what I'm hearing, there's some bullshit happening over at Indeed. Tim: Well, yeah. Tim: That's nothing new but- Joel: Tell us your situation and what it's like to be in indeed jail. Tim: So yeah, if you don't like me calling it indeed, but it's Indeed jail. Remember when we used to do LinkedIn jail. And people still get into LinkedIn kind of told you, "here's how you get out of LinkedIn jail." We all kind of figured it out. And unfortunately you can't figure out how to get into Indeed jail. So, Indeed jail is when they stop scraping your site and no longer get free traffic. Which is awesome, we love the free traffic. It's like a crack pipe, right? They got us to- Joel: Heroin drip, heroin drip. Tim: You got addicted and you loved it and then they took it away. So I'm in Indeed jail, they (inaudible) my side because my search quality was bad. Now they send you a couple of blog posts in terms of, "here, let's have this define what search quality is." Chad: Yeah, okay. Tim: So basically there's a thing, right? So if you're a corporate company, corporate talent acquisition, those jobs are number one priority. If you're staffing for them like I am, mine take kind of second priority. And then the job boards they claim, like Careerbuilder and stuff take third priority. I don't know if that's really true, but whatever. So if I have a job that's very similar to corporate job that I'm working, even though it's not a direct job, basically they're saying, "hey, candidates don't wanna see the same job, they wanna see only the job from the real corporate entity. Chad: So the duplicate (jobs) conversation. Joel: So ABC company is the real company hiring the job, if Tim's company HRU Technical Resources actually put with the job on there, they're saying, "hey, that's bad search quality, we're not gonna scrape your site, because candidates don't want the duplicates." Joel: Which, okay, you can say is reasonable. Tim: That's very reasonable. Tim: Yeah. So I was told, "hey you're putting in duplicate jobs, right? From the search quality perspective." So we go through and say, "well, they're not really duplicates because this company that we're working with, we're hiring contract jobs, not direct jobs, which are completely different, blah blah blah. And they don't care, they don't listen. So we go, "well show me where they are and we'll make sure we get these dupes off so that you can come back and search quality can run and we'll be good." Chad: Show us what you don't like. Joel: So you're bending over backwards. Tim: I really, I truly wanna fix it, right? Because I wanna go out to the audience and say, "hey, don't get yourself in Indeed jail, that's how you don't." And so I said, “just give me an example, show me." No we can't do that. Can't give you examples. But, Tim, today only, if you pay to have all of your jobs sponsored, we will go out and scrape those crappy jobs off your site that our candidates don't wanna see, and we will put them in front of the candidates, because we really are concerned about candidates, but you have to pay to do that. Chad: So it's different, if you pay for it, they're not crappy jobs anymore. Tim: No, now they're great jobs- Tim: Although, they're great jobs, okay. Joel: You pay, they'll play basically. Tim: They pay to play, but the other part I love, is in every communication I get from them, it's always about the candidate, which it never was until Google for Jobs came in and say we're about the candidate and then Indeed goes, "no, we are. No really, we are." No you're not, never were." Chad: And never were. Tim: And if I pay, guess what, you're not again. So that's kind of how it works. Joel: So I wonder what happens to the duplicate jobs, quote unquote, that used to be there. That used to be there instead of yours, do they still remain on the index in the search results? I doubt they talked about that, but- Tim: They don't talk- yeah we didn't get into that. Chad: Well that's the quality. Tim: They didn't give you anything that's the problem. Chad: That's the quality that they don't wanna tell him about, which it almost feels like they're trying to be Google, and we don't want you to know our algorithm, right? Tim: Oh for sure. Chad: Which is all bullshit, it's like, "look, if you wanna help us focus on quality." Joel: Google will actually tell you how to fix the problem. Chad: Yes. Tim: Yeah. Joel: If you have spammy links, you have crappy content, there's a pretty robust FAQ knowledge base that will tell you how to get out of jail, you submit, hey I fixed the problem, they review it, and hopefully they get you out of jail. Indeed it sounds like does not have similar process. Tim: No, in fact I got an email that basically said, "this decision is final." Final? Chad: Final until you pay. Tim: So if I fixed everything and actually rerun the search, it wouldn't matter. Unless I wanna pay, then it's completely fine. Chad: So then it's not final then. It's not final, because if you wanna slam down the gold card, the platinum card, then it's not final. Tim: Yeah the crazy part I don't understand though is how the whole process- so here's my recommendation would be; if you're currently getting your jobs scraped by Google organically, you're paying nothing. Never paid them a dime. Because if you do, they know now that you're a willing participant- Joel: Indeed or Google. You said Google. Tim: Indeed, sorry, Indeed. If I could pay money to Google in the new Google for jobs, I probably would. But that's not there yet. Joel: Are your jobs in Google for jobs as well? Tim: Yes. Joel: Can you speak to the performance of that versus- Tim: Well, yeah I mean again ... I know right now I'm not getting really any organic traffic from Indeed so, my Google traffic is way higher. But no, it's been increasing while I'm [inaudible 00:07:19] decreasing. And we actually have couple of clients that we worked with as well that were seeing some pretty big decreases from Indeed but also some pretty big increases from Google. But again, it's not necessarily there yet to say, "oh, well we can just walk away from Indeed, but ..." Joel: So where do you go from here? Tim: Probably Programmatic, JobAdX, you know, Jobs2Careers/Talroo, Appcast whatever, right. Joel: Pando. Tim: But yeah, you know, really playing in the different space. If I'm gonna pay for something, I'm gonna pay for something that works. Chad: Yeah, well. That's pretty smart. Joel: And how long have those jobs been on indeed? Tim: Total in scraping? Joel: Yeah. Tim: 8 years. Joel: So 8 years no problem. Google for jobs shows up, hey we've got a problem" Tim: Got a problem. Joel: Okay, I think that's not a coincidence. Tim: I don't think it is either. And so I'm thinking, okay well I'm just a staff member, it's just me. So I'm at SHRM Talent. Yesterday I had a really great conversation with a corporate talent acquisition leader position leader, she fills about 150 sales jobs a year. And she said, "oh well we decided to change up our job posting strategy. We went from 40 and then we wanted to add a bunch of micro markets and stuff, so we went from 40 to 120." Indeed did the exact same thing to them. Search quality issues, even though it's all direct jobs. Chad: Search quality issues? Tim: Shut 'em down, and I said well how much were you- we were paying $9,000 a month to be sponsored and now we don't have a search quality issue, she's like, "we wanna get out of that mess." Chad: So wait a minute, we're talking about an organization who this is where the job, the impetus, where the job starts. It's created, it is pushed. Nobody else, it is- Tim: It's all them. Chad: But they have search quality issues. Tim: And again, they wouldn't tell her exactly why, they kind of hint. Chad: Shitty job descriptions? Tim: Well no it was location, right? They were in Columbus, Ohio and then they're Strongsville, Ohio and then they're like, "well that's the same location, same job." And you're like, "well yeah, but it's our job, and maybe those are two actual locations. You can't say that that's what it is. Chad: And you should be able to parse that shit out if you wanted to anyway. I mean there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to split that into two jobs. Tim: Yeah, but again, the reps, literally, all they do is go, "it's search quality, we have no control over it, telling us we have no idea, search quality, search quality." And it's like the gestapo, right? Joel: Would you go as far as to say extortion? Tim: Well no, because they're giving you something for free, right? Chad: Well they're not now, they're not now. Tim: The crack dealer wasn't extorting me when I decided to buy crack- Joel: The first hit was free. Tim: The first hit was free. Tim: I'm a willing participant in this scheme, right? Chad: An eight year high, but now you gotta pay for it. Tim: I mean, I think the reality is though I think I have really good recruiters, and we do a lot of different things, it's not gonna kill us, we'll be fine. But, for me it's always about, again, this is happening to me, it's happening to other people that won't be fine because they post and pray and maybe the only way they're getting candidates. So how do we go out and say, "oh, well here's probably some things you might have to do." Joel: So if you're listening, and you have a problem with Indeed, or you're in Indeed jail you wanna share your story, go to chadcheese.com and tell us what's going on. Chad: I would love to hear that. And just a little love, little Tim Book love. Tell us about the new book that just came out. Tim: Yeah the Talent Fix, it's on the SHRM store, it will be on the Amazons probably in six weeks, there's always a time lag there. But it was my thing, I get tons of TA leaders that call and say, "okay, I'm broke in. What would you do, how would you fix." And so I just said from beginning to end, here's what I would do if I came in to run your shop. Chad: And you're talking about different types of tech stacks per se, which is really cool, because we see so much redundancy, we see companies; they don't even use their applicant tracking system right, but yet they wanna start stacking other pieces of tech on, so from your standpoint, you go through just nice and clean and say, "this is, if you want this kind of stack, this is what you should look at." Tim: Yeah, I mean I still I think I did an ebook too as well, a book that you can download, you guys I look at probably 100, 150 different techs systems a year where I write about probably 50 on the blog, but the reality, there's 20,000 plus, right, that are out there. I mean that's the one thing when you come around SHRM Talent, your own practitioners that are in the weeds, they're overwhelmed by all of it. Chad: Oh god yeah. Tim: I mean, they're just, they're just like, "oh crap, like what do we do? I have an ATS, now what?" Again, I was talking with some people yesterday. I mean they're just literally starving for permission. What do I do for texting? What do I do for sources? Chad: And then there are these chat bots, oh my god. Tim: And then they bring chat bots, and you're just like ugh. Chad: Oh Jesus, yeah. Let's focus on process first and then we'll start to plug technology. Tim: I mean, I know you guys agree with this, if your recruiting sucks, that technology is just gonna allow to suck faster. So how do we first fix recruiting, and then let the tech help you. Chad: Stop blaming your applicant tracking system and your platforms, first off, find out where your recruitment suck comes from. Tim: It's the number one issue I give. You come in into our place center, "well our ATS sucks, we need a change." Chad: No. Tim: Well wait a minute, let's take a look at what you have. And it's usually decent tech, they're just only using 25%. I'm like, "if you become a super user of the tech you have now, do that first and then let's come back and talk, because they just don't do it. Chad: The new book, once again- Tim: The Talent Fix. Chad: The Talent Fix, get it at- Tim: You can find it at the SHRM store. Chad: Okay cool. Joel: Any blog, where can we find that? Tim: timsackett.com. If you Google Tim Sackett, I'm like the first 100 pages of the Googles. But there's also another Tim Sackett. Chad: Of the Googles. Tim: The Googles. Tim: There's another Tim Sackett, he's a truck driver chaplain. I am not the truck driver chaplain, Tim Sackett. So if you run into Tim Sackett truck driver Chaplin, different guy. Chad: Does he have a blog? Tim: I don't know if he does. I've always though how cool would it be if I was the truck driver chaplain Tim Sackett I was both guys. Like as my super hero. Joel: Thanks Tim. Tim: Thank's guys. 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. #Indeed #Sackett #SHRM

DUMPSTER FIRE!! CareerBuilder is a mess right now, according to our sources. We're talkin' execs jumping ship, layoffs, angry sales people and a lot of bitter 'Builders. Tune in for all the latest. Oh wait, there's more: - Indeed Crowd is a failure - Ladders tries its hand at referrals - Snagajob is now Snag ... here's why - Monster goes 2-pane - What do Textio, Uncommon.co and Indeed have in common? - Oh, Canada! Indeed acquires Workopolis And lots more. It's the first show to go over an hour, but we think you'll be rewarded for your time. Just listen to it in 2X and cut it down to 30 mins. Boom! And check out our sponsors: America's Job Exchange, Sovren, JobAdX and Ratedly. No dumpster fires at these companies (cough ... CareerBuilder ... cough). PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash, and Joel Cheesman are here 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: Spring is finally in the air kids. Welcome to the Chad and Cheese Podcast where we have our way with the news of the day and HR and recruiting. I like that. That's [crosstalk 00:00:37]- Chad: That was bad. Joel: No. That's awesome. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel: On this week's show, Careerbuilder is an absolute dumpster fire. Indeed, is throwing in the towel, aye? Chad: Yeah. Joel: That was awful, and we ask does a Snagajob by any other name taste just as sweet? Buckle up kids, we're not drunk, I promise, but this is going to be a bumpy show. Announcer: 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. 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. To learn more about Sovren AI matching visit sovren.com. That's sovren.com. Joel: New ads, same silky voice from Sovren. Chad: Whoa. Yeah. You're dumb so don't worry about trying to outsmart the robot. The robot will take care of all your pleasure and needs. Joel: Absolutely. This show could tip the scale at an hour, so let's run through shout outs real quick. Chad: Okay. You were in Erie last week. I've got a quick question, did Ed from Philly jack up any of your interviews? Because he was stalking you for a while. Joel: No. You know, he talks a lot of trash. I was a little afraid that he might, you know, pop me on the head, you know back of the head during the show, but he didn't even come say hi, so I'm a little sad. Yeah. Ed, next show, man, come say hi, we love our listeners, whether they're team Chad, or team Cheese. Chad: Ed come on, man. You're team Chad, you should at least put a little smack on his head while he was doing the interview. Joel: A little karate shop in the throat. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Something, man. Chad: That's what we expect somebody from Philly, the city of brotherly love. Also, Nancy from Philly said, "No more of the use of off the chain or lit," she said, "Don't do that." Joel: I'll agree with that for sure. Yeah. Sorry, Nancy. Chad: Our bad. Job doctor, "Very smart," love this guy. He wanted us to know about 82 labs. They just received eight million dollars in funding to create a better hangover recovery drink, because he knows all of next week we're going to be where? Joel: Vegas. Vegas, baby. Chad: Good. Love it. Job doctor. Joel: You know, I have found, I think, the solid hangover remedy. It's called Fly By, F-L-Y, B-Y. Chad: Okay. Joel: It's a pill, and I have tried it as an old white guy, not that white has anything to do with it, but as an old guy my hangovers were hurting, so for what it's worth I've tried a few Fly By is pretty good. I'm going to be taking it to Vegas for sure. Chad: Okay. I'll be bumming some off of you then. Louise Triance I want to hope that I'm saying that right, she sent a picture to us on Facebook, she tagged us, she's on a beach looking at, I'm assuming the ocean, and she said, "Chad and Cheese, you sound so much cheerier when I'm listening in the sun." Joel: Now, Louise is English, so I'm guessing she's in the south of France, or Spain, or Greece, or somewhere really nice like that, so glad we could cheer you up there, Louise. Chad: Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. We've got some big ups for new leaders out there, Tom Kenney, who was the CTO over at SmashFly, and if you listen to Chad and Cheese regularly we just did an interview with him in Ireland while we were drinking Guinness. He was just promoted to CEO of SmashFly. Awesome. Joel: That's great. Chad: Big ups, man. Joel: Thad- Chad: Yep. Joel: Thad at our buddies at Jobs2Careers is their new CEO as well, so shout out to Thad over there in Texas. Chad: Thad Price, man, he's been there forever. Big ups. Joel: It's not because of his long tenure that he's CEO, the guy actually knows what he's doing. Chad: Oh, yeah. Maybe I don't know. Joel: Speaking of dudes who know what they're doing, a quick shout out to Anoop Gupta, who I did interview on the last podcast from ERE, just the dude is super smart, he's CEO of SeekOut.io, he's from Microsoft, he's way smarter than most of the people who get into this business, including yours truly. I just want to thank Anoop for being in the industry, and making it a little smarter, so shout out to Anoop there in Seattle. Chad: Yeah. If you didn't listen to the last podcast, go back, there are four interviews, very quick interviews, and I believe, Joel, at least two of them have already shown interest in being on firing squad. Joel: Do they know what they're getting into, is my question? Chad: I hope not. I want to be able to give a quick shout out to everybody that's out there listening about LinkedIn meltdowns that are happening and we get to watch them, much like we get to watch it happen on Facebook every day, but I actually had an individual reach out to me on messenger, I can't tell who it is, you might have seen him in the stream go crazy and meltdown this week, "Chad, please look over my profile and resume, if you see that you can help me finding some interesting products to work on I cost X, expenses," blah, blah, blah. "Here's my resume. My specialization is turnaround, and startup." I thought, wow, okay, that's pretty cool. But this is how he ended the message, "If you can't help me, drop me." At that point, dude, at that point- Joel: Drop me? Chad: Yeah. Exactly. I was like, okay, well fuck you. Joel: Is he a baked potato? Drop me? Chad: Yeah. Just off of- Joel: Did you know this cat? Chad: No. Joel: Did you disconnect with him? Chad: I don't know him we're just linked like you are with many people on LinkedIn, and he's just like pretty much, like, hey, if you can't help me get a job then just drop me from your connections. Everything was great til then, then I looked back and I started looking in my feed and he just had a total meltdown on LinkedIn, so yeah, this is a great example of what not to do on a professional network. Now, if you want to treat LinkedIn like Snapchat, or you want to treat it like Facebook, understand there are going to be more than likely ramifications that are different than if you do that on Facebook. Joel: This had to be a millennial. Chad: No. Dude, I don't think so. I really don't think so. Joel: Did you reply to his, drop me if you're not going to help me? Chad: No. Joel: Or did you drop him before he had a chance to drop you? Chad: Dude, I don't have time to go through all that shit, if he wants to he can find a way to drop me. Joel: Right. We have LinkedIn etiquette, occasionally on the show. Yeah. Don't reach out to someone you don't really know just because you're connected and say, help me, or drop me. Chad: That's just dumb as hell. Joel: All right. Speaking of LinkedIn, on the positive side, a shout out to Nick Nick Kroshus who I met in San Diego, a big fan there employed at LinkedIn, shout out to Nick, appreciate the listenership. Chad: Love the LinkedIn. This is just for fun, a shout out that came from Ron Pearlman to Mark Zuckerberg this is his tweet, “Is it just me, but every time I hear Mark Zuckerberg talk I feel like Jim Henson's got his hand up his ass.” Joel: Zuckerberg who had testified in front of Congress- Chad: Yeah. Joel: This week, actually sat on a booster chair, you didn't believe me when I told you, but go search Zuck Congress booster chair, whatever, and he's literally sitting on a booster chair. Chad: Is it like a phone book? Is it like an old standard phone book? Joel: It's like one of those seat cushions you would get going to baseball games, and sitting in the bleachers, you want to pad your butt a little bit. It's like one of those booster chairs. It's not like one of the ones at the restaurants for the kids. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It's not quite that bad, but somebody wanted him to be elevated, so he looked more powerful, I assume. Anyway, my last shout out goes to Brian Mercer who is also at ERE, a fan of the show, he's head of the digital HR tech over at Mercer Healthcare, so thanks for listening Brian, appreciate it. Chad: One big thing, where are we going to be next week? We're going to be in Vegas. What are we doing? Joel: SHRM Talent, we're just going to break shit and scare- Chad: Yeah. Joel: People, I think. Then TATech probably the same thing, although it'll be a repeat performance of all of our TATech shows, so it won't be quite as nice. Chad: Yeah. I think- Joel: [crosstalk 00:09:35] I guess. Chad: We've tempered the crowd at TATech and they understand what's going to happen, but SHRM Talent, I mean, literally it's going to be a fun time for us, let's just say that. Joel: It's going to be like the movie Weird Science, where the motorcycle gang kind of breaks into the house and eats all the food, and trashes everything, and then Kelly LeBrock comes in and fixes it, but up until that point I think that's going to be sort of us at SHRM Talent next week. Chad: That being said, last but not least, I want thank Disability Solutions, because Disability Solutions understands that everyone, even the hard of hearing and the deaf need a little Chad and Cheese in their life, so thanks again to Disability Solutions for making sure that transcription of this podcast and all the other podcasts are available. Joel: Can we get to the show, now? Chad: Yes, please. Joel: All right. Great. Okay. I'm going to take a breath before this. Okay. Chad: Here it is. Joel: I'm going to start, here it is, Chad is just going to sit back and listen. There's a Careerbuilder story that I've been working on writing for ERE for over a week now, and I want to express that the opinions that I'm about to drop are not the opinions of ERE who I write stories for. They're totally divorced from what I'm about to say, and comment. A lot of it will be the same as a story, but a lot of it will be sort of my own opinion, but they are not responsible for anything I say. Now, that, that is out of the way. Chad: Wait a minute. Nobody tells me or Joel what to say. Period. These are our opinions. It's our show, and if you don't like them, stop listening. If you love it, then share the hell out of it, but other than that ERE doesn't have anything to do with us. I mean, even our sponsors, or our conference partners. We let them know right out of the gate, this is our shit, if you don't like it you don't have to be a part of it. The thing is, they enjoy it, and hopefully you do too. Joel: Thank you, Chad. You're right. Nobody tells us shit. Chad: Fuck yeah. Joel: And we don't listen anyway. A little back story, a couple of weeks ago I get a text, all these sources are going to be anonymous, I will say none of my sources are scrubs. They typically are upper level management type folks, so take that for what it's worth, but I get a text from someone that basically says, Careerbuilder has canceled their annual show for sales people. They have a conference every year in multiple places around the country, apparently called, The President's Club, where sales people that perform really well are rewarded appropriately. As many of you know, Careerbuilder was acquired last year by Apollo Global, who is a private equity firm. Now, when private equity firms buy a company, it's not like Randstad buying Monster, like a staffing company kind of synchronized business models. Private equity firms have one job, and that's maximize profitability, which is what Apollo is doing. Now, when you maximize profit some eggs get cracked. Right? You're making omelets- Chad: Yeah. Joel: You're making the most money, things are going to get broken, so a lot of things have been canceled. Executives are leaving. It's a little unclear in terms of are they being fired? Are they resigning? Quote on quote. Are they actually just getting the hell out of dodge, because they don't like how the furniture is being reorganized. We also have really mad people in sales. We have engineers exiting. Anyway, I get a text that sort of starts this whole flow. I check with sources at the company, people I know, and people that they know, et cetera. Right? This thing starts unraveling. I get an audio clip, which we're going to play- Chad: Yeah. Joel: After an ad, because we're going to talk about the executives, first, then we're going to talk about the engineers leaving. I get an audio that's just gold in terms of media perspective, but it's basically their head of sales, or someone high up in sales saying that this sales trip is not canceled, it's postponed. He goes on to blame really unique reasons as to why they're not going to Mexico, which was the original plan of the company, and this contradicts the plan that- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Their CEO had said, the trip is canceled. Okay? Chad: Yeah. Joel: We'll get to that in a second. Anyway, as I dig deeper into this story, more and more people come out, because I was writing a story in ERE that was in draft form, it wasn't ready for primetime. ERE was legitimately hacked probably by WordPress SEO people and the story went live, unexpectedly, not on purpose. It has since been pulled. Of course, it was in Google's cash, good old Google grabbed it up. The story was still available and still made the rounds. I don't know if it's in Google, still, but it might be. Finalized version of that story should be coming out soon, if it's not already out by the time you listen to this, but the story got out, so when the story got out, more and more people came forward to tell me what was going on. I think most notably some top executives are leaving the company. You and I know most of these guys, like Richard Castellini is a former headhunter.net guy- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Who's been there for almost 20 years. Chad: Yeah. Joel: He left for a little bit to join the Groupon phase, when everyone was into that, it was a site call like Coupon Cabin, I think, but he quickly rejoined Careerbuilder and he's been there for a long time. There's another guy, Colin Field, who was a headhunter acquisition he's vice president of infrastructure, he has since left the company. His LinkedIn profile has been updated. He's now at New Relic, apparently. Jim Butler, not a headhunter guy, but he was former senior director of governance, risk and compliance, not a flimsy title. He's not COO at a company called, NetWatchman according to his LinkedIn profile. Kevin Knapp, who is or was CFO, apparently, according to my sources been gone for quite a while, even though his LinkedIn profile says that he's still at Careerbuilder, so I'm not sure about that. These are really important people that- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Leaving the company. Old time people, part of the culture. Part of the fabric of Careerbuilder. Apollo brought in their own COO it looks like at the end of last year, Irina Novoselsky, if I'm saying that correctly. I don't know if she was brought in to ax people and upper level stuff, I don't know. The first piece of this story is that executives are leaving that have been with the company for a long time, and I have to attribute that, and the sources that I've talked to, attribute that to what Apollo's doing with really just cutting stuff up. Sources I've talked to said, "They wouldn't be surprised if all these sort of businesses that we talked about in the past will either be auctioned off, chopped up, closed, you know, shuttered in the future," but it's a problem. CEO, Ferguson is still there. He's been there for a very long time. I think he was a headhunter guy, too. Chad: I'm wondering how long that's going to be, though? Joel: Yeah. I mean, my guess is, this is my own opinion is he's probably under contract to sort of get the ship to port, and then do whatever you want, but I think similarly to how Sal left Monster, a little bit different, but Sal's gone, Dice is looking for a new CEO, I would not be shocked to see Careerbuilder looking for a new CEO this time next year. Chad: I agree a 100%. Again, what we're seeing is we're seeing some heads be lopped off left and right. It's interesting because I think one of the quotes that you had actually said from director of global communications he was talking about Castellini the quote was, "As with all expat assignments, visas have expiration dates and he is returning into the states in April." There is no senior level executive role based in Chicago office, in the Chicago office available at this time, and he will be leaving Careerbuilder. I mean, it's like, yeah, we'd love to have him back, but we really don't have a slot for him. I think that's bull shit. If you've got a guy that has that kind of cred, that kind of experience and he's done shit all over the world for you, it doesn't matter, you're going to find a place for that person. Period. Right? This was overall, yeah, you're done, and you're done. Joel: Yeah. That is, we'll get the Careerbuilder communications guy, Michael Irwin in a second, particularly with the sales side when we come back from the ad. That's sort of his job is to sugarcoat, or spin the news it's like, "Yeah, you know, his visa ran out. He came back and we didn't have a spot for him, so he's going to go elsewhere." I'm like- Chad: Yeah. Joel: But he's been there for three months, he was just on a little project and now he's leaving, like this is an almost 20 year executive- Chad: Yeah. I mean, from a transparency standpoint that just doesn't jive. The sniff test, I mean, it doesn't pass at all. Yeah. I get that Irwin it's his job to make a piece of shit smell good, but I mean, come on man, you've got to do much better than that. Transparency is going to be important for the organization, and if you're making changes then make the God damn changes, and have a spine for God sakes, and say why you're making the changes. If you're going to make those changes, and you have business reasons behind it, you have business reasons, but guess what? Don't be spineless. That's all I'm going to say. Be transparent. Joel: Yeah. I think, additionally, the fact that there was no statement from Richard Castellini saying- Chad: Yeah. Joel: "I've had a great run with Careerbuilder. I've made a lot of friends. I've progressed as a human being. I'm leaving because of A, B, and C. Appreciate the time here." Chad: Yeah. Joel: "Nice, great knowing you," kind of thing. There was no, these people just basically left. There was no statements from these folks. It just stinks. I won't go as far as saying, unprofessional, but they certainly could have handled the exits of the executives a little better. I'm sure they hope that people like me wouldn't- Chad: I know. Joel: Get wind of it, and write about it, or talk about it, but that's not the case. Yeah. They've handled this pretty poorly, I think. It gets a little worse for Mr. Irwin as we talk more, here, today. I think it's probably going to get worse before it gets better for them, which we'll talk about, which leads me to the engineering team at Careerbuilder had a fairly high up person in engineering contact me after the leak story from Google Cash, he says almost 50% of the engineering team is gone. He says, most of them have left on their own freewill. Apparently from what I can gather the new owners, Apollo, are into the core business, what makes money. They understand the job posting stuff. They understand- Chad: Right. Joel: The basic business. The R and D of the company, which is what the developers love- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Right? They love the new stuff. They love the experimenting, is gone. I think that probably plays a big part in it, but apparently compensation has played a much bigger part in terms of the exits of the engineering staff. Apparently, compensation is reviewed every year around it looks like raises happen in January and July, so I guess there are two phases of raises. When Apollo took over in October of last year, they brought in the new CEO, they postponed reviews and compensation increases til April, which apparently most people were cool with, but when they came out with what the raises were going to be they were significantly lower than what people were thinking they were going to get, or expected to get, or certainly what was sort of consistent with history of raises that were given at Careerbuilder and engineers are not happy. They've left in exodus, I mean when you cut almost half of your staff and engineers that's kind of a bad thing. The other ones I understand are looking for work, they're not happy, and will be gone eventually. My guess is it won't take long. I had one of my sources, who's an executive at a competitor tell me that they have about a dozen candidates- Chad: Yeah. Joel: In their queue from Careerbuilder, so that's not just engineers that's probably a mix of folks. Yeah. I think from an engineering side that's bad not only from losing that kind of talent as a tech company, but also it doesn't bode very well for future products, and new features, and innovation. Chad: Back to Irwin, this is the kind of shit you're going to have to deal with. If you're going to try to blow smoke up our ass, this is the time of transparency. The public, not just us, the public's going to find out exactly what's going on, so you either embrace it, stiffen your spine and take care of it, or keep playing these games, and you're going to have issues like this and they're going to continue to become a train wreck for the organization. Joel: On Irwin, quickly, when the leak story came out online, I went and got clarification on some of the facts from the story, things that I had written in the story, for clarification. He was fairly quick to answer, now he spun his answers, for the most part, like the one in Castellini, it was the visa, it wasn't anything. He did answer me, now, when I got a flood of people come to me after the story was sort of unexpectedly released- Chad: Yeah. Joel: I went back to him to clarify those facts, right? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Or those statements. He came back and basically said, "I clarified the stuff from the first story, this is not consistent with what we expect from ERE. I will not be answering anymore questions, or giving you sort of the pleasure of asking me more stuff," which is really bull shit, because if it's your job to communicate with press, you should do it. The only reason you wouldn't do it is you don't want to answer the questions. It's sort of a Trump move, like let's- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Just move on to the next thing. This is way beyond you guys, this is fake news, this is crap. You guys should be out of business. I should probably be let go, et cetera. Yeah. PR from a multiple perspective has dropped the ball at Careerbuilder, and I don't know if it's Apollo pulling the strings, or if this is business as usual at Careerbuilder, but yeah, it's definitely a sour taste in my mouth from dealing with the communication folks at Careerbuilder. Chad: He literally just told you, I'm going to run and hide. I'm going to find a corner, I'm going to get in the fetal position, and I'm going to put my thumb in my mouth, and I'm going to start sucking on it, and hope that all this shit goes away? Joel: That's one way to look at it, for sure. You can speculate all you want, but they clearly don't want this story to be out. They don't want this to be talked about. I'm sure they're hoping it will just go away, but of course it won't. Yeah. Instead of saying, you know, hey, let me address each of these things, yes, we've lost 50% of our engineering, because of this, this, and this, or hey, yes we had this sales comment, this did happen. The layoffs happened like this, or they didn't. There's no clarification, or even sort of confirmation of the facts, so if they're not going to answer all I can go on is what my sources tell me. Chad: Yeah. Again, it's about transparency. If what you're being told can be contested, it should be contested. If it can't be, you can obviously run and hide, like this individual obviously is and he represents the organization, so is the organization running and hiding from transparency? That's all there is to it. Joel: Yeah. Let's take a quick break, and we'll talk about the sales side of the story. Sound good? Chad: Yeah. Announcer: JobADX, as the best ad tool in the industry. We provide publishers and job boards higher rank share than other partners through our smarter problematic platform. In many cases, 30% to 40% greater, and more. We're like Adsense but with a better split for you and added relevance for your audience. Job ADX also offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPO's, and staffing firms. Real time dynamic bidding and delivery for your clients postings through the industries first truly responsive tool, not set in regret. All of this is done with the flexibility of cost per impression, click, or application. We also offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. Finally, JobADX delivers direct clients, superior candidates through the best of programmatic efficiency, and premium page ad positioning. To partner with us you can visit or search Job ADX. You can also email us at joinus@jobadx.com, to get estimates or to begin working together. JobADX the best ad tool. Providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Chad: Big love to JobADX. Joel: JobADX. All right. Back to the Careerbuilder story. Let's talk about sales, which is apparently a total mess. A couple things, so I mentioned- Chad: Yeah. Joel: I mentioned the sales trip that happens annually, so that was in the original story that got published, unexpectedly, and that was part of my email to Irwin was to clarify what had happened with the trip. Now, he comes back, and basically says there's never been a company trip to Mexico. Chad: Wrong. Joel: Okay. I do a little digging, it turns out social media is a great way to clarify or confirm stuff, so I dig around Instagram, and if you search the hashtag, CB Trip 2015, there are clearly pictures from Mexico of sales people at Careerbuilder enjoying a nice time. Everything that Mexico has to offer in these pictures. I go back to him, and I say, basically, "Instagram says differently about this Mexico thing." Chad: Right. Joel: He basically comes back and says, "Oh, yeah. There was a trip for sales people in 2015," and then he goes back to his line of, "We didn't have a trip, but sales people were given a cash reward," or some sort of compensation, and the feedback was positive, but the mere fact that he went from saying that we've never, no one at Careerbuilder has ever taken a business trip in mass to Mexico, and then me catching him on Instagram and him backtracking and saying, "Oh, yeah. There was that trip in 2015," is really funny, and for my money, homeboy has no credibility from what he's doing anyway. Anyway, that happened. The trip is sort of a menial side story. Right? Like I don't really care, take sales people on a nice trip, okay, cancel it, because its too expensive, and the new owners don't want to do it. The bigger story around sales, to me, again, sales people came out, and sort of shared some of this stuff- Chad: Right. Joel: With me and I cross referenced some of the stories, so a 152 sales reps, apparently, were let go by an automated phone call. Chad: What? No fucking way. Joel: That their position no longer exists at the company. Yeah. The comment that one person gave me that was great was, they dragged a 120 people that bled orange and blue, which is the corporate colors, or used to be, they're entire professional careers and slaughtered them without notice. They preach all these different values, they're plastered all over every wall, and they're the biggest bunch of hypocrites I've ever dealt with. That's a really crappy way to let people go. I don't know exactly if they knew a call was coming, if it just came, or what, granted it's an official way to let people go, but it's a real crappy way to do it. Chad: These people, I mean, are they getting calls at home? I mean, these are automated calls, which really blows my freaking brain in the first place, but where are they getting these calls? Joel: I don't know. I'm not sure it matters. Chad: Okay. Joel: My guess is that it was probably a day at the office- Chad: Yeah. Joel: It may be their cell numbers, before the day began, and saying, hey, when you come in, if you do know more about this, feel free to reach out to us at chadcheese.com and let us know any specifics, but all we know at this point and it was not, I gave Careerbuilder a chance to say this was BS- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Which they failed to take that opportunity. What I can tell you is that they received automated phone calls that their job was done. From what I could tell they weren't given, actually, they were given, I believe, a month of severance for every year that they had served at the company, and I'm not exactly sure about that, so they were given something, but they- Chad: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:31:12]- Joel: We were given notice that they we're being fired. Apparently, some of the sales people were pretty good from what I can muster, they weren't like the worst of the worst sales people. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Apparently, morale is really taking a hit because of this, so one of the quotes I had in the story was, quote, "This past year we had our idiot sales leader," which we'll get to in a second, get us all involved to tell us that we were having our car allowance taken away, because we were tight on expenses." Now, this car allowance was apparently really a big deal. My source said, quote, "It was factored into our salaries, that's $5,000.00 that we all depended on to utilize for trains, or gas, or whatever. It was part of our salary that made our compensation a bit more competitive without notice gone," end quote. Chad: There's a lot without notice happening, here. Joel: Yes. Back to this trip thing and back to the original commentary about it being canceled or postponed. We have a source telling us, telling me, that CEO, Matt Ferguson went on a conference call to the company saying that the annual sales trip would be canceled. We have the global head of communications confirming that the trip didn't happen, but the people were given money for their troubles, and that they were happy about that, however, we have audio from John Smith who's I think chief revenue officer, let me verify that, when we come back, but the tape, the recording was sent to me, this is a company sales call as to why the company was not taking a trip to Mexico. Let's listen to that real quick and then we'll talk about it. I'm going to- Chad: Roll the tape. Joel: I'm going to mute us, because we can't listen to this without laughing. Chad: Yes. Joel: It will detour from the effect. Without further ado, Careerbuilder. Careerbuilder Sales Tape: Lastly, trip, yes, there will be a trip. I just don't know when and where, yet. As soon as I will know, you will know. Know this, where not sleeping on this, it's not like we're not focused. We actually had a trip done, and sold out three weeks ago. We had a great hotel in Cabo. We had dates confirmed. Problem is, Cabo has become completely destabilized. They've literally, this holiday season they've had over 50,000 reservations canceled. Evidently, when El Chapo was incarcerated, the code of ethics said he is still in Cabo and throughout Mexico has gone away. There's no code of ethics. There's no code of honor. All of a sudden there's a war for power, so you're seeing things happen that you haven't seen in the past where people, gangs, drug dealers, were actually going into restaurants and shoot up the place, that never happened before. Bottom line is this, I wish I could sit here and tell you we- Joel: And that's all I got. Chad: And that was not us laughing by the way. That was- Joel: No. Chad: That was actually sales people who were on the call, or wherever they were, they were taping this, and they were laughing, hashtag, El Chapo. Joel: Honestly, we're not exactly sure who's laughing. Chad: Yeah. That's a good point. Joel: But it's not us. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Which is the point. Chad: Yep. Joel: Yeah. According to that recording, the trip was just postponed, we're waiting for El Chapo to face the justice system, or whatever, and things to calm down in Cabo, which was a little bit different from Careerbuilder telling me that we're a little tight, or telling sources of mine that money's tight, and the trip isn't going to happen. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Basically, on the trip front there's a lot of different stories, and I'm not exactly sure, I don't think it's that important, frankly, I think the way people were laid off, I think the morale of the company, and what's going on with things like car allowances being taken away are a way bigger deal, but these sales people in your, you were in sales, right? These folks- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Love these trips. They work really hard to take them. I've heard that Rolex's and whatnot were given to the best sales people, so this was something that people looked forward to, and it was taken away. Chad: At the end of the day, it's all about messaging. Right? Again, what we're seeing from the actual international com's guy, or whatever the hell he is, and his inability to actually message, and then we've got this, where we're talking about, we're blaming everything on El Chapo, I mean, this just seems like a comedy of errors. Joel: Yeah. It's a little bit of keystone cops there in Chicago, and Atlanta, and everywhere else that Careerbuilder is spread around. Chad: Three fucking stooges. Joel: I will end, because I'm frankly tired of this story. Chad: Yes. Joel: Because it's been hanging on me for weeks, now. It is a bit of a statement on the job board industry. It is a bit of a statement on when you get acquired by private equity what's going to happen to you, and my guess is Monster is on a similar short leash, even though their masters, now, are a little bit different than a private equity company. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Who's sole mission is to maximize profit, get rid of things that don't matter, or don't make money, get rid of people who are too expensive, et cetera. But this is a word of warning to anyone who works at company who has a private equity firm come in, or have a new owner come in like this happens pretty regularly it's not exclusive to Careerbuilder, and I think it's a little bit of a statement on the job board industry, and how it's almost become like a commodity of hey, let's just juice as much profit out of this thing as we can, get rid of it, flip it, go public, whatever it is, but the name of the game with job boards now is not high growth, it's about buckling down, maximizing profits- Chad: Yeah. Joel: And getting rid of the fat. That's kind of the state of the industry right now. You ready to move on? Chad: Please. Joel: All right. Let's talk about Indeed Crowd, and their referral reward. Chad: Yet, another company flames out in their try, in their want, and their need to get another referral space. Joel: Now, we should have some historical perspective on this, because you and I have seen so many of these things come and go, and in theory they're great ideas.right? Like, hey, you know a friend whose in sales, we have a sales position open, if we hire that person on your referral we'll give you a bunch of money, like it makes perfect sense in theory, but- Chad: Right. Joel: No one can make this work. You and I remember H3 from back in the day. We remembered Jobster, we remember refer.com. Chad: There's a bunch. Joel: A handful of them. Right? Yeah. Indeed, launched Crowd two years ago, I thought, well, if anyone can make it work Indeed can. Chad: Yeah. Joel: You know? They got a ton of users. Chad: Yeah. Joel: They're user friendly. Chad: Yeah. Joel: It can work. Announced this week, they're shutting it down in May. It was an experiment, quote on quote, that they tried and just didn't work out, and they're moving on. If you're out there thinking about creating this business, just don't, because it apparently just does not work, even if we have social media- Chad: Yeah. Joel: We have easy ways to share stuff, and email. People do not share jobs with people. Period. Chad: Hans, who is CEO of H3 had a great quote, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, and in this case, you know, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make them refer their friends for jobs. It's a very small percentage and we always hear that referrals are like one of the number one sources for organizations, that is, it's not easy to scale because there has to be a want, and/or need to do it. To be quite frank, I mean, I don't want to sit around all day and look for jobs to refer my friends to. If I see a job, or if I'm in an organization where I think there's a great fit then I'm going to want to pull that talent in, because it's going to benefit them, and more than likely it's going to benefit me, too. Joel: Yeah. And the scalability is a great point, because you have to get people involved, they have to approve the- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Candidate that you're submitting. There's usually a 90 day period where the person has to stay employed. You know? I mean, there's so many hoops, it's not simple, it doesn't scale. It just doesn't work, however- Chad: Ladders. Joel: Our friends at Ladders formerly The Ladders, just The Facebook they thought that would be fancy to do The Ladders. In the same week they pretty much that Indeed announces that they're getting out of the business, The Ladders has announced their own referral business, but their payouts are in the 10 grand range, which they think will make a difference. Now, Indeed got up to as high as 5,000 and couldn't make it work, so can a fringe site like The Ladder's, or Ladders at 10 grand make it work? I don't know if there's a sweet spot for money, but let's try 10,000 and see if that works. Chad: Yeah. I think, you know, if you can actually mobilize recruiters, independent contractors, that's not a bad payday, especially if you can go out and do what you normally do, and do referrals through this system, the only way that you can scale this thing is to hope that people who are actually interested and passionate about getting people jobs will want to be able to help, because in most cases the rest of us have other shit to do. Joel: Enough said. Textio- Chad: Yes. Joel: Has a new thing. We'll talk about that. Diversity, Indeed is bringing diversity reviews into their platform in Uncommon, as a way to create better job ads, so this is a little bit of a segue into job postings, and diversity. I guess we can talk about Textio, first. You're pretty high on their new product. Chad: I'm just high on the concept overall, because I see this happening no matter what. Textio, very smartly gets into the space and says, hey, they say exactly what we all know, your job descriptions suck, not to mention they probably focus on one gender bias versus another just with specific types of words, so what we can do is, we can help you balance them out, and/or if you're looking for more female engineers, we can try to help you use different words, different phrases, things like that to focus more on drawing females in than possibly the male side of the house. That made a hell of a lot of sense on the job description side. Chad: Now, they're pushing this into messaging, so emails, and things like that. Now, we see this already on my android, or Facebook, or what have you, you get pretty much AI responses to conversations that are happening, this is pretty much, it looks like composing parts and/or all of a message for you, which is incredibly cool. I see this happening more on most of the texts that we do now, whether it's texting, whether it's Facebook messaging, WhatsApp, emails, not all humans write well. To be able to have kind of like a cushion, or at least a piece of AI machine learning type of technology help us with that, I think is smart. Obviously, Microsoft and being able to help with my spelling, just isn't enough. Joel: Now, look, historically when people post a job they go to Google and they say, you know, "Sales job description search," and they pull out the best thing they can find, copy and paste, change some words around and go on with their life. Very few people start from scratch to post a job. Yes, we're copying and pasting jobs from probably the early 2000s like caveman language. Right? Like, for job postings. The fact that we're getting some technology around improving these is a great thing. Chad: Yes. Joel: Uncommon.co, who we had a firing squad with recently and is now actually a new sponsor- Chad: Yay. Joel: Thanks to them, we like those guys a lot. They have also just released a way to submit your job into their system, and then they have a little like meter- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Like green to red, and green in the middle. It tells you if your job posting, the keywords, and description is too vague, or if it's too specific, and it gets you hopefully right in that sweet spot. We really haven't seen a ton of technology. Chad: No. Joel: Around making better job descriptions, so it's good to see Textio and Uncommon, create some solutions to help us write some better job descriptions, and more inclusive [crosstalk 00:43:51]- Chad: I've got a byline for tag over at Uncommon, I think this is great, Uncommon.co, scoring your shitty job descriptions. I think that'll work, I think that'll actually really pull people in, and you'll sell a hell of a lot. Joel: Uncommon. Make your jobs not suck so much. Chad: See, we're talking about real transparency. Everybody knows they've got shitty job descriptions. They need help. Go after those people. Joel: They need help. Chad: Go after those people. Joel: Wrapping the sense of some diversity as well, you really like what Indeed has done with pulling in some diversity review sites like Fairygodboss for women, and Her Site comparably another one to pull some of that data into their company descriptions, talk about that. Chad: Yeah. You won't hear me say much on the positive side about Indeed, lately, but I think this is a great move from the standpoint of being able to position themselves better in the market on the review side, and to be able to help individuals who are more diverse, to better understand how the work environment is, so Fairy God Boss, whether it's on the female side, and I think that's a great place to start. If there are already review sites and you can aggregate that information, and make it usable, and beautiful then that's really freaking cool, but again, I see this as an opportunity for them to really bolster not just their reviews, but to be able to do a little aggregation and focus, so that they can start to compete better against Glassdoor. Not that they're doing a bad job against Glassdoor, but to be able to start to kind of carve in and to be possibly more specialized. Joel: Yeah. And frankly, you know, Google For Jobs, as well, is pulling in review data in terms of the number of stars in their search, so it makes sense for Indeed to sort of not only have- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Their own reviews, but also how do we build more context around companies and hiring diverse candidates. Yeah. I agree, this was a great move from Indeed. Let's hear a quick ad from our boys at America's Job Exchange, and talk about Snagajob. Announcer: America's Job Exchange is a market leader in diversity recruitment, and an OFCCP compliance solution provider. We serve over a 1,000 customers, consisting of federal contractors, and subcontractors to SMB's, and Fortune 500 organizations. America's Job Exchange specializes in job distribution to over 6500 state one stop career centers, and community based organizations, ensures the creation and maintenance of state credentials, obtains veteran preference on job postings, robust outreach management, and supports effective, positive recruitment efforts designed to recruit individuals with disabilities, veterans, women and minorities. For more information call us at 866.926.6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Joel: Just remember, compliance is mandatory, diversity is essential. Chad: wow. Mind blown. Joel: Snagajob is a success story that we don't talk about very often, just because I guess we don't cover the hourly retail sector very much. Chad: It hasn't been as exciting, though, really. I mean, Snagajob really hasn't, they haven't done really much exciting from a change, or anything like that, so it's kind of been business as usual. That's why I would say that we haven't really- Joel: Yeah. Chad: [crosstalk 00:47:25] on that. Joel: If you don't think growth, and revenue or exciting I guess they've been pretty boring. Anyway- Chad: Good point. Joel: They- Chad: Well taken. Joel: After 18 years in business, I believe, they are rebranding, and they're not just rebranding because they sold their domain, or- Chad: Right. Joel: Just because their CEO had a bad breakfast, or something. They're changing their brands, because the market itself is changing. That the comment that the CEO gave to me that I thought was great was, he said, "People aren't looking to snag a job anymore, they're looking to snag a shift." We look at the guys of Shiftgig, and we had those guys on a X exclusive webinar, recently. Chad: Yep. Joel: The world of work is changing, and these guys are changing their brand to snag.co primarily mobile based platform, so people that are on the hourly, seasonal, retail sector they can get up similar to Uber- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Check themselves if they're ready to work. Employers can say, hey, I need four waiters tonight, go on the platform, bring four in, pay them through the system- Chad: Yeah. Joel: I mean that's kind of where the world of work is going, as opposed to, yeah, I just work at Cheesecake Factory, and that's it. Chad: Yep. Joel: In this case, I work at four different restaurants, and I can choose my own time, I can select the employee that I like better over the other one if their shift, if they're dueling shifts. It's really pretty interesting, it's just very interesting how the world of work is going, and someone that's been around for 18 years like Snagajob believes that it's important enough to change their branding, and their platform to accommodate. Chad: Yeah. I think the brand change, first, I'm going to hit the brand change, because this is big, we've talked about Indeed, Monster, and I mean all these different sites who they don't have job in them or career in them, or anything like that, so they can do multiple things, they can pivot, they can do some really cool things. I think it was smart for Snagajob to go to Snag as opposed to Snagajob. Snag.co, I hope they can acquire the dot.com sometime soon, but I think Snag, that was a very smart pivot, and then being able to focus on, and I agree with this a 100% taking a look at Shiftgig out there, take a look at Moonlighting, I mean, there are all these different sites that are really- Chad: Really being able to push what work or gig work means, and really, I think, aspiring to be the Uber of all of these different segments of gig work. Right? Joel: Uber for hourly jobs. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yeah. Chad: It's freaking amazing. I think they've got some really funny shit that's going on, like badges, you know? I don't think that we need any stinking badges, but that's okay that could be a quote on quote certification. I think, it was funny, the CEO gave an example of Snag created a bun dresser badge for burger joint, Five Guys, so all the restaurant know a particular worker is fit for flipping burger patties at all of their locations. It's like, okay, I probably could have gotten a better example, but apparently they need a shit ton of burger flippers, so maybe that makes a hell of a lot of sense. Joel: Right. Part of the point was, you know, some of these are different franchises- Chad: Yeah. Joel: They have different owners. Some of them are corporate owned. In the case of like a Five Guys, if you're a franchisee, and someone works primarily at maybe a corporate owned restaurant, they already have that seal of approval that they can step in right now at your restaurant and start making burgers because they've been approved, because they've done it in multiple Five Guys restaurants, or wherever. Yeah. I think the badges are cute, kind of fun, but I do think it does have some pertinent asset or value to a hiring manager. Chad: The biggest way is how you get paid. I mean, that is the most interesting, and cool thing, because from an Uber standpoint you don't have to worry about all the money changing hands and all that other happy horse shit. What happens is you get paid through the app and no matter whether you've got a Five Guys, or White Castle, or wherever you're going, it doesn't matter, everything gets paid through that app. Joel: Yep. I did talk to, also taxes, and all that stuff is handled just like an Uber and Lyft, et cetera, from the app, or from the platform. I will add, because you mentioned the dot com, they are in negotiation to acquire the dot com, I know that, I think, they're into like seven figures for it, so- Chad: Oh, yeah. Joel: [crosstalk 00:52:08] to do, if they can do it. I also think that in a mobile app world, having the dot com isn't quite as important as just going to iTunes, or Google Play, and searching Snag and seeing the app. Anyway- Chad: I agree. Joel: Let's talk about pains. One of your favorite topics. Monster is getting into the T-pain, or the two pain game. Chad: Yeah. What was reported from Ireland was true, and it was funny, because we were on stage and we were talking about Indeed and this whole two pain thing that they're doing, and somebody was like, "Hey, Monster's going to do this, too," and they were actually testing it in Europe when we were in Europe. Monster, their job search switches from that nasty ass, NASCAR logo driven job search results, and now they're going to more of a new frills Indeed look. I think it's definitely good for candidates and good for employers, and here's why it's different for everybody, and it's also different from the Indeed piece. It's an easier way to find jobs, one of the things that you noticed, when we were talking about Indeed doing this, is that it was very easy to browse jobs. You don't actually have to go from page to page, to page, to page, it just pops open a pain, and you can browse really easily, and it makes it much easier from a user experience standpoint to try to find, and quickly glaze through all these different types of jobs. Chad: Now, the big difference is and we got clarification from Monster on this is on all of their CPC ads, the only time that a client actually pays for a click is when the candidate clicks apply, not on the job description that shows the job, which is different from what we've heard from the Recruitics Whitepapers, and all those other things from Indeed. I think that is good for the job seeker, obviously the candidate, and great for the employers. Here's the big thing that I want to push out, and the thing that Careerbuilder, and Indeed, and many of these other companies that we smack around a lot are really getting wrong. Monster, is really trying to engage, and they're trying to help us understand, and they're trying to help others understand, obviously in some case through us, what's going on? They're being incredibly transparent. Chad: On LinkedIn last week one of the VP's of product posted a screenshot of this new two pain thing that they've got on the calling combined search, and I started asking questions, because if you're going to put it out there in public, you better be able to start answering questions on it, so I got contacted through this and they started, they actually provided answers to the questions from the SVP of product, Nathan, so it was like, look, we understand that you're curious and we want to answer those questions, so we're going to engage you, and we're going to help you understand. You might not like our answers, but guess what? We're going to give you the answers," and they gave it to us both barrels whether we liked it or not. In this case we liked it, we might not like the next ones. Joel: Not like Careerbuilder. Chad: Not like Careerbuilder. Not at all. Joel: By the way, what a concept to create something that benefits job seekers, and employers at this date and time. Very cool. Chad: Just makes good God damn sense. Again, this is a culture thing, so we see a difference between organizations who don't reach out to try to engage us, and be transparent, and then we see an entirely different feel from this new Monster leadership, and again, whether it comes out to be an amazing product, and they make a shit ton of money, or not, you're starting to see a huge cultural shift over there that is more toward transparency. Now, if it continues to go that way, obviously, you know, we're going to talk about it, and if it doesn't we're going to talk about it, but to me that's refreshing, more than what we're seeing from this guy who's in the fetal position over at Careerbuilder, or anybody. Joel: Good enough. All right. We have an acquisition, and we're done. Chad: Boom. Joel: Indeed, has acquired, or their corporate company- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Recruit whatever out in Japan, a juggernaut north of the border in Canada, I'm not really sure what to make of it, what are your thoughts? Chad: I wasn't very sure, either, and I think Steven Rothberg threw out to me is like, you know, this might be more of a defensive tactic, being able to buy up a competitor to really focus on sustaining foundation, instead of having another competitor come in and buy it up, because they have been around forever, they do have market share, there is a database that's there, so it's more kind of like securing your area in north of the border. Joel: Yeah. You know thinking about it, I don't think Google For Jobs is yet in Canada. I could be wrong about that, but I don't think they are. I think they're just in the US, currently. That being the case, Indeed saying like, hey, let's gobble up as many distribution points that we can at a reasonable price, and Workopolis is a well known brand in Canada, as we both know. To gobble up a brand, put your jobs on it is increasing job distribution. We believe that Indeed is under increasing pressure to get- Chad: Yeah. Joel: Traffic to the site, because of Google For Jobs. Buying advertising on TV is expensive, so maybe somebody did some math and said, Gee, it's going to be cheaper to buy companies that are already established in other countries than it is to go buy ads in Canada. To me, this is a total Google For Jobs move, to get ahead of that, and try to maintain as much traffic and relevancy as they can in different countries. Chad: If you're in Canada, and you can do a search, and let us know if Google For Jobs is actually working, please do so, that'd be great. Then, second, again, I see this as a short-term thinking, I mean, they're looking for the types of traffic that's going to go away, it's not sustainable, it doesn't matter, you're going to go buy that brand, but still you're going to have to continue to pump life into that brand. Now, if you absorb that brand, then obviously you're still going to have to continue doing what you were doing to be able to pump life into your Indeed brand in Canada. Chad: It doesn't matter, because as soon as you stop doing that, we saw this with Monster, we saw this with Careerbuilder, that brand doesn't beat out how I do business every day, or how I just as a human being how I use the web, and I use Google, so if I'm not thinking of you, and it's funny, because we saw that the lift in traffic that Indeed has been seeing is through Google is organic, but it's all branded Indeed sales, Indeed this, or Indeed that. Once that goes away, and we're not using that, guess what? We're not going to Indeed anymore, so this is not sustainable. It doesn't make sense. If you take a look at what Snag just did, that makes a hell of a lot of sense. It's talking about turning what you're doing into a different way of lifestyle, and if you can't find your way to do that, you can't pack up and go home, but you better fucking find one. Joel: I got nothing after that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I think we've surpassed the hour mark for the first time on a show. Maybe we should relieve our poor listeners- Chad: We out. Joel: And just say, we out. Now, tell us real quickly who our guest announcer is today. This is my stepson, Tristan, who describes himself as extra and I have no clue what the hell that means. Chad: All right. We out. Here's Tristan. Tristen: Hi, I'm Tristen. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, the 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. The most important part is to check out our sponsors, because I made new tracks by it, you know the expensive, shiny, gold pair that are extra, because well I'm extra. For more visit chadcheese.com. #Indeed #TheLadders #Snag #Monster #Workopolis #Textio #Uncommon #Careerbuilder

Chatbots... CHATBOTS... CHATBOTS!!! There's a lot of confusion around chatbots in recruiting. Do you need one? Which one? How much? Questions abound on this technology that serves as a buzzword at every conference and practically every blog post online. RoboRecruiter thinks chatbots are not only the future, but the present as well. We'll see about that. The Chad & Cheese bring in CEO Chris Collins and put him through the Firing Squad to see if chatbots truly are all that, and if RoboRecruiter should be added to your shopping list. Hang tight! And be sure to visit Firing Squad's exclusive sponsorship partner Jobs2Careers, a company that could make Firing Squad its bitch. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Chad: Okay Joel, before we get into Firing Squad, I have quick question. Would you say that most companies find it hard to attract the right candidates to apply for their jobs? Joel: Well, Jobs2Careers certainly thought so. That's why they created their new talent attraction platform, ODT. Yeah, you know me. Chad: Dude, that's OPP. This is ODT, which stands for On Demand Talent, where data driven talent attraction is made easy. The on demand talent platform enables recruiters to reach the right talent at the right time, at the right price. Joel: And the best part- Chad: What? Joel: You only pay for what Jobs2Careers delivers. Chad: No. Joel: So, if you're attracting the wrong candidates or you feel like you're on a recruiting hamster wheel, just go to go.j2c.com/cc and learn how on demand talent or ODT, yeah you know me, can get you better candidates for less money. Chad: I'd say you just go to chadcheese.com, click on the jobs2careers logo there and it's just that simple. Joel: It is simple, army with harmony. Announcer: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest start-ups through the gauntlet to see if they got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: All right. All right. All right gang. Joel Cheeseman here with Chad Sowash on another episode of Firing Squad. On this month's episode we're talking to Chris Collins of RoboRecruiter. Chris, say hi. Chris: Hey guys. How you doing? Hey Joel, Chad, good to be here. Chad: Good to have you. Joel: Don't adjust your volume, Chris is Australian. So, yeah, that's the deal with that. A quick introduction. Chris, CEO of RoboRecruiter. Anything else you wanna mention? Second Life? Chris: Yes. The CEO of RoboRecruiter, got a bit of background with virtual worlds and virtual reality combined with HR Texas, probably quite different to maybe other people you've had on here. And I'm based over in San Francisco. So an Australian, but been in the US for 14 years. Joel: Awesome. Awesome. Chad do you wanna take it from here? Chad: Yeah. So first off, I definitely have to say we talked a little bit in the pre pod about this, but Joel is wetting his pants right now because Chris has some time with Second Life and everybody who listens to this podcast- Joel: Like a baby I'm crying. Chad: Knows he loves the virtual reality, man. So Joel's going to be loving this one. Okay, So here's the format. If you haven't listened to a Firing Squad before, shame on you. Joel: Shame on you for sure. Chad: Welcome. So, Chris, this is how it goes. You're gonna have two minutes to Pitch RoboRecruiter. At the end of two minutes, you'll hear the bell. And Joel and I are gonna hit you with some rapid fire Q and A. If your answers aren't concise and you're starting to drone off, you'll get hit with the crickets. Means you need to tighten it up and move along. At the end of Q and A, you're gonna either here one of these three things from myself and or Joel. It's a three point rating system. That first one is the big applause. This is what you're going for, which means you've exceeded expectations, you're kicking ass, keep doing what you're doing. Number two would be the golf clap, which is my favorite. It's so pathetic, but that just means that you have a lot of work to do. And last but not least, you don't want this one. It's the firing squad. That means you should go ahead, pack your shit up and go home and try again. Joel: Go back to Second Life. Chad: So that's firing squad, it's time to pitch so buckle up and let's do this Joel. Joel: Chris are you ready? Chris: I'm ready. Joel: Two minutes starting- Chris: Great. So Chris, CEO of RoboRecruiter. The situation is, here's the big problem is that over the next few years we're gonna see a seismic shift on how we interact with candidates and what that's going to bring on is what we see as the active intelligent database. Now, why the active intelligent database? If you look at all the systems that are out there, you know Salesforce, Bullhorn, really all these massive database systems, you've got a wealth of data in there. However, you don't have the resources to be able to reach out and contact all these people, so you've got assets that you're unable to utilize. That combined with the political environment and how people are changing around ownership of their data, you need to be able to interact with people and keep them engaged. And so that's what we do with RoboRecruiter. Very dead simple. We go out chatbot technology, can communicate over SMS, Facebook Messenger, Slack, really anything out there. Chris: We engage and update those candidates and we keep them active. In keeping them active, it allows you to be able to make a lot more money and allows your candidates to be a lot happier because they're ready to go and you know when they're available. So why do it over with RoboRecruiter? One of the really cool things is how much data you get back. So firstly, when you do a RoboRecruiter campaign, let's call it tens of thousands of people, you can see engagement rates of up to 20 to 60 percent. That engagement comes back within the first 10 minutes. You do a campaign, first 10 minutes you got 40 percent of the people have already replied. So with that, you've got incredible real-time data that's valuable coming to you really fast. So to sort of summarize at a high level what we do, is we can go out to your database, we can completely activate everything that you've got on there. In engaging with that database, we can do a multi lingual and we can do it at scale. And then the final thing there is that we can completely automate the process. So we automate the process and keep them updated for you. So that's what we do. Joel: So in three seconds, where can I find out more, Chris? Chris: Yeah, so you go to roborecruiter.ai, to our website. We've got everything you need to know there. Joel: Good enough. All our guests forget that. They should put that in there, like, "To learn more, visit robotrecruiter.ai." All right we gotta pull the people on. All right, I'm gonna start off Chris. It is so noisy with solutions like yours. We've talked to crowded.com. We've talked to candidate.id. There just seems to be so many of these sort of automated, bring your candidates back from the dead, engage with candidates automatically. How are you guys so different from all the others out there? Chris: So I'll take that in a couple of ways. Firstly as far as the actual core company makeup. So we're a combination of traditional recruiters, which I'm sure a lot of people have got that piece as well, and then technologists. Technology is based out of Silicon Valley. So we've got people that have worked on the floors and understand it and then we're applying tech to that. The second piece is how we're going about the tech in activating these people, and we do that with what we call PALS. PALS standing for price, availability, location and skill. So in us activating the candidate, that's the core elements that we're bringing to bear, and then we're keeping those pieces active. And we're not trying to replace a Linkedin, we're not trying to replace the information that you've probably already got on your database. We're purely just focused on the PALS, then using our chatbot with some AI pieces to it, keeping that active based on the information that we get back from the PALS. They're kind of about two pieces, the makeup of the company and then how we're tackling this problem. Chad: Chris, it's interesting. We just got back from Dublin and one of the pitches, or one of the presentations that we heard was, "Everybody's looking for a chatbot. And it's interesting because it sounds like RobotRecruiter, really the base of is chatbots, number one, and number two, you always said chatbot once in your pitch. If it is so popular and everybody's looking for a chatbot, why aren't you chatboting the hell out of this thing? Chris: For us the key piece is the active intelligent candidate profile, right? And with that it's then how do you get to that active, intelligent profile? And that's key piece to a company. And what right now currently enables us to do that is chatbot technology. if you look at my background, with VR and all that kind of cool stuff, in five years how you get that active profile, the technology that does it could be completely different, but our core with RoboRecruiter is that active intelligent profile and what supports it right now. So at the moment is the chatbot technology and it's very cool what we've got. But in as maintaining that active intelligent profile, who knows what will happen in the future. Chad: So when it comes down to actually getting your active intelligent database, as Joel said like we've Crowded.com and we actually talk to uncommon yesterday. There's this scraping or this ability to actually go out to social profiles and really rejuvenate profiles within your database that way as well, which is different from a chatbot. So are you currently doing that or is really the chatbot the smart way to go, especially with GDPR happening? Chris: Yes for us the chatbot is what does it. So we don't go out and do any scraping across the profiles. We get them with the responses that come back from the person. We used that to update what you've got on your database or we completely integrate into your ATS, whereby when you're doing your search, not only are you getting your results back that you should speak to that person, but also a visibility into, again, the PALS, their active intelligent features of their profile. Joel: Chris, how does the technology integrate on the consumer side? How would I as a job seeker interact with your product typically? Chris: Yeah, sure. So you'd get an SMS from us, or you'd get a Facebook Messenger from us and that's coming from the customer. So it says, "Hey Mike, this is Chris from ABC recruiting, we've got ..." And it could be a number of different things, "We've got an interesting role for you", or "Hey, we haven't spoken to you in a while, we just wanna update your information." So from there you can opt in to a conversation. So I'm cooking on that. Then you will start engaging with the chatbot. The other pieces were very clear that this is a chatbot that you're engaging with, and then what it starts to do is go through. If it's a job saying, "Hey, I've got a Java script role based in San Francisco, here's the information we've got on you. Can we discuss through and update that information?" And then it'll go on. Joel: Will you be integrating with sort of the career site interface where someone searches for jobs and a little icon in the bottom where I can start chatting there or is it all sort of actively based where there's an sms or a message sent? Chris: Yes. So then you can embed the chatbot into your website so it can be much ... The active side is you get a broadcast out to you. The passive side, you've done a search, you go to the job chatbots there that can qualify you on the role or the person has a link that they can send to someone. So I could be talking to you and say, "Hey, I've actually got some other jobs for you. Let me just flick you a link to our chatbot that could qualify for some other jobs." Chad: Well okay, so let's dive deeper into whole process methodology because in most cases talent acquisition leadership, they don't understand. With so many different products that are out there, they don't understand what a chatbot does entirely, right? So take me and take the listeners through kind of like the process methodology. I'm a candidate, all the way from hitting the website through interview handholding. I mean, what can your work chatbot actually do and how can you help talent acquisition really take a lot of those administrative, I would say administrative tasks away from recruiters and sourcers? Chris: Yeah sure. I think that's a really great point. I think in some cases with new technology, you may be thinking chatbots and people may be thinking AI and thinking that sounds cool, but it's a little bit out of my reach where, what's interesting with the chat box technology, it's just doing messaging and messaging is something that we're all super familiar with because we SMS, we talk to our friends over chat all the time. So all that a chatbot does and especially in our case, is that we're just working with the recruiter to be able to help qualify the candidates or keep a candidate engaged to allow the recruiter to have a meaningful conversation. So it's as simple as the equivalent of you send out an email to someone and you're waiting for their reply, and with that reply the recruiter then acts on the information that comes back. Chris: However, in a chatbot, what you're doing is that instead of an email, a chatbot's going out and conversing with someone a little bit more. And so the information that comes back to you is a lot more targeted, a lot more kind of meaningful. Again, it's just simply helping you have more information when you get that person on the phone. Chad: So specific tasks, the chatbot can help with really gathering data from the candidates through the application process? Is that a checkbox that a TA can say, "Okay, chatbot can help with that? Chris: Yep. Yep. Chad: So what about the interview? Can it help with the interview too, gather data from the interview side? Chris: This is interesting, we often eat our own dog food and so us doing our own hiring and having recruiters within the company that used to be recruiters watching how we work, and it helps guide some of our product roadmap. Chris: So what the chat box does really well is text. Let's say 200 people and it qualifies them, sort of does that first screen on them for getting the information back on who could be right for the role. But getting that person on the phone and being able to speak to them when you've got the short list of people that you want to be able to do, we don't get involved in that. Again, doing something face to face in an interview level like that, that you still do, either you do as a human to human. Which again it's kind of one of our big 10 taglines is that RoboRecruiter making conversations more meaningful because we want to get you to a place where you're having ... As a recruiter you've got let's say eight hours in the day, or 12 or 16 depending on how busy you are. Chris: So let's say you've got limited time. So what the chatbot does is for every minute allowing you to everyone you're talking to, it's pre qualified. It's said that they're available at saying, "Here's the information you've got on them so that every conversation you're having is more meaningful, which is gonna make you more money. Chad: Can you program it to automatically schedule interviews after they've made it through that first set of screening? So it goes through screening and then if they screen through, will automatically start the scheduling phase. Chris: Yes. Yeah, you can hook all that stuff up. So what we do, is that we integrate with third party applications that do that kind of scheduling. So for example, you record integration with Calendly. So you say, "Hey, here's this hot job that I want to get RoboRecruiter go and shortlist people for me. If there are people that are qualified for this job that I would like to speak to, then get them, let's start scheduling them and use Calendly or use whatever third party system that you're using for your calendar to do that for me. Joel: Hey Chris, we've talked in the past about the resume, black hole, candidates applying the jobs and not getting any sort of engagement whatsoever. And the word about a year ago is that candidates enjoyed talking to a robot or an automated system because at least they're engaging with the company in some way. Are you still finding that's true today? Are candidates sort of still enjoying talking to a robot as opposed to a real person, or do you feel like at some point there'll be a point where people are like, "Why am I talking to a robot? This is stupid. I'm gonna go somewhere else"? Chris: Yeah, I think that a couple of interesting things is one that this whole thing around and it's kind of the philosophical debate. Do you tell someone they're talking to a robot or a real person, even though it is a robot? So one, we believe you tell somebody you're talking to a robot because to your point, it's kinda they respect it, they're not trying to guess if this is a robot and they understand what's happening, I think the key part around is balancing with new technology. How much is this a novelty, therefore people are enjoying it. But they may stop enjoying it, to how much is this sort of impacting my business. We say that the chatbot is continuing to impact the business because it just gets to the point of each question. Chris: You, it doesn't dillydally along, it can be very quick. But the whole thing around, yes, a chatbot can get back to people and, and I think then what it comes down to is, what's the sentiment of the conversation that's coming out of that? Maybe it's a rejection. So it's whether or not the rejection is done in a way that's not insulting to the person that felt like it spend enough time with the person. You want to value the person's time in going through that rejection. I think that's really important. I think the other nice thing that you can do with a chatbot that often happens that you can't do in other models is it kind of can do that at scale. So, you know, I think you had a thousand people who apply to a job, 999 couldn't do it. If you don't have a chatbot, you've got to do some kind of email that doesn't feel personal or you've got to try and call through these people. Where chatbot does that, it talks to them all. Chad: Do you have a business case around that? Because that is powerful. To be able to say that a thousand individuals apply for this job, the chatbot screened them, then scheduled them, right? Those are two things that recruiters don't really need to mess with. So do you have like business cases to show time frame on how that would happen versus the amount of time it would take for an actual human being to do that? Chris: Yeah. So we've done a couple of data points, in the kind of two minute pitch, it said that you do what a blast out to a thousand people and you're gonna get a response rate of 20 to 60 percent. Of that, 40 percent of those people reply back in the first 10 minutes, right? And that's incredibly rich information the first 10 minutes. There's no other way that you can do that. So we've kind of gone up against a call desk in Europe where say, we're processing through several thousand candidates they hadn't spoken to in a long time. They had five people going through in three weeks, and they got great information back. For a recruiter, finding out there are a whole bunch of people you haven't spoken to are available and what company they're at or what company they're interviewing with. I mean, there's your money right there, right? But hat took three weeks and they made money off that. We did the same thing with RoboRecruiter and they got that information back in 24 hours, and it was of the same quality. Chris: So you know, that's where you kind of ... Matching this stuff up. People engage people give you great information and could do it at scale and the key being, it's just to let, giving you the information that for your limited time during the day, you then having great, meaningful conversations with people. Joel: Chris How do you feel a chatbot impacts employer brand? Chris: I think, you know what I'm going to say, I have to say it's fantastic for the employee brand, but I think what it comes down to is that the technology adoption is just getting quicker and quicker. Right? You guys have all seen those great curves of how long things took to get to a billion. The radio, the TV, the Internet, smartphones, and chatbot is even a bigger hockey stick. Chat is even a bigger hockey stick, SMS has been around for a long time, but then all of us ... it's something happened in the last sort of five years where everyone, you know, phone usage, voice phone usage dropped and chat just spiked. Chris: So back to the question specifically on brand, consumers are communicating via messaging or all ready. In some of my SMS, Google, I'm a known android user, Google is suggesting replies, that I can make to friends. Working this way is native to my day. So it's more of companies that aren't engaging using this kind of tack potentially damages their brand because everyone is just using this stuff day to day as a consumer. So that's kind of how we see it. Chad: Okay. So when it comes down to clients, I mean from a client standpoint, who would you say is your priority? What pool at our group is really your major target for this product? Chris: Yeah. So we are selling to staffing companies, the core technology, great way for them to be able to engage with their candidates. And we're starting to go and sell to actual hiring managers for them to be able to access and re-update their systems as well. That's where we're focused on really, anyone that's looking to hire and has data already that they wanted to really update and utilize its scale. Joel: Chris, one of my biggest challenges with sort of embracing chatbots and companies that do it, is just sort of the underwhelming feeling that this is a commodity and that eventually chatbots will be free and someone will have an API for questions in regards to recruiting, and you'll be able to plug that in to your chatbot. convinced me that chatbots are not a future commodity or just a feature for every ATS to add on easily in the future. Chris: I'm not gonna convince you of that. I a hundred percent agree. I think that with most technology, that's where it moves is as the technology becomes something that everyone uses. And I think that comes back to my pitch that I gave you guys and the exact thing that you called out. I use the word chatbot once because what we're focused on is that active candidate profile and how we keep that candidate active and give you an intelligent profile. And again, we've got great chatbot technology that does that. We've got the best chatbot technology that does that. But as we move forward there's gonna be other technology that we bring to play to keep that data are active. So, maybe a surprising comment, but it's obvious. Just look at technology and how it works. A point thing we're all about the active intelligence database. Chad: Yeah. I definitely dig that and anybody who's been in this industry realizes that, you know, through evolution, that's what's gonna happen. So my question knowing that, that we've seen texts recruit actually be absorbed or bought, acquired, whatever word you want to use by one of the major applicant tracking systems. So what's your exit strategy? What are you looking to do? Are you looking to trying to build and become a part of one of those big ecosystems? Chris: If I throw on my pitching to investors your way, we are looking to completely change the way that a candidate looks at their profile in a similar way that Linkedin changed the way that, that putting your profile online for everyone to be able to search against, radically changed the industry. So, we've got pretty massive aspirations to become the next way that you consider a candidate profile. And again, do that with PALS. In five years we would open this podcast with, "Hey everyone, let's tell each other up house. In a similar way that we can watch a Linkedin profile? That's where we wanna be. Chad: That's a very political answer and I appreciate that. But I mean, Joel and me we were just talking about the commoditization prospectively of every technology that's out there. So there's got to be a plan. Do you have any major targets? Are there any types of systems that you guys would actually really like to say, "Hey, from a priority standpoint, we would like this awesome chatbot technology, this active, intelligent database technology to, be a part of that ecosystem. Chris: Yeah. I think that for us to be a part of the Linkedin ecosystem, any kind of an ecosystem where there's the matching details of the candidate is where power is perfectly sits on it, If that makes sense. Joel: Chris, give me a sense of a money that you've raised. Are you bootstrapping this thing a Gimme a sense of pricing for our listeners? Chris: Yeah, sure. So, we as a company been around for 18 months. I joined to go to the company CEO five months ago, but we've been working with the main founders over 17 years. We did a family and friends round, when the company first got started and mainly one of the founders getting bootstrapping that from family and friends. In the last five months we've just closed a seed round. Chris: Seed round was a $2,000,000 round and finished up in February. So we've got a nice bit of runway, some pretty nice targets that we're going after and starting to see some good adoption on to build up towards a series. As far as pricing goes, we've really got two options, one is on just what we call just on a one off campaign. So easiest way to describe that is GDP, and someone's got a million records. Someone has, someone has tried email that they don't have the time to speak to everyone on the phone. They're like, "Whoa, hang on a second. These guys can get me anywhere from 20 to 60 percent engagement on the rest of these guys." Let me give you a whole bunch of people and you can activate them. So we got pricing, that's on that, that starts it anywhere from sort of $250 all the way up to tens of thousands depending on the size of the database. Chris: "One off hit send you back the data. Nice doing business with you." The second piece is on a monthly subscription, and that comes down that we priced that on conversation credits. What is the chatbot doing as far as keeping people updated? And that pricing starts at $250 a month for sort of small number of people, a small number of candidates that you keeping up to date. It's more being upwards of a thousand people that you're keeping up to date. And then like depending on enterprise, depending on deep ATS integration, how embedded we're going into the ATS can go all the way up to. [crosstalk 00:27:58] You had to get it. You were waiting for it. Joel: Dude, pricing should not be a long answer. All right Chad, I'm good. Yourself? Chad: Yep. I'm ready man. Let's do this. Joel: All right Chris, are you ready to face the firing squad? Chris: I'm placed. Joel: I'm gonna start it off. I think that you guys have some great tech pieces here. I think you guys have some smart technology. You have certainly a crowded field, the Mias and the Olivias and the Gobies of the world are sort of all vying for a piece of this chatbot space, which is probably why I think there's some major hurdles there for me. Yes, I appreciate that you agree this is a commodity, but how do you grow out of that? How do you build a moat around that is really hard for me to sort of get my hands around. So I think in terms of where the, where the puck is going, chatbots or certainly a piece of that, I'd just love to hear more, I guess in terms of the mode that you're gonna build, the business stability that you're gonna have and not just get swept up by Google's technology or something that Linkedin launches next month. So for me, RoboRecruiter gets a modest clap. You've got some work ahead of y'all Your turn Chad. Chris: Cool. Chad: Excellent. Okay Chris. A great pitch. I think right out of the gates, you have to remember who you're talking to. You're talking to talent acquisition professionals. You need to keep it simple, stupid. So I really appreciate the active intelligence database that you're building in all the powers and all these things. The thing that you have to remember is who your customer is and who you need to pitch, right? So keep it simple, stupid. Don't get too heady. Tighten up the language, and even though you kind of move from chatbot to active intelligence database or candidate profile, it's not a bad word to say chatbot, especially right now because it will turn heads and it will get people focused on, "Okay, what can you guys do to help us?" Chad: That being said, I believe because of Gen Z, the Millennials and really everybody focusing on taking less phone calls, much like you said, we're going to see more of a shift toward this type of process methodology for everything, for interviews, I mean all the way through the process. So I think the stock is definitely gonna go up on this. And I know Joel was talking about Mia and Olivia. I don't see that as competition, I see that as validation, so that's good. If you were the only one in this market who were doing it, guess what, then there would be a problem. Being able to take that business case three weeks, 24 hours, you need to pound the hell out of that and from an employer brand standpoint, which Joel brought up, that's another piece. Job Seekers do not mind. As a matter of fact, they would rather talk to a chatbot than to talk to nobody at all. That will increase the employer brand and overall from my standpoint, I see nothing but heading up for RoboRecruiter which is why I'm giving you a big applause. Chris: Thank you. I knew I liked you better Chad. Chad: Everybody does. Joel: Chris, congratulations. You made it through the gauntlet bullet free. How do you feel? Chris: I feel good. I feel ready to take on my day. Chad: Excellent. Joel: Awesome. Awesome. Well everyone, thanks for listening. And until next time, we're out. Announcer: This has been the firing squad. Be sure to subscribe to the chadcheese 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 gone today. That's www.chadcheese.com #RoboRecruiter #FiringSquad

Hey kids, this week Joel was in San Diego at ERE and Chad was in San Francisco at a Biddle Consulting Group Institute Summit - swanky right? Luckily between naps Joel was able to get some quick interviews from - VideoMyJob - Kristen Graham, Co-founder - YouVisit - Erik Carlson, National Ad Director - Seekout - Anoop Gupta, CEO - AllyO - Ankit Somani. Co-founder Look for these companies to get in front of the FIRING SQUAD very soon. Give it up for our sponsors. Lots of wallet share love should be bestowed upon America's Job Exchange, Sovren, Ratedly and JobAdX - only one X. Enjoy! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 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: It's Chad. This week, Joel was in San Diego at ERE. And I was in San Francisco at a Biddle Consulting Group Institute summit. Swanky, right? Luckily, between naps, Joel was able to get some quick interviews from VideoMyJob, YouVisit, Seekout, and AllyO. The problem is, without me around, well, Joel goes a little soft on the interview. So look for some of these companies to get in front of the firing squad very, very soon. Enjoy. Joel: I'm here with Kristen Graham of VideoMyJob. Kristen, give us the ... Well, you're Australian so welcome to the States here, first of all. Talk clearly, 'cause our audience is a little slow. Give us the elevator pitch about what VideoMyJob does. Kristen: VideoMyJob is exactly that. We bring jobs to life on a scalable way for organizations to govern their brand and ensure their brand is ... Can we start again? Joel: Pause. Go. Kristen: VideoMyJob helps organizations bring their jobs to life on a global scale. Joel: Very good. There are a ton of video solutions out there. What makes you guys different? What's your differentiator? Kristen: So, VideoMyJob helps organizations film with in-app features like teleprompter, lighting balance, volume, audio enhancement. We then allow you to edit the video and add B-roll footage of your team or the environment that you're working in. And then, we share. So, we allow the organization to share throughout their ecosystem. Whether it's on a job board or whether it's on their internal Vimeo, internet, or whether it's an email or text message. Or on all their social platforms in the right file format. Kristen: And then, we track that video. So the fourth thing we do, we track how the video's performing. How many applications it's getting. Views, comments, engagement, all that sort of thing. Joel: There's some debate about video. About whether it should be sort of a high-priced ad agency manicured video, versus just push play on the iPhone or record on the iPhone and submit to YouTube. What are your thoughts on those two worlds? And where do you guys sort of come closer to? Kristen: Sure. I think there's always a place for highly polished corporate videos, especially for TV and promoting products. But when it comes to promoting a job, it's the people that sell the opportunity. And it's ... people join companies for people. And a hiring manager or recruiter or even an employee in the job are the best people to actually describe what the actual opportunity is. So I think there's somewhere in between. Picking up your iPhone and recording, I think, is a little bit too casual for a corporate environment. But VideoMyJob helps you get that authenticity across in a video. And, yeah. I think that's pretty much covered it. Joel: Yeah, to me, you guys ... And we certainly can't show this on a podcast, but you guys have some features that sort of allow you to have a raw type video but then also look professional at the same time. Talk about those features that allow users to do that. Kristen: Sure. So, we work with an organization's marketing team. So we set the brand guidelines in the app, and then close it down so your employees can be generating the content but keeping their brand guidelines set to the company's brand. We also have governance across, in the app. Where a standard user can create, edit, and ... But the administrator is the one that shares and promotes the video. Joel: And one of the features that I think is cool is almost a little teleprompter where you can have a script and be video taping someone and they can read the script. So anyone sort of shy of video and nervous, I think you guys kind of take that out of the process. Joel: Tell me a little bit about your pricing, the product breakdown. What does your typical client look like? Kristen: A typical client looks like a large corporate client who really has a great brand. They have a great employee brand and they want to bring that to life through using video. So, we have different pricing models for size of company. But we're just started out in America. And opened our office in San Francisco 10 weeks ago. And we're going to market with a US launch special of 2,000 a month. And that allows an organization across America to create unlimited video, have unlimited users on the platform. We also ... that includes your onboarding. So, your users get to go through our online training platform. We also have these cool little selfie sticks that you get for your team. And also all your brand set up integration, that's all included. Joel: Any thoughts on VR? Augmented reality? Are you bullish on that, bearish? What are your thoughts? Kristen: I love it. Especially if ... for grad campaign show days where you try to really immerse the person in the role. I think it's an awesome opportunity. I am struggling to see how that can come to life in everyday job ads. I still feel typical bringing a job to life through seeing real people is a better, more scalable approach to that. If VR can be scalable, how awesome would that be? Joel: She's trying to speak English, which is her second language. So she's stumbling through some of this. It's okay. Joel: Where can I find out more about VideoMyJob? Kristen: Videomyjob.com. Joel: Thanks Kristen. Kristen: You want coffee with that? Joel: It's commercial time. Announcer: JobAdx has the best ad tool in the industry. We provide publishers in job boards higher rev share than other partners through our smarter, programmatic platform. In many cases, 30 to 40 percent greater and more. We're like Ad Sense, but with a better split for you and added relevance for your audience. JobAdx also offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms. Real time dynamic bidding and delivery for your client's posting through the industry's first truly responsive tool. Not set in regret. All of this is done with the flexibility of cost per impression. Click or application. We also offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. Finally, JobAdx delivers a direct client's superior candidates through the best of programmatic efficiency. And premium page ad positioning. To partner with us, you can visit or search jobadx.com. You can also email us at joinusat@jobadx.com to get estimates or to begin working together. JobAdx. The best ad tool. Providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Chad: It's show time. Joel: Hey guys. I'm at the ERE conference, as you know. I'm here at the YouVisit booth. We're talking VR headset employment, which I've always found fascinating. Chad doesn't think so much of it, but I do. They are the only VR headset company here at the show. So I wanted to take a second to talk to them. Here I've got Eric Carlson, senior sales manager. Eric, how are you doing? Eric: Great, thanks. Thanks for coming by. Joel: Excellent. Well, give us the quick elevator pitch on what you do. Eric: We create virtual reality and interactive 360 experiences for different use cases. From recruiting purposes, for training, branding, et cetera. Joel: So a lot of people will say, "I don't have a VR headset. I've never done VR." What is sort of your opinion on the future of this? Is it really gonna take off? I assume your business is predicated on it actually being popular, or maybe it doesn't. What are your thoughts on VR sort of as a general business strategy? And ... yeah. Eric: Well, VR ... Part of the ... Is VR is gonna continue to evolve as content becomes more available and accessible to be able to use it. Our platform actually, you don't need just the VR headset. You can actually access and have full interactivity on your mobile phone, on any platform. Tablet and desktop as well. Joel: So you're working with Deloitte to do this. Tell us exactly what you're doing for Deloitte and how they're benefiting from VR. Eric: Yeah, we've worked with a lot of companies. From Cisco, Deloitte, Pilot. And what we're doing is creating experiences that show a day in the life. So, someone walks in the door goin through ... it could be a different job track, for example. Something like that. With a compass group is something we created, where you can choose the job track that you're going on and now follow that person in a virtual experience, and a day in the life and see what their day is like and what it's gonna be like to work there. Joel: What would Deloitte or one of your companies say is sort of the goal of VR? Is it actual leader candidate generation? Is it just a branding tool? What are they getting out of it? Eric: It can be both. It's certainly branding. The part of it is vetting. You wanna get the right person who's truly interested in your company for the right reasons to come through the door to ... When, sometimes people are spending resources to bring people in for interviews, things like that too, you wanna make sure that you've vetted the right person and that there's true interest. Also, people are spending a lot of time researching your company. From going to LinkedIn, Glassdoor, whatever it might be. And going to your website. If they go to your website and find a link that can take them through a 360 experience and different parts of your company, there's a true value to that. For them to truly have an understanding of what it's going to be like to work with you. Joel: Now, one of the things that your product sort of requires is that a user download a native application on Google Play or iTunes. Have you found that to be a hurdle for adoption or not so much? Eric: That's only one component. You can use the mobile app for the mobile experience. Or, to put that into a VR headset. But the other components of what we do, as well, is that you can have the full interactivity on any platform. On a desktop or even a mobile device without downloading the app. The value to downloading the app is getting a fully cached experience. You don't have to worry about wifi, for example, or internet connection. But then also, being able to put it into a VR experience, which works really well. If you wanna bring some sort of cardboard headset, for example, to any type of event that you're doing or hosting. Or even use as a mailer to drive attention and to brand yourself. Joel: Now, one of the things that I find amusing ... and I've been doing this for a while. When webcams were first on the scene, and not every computer had a screen on it, companies would actually send out branded webcams to candidates to then do over the internet interviews. And you guys have a nice little package here where I don't have to necessarily have a VR headset. I don't necessarily have to have the tools. So tell our audience a little bit about the packages that you're enabling companies to send to people, how they're using it, and just exactly how that's working. Eric: Sure. We work with companies that you can actually ... it's called a cardboard headset. It folds down to basically like a four by six and a one-half inch deep. Very light. And these are something that you can actually brand. You put your logo information on it. On the back side, you can put the information. "Download this app. Put your phone into the headset." And now they have the VR experience. So this is something that you can use as giveaways and also as mailers. People will often mail it out, too, when you've identified a certain quality audience that you want to send this experience to. And now they have a branded headset specifically with directions to have the VR experience that we've created for you. And they're gonna hang onto this headset, as well to continue with your branding. Joel: To me, it looks a little bit like a DVD box. Eric: Yeah. Joel: About the size of a DVD. Tell me about pricing. Eric: Pricing ... the experiences really range depending on the level of interactivity that we do. We're a full-service solution from pre-production, going on location and shooting, post-production. Pricing starts in the 20k range and then builds from there depending on how many interactive elements we build into it. We are, with the experiences, able to take your existing videos and photos, et cetera, and build them in as hot spots, as well. So you can use your existing media as part of the experience. Joel: Where can I find out more about you? Eric: Come to youvisit.com. Joel: Thanks, Eric. Eric: All right. Thank you. Joel: It's commercial time. Announcer: America's Job Exchange is a market leader in diversity recruitment and an OFCCP compliant solution provider. We serve over 1,000 customers consisting of federal contractors and subcontractors to SMBs and Fortune 500 organizations. America's Job Exchange specializes in job distribution to over 6,500 state one-stop career centers and community based organizations. Insures the creation and maintenance of state credentials, obtains veteran preference on job postings, robust outreach management, and supports effective, positive recruitment efforts. Designed to recruit individuals with disabilities, veterans, women, and minorities. For more information, call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Chad: It's show time. Joel: I'm here with Anoop Gupta, CEO and company-founder of Seekout. Anoop, thanks for taking some time out with us today. Anoop: Thank you, Joel. We are excited to talk to you. I love the writing and the work that you do. Joel: Thank you very much. Well, a lot of people don't know Seekout. Give us the elevator pitch. Anoop: Seekout is a passive recruiting tool for the savvy recruiter. Some of the unique points are how we give people talent insights. So you know, whatever role they are looking for, how do they find where the candidates, what they do. Both has a ... to be more focused in their recruiting and in conversations with a hiring manager, which has increasingly become important. We are very good at diversity, and that is important to almost all enterprises and business. To grow a business. Whether you're looking for African Americans, womens, Hispanic, veterans. How to find highly qualified candidates. And then one of the most unique aspects of Seekout is how we can enable you to find great coders who are there are on GitHub. We can take their GitHub profile, combine it with their public information, run education and experience. We can bring the work they've done in their repositories and serve it to you in a beautiful, searchable experience. Joel: Great. Now, you have a pretty unique background. Tell me about that, and then also tell me, what inspired you to get into the HR space? And have you been verified by a therapist to be sane? Anoop: That's a ... So Joel, my background is I was a prof at Stanford. And I sold my first company to Microsoft in 1997. And had a variety of amazingly interesting. I was fortunate. Roles inside Microsoft. From directly appoint to Bill Gates as his technology advisor to heading all our business communications exchange and Skype, global tech policy, education. Basically, after 18 years at Microsoft, I wanted to travel new roads. You know, all of us have one life and we gotta have the experiences and the learnings. And Microsoft is discovering the world when in an 18 wheeler truck. I wanted to get on a bicycle and travel the hills. So, you know, this is an amazingly humiliating and ... humbling, not humiliating, experience. And it is a tremendous growth experience for me. Joel: There are the a lot of competitors out there that are sort of sourcing tools like yours. Entelo, Hiring Solve would be ones that our listeners know about. How are you guys different? Or, can you use all the services together? I don't know there's a winner take all? Or, what are your thoughts on that? Anoop: So, Seekout is unique, as I said, in terms of how we help you develop tech talent. How we help you get to diversity. How we let you get the insights. And some deep machine learning in the search engine that we do for you. We interface and play vowel with other tools. And you know, ATS/CRM systems that are there. But it is our take, coming from a hiring manager. So one is, we love recruiters. We don't think it is replacing them, anything like that. But we also come very much from the hiring manager perspective. How do you improve that interaction? Because if you can engage with the hiring manager, you will waste less time sourcing people. So a lot of it comes from that perspective for us. Joel: What do you think the profession of sourcing looks like in five years? Anoop: I actually write what the recruiting toolbox people say. It has to go to be a talent advisor to the hiring manager. And also, similarly, a resource to the candidate. For the candidate to say, "Yeah, I wanna have a relationship with Joel and him pushing me or taking me to my future dreams." You've got to offer something. You've got to say, "This is what people like you are doing." Hiring manager needs to know whether this talent is scarce. How scarce? How do get it and what is really important. So, we wanna enable that relationship. Joel: Give me a sneak peek into Seekout product-wise. What can we be expecting in the next few months for you guys to release if you can let us know? Anoop: So, we are very rapidly evolving and adding things. And we are driven basically by what organizations recruiters what, hiring managers want, and which can facilitate. Today, some things we want to add a lot more sources. You know, LinkedIn profile is one snippet of what a human being, a professional, is. So one big area for us is how do we bring in information from many, many other sources to build a more complete picture that will allow a better relationship with the candidate and the hiring manager? The second thing I believe is that engagement is really important. One is to find the person, but then, how do you reach out to them? How do you engage? How do you follow up? That is extremely time consuming in hard. And we are figuring out what our role should be in that. Joel: Gotcha. You mentioned LinkedIn. And our listeners know about the case with LinkedIn and HighQ. The scraping of data and profiles. Obviously, this impacts you. What are your thoughts on the case and how it might turn out? Anoop: So, my belief is that the public profiles belong to the candidates. They want it shared with the world. And if LinkedIn is making it available to the public, the way the internet is structured, they should be available to anyone. And this si regardless of how we think about the data. If you do price comparison on internet, it won't work if you are not able to look at Amazon and [inaudible 00:20:41] and Nell. So internet, in fact, it's value comes from the openness. And that is what we believe in the LinkedIn and support the HighQ case. Joel: Cool. Tell me about pricing at Seekout. Anoop: So pricing, we have three levels. We have a 100 dollar a month, or a 1,000 dollar annual pricing. We have a 250 dollar price point, and a 500 dollar a month price point. And this is all depending on the capabilities. For example, the one with our GitHub and diversity and insights and lots of things at 500 dollars. But we have all different price points to meet the needs of recruiters. Joel: And where can our listeners learn more? Anoop: They should come to seekout.io to look at website. And you can mail me directly, anoop@seekout.io. Joel: Excellent. Thank you, Anoop. Joel: It's commercial time. Announcer: Google. Lever. Entelo. Monster. Jibe. What do these companies, and hundreds of others, have in common? They all use Sovren Technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996. And we can help improve your hiring process too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovren.com. S-O-V-R-E-N.com for a free demo. Chad: It's show time. Joel: Instead of starting out trying to pronounce my next company's name, I'm gonna let him do it for me. Ankit: Our company is AllyO and my name is Ankit Somani. Joel: Ankit. Correct? Okay. Ankit: Yeah, that's my name. You got it. Joel: All right. So, AllyO, providers of Ally, the chat bot. You guys just got some money. How much? Ankit: Very raised overall 14 million dollars. And Bing Capital Ventures was the lead for the round. And we have Google AI Fund, which funds AI first companies come in. As well as Roundstar, who's a great industrial partner for us. Joel: Great. So, give us the elevator pitch on what Ally does. Ankit: So, Ally is ... The shortest version is, it's your team's AI recruiter. But the longer version is it really helps your applicants as well as hiring managers becoming their single point of contact throughout the recruiting process. For applicants, it means taking them all the way from initial hire to when they're hired. All the steps of the process automated over any form of conversation platform. So, it could be texting, it could be web chat. You could be seamlessly going between each other. But not only does doing it for applicants turns out hiring managers and recruiters don't have a great experience with existing systems anyways. So it's a lot about, "How do you make their life much, much easier?" 'Cause at the end of the day, you need to make their productivity much better. Joel: So there are quite a few chat bot players here at the ERE conference. Paradox and their Olivia chat bot is here, as well as Maya. Anyone going through the exhibit hall asking what the difference is between you and the others, what answer do you give them? Ankit: I think there are a few different things that we've done. So first, if you look at number of public deployments there are out there, that is this product proven or not? We literally let our customers shout out for us. So you see bunch of case studies. You actually see them deploying this product, completely scale it, and see and reap the advantages. And we have done multiple presentations with customers. So one is, the actual value of it. Is it proven? And in our case, we think it is. Ankit: The second is, it's really end to end. So, we don't think of ourselves as just screening tool. We don't think ourself as just standard experience or just scheduling. We think the biggest problem with the ADS and HRS and the payroll world was that people spend their entire careers building these products and integrating them with each other. We wanted to have, as I said, a single point of contact. So, one that takes people end to end. And automated at that. We already do multiple languages. We are in multiple countries. So all of that is there. But the end to end part is really important. Because if you look at AI, a big part of AI is the conversation system itself. But the bigger part of it is, how do you collect data at each of these instances and make two plus two five? That is, use the data to self-improve the process over time. And I think that's where we really wanna be playing. Joel: Give us an example of a current client and how they're using the tool today. Ankit: Absolutely. So, one of our current customers is Hilton. And we even did a public presentation with Hilton two, three weeks ago at a conference at Vegas. And Hilton ... so, different customers use it in different places. There are people who use it pre-ADS where they are really trying to attract more applicants. There are other people who are trying to use it post-ADS. Where for them, it's not a problem to attract people. It's a problem that it's too overwhelming. So, how do you make recruiter productivity much better? And so in Hilton's example, and several other customers' example, there's a whole lot of screening and scheduling that needs to happen after that. All the way to somebody getting hired. Like, we even do offer extensions, background checks, lots of different things. And even continue the conversation post-hire. So we think of it as a complete package for the applicant. That's how people have been deploying it. Joel: The latest round of 14 million. What do you plan to do with that money in the next year or so? Ankit: Absolutely. So, I mean, we're a technology company. A big part of it is to continue to make our technology much, much better. We're investing a lot in that. We've just hired rock stars in that space. People who have been doing dialogue systems for more than 15, 20 years. So, a lot of focus on that front. We're gonna be investing ... you know, our scheduling product is our own. Already does multiple types of scheduling. We're gonna be investing a whole lot on that. But that's mostly on the product side. Bringing it global, making more languages happen. A lot of that. There's a ... there's a big part of focus which is around the sales and marketing side. So, we stayed in stealth for the longest time. Because we were getting enough customers, we were able to prove it out. But now, we wanna use this funding to really put the name and word out there. So that's gonna be a place where we've been investing a lot. Joel: Right. Tell me about pricing. Ankit: Pricing is, you know, it's always an interesting thing. Because when you are focusing on individuals and SMBs, you almost need to publish it out on your main page because that's how ... you just want that to be a very friction-free process. Ours tends to be primarily focused on medium to large size enterprises. So we have an enterprise-type pricing. So, it's not something you go on a website and you see. But it's very value-based. So we look at it in terms of, how is it that a customer's gonna use it? What's the value they're gonna get out of it? And how do we make sure that while they're enabling that value, we get a piece of it? So, that's how we think about pricing. Joel: How can I learn more? Ankit: There are lots of ways to learn more. You can go on our website, request a demo if you haven't seen that, of Ally. Would love for you to see it because the best part about chat bots, it's extremely experiential. And once you see it, I bet that you'll be a fan of it. So just come hit us up at www.allyo.com. Request a demo. Hit me up. I'm Ankit Somani, you can hit me up on LinkedIn. I'll respond to your text even if it is at two a.m. in the night. Joel: Fantastic. Thanks. Chad: Joel and I will be back in our virtual studios this week. So get prepared for the Chad and Cheese at snark level alpha. Yeah, I have no fucking clue what that means. But it sounded good. We out. Tristen: Hi. I'm Tristan. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, The 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 droppin' that's happenin' up in here. - They made me say that - 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. For more, visit chadcheese.com. #VideoMyJob #YouVisit #Seekout #AllyO #ERE

After a bit of hiatus and a stint at the Guiness Recover Unit at the local hospital, Chad & Cheese are back in the groove, sticking it to everyone who, let's be honest, deserve it. Here's a taste: - Indeed's new commercial isn't so Sunny.. It sucks... - Indeed makes it official with higher prices - Google beta-steps into candidate search - It's only the start... - Starbucks closes the gender pay gap - LinkedIn gets its Snapchaty wit-it - A NYC councilman has lost his damned mind - IBM old people keep getting screwed - Weed continues to be a magnet for investment cash, even in online recruitment ... and a boatload more, boys and girls. Enjoy, and give our sponsors your wallets. Because, we said so. Lots of love to America's Job Exchange, Sovren, Ratedly and NKOTB, JobAdX. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT 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. Joel: Heidi-ho boys and girls. The boys are back in town. Chad: Damn straight. Joel: Welcome to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad: And I am Chad Guinness Sowash. Joel: Amen to that. On this week's show Indeed ruins a perfectly good song from our childhood in their new ad, Google recruitment's love train keeps on trucking, and LinkedIn embraces its inner Snapchat. And oh yeah, we might have a little something to say about Career Builder. Buckle up. But first, a word from our brand new, spanking, shiny sponsor. Announcer: JobAdX has the best ad tool in the industry, we provide publishers and job boards higher rev share than other partners through our smarter, programmatic platform. In many cases, 30 to 40% greater and more. We're like AdSense, but with a better split for you and added relevance for your audience. JobAdX also offers recruitment marketing agencies, RPOs, and staffing firms. Real time dynamic bidding and delivery for your clients' postings through the industry's first truly responsive tool, not set and regret. All of this is done with the flexibility of cost per impression, click, or application. We also offer unique budget conservation options to effectively eliminate spending waste. Finally, JobAdX delivers direct clients, superior candidates through the best of programmatic efficiency and premium page ad positioning. To partner with us, you can visit or search JobAdX.com. You can also email us at joinus@jobadx.com to get estimates or to being working together. JobAdX, the best ad tool, providing smarter programmatic for your needs. Joel: Getting programmatic with it. Chad: I heard better than AdSense and then also go to the website or you can go to chadcheese.com and click on the JobAdX logo on the site. We make it easy. Any way you want to get to them, you can get to them. Just get to them. Joel: I'm just hoping that they don't pull a Nexxt and add another X on their name, so we have to say, "Job Ad Double X". Chad: Dude, I'm telling you right now, it's going to be a thing because it's obviously worked for Nexxt. So that's awesome. JobAdX. Just one X, guys. Just one X. Joel: Keep it to one. That's how we like it. Oh man, we're back. Ireland, we're sobered up. Chad: Dude, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. We've got so much yet to talk about and yeah. We had a great time in Ireland. I mean, big props to everybody that was over there. Joel: TATech. Chad: Yeah, TATech and everyone that was there. All the attendees. It was amazing. We were on stage and you asked, "Hey, you know, who's ever listened to Chad Cheese podcast?" And literally, like 95% of the audience raised their hand. So apparently we're big in Europe. Joel: I hope they heard the question correctly. Maybe it was, "Who hates the Chad Cheese show," but yeah. That was very impressive. Yeah, well, we have a lot to talk about. Let's get to the shout outs. My first one, Wendy Cosmak from LinkedIn, just a big fan, wanted to say that to her. Thanks for listening, Wendy, and keep bringing those LinkedIn folks in because we love them. Chad: We do love them. We also have Jem from Talent Nexus. He's over across the pond in England. He tweeted a picture of a traffic jam and this is what he said, "Sitting in this for two hours. One highlight is listening to the Chad Cheese Guinness-fueled podcast." God damn straight, Jim. Very nice, very nice. Joel: Nothing makes a traffic jam in rush hour better than a little you and me in the ear drums. Louise Triance, I hope I'm saying that correctly, she's at UK Recruiter. She's a big fan. Wanted to give her a shout out. Louise, thanks for listening over on the other side of the pond. Chad: Amazing. Joel: We appreciate it. Chad: Love from Japan. You saw this, right? This was some crazy shit. Joel: Crazy. Chad: Yoshio Fujimora, I hope I got that right. He tweeted in Japanese, so I had to use the Microsoft translation that's already embedded in Twitter and it actually- Joel: You're such a Microsoft whore. Chad: No, dude, it was just embedded in Twitter. So it said, "HR has been delayed about 20 years in Japan," and the rest of it made no sense whatsoever. So big thanks to Yoshio and a big come on, man, to Microsoft for shitty translation software. Joel: So we think Yoshio likes us, right? Chad: Yes. Joel: From the ... Okay, well that's good. Yoshio, keep listening. Chad: Yes. Joel: Shout out from me to Alan Barker who just appreciates us and we appreciate you, Alan, there at Monster. Chad: Love our Monsters. Shout out to HCMTechnologyReport.com. That is a damned mouthful. Mark Feffer, he's been pulling me into some articles, some round tables and stuff like that, and it's really good stuff. It's funny. One of the quotes he just had from his last article I thought was very Chad and Cheese-ish. "If two or more HR professionals get together and don't begin discussing engagement halfway through their first drink, something's wrong." Joel: Would it be Chad and Cheese-ish or Chad and Cheese-y? I'm trying to figure that one out. Chad: Depends on the article. Joel: Yes. I think you and I are on the road next week separately. We're dividing and conquering, I think. I'll definitely be at Erie and San Diego. I think you're going to be on the west coast as well. What are you doing? Chad: Yup. I'm going to be at BCGI, Biddle Consulting Group Institute. They've got a summit going on in San Francisco and me and my lovely wife Julie are actually doing a tandem presentation, about an hour and half on how companies suck- Joel: I'm sorry. Wife talk gets the crickets today. Chad: How companies suck at recruiting veterans and individuals with disabilities, Joel. That's pretty goddamn important. Joel: Fine. When you do disabilities compliance, that's great. Yes, if you're in Cali, you have no excuse to say hi to either Chad or myself because we'll be conquering both sides of the state. Chad: That's right. Joel: Also wanted to say, again in April, SHRM Talent in Vegas, TAtech in Vegas, be there or be square. We're going to tear a new one and make them regret every minute that they invited us to their show. Chad: SHRM Talent, guys. I mean, if you're on the talent acquisition side, you've a vendor, or you're a talent acquisition professional, how in the hell are you not there? And then wrapping your week in Vegas up with TAtech. What I like to call the Spring Edition of TAtech. We're going to be enjoying the hell out of Vegas a couple weeks from now. Joel: I know I prefer my Pete and RePete in springtime. Chad: Those guys kick ass. Joel: Very nice. Chad: Couple more shout outs. Joel: What else you got? Chad: I've got Job Board Doctor. He was listening and thought it was funny that we were giving Mulberry's millennial CEO shit. And then a long list of just love and thanks: Amy Butchco, I think, over at SAIC is listening. Lauren from LinkedIn, Irish Recruiter, that's Ivan Stojanovic, one of our- Joel: Big fan. Chad: Buddies, yeah. WhyApply, Shane at Clinch, Thom at SmashFly, Adam at Candidate ID, Bogomil at Google, Terry at Pandologic, and last but not least, it's going to be repetitious but damn it, mad props to the TAtech boys, Peter and Pete - You guys are kicking ass and taking names. Joel: For sure, for sure. Chad: More than I expected, guys. Great job, great job. Joel: Yep, and definitely the clench boys showed us a good time in Dublin. We appreciate the locals showing us how it's done. Chad: Jane and Pat. Joel: Yeah. Ready to get to the show? Chad: Let's do it. Joel: Alright. Your favorite whipping boy Indeed- Chad: Yes. Joel: Starts us off this week. You're not a real big fan of their commercial. Lay it out for us and what you don't like. Chad: So I mean, talk about a great song. Sunny by Bobby Hebb released in 1966. Smooth, awesome. I mean gets you into a mood. Joel: Low town. Chad: Yep, but it's a horrible damn commercial, man. I mean it gets you in and you're like, "Wow okay, I'm in the groove." And then it's just a really bad commercial. It takes you through what looks kind of like the first person shooter games that are out there. It's a first person type of video. A guy is getting rejected over and over and over, just having a hard time. Then he goes home, his dog gives him a Java development book. He goes to Indeed for interview tips. And the world opens up for him. I mean it's dumb as shit. But apparently it's gotten them some traffic. Joel: So if you haven't seen it, go to YouTube search, "Indeed Sunny," you'll find it. So my first reaction ... My overall reaction to the advertisements on TV, which is sort of new territory for Indeed who has relied on Google traffic for the most part, but they can't do that anymore, is that how are they branding themselves versus, you know, Google? So when I first saw the commercial, I thought, "Okay. They're branding themselves as sort of a career platform. I can go learn new skills, upgrade my game, and get a better job." Which is a totally acceptable brand against Google, which is pretty cold and corporate, search for jobs. You know, Google is this minimalist technology company and Indeed is trying to be this sort of warm and fuzzy like, "We're your career platform." Joel: Now when I looked back at the commercial, there are a few things that are confusing to me. Number one is the guy first gets an alert on his phone. I don't know if you noticed this or not. But he gets a notice from Indeed that he has an interview request, okay? So the interview clearly goes badly on all of these jobs. So the first message to me is okay- Chad: Indeed sucks. Joel: Indeed's matching sucks because all these interviews this guy has are awful and they're all driven by Indeed search. So that was number one. Number two was the guy comes home and his dog has a coding book. So I'm thinking, "Holy shit. A technology company is promoting a book to go upgrade your skills in technology." And then I thought, "Okay, that's really stupid." But then I thought, "Oh, well maybe Indeed has like some educational tools." Well, they don't. And then I thought, "Okay, I go to Lynda. Chad: LinkedIn. Joel: Which is owned by LinkedIn for that or I go to Degreed or I go to, you know, Udemy. So Indeed doesn't have the services to help you learn coding. So I thought that was a big mistake. And then the last thing ... Shit, I'm spacing on this. But the last thing was- Chad: You mean when he comes in and they're all like clapping because he got the job? Joel: Yeah, that was ... I guess the two things that got me were like the matching sucks because the first interviews sucked and they were all Indeed jobs. And then the second thing was the coding, or like upgrading your skills. I know there's a third thing but I'm spacing on it. Maybe it will come to me as we talk about more Indeed stuff. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Which is their subscription model, which was officially released. Chad: Well now, before we get there, before we get there, let's talk about traffic because this is important, too. So because they actually realized traffic, they've been realizing traffic from these ads. So we got some analysis from a listener, which is pretty cool, and this is what we saw. And actually got some data, too, which is really cool. A couple of reasons Indeed still gets it's organic and it is growing. So they've got growing organic right now a very large percentage of their organic is from branding terms. So for example, people are searching in Google for Indeed. So this is growing activity as they spend more and more on branding such as being the primary sponsor on March Madness. This is where they use this ad. Chad: Here's they key, guys. Indeed, guess what, this is demonstrating that your model is not sustainable. You believe that you can build a brand that will stand the test of time. I give you Exhibit A: Monster. Shit didn't work, guys. They had Superbowl commercials, they had blimps, they had all that other stuff. Guess what? That shit doesn't work. You know what works? Behavior. Joel: Innovation. Chad: And these people are going to Google as behavior to look for you. So when your brand fades, which it will, guess what they're going to do? They're going to search jobs in Google and they're going to use Google for jobs. Which you are not pumping jobs into. Idiots. Joel: So I'm pretty sure I know the person who gave you that and the research that he showed you. One of the things that it reminded me of was ... Can you name the most profitable year in music? Chad: Most profitable year in music? Joel: I'll give you the answer because we have a lot to talk about. The answer is the year 2000. Okay? You had NSYNC, you had Brittney, you had Backstreet Boys. Like it was a huge year for music sales, okay? Now if you were in the music industry, you could argue that, "Okay, I'm looking at this Napster thing. I'm looking at this internet thing. And who gives a shit? Like we were more profitable this year than we ever have been and the good times are going to keep rolling." Now if you were a smart person and that was most other people who weren't blinded by the money, you could say, "Okay, dude. Napster and the internet, that is going to totally disrupt your whole world in the next five to ten years." And guess what, it certainly did. Joel: So to me, spouting off about how much Indeed's revenue is growing and how much their traffic is growing, to me, falls on deaf ears because this thing happens all the time. High revenue and whatever doesn't translate into the fact that your world is, you know, crumbling. You know, this is going to hit them like a ton of bricks whether they get it immediately or over time, it probably will be over time, but it's going to happen in our opinion. You can be blind to it and say like, "Things are good. They're going to get better." Or say like, "Yeah, the writing is on the wall, we need to address that quickly." Chad: Yes, agreed. It's not sustainable. So now to resume subscription. Joel: Yeah. It's official. Chad: Prices are up. The newly launched model is out. And apparently this product was delayed two months, at least this is what I'm getting from sources, because they wanted to, "Let enterprise customers get ready," which sounds like a load of bullshit. It's more like Indeed has pissed off a lot of big customers with this announcement. So they wanted to wait a quarter, let the proverbial dust settle, and then try to stealth it in there. Because you and I both know many vendors out there try to sneak stuff in when talent acquisition leaders are not paying attention. Because they're so goddamn busy in the first place, so they just say sneak it under. So yeah, companies were pissed off. Joel: Yeah, and you have some contacts telling you like prices going up two to three times what they were previously, right? Chad: Yeah, actual ... I mean, here's some customer quotes, "They are the absolute worst," they being Indeed, "We saw a 2-3x increase. Not worth it." "I hate Indeed. Their reps harass nonstop." Last but not least, "It's a mess and a big miss." Joel: Yeah, that's crazy stuff for sure. And you know, the strong arm sales tactics by Indeed have been there forever. Chad: Oh yeah. Joel: I'm kind of still surprised with change in leadership and whatever that hasn't changed, but apparently according to your sources, they're bastards. Chad: I remember in the early days when I was VP over at Direct Employers, and I would have our members call me and say, "Hey, can you get these Indeed sales guys off my back? They're calling me every day." Joel: Yeah. Chad: But I mean when you're seeing prices raise like that, I mean, just the regular subscription model from a dollar to $3. And then they had this complex kind of buyback engagement system which, from an intent standpoint, oh that sounds all well and good, but it's not practical. And to try to keep it, I mean you're going to need an actual individual who is focused on trying to make sure that you keep that shit clear on the credits that you get back and what you're paying. It's complex and it's bullshit, and TA doesn't have time for it. And Indeed hopes talent acquisition doesn't have time for it as well because again, they make more money, right? Joel: Yeah. And Indeed's pushback would be, "Well, we became a billion dollar company in five years so screw off with your criticism of our sales tactics." And they probably would be a little bit right on that. LinkedIn. Video. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Embracing video big time. Embracing their inner Snapchat was one of the first stories that came out this month. We now have LinkedIn with filters. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Some of our subscribers or listeners maybe don't use Snapchat. I use it very minimally just to keep track of what the hell the kids are doing. Chad: Yeah. Joel: But if you are familiar with filters, you can put little signage on your video, you can put like where you're videotaping from. Snapchat takes it to a whole nother level and LinkedIn has some really pared back filters, but filters nonetheless, which says to me they're trying to keep hold of the younger user. Maybe attract younger users because I know I'm not going to use any of the filters probably on any videos I make for LinkedIn. What are your thoughts? Chad: Video is incredibly smart, not to mention the way that video is gaining traction in LinkedIn. I think you're saying it better in the actual results. A shit ton of views. I mean that's just content that LinkedIn wants to pull in so they're really giving you bonus views and whatnot for it. So that's awesome. I think you're 100% right when it comes to the actual filters and I think the correct word would be, "LinkedIn video with filters is lit." "Off the chain." Joel: Off the chain, baby. Chad: But yeah. I think it just makes sense. I mean you got to, as we've been talking about, there are different social platforms for different demographics. The individuals who are using Snapchat are incredibly different from those who are mainly using a LinkedIn or mainly Facebook. I mean there's ... Obviously LinkedIn is there, I wouldn't say a major player on the social media side of the house as a Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, you know, Instagram. I think that's where it all lies. So they're trying to ingrain some of that, which I think is smart and you know, with Facebook and all the bullshit that they're going through right now with Cambridge Analytica and all this data. Joel: Privacy. Chad: It's turning people off. We'll see if it's enough to send them to other platforms, but I think it's a good move for LinkedIn. I won't use filters, but you know, I think younger demographics definitely will. Joel: Yeah, I totally agree. And also I think released today, they announced video for company pages and also sponsored video for their advertising product. So they're certainly seeing the engagement, because they're spending time developing for it. I want to see them come up with live video. I know every time that we do a live show, we sort of default to Twitter, which I think gets minimal engagement. I would really love to see LinkedIn launch a live streaming video service where I can go see conferences, streaming video, or things that we do. I got to think it's around the corner but I certainly hope that's on their roadmap because I know that we would certainly use it at our conferences because it is more of our demographic and target audience. Chad: I think LinkedIn as a platform, they're having scalability problems. Just because when you go into it, sometimes it lags. I mean you try to post a YouTube video and it won't even post correctly. It won't give you the video caption or anything like that. So I think they're trying to scale and it's not happening the way that they want to. So going live is going to take a little longer, but there's no question, we would definitely use it. Chad: Here's the danger guys, two dangers. First and foremost, when you start to allow the younger generation, let's say, to use LinkedIn like they use Snapchat, all the shit that we talk about and we get pissed about, "You shouldn't put that on LinkedIn." There's going to be a hell of a lot more of that, guys. More of the, "Personal not professional," stuff. Second, video resumes. We're going to be seeing people on this goddamn thing doing what they see as a "video resume" or ... Exactly, exactly. LinkedIn is going to go into a, "Oh, you can do your video resume." If they go that direction, I don't think it's going to fare well. Joel: No, no. If you're listening, LinkedIn, and we know we have some listeners. Chad: Don't do it. Joel: Do not go down the video resume path. Chad: Don't do it. Joel: Because you will feel our wrath. Chad: Don't do it. Joel: Okay, moving on. This one's in your sweet spot. Starbucks is doing some gender pay gap adjusting. What's going on there? Chad: Don't we have an ad first? I thought we had an ad. Joel: According to our notes, no. I can go to an ad if you want to like really set yourself up for the Starbucks stuff. Why don't we hear from Sovren and you get prepared to talk about Starbucks. Maybe have a cup of Starbucks before we talk about it. Announcer: Google. Lever. Entelo. Monster. Jibe. What do these companies and hundreds of others have in common? They all use Sovren technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996. And we can help improve your hiring process, too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit Sovren.com. S-O-V-R-E-N dot com, for a free demo. Joel: So one of the things that our listeners love about us, we put this show together like 30 minutes before, we throw notes in, and sometimes, this case included, things get mixed up and we miss stuff and whatnot. So basically, Chad, you have our notes, what would you like to talk about after the Sovren ad? Chad: Google. Joel: Google. Okay. Let's talk about Google. Did we talk about the Gmail integration? Chad: I think a couple weeks ago we did, but I think it's pretty amazing to start to see. A couple of weeks ago, they launched a seamless integration with Gmail. That's pretty damn big, right? Joel: Yeah. Gmail is used by a few people, last I checked. Like a billion. Chad: Yeah, yeah. It's fricking crazy. But now we're talking about the entrée into really people search and matching with Google Hire. And you wrote a little something about this. Joel: I did. The beat goes on. Now you and I have been talking a long time about having an Entelo hiring solve type where they go profile hunting around the net. What they launched this week was sort of more logical. They have basically Google search technology within the Google Hire product, which is essentially an applicant tracking system, for users. So you know, I posted this on LinkedIn and someone replied, you know, "This is the same thing that our ATS has, like what's different?" I said, "Well, Google does search better than anyone else and your ATS does not. That's why this is different." So Google is going to be Google-fying your resume search in terms of related searches, candidates that are similar, trying to predict what you're looking for based on the job. Presenting candidates before you actually even search for them. I mean they're going to Google-fy the whole process. Chad: Yes. Joel: And you know, you and I believe that's eventually going to be in sort of a search the web component as well where they bring in, like, "Here are your candidates, here are some others around the web that we think match that as well." You know, "Would you like to send out a message to them? Would you like to schedule on Google?" And you and I are fortunate enough to hear Bogomil from Hire with Google at the TAtech conference. And the vision that he laid out for everybody was sort of this entire soup-to-nuts AI powered search matching, scheduling, you know, interviewing process. And this just to me is another step into the grand vision of where Google is going. Chad: Yeah. And so we've ... Take a look at Job Discovery first, the API that they've put out with Job Discovery, that has been incredibly successful. It's machine learning, AI, whatever you want to put into it, right, but it's been incredibly successful and it's probably going to get out of beta here in the next few months or so. That is amazing for a Google product to be in around 18 months and then be out of beta. They are seeing some amazing strides with Johnson & Johnson with Career Builder, that is a jobs API that is machine learning AI, right? Chad: So that being said, now we take a look at Google Hire and they are launching something called Candidate Discovery. This is a way, and this is from my standpoint, this is a very smart way to start to baby step into more of an enterprise API like the Jobs Discovery API. So Google and Gmail ... Think of it from this standpoint. You got the data around jobs now that you've done all this mapping and whatnot for Jobs Discovery. You can use that data against the actual people data that you have now within Hire. One of the things that I love about technologies today versus five, ten years ago, is that we didn't even screw with candidates that were in our database. They went into the black hole, and the black hole was the black hole, and that's just ... It is what it is. Google Hire, Candidate ID, I mean we're seeing all these companies that are starting to ... Crowded. Joel: Yeah, Crowded. Chad: Starting to revive the candidate resume database because these are individuals that you have already paid for. Instead of going out and paying for them again or paying for others that could perspectively have like skills, go ahead and rejuvenate the ones that are in your database, match them against open recs that you have now, before you go paying for new ones. Number one. That is amazing. It just makes good sense. For anybody that thinks that their ATS has the exact same type of process, in the same class of Google? Yeah, you're fooling yourself. We're going to see applicant tracking systems once this becomes an enterprise API, we'll see ATSes using it, we'll see companies like the Career Builders of the world using it. It just makes damn good sense. And here's the thing that kills me, it cracks me up. I was pounding Bogomil from Google during our interview, and I was like, "Where's the people API?" And he just kind of smiled and then guess what? A week later they launch it. So it's not the API, but it's, I think, a baby step into an enterprise level API. Joel: Yep. Google is being very methodical, calculated, probably trying not to step on too many toes too quickly. You mentioned Career Builder and how much they've embraced the Google train and you know, Career Builder has a product called Talent Discovery, which sounds a lot like Candidate Discovery, right? So you know, Google's doing the Google thing and you know, we'll see how that plays out but if I'm at some of these companies that have embraced them, I'm thinking a little ... I'm a skittish maybe about what's going on, but maybe I expected it and I'm just, you know, I'm waiting it out until I find out something else to do when I grow up. Chad: Think of the products that you can plug in for Google. I mean you've got Google Analytics, you've got Google Sheets for you know reports and things like that. There are so many different opportunities to spread this out and to be able to use this data. I mean big data was a big term for a very long time, but it didn't matter because we didn't have the machine learning and AI that we do now. Joel: Yep. Moving on or anything else to say about Google? Chad: It's good stuff. Joel: We're watching Google. And by the way, if you haven't heard our interview with Bogomil from Ireland, I encourage you to look back at past episodes and listen to that. It's only about 10 minutes long, but pretty insightful stuff, although he was very diplomatic in most of his answers. Chad: Chadcheese.com. Go there. Joel: Chadcheese.com, baby. Alright, do you want to talk about Starbucks now? Chad: Yes, yes. Joel: Alright, Starbucks. Okay, man. This is your sweet spot. Starbucks. Gender pay gap. Go. Chad: So they're reporting that they're closing, or they've closed, all gender pay gaps in the US. And they're planning to do it worldwide. This is big because we're talking about equality, we're talking about talent, right? So this is very big for any company. So it's funny because when I posted this, you know, there are critics that are out there and the retail industry shouldn't have much of a big issue because you know with pay gaps, because they're pretty much aligned as it is. And it's like, okay. So there are a few things to kind of unpack there. Chad: If that's the case, I have two points veiled in questions, probably because I watch too much Jeopardy. If it's so easy for a sector like retail to do this from a pay gap standpoint, why the hell haven't more companies declared they fixed the problem? If it's so goddamn easy, then why isn't it fixed on the retail side? I mean more companies, more brands should be standing up and saying, "Yes, we agree. We've got this fixed." That's number one. Number two, if Starbucks culture made this a nonissue, which is one of the points as well, made this a nonissue, don't you think that's a pretty goddamn good story in itself? "Yeah, well, yeah, well. You know, Starbucks culture, yeah, that was easy for them because of their culture." Well shit, dude. That's a big fricking story. If they automatically were really focusing on equality for all of their employees, doesn't that make for a big damn story? Joel: Yeah, and it's probably a pretty good recruiting and retention tool, as well. Chad: Yes. What about product, though? You think about brand, who buys Starbucks, right? Pretty much everybody does. Joel: Everybody. Chad: Everybody does. So from a PR standpoint, from a brand standpoint, from an employment product sales, I mean, that's the thing that I don't think talent acquisition really has gotten a handle on over the years, is that they affect the brand. They play this bullshit employment brand thing, which I don't believe in. They impact the brand. The brand is bottom line. It's sales. I mean candidates are customers, and if we don't treat them like customers, guess what? We're going to lose their sale. And we saw that with the Virgin media report that they put out and losing 6 million dollars because they treat candidates like shit because they didn't treat them like customers, yada, yada, yada. But anyway, this is a key point. If your brand is not taking the lead on many of these issues, then screw your brand because it sucks. Joel: How much do you think politics plays into decisions like that? Because Starbucks historically is a pretty liberal organization. I don't think Howard Schultz has much fear about the Trump organization at this point. Like do you think that plays into it and why Walmart and others don't come out because of political reasons? Chad: No, I don't think it's really political reasons as much as it is an overall holistic sense of understanding your product and understanding how you're seen to your customers. And I'll give you a great example. So Starbucks was very heavy on hiring veterans. Thousands and thousands of veterans. They put their stake in the ground and they killed it. And they're still killing it. That translated, and remember, when I was active duty, I was deployed. I was on Fort Benning, Georgia. There was a Starbucks that was probably, you know, another half mile further away than the closer coffee shop. I always went to Starbucks, man. I knew that they cared about us. That was the brand. That was what our community felt. That's exactly the smart thing for any brand to do. And for you to say that, "Oh, it's easy for them to do that." You know what? I'm done. Joel: Okay, you're done. I'm going to ring the bell. And we're going to hear a word from our favorite compliance sponsor AJE, unless you have anything else to add. Alright. Announcer: America's Job Exchange is a market leader in diversity recruitment and an OFCCP compliant solution provider. We serve over 1,000 customers, consisting of federal contractors and subcontractors, to SMBs and fortune 500 organizations. America's Job Exchange specializes in job distribution to over 6,500 state one-stop career centers and community based organizations, insures the creation and maintenance of state credentials, obtains veteran preference on job postings, robust outreach management, and supports effective, positive recruitment efforts designed to recruit individuals with disabilities, veterans, women, and minorities. For more information, call us at 866-926-6284. Or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Chad: Another thing on the America's Job Exchange side of the house, one of the things that they're actually pushing, which I agree with 100% is their new byline is, "Compliance is Mandatory, Diversity is Essential." And I really think that Starbucks is trying to embody. Pretty cool stuff. Good job America's Job Exchange. Joel: Good job. Alright, man. We're going to bring back something that we did a while back but haven't done. I don't think this will be a normal thing, but we have a lot of news, so we're going to go rapid fire hit on some of these stories and just make some brief comments and then move on to the next one. So do you want to tackle the first one? It's one of your favorites. Chad: I don't know if it is or not. Let me see what we have here. Okay, yeah. So New York councilman introduces a bill that will prohibit bosses from requiring employees to reply to an email after work. This bill would impose a $500 fine for employers. Joel: What? Chad: For the first offense. Employees would be entitled to like a $250 per violation. I mean okay, so at the end of this, and I think this is crazy, it's an overreach. Total load of bullshit. Joel: Well, it would ban it from requiring people to reply. You can still send the emails, just don't expect them to answer it until work hours. This is so un-American it makes me want to puke. You also didn't add, also from the story, if an employee experiences retaliation from the boss, they're due $500 like per violation. And then they're due $2,500 if they're fired for not replying to emails after work hours. Like this is so ridiculous, and there's just no way. Like this probably wouldn't even pass in France this is so like communist. Chad: It's ridiculous. Joel: But yeah, it is New York City, and things are a little crazy out there sometimes. Okay. Next story that we have, Hire Maturity, which we talked about a week, two weeks, three weeks ago, and sort of made fun of them for being a blue haired job board reminding us of eons.com back in the day. We talked about them going out of business, but apparently you have word that they literally are like going out of business. What's up with that? Chad: Yeah, I mean if you go to hire-maturity.com. Joel: Great URL. Chad: Because you never would unless I actually asked you to, there's a message, "Due to unforeseen circumstances," it seems like there might be a non-compete issue or something like that that's going on here, but I mean, really at the end of the day. This model overall is dead in the water. And like Joel said, we talked about it a couple of weeks ago, check it out on the podcast. It's not worth much of our time now. Joel: Good enough. But what is if we're talking about old people, IBM last week or recently cut more than 20,000 US employees aged 40 or older, which includes us, Chad, by the way, in the last five years. This was according to a Propublica investigation. I've never heard of Propublica, but I assume they're legit. The publication alleges that IBM did not provide older workers with paperwork they're legally entitled to and showed an age bias when implementing layoffs. Propublica also says managers encourage some staff to apply for new roles while also telling the hiring departments to not employ them. The report claims the moves were part of broad cost cutting measures that allowed the firm to bring on younger workers on lower salaries. Chad: Exactly and that's what it comes down to. That's what it comes down to. Cost cutting measures IBM's getting their lunch fricking fed to them by now bigger names. IBM used to be the name on the block, now it's not even a part of the conversation a lot of the times. So what do you do? You look at your top earners who have been in the company, have been trustworthy, and they've been there loyal, and you go ahead and just cut their heads off. Joel: Do you think this is really age bias or just the fact that IBM is sucking as a business and they're cutting costs and over 40s are the most well paid? Do you think that was more of it than just actual straight up ageism? Chad: They're not targeting 40+. I don't believe that they are, at least. I think what you've hit is really the nail on the head. Take a look at the tenure in the company. Obviously if you're younger you're not going to have much of a tenure versus, you know, if you've been around for 20 years, 10, 15, or something like that. And the salary that you have, that base wage, is going to be much larger than somebody that you can bring in. So in most cases, I've seen this with some companies, I don't know if IBM did it, where you can cut one head and then replace it with two individuals who are coming straight out of college or have just a little bit more kind of entry level, and still pay less. So twice the manpower, which is what they would say, and you keep going forward. It doesn't generally work that way because of expertise and getting shit done. If you've been in the seat for a while you know how to effectively get shit done. But yeah, that's fairly the norm. Joel: I think Raphael [Espani? 00:40:51] from New York City who introduced the email bill should also introduce the ageism bill where you're fined $500 for every 40 year old that you lay off. Anyway, alright, so moving on. Quickly on Career Builder. Okay. This one hits home for me. I am in the process of writing a story about Career Builder and sort of the state of things at the company, which I will say, seem to be in turmoil. The story I was working on was accidentally published it's since been pulled. But the story is like an onion that I keep peeling and it gets a little stinkier each time. So I know that there's stuff out there, but we're going to hold off a little bit until we get the whole story and we'll come with you with sort of the whole thing that's going on and everything that's going on there. So I know some of our listeners are like big time fans and know that this article's out there. I will just have you temper your excitement for probably one more week until we get the full story, and then we'll come out with everything that we know that's going on at our friends at Career Builder. Chad: Hashtag El Chapo. Joel: Alright. We're flying along here. Some people raised some money. Frankly, I have no idea what they're doing. Do you? Chad: It says AI, so they're automatically going to get money. Joel: Oh, of course. So AI, automation, chat bot, here's $14 million, okay, good luck to them. Vangst, probably out favorite startup because they are pot. Chad: Weed. Joel: They're getting weed people jobs. God. They've got 2.5 million. Any day now I'm waiting for the feds or Trump or whoever to be like, "Nope. No more weed." And the feds will walk in and put all these people out of business. Chad: Yeah. Joel: I don't think it will happen maybe, but it's certainly a risky endeavor. And lastly on our rapid fire is Randrr, which is a horrible name. R-A-N-D-R-R. Chad: Yeah, it's horrible. Joel: I guess R-A-N-D-E-R was taken so they're Randrr. Chad: Or E-E for Randee. Joel: Randee. I don't know what Randrr has to do with anything is sort of silly. They bought a company called anonymous, who was originally Poachable, which kind of got some buzz early in the days. So it looks like the two founders Poachable, they changed the name, they did some other stuff, and then they sold this company to Randrr. And then I think the two guys from anonymous, like they work for YouTube or Google or something. So they basically, like they just dumped this thing on Randrr and we'll see if they do anything with it. But that's our rapid fire. Chad: I've got one more. Joel: Oh, you've got one more. Let's go. Chad: One more, I've got one more. Dutch Staffing Firm, young capital announced today it is planning to offer job candidates a joint, a marijuana cigarette or a shot of alcoholic beverage in order to get them ready for the job interview. Joel: What's strange about that is that's sort of our strategy before we start the show, to get the best out of our show. Maybe there's something to giving candidates a shot of vodka or whatever before they do the interview. Wow. What a crazy freaking world we live in. Chad: I love it. Joel: I got nothing else, man. How about you? Chad: I'm out. Joel: Alright, we out. Chad: We out. Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. That's 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.

People on LinkedIn aren’t looking for a job and too many candidates on job boards aren’t qualified. Therein lies the heart of start-up Uncommon.co and how it hopes to break through the crowded space of recruitment technology. The company says it uses AI technology trained on over 50 million career paths and analyzes applicant resumes for hard skills, like expertise in data science or kinesiology, by looking for factors like degrees attained or years in a role; soft skills, like creativity and entrepreneurship, are found by extrapolating skills necessary for success in past jobs. Chad & Cheese put Teg Grenager, CEO, through the gauntlet and see if his company has what it takes to make it in the world of recruiting. The companies that put $18 million in their company recently certainly hope so. And after listening, be sure to checkout Jobs2Careers, exclusive sponsor of the show. Jobs 2 Awesome, more like it! PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Chad: Okay Joel. Before we get into Firing Squad, I have one quick question. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Would you say that most companies find it hard to attract the right candidates to apply for their jobs? Joel: Well, Jobs2Careers certainly thought so. That's why they created their new talent attraction platform, ODT. Yeah, you know me. Chad: Dude. That's OPP. This is ODT. Which stands for On Demand Talent. Where data driven talent attraction is made easy. The On Demand Talent platform enables recruiters to reach the right talent at the right time at the right price. Joel: And the best part? Chad: What? Joel: You only pay for what Jobs2Careers delivers. Chad: No! Joel: So, if you're attracting the wrong candidates, or you feel like you're on a recruiting hamster wheel, just go to Go.J2C.com/CC and learn how On Demand Talent or ODT, yeah you know me, can get you better candidates for less money. Chad: Whoo! I'd say you just go to ChadCheese.com, click on the Jobs2Careers logo there and it's just that simple. Joel: It is simple. Arm me with Harmony. Announcer: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest start-ups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level. Joel: Alright, alright, alright. What's up everybody? Joel Cheesman here. Chad Sowash up on the other line. And welcome to Firing Squad. Chad: Here we are. Joel: Today, we have a very special guest. We have Teg Grenager, I believe I pronounced that last name correctly. Chad: Butchered it. Joel: Teg is with Uncommon.co. Utilizing a lot of AI automation, cool stuff. He's going to tell us more about it. And Chad and I are going to determine whether or not he is going to pass the Firing Squad without injury. Chad, how are you doing man? Chad: My trigger finger is itchy dude. Joel: I know. We talked about that. And I'm a little drunk still from Ireland. So the guns could go off today, I don't know. Chad: Well excellent. So Teg. So what's your position there at Uncommon.co? You chief bottle washer? What's going on. Joel: Quick intro. Teg: Yeah, I am chief bottle washer. But I'm also chief executive officer. Joel: Very nice. Very nice. Chad: So, here's how it's going to go, my friend. You will have a two minute pitch. And at the end of two minutes, you'll hear the bell. Then Joel and I are going to hit you with some rapid Q&A. Now if your answers aren't concise, Joel is either going to hit you with a bell or the crickets, whatever he feels like he wants to hit you with. Joel: I prefer the crickets, because I'm natural like that. Chad: But they generally put him to sleep. Chad: At the end of Q&A ... we've got a three point scoring system here my friend. You will either receive big applause, which means you exceeded expectations. The golf clap. My favorite. You're on your way, but you have a good amount of work to do. And then last but not least, you don't want to be in front of the firing squad. Chad: That pretty much means- Joel: Ouch. Chad: That pretty much means you're going to pack your shit up and go home. But that's it. That's the firing squad. You're going to hear the bell. You're going to start the pitch. Joel, it's on you man. Joel: Teg, are you ready? Teg: I am totally ready. Joel: Two minutes starts now. Teg: Alright. Thank you guys so much for having us on. So I want to tell you about Uncommon. Uncommon is a programmatic talent marketplace that makes it really easy for recruiters and hiring managers to use and benefit from programmatic recruiting technology. But no mistake, this is not a job advertising system. This is not complicated. Uncommon doesn't require any training. It's designed to be simple and intuitive for everyone to use. Teg: With Uncommon, recruiters can imagine the perfect candidate for their position, write down the precise qualifications that meet or exceed the, sorry, the precise qualifications that they should have and then sit back and receive a stream of applicants, interested applicants that meet or exceed those qualifications. It's very simple. And we think it's the way things should be. Teg: So put yourselves in the shoes of a recruiter who needs to source candidates. I know we've all been there. And today you have two choices. One, you can advertise the job on a bunch of job boards, in which case you have to, first of all, figure out which ones to advertise on. Then you have to pay them usually on a CPC basis and when you sit back, you get a flood of candidates who are very interested in your position, but mostly unqualified as well. And then you have to spend your time screening them to figure out who are good ones. Teg: Or number two, you can go license an expensive database of passive candidates and write down some complicated boolean search string, in which case you get a bunch of candidates who are very qualified for your position, but not interested. So you have to spend your time of course trying to convince them that they need a new job in the first place and that they should be interested in your job at your company. Teg: So we at Uncommon are changing all that. We provide recruiters with a stream of candidates who are both interested and qualified out of the gate. And we show you, this is my favorite part, in a side by side comparison exactly how each of those candidates stacks up against the required qualifications that you asked for. It's like a dream come true. And best of all, Uncommon has introduced a new pricing model. We charge the employers on a cost per interested and qualified applicant basis. In other words, you only pay for the interested candidates that meet or exceed those custom qualifications that you wrote down initially. This means that we're totally aligned with the recruiter's best interest. Teg: Make sense? Joel: Makes sense. Are you done? Teg: Awesome. We're transforming the in ... okay. Joel: Uncommon.co. I'll tell everybody for you. Okay. Chad: Uncommon.co. Yeah, no, good call man. You got two minutes. I think we're giving them way too much time. Because they're just killing us. Teg: A little nervous. Joel: A little nervous here, I think. Chad: I love it. He's listened to the Firing Squad before. Teg: I don't know why, with that firing squad out there in front of me. Chad: So, where the hell are you finding qualified candidates? You're going out from a programmatic standpoint, pushing jobs out. And how does that work from there? Just for the talent acquisition, VP or Director or Manager, whatever, who's listening right now, how does that actually work for me? Teg: So I don't want to focus on it too much when I talk to recruiters, but of course, we do have AI and data science at the core of everything we do. That's my background, you guys might know already. So the last company that I built together with our founder, Amir Ashkenazi, was an advertising marketplace, a programmatic advertising marketplace. And we heavily leveraged AI and machine learning there as well. So we basically are using those technologies to do the things that recruiters would have to do themselves if we weren't around. And that they have to do today without Uncommon. So we figure out which job boards to post on, we figure out as the candidates come in, as the applicants come in, which ones are actually meeting the requirements and why. Show you side by side. Teg: And we also go to other source of candidates. We have increasingly our own growing database of candidates as you can imagine. People that we're looping in and engaging over time. So we reach out to them and ask if they're interested, the ones that are qualified. And we hit third party passive databases as well. Teg: But the whole point is that the recruiter shouldn't have to know about all that. That's like mechanical stuff that machines can be really good at. The recruiter should just focus on what kind of candidate they want to talk to and then let us know about that and we should do all that hard work for them, whether it's looking at passive databases or screening through the active ones, whatever it is. Chad: So, it sounds a lot like Zip Recruiter. How do you differentiate yourself from Zip Recruiter? Teg: Good point. Zip Recruiter is a great company. And I think they've obviously experienced tremendous success and growth recently. There are some really big differences. First of all, Zip Recruiter doesn't ask you in a precise way what kind of candidates you want to look for. So when you sign up with Zip Recruiter, you specify, you list the job they are looking for and you write some text in your job description, but you don't actually tell them who you would consider to be qualified. And so when they send you candidates, it's generally everybody. They sort them for you, but they generally are sending you all stripes of candidates. People that you consider qualified and lots of people that you don't. Teg: Second of all, I think Zip Recruiter has really focused, and I think these two are actually related. I think Zip Recruiter is really focused historically on the small and medium sized market. They've generally been serving small mom and pop and other kind of local businesses with lower skilled jobs. And we're really, we serve those guys, of course, but we're really focused on skilled jobs. And we've built a system that's filled with pretty sophisticated models of skills and experience in different kinds of roles and different kinds of companies and all that kind of stuff. And that's just stuff that Zip Recruiter hasn't done yet, mostly because they haven't really had to, for the kind of customers that they've been serving. Chad: So, you're mainly enterprise, is what I'm hearing then? Teg: Yes. I would say that we are currently, our customers are largely, are mostly kind of large enterprise, although we also work with many staffing agencies as well. But yeah, typically I think we do best on those high skill jobs that are at a range of verticals, but still where there's really a heavy screening task that otherwise a human would have to do. Joel: Hey Teg. I'm going to go the other direction from Zip Recruiter and I have the luxury of doing a report on you guys. We've talked previously. And I think there's a serious Intello kind of component, where you guys have 50 million, or at least when we spoke, there were 50 million or so profiles, I believe. Teg: Yes. Joel: How are you different from an Intello, a Hiring Solved, from that side of the product? Teg: I think I lost you for a minute, but I think you're asking how we're similar or different from Intello, Hiring Solved, Job Jet, those kind of guys, right? Joel: Yes. Teg: Yeah. So in my opinion, they're solving part of the problem. But they're focused so heavily on finding passive candidates in these big databases. And they're not activating those candidates for you. They may give you some tools and maybe you guys know differently, maybe there are some who are doing a great job with this, but what I've seen is that you then get an opportunity to reach out to these people, but it's still left to the recruiter to try to go and turn them into interested applicants, from ... they may be qualified. It's easy to find qualified people in those databases, but there's still a lot of work to be done. You've got to reach out to them, often to have some kind of pipeline or some kind of ... increasingly we're talking about CRM for job seekers and so on. And we believe that, again, recruiters shouldn't have to do all that. That's something that we should do. And that we can go and leverage those databases and we have partnerships with databases that are similar to some of the guys you mentioned. But all that work of trying to engage those candidates, that's something that we're doing for the recruiter and the hiring manager. Chad: So there's a marketing aspect that a Brilent or Hiring Solved or what have you, does not have that you're saying that Uncommon does. Teg: Exactly. So to come back to my pitch at the beginning, the candidates have to be interested and qualified. What does every recruiter want? They want a list of interested and qualified candidates. In other words, people that have already said they're interested in the job and they know meet the basic qualifications, that they're ready to then show to their hiring manager. And if you're going to go use a big database, you're going to have to go turn all those qualified candidates into interested ones, get them to actually apply, indicate their interest. Or the other way around, if you're going to go and collect all the stuff coming in from job boards, you're going to have to take all these interested people and figure out who's qualified. Teg: So again, we think that that's something that is very automatable. And we provide a beautiful system that allows recruiters to do just that in an automated way. Joel: So, there's some big companies getting into the AI space, as you well know. A little company named Google. Do you guys think that you can out AI Google, knowing that they've turned their guns on the recruiting space? Teg: Oh, I love that question. So, for reference, in my last company, AdaptTV ... it was a video ... we were building a video ad, programmatic video ad marketplace. And Google had just bought two amazing companies when we started our company. They had just bought YouTube, which meant that they were basically the king of online video. And they had just bought Double Click, which those of you may remember, was the premier largest ad marketplace. And we just thought, okay. This is it. They're going to eat our lunch. Why are we even doing this? Teg: And it turned out that Google moves very steadily. They're very smart. They move very steadily, but they also move very slowly. And typically, predictably. And they do things in a very Googly way. And over the years that we build AdaptTV, we actually ended up partnering with them a lot more than competing with them. And they didn't in the end, I think, have a negative impact on our success. Teg: Now who knows what's going to happen here? I can't know what's going to happen in the future, but I see the moves that Google is making, just like you do. I have a very similar view on it. I think that they are disintermediating essentially the big job search engines. I don't need to name them, but you can name them. Joel: And we do weekly. Teg: And that that is a landscape that we're now going to have to live in. Unfortunately with our strategy at the moment, this is honestly at the moment, just kind of lucky, but we're not going head on for them. That we can benefit from a world where Google does a great job with job search, because we work for the employer typically. We sit between the employer and the job seeker and help make that application and screening process great. And we can keep doing that, because the employer wants to keep doing that, even if Google is the one that's providing job search. Joel: Teg. I'm really curious about your pricing model. I believe you call it Pay per interested candidate. Is that correct? Chad: CPIQ. Teg: Hey. Thank you. Joel: Yeah, tell us about that. Expand on that for a minute. Teg: Yeah. So cost per interested and qualified. We invented that term. What we've seen so far is that the world is generally operating on a CPC basis, and that's itself sort of an innovation over the old listing fees that we've had for the last decade or two. But we think CPC is wrong. And the reason why CPC is wrong, it's wrong for the customer. It's wrong for the recruiter. Because when the large job boards are billing you CPC, their incentive, their motivation, of course, is to send you more clicks. And more clicks doesn't mean more qualified clicks. So, yeah, exactly. Teg: So, you know, so what we see is that, that actually it's a sad thing, because if you think about the way job matching has worked forever, it typically starts with an employer listing a job and an applicant indicating their interest. It doesn't have to be, but that's historically how it's been for most of history. And basically, employers have lost faith in the job boards. They've lost faith in that active candidate channel because the quality has gotten so low. So we don't believe that has to be the case. We actually see a lot of good candidates coming through the active channel. But they need to be, there needs to be a level of automatic qualification put inbetween so that that employer is not just overloaded with these people who are spraying and praying for their job search. Joel: And is this different than cost per acquisition? Just to be clear. Teg: I think that it is, very much. Because it's cost per qualified applicant, right. So it's, or cost to acquire someone qualified. So we're running the automatic screening with a side by side comparison. We're doing that for every candidate. What's really cool guys is that it can benefit not just the employer, it can actually benefit the job seeker. And we're already doing a little bit of this and we hope to do a lot more of it in the future. But we can actually show the job seeker as they're coming in, as they're indicating interest in the job, as they're applying for the job and so on. We can show them where they stand. And not in some kind of fuzzy way, like you're in the top 10% of candidates for this position, which you can see on certain, like LinkedIn and so on, but that's always been nebulous to me. Well, what does that mean? Am I going to get a call back or not? Am I qualified or not? Teg: We actually can tell you, show you the same side by side thing that we show to the employer. We can show you, hey, here's where you stand relative to the things that this employer, this hiring manager has said is important to them. Wouldn't you love to know? Right. And if you can see that you're clearly falling short, there's things that you can do. Maybe you forgot to put stuff in your profile on your resume. Or maybe you want to go back and get a little training. Right. Teg: I've been talking to a lot of people recently who are taking courses that, like general assembly, or boot camps or online courses. And these things can really help people backfill missing positions, if they have a particular job that they're going for. And we're, our service, because we're automating and creating this transparent and automated view of the qualification of the candidate for the position, we actually have the power to be able to do that and to help the job seeker in that way. And I don't see anyone else right now who can do that. Chad: So on the CPIQ side of the house, you're talking about interested. Well, yeah, they applied, so therefore they're interested. So you check that box. And qualified, you pretty much have an arrangement with the employer. Let's say, hey look. These are your requirements. If they meet these requirements, than they are qualified. So therefore, that's when you go in and that's when we bill you for that candidate. Is that how it works? Teg: So, yeah. Very good. Thank you for asking me to qualify Chad. That's exactly right. Joel saw a demo of it earlier. And I wish I could demo on the air, but of course that doesn't work so well on a podcast. But yeah, basically you know, there are other pricing models you can imagine. Like obviously, you can go all the way to the hire and have a success fee and then you look like a contingency agency or whatever. But we're trying to find a happy medium of something that we can do really well. Like a metric that we can optimize to. Or a goal that our system can be trained to optimize to. That is also total aligned in the interest of the employer. Teg: And so we have found that what works really well for us is that when the employer is rigorous and writes down what they're looking for and that's part of our process. It does take an extra minute up front. We got to ... instead of just writing a job description and copying and pasting a bunch of requirements, you've got to actually think and write down the requirements you're looking for. And once you've done that, when we find people that meet them, that's when you pay. You pay $9.95 by the way, just to be very clear. That's our introductory pricing. We can actually have a whole cool discussion about the future of pricing. I believe that in general, it should actually be dynamic, not static. But we're starting to keep things really simple with a $9.95 per interested and qualified candidates. This is the one you've talked to and who meets all of your custom requirements. Teg: But that means that you do have to think in the beginning, what do, ... sort of visioning your future. Like, you need to sit down or think, what is it that I want to, who do I want to talk to? What do want to receive? Before you start the process. Because then you are going to pay, yes. Chad: So on the partner side, following up. You were talking about Google. So how specifically, and I see it on Uncommon.co, you're partnering with two big names. Google and Amazon. How are you partnering with them. Teg: So I believe that they're actually listed as customers on our website, not as partners for right now, just to be super clear. But actually to talk about today, how we are. So Amazon ... hey, wait, wait, wait. Why? Chad: He was giving it to me. Teg: Oh. Okay. Alright. Well, Bill wants to make sure the website is clear. But. Joel: No Chad. Chad: The website ... wait. First off. The website says Joel, dumbass, Brands we've proudly partnered with. Teg: Oh. You're right. Joel: Oh. Chad: I know I'm right. Joel: Teg. Joel: Chad is rarely right, for the record. Teg: Alright. These are our customers. Okay. Just to be clear. Everyone knows they are our customers. Chad: Well you've got some pretty big name customers. But you did say earlier that with an earlier venture, you partnered with Google. Are you partnering with big companies now? Like the Google's and the Amazon's. Joel: Google for jobs. Chad: To be able to fill out your product offer. Teg: Okay, so the answer is yes. I don't have any to announce. But you guys would be, definitely on the short list if we, if and when we have some cool announcements to share. But let me give ... well, there's a very obvious way to work with Google right now, which is that we are building a product that is starting on the recruiter side, the employer side. And so we're very happy to have all of our customers position listed on Google. And we're actually getting nice, healthy, you can call it SEO or whatever you want to call it, but a nice flow of candidates from Google for jobs. So that works very well for us. Teg: But if you want to think just more generic terms about some of the, let's say incumbent job boards from the decade past, there is a great opportunity without naming any names for us to white label or otherwise provide technology to them so that they can start to operate, instead of on a CPC, they can start to test out this new CPIQ model, on both sides potentially, with their job seekers and with their employer relationships. And the reason why they might want to do that is that they see that, they see the writing on the wall like we do, that Google is going to really eat up a big part of their value proposition and that the old CPC model for just getting search clicks isn't going to sustain them forever. So they're quite interested in exploring partnerships with innovative technology companies like ourselves. Teg: And by the way, for any of those people who are out there listening, we do have some very cool partnership opportunities, if you are a job board or a job site. We can take the very sophisticated and I think very innovative technology that we have inside and white label it and make it available for people to create their own offerings. And that's something that we're very happy about. Joel: Always be selling Teg. Always be selling. Chad: Closing. Joel: Chad. Teg: Anything. Chad: Always be closing. Joel: Yeah, that too. Chad and I have been around quite a while in this industry. And the companies that kind of come and go are typically ones where there's very little core competency or experience in the employment space. And if I'm incorrect let me know, but it sounds like you guys are from a totally different world than recruitment. So what do you think, if that's the case, is that an advantage, a disadvantage? Talk about that. Teg: Well, first I want to say it's an advantage. But I also want to have enough humility to say that I hear you. And there's a lot that I don't know and I'm learning every day. So yeah, I'm definitely coming from outside of recruiting. I never worked at a job board or an ATS. And every day is about learning for me in our company. We do, or course, have a lot of people now working for us who bring some pretty deep experience in our industry. Teg: So for example, our significant people in our data science team have actually come from recruiting other, very exciting, out of recruiting tech companies of days past. But you know, so I'll tell you the advantages. So the disadvantage is I have to learn everything and every day is a new day. The advantage is that there is actually a tremendous amount of experience that I think we can bring from our experience, our time in online advertising. Teg: So online advertising went through a programmatic revolution while we were building and running AdaptTV. And basically when we started, there was no such thing as programmatic. And by the end, programmatic was the lion's share of the digital spend. People decided that it made a lot more sense to spend their money with data, actually cherry picking. Understanding who the audience was and the users were and cherry picking and advertising to the people who actually were interested in their products. And they found that that created a lot of value. And of course, needed a lot of technology. It needed to be able to represent this huge datasets of users. And you needed to be able to make decisions very quickly in an automated way. But we built all that stuff over several years. And that was incredibly rewarding and created a lot of value. Teg: And I think recruiting is going through the same thing now. It's just the very early days. But we are, employers can benefit tremendously. And I don't have to tell you guys this, but from more deeply understanding ... I mean, imagine putting an ad out there and having no idea who you were showing it to. That would be silly. That's like 200 year old advertising technology. Teg: But it's the same thing. Recruiting today is listing job ... job boards are showing jobs to candidates where they have no idea whether that candidate is qualified for that job, is interested in that job. It doesn't make sense. Instead, we have tons of data about these candidates. Let's use it as they come in and let's use it to show them the right jobs and to then show the right candidates to the employers. It just makes sense. Chad: So on the other side, you guys actually state that you leverage, are transparent and objective analysis of qualifications to increase diversity and reduce bias. How does your system? Because you have all this data. And this is about, obviously, how you're dealing on the recruiter side of things. How do you boost diversity? Teg: I love this question, because it is one of the reasons that I think many of us in the company get up and come to work everyday. If you think about how recruiters and hiring managers make decisions today, it's very manual. Typically it involves reading or reviewing a whole lot of resumes and profiles. And we've all been there. It's very hard to make those decisions. You're going to spend maybe 30 seconds, maybe a few minutes looking at a resume. If its really interesting. And you're trying to make that ... it feel like a gut decision, for a lot of us, when we're doing it manually. It's sort of like, yeah, this guy doesn't really have what I ask for, but on the other hand, why I really like that company or that school that he worked at. And wow, that project sounds really, that's something, I worked on something like that. Or I understand people like this, or whatever it is. Teg: And we're using gut, we're doing gut decision making basically. And we all know that that can be very good, productive in certain domains, but also does of course, it's filled with implicit bias. Even if we're trying not to be biased, we are. And so, by giving some of those early decisions about the level of qualifications of a candidate over to a machine, who's going to rigorously just follow, do the most dry and boring comparison, cut and dried comparison possible, we do remove that really big factor, that introduces bias at the beginning of the process. Teg: Now we can't remove bias from all process, of course not. But we can at least have a positive impact in that screening process. So that's one of the things that, one of the benefits, I think that we provide, over and above obviously, being cheaper, faster. Chad: So, you're really removing the face of the candidate, per se, and just trying to boil it down to, do they meet the qualifications. The big question is, and this is the hard part. And I think this is what you actually talked into was, what if the requirements are actually biased themselves? Teg: Yeah. No, that's a real, well ... one of the fun things about being in the position we're in, is that we are defining the language that employers and candidates are using. We're asking our customers and it's mostly coming from them, but we also get some editorial say. And like, what kind of requirements do we put in there? So, for example ... and we've been very judicious about choosing the kinds of requirements, or even able to put into the system today. So I don't have an age requirement, for example, because our nationality requirement or obviously a gender requirement. You can't put those things in as requirements. And I've had people really ask me for age over and over again. And we have not done it. And the reason is, I myself am 46 years old. So I'm getting up in the years. And if I wanted to go get a software engineer position or any other kind of contributor position, I'd have a lot of hiring managers who'd start to look at me and say, "Well, he's kind of an old guy. I'm not sure I really want to hire him." Teg: And so I've had a lot of hiring managers come to me and say, "Hey can I put a limit, like an upper limit on the years of experience or the level of seniority?" And that in general, we have not done. We do of course have a lower limit on years of experience and level of seniority, but the upper limit I think is prone to be abused. And we can handle ... and I'm like, "Why? Why do you want to not hire someone more senior? Like, wouldn't they be more experienced?" And then you dig into it, and they're like, "Well, I'm afraid, because they're so senior that they won't like the job or that their salary expectations are going to be too high, or whatever. And so, we're going to try to address those things separately, in a more specific way, but not just like, Hey, let's discriminate against people that have a lot of years of experience." Teg: So that's just one that I happened to relate to, but obviously we're doing the same thing across the line with a cultural and ethnic background and sexual orientation and gender and all this kind of stuff. So we keep those things out of the qualifications. And we keep the qualifications really cut and dry. Joel: I'm sorry. I've got to pull the plug on this diversity stuff and compliance. Chad loves it. I've had enough. Chad: Everybody loves it but Joel. Joel: Yeah. Teg, last question from me. You guys have recently raised a lot of money. Tell us about that. And then, tell us what are you planning on doing with the fundage? Teg: Well, so we raised $18 million, a series A, from three different investors actually. So we have- Joel: Whoo! Teg: Yeah. We have Spark Capital, we have Kaden Partners and we also have Ventures. So some of these guys actually invested in our last companies, so they're folks we've had a good relationship and a long time. We're not going to do anything mysterious with that money. It's very simple. We're going to continue to develop our product and to market our product. So, both of those things cost money. We have an incredible engineering and data science team I'm super proud of. So we're going to continue to fund them and grow that team. And then of course, we're going to invest in sales. And you guys know about that as well, but you've got to get in front of all these recruiters, especially in the enterprise and the large agency, staffing agency space. We've got to have people to help connect to those agencies. So that's another area of our investment. Joel: How refreshing that you said sales people. Teg: I didn't actually say the word sales people. But yes, we're employing sales people. Joel: Alright. Chad, I'm ready to send my card in. How about you? Chad: I am. Joel: I'll go first, if that's okay. Chad: Okay. I'm waiting with baited breath. Joel: I bet. I bet. Man, this product is, I mean, it's so in depth. It's hard to have a 30 minute firing squad and really understand what's going on. You're pulling in programmatic components, you're pulling in sourcing components and automation. Your pricing model is very interesting, although I'm assuming that most of your prospects will find it very tough to understand. Pay per click, for example, was very challenging at first for people to understand. I think this is in the same vein. But you're pulling in so many components to this product. I love, you guys have a great past of success. I actually like that you're not from the recruiting sector. You're from the marketing, advertising sector. So for me, you guys definitely get a rousing applause. And I'm really excited to see where this goes in the next 12 months. And hopefully we can get you back on and see where it's gone. But you're throwing so many ingredients, that I hope it works out for you guys. Teg: Thank you Joel. Chad: Ugh. Now it's my turn. Joel: Your turn. Chad: Trigger finger. Okay. So, Teg I have to say, there's no question. I don't quite agree 100% on the CPIQ side of the house, that Joel is saying it's going to be hard for employers. I think the last part that you just went over, talking about marketing and especially to advertising agencies. They'll eat us up. They might not like your price point right out of the gate, but they will eat this up. It's different, it's something they can understand and it's something that they can measure. Right. Because you are giving them exactly interested and qualified. You tell me what qualified looks like, we're going to give you exactly what that looks like. And then guess what? You're going to pay us for that. Chad: So I think from my standpoint, it's incredibly simple. What I love is that you are using a programmatic outreach. And again, we see some other platforms doing this too. The programmatic outreach. And also the AI piece, which to be quite frank, is going to kill sourcers and it's going to rejuvenate and really reclassify what a recruiter does, in the long run. But I think this is definitely what a platform of the future looks like. And it doesn't hurt that you just got $18 million. So from my standpoint, its definitely a big applause as well. Teg: Awesome. Thank you for that. Joel: Alright. Congratulations Teg. Teg: Thank you both. Joel: What do you have to say for yourself? Teg: Delighted. You guys are believers. Yeah, no, we- Joel: You have a 14 day trial. I wanted to put that out there. Where can listeners find out more about- Teg: Uncommon.co. And we have a 14 day free trial. What's amazing about that, it's actually too generous. We should, we'll have to reign it in at some point, but you can list as many positions as you want. Let's say you have 10 or 100 open positions right now. If you want to go through and get those listed in your 14 days, you can get a lot of qualified candidates. Joel: For free. Chad: Holy shit Teg. You're going to have to stop that quick. You're going to have to make it 7 days. Joel: Chad's a real stickler for free stuff. He doesn't like it very much. Joel: Alright man. Teg, appreciate it. Good luck to you. And success. Congratulations on surviving the firing squad. Chad: Good stuff. Teg: Awesome. Thank you Joel. Thank you Chad. Announcer: 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 start-up who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com. #Uncommon #FiringSquad #TATech

A NEXXT EXCLUSIVE! One of the biggest treats from our time at TAtech in Ireland this month was the opportunity to see Hire with Google's Bogomil Balkansky, VP Cloud Recruiting Solutions, present. A bigger treat was enjoying some Guinness and interviewing Bogomil at the social TAtech event from the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. Enjoy. PODCAST TRANSCRIPT Intro: This, the Chad & Cheese Podcast, brought to you in partnership with TA Tech. TA Tech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Visit TATech.org Chad: Okay Joel, quick question? Joel: Yeah. Chad: What happens when your phone vibrates or your 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: (Laughs) Yeah, I know. I call it our Pavlovian dog reflex to text messaging. Joel: Yeah, that's probably why text messaging has a frickin' 97% open rate. Chad: What? Joel: ...and a crazy high candidate response rate within the first hour alone. Chad: Which... are all great reasons why The Chad & Cheese Podcast love Text-to-Hire from Nexxt. Joel: Love it. Chad: Yep, that's right. Nexxt, with a double X, not the triple X. Joel: Bow-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 & Cheese Podcast, you can try your first text-to-hire campaign for just 25% off. Boom! Chad: Wow! So how do you get this discount? You're asking yourself, right now. Joel: Tell 'em, 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. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Just go where you know. ChadCheese.com and Nexxt, with two X's. 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 & Cheese Podcast. Chad: Okay guys, we're back. Yes, we're at the Guinness Factory, is that what, it's the factory. Joel: I'm totally sober. I promise. Chad: He's full of shit. Anyway... we're here with podcast favorite, Bogomil. Joel: He's actually not a podcast favorite, he's more like Sasquash of podcast. Chad: (Laughs) Joel: ... Giving him ... he's actually handcuffed to a pint of Guinness right now. Bogomil: I think Bogomil is enough- Chad: No? (laughs) Bogomil: You can't hit people with both Bogomil and Balkansky. Chad: See I like Balkansky. Bogomil: Either one. Joel: I agree, I agree. Our audience is not that sophisticated. Chad: Yes. So five good minutes with Bogomil. You had a presentation. Very interesting from the standpoint of... talking about pretty much a ton of different aspects of recruitment technology. That it looks like Google is diving into very quickly, is that correct? Bogomil: Well, we don't enter recruitment technology until April of last year. It's no secret by now, but we're fully in. Chad: Yes? Bogomil: And yes, I think Google as a company as AI first strategy... across all our products and product line. So, you'd think that also in recruiting, our efforts would be very much in the direction of leveraging AI in the new products and solutions that we're rolling out to market. Chad: So you guys have had the... How long is the... jobs discovery API actually been out? Little over a year right? Bogomil: It's not fully out. Right? So it's still in private beta. Chad: But it was in... Okay. How long- Bogomil: It was announced at the end of 2016- Chad: Okay. Bogomil: ... So it has been a little more than a year. Chad: And soon... I hear- Joel: Soon, possibly, maybe- Chad: ...its coming- Joel: ... you've heard a rumor Chad: ... out of beta. Which is amazing for a Google product because... that's not even a year and a half. Right? Bogomil: Yeah. No, it will graduate from Beta at some point soon. Yes. Chad: At some point soon... which means it has been incredibly successful. Bogomil: So far the experience has been really really awesome. We are working with a whole bunch of career site providers and staffing agencies- Chad: Yeah Bogomil: ...and Chad: Big names. Career builders, [Jibs 00:04:14], Zip. Bogomil: And also powering a lot of big name company career sites. Chad: Yeah. Johnson & Johnson. Bogomil: Johnson & Johnson, FedEx, and some others that we haven't announced yet, but they're really like the Fortune 100 companies. Chad: So on- Bogomil: And the result that we're seeing on SDR are quite impressive. When we went into this whole thing and when we announced Job Discovery. We're pretty confident that we have a good product. However, we didn't really have a good benchmark of what the real impact would be. In some sense, we didn't know exactly what to expect. Chad: Yeah. Bogomil: And we have been pleasantly surprised with the kind of results past customers are achieving. Like Johnson & Johnson has been very public with their 41% increase in qualified candidates for hard to refer jobs. Right? Chad: Yeah that's big. Bogomil: And so emphasis and key word is qualified. So honestly the last thing anybody wants is another pile of candidates that are not qualified so that your recruiters have to spend more time to shift through more resumes- Chad: Well, that being said... resumes- Bogomil: Yes. Chad: ...people... being able to turn an API or turn your machine running onto the people problem right now. How soon can we expect a people API in actual launch? Bogomil: Well, take them one at a time. We are... first focused on graduating the jobs API or the job... they call...job discovery services- Chad: You're so excited about it though! Bogomil: ...to get it in the hands of everybody. And that's what the chief focus is on. Joel: So you're not running for president? Bogomil: I am not running for president. Don't [inaudible 00:05:46]. Joel: Yeah. Yeah- Bogomil: ...for president. Joel: A few years ago I wrote a very nice post about how good Google's homemade ATS was. And I'm assuming that a lot of the elements of the homemade Google.com job seeker experience has translated to some of your Google Hire technologies and development. When will see and will we see Google Hire replace the Google.com, sort of, homemade ATS? If ever... Bogomil: Yeah. So the quotes are different. Hire is a separate and different product from the Google internal past Google ATS. Joel: Yeah. Bogomil: And the reason for that is, we're targeting Hire at existing G Suite customers all in the US for the time being. And obviously, the typical G Suite customer is a much smaller company than Google, which is one of the largest companies out there. And the requirements of our G Suite audience are quite different from the requirements of Google. Google has one of the most unusual and [inaudible]. For example, hiring managers at Google won't make any hiring decisions. The hiring decisions are made by hiring committee, which consists of people who actually have never met the candidate live. And these are the kinds of requirements, quite obviously, that we haven't actually who haven't actually baked in Hire. And that's the major reason why Google is not using Hire yet. We're really focused on the G Suite for this. Joel: You heard him say, "yet." Right? Chad: Yeah. Yeah. Joel: We got that. Joel: What's next? Can you give a preview? Obviously, you're talked a lot about the future, the matching stuff, the job seeker, the scheduling... what can you share with subscribers and listeners about what's next at Google Hire. Bogomil: Yeah. We are still... I would say, the very beginning of our journey. Its fair to say that we're a big company, but we're the new kids on the block, until we create the technology, job discovery... still in beta. Hire still a version one product. So we have a lot of opportunities in front of ourselves to deliver great capabilities to our customers. Bogomil: I can comment on kind of very specific things, but you can expect that a lot of the innovations that will come from us goes into the direction of... in two directions, I would say. One is to extricate people from a lot of the mundane, kind of tedious things that every recruiter and every job seeker has to go through. There's still too many processes and talent acquisition that are honestly, mind numbing, tedium people clicking endlessly page per, per page, per page. And our team is very focused on trying to reduce that tedium to be able to, A. focus the recruiters on what they should really be doing, which is... build relationships with candidates, like try to sell candidates at working for their company. And same thing with candidates that will continue making that process of looking for job and applying for a job a lot easier and more elegant. Bogomil: So that's one aspect of what we're focused on, just making our process faster and more efficient. And the second thing that we will continue to be focused on is really... to continue improving our technologies in able to better match more people for jobs. If you think about how we as a company can have great impact on this two sided marketplace, is by enabling better matching and helping people find the best job that they're suited for, and helping companies build the greatest teams. Chad: Right. Right. Which gives you an opportunity to start to break down their skills and their resume, and then match it... which leads to a people API. Bogomil: Says Chad... Joel: Bogomil, we thank you for your time. I for one, I cover this industry, it's exciting to see Google- Chad: Very. Joel: .... Facebook... some of the big players with a lot of resources and brainpower get behind this challenge of hiring. So we appreciate your time. Enjoy the party, and we'll have fun watching you in the future. Bogomil: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Chad: Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Before we go. Remember... when I asked you about the whole reflex and check your text messages thing? Joel: Yeah, you know all about reflexes. And then I brilliantly tied it to text message's 97% open rate. Then I elegantly... elegantly, tied it to a better experience for your candidates. Chad: (laughs) Joel: Don't laugh Chad. I can be elegant. Can't I? Chad: Whatever, man. I know it's redundant. You already heard about Text-To-Hire, but you're still not using Text-To-Hire from Nexxt. Joel: What? Chad: I know, man. Joel: Come on, man. Since advertising takes repetition to soak in, I just thought I'd remind you again, this is all by Elegant Design. It's all about Text-To-Hire, and it's all about Nexxt and Elegant Design. So go to chadcheese.com. Click on the next logo, and get 25, yeah I said 25% off your first Text-To-Hire campaign. Chad: Whooa! Joel: Engage better. Use Text-To-Hire from Nexxt. Two X's. Chad: Booyah! Outro: Thanks to our Partners at TA Tech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. Remember to visit tatech.org. #Google #GoogleHire #GoogleJobsAPI #AI #TATech #Nexxt

The Chad and Cheese take their act across the Atlantic for TAtech Europe, conveniently scheduled around St. Patrick's Day in Ireland. Sláinte! MAJOR love to our partners at TAtech and copious amounts of love goes to America's Job Exchange, Sovren, Ratedly, Catch 22 Consulting and our newest sponsor - coming in April - JobAdX! And special thanks to Nexxt and Jobs2Careers for sponsoring our monthly shows. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (apologies for missing some content as not all speakers in the room were mic'ed up) Chad: Hey, boys and girls, Joel and I were in Dublin this week for TA Tech. Enjoy. Announcer: America's Job Exchange is a market leader in diversity recruitment, and an OFCCP compliant solution provider. We serve over a thousand customers, consisting of federal contractors and subcontractors, to SMBs and Fortune 500 organizations. America's Job Exchange specializes in job distribution to over 6,500 state one-stop career centers and community-based organizations, ensures the creation and maintenance of state credentials, obtains veteran preference on job postings, robust outreach management, and supports effective, positive recruitment efforts designed to recruit individuals with disabilities, veterans, women, and minorities. For more information, call us at 866-926-6284, or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Joey Stubbs: Without further ado I want to introduce Chad and Cheese [crosstalk 00:01:02]. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Yeah. Joel: What's up Dublin? Speaker 3: We got ... Pete? We got music, Pete? Chad: What's up Europe? Announcer 2: The most dangerous podcast, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here on punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinions and loads of snark buckle up boys and girls, it's Chad and Cheese podcast. Chad: Now, it's real. Now, it's real. Joel: Can we do the show now? Chad: Yes. Joel: Awesome. What's up Dublin? What's up TAtech? Chad: Bring it. Joel: Welcome to the hangover detox session of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chad: There we go. Louder. That's right. Who else is hungover? Joel: We're the only ones, dude. No one else in Dublin at this show is hungover. That's great. Chad: I'm blame Shane. I'm blame Shane. Joel: Well, thanks for listening. I'm amazed we have so many listeners here today. Chad: Big in Europe. I never knew. Joel: Huge in Belgium right here. Chad: Belgium. Joel: Brussels loves Chad and Cheese. Chad: Brussels. Joel: We have a fairly short period today, so let's get to the show, I guess. Chad: Yeah. Shout outs. Joel: We have schwag. So, I guess the rules are if you ask questions, if you say something snarky, insult another company, you get schwag. You get rewarded for that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So, if you're game, we got schwag for you. Chad: Yeah. Joel: We usually start out the show with shout outs, some of you know. I'm going to do the show shout outs, and then Chad has some, I guess, external shout outs. Chad: Yep. Twitter. Joel: Number one, Shane and Paddy, who I don't think are here, showed us a fantastic time last night and our incredible representative of the Dublin area, shout out to them. Adam Gordon, who also isn't here, but shout out. He'll also do the show later. He was a great sport with the interviews yesterday. Tom, did an interview with us. Chad: Yep. Joel: Bogomil from Google, we really got him to just spill it, all of it, yesterday. We'll be publishing that podcast soon. Let's see. Terry, the Dutchman, Baker, thank you for the interview. What was the joke? If you're not Dutch, you're not much. I think that's what I learned, yesterday. Eugene and Paulina from Job Today. Russian fans, originally Russian fans. We like that. They came up and said, "Thanks." Joey Stubs, for wearing the ugliest sport coat I've ever seen. Thank you for that. Chad: Yeah. It said, "American," all over it. Joel: I'm still having nightmares from that. Chad: Like, Shamrocks. Joel: And I guess Pete and Repeat. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Thank you for having us, again. We love it, appreciate it, and will try to continue the grade A work that we do here at TA Tech in Europe. Chad: Much love for TA Tech. Is that all you got? Joel: That's all I got. Chad: Are you done? Okay. So, we also ... Obviously, we're big on Twitter, too. Hashtags, #ChadCheese. So, if you are tweeting right now, just use the #ChadCheese. Ed, from Philly, you will be listening. He wants you to stop hating on millennials. Joel: Yeah, but one of our other boys loves the millennial bashing, which we don't have on the docket for today, so we'll have to save that for another time. Chad: Not today Joel: Millennials, I apologize, but I hate you all and I express that on the show. I'll save it for today. Chad: Yes. He's a crusty old bastard. Joel: Yes, I am. Chad: Then, he wanted to go hate ... Now, he's hating on Tinder for Jobs. Who was the Tinder for Jobs guy, yesterday? Who was the ... He's not ... There he is. Joel: Yeah. Chad: Tinder for Jobs. Joel: You suck. Don't do it. Good Lord. Chad: Job Board Doctor giving us love. Don't know where you're at, dude, but you're missing a party here in Dublin. Kyle, couldn't make it. Sucks to be you, Kyle. Jason Roberts said that ... I don't know. Does everybody know that we're actually running for co-president of Monster? We need votes. Monster doesn't have a CEO. Monster does not have a President. Joel: Not yet. Unless they announce it, today. Anybody know anything? No? Chad: We believe Chad and Cheese can co-president Monster. We got a whole- Joel: We can't do any worse. Chad: Yeah. We got a whole campaign behind this thing. But insiders in Monster say that's not going to happen, so we've got to get the ... We got a Russian connection now, so we can get the bots going. Get the trolls. Joel: We could. We could. Chad: We can win this election. Joel: They're not going to let us back in America after this. There we go. Chad: There it is. Joel: Now, the party's starting. Chad: There we go. It's not pumpkin though, Joe. Joel: Cheers or what is it, Sláinte. Joey Stubbs: Sláinte. Joel: Sláinte! Dang it. Chad: Sláinte. Joel: I'll get it, eventually. Chad: And that's it for shout outs. Joel: Awesome. Let's get to the show, shall we? Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yes. Okay. Chad: I need to get to my beer. That's much better. Joel: I guess, we could start with Google. Who was at the Google presentation, yesterday? Chad: Anyone? Who was not at the Google presentation? It was packed. Joel: Who was writing down an alternative business plan while they were listening to Google? Yeah, that was scary. Chad: It was good stuff. Joel: So, if you weren't there, Google's going to AI the shit out of your ATS. Chad: Yes. That's putting it nicely. Joel: They may actually make matching a reality. Chad: Now? Joel: Matching has been a Sasquatch, if you will, for about 10 years. Google might actually pull it off. Chad: Yes. Joel: At least that's what I got yesterday. Everything from matching resumes, to jobs, to your scheduling. I'll probably forget a few things due to hangovers. Oh, and glasses, too. Chad: Nice. Joel: Is it ice cold, though? Chad: It's a little cold. Joel: I don't know, what are your takeaways? Chad: Yeah, so it's funny because it was like the whole, "If." If we could do this? Ask everybody, "If we could do this," and then he's showing screen shots of shit they're building, right? It's like, "If we could do this," which we're doing right now. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty awesome. Again- Joel: I love how he softens everybody up with cucumber stories. "There's this farmer in South America that's growing cucumbers and he's using our AI technology." Chad: Japan. Joel: It's probably not a good accent or impression of you at all. Chad: No, not at all. Joel: They soften you up at Google and then they punch you right in the gut with what they're going to do. The good news is, they gave you an alternative business, though. They said, "Voice assistance are our next business of the next two to three years." So, if you're scared to death of what Google's going to do to your business, start making that Alexa app today, that Google Home, that Syria app today because at least Bogomil gave you the next thing that you can be a couple years ahead of it. Chad: Yeah, I mean, we saw the Trojan horse with Indeed when they were going after the Monster and CareerBuilder take down, right? Monster and CareerBuilder could have crushed them. Now, we've got this company called Google. You're not crushing Google, so it's like how do we play well with Google. Now, anybody using the jobs API? Joel: Yep. Chad: The discovery API? Not yet? Is it available here? Joel: They're here in the country during business where they have to deal with Google for Jobs. Chad: Yeah. Well Google for Jobs ... Yeah, yeah. Joel: Alright, well let's get this out of the way. Winter is coming everyone. If you're not prepared for basically having Indeed within a Google search, you're going to be greatly behind the eight-ball. We are here to provide a service, I guess, to tell you what's coming. Now, the good news is- Chad: Fairly simple. Joel: -if you play with Google ... Chad: Nicely. Joel: ... you're job site will be listed with the other jobs that are on Google. Duplicate content, you'll be competing with other job sites. I will tell you one thing that you can do to help yourself is to Amazon the shit out of your application process. If applying to your site isn't super easy, a job seekers is going to have a lot easier time going to your competitor through Google for Jobs than they ever have. Chad: And data, too. Joel: And data, too? Chad: Yeah. Get more data. That was one of the biggest issues. Companies in the US, and I don't know if it's the same in Europe, they don't like to give a lot of info. They don't like to give salary ranges. I mean, these are the things that obviously job seekers, the users, customers, it's nice to have. I mean, I would like to before I apply for a job know how much you like to pay. So, they're really forcing, Google's really forcing companies to push more information. Now, take a look at ZipRecruiter. Joel: They're also pulling data from PayScale [crosstalk 00:09:48] salaries. Chad: Yeah, but if you push it yourself, I mean, I don't know their algorithm, obviously, but I believe you're getting heavier algorithm on that. But ZipRecruiter, their case study, and it was actually a Google case study, showed that they're getting a 35% lift in search traffic. Anybody want 35% lift in search traffic? Speaker 6: Monster got 100%. Chad: What's that? Speaker 6: Monster got 100%. Chad: Monster got 100%? That's 'cause nobody was going there because they suck. They've got the worst search engine for [crosstalk 00:10:22]. Joel: What do you want? You want some Purell, a pen, or a cup? Oh, boom. Nice catch. Chad: Yeah. I'm pretty good. Yeah. So, getting that kind of a lift. I wonder ... So, 100% in the US, I'm assuming. Joel: There's a word of warning for sucking from the Google tit though, that we should let people know about. So, when Indeed launched, everyone was like, "Free traffic," "More traffic," "Awesome." Over time, traffic went down. You had to pay for traffic. ATS direct employers jobs became more prominent than Indeeds. So, there's a word of warning. Enjoy the Google traffic while you can, 'cause it may not last. Thank you. Chad: Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, so right now the Google for Jobs experience isn't really great for the applicant tracking systems. I mean, if a job seeker wants to go through an applicant tracking system the button actually says the applicant tracking system name. SmartRecruiters. What does that mean to a job seeker? I know what Glassdoor is. I know what ZipRecruiter is, probably. I might have used those before. So, more than likely just from a UI standpoint, it's not great for the [Iceman's 00:11:45] of the world. I see that changing. I don't know how they're ... I mean, it's just verbiage to be quite frank, but right now it will say Taleo. What's a Taleo? Joel: If I'm a job seeker, I don't know what Taleo is. I don't know what Connects is. I don't know what Isis is. I might know what Monster is. I might know what LinkedIn is. So, branding's going to be important in this new world unless Google can figure out how to put the direct employer name within that site, which they probably can at some point. So, enjoy that branding while you still can. Who here is dealing with Facebook as a job posting competitor? Well, you guys have it easy here in Europe. States now, we're fighting tooth and nail for real estate.Facebook just launched in 40 countries, apparently none of which are in this room represented. Chad: Either way, not pushing it. Joel: Another word of winter's coming, Facebook is coming for your kids, as well. They're going after more of the small businesses, I think it's fair to say. They have a ton of data. They have a ton of profile data. I don't know if you guys do this, they are leveraging messaging in their job postings. They're starting to leverage automation in those chats. We talked about chat bots. Facebook is already playing in that game, as well. To just add a word of caution, what's going on, essentially it's going to be my opinion at least is we're going to have three platforms: The Microsoft LinkedIn platform, the Facebook platform, and the Google platform. Chad: Amazon Joel: Companies eventually will choose which one is their product of choice. Chad: Yeah. I think Amazon [crosstalk 00:13:22]. Joel: And that's where they'll have their ATS, that's where they'll post their jobs, and that's where they'll be happy. Chad: The biggest question is, where do you take ... If you're Job Board, right, and you're fighting for traffic, how do you change your model? Partnership, obviously is a big key we see with ZipRecruiter. They're using many different Google products. They've partnered very closely with Google. Long term we'll see how that turns out. It's working out well for them now. But Google for Jobs, it's no question, it's going to be coming to Europe. When it does, who's not going to be happy when it comes to Europe? Indeed. 'Cause Indeed's not playing. Joel: Sure. I have a long list of people who probably won't be happy, but let's go with Indeed. I don't even know when that plays into space, is going to be unhappy. Chad: No. Google- Joel: Eventually, unhappy. Chad: Google ... Well, eventually [crosstalk 00:14:16]. Joel: Indeed doesn't play with Google. You won't find Indeed jobs on Google for Jobs. Indeed has made a conscious decision to say, "We're putting up the mode, we're battening down the hatches, and we're not going to play with Google." Whether or not that lasts is up for debate, but at least for now they're holding the fort against the big G. Chad: Yes, and that means ... what we've seen in the US ... that means a redistribution of traffic back to everyone else. That's what happened, right. So, Indeed's got this big pipe that they've SEO'd the shit out of fricking Google, right, and next thing you know, all that organic is pushed down, Google for Jobs is there and guess what? Since Indeed is not pushing their jobs into Google for Jobs, they're down further on the page, your jobs, perspectively, at least the jobs of the job boards playing the game in America, they're seeing a really good lift. Somebody had a question? Joel: If you'd been in the states, you would have noticed a big spike in Indeed advertisements on television and elsewhere, which I assumed was a freakout of the fact that they lost traffic to Google. Chad: And not sustainable. Yes. Speaker 5: There's a reason people [inaudible 00:15:33] Joel: Privacy. Speaker 5: 2.4 billion [inaudible 00:15:36]. Joel: Can we get a mic. Oh, there it is. Speaker 7: Repeat the question. Joel: Yeah, repeat. The question is, basically, Google hasn't launched here because they're in a legal battle- Speaker 5: [inaudible 00:15:55] Joel: Which they can find in their couch, by the way. Speaker 5: In [inaudible 00:16:04] jobs promoted by all the other [inaudible 00:16:27] into the European [inaudible 00:16:30] legally would be a problem- Joel: So, the shocking case, correct me if I'm wrong, is their own search engine for- Speaker 5: [inaudible 00:16:40] Joel: Correct, so they're- Speaker 5: [inaudible 00:16:45] Google got bloody 60% of the market search [inaudible 00:16:52] so for them to artificially promote their service above everyone else is [inaudible 00:17:04] right in the face of the European union. That's why they'll never launch here in Europe. Chad: Have you seen the interface? Have you seen the Google for Jobs interface? Speaker 5: [inaudible 00:17:16] Chad: Yeah, but the thing is they're not pressing their jobs, what they're doing is they're actually, that's what we're talking about, redistribution, so right now, they're not giving anybody really I would say a lift over anybody else. If you're playing. Speaker 7: [inaudible 00:17:38] Chad: That's not their service. It's search. It's search. It's not a service, it's search. No, what does Google provide? They provide search. Google provides search. Speaker 5: [inaudible 00:17:50] Chad: What is search in the first place? It's an aggregate, right? It's a directory. It's the same thing. Speaker 5: [inaudible 00:17:59] Chad: They don't- Joel: We don't have time for this. Chad: No, we do. We do. Joel: We really don't. Chad: Anyway, if you take a look at the interface, the way that Google is actually going after this is they're not promoting their service, they're providing a better interface to get to jobs on other job sites. Joel: Google's in the room, by the way. Would you like to comment about this case [inaudible 00:18:20]. Damn it. Speaker 7: [Not gonna happen] Joel: Okay. Alright, if you believe Google will not have a jobs component ever in Europe, then you can just forget what we just said. If you believe there's a chance that Google might beat the case or do what Google does and win in the end, then keep listening to us and eventually this will happen. Chad: It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing. Carry on. Joel: Carry on, okay. I will pick up the pieces. So, I don't know, we've got five more minutes. Chad: Okay. Joel: We can do Q and A. We can talk some more stuff. What do you guys want? Raise your hand if you like Q and A and discussion with the audience. Raise your hand if you just want us to talk more and bullshit. Yep, question. Speaker 8: You talked- Joel: Wait for the mic. Speaker 8: [inaudible 00:19:06] Chad: Wait for the mic. Speaker 8: You talked to me a couple of weeks ago and brought my focus on [inaudible 00:19:11] the way I can bring traffic to first week on the [crosstalk 00:19:17] Chad: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Talking about the two-click? Speaker 8: Exactly. Chad: Yeah. Speaker 8: Can you please update us on what's going on in Europe and customers speak of Germany as of [inaudible 00:19:30] Chad: Yeah. Indeed, to be quite frank, they're fucking up right now. They're not playing with Google. They're in a non-sustainable position. They're spending a shit ton of money to press the traffic that they were getting from Google for free, right. And what are they doing to be able to subsidize this position that they're in? They're charging the shit out of their 35% plus, number one, and then they change the models. Everybody see the two-click, two pane model? Not two chains, the two pane model. Actually, you're getting charged for the first click that doesn't take you to the job. What? Joel: I'm with you. Yeah. More click, more money. Chad: And big props to Recruitics. First and foremost, they put out an email to their client to let them know what was going on. One of their clients actually shifted it to us and then we got a hold of Recruitics and they did a little white paper or something like that. So, they're trying to keep people informed, which is great because to be quite frank, Time Acquisition wouldn't know what the hell was going on because they don't pay attention. They don't pay attention to that shit. Joel: The one's that listen to us do. Chad: Yeah. That's why they listen to us 'cause we pay attention. Joel: And they're not the only ones sucking money everywhere they can, 'cause everyone heard about the Glassdoor IPO rumors? Yep. Glassdoor's raising prices. They're going after staffing firms. Question? Okay. Chad: There we go. Speaker 9: I have a comment on the two pane. Indeed launched that in January and Monster's launching this week. Joel: Who? Chad: Monster's launching a two pane this week? Speaker 9: Yes. Chad: Are you kidding me? Joel: The energy drink is launching a job search? What? Chad: So, we're going to have to have a one-on-one with Chris Cho. The new Product guy of Monster. Joel: Sure. Monster actually talks to us now because they need to, I guess. [crosstalk 00:21:34] Chad: Because we're going to be co-president. So, where did you get ... What source? Is that somebody- Speaker 9: Monster. Chad: Source Monster. Okay. Joel: Scoop everybody. Tweet. Chad: Scoop. Scoop. Joel: Any other questions? We got a couple minutes, unless Pete and Repeat want us to give ... Oh, 10 minutes. Chad: There we go. Joel: We're on fire. Chad: 10 minutes. Joel: Wie Gehts? Speaker: Hi there. I really like your opening on opportunity for recruitment. Joel: Oh, shit. Speaker: Oh shit or bullshit? Chad: Ooh. So, Blockchain to me ... How long does it actually take for a transaction to happen at Blockchain Speaker: A couple seconds depending on which platform you use. Chad: So, a second to ten minutes. Speaker: Yep. Chad: Yeah, okay. Joel: I think it's one of two roads. One, is that no one gets it, understands it, cares about it, and it's just kind of a fringe technology, or it really transforms how we do business. I was watching the Blockchain before I came in and when I hear him talk I'm saying, "This could put the background check business out of business." If you have a ledger of where you went to school and where you went to work, you don't need background check companies. I also heard if you have a social network that's built on this privacy infrastructure, then do social networks pop up and say, "We don't collect your data but you have a profile and your safe and we're going to use your data to advertise to you. We're not going to re-target you." Do people embrace that and go do a private social network. Does LinkedIn change their model in light of that. I think it could either really transform and shake it up or it will just fizzle out and not catch on. Chad: It has to do with adoption, I mean, overall. Especially, for platforms who are using, blotching, as a selling point. Nobody understands what the hell it is. You got to be able to come down with a very concise and easy way to ensure that your customers know what it is. I mean, if it's a candidate thing and you're doing it for candidate privacy or whatever it is, you're just going to have to be more concise. We had a CEO from Moonlighting on- Joel: Yeah. There are a few companies, well ICOs, so there are two job sites that are raising money. One has raised over a million and a half dollars in an ICO, which is Initial Coin Offering. I guess you guys know that. Yeah. There's some underground stuff that's going on that's interesting, but does it stay underground or not, I don't know. Chad: But we asked him to just define what it was and it was not concise by any means. Again, people aren't going to buy what they don't understand. Joel: Yeah. Well, I would say Tom, from Smashfly, he's talking about chat bots and how people go, "I need a chatbot," and you're like "What do you want a chatbot for?" They're like, "I don't know. I just need a chatbot." Chad: 'Cause they're easy. Joel: You're going to see people say we're built on Blockchain, just like we have AI and we're automation. They're buzz words you're going to hear and Blockchain's going to be one of them for sure. Chad: If they can understand it. They understand what a chatbot is. A chatbot is so simple. Joel: I don't know what ... If you talk to Tom, they don't. They just think they need it 'cause it's hot. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And to be able to tell their friends "Yeah, we're on that Blockchain stuff." Chad: Like the Blockchain chat. Joel: Ooh. You're innovative. That's cool. Any other questions? I guess we're down to like two minutes. Chad: Oh God. Now, you've wrestled the damn bear. Speaker 11: [crosstalk 00:25:00] comments on the chatbots. Yes. Joel: Did you not say that? Speaker 11: It's a question about not showing up for the one chatbot formats, right, but what we're trying to do is increase their engagement with people coming to their sites and looking for their jobs. So, while the question may be, "Yes. What do you want a chatbot for?" "I don't know. I don't know how to use it," doesn't mean there's not value that they're seeing in engaging with those people. Joel: But the motivation to even ask about it is because they heard it on a conference or they heard it on a ... read it on a blog. Chad: It's the shiny. Joel: They just say, "We need a chatbot." Speaker 11: That isn't how all great ideas come from. You hear it from somewhere, you do a little research, you ask questions, you figure out what it means, you then talk to people about what it can be used for, and there you go. Joel: He's doing a real good job of spinning what I heard yesterday. Chad: Yeah. Yeah, he is. It's good. I think it's got to be simple. Joel: Do you agree that Blockchain is a buzzword, is going to start making its way into sites to draw attention and customers? Speaker 11: Blockchain is a buzzword? Joel: Well, yeah. It's like we have Blockchain or our shit's built on Blockchain. That's going to happen, yes? Chad: It's going to happen. Joel: Okay. Chad: Yeah. Joel: That was kind of my point. Not going after you for the chatbot thing, but just people will use stuff because it's a trending word. Three minutes. Chad: Three minutes. Joel: Questions. Chad: One more question. Oh, not Murphy. Joel: Oh, Murph. Chad: Damn it. Joel: Nice tie. You're always so well dressed. Murphy: Thank you. Joel: [inaudible 00:26:24] could take a few tips. Murphy: I think you're bullshitting. The comment about the two pane from Indeed came up and Monster's launching it. Glassdoor's been doing that for over a year, if not from forever [inaudible 00:26:36]. Joel: But they don't charge for clicks. I mean, there's a difference, right? Murphy: Last one we charted has a [CBC 00:26:40] model where they do anything first click on [inaudible 00:26:44] Chad: Well, okay. First off, what was Indeed ... what was their slogan when they first came out? Joel: Google for blank. Chad: Google for Jobs. Right? They were Google for Jobs. They- Murphy: Someone else said that. Chad: A search engine. Yeah. Joel: Google said that, I think. Chad: It might have been Google. Joel: Google became Google for Jobs. Chad: It might. Yeah. Google became Google for Jobs. Very nice. It's like they set it up for them or something. Chad: I mean, it looks like a huge regression. You're going from super simple to now you're just putting layers in front of job searches. Joel: So, what does a search engine do? A search engine takes you to another site. Right? That's the whole point of Google. What sites have what I'm looking for? I go to that website. Indeed's initial value proposition was we're a search engine for jobs. Click on the job, you'll go to the site that has the job, apply through that site, whatever. Now, Indeed is progressively wanting to not have you leave Indeed at all. The value proposition has changed in our opinion. We think that change is largely due because the monetary suffering that they're going through with Google taking their milkshake. I don't know if that answers your question or not, but last years propositions never been word search engines for jobs. [crosstalk 00:28:05] Chad: They're a review site that turned into a job site. Murphy: Google started out as search the web, right, and then they had Gmail and then that's where most people spend more time outside of Facebook than anywhere else. So they grew to platform with new services. Indeed's doing much the same thing, right? Joel: So, you're comparing going from a search engine and adding a email product [crosstalk 00:28:31] Chad: To changing the search engine entirely. Murphy: Well, Indeed is doing more profiles, resumes, you can apply to jobs directly. Chad: Indeed prime. Murphy: It's a lot more than a search. At least that's the intentions. Chad: It is now. Murphy: I guess that my question is, why not find a way to generate a higher revenue off the site. It seems to me [inaudible 00:28:54] I'd rather pay money to keep a person on the website rather than having them leave. Chad: As somebody who obviously works with the companies and you probably do too, that sucks because I want the candidate to go through my experience. My experience my suck, but still I'm paying for that experience. Joel: Maybe I want to re-target these people. Maybe I want to present [crosstalk 00:29:12]. Chad: That's not your choice. That's my money that I'm spending to get that candidate and you're still keeping them on your site. I get what you're saying from their standpoint. Murphy: You think it sucks because of perspective evidence TA professional. Chad: Yeah. Joel: From a user, I don't. I think as a user, if you click through say Indeed, get window panes and quickly go through jobs, I think that's great. But from a non-posting standpoint and a TA standpoint, I think there are questions there. Chad: And they make a hell of a lot more money because of a lot more clicks. Joel: And it's our job to present these issues so you can ask your own internal team, "Does this matter to us or not?" Murphy: [inaudible 00:29:48] Chad: That's never a bad thing to do. Yeah. Joel: Because people must see you do it. Thank you guys. Thank you. Murphy: Thank you guys. Thank you very much. Announcer: Google. Lever. Entelo. Monster. Jibe. What do these companies and hundreds of others have in common? They all use Sovren Technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligent software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process, too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovren.com, S-O-V-R-E-N.com for a free demo. #TATech #Indeed #Monster #Google #GoogleforJobs #GoogleHire #GoogleJobsAPI #Nexxt #LIVE

Call it the International Women's Day episode, although it's mostly about Millennial-bashing. This week: - United Airlines does a U-turn on bonus lottery - Glassdoor sends out conflicting messages about a price increase - Burger King torches traditional recruitment advertising - Come on Jobu Jobs stop the stupid "Tinder for Jobs" shit - Activision coddles its Millennial employees - Will Google's end the "War for Talent"? ... and a friggin' bunch more, yo! Like always, go show out sponsors some love. America's Job Exchange, Sovren, Ratedly, Catch 22 Consulting and our newest sponsor, JobAdX rock the house! And special thanks to Nexxt and Jobs2Careers for sponsoring our monthly shows. 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. Joel: Yes, all right. We're recording this episode on International Women's Day. Chad: Yeah. Joel: So what better way to celebrate than listening to a couple of meatheads talking about recruiting, beer and whiny-ass millennials. This week, United Airlines makes a U-turn with employees, Glassdoor is tinkering with its pricing model, and Jobu is not just one of your characters from the movie "Major League" anymore. Chad: Jobu. Joel: Wild Thing is coming out of the bullpen, kids. Get ready. Announcer: Google, Lever, Entelo, Monster, Jibe. What do these companies, and hundreds of others, have in common. They all use Sovren technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job, while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996, and we can help improve your hiring process too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit sovereign.com. S-O-V-R-E-N dot com for a free demo. Chad: Free demo. Joel: Happy International Women's Day, Chad. How are you celebrating? Chad: I'm celebrating with a wonderful woman. Julie Sowash, yes, a very strong business woman who loves her International Woman's Day. Joel: As do all women obviously. My wife a professor in college, far more educated than myself will be attending a smart woman's dinner tonight, and I'll be watching the kids. Three of them. Chad: She's so smart, but yet she, you. I mean, I don't, I still don't get that. Chad: Anyway, International Woman's Day. They deserve more than a day. Joel: Glad you stopped there. Pretty much every day is women's day in my house. Joel: Shout outs. Let's get to those. Chad: Shout outs, right out of the gate, David Zaneski sent a zinger, where he said, "I was channeling my inner Xena yell during the Google Goes Latin podcast." Very nice, DZ. Very nice. Chad: Here's the thing though. So I missed Remy. Where did Remy go? Remember we gave David and Remy shit on the same exact podcast, and David's still shooting snark at us. Come back, Remy. Come on man. The snark it's warm. Joel: All the Recruitics kids are snarky, and then we hit back and they kind of curl up in the fetal position. Chad: Oh, wow. Joel: Zila that's for you. Chad: All Recruitics kids. I can't believe you went there. So anyway. Snark is obviously, it's gonna be warm. It's gonna be very uncomfortable, but it's fun. It's good stuff. Joel: They're all dead to me at Recruitics. They're all dead. Chad: I still love you Recruitics. Joel: What else we got shout outs. Chad: I wanna thank Cory Kapner for pointing out. He actually did a screenshot of a Find.jobs fail. We talked about Find.jobs I believe it was on the last podcast, and Cory sent a screenshot. It actually showed that this new high tech Find.jobs platform couldn't even handle different location formats. I meant it's the very basics of job search. Location formats and their system couldn't even handle it. I thought it was pretty pathetic, and obviously Cory did too, so we shared it with the world. That was a big Fail.jobs moment. So thanks Cory for that, and Find.jobs whatever dot jobs. Get your shit straight. Joel: I feel like we're enabling a whole new generation of snark, smart asses. Chad: Why not? Joel: What do you think? Chad: One of the reasons why people listen to us is because they enjoy listening to no bullshit podcasts. They want to listen to, just cut through it, right? People have that need. It's a safe place. Come on. We're not getting personal here, right? We're talking about things that are actually jacked up, and to be quite frank, we're giving you really free consulting. So fix your shit, guys, and hell, I think it's healthy. It feels good and cathartic to me. How about you? Joel: Hey the more people that are out there like us, I say the better. If we're helping enable a new generation of snarkists, then I think we're doing our job ultimately. Chad: Here's another example. So Olivia added me on LinkedIn. I won't share her last name. She added me on LinkedIn, and then she sent me a note. Thanks for the add. I was just listening to your latest podcast, and added you after I pushed the invite button. She got into the millennial segment about adding randoms on LinkedIn, so apparently she was a random, without context or note. I couldn't help but laugh, since that's exactly what I just did to you. Keep up these kick-ass podcasts. Now that is how you save a bad situation right there. It's like, "Oh yeah, I'm just gonna be lazy and press invite," and then she was like, "Oh you know what? He just accepted. I should send back a nice note thanking him and saying he has a kick-ass podcast." Good job, Olivia. Very good job. Joel: Yeah, and I don't even mind just the sort of cold and corporate connection on LinkedIn. It's when you ask me for something that pisses me off. Like connect me with, great, but then 30 minutes later, "Hey what do you think about," blah, blah, blah, or "What are the ten ATS' in your opinion?" Like get the fuck outta here with that shit. That pisses me off. Joel: But anyway, I appreciate the shout out, and yes it is kind to say something when you connect with someone on LinkedIn. Someone I'm connected to on LinkedIn that I want to send a shout out, and I can't believe I haven't yet, is Abby Cheeseman at Skill Scout. Not only does she have the best name in the industry, Cheeseman, it's spelled correctly, which is often, but we are not related in any way that I know of. She's married to a Cheeseman. Now he and I may in a past life be connected someway, but apparently a lot of people go to Abby and say, "Are you related to Joel," and she has to say, "No," and I get the same question too. Chad: She says, "Who's Joel?" Joel: I'm gonna clear it up right here on the podcast. Yeah, exactly, Joel who? Joel: Elena as well. This is a startup out there that's run by two women. I know they're super passionate about that, and a big shout out to them out there in Chicago where they're based. Chad: So Skill Scout? That's the one, right? Joel: Yep, Skill Scout. They do video, which we love videos, so yeah. Call them up and support a women's business out there. Chad: Where are we gonna be next week, man? Joel: Dublin. We've just been talking about it for the last six months. Chad: So excited. Joel: We're finally gonna be there. I'm hyped. Chad: No I'm totally hyped, and dude I took a look at the individuals who are going to be there. Not just the ones on the agenda, but you've got Nexxt, Zip Recruiter, SmashFly, Google, Clinch, Madgex, Lensa, PandoLogics/used to be Real Match. Candidate I.D. I mean you've got an awesome mesh of U.S. TAtech and Europe TA tech. If you're not there and you're in this industry, I gotta ask: What the hell are you doing? I mean are you in the fetal position in the corner? What's going on here? Joel: Pete and re-Pete Weddle always bring it, so shout out to them as well. They always amaze me with their conferences. Chad: Last but not least, go to the ChadCheese.com site. There's a little banner that says, "Meet us," and much like TA tech, Joel and I are going to be at different places. Joel is going to be at ERE in San Diego in April. I'm gonna be presenting in San Francisco in early April around the same time. Then, drum roll, SHRM Talent. Joel: SHRM. Chad: In Vegas. Joel: Yes SHRM somehow let us into the party, and we're probably gonna break stuff and they may never invite us back, but at least we get that one shot to have our fun at a SHRM conference people. Chad: I hope they've upped their insurance. That's all I have to say. Yeah, so we're going to SHRM , and then right after SHRM, I mean we're gonna spend a week in Vegas, man. Then right after SHRM we're going straight to TA Tech. So if you are in Vegas for SHRM, you should also take a look at TA Tech right back to back. You're already there. Joel: It's Vegas. Chad: Oh man it's Vegas. Stay. Have a good time. Joel: By the way did I hear SHRM right in our call with them that they're gonna give us access to their Facebook streaming video accounts? Chad: Yes. Joel: Good God, someone drug test the folks at SHRM because something's in the water out there. I don't know what's going on. Cause chaos and rock like Amadeus. Joel: All right, you ready to get to the show? Chad: Let's do it. Joel: All right, United Airlines new worlds of stupid this week, replaced quarterly bonuses with a lottery, okay. Workers who hit performance targets will be entered to win prizes including cars, vacations, I guess that's a free flight, or even a hundred grand for one lucky employee. Chad: Yes. Joel: About 1.6 percent of United's 86,000 workers will win something every quarter. That's not a lot. That's not a high percentage. Anyway, the new system replaces previous pay incentives, which have been anywhere from $63 to $7,589. Chad: Yes. Joel: Ink Magazine estimates. Social media, at least in my circles, went sort of ape shit when this was announced for obvious reasons. Chad: Yeah. Usually a lottery is something that you choose to do, right? In some cases you're gonna go. You're gonna spend a buck or $5 or $20 or whatever it is to go play the lottery for a chance, right? This isn't even giving you an option, right? This is, "Guess what guys? You're not gonna get a pay increase, but we're just gonna go ahead and throw you into this lottery, which only," as you had said, "1.6 percent will win." Just from a PR standpoint, this is one of the dumbest things, which is why they backed out of it obviously. Chad: One of the dumbest things you can do. Hey look, we think this is really cool. So cool that we're gonna make sure that pretty much 98.4 percent of you are not gonna get anything, right? Joel: They took this flight back to the gate, yes. It did not get very far before social media and I'm sure there was an uproar internally that we don't even know about of people. Yeah, it's clearly sort of a cost-saving measure. Sure they wrapped it in sort of a fun thing. They wrapped it in you can win a car, a hundred grand, but people who hit bonuses, they just want average shit back for hitting their goals. I don't know what it says about human nature. We want what we've earned, and not put our name in a hat and maybe I'll win something big or I won't win anything at all. Chad: Right. Joel: This certainly exemplifies human nature and how companies really screw this up. I wouldn't be surprised if some HR folks got fired over this because of the outrage that followed. But dumb idea on all counts. Joel: If I know that you really suck, you might have just barely hit your goals, right? But I totally crushed it, and you win a hundred grand, how am I gonna feel as an employee that got to see someone substandard to me win a hundred grand in the lottery. I'm probably not gonna be real happy about it. Chad: That's gonna happen a lot. Chad: So here's how you fix this, United. I'm gonna give you a little free advice. What you do is you keep the raises in place, and because you created this PR nightmare for yourself, some idiot within PR and/or marketing, what you do is you go ahead and you institute the lottery as well. You do both. Don't be dumb asses. You're gonna come out of this like dragging a guy off a plane for goodness sakes. You need to be smart about this. Go ahead and institute both. Whether you do it for one year or not, you've got to be smarter about how you do business. This is dumb. Joel: This needs to be, again, going back to the International Women's Day, they need to find their inner Oprah and everybody gets something. So you get a car, you get a car, you get a something. Like give everybody something that hits it, but then have a few lucky winners that really strike it rich, right? I think everyone would be happy with that. Joel: We're in agreement on that. United fix your stuff and you're welcome. That was free advice from Chad and Cheese. Chad: You're lucky. Joel: Also needing advice apparently is Glassdoor. What happened with them this week? Chad: Well, you know, I think looking to position yourself for IPO does some weird things to companies, don't you think? Joel: Yeah, people lose their minds in IPOs. Chad: People do lose their minds, yeah. Joel: Like where can we make money? They throw the couch cushions off, right, and they go looking for change. We need to pump up that first initial report to Wall Street. This to me is clearly them saying, "Okay let's flip up the staffing industry cash cushion and see what kind of dollars we can generate from this." Chad: Yeah, so I mean this next segment actually started with a weird email that was screen-shotted and it was shared on Twitter, and it was asked to pretty much to Glassdoor, marketing communications in Glassdoor overall. What the hell does this mean? Here's what the email actually said. "I want to let you know effective April 1, 2018," I actually thought it was April Fool's at first, "Glassdoor's rate card will increase." Very nice. "If you're currently receiving any organic applies from Glassdoor," this is important. "If you are currently receiving any organic applies from Glassdoor, they will stop. That will no longer be a free feature. Again, that will stop. If Glassdoor is something that you're interested in, this is where the sale comes in, then you can call your account executive right? Joel: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad: So I reached out to Samantha, I'm gonna get her last name wrong, Zupan, who is in charge ... She's VP of communications over at Glassdoor. Joel: She's very nice. I will vouch for her. She's a good kid. Chad: But the thing is, what she responded back with on Twitter totally contradicts what I just read. She said, "The changes reflect how we're doing business with staffing firms." Just staffing firms. "We're looking to set up paid business relationships with them to help boost their recruiting efforts." Go figure. "We're not removing organic job listings." Okay they didn't say they were gonna do that in the email, although job candidates will continue to be able to apply for free jobs on Glassdoor organic or sponsored, which is counter to what the actual message was. So I wonder, if this was a communications error kinda on the sales side that was sent out to be able to try to spur the sky is falling for staffing firms, say "Oh my God we've gotta buy this," or which one. Who's lying, that's the big question? Joel: It's a rogue sales person obviously. Chad: They're everywhere. Joel: Dude, yeah, there's confusion here and no doubt to me, Glassdoor's gonna look at how do we bleed this turnip for more cash. Staffing industry historically has been the whipping boy of the whole thing, and even you and I have talked about the money that Monster made from staffing companies and Hot Jobs didn't do that. I forget what you said what percentage of Monster's revenue was staffing firms, it was like 70. Chad: It was like 75 percent. It was like 75 percent, yeah. Joel: Yeah, 75 percent. Like I can't fault Glassdoor for you know, "Oh shit. There's some money there," in doing it. But also to me it's a little bit confusing in that Glassdoor is built on sort of companies having profiles and having reviews and interview questions revealed, where if you leave a review for a staffing company, do they have profile pages? Is it for the company they're hiring for? If their interview questions, would you leave that question for the staffing firm or for the direct employer? Do they even know the direct employer? Joel: So from a usability perspective, I see this being potentially challenging from them, but hell, we've gotta raise money because we got an IPO coming up, so to hell with users. Chad: So I actually reached out to somebody in the staffing industry and said, "Hey, what the hell's up?" They said, "You have to have a minimum $2,000 spend, and if you don't pay, your competitors sponsored jobs actually show up by your reviews." So obviously your jobs, over in that right rail, are not gonna populate because you're not paying to get your jobs into your profile, so they'll go ahead and slap obviously some competition over on that right rail. Chad: This to me is really taking the brand hostage. It's not a great way to do business man, because nobody likes, I don't care if it's a staffing agency or not, nobody likes to be taken advantage of, and as soon as they see a window, they're going to fricking take their spend, and they're gonna run to somebody else. We saw this with CareerBuilder. We saw this with Monster. When Indeed starting to make their play, as soon as people had an opportunity to be able to take their money and go somewhere else, guess what they did? Joel: They did. They went somewhere else. Chad: You saw where I was leading there. Joel: This feels like if you followed Yelp at all, and it almost feels like Glassdoor is taking a page out of Yelp's strategy, there were a lot of local businesses that complained about Yelp, sort of, you know, not directly saying it, but sort of around the way saying, "Hey if you don't pay us, your competition's gonna be more visible. Those shitty reviews are gonna be at the top of the page." Sort of subtly if you're a paying customer, if you pay us money, you'll be able to control those reviews, or maybe those reviews will go away or go lower down the totem pole. Joel: This sort of blackmail business is real shitty, and it usually doesn't work long term, although again, if you have an IPO coming up, you wanna show growth, get that stock price and then everyone cashes out and who cares. Long term it's not a real great strategy. Chad: No, and so I asked, "What the hell? Why aren't they doing the same? Why are the focusing on staffing and not talent acquisition?" Their response was, "If you had a shitty Glassdoor rating, would you sponsor jobs? If you did, do you think the cost per applicant would be good, or that your advertisers would even want to suppress," there it is, "The bad reviews." There's no question. We see trouble actually brewing for Glassdoor I think on a long-term scale, but again, if they're thinking short term just because they wanna get to IPO. They wanna be able to squeeze as much as they possibly can. The big question is if you're a staffing company right now, do you just tell them to go to hell? Joel: Maybe. You got other options. But a lot of them, if it's successful, they'll stick with it. Chad: Yep. Joel: Time will tell, man. You know one company that's not short-sited, and looks out for their customers and users is America's Job Exchange, and you got something to say about that. Chad: I was actually just thinking about them. They're starting to roll out a new website and new messaging, and it's actually pretty cool. The new messaging is, "Compliance is mandatory. Diversity is essential." I think that is very smart and really packages up, yeah. Joel: I like that. Chad: Good job America's Job Exchange. Joel: They must have come up with that under the three feet of snow that's in the northeast area this week. Way to go, team. Chad: So they're messaging. Great things happen when organizations embrace diversity. America's Job Exchange provides a simple yet effective solution that connects equality-focused employers with the talent they need to build successful teams and maintain OFCCP compliance. This is the big message that major Fortune 500 companies, federal contractors, they all need to understand is yes, yes, yes, yes. You gotta check the box. You've gotta do the recording. Compliance is mandatory. If you wanna continue to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases billions of dollars a year, from your client, the U.S. Government, then you have to focus on compliance, but the big key for business is diversity and how essential it is. Research has actually shown how essential diversity is to a working team. Chad: A new idea is being able to really launch companies into the stratosphere of success. Big, big ups for America's Job Exchange. Check them out. New beautiful starting to roll out site, Americasjobexchange.com. If you do care about diversity because you know it's essential, go to chadcheese.com. Go down to the sponsors area, just a little scroll, and click on America's Job Exchange, and there's a 25 percent or some type of discount. There's a discount there to start using America's Job Exchange and focusing on compliance and diversity. Joel: Did you just say, "Little scroll?" Chad: Little. Joel: I like that. Just a little scroll away. Chad: Just a little scroll away. chadcheese.com, little scroll. Joel: Of Fortune 500 companies only 10 percent are women-lead, so AJ fight the good fight. Get that diversity into the bigger companies as well as the smaller ones. Chad: Amen. Joel: Do we have to go to millennials. Damn it. I was having a good day, and now we gotta talk about millennials. Chad: You're so excited about this. Okay so let's talk about the Burger King ad. Let's talk about this. Joel: Yep. Chad: Tell me about these Burger King ads, because you I think you put them up and I was like, "What the hell?" It looked like it was fake, didn't it? Joel: So I get all kinds of news stuff, and marketing is obviously something I'm passionate about, and every once in a while on one of the Ad Week or advertising blogs or publications, there will be an employment-related story about advertising, and this story was print ads for Burger King, that were totally out of bounds. The whole gist of it was to get your attention. No shit. They had pictures of soccer hooligans, or football hooligans because we're going to Europe, football hooligans with like, you know- Chad: Molotov cocktails. Joel: -Molotov cocktails. Like throwing fire and fighting police and it was like, "Oh you like burning stuff? Come charbroil some burgers," or whatever it is. That was such an extreme message, but clearly Burger King ads to be so outrageous with their ads because millennials apparently won't get off the couch to go work at Burger King unless they see something really outrageous that connects with them. Apparently, by the way, I guess part of the advertising from the agency was like, "Look, young people are mad about government. They're mad about the man. They're mad about everything," so connecting pipe-bombing the government is equated to going to work for Burger King, which, let's be honest, is a relatively boring job I would think. Joel: It just showcases the depths that millennials have driven marketers to get their attention. Chad: Just allowing these types of ads to go out. I don't know who, and I think this was in Germany, right? Whoever is in charge of marketing in Germany, if they still have a job right now, I would be incredibly surprised. This is ridiculous. Joel: It doesn't really matter probably because a company that you shared on our stream this week is developing flippy, which has a cute name, but is putting all these kids out of business because it's gonna do the burger flipping for us, like much of the things that will be automated. So flippy will be there, and we won't have these Burger King ads anymore because all the Burger Kings, Wendy's, McDonalds, etc. will just buy robots to flip burgers, which will also be to order from your mobile phone. You won't have to talk to someone to take your money. The future of fast food is interesting, but it's probably a lot with fewer humans I would think. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And that affects the millennials as well. Self-driving cars or trucks were in the news this week as usual? Chad: Yep, so Embark Trucks. They've actually created a system that they've built with Peterbilt Trucks that had an autonomous truck drive from California to Florida. 2400 miles without a human driver. Pretty amazing. We're always talking about AI and machine learning for our industry, and there are a lot of people that actually scoff at, "Oh yeah AI and machine learning, whatever recruitment," blah, blah, blah. Listen guys, if they can do this on the road. I mean we're talking about AI machine learning to map everything around you to avoid obstacles, to know where you're going. Mapping obviously all the GPS, oncoming traffic and shit like that, it's like having robot situational awareness really. It has cameras everywhere. It's equipped with radar and lidar, the light detection ranging systems. Joel: Lidar, geez. Chad: Yeah, I mean it's got all the cool shit that's on it, and it only needs humans when it needs fuel. To be able to actually get off an exit, fuel up, do whatever it needs to do and come back on, or obviously go ahead and drop your load. Chad: Yeah, right now, you "need" humans. Much like flippy, you know a human has to put the patties onto the grill right? That shit's gonna change guys. If you can actually make a robot that's going to flip burgers and drive, even more so drive from California to Florida, and right now it needs a human for off ramps, how long do you think it's gonna take for them to get that shit right? Joel: Not long. In fact I heard a story this week as well as Dominoes how they're sort of secretly R and Ding self-driving cars to deliver pizza. You get a code on your phone to open the locker with your hot fresh pizza, and not have to deal with a deli very person. Yeah, the future is scary. Chad: And millennials won't do those damn jobs, right? We can't find truckers. We can't find burger flippers. We can't find pizza guys. So who is going to take those jobs? Obviously have immigration problems and we think that obviously all of our jobs are taken. That's so much bullshit, man. We need to focus on where the need is from a workforce standpoint and long-term need. Robots are coming, guys. Joel: Just give people their VR headset, hook them into Xbox and the sex robots will be delivered and we're all good. What else do we need? Chad: Wall-E. Joel: Something near and dear to my heart, Jobu, as a former Cleveland resident, love the movie Major League, but maybe not the best name for a job search site. Jobu Jobs is in Beta, and this is still on our Millennial rant. So a 22-year-old kid basically started this company. It's a "new Tinder for jobs site." Chad: Oh God. Joel: It's in Beta, but there are screenshots. They even have the whole like, "It's a match thing." The visuals if you've been on Tinder. It's been a while for me. I know you've never been on it, but you've seen screenshots I'm sure. We need to get away from this Tinder for jobs stuff because no one has the time to flip through right and left on candidates or jobs that they want. They want to search it. They wanna get to relevant results, and more and more on the recruiting side, they just want to automate the sourcing with robots. To think that we're gonna swipe left and right on candidates when there's so much more efficient ways to find people is ridiculous. Joel: Stop the madness. This company out in Boise, which I understand is a beautiful place, find something else to do than launch Jobu Jobs/Tinder for employment, okay? Chad: Don't waste our time and your money. Don't do it. I literally thought this was a joke when you threw it out there at first because I read it and I'm like, "This has gotta be a bullshit joke." I mean since eHarmony for jobs is now dead, it's proven to be dead, now we've got a fall back position. It's Tinder for jobs. Everybody now is going to be Tinder for jobs. Joel: Yeah. Still with the Millennial rant, Activision Blizzard, great company, have friends there, anyway, they are giving new parents that are employees, a $1,200 baby crib. This crib will change your kid, rock your kid, feed your kid, talk to your kid, white noise it to sleep, etc. This is what we've come to with Millennial coddling is giving new parents at the company this $1,200 baby crib because I, Millennial need my sleep and don't want to wake up at 4:00, I want this machine to raise my kids. Again, this is going I guess where the world is going. To me this is a sad statement on employment that we're giving cribs away because we want our nice young employees to get their sleep at night. Chad: Well Activision ... Did they develop this crib? Joel: No. Chad: Okay, okay yeah that's pathetic then. Yeah, so at the end of the day, it's back to the millennials just wanting things handed to them. Yeah, I shouldn't have to do that. I shouldn't have to raise my kids. Does it really change the kid? I don't think it changes the kid. Does it change the kid? Joel: No I was kinda being facetious about that, but you know that's coming. Chad: Yeah, but again I don't want to do any of this, right? I just want some machine to do it for me, and that is ridiculous. How do you believe people become successful? They have to do the dirty work. How do you think that you become a successful parent or ... It doesn't matter. You gotta do the dirty work, right? That's the fun part about it. Chad: I look back into those sleepless nights that I had with my kids, some of the best memories I've ever had, and you're just screwing yourself out of them because you're a lazy ass. Joel: Do you think people choose Activision Blizzard to work because of something like this? Probably right? Chad: I don't think they [crosstalk 00:32:39]. Joel: I bet all the new parents that get this crib are like, "Activision is awesome. They bought this crib for me. I sleep at night. I don't see my kid, but hell, I'm sleeping at night." Chad: Yeah, I don't know. Joel: Lastly on the Millennial rant thank God is Phil Strazzulla, I think I'm saying that correctly, who works at Next Wave. He put up a video on LinkedIn. I got no problems with that. It was a whiteboard Wednesday video, which is sort of getting popular or has been popular for a while. Anyway, he made a statement like SEO for employers is dead, or they don't have to worry about it, yadda yadda. You and I both know that, I mean look. Are there other options? Yes, but you know your point, and I would have made the same point is that Google for Jobs is creating a whole new sort of discipline around optimizing your jobs, right? I even wrote a post on ERE. You can go search for it. It's like seven optimization tips for conquering Google for Jobs or something. Joel: It's all very practical, organic search result optimization tips that will affect your search. So he sort of glossed over that. He was looking at sort of old, general job search stuff even though he does mention Google for Jobs so it was around. Chad: Sort of, I mean it was over a four minute video, and it mentioned Google for Jobs. And it's like, dude, what the hell are you talking about when you're talking about optimizing for job content. You're not even gonna go ahead and spend a good portion of your video on optimizing Google for Jobs. Joel: He spent no time on that. Chad: Yeah. Joel: He said it was there, but he didn't, he just said SEO was irrelevant. No company should worry about that, which is a relief for I'm sure a lot of companies to think that. To also think like, you shouldn't care about it because Indeed and Glassdoor and everybody else has those top rankings, is sort of dangerous. I could take any decent company and compete and most SEOs could with those rankings. So it's not like, "Oh well, so-and-so ranks for it, so you're screwed. Don't even worry about it." Joel: The video's gotten 20,000 views so kudos to the kid, who I've spoken to and seems like a nice guy. Kudos for the 20,000 views, and that sort of helps his argument that focus on social media stuff because it's more pertinent and relevant, and you're gonna get more traction, which was the case in this. My problem with him was, you kinda sort of really lightly with gloves went to him and he called you, no reason to be a jerk, and it was this whole thin-skinned Millennial stuff like, "Oh don't, wait." If you have an opinion, get ready to be called out on it and defend it. You and I deal with this everyday, right, maybe because we're old and grissled and angry at the world, but deal with it. You got an opinion, you own a company, don't call someone a jerk because they're putting you on the mat for something. Come back with more ammunition. Come back with an opinion. Come back with facts, and don't just curl up in a fetal position and call someone a jerk about it. Joel: Millennial rant over. Chad: Yeah, it was fairly simply. The guy didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He was looking for something. He might have read a book from the late 1990's on SEO or some shit like that. Maybe he watched a video, but he truly didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I just threw out there, "Hey dude, you're glossing over the biggest piece of this, and then maybe you need to listen to a Chad and Cheese podcast," and yeah. I've been called much worse than a jerk. I actually kinda chuckled about it because yeah, he is a kid, and he needs to be whipped around a little bit. Joel: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. You're gonna get hit, dude. Just get up. Don't jerkify it. I gotta move on from this because I'm getting irritated. Joel: What better way to do that than to thank a new sponsor from the show. Chad: Yeah. Joel: Yes, we're very excited. Chad: Coming in April. Joel: In April, Job Ad X from the folks that have given you Recroup have a new programmatic solution for your job advertising needs. I won't get too far into it because they'll have their own message for you, but we're both very excited. We have officially sort of filled all the spots on the show for sponsorship, but we also want to take this quick ad spot to talk about our own stuff. Chad: Oh yeah, so you obviously know us for the Chad and Cheese podcast. We both have together collective 40 years in this industry and we've seen a lot of shit obviously, and we know a lot of people. That's the big key. So one of the things that we can help most businesses out with, whether you're talent acquisition or you're a vendor, is to be able to innovate, compete and really just focus on your business. In most cases you don't have the experts in-house to be able to do that, and you don't have the cash to hire them full time. Go to chadcheese.com click on Huddle, and we have consulting, obviously, opportunities where we can sit down with you and we can have a huddle, and we can start to talk about some of these things. Chad: Again if you're on the vendor side of the house, in most cases, your big focus is how do we increase sales, right? We can help with that, so look at Huddle. Joel: Sales, marketing, you're a startup looking to understand the business better, the demographic, the customers that you're hoping to nab. If you're an international company looking to crack into the United States. Chad and I have 40 years I guess combined experience in this space. We have incredible networks to sort of help plug you in to companies or contacts. Joel: Yeah, if you're looking to take your business to the next level, chadcheese.com click on Huddle. Check it out. We'll come out and spend a day with you. If you're looking to take your conference to the next level, click on Roadshow, and we'll come out and shake up your event for sure. With spring and summer, a lot of conferences are starting to come out and looking for new ways to entertain and titillate their audience. Chad: That's a big thing, right? You definitely want to drop knowledge on your audience, but you don't wanna do it in a boring-ass way. That's one of the things that we've been able to do, right? Joel: It's a no-cricket process. Chad: Put our asses on stage. Live podcast. No PowerPoints. No sales speel. No yawning. We're gonna invigorate the crowd. We're gonna have fun, and we're gonna talk about shit that matters. So go to chadcheese.com, click on Roadshow, have us at your event. Joel: All right closing the podcast, iCims ATS, popular ATS. We've talked about on the show and had their wonderful Susan Vitali, marketing person on the next exclusive a few months ago. Had an interesting blog post that we thought we'd talk about. Tell us about what he said? Chad: It was entitled, "How Google Begins and Ends the War for Talent," and pretty much to kinda paraphrase what he's saying in this is, "Hey TA tech industry, you created the gap. Now Google is going to fill it." Job search sucks. Remember that Monster said that. We talked about that last week. Imagine that. Monster says job search sucks. Applying from one site to the next, throwing all your information out there on the web, It isn't fun. It isn't easy. It isn't safe. The candidate experience just falls flat, and it sucks, right? Chad: So all these different pieces of it. There's an opportunity, and you've left room for Google to come in and take market share. That's really- Joel: Drink your milkshake. Chad: - yeah, drink your milkshake. So TA tech industry, you had one job, one job, and Google's now going to take that job. Chad: What are you thoughts about that? Joel: To me, he makes a great point. We've talked about it on the show in terms of Google data. Google knows that people were clicking on job pages and finding duplicate jobs everywhere. Google knew all that, and part of I think the inspiration for Google for Jobs was to help the users better navigate the duplicate content issue. The multiple sites issue and going back and forth. They sorta brought that upon themselves. They needed money, and multiple postings, and the distribution model is a great model for profit. It is biting them in the ass. Joel: My challenge with the post was that he sort of, his context was that nothing would change going forward. That job search would continually be, I go to Google.com, I search for jobs, there are the jobs. That's end of story. It's a little more, potentially ... It is more complicated than that, and I think the future of job search will continue to evolve, and I'm not sure how Google's place in that new world is going to evolve with it. Joel: I still really think that voice assistance will have a place with all this, and I'm not sure Google is gonna be there. I think mobile devices, automation stuff. I just think searching for a job, when you and I were doing it, we bought the Sunday paper, we looked at the ads, we sent out letters, we made phone calls. That was our reality. It has evolved significantly from that. No one does that anymore, so can we say ten years from now people will still go to Google? Chad: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Joel: I don't know. They probably will, or a good number will. I think Facebook has a good opportunity as a lifestyle business and a place where people spend most of their time, to be a juggernaut in terms of job search. I think Microsoft LinkedIn component in terms of the workplace enterprise software has a place in this. Ultimately, my problem with it is it sort of puts us in the mud and we're not changing and Google has won. Chad: Yeah. Joel: And I think that that's not gonna be the case in the future. Chad: Yeah, I think we're seeing a ton of startups, really cool startups, really push some of these old codgers in the industry, and that's great. One of the things that Collin does cite is some CareerBuilder research that said 80 percent of job searches actually start on Google. I don't know if it's that high, but I know it's high. To your point with regard to voice and mobile, I think, to be quite frank, voice and mobile, Google has those covered. They have an amazing voice assistant. They own probably the lion's share of operating systems on the planet for mobile. Chad: I think they're good there, it's all about that lifestyle piece like you're talking with LinkedIn and more so with Facebook. Where I think Collin is amazing, but I think where he misses the mark is his real focus is, "Hey Google is going to be sending these job seekers to the corporate career site." That's pretty much what it's all coming down to. Yeah, you can go to Glassdoor and their little buttons and all this other fun stuff, but it's gonna be so much easier for a job seeker to go directly to your isem system or what have you. That's not what we're seeing now. If you do a search, and you check out some of the options when you click on a job, it won't say, "Career site." It'll say, "Smart Recruiters." As a job seeker, I don't know what the hell a Smart Recruiters is. I do know what a Glassdoor is. I do know what LinkedIn is. I'm gonna use one of those, right? Joel: Or Taleo, or Kenexa or iCims. Chad: Yeah, I don't know what iCims is because I'm a candidate. I don't know these things. To think that it's already kind of figured out is wrong. I think the way that Google is going after things right now is very smart to ensure that they're not focused on creating a "monopoly". They've gotten in trouble for that before. There are still a ton of wrinkles to iron out, so Collin I agree there is a huge gap in the market. That's why Google is here. That's why they have pretty much the trifecta of products that are out there right now. I don't think they're anywhere close to where they need to be able to offer a great user experience. Joel: Yeah, and brand still means something. I think ease of use, right? A lot of these ATSs still suck ass in terms of applying. If I'm a job seeker, and I see jobs that I like, if I like applying through Glassdoor or I love how Monsters interface works. By the way, if you're Monster, you should really be working hard on making that as easy as possible. Like whoever's gonna Amazon the apply process is going to win because just like buying a product. If you think Amazon is super easy, which it is to buy stuff. If you did the search for products, and you could buy it from either Walmart, Target, Buy.com or Amazon, if you are an Amazon loyalist, you're gonna click Amazon. You're gonna click one-click buy, and you're gonna be done. Joel: That's how this is gonna work. The job search site that is the most seamless, frictionless process is going to win. I totally agree. It's not just gonna be Taleo or iCims or anyone else because it's the corporate site, although I think there is some relevance to that. If you can make it easy as possible to apply, you're going to win. Chad: That's the charge. That's the charge for every company out there. Really for every vendor out there is to be able to make that one touch so that I don't have to worry about pushing my data out from site to site to site to site to site to site. Joel: By the way, I would put LinkedIn as the front runner in that race. People already have their profiles there. It's already pretty easy on LinkedIn. No upload or resume thing. It's already done. Personally for me, I think LinkedIn is in the pole position in terms of that environment. Chad: Facebook is coming up fast. Joel: 50 minutes dude, although you'll probably edit down to like 30 minutes. Anyway, we've been on a while. I say we out this thing, and go on with our lives. Joel: I do want you to introduce the outro because it's your daughter and it's awesome. So any intro to this? Intro to the outro? Chad: Yeah, it is awesome that it's International Women's Day and my daughter is actually doing the outro. A very strong, young lady who's gonna be a strong woman one day. So here's Ema. 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. #BurgerKing #UnitedAirlines #Jobu #Google #iCims #Activision #Glassdoor #Millenials

March Madness is podcast madness, apparently. On this week's episode, the "badasses" are talkin': - Wait... Albert the Frog has LinkedIn endorsements? - Google keeps kickin' ass and takin' names in employment tech - Bloomberg says Glassdoor is headed toward IPO country - Facebook eyes global market with jobs plus messenger update / impact - RealMatch is now PandoLogic, er, pandoIQ er, PandoProdux? - New CareerBuilder looks pretty much like the old CareerBuilder, minus the orange Chucks - Monster's new 'hype' video and adds purple Chucks - Cash keeps flowing: Peakon get 22 million, Nomad Health gets 12 million ... and a shit-ton more... Enjoy and give our sponsors - Sovren, America's Job Exchange, Ratedly, Nexxt, Jobs2Careers and Catch 22 Consulting - a blank check. Don't forget to MEET The Chad and Cheese at TAtechEurope or SHRM Talent. PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Joel Cheesman: Chad and Cheese is brought to you by Ratedly. Stop manually checking your anonymous employer reviews. Ratedly monitors over a dozen sites online automatically for you. Visit ratedly.com today to learn more. 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. Joel Cheesman: Welcome to March, boys and girls. Welcome to Chad and Cheese, HR's most dangerous podcast. I'm Joel Cheesman. Chad Sowash: And I'm Chad Sowash. Joel Cheesman: On this week's episode, Google continues to kick ass and take names. Glassdoor eyes, Wall Street, and Real Match really rebrands itself, Pandologic Really. Really, Real Match? Stay tuned. We'll be right back for real. Chad Sowash: Really, really. Joel Cheesman: Really, really. Announcer: America's Job Exchange is celebrating our tenth year as an industry leader in diversity recruitment of OFCCP compliance. We've been helping our 1000 plus customers comply with OFCCP regulations that directly support positive and effective diversity recruitment, designed to attract and convert veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, and minorities and empower employers to pursue and track active outreach with their local community based organizations. Want to learn more? Call us at 866-926-6284 or visit us at www.americasjobexchange.com. Chad Sowash: I feel all nice and warm and cozy in my America's Job Exchange Columbia jacket. Joel Cheesman: As I'm writing show notes in my AJE notebook, yes. They need a new ad, man. They've had that one for a while. We need to get on them for a little spunky ad. Chad Sowash: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, I mean, [crosstalk 00:02:16] when it comes to compliance, you've got to sex it up, right? So we might have to do a little bit of that. We'll just put the Barry White of podcasting on that. Joel Cheesman: Did you say compliance? I think you did. Oh man. All right. We've got two rants to start off the show. Do you want to go first or you want me to rant away? Chad Sowash: Oh, you know I do. Joel Cheesman: Okay. Chad Sowash: Do you receive these random LinkedIn endorsement from people you don't even know? Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Chad Sowash: Okay, okay. So like Jeff endorses you for leadership. And I'm like, "I don't even know who the fuck Jeff is." I mean, I've never worked with Jeff, so I thought for some reason, I don't know why. But I thought I'm going to go check this out. I'm going to go check Albert the Frog's profile to see if this purple little guy actually ... No, seriously. I want to see if he receives endorsement. Joel Cheesman: Don't tell me the frog has endorsements. Chad Sowash: The frog has endorsements. As a matter of fact, six people endorsed a damn purple frog for talent acquisition. And this is gone too God damn far, LinkedIn. It's time to get rid of endorsements because we all know they're just a ploy to suck us back into your system. But they don't really mean anything. Joel Cheesman: Did you know any of the endorsers? Chad Sowash: I did not. I was actually second connection to all of them. But I do know, just being connected to this purple frog. I mean, come on. So Jim Stroud, buddy Jim Stroud, we love him. John Sumser, the couple of guys, they're connected to this guy. I mean, come on. They were not- Joel Cheesman: Come on, Jimmy. Chad Sowash: They didn't provide any endorsements although, I mean, come on. This is literally, this is not legit for a quote unquote "professional platform", especially when we have Twitter and Facebook going through all this validation shit with bots and whatnot. Don't play with the fucking purple frog, okay? Joel Cheesman: Agreed, agreed. Now what company is the frog again? Do we know? Chad Sowash: Preferred Hired, I think. Joel Cheesman: Preferred Hired, okay. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: All right. Yeah. Change that. My rant is LinkedIn as well. Chad Sowash: Really? Joel Cheesman: Basically. So, I don't know if it's a millennial thing because most of the cases are with younger folk. Chad Sowash: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Joel Cheesman: But they connect with you on LinkedIn and I appreciate the fact that maybe they listen to the show or they read my shit or whatever, but as soon as they connect, they email me and they want advise. They want connections. They want something. It's like, take, take, take. And you got to give in this industry, people. Don't just take. Give three times or more before you ask for something. Or at least tell me, "Man, you wrote such and such," or "When you said such and such, I really liked that and here's why." And then maybe get around to asking me for something. Don't just ask me for something as soon as I connect with you. Chad Sowash: Well, that's not a LinkedIn rant. That is really a millennial rant but they're trying to get at you through the professional mechanism as we know as LinkedIn which also houses a purple frog named Albert. I know we have LinkedIn peeps that listen to us. Can you please fix this shit? That would be awesome. Joel Cheesman: Fix the millennials' LinkedIn. If you can do that, we'll all be a lot happier. Okay, let's get onto the real thing. Chad Sowash: Shout outs. Okay, so shout out to Thomas and Jim over at Talent Nexus. So, it's interesting because we're hearing so much about Google for jobs and whatnot here in the states because we see it. They're not seeing it in Europe yet but they're going on. From my understand, job boards across the pond are scared as hell about Google For Jobs. Joel Cheesman: As they should. Chad Sowash: The total uncertainty is apparently paralyzing them right now, which is another great reason why ... Listen up, people. If you're over in Europe and you're not going to TA Tech in Europe, in Dublin, this is one of these reasons why we have these types of conferences. You should be there. If you haven't registered for TA Tech Dublin. It's tatecheurope.io or go to and click on the banner, "Meet Chad and Cheese". It's right there, too. But you should be there. If you're paralyzed or you're uncertain about Google For Jobs, then go find out about this shit, guys. Joel Cheesman: Because Chad and I will be there. We may not be sober enough to remember our conversation, but we will be in Dublin at some point this month. Which also remind the folks of our Vegas tour later on in April, is that right? We're doing TA Tech in Vegas and also Shurm. So we're going to kill it in Vegas. Chad Sowash: TA Tech, I mean Peter and the gang over there, they know and I think they've baby-proofed everything for TA Tech. I call it the Spring Edition. For some reason, Peter likes to call it a Congress but we all know Congress doesn't get shit accomplished. So I'm rebranding it at TA Tech Spring Edition. Once again, go to the Chad Cheese Website. Click on Meet Us, the Chad and Cheese. We're also going to be at SHRM Talent, who I guarantee you have not baby-proofed anything for Chad and Cheese while we're in Vegas. Joel Cheesman: They don't know what the hell's coming at them at that show. Chad Sowash: SHRM, SHRM, SHRM- Joel Cheesman: Is engaging with us. Chad Sowash: It's awesome. Joel Cheesman: It's the end of the world as we know it. Millennial and SHRM, okay. Here we go. Chad Sowash: You've been getting trolled by Jonathan Zila on Twitter so I wanted to give a quick #ChadCheese shout out to Johnathan. Love that guy. Keep trolling Joel. We love it. Mason Wong- Joel Cheesman: All right, stop, stop, stop. Okay. Zila, number one, he's jealous of my beard because it's better than his. And number two, he comes off as this really nice spiritual sort of earthy granola guy. And then he just unloads on Twitter. So Zila, I'm not buying it, your little Recruitics, analytics company isn't fooling anybody. We know the real you and the next time I see you, I'm shaving the beard of, just to be ready. Chad Sowash: Okay. So I would have your body guards ready. You won't need it for Joel because he's not going to do it, seriously. Mason Wong, also trolling you. He said, "Yammer my ass." He didn't really say that. I'm putting words in his mouth. He said, "Joel, you need to get educated on Microsoft Teams." Because we were talking about the whole dynamic signal thing. He's like, "Yeah, you got to get edumacated, Joel." Joel Cheesman: Was this Mason? Chad Sowash: That was Mason. Mason's trolling. Joel Cheesman: Mason. Chad Sowash: Oh yeah. Joel Cheesman: Mason's usually my buddy, man. Come on, Mason. Chad Sowash: Damn. Joel Cheesman: I'm going to get yammerifed on these folks. Chad Sowash: Shout out to the Hawk brothers, Tim, Bill, and Brian, they all listen. I can't remember which one said it. It was either Bill or Brian but they referred to the podcast as "The Badass Podcast". Joel Cheesman: Dude, do they know that we're two middle aged white dudes in our 40s? Hardly badass. Chad Sowash: I'm badass. I don't know about you. I'm total badass. Joel Cheesman: Good lord. Chad Sowash: You got a shout out from Robin Hannah over at Dynamic Signal, didn't you? Joel Cheesman: Oh, dude, this is like the Hate Joel shout out day, so all of you can go to hell. Yes, Robin, the PR chick at Dynamic Signal got all uppity on me. She wants to schedule a call, show me demo, try to change my mind about the company. Okay, Robin. I'll talk to you. I'll give you some time to change my mind and if you do, I'll go on the air and tell you I was wrong about Dynamics. Chad Sowash: I think it's nice that Robin offered her education services to get you up to speed on employment engagement platforms. I mean, seriously, they just- Joel Cheesman: She's in marketing. It's her job. Chad Sowash: It's charity. Joel Cheesman: This isn't charity. Chad Sowash: She's trying to help you with that tin cup. Throw some knowledge in that tin cup. Dude, last week they got 36.5 million. This week, Peak On, who is also an employment engagement platform, a la Dynamic Signal, they got 22 million this year. Joel Cheesman: That's a lot for some Peak On pie. Chad Sowash: You don't think it's a big thing and it's not genius, but I'm still standing by it. I think they're throwing cash at it because this is a very smart type of platform to be in. Joel Cheesman: And they're stilling money to healthcare job boards, apparently. Chad Sowash: That was cool. Joel Cheesman: Nomad Health got 12 million this month or week. So good for them. Yeah, if you want to do a job board, do it in healthcare or tech, I guess. And you'll make some money. But don't launch that Toledo area job board because you're going to go no where with that. Chad Sowash: That's probably not smart, no. Last but not least- Joel Cheesman: Can we get to the show? Chad Sowash: Jesus, man. You've got all these people that are out there listening to the Chad and Cheese and they might be listening on their desktop. But they can listen on Stitcher, Cast Box, Pocket Cast, Over Cast, and this week, Tune In just added the Chad and Cheese. You can go to iTunes, you can go to Google Play. And if you have a podcast player on your phone and you can't find Chad and Cheese, message us and we'll do everything that we can to get that pod feed up and running for you. Just let us know and listen more. Go back. Binge. Joel Cheesman: Yup. And by the way if you listen on iTunes, Google Play, et cetera. Leave us a review. Let us know how we're doing. Hate on us, love on us. We don't care. Your feedback and engagement is our oxygen because Chad and I sit here at a microphone and hope that people are still listening. But getting that feedback is great for us. So take two minutes out of your day and tell us you hate us or love us, either way. Chad Sowash: And if you have a beard and you hate on Joel, he's going to try to come shave it. Joel Cheesman: Well, I know who doesn't need beard to be successful is Google, apparently, who is not taking this employment thing likely. Chad Sowash: They are not. They are not at all. The trifecta of Google. You've got the Google For Jobs, the Google Jobs Discovery API, I still don't like that. And then you've got Google Hire, right? Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Now you talked to these guys. Can't you get them to change the name of Google Cloud Job Search Discover API or whatever it's called? Get them to snap that up a little bit. Chad Sowash: Well, to be quite frank, I don't think they're going to because from my understanding and they don't have an official date, but it's going to be coming out of beta soon. As you know as well as I do, Google keeps shit on beta forever. And these guys, they've been in beta for months so they're kicking ass and taking names. Joel Cheesman: I think G-Mail's still in beta isn't it? Chad Sowash: I think G-Mail's out of beta. I think, yeah. Joel Cheesman: Oh, okay. Maybe not my version. Chad Sowash: That being said, Google Hire just launched an add-on for G-Mail. You saw that right? Joel Cheesman: I did. I did. Which, by the way, is quite a nice advantage that you can build your product into, oh, I don't know, G-Mail. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Or Google Sheets. Or all the other rest of the Google suite of services that they have there. But I mean for small to medium sized businesses who get the majority of their applications via email, now Google Hire and G-Mail ... Google Hire has an add-on for G-Mail that allows the SMBs who are using Google Hire to easily drop candidates into their database directly from G-Mail. Then you can create a profile. You can invite the candidate to the interview. You can disposition the candidate. You can do all that from your G-Mail inbox, which is fricking cool. Joel Cheesman: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Which, by the way, some good news on the Google Hire front from OnGig, who does a study of like a 1000 plus companies and their ATS preferences. So, Google Hire, although a small usage number, is currently now, according to OnGig a top 25 ATS, which frankly, considering all the ATS's out there is not too shabby considering it's less than a year old. It is also in the top ten for most used small businesses as an ATS, which I think is probably their target anyway. And they're also ... Well, they are by far, the fastest growing. Now I know they're coming from zero so that's not super impressive but some of these things, numbers and we're getting metrics around Google Hire, it's not too shabby. And launching some of these new features is only going to help propel it further up the charts. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think some of this is suspect though because OnGig is partner very close to Google. So again, this is on the propaganda wagon. Because you're right, I mean, Experiencing, they show over 300% in client growth. Check my math. If you have one client and you add nine, which makes 10 clients, you're at like 900% growth versus if you have 301 clients and you add the same amount of clients, nine, it's only 3% growth. So I mean, come on guys. I get it and all this stuff is cool. Joel Cheesman: Hooray. Let's hear a hooray for the Ohio Public School system. Chad Sowash: Woo-hoo. I used easy numbers to be able to make sure that I could get those and it still might not be right. But yeah, I think Google Hire, with this add-on to G-Mail and then also just the ability to start using suite products in a very fluid manner is going to be really awesome for all the SMBs that are out there as they start to ... I don't know how long it's going to take them, but as they start to eye the enterprise market. Joel Cheesman: And we're going to see Bogomil, the head of the snake ... I guess snake's a bad word. The head of the whole thing in Ireland this month. Maybe we'll try to corner him for a little interview. Chad Sowash: Well, I actually talked to him yesterday and I said we're going to get him drunk so that we can try to get more out of him. He said he could drink you under the table. So there's no ... He's European. He can hold his liquor and he doesn't think you'll be able to. So hopefully you've been training for this because I know I have. Joel Cheesman: My only question is if he's European is he going to put the murse on the ground before we start drinking or is he going to still have it over the shoulder. That's what I want to know. Chad Sowash: The murse slash man purse. That was very nice, very nice. Joel Cheesman: I just ticked off a whole continent. That was great. Okay. Let's see if we can piss off the North American contingent. Our next story unless you got something else you want to add on Google Hire? Chad Sowash: No. Carry on. Joel Cheesman: So Glassdoor, the brilliance of Joel Cheesman, your partner, predicted that it would be file IPO this year. And sure enough, Bloomberg has a story that they're projected to go IPO in the middle half of 2018. Your thoughts? Chad Sowash: My thoughts ... It's like predicting the sun's going to come up tomorrow. That was a pretty easy prediction to make, right? I think it's going to happen. But you also pointed out in your story that you put out there that there are some bumps in the road that Glassdoor is going to have to think about. What were some of those bumps? Joel Cheesman: I'll go on record to say I don't expect to purchase said stock. There are three main hurdles that I see. You can feel free to disagree or agree. Number one, I feel is that reviews are becoming commoditized. I feel like Indeed is creeping up on their numbers just by the pure traffic and volume of people that go to Indeed. I feel like they're smaller players, they're niche players that are making an impact. I feel like Google having reviews and Google For Job search results is sort of commoditizing reviews. I think LinkedIn is going to have reviews at some point. I think Google will probably have reviews at some point. I mean, a restaurant review no matter where you get it, is usually positive or not based on the food. Doesn't matter if it's a Yelp review or a Google Review or a Facebook review or a FourSquare review. So to me, this stuff is going to get commoditized and when Glassdoor loses reviews, they lose market share. Joel Cheesman: The second reason is jobs are being commoditized. Most of the revenue of Glassdoor as far I know is all job board, job posting related. And we're seeing what's going on with that with Google For Jobs and commoditization there. I don't see that as a growth driver of the company. They don't have profiles of people like a LinkedIn or even an Indeed where you can at least search resumes. So to me, that's a real hurdle for them. Joel Cheesman: Number three as we've talked about on this show briefly, they're in legal battles all the time. Companies want to know IP addresses and they want the company to reveal who said such and such. If there's precedent in the legal system of you are no longer anonymous on Glassdoor or these other anonymous sites, then what are you? You've lost trust with your users who only leave stuff because they think they're anonymous. There's so real land mines, in my opinion. And there's really a lot of commoditization in terms of what they provide. For those reasons, I think they're going to have a really hard time being public, although they've raised $200 some million and they have no choice but to go public and try to have a liquid event in that way. But to me it's sort of like when FitBit launched, it was like, "Oh shit. Apple Watch is coming." Or maybe Pandora with Spotify. They have to do it now and try to get as much as they can before the whole wall comes down and I think that's why they're going public. It's not a stock I would recommend or buy. I think it'll be a tough ride for them. Chad Sowash: I agree. And as I said before, I think saying that they're going to go public is like saying the sun's going to come it. It's got to happen. It's got to happen. Joel Cheesman: I'm sorry. Mr. Monster's going to come back, speaking about coming up from zero. Chad Sowash: Which you said was laughable. So I'm making the hard predictions unlike you. But back to my assessment here. Yeah, if Glassdoor does try to add other services, I mean, reviews have to do with employee engagement. We just talked about two companies who just received 36.5 million and 22 million in for employment engagement or employee engagement types of platforms. Which could be turned around also into candidate engagement types of platforms. So if Glassdoor is smart, they'll understand what they have right now and they'll be able to pivot off of it. But we'll see. Again, we've seen companies like Monster and Career Builder not be able to pivot because they get hooked on the crack and they focus on that one piece and they think that's going to take them through and you know, it's not. It's all about being able to change and reinvent yourself, much like again, Netflix. Joel Cheesman: Are you going to buy the stock? Chad Sowash: Hell no. Joel Cheesman: Do you think the stock will be worth more on day 365 than it is after day 1? Chad Sowash: Again, I think they have way too many big hurdles in front of them. They're going to have to add more than what they have in their portfolio today to make it interesting for an investor like myself. Joel Cheesman: Agreed. Well, it'll be fun to watch, either way. And speaking of fun- Chad Sowash: Yes. Joel Cheesman: Let's take a quick break. Let's hear from Sovren and when we come back, we'll talk about Real Match, Career Builder, and Monster. Sound good? Chad Sowash: Pando. Announcer: Google. Lever. Entelo. Monster. Jibe. What do these companies and hundreds of others have in common? They all use Sovren technology. Some use our software to help people find the perfect job while others use our technology to help companies find the perfect candidate. Sovren has been the global leader in recruitment intelligence software since 1996. And we can help improve your hiring process, too. We'd love to help you make a perfect match. Visit Sovren.com, S-O-V-R-E-N.com, for a free demo. Joel Cheesman: You have to tell the folks what your comment was to me when I shared the Real Match rebrand story. Do you remember what it was? I was something like- Chad Sowash: I can't. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, real smart. Go from two works that people can spell and say to two words that not so much, so something like that. Chad Sowash: Yeah. Joel Cheesman: There's something in the water, right? Beyond is now Next, although there was some financial incentive to do that, that we found out later. So the story. Real Match, about a month ago, launches Pando IQ. Chad Sowash: Right. Joel Cheesman: Pando is apparently not the bear, the black and white bear that's really cute but can kill you. It's a life form of plants' roots that have survived millions of years. Apparently, Wikipedia says this thing is dying, so it might not be the best name for a new company or new brand. The idea was like it's the root of life and information, et cetera, and then IQ just because it was a progmmatic thing and smart. So now, Real Match is Pando Logic. We have PandoIQ, which was kind of strange because they launched Pando IQ before Pando Logic. So I'm assuming that Pando Logic will be the mothership for all these other PandoIQ, Pando AI, Pando Bot. Chad Sowash: Pando Products. Joel Cheesman: Pando job posts and what not. But yeah, it's hard to rebrand. I don't know if it was the right move. Real Match, people kind of knew. What are your thoughts? Chad Sowash: So my first question is, do you think a dating site offered Real Match dollars so that they could make this. I mean, a la, Beyond.com and Next with Bed, Bath, and Beyond. It was kind of like an offer you can't refuse. Joel Cheesman: I'm going to give you a little love for that because that was pretty good. Match.com might have backed up the Brinks truck to get real match. Who knows? Chad Sowash: I don't know. But from my standpoint, Real Match, yes. It is a known entity in our industry but just on the vendor side of the house. And Real Match was incredibly smart because they focused on vendors and driving traffic and doing programmatic and those types of things to vendors because vendors understand that they need traffic and they will spend money for it, right, where talent acquisition won't. They just see all this mystical ... It was like SEO in the day. It was like magic. What's this magic I'm paying for? Vendors would, right? So they've been doing that for ten years. Now they're pivoting and they're providing that service now to talent acquisition with Pando IQ. So from my standpoint, you're a known entity. We know what you do. Now this talent acquisition side of the house might not, but who cares? It's still a brand that everybody knows. Why pivot and why try to rebrand? That to me is interesting to say the least. Chad Sowash: I think from a products standpoint, I've gone through and talked to Terry and some of the team about product. It sounds incredibly smart. I think the pivot's smart. The data points that they have available to them, being around for a decade, is much different, I would say deeper and more breadth of knowledge and data than most of the other analytics platforms and programmatic platforms that are out there. It made just a hell of a lot of sense to do what they did. Other than the rebrand. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. I don't think the name is any criticism on the product. I think that they're going to be a player in the programmatic ad game, which we both agree is the future of posting jobs. I tend to agree with you. It was a known entity. They're ten years old. I guess, but it's also an argument, if you're starting a business, dude, just name it something that means nothing. Like Indeed, Slack, Monster, Amazon. Then you can do whatever the hell you want, right? Don't pigeonhole yourself into Ohio Jobs if you want have job posting in New York. Just name it something crazy. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, we like the product. We like Terry. We like him personally but this was sort of a head scratcher to me. Chad Sowash: Well, here's what's going to have to happen. And first off, I don't know what's up with that new logo either. But here's what's going to have to happen. They're going to have to focus on targeting the same market that they've been in for ten years to be able to rebrand and then this new market with an entirely new name. So they're really going to have to do some great targeted marketing to talent acquisition and back into industry professionals to be able to get that new spin out. Much like Next has done. I think Next has done a pretty damn good job. So hopefully- Joel Cheesman: Sponsor. Chad Sowash: Yeah. That's a good idea. Joel Cheesman: Clearly leveraging Chad and Cheese is the answer for Pando. So if they're listening, write a check and we'll take care of the whole branding thing for you. Chad Sowash: Yeah, we can do that. Exclusive podcast. Joel Cheesman: Speaking of brands that are old and crusty, let's move on to Career Builder and Monster, shall we? Chad Sowash: Let's do that. Joel Cheesman: There's a new Career Builder, and I'm going to be honest with you, I don't review every single thing that we talk about on this show, and I had done no homework on this new Career Builder thing. So please enlighten me on the new Career Builder. Chad Sowash: Well, first shout out over to Roy Maurer over at SHRM who wrote the story. He actually did an interview with Matt Ferguson. And this is a quote from Matt, "Most people know our job board but they don't always know that we're a single source provider of end to end solutions to find hire and manage talent." Exactly, Matt. No shit, buddy. We know that. We know that. Marketing has been a huge issue for Career Builder. Even talking to their clients and rebranding the same damn platforms over and over and over so you don't even know what the damn names are of them. Chad Sowash: Although, taking a step back, part of my 2018 prediction was that Career Builder and Monster were going to either start to sprout back up or they were going to die. One of their product platforms, talent discovery, does some pretty cool shit and I really believe Career Builder can start to get their groove back if they can get their messaging and their sales down. I mean, those are two really big areas that you have to get right. I don't care if you've got the best widget in the world. If you don't have sales and marketing right, that thing is going to be a dude. They need to get those two things right. I think they've got the right people in place to do it. It's all about execution. It's all about execution. Joel Cheesman: So you're saying if they just act like Stella and get their groove back, then it's sunny skies ahead basically? Chad Sowash: That's so bad. Yeah, so move to Jamaica. Wasn't that the thing? Joel Cheesman: I don't know. My daughter's name is Stella so I catch those references when you make them. Chad Sowash: Yeah. So Career Builder, Monster, Career Builder is new again. That was the whole thing. So again, it's all about execution on the marketing and the sales piece. Joel Cheesman: So it's basically not a new story. It's the same one that they've been trying to relay to everyone for a long time. "We're not just job boards. We're this new ... " They launched this new logo how many years ago? Like, we're moving beyond the orange and blue job board fun converse Chuck Taylor sneakers. We're now service and technology. They've been pitching this idea for a long time. It apparently isn't getting through to people. Chad Sowash: Well, it's not getting through to people because they're not executing on it. I mean, they expect, or at least from what I've been able to see over the years, experience over the years, is they expect telesales organization to be able to push this type of message. And pretty much that by itself. And maybe show up to some conferences here and there but you have to have a multi-layered outreach strategy put in place and I mean, that's how you're going to get things done. I mean, look at what Indeed did to be able to get not just their message out there but to be able to shape and educate a market. That's what you have to do. Joel Cheesman: Yeah, the sales force that's getting job postings is a much different sales force than the one that's selling tech products and services. All right. So the Monster continuing with the onslaught of YouTube videos, has a, what you called a hype video. Chad Sowash: Teaser. Joel Cheesman: Which is nothing like the Ohio State Buckeye football hype videos. But you called it a hype video. I call it more of like an Apple strategy video. Basically what Monster's done, they're doing the Monster Bugs Bunny thing, which we love not so much. But they're doing that. Now, they have Richard Cho who we, I think, both know and like and respect. He's doing sort of the Apple videos where they have Johnny Eye in black and white and music and he's like, "We looked at the new iPhone and we looked at designed and how people are made." So he's going up job searches f'ed up and people aren't getting what they want and we're here to fix it. It was sort of like a teaser about Monster's going to break through with this new product or technology to fix job search. Joel Cheesman: My take was sort of like a big yawn. But I get what they were trying to do. It's like they need to come out with the Deal Domino's ads where, "We know the pizza sucks and we're going to fix it." They just need to come out on YouTube and go, "Okay, guys. Monster blows. But we're fixing it and give us a month or two and we'll come back to you with a brand new Monster and it'll be awesome." Chad Sowash: Yeah. Well first off, obviously Chris didn't make a big enough of impact on you because his name is Chris Cho not Richard. Joel Cheesman: There is a Richard Cho though, right? Chad Sowash: There is. I think he was actually at Facebook- Joel Cheesman: He's at Facebook, okay. My bad. I'm bad with names. Chad Sowash: So we know job search sucks. This is pretty much what the video is. We know job search sucks. The problem is Monster, you had one job. Over the decades, you've had one job. Joel Cheesman: I see what you did there. I kind of liked it. Chad Sowash: And you blew it. You had one job and you blew it. So hopefully, and I think Chris Cho and I think there are a ton of big names that they've brought in to fix Monster. I don't want to see teaser videos. What I want to see is hype videos of shit that you're actually launching. That's what I want to see. That gets me excited because it's real. I see this as a teaser video. And I think he's going to be able to do some really good things at Monster when we can see them. I'd like to see them plug into Google Job Discovery API because yeah, your search sucks but guess who's search doesn't suck? Google's. Joel Cheesman: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chad Sowash: Start to leverage partnership and start to really focus on that portfolio that you guys have there to be able to turn out some really, really kick ass products. But you know, I don't want to hear about it. I want to see it. That's what I want. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. It sounds to me they need some new leadership in addition to the leadership that they've already brought on. Chad Sowash: That's a good point. Joel Cheesman: And that leads us to our next sponsor. Announcer: The following message was paid for by the campaign to elect the Chad and Cheese as co-presidents of Monster. Chad Sowash: Hi. My name is Chad Sowash. Joel Cheesman: And I'm Joel Cheesman. You know us as the- Chad Sowash: Chad- Joel Cheesman: And Cheese podcast at chadcheese.com. Chad Sowash: We are aware Monster's new owners have lopped off the heads of old Monster leadership and have focused on filling those positions with fresh idea and new, proven leaders, which is why- Joel Cheesman: Let them eat cake. Get it? Chad Sowash: What? Joel Cheesman: Lopped off heads, Marie Antoinette. Oh, come on, man. Chad Sowash: Which is why the Chad and Cheese are officially running for co-president of Monster. Joel Cheesman: The Chad and Cheese understand that current vulnerability of Indeed in a market that is crying out for new platforms for and of the people. Chad Sowash: Really? The baby sound effect? Again? Joel Cheesman: You know it's my favorite. Chad Sowash: Yeah. You do love that damn thing. Chad Sowash: The Chad and Cheese pledge to build and drive cost effective recruitment options through a new Monster vision. Joel Cheesman: Yes. And the Chad and Cheese also want to answer your longstanding questions. Like, "Whatever happened to Monster networking? Chief Monster? Jobr? Hot Jobs? Gozaik? Job Pilot? Talent Bend? Trovix? Tickle? And that blue collar thingy, what was that called? I can't remember. Chad Sowash: The Chad and Cheese promise to get you, the people, answers. And we also promise not to make boneheaded decisions like buying Tickle instead of LinkedIn. Yeah, that actually happened. Joel Cheesman: Aye. Chad and I are asking for your support in our bid to co-president Monster. Chad Sowash: Vote for the Chad and Cheese for co-president of Monster because you deserve a new Monster and we don't mean that purple Bugs Bunny cartoon ripoff thing, either. Joel Cheesman: It's a new day. Chad Sowash: You deserve a new Monster. And you'll get one, with the Chad- Joel Cheesman: And Cheese as co-presidents of Monster. Announcer: This ad was approved by the Chad and Cheese podcast. Look, there's literally no way in hell these guys are getting this gig, but they have a pretty amazing podcast, honestly. So visit chadcheese.com. Paid for by the campaign of the Chad and Cheese for co-president of Monster. Chad Sowash: Speaking of blue collar thingies ... Joel Cheesman: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Damn, we got the segues galore today. Chad Sowash: Facebook! Joel Cheesman: Facebook! Chad Sowash: Yeah, so Facebook roles out job postings to become blue collar LinkedIn. Did you see this article? You saw this article? Joel Cheesman: In 40 new countries. They're not forking around, people. Chad Sowash: So, thoughts on this? So, starting again, I mean, blue collar and also really very focused on SMBs, right? Joel Cheesman: I think Facebook is a serious player in the small business, seasonal, retail, service. People who don't have resumes, people who are used to chatting and messaging and they're on Facebook anyway or they're on Instagram or whatever. I think that Slack could eventually have something like this but every small business and big business is on Facebook. It's free. They get customers and feedback already. It makes sense that they can post jobs. It makes sense that they can message with these folks. And as we see, also out on the wire this past week is there's a new messenger where you have sort of chat bot options. It's very easy to see where a company, a small business that has a Facebook page can post jobs there, can direct users to Facebook to see their job openings. People can apply with their Facebook account. They can have chat bots ask about how old are they, do they have a driver's license, do they have an education. All those things that are sort of prescreening questions for service jobs and retail, et cetera. That makes total sense to me. Facebook is in the pole position to really impact small business hiring. I think that they are doing the things that they need to do to continue doing that. I think Google, although helping SMBs and they will continue to do so, I think they are going after LinkedIn and Microsoft, ultimately. Chad Sowash: Yup. Joel Cheesman: So I think Facebook, they're going after the Craigslist crowd. They're going after those kinds of companies and businesses. I think that's smart. Let Google and Microsoft hash out the big enterprise, high tech AI stuff and let us handle the other 85% of hiring. Chad Sowash: I think, there's no question. To be able to, and I don't really think Slack. They might try to break into this game but I think Facebook being able to move forward with the messenger piece is the biggest piece of this. Just being able to post jobs out there, I mean, okay. That's all well and good. But it's all about engagement and connectivity. And then being able to allow candidates to be able to apply with their profile information. At that point, if you're actually looking at jobs and you need to put more information into your profile, that means Facebook's starting to get more information about you, which means they can target you with ads and do all these different things. Chad Sowash: So I mean, from a strategic standpoint, this is great because I want to put more of my information into Facebook so that I can answer questions, apply for jobs, and those types of things through messenger. I think just overall it's a really cool strategy. We'll see where it goes. Hopefully they can stay out of all this fake bot profile building and all the other crap that's going on in Facebook and Twitter right now. Joel Cheesman: And by the way with, I think, 80% of Facebook usage being mobile and most of these kinds of jobs being local that to be able to serve the opportunities to people that are only within a one to two mile radius of your small business, that makes a ton of sense because you're not going to get applications from Zimbabwe or Russia or China or places that are totally irrelevant. So Facebook has a lot going for it, to tackle this marketplace. And they seem to be doing the right things. Chad Sowash: Which is another nail in the coffin of another app called WorkHere, right? Joel Cheesman: Ouch. I figured you might work that one in. Chad Sowash: I mean, it is though. You can't ... How are you going to combat something like this, something that's already scaled. It's already scaled. It's already there. It already has the user base. It has everything that you need but you will never get. You're dead. Joel Cheesman: So their answer would be that they're helping enterprise companies on a local level. They're not helping the local pub or the salon- Chad Sowash: No, because that's what they were doing before. They were- Joel Cheesman: Yeah. And that didn't work. Their goal is ... They're more like national focused, where Uber ... Anyway, yes. To go tackle the local ... I mean, Craigslist is going to be challenged if this thing works out and local job boards are going to be screwed if this works out for Facebook. And people like Work Here are pivoting outside of this because it's so hard to compete but Facebook has two billion users that says it can work. Chad Sowash: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And then when do they start to get into the enterprise space? Joel Cheesman: Do they? I don't know. I mean, I'd be pretty happy with 85% of the hiring that goes on in the country using my shit. Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah. And you don't have to worry about all that other compliance record keeping bullshit. But yeah. Joel Cheesman: Are we out? Chad Sowash: Well, first off before we're out, we have new outros that are [crosstalk 00:43:57] because Joel and I did not like the dude from the suburbs who was doing our outros from before. What did you say to this guy? Joel Cheesman: I had this vision of this guy on a mic with the Brooks Brothers polo and the Sperry Topsiders and sort of the Clark Griswold khaki shorts. Chad Sowash: Not badass. Joel Cheesman: And we just said, "Let's bring it in house." You did two. I picked the best on that I liked. I think we're going to have family members come in. Maybe we'll have some guests do the outro. But we decided to make this a little but more fun, a little bit more family-esque. Chad Sowash: Should be fun. So our outros from now on, you probably will hear many different outros so enjoy them. Joel Cheesman: Yeah. It could be a dog at some point barking. Yeah, who knows? But yeah, thanks for listening everybody to our quote "badass podcast". Chad Sowash: We out. Chad Sowash: 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. #AlbertTheFrog #GoogleforJobs #GoogleHire #GoogleJobsAPI #Glassdoor #Facebook #RealMatch #PandoLogic #Careerbuilder #Monster #Peakon #NomadHealth